Poet, translator, professor and writer: William I. Elliott has spent a lifetime in Japan devoted to modern poetry. It all started in 1964 in Yokohama, when Elliott opened the pages of a local newspaper to discover the poem "Humanism" by Shuntaro Tanikawa.
Now one of the most widely read living poets in Japan, Tanikawa had already established himself as a popular modern poet, but Elliott did not yet know anything about him. As he remembers, "At first I was simply excited because I could read it, as the poem was in hiragana."
Then a lecturer at Kanto Gakuin University in Kanagawa, Elliott had been a literature major back in the States and a poet, but his path to Japan had to that point given him little chance to discover the country's poetry. There wasn't even a literature department at Kanto Gakuin. With the discovery of Tanikawa's poem, though, Elliott's mission in Japan was decided.