1. Giorgio Amitrano (University of Naples L’Orientale)
Echoes of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe in Mishima Yukio’s Shiosai (The Sound of Waves)
Mishima’s interest in Greece preceded his 1951 journey, but it was after that visit that this interest deepened into a lasting passion, giving rise to several notable works. Among them, Shiosai (The Sound of Waves) is certainly the one in which the influence of the Greek world emerges with the greatest clarity. Loosely based on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, the novel demonstrates Mishima’s ability to transpose the original into a Japanese setting with remarkable naturalness. While preserving the primal core, he reinterprets and reinvents it in a manner both convincing and unforced.
This is not the only instance of Mishima drawing inspiration from Greek texts. The short story Shishi (The Lioness) is freely adapted from Euripides’ Medea, and several of his plays are likewise based on Greek sources. Greece also exerted its influence on Mishima in a more indirect fashion, through the works of authors such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Byron, and Stendhal.
In my presentation, I will seek to outline the essential features of Mishima’s Girisha akogare (“Admiration for Greece”) and to analyze the strategies through which he achieves his transpositions. I will also investigate to what extent, in his process of adaptation, Mishima preserved elements of the original, and to what extent he distanced himself from them in order to produce a novel that, while conceived as an homage to Longus, ultimately asserts itself as an original and autonomous work.
2. Yasuhiro Katsumata (Kyoto University)
Refashioning Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe in Kita Morio’s The Land Where the Gods Have Disappeared
This paper explores the ways in which Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is refashioned in The Land Where the Gods Have Disappeared (Kamigami no kieta Tochi, 1992), a novel written by the Japanese psychiatrist Kita Morio (1927-2011). The work depicts the friendship and love of the young protagonists, Norio and Tomoko, who, as another Daphnis and Chloe, gradually develop their romantic relationship towards the end of the Pacific War. Especially worthy of attention is the symbolic contrast of φύσις and τέχνη, which can also be found in the Greek original and thus is frequently discussed among critics. Just as Longus skillfully juxtaposes the couple’s inherent ruralism with their occasional contact with urbanism, so Kita presents the initially city-oriented teenagers becoming the admirers of the natural world in Nagano Prefecture, where their mutual love culminates. As a self-conscious rewriting author, the Japanese novelist literally transforms his protagonists into genuinely ancient Greek lovers. There is no doubt that Kita’s work is much more faithful to Longus’ novel than Mishima Yukio’s Sound of Waves, the most famous Japanese adaptation. The careful analysis will expand our understanding of the potential of Daphnis and Chloe as a source text.
3. Massimo Fusillo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)
Landscape and Sexuality. On Daphnis and Chloe’s Modern Reception
Among the Hellenistic novels of love and adventure, Daphnis and Chloe has enjoyed the richest modern transmedial reception, which has focused on the following key themes: the polarity between nature and culture, the central role played by landscape, the gradual discovery of sexuality, and the fascination for simple rural life clearly combined with a latent urban voyeurism. After a short presentation of the ancient novel, this paper will deal with some significant rewritings: Diaghilev’s ballet Daphnis and Chloe, based on the splendid score by Maurice Ravel; Marc Chagall’s illustrations; Young Aphrodites (Mikres Aphrodites, 1963), a film by the Cretan director Nikos Kondouros, full of archaic force, chiefly based on non-verbal communication and visual details, and focused on the discovery of sexuality as a long, hard and dissonant process; a novel by Iurii M. Nagibin, A Daphnis and Chloe of the Era of the Cult of Personality, Voluntarism and Stagnation (1992), a prominent Soviet writer, famous for his short stories on the tension between rural and urban Russia, and for his film scripts, among which is Kurosawa’s masterpiece Dersu Uzala (1975); and finally Mishima Yukio’s The Sound of Waves (Shiosai), in which Dionysiac passions are controlled through a severe classicism.
4. Rui Nakamura（Tokai University）
The Reception of Greek Sculpture in Japan: Focusing on the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’
This presentation explores, from an art historical perspective, how the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’, a representative example of Greek sculpture, was received in modern Japan. One of the fundamental differences between Japanese and Western art is the depiction of the body. During the Meiji period, when Western art was actively introduced to Japan, classical sculpture, which lucidly embodies the Western image of the body, was brought in through plaster casts.
While the nude sculpture of the goddess, ‘Venus de Milo’, among other Western classical sculptures, was accepted as an example of nude beauty, the newly excavated male figure, the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’, intriguingly, was perceived in a completely different way. The introduction of nude female figures sparked controversy over nude painting and raised moral issues. On the other hand, the historical position of the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’ was clearly established from its introduction (as belonging to the early Classical Severe Style and demonstrating its distinctive style). The discussions of the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’ by painter and art educator Kume Keiichirō and author Mishima Yukio are important. In this presentation, I would like to examine the reception and understanding of Greek sculpture in modern Japanese culture, focusing on the ‘Charioteer of Delphi’.
5. Diego Cucinelli (University of Florence)
Ancient Greece in the Poetics of Murakami Haruki
In modern Japanese literature, interest in classical Greece is evident in prominent authors such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Abe Kōbō, and Mishima Yukio. Less explored is the relevance of Hellenic culture for contemporary writer Murakami Haruki, although his debt to it is clearly evident in his earliest works, including the short story The Man-Eating Cats (Hitokui neko, 1983) and the novel Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no mori, 1987). Over the years, Murakami’s travels to Greece have consistently flowed into his fiction and travelogues, establishing a dialogue with elements from diverse cultural contexts (Japanese, American, etc.).
Through an analysis that spans fiction and non-fiction, this study aims to analyze the image and function of classical Greece within Murakami’s work. Specifically, particular attention will be paid to the works belonging to the author's “early period” to trace the roots of this cultural influence. Specifically, in addition to the two aforementioned works, this paper will place particular emphasis on the travelogue Rainy Skies, Fiery Skies (Uten enten, 1990) and the novels Sputnik Sweetheart (Suputonikku no koibito, 1999) and Kafka on the Shore (Umibe no Kafuka, 2002), in which the image of classical Greece is reflected in the very architecture of the works.
6. Chiara Ghidini (University of Naples L’Orientale) and Luca Iori (University of Parma)
Localising Greek Historiography: Thucydides in the Japanese Context
The writing of ancient Greek history in Japan constitutes a distinctive strand within global historiography, shaped by the reception of Western scholarship and the intellectual climate of modern Japan. From the Meiji period onwards, Greek history became a key arena for negotiating concepts such as democracy, citizenship, and the polis, often interpreted in relation to Japan’s own political transformations. Within this discourse, Thucydides occupied a privileged position. His History of the Peloponnesian War was translated, annotated, and taken as a model of rigorous method and political analysis. Japanese scholars highlighted his distinction between proximate and underlying causes, his use of speeches as instruments of dialectical reasoning, and his analysis of power, fear, and interest as drivers of historical change.
At the same time, the translation and appropriation of Thucydides exposed the challenges of transplanting classical historiography into a non-Western context. Early translations aimed at accessibility for historians outside the field of classics, while later critics questioned their philological precision. His reception in Japan was closely tied to the dissemination of Western historical methods and research trends on Greek antiquity, which were creatively assimilated and reinterpreted within Japanese scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean.
The Japanese case exemplifies both the appropriation and the critical reworking of Greek historiography beyond Europe, showing how the study of ancient Greece became a mirror for Japan’s reflections on modernity, conflict, and historical responsibility.
7. Yūko Fukuyama (Waseda University)
Literary Works on Greek and Roman History during the Democratic Movement in the Meiji period (1868-1912)
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, demands for a democratic governmental system began to emerge in Japan. To popularize the ideology of democracy, episodes of Greek and Roman history attracted the attention of Japanese intellectuals in the 1880s. Yano Ryūkei's bestselling novel, Young Politicians of Thebes (経国美談, 1883-4) staged its set in fourth-century BCE Thebes and depicts the struggle of young Thebans to establish a democratic society in their homeland. Among Shakespeare's many plays, Julius Caesar became the first to be translated into book format in 1884. As its Japanese title The sword of liberty and trace of its slash (自由太刀余波鋭鋒) exhibits, the importance of democracy and liberty promoted the publication of such works. These literary activities reflect the contemporary democratic movement in late nineteenth century Japan. The chronological and geographical distance of the Greek and Roman worlds from Meiji Japan was seen as an ideal setting for young activists to express their ideologies. At the same time, such works contributed to spreading awareness of the Greek and Roman world among Japanese readers. This presentation aims to explore the appearance of Greek and Roman episodes in the democratic movement during the Meiji period and demonstrate their influence on the promotion of interests in the classical world in Japan.
8. Ichirō Taida (Toyo University)
Persian Wars Described in Japan: From the Late Edo Period until World War II
Although the Persian Wars occurred over 2,500 years ago, scholars in modern Japan—a place both distant in time and space—study those wars. The Japanese Society of Western History (1948) and the Classical Society of Japan (1950) were established after World War II, and with such establishments came an interest in classical history. Japanese scholars who were a part of such societies have studied hard, and some of them have published their research on the Persian Wars. Today, in Japan the topic of the Persian Wars is referenced not only within the academic world but also within pop culture.
However, what was the situation before World War II? When did the Japanese first learn of the Persian Wars? Considering historical texts, this interest likely began in the 19th century when books about the general history of the West were compiled in Japan. The Persian Wars were explained in the books. In my presentation, I want to talk about how the Persian Wars were described from the late Edo period until World War II.
11. Luca Prosdocimo (University of Naples L’Orientale)
Museums and Collections of Japan. History and Reception of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities (1868–2023)
This speech presents the results of a very recent doctoral research project describing the acquisitions, intercultural transfers, and accredited reproductions of Greek, Etruscan, Italic, and Roman antiquities in East Asian museums. It focuses on Japan, a prominent recipient of the historical and artistic heritage of the Mediterranean basin. The aim is to provide, for the first time, a reasoned and systematic survey of classical antiquities in Japan. Indeed, Mediterranean archaeology is quite a focus in Japan, extending to both Japanese and non-Japanese archaeology. This popularity is evidenced by numerous television reports, newspaper and magazine articles, a growing number of archaeological museums (often local and with interesting educational purposes) and archaeological exhibitions (in public and private museums), and a series of new open-air archaeological parks, specialized research parks, and restoration centers throughout the country.
This research has enabled, for the first time in the field of scientific studies, the macro- and micro-historical reconstruction of the history of Western art antiquities in Japan from the early Meiji period to the end of the Heisei period, accompanied by the meticulous recording of a significant portion of the finds identified in public and private museums. The main purpose was to provide the academic community in the historical-archaeological field with a useful historical-philological reconstruction and census tool for monitoring the distribution of classical antiquities in Japan, thus enabling them to identify the presence and correct location of works of art, artifacts, and products of the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin.
1. Hironori Satō (Tokyo Institute for Classical Studies [Tōkyō Koten Gakusha])
The reception of Ancient Rome in the Game Fate/Grand Order
Fate/Grand Order, published by Aniplex, is a popular mobile role-playing game with over 32 million downloads in Japan and over 80 million downloads worldwide. The game features numerous characters inspired by famous historical figures, including figures from classical world such as Julius Caesar, Nero, Romulus, Caligula, Boudica, Attila the Hun, and Spartacus. Vercingetorix, from the Gallic War written by Julius Caesar, also appears in that game. The fidelity concerning their appearance varies, with some characters, such as Nero and Attila the Hun, depicted as female.
Furthermore, Latin quotations by ancient authors can be found in the lines spoken by famous people of ancient Rome, or in the names of the special moves (called Hōgu) they use. My presentation introduces these quotes and examines the similarities to and differences from the ancient originals. It also introduces the lines of these characters, examining what sources they refer to and what appears to be original.
2. Filippo Cervelli (SOAS University of London)
Heaven Can Brook Two Suns? The Many Lives of Alexander the Great in Manga
This paper proposes the study of manga on Alexander the Great to further the understanding of cultural adaptation and transnational reception of ancient Greek history in contemporary Japan. Despite the long-lasting fascination the historical and romanticised figure has exerted in academic disciplines and literary fiction, Alexander the Great has not often been the main subject of popular audiovisual media. In this context, Japan presents an exceptional case. Alongside the 1999 anime series Arekusandā senki (Reign: The Conqueror) by Madhouse, based on the novel by Aramata Hiroshi, possibly the most famous example, the manga scene has been particularly receptive to inspirations from the Macedonian conqueror. These contemporary products, cutting across genres, productions contexts, and target audiences, offer valuable insights to explore how Japanese manga sensibilities resonate with, select, and reshape elements of the Alexander myth. First, Arekusandā daiō: Tenjō no tengoku (Alexander the Great: Kingdom of Heaven, 1998), by the shōjo mangaka Akaishi Michiyo, focuses on the close relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion; the second, Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s 2003 Arekusandorosu: sekai teikoku he no yume (Alexandros: The Dream of a World Empire), part of an NHK initiative, has educational undertones; lastly, Iwaaki Hitoshi’s ongoing Hisutorie (Historie, 2004-), tells Alexander and his father Philip’s story from the point of view of their personal secretary Eumenes of Cardia, underscoring themes of racial discrimination and integration. The paper analyses these works to explore the relationship between Japanese imagination and ancient history, focusing on the sources on Alexander that inspired the manga (Plutarch, Arrian, but also modern authors), and how these are reworked intermedially. At the same time, it reflects on how the manga’s particular interpretations of the Macedonian conqueror, a figure culturally and politically at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, may respond to specific media contexts and coeval socio-cultural issues in Japan.
3. Luciana Cardi (Kansai University)
The Olympic Games through the Lens of Japanese Manga
My presentation examines how contemporary Japanese manga represent the Olympic Games, focusing on Yamazaki Mari’s Olympia Kyklos (Orinpia kyukurosu, 2018–2022) and Satonaka Machiko’s The Poem of Olympia (Orinpia no shi, 1981) and Myron the Javelin-Thrower (Yari no Miron, 2002). I explore how these works approach and reconfigure the motif of ancient Greek Olympic sport in distinct ways.
Since the 1960s, following the interest sparked by the first Tokyo Olympics (1964), manga have often explored Olympic sports as a theme. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, several series traced ascent narratives in which athletes achieved Olympic victory after grueling training and hardship. Such protagonists—marked by resilience and strong moral fiber—sustained a broader narrative of individual and collective success through perseverance in the face of adversity, often read as mirroring Japan’s postwar economic recovery. Because the primary focus was on the athletes as role models for the Japanese community, comparatively little attention was paid to the Greek origins of the Games. By contrast, in recent years—and especially in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics—several titles have either set their stories in ancient Greece or explicitly linked the modern Olympics in Japan to their Hellenic origins. Satonaka’s shōjo manga series focus on heroines whose lives are overshadowed by the athletes they love and, in counterpoint to traditional rise-to-victory stories, foreground athletes who do not ‘make it.” On the other hand, Yamazaki employs a time-slip narrative device to draw connections between ancient Greece and Japan and to explore contemporary issues in Japan in light of Greek philosophy.
4. Tomohiko Kondō (Keio University)
Stoicism as Past and Future of Japanese Philosophy
This paper considers two distinguished Japanese scholars who, though separated by about a century, both turned their attention to Stoic philosophy: Hajime Ōnishi (1864–1900), one of the earliest figures in the modern academic reception of Western philosophy in Japan, and Shigeru Kanzaki (1952–2016), a contemporary historian of ancient Greek philosophy who was also deeply versed in philosophical traditions from other periods, both Western and Eastern. Whereas the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were largely received in modern Japan as the origins of Western thought, in contrast with Eastern thought, Stoic philosophy was often approached, and sometimes appropriated, as bearing affinities with Japan’s own intellectual traditions. Ōnishi was among the first to explore this connection, comparing Stoicism with Bushidō, the ethics of the samurai. What did the recognition of such affinities mean to him in understanding the past and envisioning the future of Japanese philosophy? Kanzaki, for his part, showed a marked interest in Hellenistic philosophy, especially Stoicism. Within his broader historical vision, which encompassed contemporary philosophies such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger and analytic philosophy, as well as early modern Japanese thought (notably the so-called Christian century), what specific role did Stoic philosophy play in connecting diverse intellectual traditions of the past and in pointing towards philosophy for the future? By addressing these questions, this study will explore the significance of their focus on Stoicism in conceiving both the past and the future of Japanese philosophy.
5. Noemi Lanna (University of Naples L’Orientale)
The Concept of “Glorious Death” in Oda Makoto: From Ancient Greece to Postwar Japan Via Vietnam
Oda Makoto (1932-2007) was a prolific novelist, an influential exponent of peace thought (heiwa no shisō) and one of the intellectual fathers of the “Citizens union for bringing peace in Vietnam” (“Betonamu ni heiwa o! shimin rengō”) anti-war movement, better known with the name of “Beheiren”. He was also one of the few young Japanese who chose to major in classical Greek philosophy and literature at Tokyo University in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Although limited in number, references to the history and culture of ancient Greece distinctively characterize Oda’s non-fictional production.
This presentation will move from one of Oda’s key-notions, the concept of “difficult death” (nanshi, 難死) to analyze how classical Greece contributed to shape his counter-hegemonic discourse on pacifism. Oda coined the term “difficult death” to refer to the death of Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. Just like soldiers in Ilias, they died “meaninglessly”, in spite of the bombastic metaphors used by war propaganda to present their sacrifice as a “glorious death” (sange), worthy of praise and emulation. As will be shown in the presentation, not only did Oda refute the concept of “glorious death” as defined by war propaganda, but he also used it as a starting point for a critique of the mythology of victim consciousness and the inconsistencies of Japanese post-war democracy by drawing parallels between ancient Greece, imperial Japan, and the Vietnam War.
6. Paolo Villani (University of Catania)
Interpretationes Graecae of Japanese Mythology: Comparatists’ Tribute to Japan’s Geopolitical “Departure from Asia”?
The heritage of ancient mythologies has played a pivotal role in constructing the identity of many modern nations. Japan is no exception. Much before the country’s proceeding on the path of Western-style modernization at the end of the 19th century, the nativist movement’s reading of Japanese sacred history told in early texts had triggered a distancing from Chinese tradition – even a denial despite evidence of Japan’s cultural debt to China – which resulted in major political consequences. Some visionary ideas that Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) grounded on his faith in the holy kingship as mythicized in the Kojiki (古事記,712) found, for example, their way into the 1889 Constitution of the Empire of Japan.
By the end of the 19th century, however, in order to bring the profile of Japanese identity into line with the changing geopolitical situation, the liberation from the burden of Chinese cultural hegemony had become a necessary but not-yet sufficiently expressed condition. In 1885 “Departure from Asia” (脱亜論) a newspaper editorial credited to Fukuzawa Yukichi, marked a turning point. In dealing with Japan’s place in the world it voiced the urge to “float on the sea of civilization” (文明ノ海ニ浮沈シ) of the West. Around the same years, European and Japanese scholars began to notice some similarities, details of which have been widely reviewed in more recent decades, between the Greek and Japanese mythologies. This paper explores the hypothesis that the comparisons stressing such resemblances may have not only accompanied but supported the Westernization of Japan during the 20th century.
7. Kyōko Nakanishi (Tsuda University)
Cultivation, Empathy and ‘Stories of One’s Own’: Reception History of Greco-Roman Mythology in Modern and Contemporary Japan
This paper focuses on how the narratives of Greco-Roman mythology have been rearranged and recreated in Modern and Contemporary Japan. It can be discerned that there is empathy for the polytheist worldview, which is shared by Japanese folk religion and Greco-Roman religions.
Among the various aspects of Greco-Roman religion, mythology in particular attracted enduring attention. Early solid and academic contributors are Matsumura Takeo (1883–1969), Kure Shigeichi (1897–1977), and Kōzu Harushige (1908–1973). Under the influence of the French School, Yoshida Atsuhiko (b. 1932) and Matsumura Kazuo (b. 1951) widely introduced the comparative and anthropological view on Greco-Roman religion and mythology.
Meanwhile, translations and retellings by popular historians and literary writers exerted a vast cultural influence in Japan after the late 19th Century. Two tendencies may be discerned: one is that transmits Greek and Roman mythology as a component of self-cultivation; the other is that reimagines and retells the myths as “stories of one’s own” for both author and reader alike.
Since the late twentieth century, the dissemination of Jungian psychoanalytical theory-based astrology has contributed to acquiring a vast general readership of Greco-Roman mythology in Japan. Under this current, readers and users of astrology are introduced to interpret the myths of the constellations as narratives of their own lives on a deeply personal level. In parallel, some audaciously reconfigured narratives and mythic figures found in manga and social games have likewise functioned to allow readers and users to participate in and imaginatively inhabit mythic time.
1. Yasmin Haskell (Monash University)
From Tenshō ‘Boyzone’ to Viennese ‘Boys’ Own’: Jesuit Schoolboys Write about Japanese Youth
In the first quarter of the eighteenth century a team of well-born Viennese schoolboys convened in the Prater park and told each other tantalising tales about the deeds of ‘glorious youth’ in the Indies, viz. the faraway lands to which the Catholic faith had been introduced by Jesuit missionaries. This at least, was the pretext for a Latin graduation volume they dedicated to the new doctors in liberal arts and philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1726. A substantial section of the boys' lively prosimetric dialogue is devoted to the culture, religion and people of Japan. My paper will consider its sources as well as its setting, and how Japanese youth specifically are represented in its wider economy of wonders. I shall compare this group project by the Vienna Rhetoric class with a short epic composed by a Jesuit schoolboy in Liège, on Francis Xavier’s voyage to Japan. Finally, I would like to suggest an intriguing possible model for the Viennese volume: the Annus academicus by Neapolitan Jesuit poet and professor, Niccolò Giannettasio.
2. Akihiko Watanabe (Otsuma Women’s University)
Japanese Jesuits and Oriental Studies in Baroque Rome: From Maffei to Konishi and Beyond
In the Baroque period, as always, the Eternal City was the centre of the world, the orbis terrae theatrum (‘theatre of the whole world’) where everything that was worth knowing in the world was acted out, as a contemporary Latin text composed for Japanese students stated. Here, if one wished, one could have Latin translated into Japanese and vice versa, and hear a barrage of demonstration speeches in 28 languages including Chinese, Russian, and ancient and modern Greek. This presentation looks at the careers of European humanists such as Giovanni Pietro Maffei (1533–1603), who may have known some Japanese, as well as Japanese travellers and students such as Thomas Araki (?-1646) and Mancius Konishi (1600-1644), who on occasion taught bits of Japanese and Chinese to the local audience, together with their surviving output and evidence of mutual linguistic studies. The survey sketches the cultural, historical and religious backgrounds that made this remarkable confluence of East Asian and Greco-Roman traditions possible, and briefly explores the motivations behind it, which however all doomed the intense learning exchange into becoming a historical curiosity detached from modern academic traditions.
3. Cynthia Liu (American Academy in Rome)
Virgil goes East: Epic Patterning in the Paciecid and Ruggeriad
Bartholomew Pereira’s Paciecid, recounting in the form of Virgilian epic the martyrdom of Francesco Pacheco in Nagasaki, was published in 1640. Roughly fifty years prior, the anonymous Ruggeriad (ARSI Jap.Sin.101.I fols. 118b–31a) was written, also in imitation of the Aeneid, celebrating the success of Michele Ruggieri’s arrival in Guangzhou. Both poems depict not only Jesuit missionaries in East Asia, but also East Asia itself for European readers. This paper will examine and compare the two poems’ use of Classical epic set-pieces. First, both poems model Jesuit arrival in Macao (Paciecis 1 and 9; Ruggeriad lines 174–5) after Aeneas’ arrival in the port of Libya in Aeneid book 1, which itself is indebted to Homer’s Scheria (Od. 7) and Cyclops’ island (Od. 9). These episodes from the Odyssey, besides being read ethnographically on their own terms, provided historiographers, e.g. Herodotus, narrative patterns for their own descriptions of foreign peoples. This tradition of epic-ethnography makes its way, I suggest, into our two Jesuit poems. Second, both poems draw on the (attempted) embrace between Aeneas and Anchises in Aeneid book 6 to depict Jesuit arrival in Macao (Paciecis 1, Ruggeriad 181), setting the port as a liminal Elysium. Finally, both poems draw on similes from Aeneid book 4, a striking choice given the exclusion of the book from the Ratio Studiorum. Paciecis 11 adapts the famous hunted-deer-simile describing the love-struck Dido (Aen. 4.69-73) to image the Jesuits straining towards their martyrdom in Nagasaki. The Ruggeriad (ll. 265-75) adapts the simile likening the Trojans to ants as they depart Carthage (Aen. 4.401-7) to depict the excited rushing of the denizens of Guangzhou to see the newly-arrived Jesuits. Ultimately, I suggest that the allusions to Virgil’s epic, especially to the ‘problematic’ passions of Aeneid book 4, are ‘redeemed’ within the religiously-motivated Jesuit poems.
4. Pierre-Alain Caltot (University of Orléans, France)
Figures of Cubosama in Paciedidos libri of Bartholomew Pereira
Bartholomew Pereira’s Paciecid, published in 1640 in Japan in Latin, was translated into French in 1887 by Alfred Guichon de Grandpont, a French naval administrator. Although Guichon de Grandpont traveled a lot, he never went to Japan. During his career, he wrote several books about naval history, but he also translated several works from Latin into French. In his 1995 article, Amadeu Torres analyses some aspects of the French translation, stating that Guichon de Grandpont made great efforts to write a fluid text, preserving the influence of Latin poetry, especially the Virgilian style.
I would like not to focus on stylistic issues but instead on the content — specifically, on how East Asia is depicted for European readers. More precisely, my analysis will highlight the way Cubosama, a political and military official, is depicted as an oriental figure for European readers. My analysis of the figure of Cubosama investigates whether Bartholomew Pereira’s Paciecid and, two centuries later, Guichon de Grandpont’s translation are consistent or not with European conceptions according to which “the Orient” or “Asia” represents the world of the past and of tradition—as well as of despotism—and therefore of tyrants (tyrannus or rex) marked by cruelty and indifference to death. More broadly, I will focus on the way Pereira uses Latin words to describe the Japanese political environment, and also how these were translated into French.
5. Maxime Pierre (Paris Cité University)
Staging Seneca’s Medea in the Form of an Intercultural Nō
From ancient tragedies, we have lost almost everything: we know that they were played with masks, music and songs. A tragedy was not just literature but a synthetic art articulating sounds, shapes, and text in a whole performance. However, tragedy with its masks, chorus, songs and music disappeared. The “flesh and skin” of the show are gone. Just the “bones” remains: the text. What can allow us to make “tragedy alive? As a synthetic art, integrating both visual and musical forms, the Japanese tradition of nō is a possible answer. With the collaboration of a nō dancer (Matsuura Masato, from Kanze School) and a nō composer (Richard Emmert, from Kita School), we have staged Seneca’s Medea with the nō techniques in modern French. In this talk, I will retrace the steps of text composition, music, and staging that led to the creation of the performance on November 14, 2024, at the Musée Guimet in Paris. I will describe what it means to transform Seneca into a nō: what it does to Seneca’s text (cutting, adding, developing the text in order to create a nō structure), to the characters (shaping Senecas’ characters for shite, waki, kyōgen actor) and to the chorus (from a group of citizens to an impersonal and narrative group).
6. Miho Takahashi (Kansai University)
A Rereading of the Trachiniae as a Cultural Fusion of East and West
In his lifetime, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) tried to write three nō plays in English. Among them his ‘version’ of the Women of Trachis (1956) was the only play that he had completed and seriously considered as a cultural fusion of East and West. He translated Sophocles’ Trachiniae into English when he was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital. The two-part plot of the play reminds of several nō plays which Pound had reread at that time. He hoped that his English version would be translated into Japanese and performed as an authentic nō play. In the preface of the Women of Trachis, Pound declares: ‘The Trachiniae presents the highest peak of Greek sensibility registered in any of the plays that have come down to us, and is, at the same time, nearest the original form of the God-Dance.’ Pound’s stage directions indicate that he surely regarded the Women of Trachis not as a nō-like ‘mask’ but his original ‘nō play,’ in the same way as Yeats described his own work At the Hawks’ Well. Pound believed that his Trachiniae, as a fusion of Greek Tragedies and Japanese nō plays, could lead to a world culture of East and West. Pound’s later correspondence with his Japanese friends shows how eagerly he hoped to accomplish the plan of performing a Greek drama in the form of a nō play. However, none of his friends helped him with translation, and the work had been left for almost forty years after Pound’s death. Finally in 2009, the Japanese translation was launched, and delivered to Minoru Umewaka family in 2023, according to Pound’s wish. This presentation shall reconsider Pound’s Women of Trachis by focusing on his instructions for translating Sophocles and fitting it into the Japanese nō drama form, and examine how the Trachiniae and Japanese nō plays would intersect with each other in Pound’s idea from a Japanese translator’s perspective.
7. Hiroshi Notsu (Shinshu University)
Reception of Ancient Greek Tragedy in Japan: Creating Production Texts
This presentation explores how Greek tragedy was received in modern Japan through both scholarly translation and theatrical adaptation. From the late nineteenth century, Japanese scholars produced precise, philological versions for academic audiences, while theater practitioners created adaptations shaped for performance, emphasizing accessibility and emotional impact. Examining these parallel practices reveals the negotiations between fidelity to the original and the demands of the stage. Rather than passively importing Western models, Japanese interpreters reimagined Greek tragedy through their own linguistic traditions and established forms such as nō, kabuki, and jōruri. This dual approach shows how translation and performance together mediated the encounter between antiquity and modernity. In doing so, Japanese engagements with Greek tragedy contributed to global conversations about the continuing relevance of classical traditions.
8. Riccardo Palmisciano (University of Naples L’Orientale)
The Origins of Greek Tragedy and the Origins of Nō Theatre. So Far, so Close
For many decades, scholars have debated about the origins of tragedy from many different points of view. One of the most disputed arguments is the true meaning of Aristotle's words in his Poetics, where the philosopher associates the birth of the tragedy both with satyrikòn and dithyramb. How can we match these two elements? What exactly is satyrikòn? Which is the link between satyrs and dithyramb? Despite the numberless proposals, we are far from having found a shared solution.
A careful reading of Aristotle’s passage shows that he actually keeps dithyramb and satyr drama separate and that in Poetics it is the satyrikòn that is placed at the origins of tragedy.
At its beginnings tragedy was short and comic since it originated from satyr play and became a serious and solemn genre only in a second phase. According to Aristotle, the most solemn and serious of the Greek theatrical genres derives from a comic genre, with an ethos that is anything but solemn.
A careful comparison with the origins of nō theatre and the role that comic elements play in Nō dramas, even in their most evolved forms, can be very helpful. The fact that comic and unsophisticated dramatic forms are also at the origins of nō theatre provides an important parallel that can help us better understand the origins of Greek tragedy.
9. Laura Massetti (University of Naples L’Orientale)
Memory and Evocation: On the Possibility of Comparing Greek Lyric Poetry and Nō Theatre
It is widely acknowledged that nō is one of the best comparanda for Greek tragedy (see Takebe 1960, Lesky 1963, Smethurst 1984, 2013 and 2025, and Palmisciano 2021).
Yet, “anyone choosing at random and reading the texts of a Japanese nō play and an ancient Greek tragedy cannot help being struck by the differences between them” (Smethurst 1989, 3). In light of such diversity, Vanessa Cazzato (2019) has recently given new inputs for comparison between nō and Greek lyric poetry. Lyric poetry, which featured words, music, and dance (molpḗ, see Calame 2001, 20), occasionally included myth. However, unlike tragedy, it did not revolve around dramatic action. Thus, comparable features between nō and lyric poetry include strategies that aim at evoking gods and men, plants and inert objects, memories and myths in the “mind’s eye” of the spectator. In each, various associative ways (including the so-called “Pindaric flights”) allowed the ‘fluid’ persona loquens (sometimes the poet, sometimes the chorus, sometimes an indistinct voice of wiseness) to freely manipulate the time layers of a story and to blend them using the historical present, linking myth and the performance occasion in a single (ritual) continuum through evocation and memory. Following this research thread, in my talk, I will compare selected aspects of nō plays and of odes that were composed by choral lyric poets such as Pindar and Bacchylides (6th–5th century BCE).