Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the same Japanese version appeared under the title ‘The
Unconscious and Wu-Hsin,’ together with an introduction by Tsujimura and
commentary by Hisamatsu.
Koji Sato, professor of educational psychology at Kyoto University, later asked
Jung’s permission to publish a protocol of the text in Psychologia, an English-language
journal that he edited. But Jung refused. In a letter to Sachi Toyomura, who had
translated Tsujimura’s Japanese version into English, Jung explained the reasons for
his refusal. The letter was later published in volume 3 of Psychologia (1960), and is
now available in a book edited by Daniel J.Meckel and Robert L.Moore, Self and,
Liberation: The Jung/Buddhism Dialogue (Paulist Press, 1992). Among his reasons for
opposing this ‘most delicate and correspondingly dangerous procedure,’ Jung mainly
cites inevitable and profound gaps in his and Hisamatsu’s understanding of each
other’s traditions.
In 1968, seven years after Jung’s death and one year before the inclusion of the
Japanese version in Eastern Nothingness, Sachi Toyomura’s English translation was
finally published in volume II of Psychologia. The translation was accompanied by a
statement by Sato, who claimed that Jaffé’s gift of the German protocol to Hisamatsu
could be interpreted as an expression of permission for Hisamatsu to publish it. More
than twenty years later, Jaffé told me that Sato had misunderstood her intentions
altogether, as she had sent the protocol to Hisamatsu only as a ‘memento’ (Erinnerung)
of his encounter with Jung.
As I have already suggested, the English translation published in Psychologia was
not directly from the German text, but from Tsujimura’s Japanese translation. Nor
was it revised by any native speaker of English. Four years later, in 1972, in reviewing
the dialogue for Psychologia, Noma Haimes wrote: ‘Partly on account of a strange
translation, the dialogue sounds like Alice in Wonderland.’ As Jung’s letter to
Toyomura suggests, he himself must have read the English translation—the quality
of which may have played into his decision not to allow its publication. Now,
however, even as Meckel and Moore, in republishing Toyomura’s translation, have
also clearly revised its English, the problem remains that the lone extant English
version of the Jung-Hisamatsu dialogue is, at best, a retranslation of a Japanese
translation of the original German protocol.
In the mid-1980s, I had the good fortune of meeting several times in Europe with
Aniela Jaffé, to discuss the matter of the protocol and translation. On 3 January 1985,
following our first meeting and more than twenty-five years after the historic
encounter between the two men, she wrote to me as follows:
When I reflected on our very interesting dialogue, a problem occurred to me,
and I want to talk about it. I suppose that Prof. Hisamatsu and Prof. Jung
spoke with each other in English (though I don’t exactly remember). But if
that were the case, I could certainly not have taken such a detailed protocol.
For I could only take shorthand in German. It is possible that I had taken notes
in German in my notebook. But is it conceivable that Prof. Hisamatsu later
elaborated on the text, especially his own comments?106 THE JUNG-HISAMATSU CONVERSATION