Appendix of Names and Terms

Adams, William (1564-1620). English pilot of the crippled Dutch ship Liefde, arrived at Itô in April 1600, most of the crew dead or dying; thereafter resident of Japan, eventually as confidant and advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Arakida Moritake (1473-1549). Renga and haikai poet whose image of a butterfly returning to its branch was made famous in Europe and America by Pound’s reliance on it in explanation of his ‘form of super-position’.

Ariga Nagao (1860-1921). Student at Tokyo Imperial University who helped Fenollosa with translations of the poems that were the subject of Mori Kainan’s lectures; later professor of international law at Tokyo and Waseda universities.

Ariwara Narihira (825-80). Waka poet and legendary lover, whose poems are the subject of frequent allusion in the later literature, including the nô Kakitsubata.

Aston, W. G. (1841-1911). British Japanologist, translator, and author of the first English-language history of Japanese literature.

Bigelow, William Sturgis (1850-1926). Boston physician who travelled to Japan for diversion in 1882 and remained seven years, studying and eventually converting to Buddhism.

Blyth, R. H. (1898-1964). British poet, translator, and author of influential and idiosyncratic studies of Japanese poetry and Zen Buddhism; after accepting a teaching post in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1924 did not return to Europe.

Brinkley, Frank (1841-1912). British army officer and Japanophile; came to Yokohama in 1867; after 1871 military advisor to the Japanese army; after 1891 Tokyo correspondent for the Times of London; father of Pound’s acquaintance John Brinkley.

Chamberlain, Basil Hall (1850-1935). British Japanologist and translator of Japanese literature, the most influential before Waley; professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, 1886-90.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). Bunraku and kabuki dramatist, in several early- century English-language sources identified as ‘the Shakespeare of Japan’.

Chûshingura. Enduring Edo-period tale of the revenge of forty-seven loyal samurai for their master’s betrayal, and of their own subsequent suicide; told in many versions, most famously on the bunraku stage.

Craig, Edward Gordon (1872-1966). British stage designer, theorist of the Symbolist theatre, and editor of The Mask.

Dickins, F. V. (1838-1915). Medical officer of the Royal Navy, stationed at Yokohama from 1863-66, among the earliest translators of Japanese poetry and drama into English.

Doi Kôchi (1886-1979). Professor of English Literature at the Imperial University at Tokyo and then founder and long-time head of the English Literature department at the Imperial University at Sendai.

Dulac, Edmund (1882-1953). French born British artist, illustrator, and designer of the masks for the first productions of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well. See Colin White, Edmund Dulac (New York: Scribner, 1976).

Fenollosa, Ernest (1853-1908). American scholar and collector of Japanese art, among the ‘Boston Brahmins’ in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose manuscripts found their way to Pound, and whose collection of Japanese masterpieces forms the core of the holdings at the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

Fenollosa, Mary McNeil (1865-1954). American author of successful novels set in Japan, second wife of Ernest Fenollosa, and the link between her husband’s manuscripts and Pound.

Flint, F. S. (1885-1960). British poet and literary theorist, associated with the advent of Imagism and the early twentieth-century turn to foreign traditions to enliven English poetry. See especially A2 and A3.

Fraser, G. S. (1915-80). British poet and essayist who succeeded Blunden as cultural advisor to the United Kingdom Liaison Mission in Tokyo, 1950-51; author of the prose Impressions of Japan (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1952).

Freer, Charles Lang (1856-1919). American collector of Whistler and the Japanese masterpieces that were bequeathed to the Smithsonian Institution in 1906.

Fujita Jun (1888-1963). Japanese poet associated with Poetry from 1919 to 1928; author of Tanka: Poems in Exile (1923) and reviews sensitive to the difficulties of joining Japanese and English traditions. (My thanks to Brigitte Wallinger for calling my attention to the note on Fujita @ the Eastland Memorial Society.)

Fujiwara. Family that dominated the Japanese court and government from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, branches of which gave rise to poets among the most noted in the tradition, particularly Teika (1162-1241), probable compiler of the Hyakunin isshu.

Fukuhara Rintarô (1894-1981). Scholar of English letters and long-time editor of Eigo seinen, the most widely-regarded Japanese journal of English literary studies;  instrumental in bringing Empson to Japan.

Godwin, E. W. (1833-86). English architect and designer associated with the Aesthetic Movement and Victorian Japonisme; father of Edward Gordon Craig. See Susan Weber Soros and Catherine Arbuthnott, eds., E. W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), which includes Nancy B. Wilkinson’s ‘E. W. Godwin and Japonisme in England’.

haikai. Linked 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllable stanzas, ranging from the two-stanza hokku (5-7-5)-waki (7-7) through more standard series of eighteen, thirty-six, or one hundred stanzas; originally non-standard renga practised as a diversion, but after the sixteenth century a serious form in its own right.

haiku. Derived from haikai no ku, a ‘stanza’ of haikai; not a term common in Japanese tradition until the nineteenth century; the modern form is essentially like an independent hokku, i.e., a hokku without following stanzas.

Hartmann, Sadakichi (ca. 1867-1944). Poet, dramatist, art critic, photographer, and bon vivant born at Dejima in Nagasaki Harbour to a Japanese mother who died in childbirth; raised in Germany, later resident primarily in the United States.

Harunobu (1724-70). Ukiyoe painter and printmaker admired particularly for his daring use of colour after the advent of polychrome printing.

Hearn, Lafcadio (1850-1904). Writer, born in Greece, raised in Ireland and the United States, who settled in Japan, became a Japanese citizen, and authored books that have defined popular conceptions of the country to this day; known in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo.

Hirata Kiichi (1873-1943). Novelist and translator, who as a young man accompanied Fenollosa to nô lessons with Umewaka Minoru, and was in large degree responsible for the nô translations that found their way to Pound; also known as Tokuboku.

Hiroshige (1797-1858). Ukiyoe painter and printmaker, famous for depictions of Japanese landscape and daily life; in the early years of the century largely responsible for European and American conceptions of a ‘quaint’ Japan; also known as Andô Hiroshige.

Hodgson, Ralph (1891-1962). British poet and professor of English letters at the Imperial University at Sendai, 1924-38; reworked Ishii Hakuson and Obata Shigeyoshi’s translation of the Manyôshû (1940).

hokku. The opening stanza of a haikai or renga sequence, three units or ‘lines’ of 5-7-5 syllables, by the nineteenth century sometimes composed as an independent poem.

Hokusai (1760-1849). Ukiyoe painter and printmaker; worked in a variety of formats and styles but most widely known in the West for the print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; also known as Katsushika Hokusai.

Hyakunin isshu. Exemplary collection of one hundred poems, each by a different poet, drawn from the imperial collections, probably by Fujiwara Teika, ca. 1230-40; the most frequently translated of Japanese collections.

Ichikawa Sanki (1886-1970). Internationally renowned Japanese philologist and scholar of English letters, for many years head of the department of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University.

Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). Haikai poet and author of ukiyozôshi, the literary equivalent of ukiyoe, tales of the denizens of the ‘floating world’.

Itô Michio (1894-1961). Japanese friend and inspirer of Pound and Yeats, dancer in the role of the hawk in the first productions of At the Hawk’s Well, later a central figure in the development of modern dance in the United States and Japan. See especially BL93 and 94 and BL183.

Kakinomoto Hitomaro (d. ca. 712). Waka poet often regarded as Japan’s greatest, among the principal poets of the Manyôshû.

Kayano Nijûichi (1890-1924). Japanese student in London in 1915, who along with Kume Tamijurô and Gun Torahiko sang the nô for Pound and Yeats; later a successful dramatist and translator; also known as Kayano Jisôichi and Kôri Torahiko.

Kenkô (ca. 1283-ca. 1352). Poet, essayist, and priest, remembered primarily for the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1330-31), prose observations about life and art that represent aesthetic understandings regarded as characteristically Japanese. The earliest English translations were by George Sansom ([D22] The Tsuredzure gusa of Yoshida no Kaneyoshi: Being the Meditations of a Recluse in the 14th Century [Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan, 1911]) and William N. Porter ([D20] The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest [London: Milford, 1914]), the latter of which was in Yeats’s library (see BL228) and would have been the version that led Plomer to regard the work a‘little masterpiece’ (see BJ3a). Other important translations are Ryûkichi Kurata’s The Harvest of Leisure (Wisdom of the East Series [D18] 1931) and Donald Keene’s Essays in Idleness (New York: Columbia UP, 1967). For a recent evocation in English-language verse see Andrew Fitzsimons’s Essays in Idleness.

Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 872-945). Waka poet, diarist, and literary and aesthetic theorist, principal poet of the Kokinshû, and author of its seminal Japanese preface.

Kitao Masanobu (1761-1816). Ukiyoe painter and printmaker, known especially for prints of courtesans of the Yoshiwara, the licensed district of Edo; later a successful novelist.

Kitasono Katue (1902-78). Avant-garde Japanese poet, photographer, and designer, founder of the Vou Club and the journal VOU; known in Pound’s idiom as Kit-Kat.

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). Haikai poet and prose writer, particularly associated with hokku that offer tender portrayals of the solitary, the lonely, and the vulnerable.

Kojiki. The ‘Record of Ancient Matters’ compiled in 712, the oldest known work in the Japanese tradition, a chronicle of the country from the mythic age to the early seventh century; regarded among the classics of the literature.

Kokinshû. The first and most important of the Imperial poetry anthologies, compiled about 905 by Ki no Tsurayuki and others; also and more properly known as Kokin wakashû, ‘collection of waka from ancient and modern times’.

Kûkai (774-835). Japanese Chinese-language poet, religious figure, and mystic, founder of Shingon Buddhism and the monastery at Kôyasan; also known by the honorific name Kôbô Daishi.

Kume Tami[jûrô] (1893-1923). Artist and Pound’s friend and helper, who had studied the nô as a child and helped Pound through ‘difficult passages’ in his work with Fenollosa’s manuscripts; died in the Great Kanto Earthquake.

La Farge, John (1835-1910). American artist, whose travels in Japan with the historian Henry Adams in 1886 resulted in the provocative study of Japanese aesthetics, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897).

Lawrence, John (1850-1916). British literary critic who took over Hearn’s position at the Imperial University at Tokyo.

Loti, Pierre (1850-1923). Pseudonym of Julien Viaud, French novelist whose exemplary exoticism includes several works set in Japan, most notably Madame Chrysanthéme (1887), which played a central role in shaping popular European and American conceptions of the country.

Lowell, Percival (1855-1916). American consular official in Japan and Japanese- occupied Korea (1883-93) and author of influential works about both countries; later a noted astronomer; elder brother of Amy Lowell.

Manyôshû. Literally the ‘collection of ten thousand leaves’, earliest extant collection of Japanese poetry, compiled ca. 759 and regarded from that time forward as a masterpiece of the literature.

Matsuo Bashô (1644-94). Haikai poet, travel diarist, and aesthetic theorist, the Japanese poet most loved in Japan and most widely known and translated in Europe and America.

Mitford, Algernon (1837-1915), in full Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, the first Baron Redesdale. Diplomat and attachè to the British Legation at Edo, 1866-70; author of among other works Tales of Old Japan.

Mori Kainan (1863-1911). Professor of Chinese poetry at Tokyo Imperial University during Fenollosa’s tenure, the most respected Japanese scholar of the subject in his day.

Morse, Edward (1838-1925). American scientist, whose interest in conchology led him to Japan, where he became Professor of Zoology at Tokyo Imperial University; instrumental in bringing Fenollosa to the country.

Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014). Waka poet, diarist, and author of Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji), often regarded as the greatest work of Japanese literature.

Natsume Sôseki (1867-1916). Novelist credited with bringing the foreign methods associated with realism to Japanese fiction, but regarded nonetheless as quintessentially Japanese; studied in London from 1900 to 1902.

Nichols, Robert (1893-1944). British poet and critic, preceded Blunden as visiting professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, 1921-24.

nô. Lyrical dramatic form that combines text, acting, music, song or chanting (utai), dance, austere staging, and elegant costume into a sombre whole that contravenes European conceptions of time and space; developed from earlier genres and brought to eminence largely by Kanami (1333-84) and his son Zeami (ca. 1364-ca. 1443).

Noguchi Yone[jirô] (1875-1947). Japanese English-language poet and author of studies of Japanese literature and art, widely regarded in Britain and American in the first quarter of the twentieth century; father of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Nonomura Sôtatsu (fl. ca. 1625-43). Kyoto painter, particularly associated with landscapes in the Chinese style and folding screens; also known as Tawaraya Sôtatsu.

Oda Nobunaga (1534-82). Warlord and autocrat whose defeat of the Ashikaga shogunate led to the reunification of Japan after two centuries of feudal war.

Ogata Kôrin (1658-1716). Painter known particularly for decorative works that combine keen observation of natural landscape with powerful anti-naturalistic design and composition.

Okakura Kakuzô (1862-1913). Author and authority on Japanese aesthetics; studied under Fenollosa at Tokyo Imperial University; after 1903 curator of Japanese and Chinese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; known in Japan as Okakura Tenshin.

Ono no Komachi (fl. ca. 833-857). Waka poet, among the rokkasen, and legendary lover, whose sadness at the loss of beauty in old age is the subject of countless tales and literary works, including the nô Sotoba Komachi andKayoi Komachi.

Pèri, Noël (1865-1922). French translator from the nô, arguably the greatest in Europe before 1920. Cinq nô (1921) andLe nô (1944) are based on work Pèri published inBulletin de l’ècole Française d’Extrême-Orient from 1909 to 1920.

Quennell, Peter (1905-93). British literary historian, biographer, critic, and poet, who held a post at Tokyo University of Literature and Science (bunrika daigaku) in 1930-31; author of A Superficial Journey through Tokyo and Peking (1932).

renga. Alternate 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllable stanzas linked through elaborate semantic, syntactic, and rhythmic rules, so that each forms an independent unit with preceding and following stanzas; often composed by several poets, ordinarily in set lengths of thirty-six to a thousand stanzas; a standard form after the twelfth century.

Ricketts, Charles (1866-1931). English artist and stage designer who saw the nô in Japan and with companion Charles Shannon owned an exquisite collection of Japanese art now in the British Museum. See J. G. Paul Delaney, Charles Ricketts: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

Saitô Takeshi (1887-1982). Japanese scholar of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, later President of Tokyo Women’s Christian College; instrumental in bringing both Hodgson and Blunden to Japan.

Sansom, George (1883-1965). British consular official in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia (1904-40), who became the century’s most widely-regarded European historian of Japan, influencing even Japanese understanding of the country’s history.

Satow, Ernest (1843-1929). British consular official, Japanologist, linguist, historian, and Ambassador to Japan, 1895-1900.

Sei Shônagon (b. ca. 966). Waka poet and diarist, most widely remembered for the Makura no sôshi (The Pillow Book), part diary, part ironic observation of life at court, regarded among the masterpieces of the Japanese tradition.

Sesshû Tôyô (1420-1506). Zen priest and painter, often of ink-wash landscapes in the Chinese style; the most widely known of Japanese artists, regarded by many as the greatest in the tradition.

Suzuki, D. T. (1870-1966). Japanese interpreter of Zen Buddhism, author of numerous widely-influential monographs on the subject in both Japanese and English.

Symons, Arthur (1865-1945). Welsh poet, critic, and champion both of French Symbolism and of Japonisme. See Karl E. Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), and Lawrence W. Markert, Arthur Symons: Critic of the Seven Arts (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988).

Taki Seiichi (1873-1945). Author and authority on Japanese art, founder and for many years editor of the influential journal Kokka; in the twenties Dean of the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo Imperial University.

tanka. Literally ‘short poem’; after the Manyôshû the principal type of waka,consisting of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.

Tokugawa. Family that from the 1603 to 1867 ruled Japan, owing largely to the military skill and political acumen of the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu (1543-1616).

Torii. Family of ukiyoe artists, particularly associated with prints of actors; dominated this genre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; among the most well-known Torii artists are Kiyonobu (1664-1729), Kiyomasu (fl. c 1696-1716), Kiyomitsu (1735-85), and Kiyonaga (1752-1815).

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98). Feudal lord and Imperial minister who rose from peasant roots to complete the sixteenth-century unification of Japan begun by Oda Nobunaga.

Tsubouchi Shôyô (1859-1935). Japanese scholar of the theatre, author, and prodigious translator, of the complete works of Shakespeare among many others.

Umewaka Minoru (1827-1909). Kanze-school nô actor, often credited with revitalising the form after the Meiji Restoration, who transgressed long-held standards by accepting foreigners as students, among them Morse and Fenollosa.

Utagawa. School of ukiyoe artists founded by Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814) and continued by succeeding generations of pupils, among the most important of whom are Toyokuni (1769-1825), Toyohiro (1773-1828), and Kuniyoshi (1797-1861).

Vines, Sherard (1890-ca. 1980). Irish poet and literary historian, lecturer in English literature at Keio University in Tokyo from 1923 to 1928; author of two prose volumes about Japan, Humours Unreconciled (1928) and Yofuku (1931), and two volumes of poetry written in but otherwise unrelated to the country, The Pyramid (1926) and Triforum (1928).

waka. Literally ‘Japanese poetry’, more specifically denotative of verse forms predating renga, including and particularly the most common, tanka.

Waley, Arthur (1889-1966). British poet and translator from the Chinese and Japanese, by any standard among the great translators of the century; self-taught in both languages while working as Binyon’s assistant at the British Museum, 1913-29.

Whistler, James McNeill (1834-1903). American painter, among the important figures in nineteenth-century Japonisme, closely associated with Japanese subjects and methods well into the twentieth century. The standard biography, despite some inaccuracies and numerous more recent studies, is E. R. Pennell and J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols. (1908, reissue New York: AMS, 1973).

Yashiro Yukio (1890-1974). Japanese art historian, author of the widely-respected English study Sandro Botticelli (1925); founder of the Yamato Bunkakan (Museum of Japanese Art) at Nara.

Yosa Buson (1716-83). Haikai poet, master painter and calligrapher, known particularly in the West for the sensuous detail and adept wit of his hokku.

Zeami (ca. 1364-ca. 1443). Playwright, actor, critic, and principal aesthetician and most important author of the nô; also known as Kanze Motokiyô and, in some early European and American references, Seami.