‘Another culture’ (A series of seven posts)

Sam2, aka our son James Miles, worked in Japan as a teacher from 2011 to 2014 (his first job when he got back to England was to set up Calderonia!). My wife Alison visited Jim in Japan in 2013. Jim has been urging me to visit Japan myself, and our current plan is to go there together in 2023. Although apprehensive about the long plane journey, I do want to go. I have been ‘engaging’ with Japan through English-language books ever since I bought The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse in 1970; I would like to experience the reality.

‘Japan’

So, the sequence of haiku and senryu above (click on it to enlarge) is literary shots of Japan from the West — that is why the title is in inverted commas. It’s how Japan has affected me without my knowing Japan in the flesh. ‘Wasabi’, by the way, is that green paste made from the Mountain Hollyhock that you have with sushi and takes the roof off your mouth. In the next six posts, which will take us up to Christmas, I shall look at some other glimpses I have gained of Japan through books, and both Jim and Alison will talk about their own experience of the country in separate posts.

I should acknowledge that three of the above poems were published in HQ Poetry Magazine and Blithe Spirit, 2019, but written many years before.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.