SPOTLIGHT ON JAPAN

When it was announced that the dynamic men running Hopkins Center and the Comparative Studies Center working together would mount the sixth-month, campus-wide program centered on Japanese culture and history, a Hanover wag predicted they'd begin on the north country horizon by replacing Ascutney with Fujiyama. The program details, recently released, do indeed speak to lofty aspirations, but they don't call for the moving of mountains.

Many other objects and personages, however, will be brought to Hanover including exhibits in Japanese art, a modern Japanese play in translation and a Japanese director to produce it, a Japanese garden in the sculpture court, Japanese musicians and their music, films, and even a kite contest, all at the Hopkins Center. At the Comparative Studies Center weekly faculty seminars will concentrate on the emergence of a modern society in Japan since the mid-19th century.

This is the third such annual program in which creativity and performance in the Hopkins Center, work in the classroom, faculty seminars and open lectures, and other events concentrate on one big topic. In 1962 the program was on "Contemporary Arts and Religion"; last year "The World of William Shakespeare" was explored.

Although the College won't have Fujiyama as "mountain in residence," there are at least three representations of the sacred summit in the strikingly beautiful Grilli Collection of Oriental Art, the first exhibit of the new year in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery and the opening feature of the program on Japan. With works dating from the 3rd to the 20th century, the Grilli Collection, accompanied to Hanover by its owner, Professor Elise Grilli of Tokyo's Sophia College, illustrates through its more than 200 items the power and variety of Japanese design through the centuries. During her several-week visit in Hanover, Mrs. Grilli gave a gallery talk on her collection, an address on modern Japanese painting, several lectures to the course on Japanese Cultural History taught by Prof. Donald Bartlett '24, and a seminar on "The Values of Traditional Japanese Art."