Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma talks with an attendee at the 2006 Texas Book Festival.
Born	(1951-12-28) December 28, 1951 The Hague, Netherlands
Occupation	Writer, Lecturer
Nationality	Dutch
Genre	Non-fiction
Subject	Japan, Occidentalism, Orientalism

Ian Buruma (born December 28, 1951) is a British-Dutch writer and academic. Much of his work focuses on the culture of Asia, particularly that of 20th-century Japan.

He was born in The Hague, the Netherlands, to a Dutch father and British mother. He studied Chinese literature at Leiden University, and then Japanese film at Nihon University in Tokyo. He has held a number of editorial and academic positions, and has contributed numerous articles to the New York Review of Books. He has been noted as a "well-regarded European intellectual."

In 2000 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture – Neoromanticism of writers in exile – in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, The Netherlands. He has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C and St Antony's College, Oxford. In 2003 he became Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, New York.

Since 2005 he has resided in New York, USA.

In 2008 Buruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe."

He is among the 100 top global thinkers of 2010, as selected by the Foreign Policy magazine. His contribution as a public intellectual, according to the magazine, is as follows:

Many liberals these days seem at pains to establish their bona fides as tough-minded hawks when it comes to global threats, but the Dutch man of letters has made a career out of affirming the classic liberalism of the open-door variety. His writing in recent years has attracted the ire of critics who think he equivocates on the dangers of radical Islam, but Ian Buruma made his response this year with a typically judicious and politically relevant book, Taming the Gods, that reflects on the Western capacity for religious pluralism. According to Buruma, Western society is robust enough to embrace even illiberal practices, so long as these are not violent. "Living with values that one does not share," he wrote in a recent column on France's burqa ban, "is a price to be paid for living in a pluralist society."

Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, a series of interviews with whom he published in book form.

Works

• The Japanese Tattoo (1980) with Donald Richie ISBN 978-0-8348-0228-5
• Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1983) ISBN 978-0-452-00738-3
• Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986) with James Brandon, Kenneth Frampton, Martin Friedman, Donald Richie ISBN 978-0810916906
• God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey (1989) ISBN 978-0-7538-1089-7
• Great Cities of the World: Hong Kong (1991)
• Playing the Game (1991) novel ISBN 978-0374526337
• The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and in Japan (1994) ISBN 978-0-452-01156-4
• Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art (1998) with Jodi Cobb
• Voltaire's Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe (UK title) (1998) or Anglomania: a European Love Affair (US title) (1999) ISBN 978-0-7538-0954-9
• The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (2000) compilation ISBN 978-0-571-21414-3
• De neo-romantiek van schrijvers in exil (Neoromanticism of writers in exile) (2000) ISBN 90-446-0028-1
• Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001) ISBN 978-0-679-78136-3
• Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853–1964 (2003) ISBN 978-0-679-64085-1
• Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004) with Avishai Margalit ISBN 978-0-14-303487-2
• Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006) ISBN 978-1-59420-108-0 winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book.
• Conversations with John Schlesinger (2006) ISBN 0-375-75763-5
• Commentary on the History of China for the time period of The Last Emperor, The Criterion Collection 2008 DVDs (ASIN: B000ZM1MIW, ISBN 9781604650143).
• The China Lover (2008) novel ISBN 978-1-59420-194-3
• Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010) ISBN 978-0-691-13489-5, with some historical examples of the value the separation of religion and national governance with the separation of church and state as one example.
• Grenzen aan de vrijheid: van De Sade tot Wilders (Limits to Freedom: From De Sade to Wilders) (2010) – Essay for the Month of Philosophy in the Netherlands.

Essays

• China's class ceiling, published in the Los Angeles Times

See also

• Religious pluralism

External links

• Official Website, with curriculum vitae
• Column archive at Project Syndicate
• Column archive at The Guardian
• Column archive at The New York Review of Books
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Template:Worldcat id
• Ian Buruma collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Article archive at Journalisted

Interviews

• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Ian Buruma from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Ian Buruma discusses A Murder in Amsterdam [Video]