All three of the publishing professionals gathered here today have been actively engaged in the publication of Western books in translation. Each of your publishing houses has its own distinct character, as do of course your respective countries' histories and sociopolitical systems. Today we'd like you to share your views on translation publishing in East Asia, based on what you know -- and don't know -- of your similarities and differences in that area. First, could I ask each of you to describe what sort of publishing activities your company has been engaged in? Let's begin with Mr. Morita of Misuzu Shobo in Japan.

I'll start with a brief look at the history of translation publishing in Japan. In his book Kaikoku (Opening the Country), which came out in 1959, the great Japanese thinker Maruyama Masao wrote that Japan has experienced two periods of "opening." The first occurred when Japan ended its centuries of isolation at the end of the Edo period (1603-1868). The second came when Japan suffered defeat in the Second World War.

After the first opening, early in the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan underwent a sudden influx of ideas from overseas. As the country actively imported the legal, political, economic, and cultural structures it deemed necessary for its modernization, its publishers issued a vast number of translations of works in the social sciences. Examples would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract and Samuel Smiles's Self-Help -- the latter in particular was a huge bestseller. As Japan entered the 20th century, interest grew in Marxism and German Neo-Kantianism, and many works of these schools were translated and widely read by intellectuals. This remained true at least until Japan started down the path to war.

Besides works in the social sciences, fiction -- both serious and popular -- stayed in fashion through the Meiji period, as it had been since the Edo era. There were translations of adventure novels like Jules Verne's Deux ans de vacances, as well as the works of Russian writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, which were usually translated into Japanese from English translations. The 1920s, when several publishers produced "Library of World Literature" series, represents an early peak in translation publishing in Japan. Nearly all the translations during this period were of European books, a rare exception being the work of Lu Xun, perhaps.

But as Japan went on a war footing, restrictions were imposed on freedom of speech and publication. It was not until the end of the Second World War that the country experienced its second "opening." After the wartime deprivation of these freedoms, people had a powerful desire to propagate liberty-embracing philosophies and viewpoints throughout society, and this desire spawned a great many publishing enterprises during the early postwar period. Misuzu Shobo, where I work, was one such company.

Misuzu Shobo was founded barely four months after the war ended in August 1945. With the expressed objective of spreading the spirit of freedom to the Japanese public, it began by translating works from France, including writers who had been active in the European resistance. Perhaps the most representative writer of Misuzu's early days was Romain Rolland, nearly all of whose works we have published.

Misuzu has a number of different focuses in its publishing activities. One is the translation of works born out of the Cold War. Misuzu never embraced Soviet-style communism; rather, its emphasis has been primarily on works in the social sciences from Europe. Another area we have delved into is works about Nazi Germany. We have published books not only about the Holocaust, but about the German nation in general, because we believe they contribute to the discussion of Japan's own war responsibility.

A third stream in our lineup consists of translations of Max Weber and other thinkers -- not only in the social sciences but the arts and other fields -- active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Finally, we have translated quite a few American works, particularly in the areas of sociology and pragmatist thought.

In the 1960s contemporary French thought such as existentialism and structuralism attracted a great deal of attention. Although Misuzu never published any translations of Jean-Paul Sartre, the definitive existentialist, we actively published other French thinkers addressing the contemporary world, including Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault. Thus Japanese readers in the 1960s and 1970s would probably associate Misuzu primarily with the translation of French books. By the late 1980s, however, attitudes toward Europe had changed. People in Japan no longer viewed it as a wellspring of thinkers who could explain the world to the rest of us. On the other hand, writers like Edward Said and Jacques Derrida became prominent during this period, and Misuzu translated them as well.

We also published translations about East Asia, particularly China and the Korean Peninsula, but most of these were from works written in English -- for example, Agnes Smedley's Battle Hymn of China and Nym Wales's Song of Arirang. Misuzu's emphasis on the translation of European works notwithstanding, we have also tried to build up an intellectual foundation for the contemplation of Japan's present and future. Central to this effort is our series Gendaishi Shiryo (Sourcebooks of Modern Japanese History). Over a period of forty years Misuzu published 58 volumes -- of around 700 pages each -- in this series, which attempts to gather an exhaustive set of source materials shedding light on the historical process by which Japan came to launch its invasive war in Asia.

In his writings about prewar and postwar Japan, Maruyama Masao, whom I mentioned earlier, criticized Marxism as well as the Japanese emperor system. Both ideologies, he felt, were "isms" that precluded independent thought. Misuzu's stance, like Maruyama's, is that one must think for oneself. Consequently, in its approach to translation publishing, Misuzu has not only sought out the latest work and thought from overseas; it has always asked itself what we need to have translated in order to knowledgeably contemplate the age we live in.

As you can see, Misuzu Shobo has throughout its history focused primarily on the publication of translations. However, compared to the 1960s, when some 80 percent of our titles were translations, today less than half are. Our experience has, I think, made us fairly astute judges of the quality and character of books published in the West. However, we have very little information or experience concerning books currently being published in China or Korea. Therefore I would have to say that at present, we are not able to render informed judgments about which books from your countries would be appropriate for Misuzu to publish, or which would be sought after by Japanese readers. That is something we must cultivate from now on.

I personally feel very close to the books published by Misuzu Shobo, which I have been reading since I was in high school, and translations of Western works certainly made up a large proportion of them. Mr. Kim, could you tell us about the situation in Korea?

Hangilsa began publishing in 1977 against a background of social upheaval that shook South Korea from the 1970s onward. I had been a newspaper journalist since the 1960s, and in the early 1970s, my colleagues and I launched a freedom of speech movement. Our activities inevitably put us on a collision course with the Park Chung-Hee regime, and in 1975, 130 people associated with the movement were dismissed from their jobs. Many of those who had been hounded out of the newspaper business for opposing the Park regime went to work for publishing companies or started their own. Hangilsa was one such company, born of those chaotic times.

At the root of the problems facing Korean society at the time lay two major historical realities. One was our experience as a colony of imperial Japan. The other was the fact that Korea had been divided in two by the Cold War.

Hangilsa began its publishing activities with the objective of addressing these two historical issues. What were the characteristics, and the ramifications, of Korea's colonization under Japanese imperialism? And why had our nation been divided in two? What had this schism done to us as a people, and what must we do to overcome it? These were the themes with which we grappled. It was a time when a full-fledged democracy movement against the military dictatorship was just getting underway, and Hangilsa decided to focus on the publication of textbooks that would help spur this movement. This put us into even more direct confrontation with the government, which went so far as to ban our books or confiscate them. For over a decade, until the late 1980s, we continued to publish, but under extremely tense conditions vis-a-vis the government.

Examples of Hangilsa books banned by the government were Korean History Before and After Liberation, Idolatry and Reason, and National Economics. Although we did use our platform as a publisher to criticize the Park regime, we put most of our energy into provoking a reinterpretation and rethinking of contemporary Korean history. Actually, insofar as the government until the 1980s was run by those who had colluded with Japan during the colonial era, exposing the truth of that history potentially represented an even harsher and more profound critique of the regime than direct political criticism might.

University professors and journalists who criticized the government were being fired left and right in those days, so we began holding lecture series featuring these people as speakers, such as the Hangil History Lectures and the Hangil Social Science Lectures. At the center of these activities, which we continued for over eight years, was the great democratic thinker and activist Ham Sok-Hon. He was our mentor and spiritual leader. Hangilsa has published his complete works.

In summary one might say that the overarching theme of Hangilsa's publishing efforts has been the national identity and independence of the Korean people. As part of those concerns, quite naturally we also introduced social movements in the Third World that ordinarily received little notice. Most of this was done through magazines such as Korean Social Studies, Third World Studies, and Society and Thought. In keeping with our publishing philosophy, the translations we publish are primarily Western works with a high degree of social consciousness. Some examples are C. Wright Mills's critique of American governance, The Power Elite, and works by Marc Bloch such as Feudal Society and The Historian's Craft. In the case of Japanese books, we were the first to offer the work of Maruyama Masao in Korean, with the intent of introducing a new perspective on Japanese fascism during its age of empire.

On the literary front, we have published translation series such as Hangil World Literature, which focuses on Third World literature from Africa, Latin America and Asia rather than the West. We have also translated non-fiction from around the world, including works by Ivan Illich and Everett Reimer, as well as by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Through lecture series like Hangil History Tour, we sought to give those in attendance a "ringside seat" to history as it actually happened. Our goal was to impart to Koreans an accurate awareness of their nation's history. This effort produced, over a period of eight years from 1986 to 1994, a 27-volume series entitled Korean History. Korean society underwent a profound transition in 1987, the year before the Seoul Olympics. That was the year of the June Uprising, which ended in victory and the restoration of democracy to the people of South Korea.

During the years between the 1988 Olympics and the early 1990s, as our government made the transition from a military dictatorship to a democracy, Korean society at large underwent another wrenching shift as the wave of globalization swept in. Like other publishers, Hangilsa was forced to adapt to these social changes and to new demands from readers. As a consequence we moved away from our focus on the social sciences toward a humanistic stance of examining human society from a more fundamental viewpoint. One result was our launch of a series of both Eastern and Western classics in translation, Hangil Great Books (it is now up to 75 titles). To sum up, in recent years we have sought to look at the world from a more open perspective than in the 1980s.

Let us now hear from Mr. Wang of SDX Joint Publishing in China.

I'll start by giving you a brief overview of the state of publishing in China. Until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, China was a feudal society, closed to the rest of the world, as Korea and Japan once were. From the late 19th century on, however, China was subjected to successive invasions by the great world powers, and was unable to do anything about it. This spurred Chinese intellectuals to ask why the Western powers were so strong, why China was so far behind them, and why it had succumbed to their attacks. These concerns gave birth to the slogan "Use Western civilization for the benefit of Chinese tradition."

But if, in accordance with this slogan, the Chinese people were to put Western civilization to use, then China needed translations of Western works. In the early 20th century, however, most works in the humanities and social sciences from the West came to China through Japan -- in other words, in the form of translations from Japanese, such as reports on research conducted by Japanese scholars. Because Western knowledge arrived via Japan, the Chinese tended to view Japan itself as part of the West, and many Chinese scholars went to Japan to study. Some well-known examples are Zhang Taiyan, Lu Xun and Guo Moruo. One result was that Chinese intellectuals of this era developed close ties with intellectuals in Japan.

Other translation sources were the Soviet Union, from which vast amounts of Marxist, Leninist and communist literature were imported, and the United States, another major destination for Chinese scholars, which provided information on the latest science and technology.

Thus China absorbed new thinking, culture and technology from three main sources: Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States. This proved to be a major impetus for reform in the early 20th century. And the May Fourth cultural movement that began in 1919 inspired further imports of knowledge and technology from these same three countries, setting the stage for a new society in China. Subsequently, more and more books were translated directly from their European or American originals, rather than via Japanese. These included works by nearly all the great Western thinkers, such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, as well as literature by writers ranging from Balzac, Tolstoy and Rolland to Hemingway and Jack London. However, between the outbreak of war with Japan in the early 1930s and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China was perpetually at war, and the introduction of philosophy and literature from overseas, together with scholarly and scientific exchange of any kind, came to a halt.

With the postwar world divided into East and West, socialist and capitalist blocs, and China part of the socialist bloc after 1949, the translation of works from capitalist societies was officially restricted. This state of affairs persisted until 1978. However, the restrictions extended primarily to works of philosophy, politics, economics, law, and academic research. The translation of classics of Western literature continued unabated and numerous such series were published.

With the promulgation in 1979 of a new policy of reform and openness, it was as if a dam had burst, and China experienced an outpouring of translations of Western books on philosophy, politics and scholarship. The mid-1980s in particular saw a flood of translations of Western thinkers of such schools as structuralism, existentialism, and symbiotics. Whether or not readers understood these texts, they contributed to a boom in translation publishing. Through translations like these, we became acquainted for the first time with the political systems, economic conditions, and business management techniques of other parts of the world. Their publication thus provided a critical energy source for the subsequent development of China.

This frenzy of translation publishing continued for nearly a decade. As it entered the 1990s, however, China's publishing industry began to look toward books on more practical topics such as economic administration and business management. Books on business became the new translation mainstream, particularly those about Japanese business practices. The pace of translation publishing also accelerated during these years.

Let me now move from an overview of translation publishing in general to the activities of SDX Joint Publishing in particular. SDX, or Sanlian Shudian, was founded in 1932. In the 1930s and 1940s the company published translations of such works as Marx's Das Kapital and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, but from early on it also published literature by Western writers like Rolland, Hugo, Dickens and Tolstoy. For the past two decades, translations have occupied about 60 percent of SDX's total output, with much of our effort put into introducing the latest cultural and academic works from the West. For example, our Frontiers of Academia series was the first to introduce the works of Juergen Habermas and Friedrich Hayek to China. Another series we publish, Culture and Life, offers a broad introduction to Western life and lifestyles.

Recently we published Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism; last year we put out his memoir, Out of Place, and this year the treatise on music he co-authored with Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. Said's works are highly favored by readers in China, and they sell well.

Over the past two decades, China has also seen the translation of many Japanese novels. These range across the entire spectrum, from classics like The Tale of Genji, to Natsume Soseki and Kawabata Yasunari, to contemporary novelists like Murakami Haruki. Japanese works make up a significant share of SDX's translations. We published Maruyama Masao's Nihon Seiji Shisoshi Kenkyu (Studies in the History of Japanese Political Thought) in 2000, and Karatani Kojin's Nihon Kindai Bungaku no Kigen (Origins of Modern Japanese Literature) in 2003. Last year, we published Komori Yoichi's Tenno no Gyokuon Hoso (The Emperor's Broadcast) and Takeuchi Yoshimi's Kindai no Chokoku (Overcoming Modernity). We are currently planning translations of many more Japanese works to come.

SDX has also published translations of Korean works, starting with the poet Huh Se-Wook's Love in the East and Collected Poems of Korea in 1994. This year we published a Korean romance novel, He Says, She Says. Until recently our eyes were turned primarily to the West, but from now on we fully intend to introduce works on the thought and scholarship of Korea and the rest of East Asia, as well as India, the Middle East, Africa, and other Third World countries.

Each of you has provided some background on publishing in your country and translation-related activities by your own company. Now we'd like to hear your responses to what's been said so far.

It was fascinating to hear from both of you about your translation publishing activities. That immediately brought to my mind the issue of copyright protection. Japan signed on to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1899; China and Korea signed on much more recently, in the 1990s. I would like to know what changes both of you have seen in publishing in your countries since they became parties to the convention.

Korea joined the Berne Convention in 1996, and that has resulted in a dramatic improvement in translation quality. Before Korea became a signatory, publishers were not as cautious as they might have been in choosing which books to translate or which translators to use. But since joining Berne, Korean publishers have acted more responsibly in assigning translators to the works they publish.

China signed onto Berne in 1992. The biggest change after Berne was in the sheer volume of translations published. That was because, once China had agreed to observe the same rules for translation publishing as other countries, Western publishers began trying to sell translation rights to China. Until then, Chinese publishers had to literally travel overseas to seek out books. Western publishers were not about to come to them; book prices were so low in China that they didn't think they could turn a profit. Also, they probably feared that the Chinese publishers would print more copies than the contract called for.

But now things have changed. China has a huge potential publishing market, so even at low prices, the high print runs have attracted the interest of Western publishers. Therefore I think it's safe to say that translation publishing will continue to grow in China.

Although the quality of the translations published in Korea is improving, there is another trend that concerns me. In Korea, the average lifespan of a book is gradually decreasing; few last more than a year now. This is a problem not limited to translations, of course. Most books vanish from store shelves before a year has passed. Under market conditions like this, and with the growing dominance of the Internet, what role should books be expected to play in society? That is the big question that Korean publishers are asking themselves.

Another issue of interest to me is the simultaneity of translation publishing. For example, American books are often translated and published nearly simultaneously in China, Japan and Korea. This phenomenon suggests to me that we should consider our own translation publishing activities in Asia from a broader vantage point. If we can translate and publish books promptly and concurrently in our respective countries, it will accelerate the speed at which we can share insights and values. Given this potential, I think we should pay greater heed to the significance and possibilities of translation.

I agree. Right now, the translation publishing business is overwhelmingly biased toward books from the West. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, most of the transactions involving East Asian publishers consist of their purchases of rights to Western books. Very few deals take place in the other direction.

That's true. I have nothing against the Frankfurt Book Fair, but Asian publishers need to create the same sort of venue in Asia. The present situation arose because we have been in thrall to Western works, Western content. To remedy that imbalance we must develop Asian content and market it to the West. Until we do that, things will remain as they are.

At Frankfurt these days, American publishers have more clout than the Europeans. It's become a place for publishers from other countries to buy rights from the United States. Taking an example from my own experience, a book published by Misuzu the year before last was very quickly translated and published in Korea. We wanted to sell the same book to Western publishers, so we prepared a detailed outline of the book in English and took it to Frankfurt. There, however, we were told in no uncertain terms that they would not even consider the book unless they had a complete English translation to look at. In short, the current relationship between East Asian and Western publishers can hardly be described as mutually interactive. In that regard, I wholeheartedly support Mr. Kim's suggestion.

The Western publishing market is nearly saturated, but there is still a huge untapped market in China. At the Beijing Book Fair last year, I asked people who were representing publishers in France and Germany how much was known about the Chinese publishing market in their respective countries, and how well conditions here were understood. They told me that Western publishers probably know next to nothing about the situation in China. So I think the Western bias in the translation publishing market is largely due to a lack of information. Therefore, I suggest that we get the ball rolling by exchanging publishing information among our three countries, Korea, Japan and China -- or, at the very least, among our three publishing houses.

When East Asians entered the modern era and for some time afterward, we obtained all kinds of knowledge by reading Western books. I think that engendered in us a strange preconception that books written by Westerners are good, and those written by Easterners are inferior. It goes without saying that there are many superlative books written by Easterners -- but until now, there has been virtually no flow of information about such books between China, Korea and Japan. For just that reason, we should use opportunities like this East Asia Publishers Conference to cultivate the exchange of information among publishers in our "Chinese-character cultural sphere" here in East Asia, as well as to work on publishing projects together. If we cooperate in the publication of books of value, our market should grow, and the number of quality authors as well.

One thing our three houses share in common is a commitment to the humanistic spirit. This commitment affords us many possibilities for productive joint undertakings, I believe. For example, we can translate and publish the works of Maruyama Masao or Ham Sok-Hon in China, and the works of Chinese thinkers can be published in Japan and Korea. Improving the interaction among our publishing industries begins with concrete steps like that, don't you think?

For Chinese publishers, the Japanese publishing industry is our mentor. Not only did our country absorb the knowledge and culture of the West via Japan, but the quality of Japanese publishing remains among the highest in the world. Therefore we can benefit tremendously by learning from the experiences of Japanese publishers in the course of our three-way exchange.

Those of us in the publishing industry do not just make books, we read them. When I read the translation of a book by Maruyama Masao, I feel a deep connection and resonance that I do not experience with a Western book. Another example is Ham Sok-Hon, an intellectual viewed by many as on a par with India's Gandhi. Yet Gandhi is known throughout the world, while Ham Sok-Hon is virtually unknown. In that sense, we have yet to achieve a full sharing of books of value with one another. In addition to sharing information and translating each other's books, I would like to propose that publishers from our three countries actually produce a book together. That is one way to share insights and values.

I have just given each of you a copy of the Misuzu Shobo catalog, and from now on I intend to send you information about our new titles. Can you both reciprocate with information about your publications? In this way, I hope we can continue to keep one another informed about what sorts of books we are publishing. And I also hope that we can continue to meet for face-to-face chats like this one.

Editors and publishers in East Asia do not have all that many opportunities to meet each other in person. We hope that the East Asia Publishers Conference will provide just such a venue for direct dialogue among publishing professionals in this part of the world. Furthermore, we can use our four-language Website to share these discussions with colleagues outside of East Asia as well. Thank you all for taking the time -- a long time, allowing as we had to for interpretation -- to meet and talk with each other today.