photo by Kirsi Stubb, 2023

1997 The Japan Foundation Special Prize

Translator of Japanese Literature, Japanologist, Writer

Kai Nieminen

[Finland]

It was quite a surprise for me to hear I was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize in 1997. At the time I did not even know that there is such a prize. I was grateful for both the prize and the opportunity to travel to Japan to receive it. As I was and still am not an academic scholar or researcher, just a self-educated translator and poet, I felt the honour overwhelming.

There was, however, a path leading to this: in 1979 I was granted a Japan Foundation Fellowship which made it possible for me to visit Japan for the first time in my life. I had been translating into literature magazines Japanese literature since the beginning of the 1970’s, starting with classical texts like Tsurezuregusa and Bashō’s haibun and proceeding to modern works of Inoue Yasushi and Kaikō Ken, then back to Bashō again, when Japanese ambassador in Helsinki, Hitomi Tetsusaburō, asked if I would like to go to Japan to see what it is really like. My first answer was that I doubted if I would find Bashō’s and Yoshida Kenkō’s Japan anymore, but he encouraged me to go and see. You’ll have no obligations, he said, you should only travel around Japan and be absorbed in what I see and feel. And so I did.

After a year in Japan I returned to Finland in beginning of Autumn 1980. As it happened, when coming back I moved to countryside some 80 kilometres East from Helsinki, to a village that provided an undisturbed surroundings for a translator and writer. During these past 40 years I have been living in shades of forest and still strongly feel that I shall stay here to the end. Since my first visit, I have been in Japan about ten times, but always go to visit my first Japanese homestead in Kita-senju, shitamachi of Tokyo - that was an ideal place to understand that Bashō’s Japan had not dissapeared, that is where he started his Oku no hosomichi and where I started mine in 1980.

Here in the woody countryside of Finland I have found ideal surroundings to translate classical and modern Japanese literature. Among other texts I for 20 years continued and finished Genij monogatari translation, which was commenced by Marutei Tsurunen in the 1970’s. Thanks to Japan Foundation I have been able to concentrate in Japanese literature. And also to build a sauna to our seaside cabin.

Kai Nieminen

(Original text in English)

The Japan Foundation Awards / Special Prizes (1997)