Miyazawa Kenji
On the whole, I give this film about 7 out of 10. I do not know of a source for this film on video, though I have not looked very thoroughly. I did note that the sound-track album is available on CD in Japan.
Mike"
Mike did us all a service some years ago when he wrote the original Esperanto FAQ for the Internet. This valuable document is now maintained by Yves Bellefeuille and you can find it here: http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq.html
Mike also wrote two Esperanto introductory courses for Macintosh users, using Hypercard. I still have copies of both of these courses which can be downloaded from the Esperanto archive, here: ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/esperanto/hypercourse.dir
The recently developed WWW Esperanto Hypercourse is a 'simple port' of that course to the web environment: if you want give this course a try, you'll find it here:
http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/Docs/toplev...
Getting back to Mike's email, Kenji has become such an important and popular writer in contemporary Japan that it's worth while providing more information about him, the more so because he was a supporter of Esperanto and learned the language himself. Here are a few biographical facts.
Miyazawa Kenji was born in 1896 in the Iwate Prefecture, and was only 37 when he died. He spent most of his life in that northern part of Japan, regarded by the residents of Tokyo as an impoverished, out-of-the-way place. Kenji's father, however, was a fairly affluent pawnbroker, but Kenji felt guilty that his family's wealth came from exploiting the poverty of others. This feeling of guilt and his strong Buddhist faith compelled him to try to help the poor farmers of Iwate.
Although Kenji wrote a great deal, only two of his books were published in his short lifetime: a collection of children's tales entitled "The Restaurant of Many Orders" and the first section of his most famous work of poetry, "Spring and Ashura." The rest of the great number of children's stories and poems that he left behind was edited and published only after his death. His popularity has continued to increase but although Miyazawa Kenji has become one of the most widely read literary figures in Japan, unfortunately he is still little known overseas.
A short passage from Night on the Milky Way Train and a short critical article about the book can be found at these two links:
http://www.g-search.or.jp/kenji/english/...
http://www2.gol.com/users/stever/kenji.h...
And much more information about this interesting writer is available at an official web site here:
http://www.g-search.or.jp/kenji/english/...
I wrote
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