Starrs, Roy 1946- (Roy Anthony Starrs)

PERSONAL:

Born November 18, 1946, in Birmingham, England; naturalized Canadian citizen; son of Edward Kenneth and Daisy May Starrs; married Kazuko Yamaguchi, August 25, 1976; children: Sean Kenji, Serena Antonia. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: University of British Columbia, B.A., 1971, M.A., 1980, Ph.D., 1986. Politics: New Democrat. Religion: "Student of Rinzai Zen Buddhism." Hobbies and other interests: Tennis, hiking, painting.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Asian Studies Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Teacher at a secondary school in Scotland, 1969-70; English teacher in Japan, 1972-74; Vancouver Community College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, instructor, 1975-76; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, instructor, 1986-87, postdoctoral research fellow, 1987-89; Union College, Schenectady, NY, assistant professor of Japanese, 1989-91; University of Århus, Århus, Denmark, associate professor of Japanese, beginning 1991; University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, associate professor of Japanese literature and culture. International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan, visiting research fellow, 2004-05.

MEMBER:

European Association of Japan Studies, Canadian Asian Studies Association, American Association for Asian Studies, British Association of Japan Studies, Nordic Association of Japan Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 1987-89, Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, 1992, and Japan Foundation, 1994-95.

WRITINGS:

Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1994.

(Editor, with Søren Clausen and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg) Cultural Encounters: China, Japan, and the West; Essays Commemorating Twenty-five Years of East Asian Studies at the University of Århus, Århus University Press (Århus, Denmark), 1995.

(Editor, with Bjarke Frellesvig) Japan and Korea: Contemporary Studies, Århus University Press (Oakville, CT), 1997.

An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Noya; A Critical Study with Selected Translations, Japan Library (Richmond, England), 1998.

Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata, Japan Library (Richmond, Surrey, England), 1998.

(Editor) Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization, Routledge/Curzon (London, England), 2001.

(Editor) Nations under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor) Japanese Cultural Nationalism at Home and in the Asia-Pacific, Global Oriental (London, England), 2004.

Contributor of articles and reviews to scholarly journals. Assistant editor of the annual Japan Studies in Canada, 1987, 1988.

SIDELIGHTS:

Roy Starrs told CA: "I am interested above all in the human mind, its depths as well as its shallows, its imaginative flights and transcendental ecstasies as well as its ideological fixations and ego-driven self-deceptions—in short, its capacity both for salvation and damnation. More particularly, I am interested in how the human mind manifests itself in cultures other than my own, and so I have spent much of my life studying foreign languages and cultures.

"When I first went to live in Japan in 1972, I was motivated by a desire to see the ‘land of Zen’ at first hand. During my two years in Kyoto I practiced Zen meditation at Daitokuji Temple and studied the Zen arts of ink painting and calligraphy at the atelier of Shotei Ibata. Of course I also discovered that Zen is on the wane in present-day Japan, along with so much else of the traditional culture. However, when I came to write my books on the modern Japanese writers Yuko Mishima, Naoya Shiga, and Yasunari Kawabata, I found that my training in Zen helped me better understand some of the major underlying issues these writers dealt with—in particular, their psychological struggles as ‘alienated’ modern Japanese cut off from their native spiritual traditions, but longing in their hearts for the sense of wholeness and harmony that only those traditions could bestow.

"In more recent years I have broadened my horizons beyond the problems of individual psychology—and beyond literature—to edit books on the rising tensions between nationalism and globalization in the context, not only of Japan, but of Asia as a whole. This is a study of human minds on a whole other level, the level of national prejudices used to bolster fragile postmodern egos. But this new social/political concern has ultimately led me back to literature: I am now at work on a novel dealing with the painful issues of national identity faced by Jews living in early twentieth-century Germany."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of Asian and African Studies, May, 1999, Steven Heine, review of An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Noya; A Critical Study with Selected Translations, p. 239.

Journal of Asian Studies, February, 2001, Michiko Niikuni Wilson, review of Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata, pp. 227-229; August, 2002, Edward Friedman, review of Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization, pp. 1014-1015.

Journal of Japanese Studies, February, 2000, Philip Gabriel, review of An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya, pp. 191-195.

Times Higher Educational Supplement, March 19, 1999, Stephen Dodd, review of Soundings in Time, p. 24; winter, 2000, Ted Goossen, review of An Artless Art, pp. 191-195.

Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 1999, Anthony Thwaite, review of Soundings in Time, p. 32.