IULA mourns the death of Ko Tazawa
Professor Ko Tazawa (1953-2022) passed away at the age of 68. A linguist, translator, lexicographer and writer, he obtained his PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Osaka and in Catalan Philology from the University of Barcelona. Since his first stay in Catalonia, he became a very active Catalanophile and a key reference in terms of Catalonia-Japan cultural exchanges.
After leaving his career as an economist in banking, and after his two PhDs, he obtained the Chair in Intercultural Studies at the University of Hosei in Tokyo.
As a translator, his Japanese editions of relevant Catalan works such as Tirant lo Blanch, Camí de sirga by Jesús Montcada or La plaça del diamant (“The Time of The Doves”) by Mercè Rodoreda, among others, stand out. He also translated Japanese works into Catalan. As a writer, we remember his books Catalunya i un japonès (“Catalonia and a Japanese”, 1993) and Petjades d’un japonès (“Traces of a Japanese”, 2022), and the compilation of his columns in the newspaper Ara, Dietari d'un japonès: entre el terratrèmol, el tsunami i la fuita radioactiva (“Diary of a Japanese: between the earthquake, the tsunami and the radioactive leak”). As a linguist, he published several dictionaries and grammars of the Catalan language for Japanese.
In recognition of his entire career, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2003), the Japanese Government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Award (2009) and the Ramon Llull International Prize (2019). In 2018 he was also named an honorary member of the Association of Catalan Language Writers.
Ko Tazawa's contact with the Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) came in the 1990s, while he was working on his doctoral thesis, Proposta per a un diccionari japonès-català per a catalanoparlants (“Proposal for a Japanese-Catalan dictionary for Catalan speakers”), directed by M. Teresa Cabré and defended at the University of Barcelona in 1999. M. Teresa Cabré had founded the IULA in the 1993-94 academic year and, therefore, the senior members were able to meet him when he came for meetings with his thesis director and participated in some of the activities we organized. We had the joy of having him teach some seminars in the PhD program in Applied Linguistics.
Always linked to Catalonia, the last occasion we had to meet him was last July 8, 2022, on a trip that he already foresaw would be his last, at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, where he presented the expanded and updated version of the Diccionari català-japonès; japonès-català ("Catalan-Japanese Dictionary; Japanese-Catalan").
Always in our memory.
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