Zenmaro Toki

After initially taking up tanka in his teens, he studied under Kun'en Kaneko, and when in attendance at Waseda University he socialized with other notable Naturalist poets such as Bokusui Wakayama.

[2] He became a disciple of Kun'en Kaneko [ja],[2] a minor poet who had studied under Ochiai Naobumi and who, according to historian and critic Donald Keene, never fulfilled his early potential.

[2] Kun'en experimented with just about every tanka school,[2] and the characteristic that critics have traditionally associated with him is his having been a "city poet".

[4] His talent as a poet first garnered attention in 1910 when he published Nakiwarai ("Smiling Through the Tears"), a collection of 143 poems written entirely in roman letters, in three-line stanzas.

[5] He adopted mild socialist tendencies in the 1910s,[6] and when, in the 1930s, the militarist government began to crack down heavily on left-wing literature, he shifted over to writing scholarly works rather than produce propaganda.