The public is invited to the following lecture. A 1,000 yen donation from non-members would be appreciated, but is not required.
Place: Seisen University, 3-16-21 Higashi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-8642 (Gotanda Station, Yamanote Line).
The December meeting is again at Seisen University, about a ten-minute walk from Gotanda station. Turn left coming out of the barrier at Gotanda JR station. Take the road forking right, accessible via the footbridge. Keep going until you eventually pass a pizza and pasta restaurant, "To the Herbs." Take the next turning to the left and continue up the hill until you come to the university gateway on the left. The lecture theatre is approached from No. 1 Building behind the Conder House and is on a lower level; the route will be clearly marked. If you take a taxi from the station, insist on "SeiSEN Joshi Daigaku", not "SeiSHIN".
Dr. Hanley was born in New York, and received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a dissertation on "Representation of Empire in the text of Rudyard Kipling." His field is British literature (The Literature of Empire), and he has published papers on Thackeray, Dickens, Greene and others. He came to Japan in 1982, and was teaching first at Hokkaido University. He is now an Associate Professor of English at Keio University.
In March 1889, the young Kipling left India on a seven-month journey to England. He sailed through British Southeast Asia, stopped at Hong Kong and visited Guangzhou, before coming to Japan in April. There he wrote a series of travel articles for his old paper, the Pioneer in Allahabad. In 1892, Kipling, now an established writer, came to Japan on his honeymoon, after a literary send-off by his best man, Henry James. This time, he wrote a series of letters for the Times, with accompanying verses, which were also published in New York and India. Twelve of the letters of 1889 were written in Japan in just twenty-six days. They are full of detail, anecdote, speculation, astute observation, and much ironic humor derived from his relative youth and his relationship with his travelling companion. Professor Hill, a Sancho to Kipling's Quixote. The professor photographs the scene, while Kipling paints word pictures with a pen, and often claims that some scenes can only be painted with "a brush". The letters of 1892 are altogether more serious and loftier in tone; here speaks the mature (27-year-old!) man of letters newly married to a bossy American, Caroline Balestier of Vermont.
The letters and appended verses of 1892 were meant for a wider audience. The earlier impressionistic letters were written "home" (to India), and were certainly not intended as a definitive account of Meiji Japan, being the quick writing of a trained journalist. They can still be read with pleasure, not only for the glimpses they give of unfamiliar Japan, but also for the insight they give into Kipling's entire opus, revealing his later themes and style in embryo. The 1889 voyage opened the young Kipling's eyes to the wider world and the Empire's place in it; he was later to practise this reinterpretation on a far more complex level when he cast his imperial gaze on India, as in Kim, for example. By the time he wrote the letters of 1892, his project -- the representation of Empire to a larger audience -- was well under way.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 10", December 2000, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
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