Join historian Angus Lockyer and audio producer Jelena Sofronijevic for a virtual walk along the Sumida River, the main artery of the world’s biggest city.

This event is part of the Society of Authors’ Japan Week, a week of online events in the lead up to the Translation Prize 2023 ceremony taking place on Wednesday 7 February at the British Library.

We are running this week to mark the announcement of the inaugural Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize for translations of books from Japanese into English. This series of events kicks off our 2024 #SoAatHome programme of online events.

Programme
Welcome, introductions and housekeeping from Natalie Thorpe – Grants and Prizes Administrator, SoA (3 mins)
Talk from Angus Lockyer and Jelena Sofronijevic (30 mins)
Q&A with audience (10 mins)
Summary and closing comments (2 mins)

The tour will take us up the river, which runs through the flatlands of Tokyo, where the working classes have long laboured. We’ll start in Ryōgoku, which is famous today for sumo, but got its start in the wake of Tokyo’s Great Fire (ten years before London’s), as a memorial to those who perished. A little further north, we’ll pause to commemorate those lost in its twentieth-century equivalents, the earthquake of 1923 and the firebombing in 1945.

We’ll then wander along the river to Asakusa, where the Sensōji temple has long provided a place for locals and tourists both to pray and to play. Along the way, we’ll have a chance to listen and see how some of Japan’s best authors and artists have tried to capture the irrepressible spirit of commoner Tokyo.

Presented with historicity, audio walking tours of London and Tokyo, which you can find at https://pod.link/1640089187.

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