One motif that unites Shakespeare with his first Japanese translators during the period of Shakespeare’s initial reception in Japan in the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) eras is the sea: as a contingency in the formation of national identities, as a key lexical item, and more obliquely as a metaphor for translation and translating style. This article discusses the significance of the sea and maritime imagery in the pioneering Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935). Tsubouchi’s career as a Shakespeare translator beginning in the 1880s coincides with Japan’s emergence as a major naval power that by 1919 had become entirely independent of foreign shipbuilders. Japan is historically a maritime culture, but during the period of national isolation (sakoku) between 1633 and 1853, Japanese people were prohibited from making oceanic journeys. Tsubouchi’s translations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works (1909-27) were made at a time of growing consciousness of the importance of the sea to Japan, and in encountering the newness of Shakespeare’s ocean, Tsubouchi also had cause to look within his own culture.

     The significance of the sea to both Shakespeare and Tsubouchi is to some extent symbolized by the defining events of their respective eras: the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (when Shakespeare was 24 and shortly to embark on his theatrical career) and defeat of the Imperial Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 (by which time Tsubouchi was 46 and about to begin his translation of the Complete Works). Victory in both cases was attributed to superior speed and gunnery, prompting the British to develop their Royal Navy as the prime force behind imperial expansion and the Japanese to believe they could do much the same. Even if that latter dream was to end in failure it encouraged the likes of Mitsubishi and the Uraga Dock Company (1) to develop a non-belligerent capacity in the post-1945 era, when Japan was to remain the world’s leading shipbuilding nation until 2003. This historical preamble is reflected in the tendency for language change to create a demand for new translations. Tsubouchi may have succeeded in making Shakespeare the preeminent Western writer in Japan, even above the great Russian novelists (2), but his translations are contingent to the nationalist trajectory that led to the Asia-Pacific war, and while he supported the language reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (the movement to assimilate the classical written with the colloquial language), he could not have foreseen the social and linguistic changes of postwar Japan, which made his translations seem increasingly antiquated and created an opportunity for new translations. Moreover, in the aftermath of 1945, language change has been necessitated partly by the influence of English as Japan’s main medium of contact with the outside world. Tsubouchi pioneered the art and craft of Shakespeare translation in Japan, but while a bulky edition of his Complete Works (Tsubouchi 2007) can be found in Japanese bookshops, readers are more likely to purchase the inexpensive and commercially successful pocket edition translations by his postwar successors.

     The defeat of the Spanish Armada and Battle of Tsushima were clearly critical moments in technological trajectories to master the seas and make oceanic transport faster and safer, and yet the sea for Shakespeare carries different meanings to what it did for Tsubouchi translating Shakespeare in the early 20th century. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the sea is an expanse that through the supernatural compression of time and space connects the classical past not only with the present but with the future:

The image that follows of the boy Cupid missing his aim at the heart of the Virgin Queen serves to legitimate Oberon’s plan to gain the Indian boy in the sense that it is one based on classical precedent and therefore possible to fail. Oberon’s vision of mastery (‘the rude sea grew civil at her song’) offers a glimpse of what the seas could become for mortals as well, whereas Titania’s mistake seems to be that of claiming for herself a future based in nostalgia:

The decade in which Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream saw two major expeditions to the East in 1591 and 1596 that were to lead to the formation of the East India Company in 1600, but the fact that three out of the six ships did not return ‘rich with merchandise’ but were lost at sea (3), suggests Antonio’s plight in The Merchant of Venice (4) rather than Titania’s picturesque ‘embarkèd traders on the flood’. Despite improvements to the design and rigging of ships over the next 200 years, it was not until the introduction of iron and steam during the Industrial Revolution that vessels achieved anything like their present size, speed and safety.

     As Caroline Spurgeon argued as long ago as 1935, and as A.F. Falconer (1965), Steve Mentz (2009) and Dan Brayton (2012) have more recently and exhaustively demonstrated, the sea is a rich source of Shakespearean imagery and knowledge. According to one online concordance (‘Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works’, 2003-13), the words ‘sea’ and ‘seas’ occur 284 times in Shakespeare’s works, which is somewhat more than ‘star’ (47 times) and ‘sky’ (48) but less than ‘death’ (918) and ‘love’ (2,191). Taking into account collocations such as ‘ocean’ and ‘Neptune’, Spurgeon admits the prevalence of maritime imagery, but comments that

Hamlet would ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’ (Hamlet, 3.1.61) and Juliet promises that her ‘bounty is as boundless as the sea’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.1.175) (5). Further references in The Comedy of Errors (e.g. the equipage of the barque of Epidamnum in 4.5.81-92 and ship ‘in her trim’, 90) and The Tempest (the use of nautical terms in the opening shipwreck scene (1.1), ‘yare’ (‘turn the helm’, 6) and ‘Lay her a-hold’ (‘bring the boat close to the wind’, 47)) suggest that Shakespeare had a detailed knowledge of seamanship, but the point is his view of the sea seems to be one of constant movement and danger broken by occasional calm, which suits his theatrical dynamic of internalized disturbance within the static setting of the wooden stage.

Shoyo’s maritime encounters

     For Tsubouchi and his contemporaries, the opening of Japan’s maritime boundaries after 1868 represented more of a break with the past than a premonition of the future. For most of the era of isolation (1603-1868), Japanese sailors were forbidden on pain of death from leaving Japanese waters, although trade with Korea and the Ryukyu Islands was permitted; this policy was strictly reinforced by a regulation that large holes be drilled in the stern of boats to keep them from venturing too far from land. Japanese scholars and officials had been aware of the geographical expanse of the oceans since the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century and through their access to Western learning, as well as developments in naval technology due to the frequent intrusions by foreign ships in the 18th and 19th centuries (6), but the dichotomy between inner and outer is inevitably more rigid than in Shakespeare’s England, where the demand to conquer the seas was driven as much by competition with other European powers than by national ambition.

     In contrast to Elizabethan England, therefore, by the Meiji Restoration the seas had been thoroughly mapped and could be traversed in relative comfort. Several of Tsubouchi’s contemporaries, such as the writers Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki, received government scholarships enabling them to experience the three month voyage to Europe firsthand, although Tsubouchi did not himself have this opportunity. Tsubouchi’s first significant encounter with the sea most probably came in 1879, when he visited a brother who was recuperating in the coastal town of Atami (Ueda 1998, 143) (7). The name meaning ‘hot ocean’, Atami is some forty miles west of Tokyo and to the north-east of the Izu peninsula, and is still popular as a seaside resort due to its combination of volcanic hot springs and warm sea currents. Founded in the 8th century, it was a geisha town with its own theatre and local Noh and traditional dance groups. Tsubouchi wrote the words for the town’s song and in 1921 recruited a cast of locals to perform a pageant he had written on the town’s history.

     Tsubouchi visited the town again on his honeymoon in 1886, and in the 1900s started visiting Atami almost every summer to avoid the Tokyo heat and work on his Shakespeare translations, which he had begun in 1909 (Omura 9-12). He liked Atami so much that in 1920 he purchased land above the bay to build a villa that he named Soshisha (Villa of the Twin Persimmon Trees), and in its garden a three-storied tower. The design was meant to represent the harmony of what he regarded as the three main cultural spheres of influence: the first floor being wa (‘harmony’), the traditional name for Japan, being the closest to the ground, the second floor kan (‘Han’) for China, and the third floor yo, literally ‘ocean’ but also meaning the world across the oceans, the West (8). It was in this environment with its fresh sea breezes that Tsubouchi completed his Shakespeare translations in 1927.

     Tsubouchi’s career covers that period between the introduction of iron ships in the 1840s and the development of commercial aviation in the 1930s: a period when maritime travel still retained the romance of past eras, was the main means of intercontinental transport, and yet new technologies coincided with the sea’s demythologization. Being a maritime nation, Japan has its fair share of folk beliefs related to the sea, such as the umibozu, the sea bonze notorious for wrecking boats and dragging sailors to their deaths, similar to the better known kappa or goblins, who do much the same thing on dry land. These beliefs were collected in the early 20th century by the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (9), and appear in a number of Lafcadio Hearn’s popular ‘tales of old Japan’ written at the turn of the 20th century (10). Yanagita’s intention was to promote the concept of an organic nation state that was capable of integrating the local differences associated with folklore, and Hearn’s to preserve a traditional culture that was already under threat from industrialization. As Gerald Figal suggests, such notions have remained influential in popular culture through to the present. In post-war Japan, the belief in monsters or bakemono can be subversive, for example in 1960s angura drama (‘underground’ protest theatre), and as an innocuous sublimation of youthful fantasies, but as Figal writes, the trajectory of Meiji culture may have been rather more one-sided:

     Tsubouchi’s relationship to modernity and imperial mythmaking is always complex. In Shosetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885-6) (Tsubouchi 1981), the treatise on fiction that made Tsubouchi’s literary reputation, he called for a modern Japanese fiction based on modern principles of psychological realism. As Figal asserts (193), Tsubouchi’s notion of psychology was ‘in all probability’ derived from his membership of the Fushigi Kenkyukai (Mystery Research Society). For Tsubouchi, fushigi (‘the mysterious’) is an object of scientific study, serving the utilitarian purpose of subordinating psychological knowledge to the needs of a modern culture, while for Tsubouchi’s near contemporary, the comic writer Izumi Kyoka (11) – in his comic tales of the grotesque – a rigidly objective approach risks oppressing the imaginative forces of popular consciousness. On the other hand, Tsubouchi’s view of Shakespeare is quite clearly that of a powerful and ultimately unknowable force that cannot be tamed, and which therefore contains the potential for subversion; his Shakespeare translations represent a compromise with his late 19th century realism (12).

     In addition to the translations, Tsubouchi wrote a number of contemporary novels and historical dramas, which are mostly set in either Edo (present-day Tokyo), Osaka or Kyoto, and also a musical drama, Shinkyoku Urashima (New Musical Drama Urashima, 1904), which is set both by and beneath the sea as a version of the popular folk tale of Urashima Taro. This is about a young fisherman who, after rescuing a turtle, is rewarded with a ride on the turtle’s back to the palace of the Dragon God at the bottom of the sea. The turtle is transformed into Otohime, the god’s beautiful daughter, who gives Urashima a mysterious box which will protect him from harm on condition that it is never opened. After three days, Urashima decides to return home, where he discovers that three hundred years have passed in his absence, his parents are long dead, and when he opens the box he ages in an instant.

     The time dilation that occurs recalls Shakespeare’s liberal use of time frames; in physics, relativity is sometimes called the Urashima effect after the legend. The story is pure lyric, fascinating, and completely open to interpretation. Yet it had never before been adapted for the traditional theatre, and Tsubouchi naturally rose to the challenge of adapting it as a fusion of the traditional and the modern and of East and West, above all to create a native Japanese style of Wagnerian opera: on expectations, therefore, a work that enabled audiences to lose track of time (13).

     Whether Tsubouchi achieved that effect is debatable, since its scale of musical and theatrical forces has ensured that Shinkyoku Urashima has been performed in full only once, but it was praised for its lyricism by the poet and translator Ueda Bin and predates the showy total effects of the Takarazuka Revue founded in 1914 (of which Tsubouchi was an early supporter) and of post-war Japanese musical drama (14). Ueda knew something of the sea, since his influential translation of French symbolist poetry, Kaichoon (The Sound of the Tide), was published in 1905.

     Tsubouchi had read and translated the first act of The Tempest by the time he wrote Shinkyoku Urashima, but was not to translate the play in full until 1915, and his three-act play En no gyoja (Hermit En, 1916) about the 7th century ascetic En no Ozuno is Tsubouchi’s elaborate dramatic response to what was probably his favourite Shakespeare play, although set on a mountain rather than by the sea (15). For Tsubouchi, the sea in Shakespeare’s Tempest provides a backdrop against which one man uses not pre-modern magic but the resources of Renaissance humanism to effect his remarkable goal of reconciliation and marriage, which is why it was important that the play’s subtle ‘sea changes’ were contained within the unities of time and place. A less realistic structure would have made the play too much like kabuki (16), straining the psychological effect for which Tsubouchi was looking.

     In Shinkyoku Urashima also there are hints of The Tempest, in particular the first encounter of Urashima with Otohime (recalling Ferdinand and Miranda) (17) and a sense that the sea itself pre-empts stylization through such phenomena as the refraction of light under water, the beauty of the ocean floor, and the play of light on water. These aspects are evident in erotic abundance as Otohime reveals herself to Urashima, when the Chorus sings her story in traditional style as she enacts it in dance:

Tsubouchi’s realism clearly does not exclude the power of the arbitrary to achieve aesthetic, erotic effects, and in this case is related to his interest in Japanese dance (Nihon buyo), which he was hoping to modernize by aligning traditional skills with psychological realism. Otohime’s dance is in fact no more than a standard kabuki dance (18) but what makes it original is the context of the work as a whole, with its fusion of traditional Japanese and Western operatic genres. This fusion proved to be beyond the capacity of Tsubouchi’s theatre, but predates the confidence of contemporary directors such as Ninagawa Yukio to blend Noh and kabuki elements with Shakespeare and modern Japanese drama (19).

     Tsubouchi’s excursion into ‘new musical drama’ was accomplished in the stylistic mixing of his Shakespeare translations, notably in his version of Ariel’s song ‘Full fathom five’, which in its use of the traditional seven-five syllabic meter of Japanese poetry (shichigocho) serves both to crystallize the play’s theme of ‘sea-change’ and to express the latent poetic of his own language. This dual tendency represents both Tsubouchi’s view of Shakespeare’s genius as at heart unknowable and arbitrary together with the arbitrariness of language and literary forms.

Tsubouchi’s translation is organized syllabically as follows:

Tsubouchi’s translation does not replicate the stricter syllabic of waka poetry, and would surely sound too rigid if it did (20), but the use of the syllabic in the first five lines is sufficient to create the desired syllabic effect overall.

     Tsubouchi’s experience of translating Shakespeare can only have brought him closer to Shakespeare’s maritime background, not to mention his contemporary background of growing Japanese mastery of the seas, which he was in a position to witness at first hand from his villa overlooking Atami Bay and on to one of the main thoroughfares into the port of Yokohama. Tsubouchi was careful to distance literature from ideology (21), although his project of translating Shakespeare contributes inevitably to the nationalist agenda of cultural reform. Yet if the extent of any writer’s nationalism is evidenced by their rhetoric, explicitly political rhetoric is absent from Tsubouchi’s writings, and is found instead in a more straightforward national pride (22), most strikingly in a speech he made in 1928 at a reception at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for the publication of his complete Shakespeare translations by the Chuo Koron publishing company:

As Tsuno Kaitaro maintains (2002), Tsubouchi was a comedian rather than a polemicist at heart, and there is in the speech an irony and a hyperbole that puts his achievement in a comic light. Yet it is an achievement none the less, which Tsubouchi at the end of his life was to regard as the greatest achievement of his long and productive career (24). What is most striking about the speech, however, is that he refers not to the ironclad ships of his own age but to earlier adventurers. Kinokuniya Bunzaemon (Kibun) (c. 1669-1734) made a fortune exporting mikan tangerines from his native Wakayama to the shogun’s capital at Edo, and one year risked storms in the Pacific to ensure that the fruit reached Edo in time for an annual festival; he later supplied the people of Osaka with nutritious salted salmon when they were threatened by an epidemic. Gohei Zeniya (1774-1852) followed the call for the liberalization of Japanese trade at a time when such trade was strictly forbidden, and may have taken his boats as far as Tasmania. Nagamasa Yamada (1590-1630) is the best known of these three for his involvement with the Red Seal ships (shuinsen) during the early 17th century, a system established under the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592 to advance Japanese trade in south-east Asia and protect it from piracy but abolished by the Tokugawa shogun in 1635 for fear of Catholic influence in the Philippines and elsewhere (Boxer 261-267). The boats were typically equipped with six to eight cannon, a technology acquired from the Portuguese, and equal or superior in size to European galleons; the Red Seal ships rivaled the Dutch East India Company for power and influence. Yamada traded in Japanese silver and handicrafts and settled in the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, where he became governor of the province of Nakhon Si Thammarat on the Malay peninsula before being killed in a local war of succession.

     Tsubouchi’s references – however casual they may have been in their context – indicate significant potential within the traditional culture for Shakespeare translation. Moreover, such asides are typical of the prefaces he wrote to his translations, where for example he compares the plot of The Winter’s Tale to the illogical structures of kabuki drama (Kai 1986). Tsubouchi’s navigation of the Shakespearean ocean was guided by the familiar landmarks of bakumatsu culture,25 and since this culture predates what is known as Japanese modernity provides a rather different perspective on Shakespeare’s dramas from those of later translators.

Translating the sea: Shoyo’s rhetorical strategies

     Tsubouchi’s strategy for translating Shakespeare was to translate the plays as he heard them (26): in other words, for the most part similar to the Victorian English that he had learnt at school and university, but with rhetorical features that could be compared in their sense of difference with the Tokugawa writers he admired, such as Ueda Akinari and Takizawa Bakin (27). For Tsubouchi, Shakespeare translation mediates the past, and does so not necessarily as a rejection of Shakespeare’s contemporary relevance, which Tsubouchi broadly accepted, but as a response to the force of Shakespeare’s rhetoric.

     Tsubouchi realized within his literary and cultural tradition a potential for Shakespeare translation, which it became his role to fulfill, and at the same time was wary of sounding too archaic, wishing to produce translations that were broadly in line with other facets of modernization, but the fact that even his later translations were criticized for archaism indicates the difficulties he had in keeping contemporary (28). This seems to have been not so much a problem of translating individual words and phrases but, for Tsubouchi, of processing or adjusting himself mentally to Shakespeare’s ‘illogical’ plot structures, when (as he well knew) only two of Shakespeare’s plays obeyed the classical unities. Tsubouchi was not necessarily confused by Western ideas, since he was also among other things an expert on British constitutional history (29), but by structures that failed to provide the authority he had learnt to expect from Western learning, and which seemed too much like his own (30). More than anything else, the translator’s sense of incongruity describes what is meant by ‘Shoyo at sea’.

     This impasse can be rationalized in terms of the Buddhist aesthetic of detachment that underscores these comparisons. Tsubouchi refers to a celebrated novella by his contemporary, Koda Rohan, which tells of the construction of a pagoda and of how at first the project divides the architect Genta from his chief carpenter, Jubei, but that later the two are reconciled, and Jubei recognized as its builder, which has important religious significance as the construction of a pagoda was believed to acquire equal merit, or karma, to the preaching of the Lotus Sutra. An orthodox Buddhist interpretation of the story might argue, therefore, that as the building takes shape it exercises a beneficent influence that heals personal animosities, enabling believers to overcome their worldly attachments. Tsubouchi insists that he is nothing like Jubei, implying that he does not expect to acquire karma from translating Shakespeare. Yet given the overt reference to the story and ironic tone of the speech, one cannot help feeling that even if translating Shakespeare did not exactly earn him karma it did bring him peace of mind. Tsubouchi was not a conventionally religious person, but was brought up in a pervasively Buddhist culture that would have necessitated a negotiation between the Buddhist aesthetics of transience and imperfection – glimpsed, for example, in Hokusai’s woodblock print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1830-33) – and the authority of Shakespeare (31).

     Tsubouchi’s own sense of incompleteness extends to his Shakespeare translations, which he revised substantially towards the end of his life, and to Japan’s reputation as ‘a translation culture’ (32). An analysis of Tsubouchi’s translations of Shakespeare’s maritime vocabulary and imagery may contribute to our understanding of Tsubouchi’s relationship with the sea, although a detailed corpus analysis is likely to yield only limited results, for example that he usually translated the word ‘sea’ with its standard Japanese equivalent, umi. A selection of Tsubouchi’s renditions of well-known maritime references offers hints as to his overall translation strategy and his response to Shakespeare’s maritime background.

     To start with, if Tsubouchi is a ship’s carpenter, then he may be a hardworking one when we recall Marcellus’ lines to Horatio:

In an early translation of the first act only of Hamlet, Tsubouchi translated the word ‘shipwright’ with exactly the same word he was to use in his speech in 1928, fune (or funa) daiku (33):

The most striking feature of this translation is the substitution of a word meaning ‘holiday’ (kyujitsu) for ‘Sunday’, since Tsubouchi’s readers would not have been used to the Christian practice of resting on Sundays, which did not become a statutory day of rest in Japan until 1947. If Tsubouchi was recalling this early translation in his speech, then the reference would probably have been ironic, but equally the comparison might suggest the wearisome and repetitive aspects of the translator’s work. Both the ship’s carpenter and the translator are engaged in ‘repairing’ or realigning material that is not their own, and work in the featureless environments of the sea and an uncharted literature, where one day or one page may well seem like any other.

     As with the swell of the sea and the threat of storms, we can interpret the task of Shakespeare translation as a concerted effort to avoid danger. In literary and in maritime terms, the danger seems to be that of ignoring the force of the Shakespearean line, of sailing too much into or out of the wind. This is a metaphor that needs to be qualified in the contexts of Meiji translation history and contemporary translation theory, although not before a few textual examples of Tsubouchi’s translation strategies.

     The first is the use of alliteration and internal rhymes to emphasize key phrases. Word play, whether merely phonetic or semantic, is so present in the Japanese language that it can easily be ignored, and Tsubouchi’s translation of Marcus Brutus’ speech contains at least two significant instances:

The emphasis of this speech lies on the shallows and miseries, because whereas fortune leads either to greater fortune or else to misfortune, the failure to take one’s chances as they come can – in Brutus’ Stoical view – lead only to misfortune. Tsubouchi emphasizes the shallows and miseries in his translation (34):

The assonance on asazu (‘shallows’), ansho (‘miseries’) and asamashii (‘shameful’) stands out clearly from the rest of the speech, and since asa by itself can mean ‘morning’ and an ‘dark’, the assonance may hint at the defeat that faces Brutus the next day. The negativity of the speech is also heard in the assonantal double negative of the final phrase, nanra ka wo torankerya naran (‘we must take’). As in European languages, the single consonant n is used in negative inflexions in Japanese, and by an accident of Japanese grammar, the obligatory ‘must take’ becomes a phrase meaning literally that ‘if we do not take, it will not become’.

     Alliteration can also be seen to ride with and to shape the rhythm of the line, which may be especially useful for translating long sentences like Solanio’s to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice:

Tsubouchi’s strategy is first to summarize the speech in a single sentence telling Antonio that he is disturbed by thoughts of the sea. After a phrase that states the subject of the next sentence (‘your argosies’), the most striking lexical item is meimei (‘each’), which associates with rippa (‘splendid’) to mean ‘portly’. The alliteration on ‘m’ seems to frame the sentence, as it occurs again at the end of the sentence in the phrase meshita ni mite (‘looking down on the smaller boats’). This alliteration, therefore, would emphasize the image of control and superiority that Solanio is trying to impress on Antonio, since presumably the younger Solanio is to some extent dependent on Antonio’s patronage. Shakespeare’s use of alliteration is more decorative (‘woven wings’), since the structure is facilitated through rhythmic variation that may imitate the movement of the sea. Tsubouchi does not have the blank verse, but he does have the punctuation, and also kanji compounds such as goryoshu (‘signiors’) and mochimaruchoja (‘rich burghers’) that visually on the page and to a lesser extent when spoken replicate the mood of cumulation and release that mark the original.

     A third technique is syllabic meter, as has been discussed with the example of Ariel’s song from The Tempest, and which seems to be the most effective way of equaling the lyricism of the source. Seven-five syllabic meter is recognized within Japanese culture as the dominant traditional prosody, one with a rhetorical potential that is equal to Shakespeare’s blank verse. In addition to traditional poetic forms such as waka and haiku, seven-five meter is also used as a narrative device in kabuki and bunraku drama, so that while it is possible in Shakespeare translation (35), it sounds too much like kabuki or bunraku to Japanese ears. This is why it has generally been avoided by translators like Tsubouchi translating Shakespeare for the modern Japanese theatre, but is appropriate for a lyric like Ariel’s song, which stands out metrically in its original context. The greatest challenge for the Shakespeare translator is to communicate the rhetoric of the source, in particular the movement of the line, but in a language where stressed blank verse is more or less infeasible and strict seven-five meter inappropriate (36), Shakespeare’s rhetoric may easily become diffuse and vapid in translation: an inevitable tendency of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translations.

     Pericles’ reunion with Marina in Pericles is an emotional scene, with its overtones of loss and resurrection. The metaphor of the daughter resurrecting the father who gave her life is important not only for understanding the past, and dramatically as well this complex metaphor allows Pericles space to get a grip of his rushing joys and to organize his thoughts:

Tsubouchi gives equal stress to the metaphor of resurrection by placing it at the sentence’s end, and imitates the rhythmical repetition of words such as umi (‘sea’) and omae (‘you’), but is perhaps too literal in his translation of the exclamatory ‘O’, which he translates as o and oi, which with his explication of the central image of rushing joy with the phrase anmari ureshii node (‘because I am so happy’) risks making Pericles’ speech sound melodramatic. The most striking feature of his translation is the use of tsunami to translate ‘this great sea of joys’. Shakespeare does not of course use ‘tsunami’, a Japanese word meaning ‘harbour wave’ that was first used in English in 1897. For Tsubouchi, however, it is an obvious collocation, since Japan had experienced two serious earthquake-induced tsunamis prior to his translation of Pericles: the first in June 1896, which killed 22,000 people along the north-eastern coast of the main island, close to the sight of the 2011 disaster, and the second the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1st September, 1923, which Tsubouchi experienced in Tokyo, and where although most of the 130,000 deaths caused by structures collapsing and fires, several hundred died in the accompanying tsunami, including 300 in Atami Bay. Shakespeare’s context is the eastern Mediterranean, in particular the seismically active Aegean Sea (37). This historical setting, with its associations with the journeys of St Paul, lends a special depth to Pericles’ sorrows, but for a Japanese audience unfamiliar with the ancient world, Tsubouchi’s reference to the familiar phenomenon of tsunami would have had immediate connotations.

Conclusion

     For Tsubouchi, the maritime is an essential part of Shakespeare’s world, and Shakespeare’s maritime background to some extent resonates with his own. Tsubouchi has long had a reputation as a hedonistic, even Dionysian figure (Nakamura 207), who tempered the seriousness of Shakespeare with the pleasures of ‘the floating world’, and has therefore never been taken as seriously as such Apollonian writers as Mori Ogai (38). According to this argument, Tsubouchi sought to make Shakespeare beautiful in his own language, and if that is the case, it was not a journey without dangers, as the task of assimilation through translation was also a conflict between two familiar impulses of domestication and foreignization, and Tsubouchi could easily have ‘yared’ the helm too far either way. Yet, for all his self-denigration, Tsubouchi is somewhat more than the ship’s carpenter, and by 1928 had made himself the master interpreter of Shakespeare in Japan. In a culture where respect is accorded authority his translations remained authoritative until the 1960s. In the 1880s, Tsubouchi effectively superseded the first of Shakespeare’s Japanese translators, Kawashima Keizo, and in the 1900s, the joint translations by Tozawa Koya and Asano Hyokyo (39), and although there is no particular evidence that any of these individuals even wished to translate the whole of Shakespeare, Tsubouchi was the only one among his contemporaries to do so based on specific goals of literary and cultural reform. This is to say that from his time as a student and as a rising and highly polemical academic in the 1880s Shakespeare appealed to Tsubouchi both as a writer whose grasp on reality could be appreciated by Japanese readers without recourse to ideological glosses and as one whose rich turn of phrase provided a sampler for linguistic reform.

     The metaphor of language as ‘a sea of words’ is not itself unfamiliar to Japanese discourse. The oldest of modern Japanese dictionaries, published between 1889 and 1891, which Tsubouchi consulted, is called Genkai (Sea of Words), and its successor, the Daigenkai (Great Sea of Words), is still in publication. Tsubouchi’s voyage was across not only Shakespeare’s ocean but the ocean of his own language; in the Meiji era there were 10,000 kanji (or Sino-Japanese characters) in regular use compared with about 2,000 nowadays. Tsubouchi’s primary view of Shakespeare translator would have come from a perspective not discussed in this article, namely the visual correspondences between kanji and aesthetic beauty of individual characters. Our tendency to ignore the written language, or at least treat it simply as ‘a version’ of Shakespeare’s, might be echoed in an observation by Steve Mentz about the sea that

The sea is environmentally the most important of geographical masses, and also the one that we know least about. From his ecocritical viewpoint, Mentz disagrees with Auden’s assumption ‘that we know no ocean outside Romanticism’ (100) (40) suggesting that Shakespeare’s early modern ocean offers a less stable and more versatile image of reality than either Romanticism or liberal humanism, one that promises death as well as treasure. Perhaps too for Tsubouchi, his reluctance to impose ideals on Shakespeare and to delve instead into the stylistic resources of his native language suggests that he too felt the pull of Shakespeare’s sea of words.

Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. ‘Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works.’ 2003-20.

Gallimore, Daniel. ‘Shoyo, Soseki, and Shakespeare: translations of three key texts.' Japan Women’s University Faculty of Humanities Journal 59 (2010): 41-61.

Kikuchi Akira. 'Rodoku kenkyukai' (Tsubouchi Shoyo’s reading research group) and ‘Rodokuho' (Tsubouchi’s theory of elocution). Tsubouchi Shoyo jiten, 1986. 395.