About This Site

introduce William Morris’s thought to Japanese audience. William Morris as artist and designer is famous in Japan, but his thought on society and his activities to bring about his ideal society is rarely known, although it is inseparable from his urge of art.

That is why I started this site in 2011 with Japanese translations of his political essays. In Japan, his famous story, News from Nowhere, has been translated recently as well as in the early twentieth century, while Morris’s several political essays were only published sixty years ago in old written style. The pioneering attempt of translation of political essays was much admired, but the sentences of sixty-year-old translation are rather difficult to today’s readers who are not accustomed to the old written Japanese. After I successfully finished my PhD at Loughborough University on William Morris’s political thought in 2008, I felt the need to translate them into clear Japanese. My ability of translation from Morris’s English to modern Japanese could be limited, but my love of the subject has kept me going.

Since the main part of this website is the translations of Morris’s original essays in English which are available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/index.htm and other sites, there is not much to be written to English speaking readers in this regard. However, I would like to say things about how I value Morris’s thought and what I think is the relevance of his thought to us living in the twenty-first century. I will write these points from time to time in the page This and That around the Society William Morris Wanted to Create.