IASIL JAPAN Newsletter2011 No. 3
International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
August 2011

1. Report for 2011 IASIL Conference at Leuven2011 IASIL Conference was held from 19 July to 22 July in Leuven, Belgium. Thecity Leuven is known as the university town with rich culture, history, and good
foods in the country. The venue, Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, testifies
Belgium’s strong Catholic connections with Ireland, which goes back to the midsixteenth century.
The conference theme was “Conflict and Resolution in Irish Literatures” and it
started with a keynote lecture by Margaret Harper from University of Limerick on
Yeats’s A Vision, followed by 132 papers and 4 more keynote lectures. Titles andtopics ranged over wide varieties: Land War Fiction, Beckett’s Stylization ofConflicts, Contemporary Irish Poetry, Aesthetics of Redemption, Early TwentiethCentury Theatre, Women Writers, Social Realism in Contemporary Irish Film,
Translation of Conflict, Contemporary Northern Irish Drama, Memory and Violence,
Crime Fiction, Joycean Solutions to Conflict, Gender and Conflicted Identities andmore. Noticeably, members of IASIL Japan actively contributed: Kiminori Fukaya,
Eishiro Ito, Tetsuko Nakamura, Soichiro Onose, Fuyuji Tanigawa, Naoko Toraiwa,Yuri Yoshino, and Kazuhiro Doki.
Actually, because of the human as well as natural disasters in Tohoku area,
IASIL members from all over the world had been very much concerned about thesituation of Japanese members and were greatly delighted that not a few members
could attend the conference. At the AGM on the last day, Secretary of IASIL Japan
read a letter of gratitude from President Masami Nakao, who could not attend theconference, and was greatly appreciated. In the following banquet, he was speciallyawarded in the status of representing IASIL Japan with books about Irish
Franciscans and Leuven because, as Dr. Hedwig Schwall, Chief Organizer of theconference, said, “Japanese people are so resilient in spite of the terrible disaster.”
The exchange became an impressive reminder of the strong ties among IASILmembers. The full text of the President’s letter is quoted below:

12. Letter of IASIL JAPAN President
12 July 2011
Dear IASIL members,
On behalf of all the members of IASIL JAPAN, I would like to convey to you mysincere gratitude for the friendship and sympathy the members and friends of IASIL
showed through the numerous kind messages sent to us after the unprecedented disasterthat took place on March 11. In the confusion after the event, which seemed to change
the lives of so many of us, how encouraging it was to be assured of these strong humanties, regardless of physical distance.
We were soon glad to find that all IASIL JAPAN members in the region were safe, butthere are a number of us with friends and relatives who lost their lives or homes. One
member reports that she was not affected personally, but that as her institution became arefuge for those who lost their residences, she is currently spending most of her time
helping them out with their daily lives.
After four months, the recovery efforts are proceeding, and at the same time, we are
beginning to realize the wide connotations of the tragedy and of its causes, both naturaland human. As people studying literature and history, we cannot but question our own
standpoints in the whole picture. IASIL JAPAN, through its primary function ofpursuing in the studies of Irish writing, will also become a forum for such exploration.
I regret not being able to come to the beautiful city of Leuven to join you and thank you
in person, but we are still finishing the last part of the semester in my institution.
However, I am confident that the conference will again be a lively and fruitful one, as isalways the case with IASIL, and I hope very much to see you next year in Montreal.
With kindest regards,
Masami Nakao,President,IASIL JAPAN23.

Reports from Members
Sharing “Conflict and Resolution” in a Friendly Atmosphere at the IASIL
Conference in Leuven

Tetsuko Nakamura (Nippon Medical School)

The 35th IASIL Conference began on July 18 in the cozy atmosphere afforded by
one of the modern auditoria (once a seventeenth-century chapel) at the Leuven
Centre for Irish Studies, located around the corner from Leuven’s Oude Markt.
Following the opening ceremony, during which Ambassadors Tom Hanney ofIreland and Jonathan Brenton of Britain humourously referred to the conflicts andresolutions between their two countries, a series of rich and stimulating academic
exchanges on this theme occupied the next four days.
As amply demonstrated in the last keynote lecture, “The Literatures of Belfast”,
delivered by Eamonn Hughes, the theme of “Conflict and Resolution” has longpermeated every historical and cultural aspect of Ireland and is certainly a key
feature of Irish literature. Hughes traced the literary representations of conflict andresolution between Catholics and Protestants back about two hundred years,
allowing us to grasp how this essential feature of Irish literature has been passed
down from one generation of Irish writers to the next. Other studies presented at theconference showed that the anxiety, suspicion, grudges and trauma experienced intimes of change and instability have also been constant and powerful topoi in Irish
literature.
Because of the smaller number of papers presented (about 130, or 100 or sofewer than at last year’s Maynooth Conference), the number of concurrent sessions
was held to four or five. This meant that participants with similar interests were able
to gather together repeatedly, allowing for coherent discussions in an intimate
atmosphere. IASIL Conferences are characterised by friendship and understanding,which encourages researchers to give presentations on work in progress so that they
can receive suggestions for further research, as was certainly the case with some ofthis year’s Japanese participants. The 2012 Montreal Conference will provide us
with an opportunity to share our thoughts with far more North American scholars aswell as with those from other parts of the world.

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A Thought on Keynote Lectures
Fuyuji Tanigawa (Konan Women’s University)
I attended the IASIL International Conference held in Leuven,
Belgium from 18 to 22, July, 2011. The host institute was thesix-hundred-year-old Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, better known as theIrish College, Louvain. It is the very place where the Annals of the FourMasters, a great classic in the Irish language, was compiled.
The conference program was “Conflict and Resolution in IrishLiteratures”, and the titles of keynote lectures are: “Gaelic Exiles in Louvainin the Early 17th Century”, “Symbols and Text: Flags and Territory inNorthern Ireland”, “The Historic Roots of Communal Conflict in Ireland andWhat Might Be Done to Address Them”, and “The Literatures of Belfast”.
These are full of information and suggestions, showing Gaelic poets'
handwriting, real flags of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, murals inBelfast, and Belfast in writing. The first of these lectures was Margaret
Harper's “The Clock Has Run Down and Must Be Wound Up Again: Yeats's
Violent Vision. She started her lecture with the clear proposition “Yeatswas a theorist”, and then gave evidences in the comparison between theVision 1925 version and the 1937 version. This procedure seemed highly
deductive, extraordinary for an archaic literary student like me, andmarvelously impressive.

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