IASIL Japan Newsletter2019 No. 1
The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
April 2019

1. Message from the New President
I am deeply honoured to have been entrusted by the membership of IASIL Japan with theprivilege of being President. I was moved by, and will never forget, the expressions of support
received from so many members, and hope that I can repay this trust and support by continuing, as
best I can, the wonderful work of our last President, Professor Naoko Toraiwa, and the work ofprevious Presidents, whose contributions have established our organization as a vital forum andvehicle for the study of Irish literatures in Japan.
One of the extraordinary facts about IASIL Japan is that we have a membership larger than thaton the island of Ireland. It is an organization that all members, past and present, should be proud of,and one that has by now, with the extensive roll call of writers and scholars that we have had as ourguests and the distinguished work of our members, as writers, scholars and as translators, created a
special place of its own in the story of contemporary Irish literature.
On a personal note, IASIL Japan has been a fundamental part of my life in this country. I joined,almost accidentally, in 1998, at the conference at Waseda University, when the guests were Paul
Durcan and Medbh McGuckian. It was my first year in Japan, and adjusting to life here has been eased
and helped in ways I am only now beginning to realise by the acquaintanceships, and eventuallyfriendships, made at that conference and over the now twenty years of my membership. I look forward
to the coming three years, not without some trepidation, but I am lucky in having a strong new IASIL
Office team, in Toshiki Tatara, as Secretary, and Hironao Kobayashi, as Treasurer, to follow on fromthe intimidatingly capable Haruko Takakuwa, and Mika Momoo. I thank you all once again, sincerely.
Andrew Fitzsimons

2. New Secretary and Treasurer
The new IASIL Japan secretariat assumed office in January 2019 and will serve for the next
three years. Toshiki Tatara is the new Secretary, and Hironao Kobayashi is the new Treasurer. TheIASIL Japan office is located at the address below. Please inform the office of any changes in yourcontact information, including email address or affiliation:
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:1

3. Payment of Annual Fees
Please find enclosed the 2019 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 theunpaid year is enclosed, so we ask you to add that amount to the 2019 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 postalOceania, North America, Central
Asia
South America, Africa
rates for JIS & IUR
America, Europe, Middle EastJIS¥ 750¥ 1,000¥ 1,300
JIS & IUR

¥ 1,500¥ 2,000¥ 2,600

4. IASIL Election 2019
The IASIL Japan Executive Committee has sent the nomination of the following members torepresent Japan at the IASIL Executive Committee for 2019-2021.
Vice-chairperson: Andrew Fitzsimons
Representatives: Hironao Kobayashi, Toshiki Tatara, Naoko Toraiwa

5. IASIL Conference 2019, “The Critical Ground”
IASIL Conference will be held from 22 to 26 July at Trinity College Dublin. For details andregistration, please go to the Conference website: <https://www.tcd.ie/English/iasil-2019/>. We hope
to meet many participants from IASIL Japan in Dublin!
26. IASIL Japan Scholarship
There was no application to IASIL Japan Scholarship. We ardently encourage more postgraduate
students to apply for the scholarship next year.

7. Journal of Irish Studies
The deadline for submission to Journal of Irish Studies Vol. XXXIV is 25 April 2019.
Contributors should send articles for consideration together with a short biographical note to JaneO’Halloran 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.

8. Plans for the IASIL Japan 2019 Conference, “Borderlands”
Dates: 12-13 October
Venue: Konan Women’s University <https://www.konan-wu.ac.jp/en/access/>
Guest Speakers 1) Aileen Douglas (Trinity College Dublin) and 2) Eoin McNamee
Symposium 1: “Crossing/Negotiating Borders: gender and nation in Ireland under the Union”(tentative title)
Chair: Haruko Takakuwa
Panelists: Hiroko Ikeda, Saeko Nagashima, Kimiyo Ogawa, Masaya Shimokusu
Symposium 2: “Borderlands between Various Art Forms” (tentative title)
Chair: To be announced
Panelists: Richard Kelly, Akiko Manabe, Hiroko Mikami, Naoko Toraiwa
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 and fax numbersby 31st May.
In light of the recent tourism boost in Kobe, the members are advised to make their hotel
bookings for the conference early. Hotels around Sannomiya, Motomachi, Osaka and Hankyu-Umeda
Stations should be most convenient for the venue.
Please also note that in 2017, we introduced online registration system for IASIL Japanconference and that the members will be notified of the conference details digitally.
39. Announcement: Seamus Heaney Award, Japan
Literary relations between Japan and Ireland might be said to date back to Jonathan Swift’s
Lemuel Gulliver, who landed near Edo (Tokyo), albeit briefly, the only real location he visited on his
fantastic voyage. Two hundred years later, another voyager, Lafcadio Hearn landed, but stayed longer,
becoming eventually a Japanese citizen. Hearn is well known in Japan for his adaptations of Japanesefolktales, which, some argue, betray the indelible mark left by his Irish upbringing.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese scholars and writers, such as Yone Noguchi, weresome of the first to take a serious interest in the work of W. B. Yeats, an interest that was reciprocatedby Yeats, in his adaptations of Noh drama, and in the many poems that reveal the hold that Japaneseculture had on the thrust of his imaginative life. It would now be impossible to do justice to the rangeof poets, novelists, playwrights, academics, translators and scholars, in both countries, whose work has
added to this tradition. The distinguished and sustained nature of this work, particularly over the last
thirty years, make it appropriate for the Embassy of Ireland, Japan, in conjunction with IASIL Japan,to establish an award to recognise outstanding contribution to the enhancement of literary relations
between Ireland and Japan.
To name this award the Seamus Heaney Award, Japan, is to honour a poet whose work, andwhose presence on many occasions in Japan, played a vital role in inspiring much of the work that theaward will recognise, and to acknowledge in an official manner, and continue, a relationship withJapan which was substantial, sustained, and marked by mutual affection and regard.
The award will be administered biennially by IASIL Japan under the auspices of the Embassy ofIreland, Japan, and to be given to: a work/body of work of outstanding literary merit; an outstanding
work/body of work of translation and/or scholarship. Nominations are requested from relevant literaryand scholarly associations and institutions, in Japan and Ireland. The nominations will be evaluated bya panel of well-qualified judges drawn from among these nominating organizations. The award itself
will be a citation of the recipient’s outstanding contribution to literary exchange between Ireland andJapan, on a specially commissioned piece by Richard Gorman, an Irish artist whose own work has had
a long association with Japan.
Nominations, to be received by November 30, 2019, can be sent by email using the subject line
‘Seamus Heaney Award Japan Nomination’ to: IASIL Japan Office:Embassy of Ireland, Japan:

4or10. Obituary: for Prof. Seishi Matsuda
Seishi Matsuda, Professor Emeritus of Kobe Shinwa Women’s University, former President of
the Yeats Society of Japan, and in charge of many roles for promoting Irish literary studies not only inIASIL Japan but also in other sister academic bodies, went on his last journey. He would never returnto our world. He was a living book of life and death, and we could never open a page in it again.
Prof. Matsuda was born September in 1941, the same year of Zero fighters’ birth. His hometown
was the meek mountain area of Kasaoka, Okayama Prefecture. After years he learned much inHiroshima and became one of the translators of Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s award-winning record andanalysis of the hibakusha, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. He worked long in Kobe, and there
hosted many renowned guests from abroad, including Profs. Edna Longley and Luke Gibbons, while
always being a sincere teacher and care-taker for the younger generations.
He never picked up part of anything or anyone. His wide, panoramic and synthetic sight over W.
B. Yeats and other writers must have been based on huge reading of many Eastern and Western
thinkers, old and contemporary. However, he never forgot to listen to a living soul.
He kept a photo on the head-side row of books in his last den in his house, taken by anothergreat scholar and his close friend Prof. Hiroshi Shimizu. In the photo a local bamboo flutist is making
impersonal, universal dance music with free breath and quick fingers at a Feis Lughnasa at the foot ofMt. Iwaki in Tsugaru, a northern country of Japan.
I, perhaps I can say “we”, cannot believe he is gone; we just expect him to suddenly appear at
the next corner on our way, and smile at us, asking interestingly “Now, how and why are you here?”
The last words to say- Goodbye, Matsuda-sensei, thank you.
Fuyuji Tanigawa

5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 2019 No.2 will be distributed digitally in September.

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