Alex Kerr
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Alex Kerr (born 1952) is an American writer and Japanologist.
Originally from the Bethesda area in unincorporated Montgomery County, Maryland, his father, a naval officer, was posted in Yokohama from 1964 to 1966. Kerr moved to Japan in 1977 and lived in Kameoka, near Kyoto, since then. Kerr maintained additional homes in Bangkok, Thailand and the Iya Valley of Shikoku .
An expert on Japanese culture and art, Kerr studied Japanese Studies at Yale University and Chinese Studies at Oxford University. Through his experiences in Japan, as related in his books, he has also become an avid art collector, and patron of Japan's traditional theatre and other arts. A good friend of the famous kabuki actor Bandō Tamasaburō V, Kerr was introduced to kabuki from a perspective, and with a depth, which few foreigners have. He frequently writes and lectures in Japanese, and is associated with the Oomoto Foundation, a Shintō organisation devoted to the practice and teaching of traditional Japanese arts.
He is perhaps most well known for his book Lost Japan (1994), which describes what he saw as the sorry modern state of the country in which he has spent more than 35 years of his life. Lost Japan was actually originally written and published in Japanese, as Utsukushiki Nihon no Zanzō (美しき日本の残像, "Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan"). He was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan; he won it in 1994 for this work.
His most recent work is Dogs and Demons (2002), which addresses much of the same issues of degradation and loss of native culture in the wake of modernization and Westernization.
In the early 1970s, Kerr purchased a decomposing, abandoned, two-hundred-year-old Japanese house in the Iya Valley, a remote mountainous area of Tokushima prefecture on the island of Shikoku. He has since restored the house to a livable state, including rethatching the kayabuki roof. The house was given the name Chiiori, or "House of the Flute". The restoration of Chiiori began a project by Kerr and others to preserve Japan's vanishing arts, culture and traditional lifestyle, a project which unfortunately produced few if any tangible results . Recognizing this, in 2007, Alex decided to become more personally involved in Iya. He expanded and reorganized the board of directors of the project, and closed the house for a few months for renovations. It reopened in Nov 2007, this time with fresh energy and focus on bringing into reality the original dreams of the project.
Kerr currently has several residences. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand for half of the year, and Kyoto, Japan for the other half, visiting and staying at Chiiori as well.
[edit] English-language Works
- Lost Japan (1994) ISBN 0-86442-370-5
- Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan (2002) ISBN 0-14-101000-2
- Living in Japan (2006) ISBN 3-8228-4594-9
