Donald Richie in Kansai

Sixty Years of Journal-Keeping in Japan and How to Do It

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear famed writer Donald Richie speak in Kansai!

Date and Time: October 14, 2007 (Sunday) at 2 p.m.

Place: Kobe Kokusai Kaikan 8th Floor Conference Room 2 (Adjacent to Sogo Department Store, 3 minutes’ walk south of Sannomiya JR station.)

Click here for a map with directions from Sannomiya to Kokusai Kaikan (Japanese only).

Fee: SWET/CUE members 1,500 yen, Non-members 2,000 yen

Reservations: This will be a very popular event and seating is limited. To secure your place, please email us at kansai AT swet DOT jp.
To qualify for the member discount you must include your name, JALT member code and indicate your affiliation i.e. CUE, Kobe Chapter or Osaka Chapter.

Synopsis: Sixty Years of Journal-Keeping in Japan and How to Do It

“A journal, the dictionary tells us, is a personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections kept on a regular basis; a diary. People keep these for all sorts of reasons. They may keep a journal as an aide-mémoire, or as a kind of day book or chap book, or as a companion or a confidant. But whatever the assumption, these are all based on the fact that time passes.

“This we commonly regret and one of the ways of holding on to passing time is transcribing it. This we tend to do when we have the leisure and the motivation—for that reason, perhaps, the most common kind of journal is the travel diary. We observe new things, we have the time to write about them, and we have the motivation to preserve them, and to maintain somehow the observer.

“This is another reason for keeping a journal. The creation of self on the page not only preserves it but also, in a way, validates this self. Diaries are in this sense special pleadings. They present a self and they defend it. I slowly discovered that I was also describing myself—not so much myself as I happened to be but myself as observer: something as ‘discovered’ as any of the scenes I was describing.”

Profile of Donald Richie

Donald Richie is an observer and flâneur, reveling in the freedom to discover himself and always aware of his role as an outsider.

Named by Time magazine, “the dean of Japan’s art critics,” and acknowledged as the foremost authority on Japanese cinema, Donald Richie has also written widely—some forty books in all—on other aspects of the country and its people.

The Inland Sea has been called a classic and its film version has won prizes at international film festivals as well as the National Geographic Earth Award. A new edition appeared in 2002 from Stone Bridge Press. His Public People, Private People has been called “unforgettable” by Tom Wolfe and of his two collections of essays, A Lateral View and Partial Views, Susan Sontag has said: “Donald Richie writes about Japan with an unrivaled range, acuity, and wit.”

Richie has lived in Japan for most of his life. Arriving on New Year’s Day, 1947, he worked as feature-writer and film critic for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. After graduation from Columbia University in 1953, he returned to Japan as film critic for the Japan Times.

He has written for Newsweek, the Nation, Variety, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and all major film magazines. In addition he presented the first retrospective of the Japanese film director Ozu Yasujirō at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival and has since designed many festival retrospectives, acted as guest director of the Telluride Film Festival, and served on the juries at the Hawaii, Locarno, Thessaloniki, Pusan and Kerala Festivals.

Appointed Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art (1968-1973), Richie has been widely honored. Awards include: Citation, Japanese Film Industry, 1970; Citation, National Society of Film Critics (USA), 1970; First Kawakita Memorial Foundation Award, 1983; Special Award, Hawaii International Film Festival, Honolulu, 1986; New York University, Presidential Citation, 1989; San Francisco Novikoff Award, 1990; Tokyo Metropolitan Government Cultural Award, 1993; John D. Rockerfeller 3rd Award, 1994. The Japan Foundation Award, 1995, and the Japan Society 2000 Award, and an Imperial Kunsho from the Emperor of Japan.

At present he maintains a weekly column “The Asian Bookshelf” in the Japan Times. In addition, he teaches at Temple University, Tokyo. Stone Bridge Press recently released Richie’s A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics and will also publish his new book, Travels in the East, in September 2007. Other books recently published are: A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (Kodansha) and Japan Journals: 1947-2004 (Stone Bridge Press).