Asakawa Kan’ichi: Letters To Mysterious Addressee G.W.

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Reference [1] is a collection of Asakawa’s voluminous letters to his parents, friends, students and colleagues. Among them were letters addressed to G.W. without its full name. It was long been considered as a mystery of Asakawa’s letters. A recent study by Jinno [2] reveals that

G. W. = Gretchen Warren (1868 – 1961) 

She was an American actress, singer, and poet. Asakawa met Warren in 1915 and maintained many correspondences with her until late 1940’s, his last days. It is pointed out in [2] that there are several hundred letters between Asakawa and Warren kept during the 40 years of their friendship. A fact that is more important than the number of correspondences, is that Asakawa appears to show what he thought of the WWII and what Japan should do in overcoming the devastation of the war.

Fig. Gretchen Osgood Warren of Beacon Hill , Boston , Massachusetts

photo credit: Family of Robert Erskine Childers

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en [3]

The following is a part of his diary (retranslation by the author):

This appears to have resulted in his final memoir which I describe in other blogpost [4].

[1] Asakawa, K., “Letters of Dr. Kan’ichi Asakawa”, Waseda University Press, Tokyo, 1990.

[2] Jinno, T., “The Correspondence between Kan’ichi Asakawa and Gretchen Warren”, WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL NO. 6, 2018

[3] Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Osgood_Warren

[4] https://japanlatebloomer.blogspot.com/2024/02/fig.html

 

 



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