I first heard of James Kirkup circa 1954, when some of his poems were read during morning assembly at Wennington School in Wetherby, Yorkshire — not far from Leeds, where he had been the first Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University between 1950 and 1952.

While I was still at school, I read James' first poems about Japan in the Listener, which we received in the sixth-form common room. I started to follow his career, but never imagined, of course, that 10 years later I would meet him at a poetry reading at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama.

I had gone to Japan in 1962, and had been working as a sub-editor at The Japan Times in Tokyo since 1963. I had produced a small book of poems, entitled Implosion, in early 1968, and had sent a copy to James, whose address I had found on a letter he had sent to the editor of my paper. In his reply to me — the only letter I have from him that begins "Dear Mr Ireland" — he had invited me to attend the reading.

During the next few years, while I continued to work at The Japan Times, I sent him almost everything I wrote, and was always amazed to receive a reply within two or three days. After my former headmaster had thundered "He must realize that poetry has content as well as form", and had written me off as a terminal case of "adolescence", I could hardly believe that someone was taking my work seriously.

Even I hardly took it seriously. Having been subjected to so much scorn at my boarding school — an institution that prided itself on the "progressive" education it provided — I tended to retreat into metaphors for an unhappiness I felt I could not legitimately express. Thus, my real thoughts and feelings — the "true voice" that James looked for — were smothered. This meant that when I did get a good