Asian Month, Jasenovac, Kobo Abe: Wikipedia articles written in November 2024

In November, when the excitement of August’s Wikimania had finally laid down, I contributed the following Wikipedia articles.

First of all, November is Wikipedia Asian Month, so I started by translating the English version of an article on businessman Quek Leng Chan at a friendship event with Malaysia. I have been contributing articles on Malaysia, mainly on people, but the more I do it, the more profoundly it develops. Next, I selected and translated Nodeulseom from the articles recommended in the “Korea” section of the Asia Month theme. I had never been to Korea and knew nothing about this man-made island in Seoul, but in the process of translation, I learned about various matters that cast a deep shadow over the island’s history.

Third, I translated Galsan Tschinag, who was mentioned in a sample article from the event. He is a Mongolian writer and writes in German, having studied in Germany. Only one of his works had been translated into Japanese, so I borrowed his “The End of the Song” from the library and read it. It was a magnificent epic poem about nomadic men and women, parents and children, and animals and humans, set in the steppe of the westernmost part of Mongolia, the writer’s native land. Having never been to Mongolia, I was overwhelmed by the author’s writing style that depicted a world completely unimaginable to me from my own daily life. Since I did not have enough information to create a Wikipedia article on this novel, I first created Wikidata, and translated the Khovd River, which flows through western Mongolia, from the German Wikipedia. The articles have been evaluated during the Asian Month, and I would like to add to it based on the evaluation.

In the middle of the month, I went to a lecture by Kayoko Yamasaki, a poet working in Serbia, whose talk was about the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia during World War II. Japanese Wikipedia had an article about it but few sources, so I looked up the relevant information and added it to the article. Concentration camps are a negative history, but having a proper description in Wikipedia is a great thing, especially today with the constant conflicts.

I also participated in a Wikipedia BUNGAKU editathon on the writer Kobo Abe, and translated an article about Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor that appeared in the Wikipedia article on Kobo Abe. It turns out he was active in Krakow, Poland, which I had no idea about when I visited Krakow in August. It showed me how much of a cultural center Krakow is. I also created a new article later on in the day about the stage designer Machi Abe, who was the wife of Kobo Abe, based on magazine articles and other information I obtained on the day of the event.

In November, I learned about places I had never been and people I had never met, and I was able to expand my world greatly through writing Wikipedia.