Chronicles of my life: an American in the heart of Japan
New York, 2008
Abstract
The development of Japanese studies as a prominent academic discipline in the West was significantly shaped by the historical intersections of personal intellectual curiosity and mid-twentieth-century geopolitical conflict. An early academic foundation in Western classical humanities transitioned into an exploration of East Asian philology and literature, catalyzed by the intensive acquisition of the Japanese language during World War II. Service as a military translator and interpreter provided critical access to primary source materials, particularly personal diaries, which fostered a humanistic understanding of the Japanese populace amid wartime devastation. Post-war research and residency in Kyoto facilitated the translation of major dramatic and prose works, bridging the gap between traditional aesthetics and modern literary movements. Extensive collaborations with central figures of the Shōwa-era literary canon, including Mishima Yukio and Kawabata Yasunari, further integrated Japanese literature into the global curriculum. Scholarly contributions such as the compilation of comprehensive anthologies and the publication of detailed biographies of pivotal historical figures, like Emperor Meiji and Watanabe Kazan, established a rigorous framework for comparative literary analysis and historiography. This intellectual trajectory underscores the evolution of a cultural mediator who successfully navigated the complexities of post-war cultural identity to define the modern parameters of Japanese studies. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
Another pleasure at Harvard that year was the course on the poetry of Du Fu (Tu Fu), given by William Hung. In some ways, Hung’s scholarship was old-fashioned, but he not only was completely familiar with Du Fu’s poems but also had consulted English, German, and Japanese translations to discover what fresh insights had been provided by non-Chinese scholars. My most vivid memory of his teaching is of the time when he recited by heart one of Du Fu’s long poems. He recited the poem in the Fukien dialect, his own, which preserves the final consonants lost today in standard Chinese. As Hung recited, leaning back, tears filled his eyes.
Not far from the British Museum was Gordon Square, where Arthur Waley live. Waley had been my inspiration for years—the great translator who had rendered The Tale of Genji into Japanese but also Chinese works. […]
Various people had told me that it was difficult to keep a conversation going with Waley. If he was bored, he did not take pains to conceal it. A friend related that on one occasion, when Waley had a particularly tedious visitor, he took two books from his shelf and invited the visitor to go with him to the park in Gordon Square and, seated on separate benches, read a book. Even though it did not take Waley long to decide whether or not it was worth conversing with another person, he was not the kind of snob who has interested only in important people. On the contrary, he had such a wide variety of acquaintances that he might be described as a collector of unusual people. If I happened to inform an Australian clavichordist or a group of Javanese dancers or a Swiss ski teacher that I taught Japanese literature, I might be asked if I knew Arthur Waley, a friend of theirs.
Waley was a genius. The word genius is sometimes used in Japan for any foreigner who can read Japanese, but Waley knew not only Japanese and Chinese but also Sanskrit, Mongol, and the principal European languages. Moreover, he knew these languages not as a linguist interested mainly in words and grammar but as a man with an unbounded interest in the literature, history, and religion of every part of the world. He loved poetry written in the language he knew, and if he did not know a language that was reputed to have good poetry, he did not begrudge the time needed to learn it. Late in life he learned Portuguese in order to read the poetry of a young friend.