On August 24, 2018, the Foundation for Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks and Southeast Asian Studies Program, Thammasat University, hosted a seminar in honor of the late Irish-born historian Benedict Anderson (1936-2015). The seminar in the Thammasat Faculty of Liberal Arts Building, Tha Prachan, included a presentation by Professor Tsuyoshi Kato about translating A Life Beyond Boundaries, Professor Anderson’s memoir, into Japanese. A Life Beyond Boundaries is in the collection of the Thammasat University Library. Professor Kato earned a Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Social Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. He is professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. As a specialist in ASEAN studies, he states on his university homepage:

I seem to be a different person when I’m doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia. My students are always telling me I look like I’m having a good time.

The memoir by Professor Anderson first appeared in the Japanese language because an editor at a Japanese publishing house asked him to write a short autobiography. As Professor Anderson wrote in the preface to his book when it was finally published in English,

The origin of this book is quite unusual, and I hope may therefore tickle the curiosity of English readers. It began around 2003 when Ms Endo Chiho, a fine editor for Japan’s NTT Publishing Company, happened to read earlier Japanese translations of my works, in particular Imagined Communities. She felt that young Japanese students had little idea of the social, political, cultural and epochal contexts in which AngloSaxon scholars were born, educated and matured. Many biographical and autobiographical books were available about ‘Western’ politicians, artists, generals, businessmen and novelists, but few about Western scholars. Her idea was to publish a short book about my education in Ireland and Britain, academic experience in the US, fieldwork in Indonesia, Siam and the Philippines, together with some reflections on Western universities and on my favourite books. But I knew no Japanese. What was to be done? She realized that I would have to be persuaded to write some simple kind of English-language text. But the crux was to find a distinguished Japanese scholar who knew English very well, was a close friend of mine, and was willing to work on a translation. Kato Tsuyoshi (aka Yoshi) had come to Cornell University in 1967 to study sociology and anthropology. This was the year that I finished my PhD (on the Japanese Occupation of Java during the Second World War and the subsequent Indonesian National Revolution) and became a very junior professor of political science. Because Yoshi was determined to do fieldwork on Indonesia’s western Sumatra I was appointed as one of his three mentors. We quickly became close friends, not least because of his lovely sly sense of humour. He was a fast learner of academic English and of Indonesia’s national language. After completing a very original PhD thesis, he returned to Japan and taught at the Jesuits’ ‘international’ university in Tokyo, later moving to Kyoto University, which was the centre for Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia, where he became a great teacher. We met there often and became even stronger friends. He told me that he thought Ms Endo’s general idea a good one, and that he had worked out a useful systematic plan, if only I would accept it. He said that too many Japanese students and teachers had little understanding of scholarship abroad because of their poor knowledge of English, French, Chinese, etc.

Even so, Professor Anderson at first rejected the idea of writing about his own life, because

professors in the West rarely have interesting lives. Their values are objectivity, solemnity, formality and – at least officially – self-effacement.

However, Professor Kato was able to convince Professor Anderson that the project would be worthwhile, so in addition to being its first translator, he also played an essential role in its existence. To convince the reluctant author, Professor Kato reminded him that his education in Ireland, Britain and America and fieldwork in Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines would be interesting for Japanese students. After this text was published in Japan in 2009, Professor Anderson was urged to consider publication in the original English, but he postponed any such decision until 2015, when he prepared a final draft. A Life Beyond Boundaries argues the importance of crossing borders, whether of places, languages, or academic fields of specialization. As Professor Anderson writes, the two main themes of his book are

the importance of translation for individuals and societies. The second is the danger of arrogant provincialism, or of forgetting that serious nationalism is tied to internationalism.

Learning foreign languages is an essential element of avoiding limits of only thinking about conditions in one country, with no basis for useful and instructive comparison. In the Spring 2016 issue of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University (CSEAS) Newsletter, a biannual publication about work by professors, visiting fellows, and other scholars working in Southeast Asian and area studies, Professor Kato wrote a delightful memoir of Professor Anderson entitled:

Three Cheers for the Hare that Did Not Stop Running to Take a Nap: In Celebration of the Life of Benedict Anderson (1936–2015)

The appreciation begins:

When I think of Ben Anderson, I often think of one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Tortoise and the Hare”… There is a critical difference, though, between the hare of the fable and Ben: Ben never stopped running!

The TU Library owns a number of editions of Aesop’s Fables, a collection of stories with  religious, social and political themes, written in ancient Greece. The fables have been used to educate young people about ethics. Aesop’s story of the tortoise and the hare deals with whether a turtle moving slowly but steadily can win a race against a rabbit, moving quickly but with only occasional effort. The expression Slow and steady wins the race is remembered from this fable.  Professor Kato also noted that after studies at Cornell University in the USA, he

went back to Japan at the end of 1976. In the summer of the following year Ben visited me and Ajarn Charnvit of Thammasat University, who was then a visiting scholar at Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University. The three of us made the most memorable trip, cycling along the southern coast of Shikoku Island for about 10 days. We were in our mid-30s to early 40s and had fun like kids; enduring heat under a straw hat; quenching our thirst with beer (admittedly not part of kids’ fun); having leisurely dips in the sea whenever and wherever the fancy took us (bicycling is freedom!); competing against each other to see who could cycle up first to the top of an arched bridge; staying at countryside accommodations, selected on the daily, random basis from a guidebook of Shikoku guesthouses (minshuku), and enjoying sumptuous seafood dinners they provided. In the pre-Internet age with no access to popular ratings, even hitting a guesthouse with so-so dinner was as much fun as hitting a jackpot.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)