Two literary Brits in Japan

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:

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