Roy Anthony Starrs

Background

Roy Anthony Starrs was born on November 18, 1946, in Birmingham, England, to Edward Kenneth and Daisy May (Hay) Starrs. In 1996, he became a naturalized Canadian citizen.

Education

In 1971, Roy Starrs received a Bachelor of Arts from the University British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Then, in 1980, he received a Master of Arts there, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1986.

Career

From 1969 to 1970, Roy Starrs was a teacher at a secondary school in Scotland. Then, from 1972 to 1974, he was an english teacher in Japan. Roy also was an instructor at Vancouver Community College in British Columbia from 1975 to 1976. From 1986 to 1987, he was an instructor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and then became a postdoctoral research fellow, the post he held from 1987 to 1989.

Starrs also worked at the Union College in Schenectady, New York, from 1989 to 1991, as an assistant professor of Japanese. Beginning in 1991 Roy was an associate professor of Japa-nese at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and also was a teacher of Japanese and convener of Asia Studies Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Achievements

• Roy Anthony Starrs has been listed as a noteworthy Asian studies educator. He has written critical studies of the major Japanese writers, edited books on Asian nationalism, globalization, pan-Asianism, Japanese modernism, and cultural responses to disaster in Japan.

Works

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  • Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima

    (Although Mishima's main literary ambition was to write ph...)

    1994
  • Japanese Cultural Nationalism

    (In November 2001, the 15th annual conference of the New Z...)

    2004
  • Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia

    (This wide-ranging, multidisciplinary collection of essays...)

    2002
  • Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata

    (This first full length, and long overdue, study of Kawaba...)

    1998
  • Modernism and Japanese Culture

    (An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex hist...)

    2011
  • Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization

    (Topics include: Government Intervention and Economic Grow...)

    2001
  • New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics

    (This collection presents twenty-seven new essays in Japan...)

    2019
  • An Artless Art - The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya: A Critical Study with Selected Translations

    (Shiga Naoya was a giant of Japanese literature but he is ...)

    1998

Views

Roy Starrs is 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, he is interested in how the human mind manifests itself in cultures other than my own, and so he has spent much of his life studying foreign languages and cultures.

When StarrsF first went to live in Japan in 1972, he was motivated by a desire to see the ‘land of Zen’ at first hand. During his two years in Kyoto Roy practiced Zen meditation at Daitokuji Temple and studied the Zen arts of ink painting and calligraphy at the atelier of Shotei Ibata. He also discovered that Zen is on the wane in present-day Japan, along with so much else of the traditional culture. However, when he came to write his books on the modern Japanese writers Yuko Mishima, Naoya Shiga, and Yasunari Kawabata, Roy found that his training in Zen helped him better understand some 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 Starrs has broadened his 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 him back to literature. Currently, Roy works on a novel dealing with the painful issues of national identity faced by Jews living in early twentieth-century Germany.

Membership

Roy Starrs was a member of the European Association of Japan Studies, Canadian Asian Studies Association, American Association for Asian Studies, British Association of Japan Studies and Nordic Association of Japan Studies.

Interests

• Painting, yoga, reading

• Sport & Clubs

  Tennis, hiking

Connections

On August 25, 1976, Starrs married Kazuko Yamaguchi. They have two children: Sean Kenji and Serena Antonia.

Father:

Edward Kenneth

Mother:

Daisy May Starrs

Spouse:

Kazuko Yamaguchi

Daughter:

Serena Antonía Starrs

Son:

Sean Kenji Starrs