University of Heidelberg

Researcher: Corinna Menzer M.A.

During the Westernization in early Meiji-era Japan, a huge amount of western European and North American literature was translated. Among those translations were the representative works of autobiographies written by representative western men. Even though the Japanese literature had a tradition of self-referential writing, the autobiography was adopted as a western import. Elder Japanese states- and businessmen, who quoted from the life stories of Rousseau, Franklin or Goethe, soon used this new literary form of public representation and vindication. A male genre from the West had found its counterpart in Japan. But it didn’t stay a male genre for long as Japanese Women started to publicize their life narratives as well.

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Researcher: Dr. Noriyo Hoozawa-Arkenau 

In this subproject translations from Russian into Japanese and that from Japanese into Russian during the Meiji-epoch, at the end of the 19th century in Japan, are researched.
In the project the so called gembun-itchi-movement at that time is considered as a dissolution process of diglossia. The gembun-itchi-movement is a language reform in that the previous written language was abandoned, which has been so different from the really spoken language that one should consider the written language to be another language system. Such a language situation is called by the sociolinguist Charles Ferguson ‘diglossia’, in which the written and spoken linguistic variants are called H and L respectively (I will, however, use the term “Not-H” instead of “L”). In the dissolution of the diglossia in Japan translations from the western languages, especially Russian, played an important role.

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