IASIL Japan Newsletter2018 No. 1
The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
April 2018

1. Election of New Executive Committee Members
The term of the present IASIL Japan Executive Committee Members is to expire on 31
December, 2018 and we are now conducting an election for the new members. Yoko Kubo,
Masami Nakao and Kumiko Yamada (of Rikkyo Univ.) have agreed to serve as Election Officers.
Members in good standing (paid-up for 2017) receive a ballot sheet with this Newsletter. Theyare requested to choose 10 candidates and check the corresponding blank boxes, to place theballot sheet in the small envelope, seal and post it in the return envelope. Please make sure that
it will reach the office by 25 May. The results of the election will be announced at the Annual
General Meeting during the Annual Conference to be held at Toyo University on 13-14 October.
2. Plans for the IASIL Japan 2018 Conference, “Exits and Entrances”
The following plan was confirmed at the Executive Committee Meeting held on 3 March:
Dates: 13-14 October
Venue: Toyo University (Hakusan Campus)
http://www.toyo.ac.jp/site/access/access-hakusan.html
Guest Speakers 1) Ondřej Pilný (Charles University, Prague) and 2) Deirdre Madden
Symposium 1: “Samuel Beckett and the Imagination of the Post-catastrophe” (tentative title)
Chair: Mariko Hori Panelists: Under negotiation by the chair
Symposium 2: “Cultivating Stories: Children’s Fiction in Ireland” (tentative title)
Chair: Jane O’Halloran Panelists: Under negotiation by the chair
Call for Papers!
Applicants for a 20-minute paper reading are requested to send a synopsis of 250-300 words as
a Word attachment to IASIL Japan office at. Besides the synopsis itself,
please send details of the author’s affiliation, full postal and e-mail addresses, and telephone andfax numbers by 31st May.
In light of the recent tourism boost in Tokyo, the members are advised to make their hotel
bookings for the conference early. Hotels around Ichigaya, Idabashi, Suidobashi and Korakuen
Stations should be most convenient for the venue.
Please also note that in 2017 we introduced online registration for the IASIL Japan
conference and digital notification of the conference details for members.
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3. Payment of Annual Fees
Please find enclosed the 2018 Membership Fee remittance sheet payable to Japan Post Bank.
You may choose to pay to the IASIL Japan account at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi below. If
you have not paid the membership fee below for any of the past three years, a separate sheet
indicating the unpaid year is enclosed, so we ask you to add that amount to the 2018 fee.
As was approved at the Annual General Meeting last October, Student membership fee (withJIS only) comes into effect as of April 2018. If you are applying for Student membership fee,
please provide the office with a copy of valid student ID with your payment.
Membership with JIS
Membership with JIS & IUR¥7,000¥10,000

Student with JIS*

¥5,000

Couple membership with JIS¥10,000
Couple membership with JIS & IUR ¥13,000*a copy of valid student ID should be provided annually

If you live abroad, please transfer your membership fee to the following account:
Bank Name Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, LTD.
SWIFT CODE: BOTKJPJT
Branch Name: Kyodo Branch (Branch No. 091)
Branch Address: 3-1-42 Miyasaka, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 156-0051, Japan
Tel: +81 (0)3-5477-5751
Account Name: IASIL Japan Treasurer Mika Momoo
Account No: 0648854

The membership fee does not include the transfer charge, so please make sure that the exact
amount reaches us. Please add the overseas postal charge to mail you the copies of Journal ofIrish Studies and Irish University Review for which you have paid, according to the table below.
International postal
rates for JIS & IUR
JISJIS & IUR¥ 750

Oceania, North America, Central
America, Europe, Middle East
¥ 1,000

South America,Africa¥ 1,300¥ 1,500¥ 2,000¥ 2,600

Asia

4. IASIL Conference 2018, “Reimagining Traditions”
IASIL Conference will be held from 23 to 27 July at Radboud University, Nijmegen, theNetherlands. For details and registration, please go to the IASIL Conference website:<http://www.ru.nl/iasil2018/>. We hope to meet many participants from IASIL Japan inNijmegen!
5. IASIL Japan Scholarship
There was one application to IASIL Japan Scholarship. We are pleased to announce Nao Igarashi(Durham University) won the award with the proposal “The Shadow of W. B. Yeats behind the‘structural tightening-up’ in Louis MacNeice’s Poems of 1939-1941”. She will receive 50,000
yen to attend IASIL Conference at Radboud University. We hope that our young members willcontinue to make the most of this opportunity we offer.

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6. Journal of Irish Studies
The deadline for submission to Journal of Irish Studies Vol. XXXIII is 25 April 2018.
Contributors should send articles for consideration together with a short biographical note
to Beverley Curran at. Please send articles and biographical information as MS
Word files attached to the e-mail. The biographical information should include the author’s
affiliation, full postal and e-mail addresses, and telephone and fax numbers. More information
can be found on the IASIL Japan website: <http://iasil.jp/guidelines.html>.
The editor suggests that those whose mother tongue is not English should have their articles
checked by native speakers of English prior to submission.
7. Obituaries
In Memory of Gerard Fanning (1952-2017)
Gerard Fanning’s death has taken away a poet of supreme attentiveness, graceful intricacy
and bracing insight: ‘the panicked wren fleeing a patch of salal / is there to remind me, that I
know / the date of my birth, but don’t yet know / the date of my death, and never shall’(‘Character in Search of an Author’). He was the recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish
Literature and the Brendan Behan Award, and his collections include Easter Snow (1992),
Working for the Government (1999) Water and Power (2004), and Hombre: New and Selected
Poems (2011), published by Dedalus Press. He was a poet who wore his acute intellect and his
influences lightly, Derek Mahon and Elizabeth Bishop were touchstones, but he read everyone
and was a font of knowledge about writers and writing, though self-effacing almost to a fault.
He was a lover of books, and of poetry, wherever he found it. I recall his joy in the poetry of themasters, Kinsella and Heaney and Mahon, and the various transports of joy and despair provided
by his fervent support of the Ireland football team. Members of IASIL Japan will recall his gentle,gentlemanly presence and quiet humour at the memorable reading he gave of his poems of‘Ireland’s Unsung East Coast’ at the 2013 Conference at Kyoto Notre Dame University, a visit
he too remembered with great fondness. He was a caring, thoughtful, and generous friend, anda poet and person of absolute integrity. He is, and will be, greatly missed.
Andrew Fitzsimons
In Memory of Yuichi Takamatsu (1929-2017)
It was with great sadness that we received the news that Yuichi Takamatsu, professor
emeritus of the University of Tokyo and former president of the English Literary Society ofJapan (1985-1988), had passed away on 19 August 2017. He was a highly respected andprominent scholar of English literature, writing numerous celebrated monographs on
Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and most notably on Modernist literature. His monumental
collection of literary essays, Igirisu Kindai Shihō [modern British poetics] (2001), not only
fascinated us with the author’s abundant knowledge and profound insights into the poets and theworks discussed, but was itself an eloquent testimony to the joy of reading literature. It wasawarded the 2002 Yomiuri prize for literature.
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Prof. Takamatsu was also widely acclaimed for his contributions in literary translation.
Among the best known are, of course, James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses (with Saichi Maruya
and Reiji Nagakawa), W. B. Yeats’s poems, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lawrence Durrell’s The
Alexandria Quartet, and the works of Thomas De Quincey and Robert Louis Stevenson (withTeiko Takamatsu). The beauty and precision of his Japanese as well as his deep understandingof the original works reminded us of the value of translation as an artistic achievement in itself.
In his classroom, as I fondly recall from some thirty years ago, the students wererespectfully attentive so as never to miss a word from such a distinguished scholar. And thewords were at a premium because he was never a man of many words. We enjoyed all the more
the moments when his sophisticated sense of humour made us smile. Prof. Takamatsu’s warmand generous personality won the hearts of all who knew him.
May his soul rest in peace, and our deepest condolences go to the bereaved family.
Masami Nakao

IASIL Japan Newsletter 2018 No.2 will be distributed digitally in September.
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