Career
Born Teru Kaneko (金子 テル, Kaneko Teru) in Senzaki-mura, now part of Nagato, Yamaguchi prefecture, Senzaki was a fishing village, relying particularly on catches of Japanese sardine. Scenes of fishing and the sea often make appearances in her poems. Kaneko"s career as a writer of poetry for children began in earnest at the age of twenty, shortly after she became the manager and sole employee of a small bookstore in Shimonoseki, a town at the southern tip of Honshu.
Here she discovered a clutch of magazines which were riding the crest of a boom in children"s literature and which solicited stories and verse from their readers.
Kaneko sent in a number of poems, five of which, among them "The Fishes", were accepted for publication in the September 1923 issue of four of these magazines. Over the next five years she published fifty-one more verses.
Kaneko has been compared to Christina Rossetti. Five hundred and twelve verses written in Kaneko"s own hand, in three notebooks, were brought to light in 1982 by Setsuo Yazaki, and the entire collection was published by JULA Publishing Bureau in a six-volume anthology.