Discipline: Literature

Makoto Oda

Discipline: Literature
Region: Nishinomiya, JAPAN
MacDowell Fellowships: 1959
Makoto Oda (1932-2007) was a Japanese novelist, peace activist, academic, and Time Asia Hero. His travels through Europe and Asia on a budget of a dollar a day formed the basis of his 1961 bestseller Nandemo Mite yaro (I'll go and see everything). His first book Assatte no Shuki (The Notebook of the Day After Tomorrow) was published in 1951. It was based on experiences during World War II and the Korean War. His first full-length novel, Amerika (America) was published in 1962. Oda won the Lotus Prize in 1981 of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association for his book Hiroshima. This led to a 1990 English translation as well as translations in French, Arabic, Italian, Korean, and Russian. It was written about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the effects on the Hopi Indians and Americans who lived near the U.S. testing sites. He won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for Aboji o Fumu (Stomping Father), published in 1998. Oda's novel The Breaking Jewel was published in English in 2003. It was about Japanese forces on a South Pacific island facing an American invasion at the end of World War II. In 1965, he co-founded Beheiren (Citizens' League for Peace in Vietnam) with philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi and writer Takeshi Kaiko to protest against the Vietnam War.

Studios

Wood

Makoto Oda worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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