Acknowledgements
After my research trips to the Yakushiji temple in the summer of 2008, I had to put the planned monograph on the Japanese and Chinese inscriptions on a back burner due to various events in the one of the most turbulent periods in my life: serving as an Interim chair at the Bochum-Ruhr University in 2008–2009, then as an Interim chair at the University of Hawai’i in 2009–2010, a witch-hunt at the same University in 2011–2013, and finally the relocation to France in early 2014, with a subsequent challenges of getting adjusted to yet another country with different challenges. There were also some more urgent research and teaching obligations. All in all, I was able to come back to this project only twelve years later in 2020, which makes this project as old as my daughter, Marie (真理枝) Alexandra.
I would like to thank first of all the Yakushiji temple in general, and Reverend Maekawa (前川) in particular for allowing me to take my own pictures of the stone with a Japanese inscription, and also for providing me with much more superior quality photographs taken by the temple. Without these pictures the present work would simply be pointless and, most likely, would never materialize. I am also very grateful to my wife and the best friend Sambi Ishisaki (石崎賛美)-Vovin, who accompanied me on all my research trips to Yakushiji, and being not just a Japanese, but a Japanese to the bone, paved very smoothly the process of the negotiations with the temple, saving her ignorant gaijin (外人) husband from committing many faux pas.
As always, I am no less grateful to all my editors at Brill: Patricia Radder, Elisa Perotti, and Irene Jager for taking care of this book, and also to the head of Asian Department, Uri Tadmor for supporting the publication of this monograph at Brill.
Finally, I would like to thank all my friends around the globe, too numerous even to simply list here, but I will make a special exception for several of them. Although none is connected with this project, all of them made my recent years of life more enjoyable and worth living: Juha Janhunen, José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente, Irène Tamba, Augustin de Benoist, Mehmet Ölmez, Wu Ying-zhe, Elena Perekhval’skaya, and Aleksandra Jarosz.
This book is dedicated to my children, Aleksei, who is himself a scholar, and thirty-eight years old, Jacob Tomotatsu (智龍), who is twenty years younger, and Marie (真理枝) Alexandra, aged twelve.
We all live under the shadow of COVID-19 now, but as the Turks say, geçmiş olsun ‘may it soon be past’!