IT IS A great honour to give the lecture this year in the name of my old fnend Hugh Cortazzi. It must be fifty years since I first met him when he was demobilised from the RAF and came to the School of Onental Studies to take a degree in Japanese. His name had long been a legendary one amongst us. He was reputed to be the very best of all the Service students, both in speaking and writing Japanese. Well do I remember people saying, ‘Oh he's good, but not up to the level of Cortazzi!’ So when he first appeared, he was regarded with awe and respect.

Old friends become the more important as one grows older, and I think that my generation in what are called ‘Japanese Studies’ are lucky. There were not many of us; we underwent the same difficult grind, and have remained friends, or at any rate in touch, for all the intervening fifty years.

I feel diffident in following in the footsteps of Ron Dore, another of our Fifty Year group, who gave a brilliant Cortazzi Lecture last year on the Deregulation Debate. My subject tonight is in a different world from his, for it concerns myth and folklore. Perhaps I should tell you that it was Hugh himself who suggested that I should choose this topic. It has interested me for a good many years, and has provided an excuse or reason for travelling to some unusual parts of Japan. ‘It is high time you pulled it together,’ Hugh warned me.

And indeed, and in parenthesis, I have before me the warning example of Frank Daniels, who during the last years of his life became absorbed in the Japanese folktales which could broadly be descnbed as Snake Stones. The hebi-nyōbo or snakewife tales, and the hebi-muko or snake-bndegroom tales; he collected hundreds of these, and wrote them all down on cards classified according to the degree of latitude and longitude where they were collected. But he never got round to publishing anything about his findings because he could not stop collecting more and more stones. He is an example to all of us who hesitate to ‘pull things together’.