Alex Kerr (0fficially appointed “Tourist Ambassador of Japan, Author)

Kyoto:                                                                         Bangkok:

Yada-Tenmangu, Mubanchi                                     15/25 City Lake Tower

Higashi-Kakiuchi, Kamiyada-cho                               Sukhumvit Soi 16

Kameoka City, Kyoto Prefecture                               Bangkok

JAPAN  621-0856                                                        THAILAND 10110

Tel/Fax: +81 (90) 5366-6046                                        Email: alexakerr@gmail.com

 A long-time resident of Japan and Thailand, Alex Kerr is a well-known author of books on East Asia. His specialty has been traditional culture, ranging from ceramics and architecture to performing arts such as Kabuki. Of all the arts he’s especially attached to calligraphy, which he first started learning at the age of nine.

Alex’s other career in Japan has been the restoration of old houses (as of 2021, about 45 houses). It started when while still in college he bought a 300-year old thatched house in romantic Iya Valley in the southern island of Shikoku. He named that house Chiiori (meaning “House of the Flute”). The house had been long abandoned, the roof was leaking, there was no electricity or water, and the nearest road was an hour’s walk down the mountain. That’s when the decades long work of restoration began, which in later years expanded to restoring houses all around Japan.

Since 1990, Alex has lived about half of each year in Bangkok, Thailand, which is his second home. Using Bangkok as a base he has explored the cultures of Southeast Asia: Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Alex first came to Japan in 1964 when his father, a US Naval officer, was posted to the US base in Yokohama. As a twelve-year-old boy he used to make excursions to the towns and countryside around Yokohama, and then discovered his life long fascination with Japan.

Alex later majored in Japanese studies at Yale, and went on to study Chinese as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford University. In between he studied as an exchange student at Keio University in Tokyo, and it was then that he discovered Iya Valley and bought Chiiori.

Alex’s breakthrough first book was Lost Japan, which he wrote in Japanese and published in 1993 (translated into English in 1996). In 1994, it was awarded the prestigious Shincho Literary Prize for non-fiction, the first non-Japanese ever to win it. In it, Alex described his experiences in Iya Valley, and then wrote about living in the town of Kameoka outside of Kyoto (where he has resided since 1977), with other chapters on Kyoto, calligraphy, and working for Texan real estate mogul Trammell Crow in Japan in the 1980s.

In 2001’s Dogs and Demons Alex wrote a hard-headed journalistic account of the damage done to Japan’s natural environment as a result of public works projects gone awry. Since then he has continued to write on issues of rural collapse (due to depopulation) and sustainable revival of the countryside. Later books in Japanese include Theory of Japanese Landscape (2014), Destroying the Nation with Tourism (2019), and Japan Pilgrimage (2020)

In English, Alex published Another Kyoto (2016), which looks at Kyoto from unusual angles, with chapters such as “Gates”, “Walls”, and “Floors”. In November 2020, Finding the Heart Sutra (2020) came out, a light-hearted presentation of the Heart Sutra, the shortest of all Buddhist writings. The sutra is just 60 lines long, but it has baffled commentators for a thousand years. While the book is light-hearted, the project had taken Alex almost forty years to complete

Most recently, in July 2021, Alex published Another Bangkok, which talks about the deep cultural wellsprings from which the huge modern city of Bangkok has evolved.

As an officially appointed “Tourist Ambassador of Japan,” Alex is deeply involved in issues of sustainable tourism development. His book (so far only in Japanese) Destroying the Nation with Tourism was not an attack on tourism per se, but a primer in techniques of how to manage tourism beneficially.

 For the present, during covid, Alex is translating Japan Pilgrimage (a travelogue of visiting ten faraway or little-known places) from Japanese into English. And he’s working on his new Youtube channel Secrets of Things.

 Alex says his website is long out of date, so for the time being he doesn’t recommend it. Instead, it’s best to keep up with his activities on Facebook. The books can be found on Amazon or Book Depository.