Valdo H. Viglielmo is a prominent scholar and translator of Japanese literature.
Viglielmo was born on December 11, 1926, in Palisades Park, New Jersey. He grew up in a small rural community in the Hudson Valley of New York State, completing both his primary and secondary school education and beginning his college studies in that state. Being of draft age during World War II and knowing he would have to serve, he chose to volunteer, serving in the ASTRP (Army Specialized Training Reserve Program). He was eventually drafted in January 1945, undergoing basic training in Florida. The European phase of the war ended in May 1945 while he was in training, but the Pacific war was still raging.
Toward the end of his training Viglielmo responded to an appeal for enlisting in a Japanese language program being conducted under the auspices of the ASTP (the word “Reserve” no longer applied) and was sent to the University of Pennsylvania where he began an intensive nine-month course of study, almost exclusively in the spoken language. After the end of the war in August 1945, his training was then directed toward being an interpreter during the Occupation of Japan, and he served as such in the 720th Military Police Battalion in Tokyo from April to September 1946.
Wishing to continue his study of Japanese after his discharge in October 1946, Viglielmo transferred to Harvard University, where he enrolled in the then-Far Eastern Languages Department, receiving his A.B. degree magna cum laude in June 1948. He was accepted into the Harvard graduate program for Fall 1948, but chose instead to go to Japan for a three-year position teaching English as a foreign language at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. In the summer of 1951 he returned to Harvard, receiving his M.A. degree in June 1952. Thereupon he moved into the Ph.D. program in Japanese literature, completing his general examinations in June 1953. That same year he won a Ford Fellowship for two years of graduate study in Japan, studying both at Tokyo University and the Gakushūin University, while working on his dissertation topic, “The Later Natsume Sōseki: His Art and Thought.”
At the latter university he participated in a graduate seminar on Sōseki conducted by Sōseki biographer Komiya Toyotaka. In the spring of 1955 his Harvard teacher, Serge Elisséeff, one of the very first foreign graduates of Tokyo University, asked him if he would accept an appointment as a Harvard instructor in Japanese language and literature beginning in Fall 1955. He taught at Harvard until June 1958, having completed his doctoral dissertation in December 1955 and having received his Ph.D. degree in March 1956. During the period from Fall 1958 until June 1960 he taught at International Christian University as well as Tokyo Women's Christian University and Tokyo University. He received an appointment as assistant professor at Princeton University, where he taught Japanese language and literature from September 1960 to January 1965, when he accepted an offer of an associate professorship in the then Department of Asian and Pacific Languages at the University of Hawai‘i, where he was soon promoted to full professor and taught until his retirement at the end of August 2002.
His primary career focus has been on modern Japanese literature, and he has produced many studies of principal authors and their works, as well as translations. In 1971 Viglielmo translated what is arguably the greatest modern Japanese novel, Sōseki’s Meian (Light and Darkness, 1916), which has also received high praise from Western literary critics such as Fredric Jameson and Susan Sontag. Two years earlier, in 1969, he translated a brace of essays, The Existence and Discovery of Beauty, which the first Japanese Nobel Prize recipient Kawabata Yasunari gave in the form of public lectures as a visiting professor at the University of Hawai‘i in May 1969.
From the late 1950s on Viglielmo developed an interest in modern Japanese philosophy, introducing to the Western world works by the two principal figures of the Kyoto school, Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, the latter of whom he was able to visit at his home in the early spring of 1959. His first translation of Nishida, Zen no kenkyū (A Study of Good, 1911) in 1960 was instrumental in a deepening of East-West comparative philosophy. But his most sustained work in modern Japanese philosophy was a collaborative effort with David A. Dilworth and Agustin Jacinto Zavala, A Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy, in 1998, recognized as the first comprehensive study of its kind, with extensive selections from the work of seven major modern Japanese thinkers.
Viglielmo served as interpreter at the first International PEN meet in Tokyo in 1957. He formed friendships with the bundan (literary establishment), including Mishima Yukio, Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan’s second recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature), Sei Ito, Satō Haruo, and such prominent critics as Okuno Takeo and Saeki Shōichi.
Viglielmo has contributed to his profession in many ways: he was on the editorial staff of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and was the first editor of the Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, which has since developed into the principal journal of scholars of the Japanese language and literature outside of Japan. He also served as an Executive Committee member of that Association.
At the University of Hawai‘i he enjoyed teaching Meiji-Taishō (1868-1926) literature. He attended the first International Conference of Japanologists held in Kyoto in 1972.
He also developed a close connection with the Japanese anti-nuclear group Gensuikin (Congress for the Abolition of Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs), and especially with the Nagasaki branch. He and his wife, Frances, were instrumental in facilitating the erection in 1990 of the Nagasaki Peace Bell in Honolulu, the funding for which came from the survivors of the Nagasaki A-bombing and their relatives and friends. In the summer of 1998 they were invited to Nagasaki to receive a Peace Prize in honor of their work in the anti-nuclear movement. In Honolulu they were granted the Peacemaker of the Year Award in 1988 by the Church of the Crossroads.
He has expressed his gratitude for having been a part of the tremendous expansion of Japanese studies in the postwar period, and, more specifically, for having lived to see Japanese literature change to an integral part of world literature.