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Dear PEN colleagues and friends,

We are preparing the 76th International PEN Congress Tokyo Congress 2010.You're your travel arrangements, we would like to inform the date and the venue of the Congress beforehand.
Please come not only the Congress but also Literary Forum and Kyoto session.

Venue: Shinjuku Keio Plaza Hotel, Tokyo (for PEN congress)
Waseda University, Tokyo (for Literary Forum)

Schedule (tentative)

1 Literary Forum/Seminar September 23rd to September 30th
2 Opening Ceremony September 26th
3 International PEN Congress/Seminar September 27th to September 30th
4 Post congress Tour/Seminar in Kyoto October 1st to October 3rd

Further details of Congress will be sent through the PEN centers in April 2010.

February 22nd, 2010

Best regard,

Our contact: info@japanpen.or.jp

Based on our long-held desire to stage the International PEN Congress in Tokyo, The Japan P.E.N.club took action to extend this invitation to the International PEN Secretariat (at London headquarters) and the PEN centres in each country. At the congress recently held in Bogotá, Colombia, our proposal was accepted, with the official decision being made to hold the 2010 congress in Tokyo (International PEN Congress Tokyo 2010) over a period of approximately one week in the end of-September.
This will be third time Tokyo has been host, the first two being 1957 (Yasunari Kawabata, chairman) and 1984 (Yasushi Inoue, chairman). The year 2010 will also be the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the Japan P.E.N. Club (Toson Shimazaki, founding chairman).

The theme for "International PEN Congress Tokyo 2010" is "Environment and Literature".
The topic of "the environment" is a wide one, however, and what we are envisioning is not limited to the global warming and environmental destruction problems that are currently the subject of worldwide debate. It goes without saying that many aspects of human birth, aging, sickness and death are intimately connected to the natural world. The actions of nature, from the miniscule elementary particle and gene level to the huge scale of the solar system and universe, exert tangible and intangible forces on the era and society as well as influencing the way people live and their ideas and literature. From a broad perspective, it could be said that the theme of "Environment and Literature" encompasses everything involving human beings.
At the root of the International PEN Congress Tokyo 2010 theme of "Environment and Literature" is a question: In what ways can literature express and portray the environment as something which exerts such a controlling influence on human life and circumstance?