IASIL Japan Newsletter2020 No. 1
The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
April 2020

1. Plans for the IASIL Japan 2020 Conference, “Revolutions/Resolutions”
The following plan was confirmed at the Executive Committee E-meeting held from 8 to 15 March.
Date: 10-11 October, 2020.
Venue: Meiji University, Surugadai Campus
https://www.meiji.ac.jp/cip/english/about/campus/index.html
Guest Speakers 1) Matthew Campbell (The University of York) and 2) Leontia Flynn
Symposium 1: “Illness in Irish Writing: mental, physical, social” (tentative title)
Chair: John Maher
Panellists: Naoko Toraiwa, Nao Igarashi, Beverley Curran
Symposium 2: “Revolutions/Resolutions: Conflict and Art” (tentative title)
Chair: Andrew Fitzsimons
Panellists: Akiko Manabe, Naomi Miki and David Taylor

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 the IASIL Japan office at secretary@iasil.jp. Besides the synopsis itself, please senddetails of affiliation, full postal and e-mail addresses, and telephone and fax numbers by 31st May.
There are many accommodation options in Tokyo convenient for Meiji University. We ask
members to research and arrange their own accommodation.
Please also note that in 2017, we introduced online registration system for IASIL Japan conference
and that the members will be notified of the conference details digitally.

*NOTE: Though the coronavirus situation is still unfolding, we hope to hold our conference asscheduled.

12. IASIL Conference 2020 “Creative Borders”
IASIL Conference will be held at University of Lodz in Poland, from 20 to 24 July, 2020.
For details and registration, please go to the IASIL Conference website: http://iasil.uni.lodz.pl/ . For theConference organisers’ notice regarding the situation surrounding COVID-19, go to:
http://iasil.uni.lodz.pl/covid-19/

3. IASIL Japan Scholarship
There was no application to IASIL Japan Scholarship. We ardently encourage more postgraduate
students to apply for the scholarship next year.

4. Payment of Annual Fees
Please find enclosed the 2020 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 notpaid 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 2020 fee.
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¥ 7,000
Couple membership with JIS
Membership with JIS & ¥ 10,000
Couple membership with JIS & IUR
IUR
Student with JIS*
¥ 5,000*a copy of valid student ID should be provided annually¥ 10,000¥ 13,000

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: Kawagoe Branch (Branch No. 382)
Branch Address: 1-2-7 Shintomi-cho, Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture, 350-0043, Japan
Tel: Tel: +81 (0)49-222-2351
Account Name: IASIL Japan Treasurer Hironao Kobayashi
Account No: 0343056
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 of Irish
Studies and Irish University Review for which you have paid, according to the table below.
International postal
Oceania, North America, CentralAsia
South America, Africa
rates for JIS & IUR
America, Europe, Middle EastJIS¥ 750¥ 1,000¥ 1,300
JIS & IUR

¥ 1,500¥ 2,000¥ 2,6002

5. Journal of Irish Studies
The deadline for submission to Journal of Irish Studies Vol. XXXV is 25 April 2020. Contributors
should send articles for consideration together with a short biographical note to Jane O’Halloran ateditor@iasil.jp. Please send articles and biographical information as MS Word files attached to the email. The biographical information should include the author’s affiliation, full postal and e-mailaddresses, 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.

6. The Seamus Heaney Award, JapanThe Embassy of Ireland, Japan is proud to announce that the distinguished poet, Mutsuo Takahashi
has become the inaugural recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award, Japan.
The award recognises distinguished contribution to literary relations between Ireland and Japan.
A poet, playwright and essayist, Mutsuo Takahashi’s work has made him one of the most eminent writers
in contemporary Japan and, through translation into many languages, one of the most well-known
Japanese writers in the world.
Born in 1937 into a family of day labourers in northern Kyushu, he attended the Fukuoka
University of Education, before moving to Tokyo in 1962, where he pursued a successful career as a
copywriter before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry,eight collections of haiku and tanka, numerous works of prose and collections of essays, and has adapted,
among others, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. Among the many awards he has received, in 2017 he
was designated a Bunkakorosha (Person of Cultural Merit) and became a member of the Nihon Geijutsuin (The Japan Arts Academy) the most distinguished arts organization in Japan.
In Twelve Views from the Distance he writes of how as a young man his ‘soul felt a strong affinityfor what was outside my world in the realm of the other.’ One of the most significant of these otherplaces has been Ireland.
He has adapted Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well as a Noh play, which was performed at the Kanze NohTheatre in Tokyo in 1990. His abiding interest in Yeats has led him to travel to Ireland three times. On
his first trip to Ireland in 1999, he toured Kerry, Sligo and Donegal, and held readings in Dublin andBelfast, meeting Irish poets, including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Peter Sirr, PaulaMeehan and Theo Dorgan. His memorable Belfast reading, with Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson,
is celebrated in the poem ‘The Process’. As the critic Nobuaki Tochigi has written, ‘the weeks spent inIreland were decisive for Takahashi in regaining his faith in poetry,’ and many of the poems in the poet’svolume, Saku no Mukou (‘Beyond the Hedge’), published in 2000, were inspired by this first visit toIreland. In the poem ‘In Ireland, I’, he writes ‘The air that struck my cheeks, the sand and soil under myfeet, / all of it was wide awake. I sensed it in every pore.’
The publication of On Two Shores: New and Selected Poems by Dedalus Press in 2006, which
included translations of these ‘Irish’ poems, among other recent work, marked the first time a Japanesepoet had been published by an Irish press. The book was launched in Dublin on the occasion of his third3

visit to Ireland, where Takahashi held a bilingual reading with his Irish translator, Frank Sewell.
It is entirely fitting that the inaugural recipient of an award named for Seamus Heaney should goto a poet. In his elegy for Heaney, ‘Talisman’, whom he admired greatly and met in person in Dublin,
Takahashi writes: ‘The bog of death has embraced you alive to the lips, to the eyelids and then theforehead / and alive still you become our perfected memory, our talisman.’
Unfortunately, given the fast-changing events worldwide due to COVID-19, and the impact ontravel, the award ceremony for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award, Japan, which was to have takenplace on April 14, has been postponed. The Embassy of Ireland remain committed to supporting thisinitiative, and alternative dates and arrangements will be proposed soon. One possibility is to hold theaward ceremony to coincide with the IASIL Japan Conference in October.

IASIL Japan
c/o Toshiki Tatara
Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Yasuda Women’s University
6-13-1 Yasuhigashi, Asaminami-ku, Hiroshima 731-0153, Japan
Tel: +81-(0)80-3701-0547

Email: secretary@iasil.jp

IASIL Japan Newsletter 2020 No.2 will be distributed digitally in September.

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