The final meeting before the summer holidays will be a joint event with Harvard Club of Japan and Brown University Club of Japan on Thursday July 10th at International House of Japan (Roppongi).

This will be an excellent opportunity to mingle socially with alumni of the two ivy league schools over drinks and buffet dinner in a relaxed setting.

More details of the event will follow in due course.

Join us for a casual evening of cocktails and light food in a private room in Hotel Okura’s Orchid Bar on November 20th.

To sign up, please contact Tim Minton (t.minton[at]camford[dot]org) by November 16th. Members are welcome to invite one guest each.

Dress code: Lounge suits
Attendance fees: 7,500 yen
Payment is required in advance. Bank details and directions to the venue will be sent to those who sign up.

To mark the end of Tim Hitchens’s term as British Ambassador to Japan (and as C&O President) at the end of this year, we will hold a seated dinner on November 23rd (a national holiday) to express our thanks to Tim and his wife, Sara, for their wholehearted support of the Society over the last four years, and to bid them farewell.

Drinks will be served at 18:30, and dinner will start at 1900. The attendance fee is 8,000 yen (subsidized), and the dress code is jacket and tie.

Members are welcome to invite one guest each to this event. If you would like to attend, please contact Tim Minton (t.minton[at]camford[dot]org) by Saturday, November 19th.

The obituary below appeared in the Girton College Annual Review of 2009, and is reproduced with permission.

“KONDO. On 13 November 2008, Ine Rachel, known as Ineko (Sato) MLitt (1937). A graduate of Tohoku Imperial University, Sendai, she came to Girton as a research student in English and gained an MLitt in 1939. Back home in Japan she became an Assistant Professor at Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School until 1943, and Professor at Tsuda Women’s College between 1948 and 1980. She had married Masao Kondo, an academic at Gakushuin University (Physics) in February 1944 and their daughter was born in 1950. She received her doctorate in English Literature from the Tokyo University of Literature and Science by submitting a thesis on Jane Austen: A Study of the Development of her Art in 1952.”

Mrs. Kondo was well known to many members during her long and active life. At our meetings she could be found, usually with a gentle smile, talking with members of any age and any academic level. What we were hardly aware of was her influence on the Japanese women she taught.

One of them, Prof Akiko Higuchi, (St Edmund’s, Cantab, 1988), has sent us her reminiscences, which are excerpted below. [Selections and omissions are entirely the responsibility of DS.]

Prof. Ineko Kondo and Mrs Akiko Higuchi, May 22, 1999

Prof. Ineko Kondo and Mrs Akiko Higuchi at the gate of the British Embassy, May 1990

Mitsubishi Club is on the 21st floor of the Mitsubishi Shoji Building, 2-3-1 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. Directions will be sent to those who sign up.

Dress code: jacket required, tie optional

Attendance fee: 8,000 yen
Payment is required in advance; account details will be sent to those who apply to attend. No refunds for no-shows or those who cancel after the closing date (23rd September).

Members may invite one guest each to this event (no limit on family members). If you would like to attend, please contact Tim Minton (t.minton[at]camford[dot]org) by Monday, 23rd September.

On February 5th, 2013 fifty-two members of the C&O Society, including two of our most senior members, Hugh Wilkinson (King’s Cambridge, 1946) and Doreen Simmons (Girton Cambridge, 1950), and seventeen guests attended a dinner in the Tokyo Club to welcome, as our newly appointed President, the new British Ambassador, HE Mr Tim Hitchens (Christ’s Cambridge, 1980) and his wife, Sara (Christ’s Cambridge, 1981). We were also honoured with the presence of HIH Princess Takamado (Girton Cambridge, 1972), who gave the toast to our new president, after which we were treated to a splendid six-course dinner impeccably prepared and served by the Tokyo Club staff.

Welcome dinner for new C&O President HE Mr Tim Hitchens and his wife. Tokyo Club - 3

A number of those present recalled Tim and Sara Hitchens from an earlier posting to Tokyo, when Tim, as a more junior member of the British Embassy staff, reported to another Cambridge graduate and staunch member of the Society, who subsequently became British Ambassador to Japan, Sir Stephen Gomersall. By a happy coincidence Sir Stephen happened to be in Tokyo on a business trip, and so was able to attend the dinner. In his after-dinner acceptance speech, Tim Hitchens spoke fondly of his time at Christ’s Cambridge. He had had the privilege of spending one of his years in the very rooms occupied centuries earlier by the blind poet, John Milton, as evidenced by words crudely carved on one of the room walls – “John Milton lived here”. It was, of course, at Christ’s that Tim and Sara met.

The main November event is a party to offer somewhat belated congratulations to HIH Princess Takamado (Girton Cambridge) on the PhD she received from Osaka University of Arts in February this year for her research on netsuke.

The party will be held on Friday, 16th November at Hillside Banquet Pachon (www.pachon.co.jp/), which is part of the restaurant complex owned and run by Monsieur André Pachon in Daikanyama. Following a champagne toast, an extensive French buffet will be served together with wine and other drinks.

Dress code: jacket and tie
Attendance fees: Members: 6,000 yen, Guests: 8,000 yen (subsidized event)
Payment is required in advance; account details and directions will be sent to those who apply to attend. No-shows and cancellations after the closing date will not be refunded; our subsidization policy also dictates that members who find themselves unable to attend at the last minute will be billed for the 2,000-yen subsidy paid on their behalf by the Society.

If you would like to attend this event, please contact Tim Minton (t.minton[at]camford.org] by Monday, November 12th.

Mr Teruhisa Nakamura’s speech at the Gokurosama Party held in his honour at Mitsubishi Club on July 6, 2012 Firstly, let me offer my thanks to the Honorary Secretaries for arranging this special “Gokurosama” event in my honour at Mitsubishi Club. The event was originally scheduled in June at Kojunsha in Ginza, and I apologise for forcing the cancellation of that event due to my visit to Oxford. I feel I must, therefore, give you a brief report about this sudden visit.

Quite unexpectedly, I received an invitation in early June – after the Kojunsha event had been announced – from Oxford in the names of Lord Patten (Chancellor) and Professor Andrew Hamilton (Vice Chancellor) to the University’s Encaenia on Wednesday 20th June. I hasten to add that the invitation was extended to me as Honorary Secretary of the Cambridge & Oxford Society and not because of any other great achievement on my part. I was, therefore, slightly embarrassed, as I had just retired from the C&O Committee at the Triennial General Meeting in April.

According to the invitation, “Encaenia is the special celebration held at the end of each academic year at the University of Oxford, during which honorary degrees are conferred in the presence of members of the University and specially invited guests.” That made me one of the specially invited guests, of course! As the letter went on to explain, “The tradition of conferring honorary degrees at Oxford goes back to at least the 15th century though the Encaenia celebration in some form dates from 1200s.” It certainly goes back to the time when I was at Oxford in the 1960s, when I recall witnessing the Encaenia procession with the Chancellor, the University’s Officers and the Honorands in full academic regalia heading to the Sheldonian Theatre. It was, I thought, a great honour to be invited, so I consulted some senior C&O members, including Sir David Warren. They all suggested I should accept the invitation.