Factbook

A Dynamic Compendium of Interesting Japanese Literary and Publishing Facts
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    The first English language edition of Kobo Abe’s ‘The Woman in the Dunes’ was illustrated by his wife Machi[UPDATED: 6-17-2024]

    In 1964, the year of the first Tokyo Olympics, Alfred A. Knoff published the first American Edition of Kobo Abe’s (1924-1993) The Women in the Dunes in English, translated by E. Dale Saunders (1919-1995).

    This first edition is beautifully illustrated with multiple drawings, rendered in pen and ink, by the author’s wife Machi who he met while he was at university studying medicine. Many believe his wife, who was an artist and theatre designer, was the inspiration behind his decision to quit the medical profession shortly after he graduated from university and one year after they married in 1947.

    The drawings depict not just the protagonists, but also the insects one of the novel’s protagonists collects while on a break from work at the start of the narrative, a break he finds it impossible to return from.

    One such illustration, for instance, consists of four rows of insects, each with four similar looking insects holding the feelers of the insect next to them, as if they are line dancing on the page.

    The Women in the Dunes, a jarringly dry novel about the futility and repetitiveness of modern Japanese existence, was Abe’s first novel published in English.  It had already won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature in Japan in 1960 and was published in America in English 16 years after Abe had made his debut as a writer in Japan.

    A film adaptation of The Women in the Dunes, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001), with its unusually memorable sound track by Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), also went on general release in the same year as the English edition was published in America in 1964.

    The film subsequently won the special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year, helping launch Abe’s reputation and career outside Japan.

    Abe, son of a medical doctor, was brought up in Mukuden, Manchuria where his father was working at a medical school. And like the protagonist in The Women in the Dunes, Abe was fascinated with and collected insects from a young age. Despite all of this or because of it his own son subsequently decided to continue the family tradition and became a doctor.

    Abe was a fan of Nietzche, Heidegger, Jaspers as well as Kafka, an author that he has often been compared to. In fact, he is often given the moniker ‘The Kafka of Japan’.

    Abe studied medicine like his father, but in 1948 the year he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, his debut book, The Road Sign at the End of the Road, was published. Three years later he went on to win the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize for his novel The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma.

    Abe was a highly creative individual who ran his own avant-garde theatre group and also wrote science fiction. His best-known work of science fiction, Inter Ice Age 4, published at the height of the Cold War in 1959, is thought by many to be one of the best works of science fiction written by a Japanese author.

    Unsurprisingly, Abe and The Woman in the Dunes in particular are still popular today amongst some of Japan’s most creative individuals. People like the up-and-coming film director Yuka Eda, director and screenwriter of the 2018 crowd-funded film Shojo Kaiko, Girls’ Encounter, and the 2019 drama 21st Century Girl.

    Such Japanese artists often cite Abe as being inspirational and hugely influential on their own work, but few recall or seem to be aware of the talents of his wife and her illustrations.

    The 1964 American edition of The Women in the Dunes contains the following text on the page opposite its copyright page: “Without The Threat Of Punishment There Is No Joy In Flight”.

    1964, Japan’s Olympic year, was not only a pivotal year for Abe with the twin milestones of his English language edition and the release of the book’s prize-winning film adaptation. It was also a significant year for Japanese publishing, other creative writers, and for Japan itself.

    The first English language edition of Kobo Abe’s ‘The Woman in the Dunes’ was illustrated by his wife Machi Posted by Richard Nathan
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    A poem about a frog written in 1686 by Japan’s most famous poet is Japan’s best known poem[UPDATED: 10-2-2023]

    Matsuo Basho, the 17th-century Japanese haiku master said to be Japan’s most famous poet as well as one of the world’s most influential, wrote the most famous Japanese poem and the most famous haiku ever penned.

    The poem, which he wrote at the age of 44 in 1686, is a very a simple poem about a frog.

    Translators have been trying ever since to find the perfect way to render the poem English, and there are unsurprisingly a myriad of versions of the poem in English translation as well as many other languages.

    Old pond – frogs jumped in – sound of water. (Lafcadio Hearn)

    Into the calm old lake A frog with flying leap goes plop! The peaceful hush to break. (William J. Porter)

    Old pond frog leaping splash (Cid Corman)

    A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps … A part, unstirred by sound or motion … till Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps. (Curtis Hidden Page)

    The original Japanese is:

    古池や蛙飛び込む水の音

    Furu ike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto

    A poem about a frog written in 1686 by Japan’s most famous poet is Japan’s best known poem Posted by Richard Nathan
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    New international standards for measuring time, weights and measures encouraged some to call for Japan to adopt a Westernised writing system abandoning traditional alphabets[UPDATED: 7-7-2023]

    At the height of Japan’s period of rapid modernisation and opening up to the West, known as the Meiji era (1868-1912), it wasn’t just Japan that was undergoing seismic change. Many countries were in fact being forced to embrace change as well.

    New international standards, for example, were emerging for time, the length of a day, weights and measures and much more in the wake of an internationalising world and rapidly emerging new technologies. 

    New technologies and communication tools such as the railways, which required standard time tables, had a huge impact on many countries including Japan.

    Phonetic transparency was also required for sending messages by telegraph, which these new railway lines facilitated the rapid spread of. It was thought that standardisation would bring efficiencies, reduce the cost, and increase the speed and internationalisation of trade.

    The first telegraph line was set up in Japan on the same route as Japan’s first railway line between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1869, much later than some other countries. Nevertheless, the number of messages sent by telegraph internally in Japan, and then internationally to and from Japan, increased exponentially.

    The introduction of railways had a very broad and deep impact on Japan, not only on how Japanese people sent messages, but on its cities and literature and much more besides.  Unification and harmonisation of standards became increasingly important.

    In 1875, Japan alongside 17 other nations attended the Paris Conference on the Metric System of Weights and Measures, and in 1884, at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington seven resolutions were agreed, several that the French delegation refused to accept, on how to standardise time and the definition of a day. 

    Time within Japan was subsequently standardised across the nation in 1886 giving birth to Toki no machi, Town of Time, in Akashi in Hyogo where Japan Standard Time (JST) is set, just over a decade after Japan had formally adopted the seven-day week system, which it did in 1873.

    Before this, time in one town could be noticeably different from another and in some nations horological experts argue that it wasn’t simply train times that forced counties to settle on a single time, but in Britain, for example, Victorian licensing laws introduced to regulate the opening hours of pubs.

    New technologies often force societies to consider their regulations; their priorities; the values they attribute to different groups, business sectors and segments and even how they weigh, measure and regulate society’s ills and benefits.

    Today officialdom and commentators obsession is with algorithms, AI, targets and data analytics as opposed to the introduction of more basic standards and measurements for time, weights and measure.

    That said, just like text messaging and emails today, these new forms of communication had a major impact on language, and generated significant debate that even encompassed for instance the future of written form Japanese.

    As is the case today, all this change spurred some very prominent Japanese individuals to call for wholesale change. 

    In 1885, a Japanese physicist, Aikitsu Tanakadate (1856-1952), invented a new alphabet for Japanese people to use called Nippon-Shiki Romaji. Romaji, is the Japanese word for the Latin alphabet, while Nippon-Shiki means Japanese style, and Romaji is now one of the four syllabaries (sets of written characters) used in written Japanese. 

    His intention was for his new easy to use alphabet to replace, not just complement or be a lexical stand-in, the alphabets and scripts already used in Japan to write and communicate in Japanese. 

    An earlier similar approach existed called the Hebon-Shiki Romaji developed in 1859 by James Hepburn (1815-1911), an American physician and lay Christian missionary. Hepburn wasn’t Japanese and his system was aimed at a non-Japanese audience.  

    His approach, known in English as the Hepburn romanization system for transliteration of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet, became popular through a Japanese–English dictionary he created. It is still used today. 

    Tanakadate and others, however, thought that their approach designed with a Japanese audience in mind would speed up the adoption of new technologies and research, creating a new Japanese ‘cultural and communication algorithm’, allowing Japan to compete more effectively with Western countries, which all used similar scripts. 

    Others held similar views. Arinori Mori (1847-1889) for instance, a statesman who founded Japan’s modern education system and was also a former Japanese Ambassador to the United States. He argued for the adoption of a simplified written form of English as the new national script. Others argued for English to replace Japanese as the nation’s language. 

    Anyone living in Japan today, or who has visited recently, might consider this aspiration fanciful and unrealistic, but other countries have adopted national language strategies to help position their nations better in a modernising world.

    Such countries as Singapore with its Mandarin Chinese and English language, Bilingual Policy and Rwanda’s policy to replace French with English as its national language.

    And Kanji, one of Japan’s four syllabaries, is after all a Chinese import that arrived in the Land of the Rising Sun in the 5th century AD.

    That said, during Meiji period Japan, magazines and publications designed to encouraged and amplify change were launched in Japan. Such publications as The Romaji Journal in 1885, The New Romaji Journal, as well as books promoting so-called Romaji Bungaku and Romaji Literature. During this period, Romaji Clubs were also founded.

    Romaji is widely used in Japan today, especially in advertising and for product branding in particular, but it is generally used to complement the traditional ways of writing Japanese, kanji, hiragana and katakana generating a soup like mix of different alphabets or scripts in any given text or passage.

    New international standards for measuring time, weights and measures encouraged some to call for Japan to adopt a Westernised writing system abandoning traditional alphabets Posted by Richard Nathan
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    In 1841 Shakespeare’s name appeared in print in Japan in Japanese for the first time[UPDATED: 6-14-2023]

    In 1841, 255 years after his death, William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) name appeared in print in Japan in Japanese for the very first time.

    This historic debut of Shakespeare’s name in published Japanese occurred in Rokuzo Shibukawa’s (1815-1851) translation, from the Dutch edition, of English Grammar, an international bestseller, which experts believe has sold more copies than any other English grammar book. English Grammar penned by the American grammarian Lindley Murray’s (1745-1826) was first published in English in 1795.

    The Bard’s 1841 Japanese debut was near the end of Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), a peaceful and prosperous period when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa Shoguns and the nation was isolated from the world. However, by this time in late Edo Japan international contact with Japan was already increasing and some books, like English Grammar, had started circulating in translation in Japan.

    The year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print in Japanese was, however, still 12 years before the Black Ships, Kurofune, of the American Commodore Matthew Perry (1794-1858) arrived in Japan in 1853, which famously led to Japan signing a treaty a year later with the United States. The first such treaty, that helped force Japanese markets and society to open up to international trade and contact. A treaty that subsequently led to the end of their reign over Japan by the Tokugawa Shoguns.

    Ironically, the first Tokugawa Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543-1616), who founded the Tokugawa military state with its dynasty of shoguns, and who would not have looked out of place as the lead character in a Shakespeare play, died in 1616 the same year as Shakespeare.

    And perhaps unsurprisingly, when the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), who loved reading narratives with tragic scenarios and twists of fate, adapted Shakespeare’s plays into films set in Japan, he set them in feudal Japan during the Senkoku period (1467-1603), also known as Japan’s Warring States Period. A time which was riddled with military conflicts and political intrigue, that ended with Ieyasu Tokugawa’s (1543-1616) rise to power and the commencement of the Edo Period.

    It took another 87 years from the appearance of Shakespeare’s name in a Japanese language printed book before the complete works of Shakespeare were published in Japanese translation in 1928.

    In 1841 Shakespeare’s name appeared in print in Japan in Japanese for the first time Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Julius Caesar, published in Japanese in 1883, was the first play by William Shakespeare to be translated into Japanese[UPDATED: 3-1-2023]

    The first published Japanese language translation of a play by William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) was Julius Caesar. It was published in 1883.

    The translation by Keizo Kawashima (1859-1933), which was in fact incomplete, was published in a Japanese newspaper. Nonetheless, it is considered by most experts to be the first Japanese translation of a Shakespeare play.

    Prior to this, quotes from Shakespeare plays, outlines and adaptations had already started appearing in Japanese often from well-known writers such as Kawasaki Robun (1829-1894), a prominent author and journalist who interestingly wrote a book published in 1872 that contains the first recipe in Japanese for making curry. In Robun’s case the Shakespeare play was Hamlet

    In 1884, Shoyo Tsubouchi (1859-1935), a Japanese writer and translator and later a professor at Waseda University, published the first complete Japanese translation of a Shakespeare play, also Julius Caesar. He gave it the title Shizaru Kidan Jigo no tachi Nagorino Kireaji, The Sharp Edge of Freedom’s Sword.

    It was a Kabuki-like adaption more than a direct or literal translation.  Early Shakespeare translations often targeted general readers not academics or scholars and as any schoolchild growing up in the United Kingdom knows Shakespeare is open to myriad interpretation. Tsubouchi published a new revised translation of Julius Caesar in 1913.

    That said, Hamlet was a play that several important Japanese authors translated in this period not just Robun. Ogai Mori (1862-1922), who is known for his contribution to the unification of written and spoken Japanese and for penning the ‘first modern Japanese short story’, for example, published a translation of Hamlet in 1889, something Bimyo Yamada (1868-1910), another famous novelist and poet, had also done the year before in 1888.

    Hamlet has since these early translations had a very special place amongst some of Japan’s most creative individuals and has now been adapted and translated numerous times after its somewhat late arrival in Japanese in Japan.  Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), probably Japan’s most notorious author, also had a go at adapting Hamlet into an illustrated children’s book.

    The celebrated Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), who loved reading and narratives with tragic scenarios and twists of fate, adapted Shakespeare’s plays into films set in Japan including Hamlet which no doubt has helped give further momentum to the interest that Shakespeare’s Hamlet elicits in Japan.

    There have subsequently been countless translations, adaptations, publications and performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the Japanese language, and Shakespearean films attract large audiences in Japan.

    Alongside Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) Alice in Wonderland and Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859-1930) Sherlock Holmes, which arrived in translation in Japan at a similar time, Shakespeare’s plays have probably been adapted and translated into Japanese more than any other literary works from England.

    Julius Caesar, published in Japanese in 1883, was the first play by William Shakespeare to be translated into Japanese Posted by Richard Nathan
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    The Japanese poet Ishikawa Takuboku was Meiji Japan’s ‘Angry Young Man’[UPDATED: 4-4-2022]

    The Japanese poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912), famous for his modern free-style tanka, disliked the repressive and static atmosphere of the Meiji era (1868-1912). 

    The only son of a Buddhist priest, Takuboku was, according to historians, spoilt and arrogant, as well as highly precocious, and saw limited positive future outcomes for the individual or the nation, in the era’s political and intellectual climate. 

    In 1913 he wrote a famous, often cited essay, The Impasse of Our Age, Jidai Heisoku no Genjo, accusing naturalism and many other so-called ‘isms’ as inadequate, and some of his poetry reflects Japan’s changing society, as well as his own self-scorn and anger. 

    Takuboku has been called Japan’s Meiji Angry Young Man, and much else, including, for example, the first modern Japanese, a provincial romantic, as well as a shameless firebrand. But his poems are still enjoyed and cherished by many today. 

    His refusal to conform and his James Dean (1931-1955) like early death at the age of 26, has helped give him a cult like status in Japan.

    An example of one of his poems translated by Roger Pulvers is:

    FATHERS AND SONS

    Why is the air so thick between them?

    Apart in spirit when facing each other

    Close in absolute silence.

    The Japanese poet Ishikawa Takuboku was Meiji Japan’s ‘Angry Young Man’ Posted by Richard Nathan
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    The translation of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ triggered Japan’s first post-war obscenity trial, in 1951[UPDATED: 11-5-2021]

    After Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan in 1951, full sovereignty returned to Japan bringing the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) to an end.

    Japan had a new constitution, originally drafted in English that it was putting into place in translation. Legal responsibility for its implementation and new rules and regulations transferred back to Japanese control. This included the regulation of the press, publishers and the media. 

    During the occupation various controls existed including General Headquarters (GCQ), for instance, determining which foreign books could or could not be published in Japanese translation.

    Despite this, Japan’s new constitution, drawn up by GCQ and ratified in 1947, prohibited all forms of censorship and guaranteed freedom of expression. This was a major change to the regulations that governed publishing in Japan, which had seen very limited development since major changes to these laws were implemented in a flurry of new regulations in Japan’s Meiji Era (1868-1912), when newspaper and magazine publishing started to flourish. 

    The post-war, liberal Western-influenced and controlled, atmosphere had a major impact on Japan, even on its publishing. This encouraged the setting up of thousands of new publishing houses and new waves of books arriving in Japan in Japanese translation, often for the first time. 

    In June 1950, a new self-regulation body was established. This became known as the Publishing Morals Committee, Shuppan Butsu Fuki Iinkai. And it was established shortly after the publication in spring of the same year, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Japanese translation for the first time.

    The book by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), which was first published in 1928, was translated into Japanese by Sei Ito (1905-1969) and published by Oyama Publishing. 

    The publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover tested these new laws and a trial took place on the grounds of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s content being obscene. A trial that went all the way to Japan’s supreme court, setting a legal precedent that lasted for decades.

    The Supreme Court decision, in this first post-war obscenity trial, defined obscenity as anything “unnecessarily sexually stimulating, (which) damages the normal sexual sense of shame of ordinary people, or is against good sexual moral principles”. 

    According to Kristen Cather in The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan,“ The Chatterley trial staged a very public struggle to define literary, cultural, and legal identity, engaging a far-reaching debate over the relationship of domestic Japanese and imported Western traditions”.  

    The Japanese Supreme Court concluded that parts of the book, consisting of about 80 pages, were obscene and banned those sections from publication and fined the translator and publisher in a landmark decision that concluded that the sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not normal and was against good sexual moral principles. 

    Despite Japan’s long history of erotic publishing of woodblock prints including Shunpon and shunga in the Edo Period (1603-1688), erotic guidebooks and tales of man-eating demon women, this imported fictional prose about Lady Chatterley and the day-to-day life of her English gamekeeper, that in addition to their intimate adulterous relationship includes “peripheral” passages on pheasant raising and managing a shooting estate, was deemed obscene. 

    A subsequent trial relating to an abridged translation by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987) of a version of Histoire de Juliette by the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) also led to a successful conviction.

    Interestingly Shibusawa, a relative of Eiichi Shibusawa (1840-1931) one of Japan’s most influential early industrialists who helped found many companies including the first Western-style paper mill in Japan in 1875, had written his graduation thesis on the Marquis de Sade.

    The lengthy nine year trial dragged in several famous Japanese authors as witnesses including Shusaku Endo (1923-1996), Shohei Ooka (1909-1988) and the Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe helping increase Shibusawa’s public profile.

    For some Japanese critics, even today, pornography and the publication of materials that are on the periphery of falling within scope of Japan’s official definition of the obscene is seen as a subversive tool through which to resist the authorities and assert a type of cultural national independence.

    That said, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, howeverwas not just controversial in Japan. It was banned in the United Kingdom until Penguin books won a landmark obscenity trial in 1960 allowing its full publication in English. This decision had a profound cultural and social impact in Britain.

    It was only in 1996 that the full book was finally published in Japan in Japanese, which allowed newspapers in Britain and America to report on this publishing breakthrough with such headlines as: Japanese to see more of ‘Lady Chatterley’ and Chatterley’ to bare all in Japan.  

    As academic interest in historically ‘obscene books’, many of which seem unremarkable in today’s light, increases, libraries like the British Library are starting to digitise their online collections and are making them available to researchers worldwide through collections like the Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender.

    These books are no longer concealed in special sections in libraries and are just a click away for some subscribers and library users.

    The translation of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ triggered Japan’s first post-war obscenity trial, in 1951 Posted by Richard Nathan
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    The translation of Harry Potter triggered a major tax investigation and fine in Japan[UPDATED: 4-21-2021]

    Yuko Matsuoka, the multi-millionaire Japanese translator and publisher of the Harry Potter novels in Japan, lost a case with the Japanese authorities, who sent her an extraordinary additional tax demand for 700 million yen, US$7 million, for undeclared income of more than $29 million.  

    The Japanese tax authorities alleged that Matsuoka, 62, received more than US$29 million between 2001 and 2004 in undisclosed income. She argued that, as she had been resident in Switzerland since 2001 no tax was in fact due in Japan. After consultation with the Swiss authorities she lost the case, as she had spent too much time in Japan during the period to qualify as non-resident in Japan for tax purposes.
    The translation of Harry Potter triggered a major tax investigation and fine in Japan Posted by Richard Nathan