William Blake (1757-1827), poet and engraver, known for his mysticism, sentiment and the complex symbolism of his work, does not seem a likely candidate for Japanese scholarly enthusiasm. Yet, he has long excited interest, even eagerness in the academic circles of Japan.
Their first acquaintance perhaps came through a lecture on Blake, "The First Mystic," which was given in the late 1890s by Lafcadio Hearn at Tokyo University. It was one of a series of talks called "Some Strange English Literary Figures" and Blake's strangeness was perhaps his initial attraction.
Or perhaps it was his strange familiarity. Blake was one of the few Western artists to illustrate his own poetry, to make the word and the image meet on the page. This was something, however, that many Japanese poets had traditionally done -- Basho, Issa and many others, drew their poems.
Though it wasn't until 1989 that the complete translation of Blake's poetry actually appeared, he was well known in Japan long before that. In particular he was taken up by an influential literary journal, Shirakaba (White Birch), a magazine founded in 1910 by a group of literati including Naoya Shiga, Soetsu Yanagi and, later on, Yasunari Kawabata.
By 1914 Yanagi's book on Blake had appeared and another author, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, thought so highly of the English artist-poet that one of his images ("The Ancient of Days") was selected as the title-page design for a new journal with which the Japanese author was affiliated.
By 1917 the first collection of Blake's poems in Japanese had appeared, and in 1919 Shirakaba sponsored an "exhibition of reproductions from the works of William Blake." By 1927, the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet, there was enough interest for the event to be celebrated in Kyoto with full academic attendance.
From then on, Japanese scholarly enthusiasm has grown, and among the results was a large exhibition and conference called "The Glad Days in the Reception of Blake in Japan," which was held in Kyoto in the fall of 2003. The present volume collects a number of papers given at the conference and offers an overview of Blake studies in Japan as well as a full bibliography.
These papers are loosely divided by historical period, beginning with the nature of "the Orient" as envisaged by Blake and his contemporaries. Blake himself only mentioned "the Orient" once, in a page from "Jerusalem," describing it as a location that he mystically claims "covered the Atlantic Mountains & the Erythrean / From bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England." Nor did he ever come to its shores. Indeed, he went to no shores at all, never having ventured more than 100 kilometers or so from his native birthplace.
One wonders what Blake would have thought of his current academic fame in this far archipelago of the antipodes. He might have found fitting his initial standing as an English bunjin, a literati painter who illustrated his own poetry. He would certainly have been impressed by the literary labors of the contributors of this volume and what they have uncovered, tangential though some of it is. He might have been gratified at his continued influence on Japanese writers such as Kenzaburo Oe.
Certainly, he would have been buoyed by the glad days of his current academic standing in Japan. As one of the commentators in this volume writes: "Neither the delay in his recognition at home nor the fascinating acclimatization of Blake in the varieties of European Symbolism fully prepares one for the astonishingly fresh and focused impact on early-twentieth-century Japan."
Blake has, for whatever reasons, been thoroughly taken up by what one of the contributors here charitably calls "the long and distinguished Japanese tradition of reception." The poet's "bright Japan" has proved to be one of his major resting places.
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