Montse Watkins

There, Watkins went to a nun’s school (Dominican Sisters of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin), where she showed herself to be quite bright and to have a gift for languages. She later studied Agricultural Engineering at the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering, as well as Philology for a year (1984).

Watkins’ biography is being written and the documentary “Montse Watkins: Kamakura Tales” being filmed by the journalist and documentary filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle, an initiative sponsored by the researcher Elena Gallego Andrada.

In October 1995, she began to write the column Octavo día [Eighth day] for the Spanish-language Japanese weekly International Press - En español, founded in 1994 and aimed for the Latin American community. Later, Octavo día would become A vista de pájaro [Bird’s-eye view]. This collaboration continued uninterrupted until October 2000, the month before her passing, due to cancer, in a Kamakura hospital. She also published opinion pieces in several other Spanish-language Japanese periodicals such as Musashi and Kyodai.

In 1994 she founded Luna Books publishing house, where she published her own translations and those of other experts, journalistic essays and fiction works. The Japan Foundation sponsored some of those publications.

In 1991 she met Tomi Okiyama, a Brazilian of Japanese ancestry, who would be her partner until her death. He was a member of the Latin American Worker Support Committee (CATLA). This meeting was a turning point in Watkins’ life. Along with her interest in Japanese language and culture, she now developed a concern for the conditions of the Latin American workers (mostly of Japanese ancestry) established in Japan from 1989 on, as a result of changes in this country’s migration policies. Watkins wrote two key monographs about the arrival and presence of Latin Americans in Japan, a research field in which she is considered a pioneer as well.

In 1988 Watkins joined the Spanish news agency Efe’s Tokyo delegation staff, where she remained for seven years until 1995. From then on, she was a correspondent for the Catalan newspaper Avui, with which she kept collaborating for the rest of her life. She also collaborated with the daily El Mundo.

In March 1985, Watkins traveled to Japan, where she immersed herself in the Japanese language and culture. “I came in search of adventure, thinking of the Japan shown in Yasujirō Ozu’s films, a refined image,” she explained in an interview published in 1999. She stayed in Japan until her death, and never returned to Spain. For three years, she studied Japanese in the prestigious Saint Joseph’s Institute of Japanese Studies in Roppongi (Tokyo), run by Franciscan friars, while living in an apartment in Tokyo’s Itabashi municipality. It was during this first period as a student in Tokyo that she began translating the writer and poet Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), specifically his Ginga tetsudō no yoru, which she would publish in 1994 with the title Tren nocturno de la Vía Láctea [Night on the Galactic Railroad] under Luna Books, the publishing company that Watkins founded in Tokyo under the Japanese publishing house Gendaikikakushitsu, founded by editors Masakuni Ota and Hideko Karasawa. She was the first “translator as well as editor” of Japanese literature into Spanish, and a pioneer of Spanish translation directly from the Japanese original.

Montse Watkins (Barcelona, August 27, 1955 – Kamakura, November 25, 2000) was a Spanish translator, fiction writer and essayist, editor and journalist who lived in Japan from 1985 until her passing in 2000. It was in this country that she carried out most of her professional activity. She was a correspondent for Spain’s Efe news agency and Avui daily, and El Mundo newspaper contributor. Watkins was well known for her research on the conditions of the nikkei, descendants of the Japanese diaspora who come to Japan in search of work not knowing the language or the culture. She is considered a pioneer in the direct translation into Spanish of Japanese literature. As an editor and translator, she always chose works by deeply engaged authors such as Kenji Miyazawa, Natsume Sōseki, Osamu Dazai and Toson Shimazaki.

Montse Watkins Pedra was born in the neighborhood of La Salut (Gràcia district, Barcelona) on August 27, 1955, to Esteban Watkins Lafuente and María Teresa Pedra Gil. Her father was vice secretary general of the Catalan Football Federation for 38 years, while her mother kept house. She had a sister, Maite, two years younger. When Montse was three years old, the family moved to the Horta neighborhood (Barcelona).