BD. Edmund Blunden and Japan

		Blunden’s treatment of Japan both in verse and in prose brought to English writing a receptiveness to the country and a refusal to exoticise that sets the work apart not only from that of Blunden’s contemporaries but also from the mainstream of English writing of Japan that has followed.

Edmund Blunden wrote more of Japan than any earlier English poet, but it is not his writing of Japan but rather his reception there that has most attracted attention. He made seven journeys to the country over a period of forty years, as professor at Tokyo Imperial University from 1924 to 1927, cultural attachè to the United Kingdom Liaison Mission from 1947 to 1950, and lecturer and promoter of English literature on five tours from 1955 to 1964. In the twenties Blunden was well-liked in Japan, but when he returned after the war Japanese gratitude and admiration was unrestrained. Thousands gathered to hear him speak on English literature at venues throughout the country, stone tablets with his verses inscribed on them were solemnly dedicated at historic sites, and admirers collected and published in commemorative volumes his every occasional note. In some ways this veneration has been to the detriment of Blunden’s reputation outside Japan. The poems in the occasional collections are slight, as Blunden himself recognised (see 70), and the reverence with which the Japanese establishment spoke of him for decades often has led to bemusement in England. The poems of Japan that Blunden himself chose to publish in collections in Britain, however (see particularly 18, 27, 30, 41, 50, 59, 125, and 144), are nonetheless striking. The early work is the first in English entirely to set aside the vestiges of literary Japonisme. It focuses as no English poems had before on the similarities between the Japanese natural landscape and that of England, and on the common humanity of the Japanese people. And his later poems of Japan at their best, as in the striking blank verse of ‘In Hokkaido’ (105), may be counted among Blunden’s best. Japan did not bring to Blunden innovations of technique or style. The Georgian edifice of the verse remained intact to the end. But his treatment of Japan both in verse and in prose—the latter from the early essays of The Mind’s Eye (42) to dozens of unsigned TLS reviews from 1927 to 1967—brought to English writing a receptiveness to Japan and a refusal to exoticise that sets the work apart not only from that of Blunden’s contemporaries but also from the mainstream of English writing of Japan that has followed.

Note: Works listed here that I have not seen are noted in B. J. Kirkpatrick’s Blunden bibliography (187) and cross-referenced to that volume.