Donald Keene, a prominent Japan scholar who has introduced a wide range of Japanese literature works from classics to post-World War II pieces to the world, died of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital on Sunday. He was 96.
The professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York is known for building the foundation for overseas studies of Japanese culture.
Keene was born in New York in 1922. While he was studying at Columbia University, Japan started a war against the United States, and Keene entered the U.S. Navy's Japanese-language school.
He served in Hawaii and Okinawa for questioning Japanese prisoners of war and analyzing diaries left behind by Japanese soldiers.
This experience and his fascination with the English-language version of "Tale of Genji" he read at age 18 triggered Keene to deeply study Japanese culture.
Keene traveled back and forth between Japan and the United States to study classics and educate scholars. At the same time, he fostered close relations with influential writers such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe and Ryotaro Shiba, and became known as a leading postwar Japan scholar in the United States along with such researchers as Edward Seidensticker.
In 1976, Keene started to publish "History of Japanese Literature" the first full-scale overview of history by a non-Japanese. In 1985, he won the Yomiuri Literature Prize for "Hakutai no Kakaku: Nikki ni Miru Nihonjin," which analyzed diaries written by Japanese from various historical periods.
In 1986, Columbia University opened the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture in his honor.
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Keene decided to permanently live in Japan, and obtained Japanese nationality in March 2012.
Caption
Yomiuri Shimbun file photo
Donald Keene smiles during an interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun in December 2017.
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