Founding Purpose and Principles

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2020-01-13

This historical statement of the Academia's founding purpose and principles was published on January 13, 2020 and updated on January 3, 2025. References to time and plans in the body retain the descriptions in that original version.

Introduction

The Japan Romanticism Academia

Seishu Hamano, Chairman of the Japan Romanticism Academia

Overseas passengers, hello! Kindly try to make mechanical translation into your language.

Founding Purpose (Concept of Establishment)

Hello, everyone. To our readers overseas: do you know how open-hearted and radiant is the waka by 額田王 beginning “茜さす…”? This is a poem composed more than a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman poet—indeed, an imperial princess at court. It is the opening of a courtly love poem:

茜差す紫野ゆき標野ゆき野守が見ずや君が袖振る

The poem depicts someone anxiously watching: there you are, waving to me in a crimson-lit field, bathed in dazzling moonlight; it makes me happy, but the keeper of the woods will see you. How dreamlike it is. Japan has had Romantic literature of this kind since ancient times. Our Academia does not merely look back fondly on the past. Passing through the medieval period to Meiji and the Romanticism that blossomed then, we connect it to the romance of people today. Nor do we only read: we ourselves become poets, composing Romantic poetry and songs; we write essays and collect moving-image works, publishing them in our journal, the Online Manyoshu, to convey Japan's spirit of wa to the world. Founded with that mission, we are already in our third year.

1. The Concept of This Academia (concept of our academia)

(1) A New Romanticism That Moves Realist Art

Everyone, contemporary literature and art may seem entirely realist—but is that right? No. There is fantasy, there is mystery, and there is passionate love. All engage with matters that cannot be resolved by the logic of realism alone. Human passions may seem always to regulate people's actions through reasoned arguments; in fact, people move this way and that as their hearts direct them. Love marriages are one example, and the grief of divorce another. These are the outcome of interwoven human relationships governed by passion. It is precisely because a world of love and hate exists that we seem able to conduct human life against the background of realism's scientific civilization. In truth, however, we should say that the workings of the Romantic heart unfold more dominantly than reason or human knowledge.

(2) A Diversity of Genres

The creativity of romance is extraordinary. Its forms are truly varied: not only literature, but moving images, music, theater, crafts, design and even karaoke. We do not believe that we should limit the genre to tanka alone, as in ancient times. Step into the streets and you see people strolling through Kyoto's Gion in Romantic costumes. This international character too is an expression of romance. That is Japan, and only by bringing in many different arts without hesitation can we create things as they are. The Online Manyoshu, now appearing on the internet, will indeed develop a wide variety of activities.

(3) We Want to Preserve the Autonomy of Romance

Today, amid a flood of populism, our first cry for a revival of Romanticism is a kind of counterculture movement. At the same time, just as the poem by 晶子 beginning “やわ肌に…” was used for commercial purposes, literary and artistic activities as a whole now tend to fall into the role of instruments of commercialism. We do not wish simply to dismiss this as regrettable. Our Romantic movement seeks creatively and wholeheartedly to return to generous humanity, show the world Japan's distinctive Romanticism, and preserve the autonomy of romance.

(4) Let Us Continue to Live through Love for Humanity, Transcending Race, Political Systems and Religion

We are human beings. We set up no national borders. We will also continue our activities by transcending every problem of politics, religion, racial prejudice and the like. All humanity are our companions. Squirrels, rabbits, whales and wolves are friends too. Our only enemies are microscopic pathogens such as the coronavirus and the plague bacillus. In the struggle for survival, we sometimes eat fish, mammals, vegetables and chickens. But we will not commit the folly of going out to kill human beings by the millions, without even eating them, in obedience to politicians' territorial quarrels. Scientific civilization is useful when it is supported by sound wisdom, so let us cultivate that wisdom. Our Japan Romanticism Academia is a group that will always live on through wisdom.

(5) We Will Put It in a Time Capsule to Be Opened Five Hundred Years from Now

When human beings bring in scientific civilization, little good comes of it. They have caused one outrageous situation after another: human beings shutting other human beings in gas chambers, or killing on the scale of a hundred thousand people from the skies above urban areas. This past hundred years has brought tens of thousands of times more wrongdoing than the preceding thousand years, yet people remain convinced that humanity is happy thanks to scientific civilization. How many more years will the Earth last? That is why we will hide this capsule securely and pass on instructions that it be opened in the year 2500. People everywhere in the world, come into our Online Manyoshu.

Return to the original site's cover page

The quoted waka and fragments of poems remain in Japanese. Existing English wording in the historical original is retained. The two accompanying images were checked visually; they contain illustrations rather than additional prose requiring translation.