Saturday 19 November 2016

Authors

November 18, 2016

The theme for this week's Blog Linky Party is Books, Reading and Authors.  I wasn't able to find any Gotochi cards of books or of people reading, but I did find a couple of writers.  Adding in a few other cards I hope this will be an interesting look at literary themed postcards.

Many non-Japanese people may be unfamiliar with the person below.  However, people in Japan usually see him every day. He holds the place of honour on the 1000 yen note.  This is Hideyo Noguchi, a research scientist who was born in Fukushima. He had quite an interesting life and in Japan is highly regarded as a medical hero.  However, when I read the Wikipedia entry about his life I was quite shocked.  He supposedly experimented on orphaned children and was often accused of having research inaccuracies.

I am not sure if the Wikipedia article is correct, but it certainly does not make Noguchi seem like he should be a national hero for going to Africa to try to discover the origin of Yellow Fever.  He does belong on this page however for the many research articles that he published.

I have visited the Hideyo Noguchi museum in Fukushima. It was very interesting.  Also, I was surprised that the Wikipedia article made no mention of his wife.  Noguchi had an American wife, which would have been rather unusual at the time.

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The rather large man below is a representation of Saigo Takamori, a samurai, poet and politician.  I don't know a lot about him, but his life is thought to be the basis of the character of Katsumoto, played by Ken Watanabe in the film The Last Samurai. Kagoshima is very far from the area of Japan that I live in, so I haven't done very much reading on Takamori.




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This gentleman came in the mail one day this year from the United States.  He is quite a famous author, L. Frank Baum, the writer who gave us the Oz series, including of course, The Wizard of Oz. 



This is Tove Jannson, a Finnish author and artist, most famous for the Moomin series.


This is a portrait of Evelyn Waugh.  He was the author of Brideshead Revisited, amongst other novels.


I hope that you have enjoyed my quick look at some famous authors.  I have only recently begun to collect author cards on Postcrossing, but I have a few now.  If you would like to see more cards that fit the topics of books or writers, please select one of those tabs on the right side.

Thank you for visiting this Linky Blog Party.  I hope that you will visit some of the other members of the group and see what they have for your viewing pleasure!


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9 comments:

Heleen said...

Great selection of postcards!

And I learned a lot now. In addition to learn about the Japanese authors who I didn't know before, I was surprised to read and see that Evelyn Waugh is a male author, as in my country (NL) Evelyn is a woman's name.

Helen said...

Thank you!

Evelyn nowadays tends to be a name for women, but in the past it was used both for men and women. Wikipedia gives a list of famous men and women with Evelyn as a first name.

I'm glad that you liked the cards.

Scriptor Senex said...

I think - but can't be certain - that Evelyn (female) and Evelyn (male) were pronounced differently. The female one began like the name Eve whilst the male one began like the word ever....

Helen said...

You could be right! It would make sense to me.

Thanks for visiting John :-)

Joy said...

I like that Tove is drawing a moomin. A nice set of author postcards.

Helen said...

Thank you! I'm glad that you like them!

Maria said...

Definitely an interesting line up of authors Helen! I'm much intrigued with the author from Fukushima (I considered taking PhD in Fukushima). It's rare that authors with scientific write-ups are featured in our pages. Thanks for joining and linking up. Until next week.

Helen said...

You are welcome Maria. It is interesting to hear that you were thinking of studying there! I'm actually off to Fukushima-ken in the next couple of days.

Until next week!

Mail Adventures said...

You're right: the Japanese authors were unknown to me. I'm a very big fan of Baum, however. I read the whole series of Oz as an adult :)
Even started a postal project about: Oz Postcard Project