It’s a challenge to pick and talk about just one thing, since there are so many to list and choose from in terms of cultural export from Japan in the twenty-first century. This maybe a somewhat cliche answer, but I would say pop culture. Japanese pop culture has a wide-reaching net, and it includes everything from anime/manga, music, films, games, cosplay, fashion, and food. The soft power stemming from Japanese pop-culture have been imperative in attracting, garnering, and maintaining interest in our country to this day.
Regarding literature, while there have been countless discourses of whether manga can be considered literature or not, I personally believe the influence and impact it has on the literary scene today can no longer be ignored or dismissed. Manga is now a major global market valued at approximately 11–12 billion USD, with few signs of stagnation. Compared to fifteen to twenty years ago, the number of titles translated to English and carried in major bookshops speaks tremendous volumes on how much it has grown and has successfully integrated itself into the literary scene, especially for the youth. Manga is an accessible window into not only just our culture, but oftentimes the Japanese mindset, philosophy, and psyche as well. So, in that sense, I believe manga’s growing popularity can also be seen as a growing interest in Japan.
For novels and more “traditional” types of literature, there has been a noticeable trend of notable female Japanese authors getting their works published in the United States and abroad, often to major acclaim. For example, in 2018, Yoko Tawada received The National Book Award for Translated Literature with The Emissary. Two years later, Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station became the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature, along with being chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2020 along with Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs. Most recently, Sachiko Kashiwaba’s Temple Alley Summer won the Batchelder Award in 2022. Additionally, to name a few works from our Support Program for Translation and Publication grant, we had the privilege to support Sayaka Murata’s groundbreaking hit Convenience Store Woman (which has been translated in over thirty territories), Earthlings, and Life Ceremony, along with Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole, and Weasels in the Attic, which have all been received well.
Describe the structure of your organization and its goal(s). How many staff members does it employ and what are their main activities?
The Japan Foundation was established in October of 1972 as a government-affiliated special corporation with the objective of promoting international cultural exchange through the implementation of comprehensive programs. In October of 2003, it was relaunched as an independent administrative institution under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With its global network consisting of the Tokyo headquarters, a Kyoto office, two domestic Japanese language institutes (the Japan Foundation Japanese Language Institute, Urawa; and the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Kansai) and twenty-six overseas offices in twenty-five countries, the Foundation operates several programs. Often in partnership with other organizations, we focus mainly in three areas: Arts and Cultural Exchange, Japanese Language Education Overseas, and Japanese Studies and Global Partnership. The JF headquarters’ projects in the field of literature and arts include subsidies for translation and publication worldwide, operation of the Japanese Literature Translation DB, support for overseas translators of Japanese literature, publishers and editors, and dispatch of Japanese authors overseas.
The JF New York office where I work is staffed by fifteen employees, and we have small teams dedicated to covering the specific three areas listed above. While most of the JFNY arts & culture team’s day-to-day work focuses on grants, we also create our own online contents such as the JFNY Literary Series, and the Pop-Culture Webinar Series where we invite scholars and specialists to discuss various pop culture topics from an educational perspective. Among other activities, we also host panels at conventions and conferences, and collaborate with other organizations to assist in implementing various cultural events. For the past few years, the Program Director of the arts & culture team and I have been responsible for sourcing and inviting Japanese talent to perform at the Opening Ceremony of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C., taking place every spring. In terms of literary events, we often collaborate with publishers and universities to promote talk events and book signings when a Japanese author visits New York. For example, in 2022 we held a reading event for Yu Miri, and a signing event for Sachiko Kashiwaba.
How much funding does your organization disburse in a year and where does the funding come from?
We receive much of our funding from the Japanese government, investment revenue, and donations from the private sector.
Including the one awarded in 2021, as many as five Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded to writers working in English in the past decade alone. Translation into English has also been a crucial factor for many of the winners to receive consideration in the first place. In light of this linguistic hegemony, I imagine that there is an increased focus on translation into English, the costs of which can’t be met by market demand alone. Given your own institution’s limited resources, what criteria do you use to choose which authors to fund, and, given the sources of your funding, are there certain considerations factored into your selection?
The Support Program for Translation and Publications, the grant program implemented by JF Headquarters, is a program which directly supports foreign publishers by selecting works from their lined-up projects to be translated/published, rather than selecting authors to be marketed by JF. Headquarters follow a set of selection criteria, along with consultation with external experts in the literary field, which includes and prioritizes the following: the necessity of JF’s grant, the quality of the book contents and translation, the significance of the publication in the region and language, soundness of the publication plan, the project’s cost-effectiveness, and specificity of the distribution plan.
Higher evaluation has been given to works which have been listed in JF’s publication lists titled “Worth Sharing—A Selection of Japanese Books Recommended for Translation” and “Lifelong Favorites—Selections from the Bookshelves of Young Readers in Japan.” (HQ created these publications with a focus on contemporary literature and attempts to feature as many authors as possible, listing excellent works which showcase Japanese society from various perspectives.) Other criteria that earn a higher evaluation include books that are considered to have a broad impact on the society of the publishing country, books by authors who have not yet been translated/published in the target country, and books translated from Japanese in languages and regions where Japan-related books are seldom published.
A literary ecosystem not only includes writers and translators but also editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents, and booksellers, all of whom play a role in fostering a vibrant literary scene. Bearing this in mind, how would you describe the state of the literary ecosystem in your country (e.g., is it healthy, in your opinion)? Does any part of your funding go toward supporting the wider literary infrastructure (as opposed to just writers and translators)? If there was a local equivalent of a magazine with a global focus like Asymptote, would it receive any ongoing support from your organization, for example?
The core of JF’s literary activities is to continue introducing Japanese literature to the world by supporting the “three parties” of authors/books, translators, and publishers/editors, through translation and publication grants overseas. Additionally, they have also created the Worth Sharing and Lifelong Favorites publications, which I mentioned previously, with the hopes of reaching as many international publishers as possible to further their mission.
Regarding foreign language translation and publishing in Japan’s current literary ecosystem, we feel that the challenge lies in the fact that Japanese publishers’ awareness and willingness to translate and publish is often dependent on individual editors (the process can be arduous and difficult for Japanese publishers to see the benefits directly). Additionally, the Japanese publishing industry has a strong incentive to promote translation and publishing in Japan.
We feel that it is imperative to encourage more people, including publishers, to understand the meaning and significance of promoting translation publishing. In recent years, the national government (specifically the Agency for Cultural Affairs) seems to be creating new programs with this in mind, so there may be a positive shift starting to take place. As I mentioned above, the development and support of excellent translators of Japanese literature into various languages, networking among publishers, and providing accurate information to translators and editors, are all issues that the JF headquarters will be tackling over the next few years.
Funding decisions can sometimes be controversial. Tell us about a funding decision by your institute in the past ten years or so that elicited controversy, describing the fallout and explaining both sides.
As a government-funded organization, we take great care in our selection process of our funding decisions and prioritize fairness above all. This applies for not only choosing which organizations to fund or collaborate with, but the contents of the project itself as well. As result of due diligence on our part, which includes a multi-step review process conducted by not just the JF staff, but a review committee comprised of specialists in the field. As a result, we have been free of any major scandals or controversies.
The sitcom Seinfeld was notably a flop in Germany. Similarly, authors who encounter success in one culture sometimes do not receive the same reception in another. What are some surprising crossover successes or failures you have encountered in your tenure with this institution and what do you think might have led to these outcomes?
While I cannot speak on any examples of crossover failures per se, I have been delighted to see the success of manga, and the works of female Japanese authors in recent years. As you mentioned, it is true that just because a particular work did well in Japan doesn’t necessarily translate to receiving the same level of praise and acceptance in other cultures and countries due to linguistic and cultural differences. However, fortunately, this has not been the case for many of the works of Japanese female authors, and popular manga titles.
One surprising example of a successful crossover was the anime Dragon Ball in the United States. Dragon Ball was an anime show I grew up watching in Japan in the early 90s, and so I was quite surprised and delighted to see it being shown on cable TV in the mid-90s to early 2000s, a time when anime wasn’t nearly as popular and mainstream as it is today. What I did not realize at the time was how much of a strong impression and impact Dragon Ball had on the young Black and Latino audiences. After conversing with some Black fans of the show at AnimeNYC over the past few years, I learned that they were mostly drawn to the show because Dragon Ball features diversity of characters, stories, and themes that really resonated with their own lives and culture (such as the main character’s lack of knowledge regarding his heritage, a story of an underdog outsider who overcomes great adversity with the help of his brotherhood, etc.).
Another example is Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. Her novel received critical acclaim in Japan and was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 2016. Featuring a woman who defies conventional thinking, expectations, and lifestyle choices in a heavily conformist, patriarchal society, she is a complete juxtaposition of modern Japanese society. Murata’s feminist perspective and voice clearly struck a chord and resonated with the audiences in the states, even if certain aspects of the story, like the setting (as convenience stores aren’t as popular, every-day locations stateside) might be unfamiliar to some audiences here.
Taking these two very different bodies of work as an example demonstrates that audiences are always seeking the human experience. Specifically, engaging stories that they can personally connect and relate to, even if it’s from a vastly different culture to their own. While the stories themselves are equally important, none of this would have been possible without the excellent work of the translators. Especially with the Japanese language, where certain phrases can be summed up in a few short words, or undertones and nuances are buried within the text, it is an arduous task for translators to accurately convey the text in English without losing the author’s original intent. Having a translator with a comprehensive understanding of not just the language, but the culture is another key component, and in many of these works, I think the author was blessed with excellent translators which resulted in the positive reception.
Finally, I think the publishers in the United States understand their market and audiences very well and have a keen eye for which works to bring over. It’s always a gamble and not every work might receive the recognition they hope and expect, but their positive track record and the rave reviews the books have been receiving in recent years can attest to their success.
I’m eagerly waiting to see what Japanese work will become the next surprise big hit overseas.
What are some recent challenges you have faced advocating for your country’s literature and how has your institution adapted to meet these challenges?
This was a discussion I had with the members of Tokyo headquarters during my recent trip to Japan. While several Japanese authors have done very well in recent years with their translated works overseas, there is still an ocean of extremely talented yet relatively unknown authors in Japan. To touch upon the fourth question above, the biggest challenge lies in assessing which works would appeal to the global audience. To do so, it is imperative that we continue to work with skilled literary agents, translators, and publishers who truly love the author’s work as if it were their own and understand how it will integrate overseas into their respective country’s literary scene.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we started to focus on creating our own online content and increasing our presence online. One of the most fruitful results of this endeavor was the creation of the JFNY Literary Series, an interactive online talk series featuring popular female Japanese authors and their translators speaking about their works and the art of translation. We collected questions from our pre-registered audience members and had some of them answered during the show. We were able to invite eight authors (Yu Miri, Sayaka Murata, Kanako Nishi, Hiroko Oyamada, Sachiko Kashiwaba, Kyoko Nakajima, Aoko Matsuda, and Yoko Ogawa) between 2021 and 2022 and were able to offer insight into the world of translation and the Japanese literary scene to a global audience. The series is archived and freely accessible from our JFNY YouTube page.
Tell us about your proudest accomplishments as an institution in the past ten years. I’d be particularly interested to hear about any campaigns that your institution conceived to advocate for your country’s literature.
While I’ve only been with JFNY for three years, during that period, we have had several proud accomplishments. I mentioned one of them already in my answer, but working with members of Strong Women Soft Power and creating the JFNY Literary Series was most certainly a highlight. Because we were unable to physically invite these authors and their translators due to the pandemic and travel restrictions, the online format worked to our advantage since we were able to bring together groups of people which would otherwise have been extremely challenging from a logistical standpoint.
From JF Headquarters’ Support Program for Translation and Publication grant program, we had the privilege of supporting Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings, Life Ceremony; Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, The Hole; and Kyoko Nakajima’s The Little House, just to name a few notable works. We were honored that we were able to take part in bringing these great works to audiences in the United States and it’s encouraging to see it was well received here as well. There certainly has been a wave of great female authors’ works being translated and brought over stateside in recent years, and we want to see and assist in that trend continuing through our literary grant program.
We were able to collaborate with authors Yu Miri and Sachiko Kashiwaba when they visited the States in 2022, and each held a book reading, and signing event at a local Japanese bookstore which were both well attended. We also held a screening event of the animated feature of Sachiko Kashiwaba’s newest novel, The House of the Lost on the Cape, at a local university. While these types of events were difficult to implement during the pandemic, as we slowly move back toward returning to a less-restrictive life, we hope that we can continue to create these opportunities to connect Japanese authors and their fans in real life.
In his Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro exhorted us to “widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities.” Yet, in one crucial respect, this ideal of an inclusive world literature shares the same problem as the climate crisis or even the COVID-19 vaccine crisis: countries that have the means to do something about a global situation often end up looking out for their own interests. How do you think institutional advocates of a country’s literature might be better allies for world literature, if they might even play a role at all?
As The Japan Foundation was created with the mission to promote international cultural exchange and mutual understanding between Japan and other countries, we certainly do tend to promote Japan with our self interest in mind at the forefront, which I understand and admit can be a hindrance to being an ally for world literature.
For Japan to better assist and become an ally for the promotion of world literature, there needs to be an initiative for more people to take an interest and go abroad to learn from the world outside of Japan. While there are Japanese students who study abroad, e.g. in New York, the numbers of those students are still relatively low compared to neighboring countries like China and Korea, along with the time spent studying abroad being comparatively shorter to their neighboring counterparts. COVID-19 certainly didn’t help matters in this regard, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Japan is often referred to as a homogenous country, and I think there is a level of complacency stemming from the fact that every aspect of life can be conducted in Japanese; there isn’t a huge motivation for the population to learn English, or any other language. Additionally, Japan is still quite conservative regarding immigration, so I think that makes it difficult for regular Japanese people to have an opportunity to meet, and truly experience or immerse themselves in other cultures beyond a surface level.
If more Japanese people had the chance to meet, or better yet, go abroad and learn from other cultures and countries, I think there can be even more meaningful exchanges and conversations to be had, which in turn will be beneficial in inspiring and creating richer stories with the potential to reach an even wider audience.
Because literature is such a powerful medium with which to explore the human condition and connect with one another, we must continue to look outward, not inward.
