A translator’s apologia . . .

My study in the Cambridge Unitarian Church

As the primary, human translator (albeit one assisted by AI tools) of the various Japanese texts found on this blog—mostly those by the important liberal, free-religious educator and thinker, Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei, but also some by key figures he knew, namely, Tsunashima Ryōsen, Tenkō Nishida-san HERE and HERE and Itō Shōshin HERE and HERE—I need to make some kind of apologia, that is to say a defence for my conduct. The basic reason for this is that I am not a Japanese reader or speaker and so, in so many ways, it’s an outrageous, and to some, perhaps, even an anger-making folly to have attempted this task. However, I think there are good justifications, at least in the present moment of time, for making my attempt.

The first is that Imaoka-sensei’s friend and biographer, George M. Williams, tried unsuccessfully for over forty years to get someone to undertake the task. On the one occasion when he thought he had found someone who might be able to take the project on, he was eventually told that there was nothing in these essays that was important enough to warrant translating them. And so the richness of the book’s free-religious content continued to remain hidden from the English-speaking world.

The second is that Imaoka-sensei’s texts are, alas, often hard for many modern Japanese readers to understand. This is because Imaoka-sensei—who was born, remember, in 1881—used many archaic Meji and Taishō era Japanese terms, and this means that even good English-speaking Japanese readers positively disposed to Imaoka-sensei’s ideas about free-religion were not confident enough about their ability to help with making accurate (enough) English translations.

The third is that, in this very commercialised age, no publisher could be found who was willing to pay for the expensive translation work to be done because they would never recoup the cost of the project.

And that was the situation when, in 2019, I began to dive deeply into George’s biography about Imaoka-sensei which also contained seven of Imaoka-sensei’s essays in English translation. The reason I had found my way to this book was because my longstanding interest in Jōdō Shinshū Buddhism (particularly its Ōtani-ha form to which I, myself, belong) and the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophers (especially Tanabe Hajime), left me thinking, again and again, that somewhere in the mix there must be some connection with Unitarian thought and practice. However, it was only when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020 that I suddenly had enough time away from my usual Unitarian ministerial duties to engage in some deeper philosophical and theological research. I began to pull every thread I could, and one day one of them led me to Michel Mohr’s book Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality, which, in quick succession, led me to George’s book on Imaoka-sensei. In short, I discovered the links I had imagined existed were, in fact, real, and I began to become more and more enthused and amazed at the possibilities this Japanese thinker offered me as a modern, free-religious, Unitarian minister. By the middle of 2022 I had begun to correspond regularly with George by email and then, thanks to the sudden widespread availability and use of Zoom during the pandemic and following, we also began regularly to meet “face-to-face”, and a real friendship quickly began to develop. In my enthusiasm to read more of Imaoka-sensei’s original work, I asked George about this, and he then told me the sorry tale I recounted to you above. It was immediately following that conversation that George kindly sent me a PDF copy of Imaoka-sensei’s essays in case I ever found someone who could undertake the task of translation. It was lovely to have it but, to me anyway, it was, alas, quite useless . . . or was it? 

And then, on 30 November 2022, ChatGPT was released Pandora’s Box-like upon the world—full of dark things, yes, but also with the possibility of finding some hope hidden somewhere in it. At first, like many people, I had paid little or no attention to it, but eventually it occurred to me that, perhaps, it might be able to help me translate the contents page of Imaoka-sensei’s book so I could at least get a glimpse of what it contained. To my utter amazement, it was able to do that. I knew it had done a reasonable job because George had earlier on sent me an accurate translation of the chapter titles of Part One of the book that had been made by Michel Mohr. Naturally, this made me wonder if ChatGPT might be able to help me tackle a whole essay, and so I chose to attempt a translation of “In the University of Life there is no Graduation” [1979] because this was one of the already translated essays found in George’s book. I worked through it very slowly, sentence by sentence, always checking it both with the excellent online Japanese dictionary Jisho.org, and of course, the existing essay, and again, to my amazement, I found that, with genuine care and close attention to detail—coupled with my own knowledge of Imaoka’s thinking gleaned from George and his book, as well as of Japanese philosophy from the Meji and Taishō periods—it was possible to make a decent, heavy-lifted, first-draft translation. In my excitement, I then chose to look at an untranslated essay on “Memories of Two People: Okada Torajiro-sensei (1872-1920) and Mr. Joseph Warren Teets Mason (1879-1941)” [1965]. I chose this essay next because during the pandemic I had joined an online Okada-style Seiza Meditation class run by a Japanese Jōdō Shinshū Ōtani-ha minister working in New York called Miki Nakura, and so I knew I could send my translation to him to check it against the Japanese. Again, to my amazement, and by now real excitement, a decent, heavy-lifted, first-draft translation had truly been made. And so began my outrageous folly that, two-and-a-half years later, gifted me with a first-draft of all 106 essays in Imaoka-sensei’s book. [A selection of these essays can be found at this link.]

During that period, a number of important things had happened. One was that I was now alert to key terms in Imaoka-sensei’s lexicon and I could see I needed to go back through the whole book paying even closer attention to translating, and, indeed, understanding them better. A second was that ChapGPT, and by now, DeepSeek, were getting much, much better at translating Japanese—as long, that is, one always kept a very, very tight rein on the way one instructed these programmes to do their work in the first instance, and then double-checked, often triple-checked the translation. And the third was that these translations were now being brought into contact with two other Japanese free-religious thinkers in international meetings arranged by George through his Free-Religion Institute programme. This meant I could now check various parts of the translations with knowledgeable, native-speaking Japanese people. Naturally, there were some things that we discovered needed correcting and nuancing—and the essays in any eventual publication will still need correcting and nuancing—but they have proved to be serviceable, first-draft translations.

After committing four years of my life to this wonderful project, my hope for it is two-fold. The first is not that the translations I have done prove to be good enough to be the last word on the subject—they’re not, and anyway, there is no such thing as the last word on anything—but simply that they might prove to be good enough first words that could enthuse a new generation of free-religionists with real Japanese language skills and insights to set about getting the job done much, much better than I have done. In all cases, my second hope is these translations help reveal that, despite what some earlier readers of the Japanese texts thought, Imaoka-sensei’s essays insights are of the greatest value to those attempting to spark a revival of interest in free-religion in both English and Japanese-speaking circles.

And now, in spite of the many reasons and caveats offered above, the responsibility for the many mistakes that can surely be found in my translations is mine, and mine alone. I am the person to blame. But, if you can, forgive me, and send me your corrections, all of which will be gratefully received. Even better, for those truly competent to do so, go back to the Japanese originals (links to which I always include in my posts on this blog) and translate better, for there really are truly marvellous things to be found that our fractious world urgently needs to hear.