
Edmund Blunden © IWM; William Plomer, photograph by Howard Coster, © National Portrait Gallery, London
TalkThursday 28 October 2021
6:00pm – 7:00pm
Two literary Brits in Japan
ドリンクレセプション 7:00pm – 8:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP
大和日英基金 主催
満席The writer Edmund Blunden arrived in Japan in 1924 to take up a post as Professor of Literature at Tokyo University. The novelist William Plomer arrived in 1926, and the two became friends, of a sort. Both returned to the UK after a few years and spread the word about Japan. It was Blunden, at Merton College Oxford, who introduced the historian Richard Storry to Japan, forging the College’s enduring connection to the country (the current Emperor studied there). Blunden returned to Japan for a period after the War as, in effect, Cultural Counsellor at the British Embassy, and the forerunner of the British Council’s operations there.
Blunden was an uncritical lover of Japan, but Plomer had more mixed feelings, sensing the dangers of Japanese militarism as early as the late 1920s. But he loved Japanese theatre, and his recommendation of Noh to Benjamin Britten directly resulted in the latter’s opera Curlew River, for which Plomer wrote the libretto. It was also Plomer who encouraged his friend Ian Fleming to write the James Bond books, and, as Chief Reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape, got them published. His influence is apparent during Bond’s adventure in Japan in “You Only Live Twice”.
A video of the event can be seen below:
コントリビューターについて

Jason James
Jason James is Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Having been fascinated by Japan on a choir tour at the age of 13, he chose to read Japanese Studies at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating First Class with Distinction in 1987. After working for many years in the financial industry as a Japan specialist, his interests took a more cultural turn when he became Director of the British Council in Japan in 2007, and then DG at Daiwa in 2011.