This issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus is the first of three special online issues that can be read in conjunction with a 2015 special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Volume XXVII). Together the issues offer examples of Kyoko Selden's literary translations and writings that span Japanese history, literature, and multiple genres. The two journals were venues through which Kyoko shared much of her work. These poems, stories, novellas, essays, plays, memoirs, and biographies—drawn from her more than twenty books and fifty short pieces—exemplify her belief in the humanizing power of literature and art, concern for the human toll of historical events, and gentle humor. They reveal new dimensions of established authors while ensuring that marginalized voices are heard. The selections highlight Kyoko's emphasis on women writers and her interlocking themes: war and peace, classical literature and art, Ainu traditions, Okinawan literature, atomic cataclysm, music, education, and childhood, among others. We have prioritized texts that have not been published and those that were first circulated in private venues; included are a few of her many contributions to the Asia Pacific Journal and Japan Focus. We have completed translations that Kyoko did not have a chance to finish before her passing in January 2013.

Helen McCullough translated and published the first twelve chapters of the medieval military chronicle Taiheiki, The Chronicle of Great Peace, in 1979. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kyoko Selden and I, then colleagues on the faculty of Cornell University, began meeting weekly to read, discuss, and translate a broad range of Japanese historical texts, including sections of the Taiheiki through Chapter 19 (out of forty). Our short-term objective was to develop materials for an interdisciplinary seminar that would introduce more of the Taiheiki to English readers. In this special issue, two selections from the Taiheiki—the dramatic and tragic death of Go-Daigo's cast-off son Prince Moriyoshi (alt. Morinaga, 1308-35) from Chapter 13 and an account of the critical battle at Hakone Takenoshita from Chapter 14, both events of 1335—are paired with linked verse by the basara (flamboyant) warrior Sasaki Dōyo, and the Edo-period Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace. All were originally translated and annotated for our Taiheiki course, first taught in 1992, a class that I continue to teach at the University of Southern California.

After Ashikaga Tadayoshi (1306-52), Chief of the Royal Left Stable, had passed Yamanouchi, he summoned Fuchibe, provincial Governor of Iga, and said to him, “We have withdrawn from Kamakura due to lack of troops, but if we raise enough troops in Mino, Owari, Mikawa, and Tōtōmi, and, if we then quickly attack Kamakura, we can destroy Sagami Jirō Tokiyuki easily. But Prince Moriyoshi (1308-35) will always be an enemy of the Ashikaga family. Although there has been no royal edict to execute him, I want to seize this opportunity. Rush back to Yakushidō Valley and stab him to death.”

In the Edo period, famines occurred frequently, imposing disaster. Major famines occurred in roughly thirty to forty or fifty to sixty year cycles, with minor famines interspersed. Typically in Kansai (western Japan), the direct cause was drought, while in Tōhoku (northeastern Japan) it was cold, but floods could also wreak havoc in many areas. Famine was also the product of the political and social system.

Indeed, a single laugh can expel a hundred depressions. In this world, however, there is nothing novel in recounting the same ordinary facts. Tosa Shōgen provoked laughter by painting a farting battle. Inspired by his example, I now record the battles of the beggars and the paupers, titling my account Hinin Taiheiki. Naturally, the characters are but warriors astride their own two legs—bare as a bare dapple-grey horse, yet worth one hundred kan. They carry iron hooks, though rusted, and wear armor of straw mats, though torn. May they be a source of laughter for all those who observe them.

The Tsukubashū (1356-57), or Tsukuba Anthology, was the first of two official collections of medieval linked verse (renga) modeled on the structural and thematic format of the seventeen imperial waka anthologies compiled between 905 and 1349. The Tsukubashū was initially compiled by the court poet Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-88) in 1356 without an imperial mandate. In the following year, however, it was recognized as a quasi-imperial anthology through the mediation of warrior and lay monk Sasaki Dōyo (1295?-1373).

For more than two decades I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Kyoko Selden on Japanese texts relating to the history of Italian opera in Japan. We started with translations involving the reception of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and then began working on Takarazuka musical adaptations of the opera. Although administrative duties made it difficult to realize a book project Kyoko's translation of the 1953 Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki (Three-Generation Chōchō-san) furnished me with the basis for a conference presentation, and we eventually collaborated on an English edition of its libretto. That edition was the result of an extensive and—for me—instructive series of revisions and discussions with Kyoko about the intricate relationships between source and target languages. We spent stimulating afternoons over coffee interrogating texts in Italian, Japanese, and English, ultimately working through several complete revisions. Lamentably, that kind of collaboration was less fully realized in the following translation, which we discussed only once. I have edited it here with the generous help of Lili Selden, and revised or added footnotes, in one case deliberately juxtaposing two viewpoints. I believe I also speak for Kyoko in hoping that readers will find it an invitation to continue and refine our dialogue on the transpositions of Italian and Japanese music-dramas into widely different cultural contexts.

Is the glass half full or half empty? Although this question is held up by pop-psychologists as a test of whether one is optimistic or pessimistic, it may be taken as making an epistemological point: one cannot tell the direction of a change by looking at the current state. A change can be fully appreciated only when it is seen over a longer period and in a larger context.

The single most remarkable feature of the 7th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) was that it took place at all, after a hiatus of no less than 36 years.

Ever since Kim Il Sung decided in the 1950s that his country needed its own way of doing things, which is often summarized under the term of chuch'e, it has been hard to categorize the DPRK as a typical socialist country. North Korea has always been different. It neither joined the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact nor was it willing to engage in the Soviet-led economic cooperation of COMECON. Its ideology moved further and further away from core premises of Marxism-Leninism. With its Hegelian emphasis on “mind over matter”, which in North Korea is called “man is master of everything”, Pyongyang's ideology stood directly opposed to the key paradigm of Marx's Dialectical Materialism. Even from the perspective of the Eastern European socialist brothers, North Korea was therefore a rather odd and even suspicious member of the socialist family, as countless documents unearthed from archival sources reveal. But the fact that a Communist party in power did not hold a congress for almost four decades has nevertheless to be regarded as highly unusual.

1. 1. Introduction to the Special Issue in Honor of Kyoko Selden: Japan in Translation - Alisa Freedman

2. 2. Introduction to the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace - Joan Piggott

3. 3. Selections from the Taiheiki: The Chronicle of Great Peace - translated by Kyoko Selden and Joan Piggott

4. 4. Introduction to the Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace - Kyoko Selden

5. 5. Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers' Chronicle of Peace - translated by Kyoko Selden with Joshua Young

6. 6. Renga by Sasaki Dōyo: Selected from the Tsukubashū (Tsukuba Anthology) -translated and annotated by Kyoko Selden, edited by Lili Selden

7. 7. The Takarazuka Concise Madame Butterfly- translated by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden