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  • Address for the London Conference
  • Arimichi Makino

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Arimichi Makino, President of The Melville Society, delivering his address at the Eleventh International Melville Society Conference with Wyn Kelley at his side. Photo courtesy of Ikuno Saiki.

First I would like to express sincere condolences to the victims of the London terrorist attacks. It must be a very hard time for the London conference directors to concentrate their efforts on organizing the program. We had a similar difficulty at the Tokyo conference in 2015. It was the time after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by a big earthquake. We managed, however, to accomplish our goal and hold the [End Page 105] conference. Thus we feel strong solidarity with the organizers of the London conference.

I would like to introduce another example of solidarity with England, which is related to "Crossings," the main theme of the London conference. Melville studies in Japan started, in a sense, with Tomoji Abe, a pioneer scholar of Melville and a well-known novelist. When he was a student of English at the University of Tokyo, Abe had the good fortune to receive a great contribution from a British man of letters, Edmund Blunden, then poet laureate of England. He was teaching English literature at the University of Tokyo as a visiting professor. It must have been a great opportunity for Abe to attend Professor Blunden's class, and it was also the beginning of the Melville Revival in the 1920s. According to Professor Blunden, there are three great tragedies written in English: King Lear, Wuthering Heights, and Moby-Dick.

Abe soon started to read Moby-Dick. He later wrote about the profound impression the book made upon him in Melville, the first Japanese scholarly work on the author, published in 1934. By then, Abe was already a well-known novelist of the "Intellectual School" during the hard times of pre-war militarism. He published many novels, among which we can trace clear influences from Moby-Dick, as we see both Ishmael-like and Ahab-like characters in his main work, A Winter Lodging.

Abe's translation of Moby-Dick was begun sometime in the 1930s. It was published volume by volume until it was completed in 1955, when he was a professor of English at Meiji University. Meiji University is one of the centers of Melville studies in Japan and is now home to the Abe Tomoji Memorial Library. It was a great honor for me, therefore, to inherit Abe's distinguished tradition as a professor of English at the same university. We organized the Melville Society of Japan with the support of Professor Tatsumi of Keio University and have annually published Sky-Hawk, an academic journal of the Melville Society of Japan, for thirty years. We imagine "sky-hawk," a Melvillean bird of heaven, flying over the world. This time hopefully it is observing the London conference from the sky and signifying the solidarity of Melvillean friendship.

Arigatou Gozaimasu. Thank you very much. [End Page 106]

Arimichi Makino
President of The Melville Society
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