Place: Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen (1-21-18 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo150-0002)
About 10 minutes on foot from Shibuya Station (JR East Exit; subway Miyamasu Exit 10 or 11; or 15 minutes from Omotesando Station, Exit B2; or 15 minutes from Meiji-Jingumae Station, Exit 4. The road forking right from Meiji-dori is quite obvious, and the Gakuen is the first big building after a row of shops, with a waterfall streaming down one wall.)

Information: ASJ Office

It is at present philosophically fashionable to talk about private language and the mind of others, but these are exactly problems that have vexed lovers: how to aptly and persuasively render your agonizing emotions into words and win an affirmative response from the loved one. Japanese classical poetry waka abounds in the strivings of such loving souls desperately trying to overcome the fundamental inadequacy of language. Understandably, the effort started with simple and straightforward exaggerations, most often invoking life and death, but in due time developed specific poetic idioms that were capable of expressing the ineffable.

Most important among them were the idioms of "water" and "fire" which lay dormant in their vernacular and concomitantly in popular beliefs and superstitions. Prof. Yamanaka's point in this talk will be to surmise that there were three stages in the development of traditional Japanese poetic diction, viz., (i) activating certain strands of daily speech; (ii) conscious application and elaboration of analogies underlying them; and finally (iii) identification in explicit terms of the comparing and the compared.

From this angle, love poems in major waka anthologies, Man'yoshu (8th century), Kokinshu (914), Shin Kokinshu (1205), and in some cases other authorized collections, will be examined to trace each developmental stage, and some peculiarities in our poetic language will be discussed on comparison with their western counterparts.

Prof. Yamanaka received his B.A. from the Tokyo Institute of Foreign Studies in 1963, and his M.A. from the University of Tokyo in 1965, specializing in English Philology. His first appointment was to Tokai University, where he remained until 1979; he then became an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, with promotion to professor in 1989. From 1993 until last year, he was a professor in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Sciences; following his retirement last March he took up a position as professor at Toyo University. He has also been a lecturer at many other universities, most recently at Seisen University.

His M.A. thesis was on "Properties of Poetic Language", and since then he has published many works on linguistic themes, such as "Roman Jakobson's Science of Language: Part I, Language and Poetry, Part II, Meaning and Form" (Tokyo, Keiso Shobo, 1989, 1995).

Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 2", February 2002, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.

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