My first involvement with IBBY came around towards the end of the 1980’s, when the Japanese Board on Books for Young People (JBBY) asked me if they could entrust to me the translation of Mado Michio’s poems into English, as the poet was selected to be the candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in the year 1990. Several collections of Mado’s poems were delivered to me, together with a letter explaining that rather than winning the Award, the aim was to let it be known among IBBY people that we had such a poet in Japan. The post-script of the letter said that “unfortunately” there would be no payment for my work! It was not that I was much experienced in translating poetry into English. Up to then, I had translated only three or four poems a year, for reading before the Poetry Reading Circle in Tokyo to which I had been invited for over ten years. The ones that I had translated were mostly poems I came across while I was rearing my three children.
There were also two volumes of “Masterpieces of World Literature for Boys and Girls” which I relished. They contained stories, excerpts from novels― not abridgements, ― poems and letters of outstanding writers from many lands including even some from our enemy countries at that time.
These two volumes taught me there were many sorrows in the world that I had not known, and I learned how intensely people other than myself could feel, and how deeply they could be hurt. I also came to realize that in order to live, one has to bear life’s complexities. Together with this, reading brought me a real spiritual uplift. It planted seedlings within me that would grow reaching out towards joy. Indeed, while living in the countryside during the war time, I was meeting both my remote ancestors and strangers from other lands on the bridge of children’s books. How fortunate I was to have someone who slipped a book or two into my hands when he visited me at our place of wartime evacuation.