Donald Keene

Education

Keene received a Bachelor's degree from Columbia in 1942. He studied the Japanese language at the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado and in Berkeley, California, and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific region during World War II. Upon his discharge from the US Navy, he returned to Columbia where he earned a master's degree in 1947.

Keene studied for a year at Harvard University before transferring to Cambridge University where he earned a second master's and became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1948–1954, and a University Lecturer from 1949–1955. In the interim, in 1953, he also studied at Kyoto University, and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1949. Keene credits Ryūsaku Tsunoda as a mentor during this period.

While studying in the East Asian library at Columbia, a man whom Keene did not know invited him to dinner at the Chinese restaurant where Keene and Lee, a Chinese-American Columbia graduate student, ate every day. The man's name was Jack Kerr, and he had lived in Japan for several years and taught English in Taiwan. Kerr invited Keene to study Japanese in the summer to learn Japanese from a student he taught in Taiwan, for Kerr to have competition when learning Japanese. Their tutor was Inomata Tadashi, and they were taught elementary spoken Japanese and kanji.

While staying at Cambridge, after winning a fellowship for Americans to study in England, Keene went to meet Arthur Waley who was best known for his translation work in classical Chinese and Japanese literature. For Keene, Waley's translation of Chinese and Japanese literature was inspiring, even arousing in Keene the thought of becoming a second Waley.

Career

Keene is a Japanologist who has published about 25 books in English on Japanese topics, including both studies of Japanese literature and culture and translations of Japanese classical and modern literature, including a four-volume history of Japanese literature which has become the standard work. Keene has also published about 30 books in Japanese, some of which have been translated from English. He is the president of the Donald Keene Foundation for Japanese Culture.

Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Keene retired from Columbia and moved to Japan with the intention of living out the remainder of his life there. He acquired Japanese citizenship, adopting the legal name キーン　ドナルド [Kīn Donarudo]. This required him to relinquish his American citizenship, as Japan does not permit dual citizenship.

Keene is well known and respected in Japan and his relocation there following the earthquake was widely lauded.

Selected works

In an overview of writings by and about Keene, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 600+ works in 1,400+ publications in 16 languages and 39,000+ library holdings.

Translations

Includes critical commentary

Editor

Honorary degrees

Keene has been awarded various honorary doctorates, from:

Awards and commendations

Decorations

Honors