{Inter} Cultural Japan

On November 3, Culture Day, the Order of Culture is awarded to five persons. One thing that always strikes me about the winners is their advanced age. The unfortunate ones who happen to die before they have passed eighty, will never get such a coveted prize. As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, this year’s winners were aged 93, 87, 84 (2x) and 82.

The most interesting (and high-profile, at least in Japan) person to receive the prize this year was author and Buddhist nun Setouchi Jakucho. Born in 1922, Setouchi wrote semi-autobiographical fiction as well as biographical novels about feminists under the name Setouchi Harumi. Among her most famous works is Natsu no owari, ‘The end of Summer‘ (1962).

She received many literary prizes, such as the Tanizaki Award. Besides The End of Summer, also Setouchi’s Beauty in Disarray has been translated into English, as well as a few short stories, but the harvest is rather meagre, considering her immense popularity - perhaps because the struggle of women and feminists in Japan is too different from the situation in the West?

[Tendaiji, the temple in Iwate Pref. revived by Setouchi Jakucho. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

In 1973 Setouchi shaved her head and became a Buddhist nun of the Tendai denomination; to signify the change, she changed her first name from Harumi to Jakucho. Besides living in a hermitage in Kyoto, she also became chief priest of Tendaiji in Iwate prefecture, a temple she revived from the ruin into which it had fallen. She has continued to write, now also on popular Buddhism.

In the second half of the nineties she published a translation into modern Japanese of the classical Genji Monogatari - an 11th c. work of fiction so difficult to read for contemporary Japanese that in the last century at least three different translations in modern Japanese were made. Setouchi’s skilled translation became a bestseller.

Setouchi Jakucho is a popular lecturer and can also often be seen on television. Her monastic life never has been a very quite one.

On Culture Day, fifteen others were named “Persons of Cultural Merit,” apparently a somewhat lower rank that the Order of Culture, and therefore allowing a slightly younger age. Among them are actor Takakura Ken and architect Kurokawa Kisho, who are both in their seventies.