Volos to Tokyo in Eighteen Years

Photo courtesy of Karen Almond.

I came late to Melville studies because my graduate school advisor in American Literature in 1968 said there was nothing new to say about Moby-Dick. When I became a member of the Melville Society in the late 1980s, there were no international conferences. For Americans, the only certain time to get together was at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, often in a northern city like New York or Chicago with ice and snow in late December. We did have crazy dreams, though. Sanford Marovitz from Kent State University in northern Ohio was always saying how great it would be if we could have an international conference someday in Greece, preferably in the summer months.

Suddenly, we were in Volos, a port city on the northeast coast of Greece, in early July, 1997. That first conference, which Professor Marovitz co-directed with Professor Athanasius Christodoulou of Volos, was very special for anyone who attended. But so has been each subsequent one: Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1999; Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, in 2001; Maui, Hawaii, in 2003; New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 2005; Szceczin, Poland, in 2007; Jerusalem in 2009; Rome, Italy, in 2011; Washington, D.C., in 2013; and now, triumphally, Tokyo in 2015.

In Volos in 1997, a future conference in Tokyo was a beautiful dream in the fertilizing imagination of Arimichi Makino. His Volos talk on “Melville Studies in Japan” was for many of us our introduction to the subject. Professor Makino was already director of the Melville Study Center at Meiji University and editor of Sky-Hawk, the Japanese journal of Melville studies. He had also been deeply involved in overseeing the 1993 publication Melville and Melville Studies in Japan, an excellent collection of essays in English by eleven Japanese scholars and writers. Adding unforgettably to what we learned about Melville studies in Japan in Volos was the presence of Yukiko Oshima, a young assistant professor from Fukuoka University. She presented an excellent paper on “The Red Flag of the Pequod: Native American Presence in Moby-Dick,” opening a rich vein that she has continued to explore in all of Melville’s writing from her transpacific perch on the island of Kyushu.

Well, now here we actually were in Tokyo eighteen years later. Professor Makino was co-directing the conference with Professor Takayuki Tatsumi of Keio University, our host for the conference. Professor Oshima was here as one of the other members of the organizing committee, most of whom had by now become very well-known to Melvilleans worldwide through their attendance at previous conferences. Professor Oshima was also present in the official conference program, for which she wrote “An Introduction to the Critical History of Melville Studies in Japan.” For all of us who had been to earlier international conferences, or to any for whom this was the first, this conference’s exploration of “Melville in a Global Context” was an unforgettable experience.

With so many highlights, it is hard to know where to begin. Elizabeth Schultz had been at the Volos conference, only two years after the publication of her pioneering book Unpainted to the Last, and to hear her plenary address on “The New Moby-Dick Art” was a real revelation, even for someone who is trying to keep up with the subject himself. I was fascinated by the reading that dramatist Yōji Sakate gave from his Bartlebies project in the plenary session that immediately followed Professor Schultz; his story “The Account of the Director of T Hospital” was absolutely gripping in its symbolic implications about life in a hospital just outside the official radiation zone of a nuclear catastrophe. The plenary address by Karen Tei Yamashita entitled “Call Me Ishimaru” was also a revelation—for her as well as her audience—as she explored Melville’s unconscious influence on her first novel while sharing the important story she is now exploring about the deep history of her Japanese-American ancestors who were interned during World War II at the internment camp in...