Nishiwaki Junzaburo was a poet and literary critic from Niigata Prefecture. He attended Keio University to study economics and foreign languages and there became interested in writing English poetry and published a few poems in literary journals. After graduating, he studied abroad at Oxford, where he was exposed to modernist literature and French surrealism. Upon returning to Japan, Nishiwaki took a teaching post at Keio and continued writing on the side, composing poetry in Japanese for the first time. He published the first Japanese surrealist poetry magazine in 1927 and founded a poetry journal, Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics). After World War II, Nishiwaki published another large poetry collection and translated T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Japanese.
Historical dictionary of modern Japanese literature and theater. J. Scott Miller. 2009.