A Book of Patriotic Movements

This poem erases Chapter 1 of the Aikoku Undo Nenkan (Yearbook of Patriotic Movements), originally published in Japanese in 1936 by the Oka Furabu (Cherry Blossom Club), a radical right-wing organization whose lieutenants had supported the failed 1935 military coup. The English version of the original document has been digitized and made available by Japan's National Diet Library Digital Collections, which cites the United States Strategic Bombing Survey as the document's source.

"A Book of Patriotic Movements" is one of a collection of nineteen erasures. The full manuscript, The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground, draws from original documents published between from 1826 to 2014, each related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War. Below is the title erasure, whose original text is one of about 100 maps included in “Illustrations of Reports of General MacArthur Volume 1,” also in the National Diet Library’s Digital Collections.