Donald Keene Center Visiting Fellows

Fall 2000

BAN Shigeru  (Architect)

One of Japan’s leading younger architects, Mr. Ban gained international attention for his low-cost quickly built relief structures, using durable cardboard tubing, built in Kobe immediately following the earthquake of January 1995.  He has since constructed similar buildings for victims of earthquakes and other natural disasters in Turkey and Rwanda. Born in 1957, Mr. Ban received his architecture degree from The Cooper Union (NY), following study at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.  He worked in the architecture firm of Arata Isozaki (1982-83).  In 1995, Mr. Ban established an NGO called Voluntary Architects Network (VAN) and soon afterward was made special consultant of the UN High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR).  He is also active as a designer of private homes, apartment houses and public-housing developments, galleries, museums, railway stations for JR, and furniture and industrial designs. Mr. Ban’s awards include:  SD Architect of the Year (1985); Tokyo Society of Architects House Award  (1993); Mainichi Design Prize (1995); Tokyo Journal Innovative Arts Award (1996); Shinkenchiku Magazine Yoshioka Award (1996); Intl. Architects Academy Ecopolis Award (1996); Japan Institute of Architects Best Young Architect of the Year Award (1997); JIA Tohoku Award (1998). Mr. Ban presented a lecture entitled "Beyond Paper and Curtain: Architectural Works and Humanitarian Activities of Shigeru Ban" at Columbia University on April 24, 2000, which was co-sponsored by the Donald Keene Center and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. Two days after his lecture at Columbia a large environmental structure of Ban's opened in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and remained as a temporary installation in the MoMA until August. In June, Mr. Ban's design for the Japanese Pavilion opened at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, and was acclaimed as the most successful Pavilion at the 2000 World's Fair. Mr. Ban returned to Columbia in the fall semester of 2000 to teach an Architecture Studio course at Columbia. As part of this course, Mr. Ban graciously offered to have students accompany him to Turkey, where he was instrumental in constructing temporary shelters for the thousands of people who were left homeless after a massive earthquake struck in 1999. He completed his Visiting Fellow activities in February 2001, when he presented various public lectures at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, The Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Japan Society (New York), and the Graham Foundation/Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago.

IMAI Masaharu (Historian)

Professor Imai is considered one of Japan's most prominent scholars of medieval Japanese Buddhism. He received his Ph.D. in History from Tokyo University of Education (Tokyo Kyoiku Daigaku, now University of Tsukuba) in 1977, held Visiting Professor positions at Beijing University (1992), Princeton University (1993), and Lijublijanna University in Slovenia (1997), and taught as an Assistant Professor and Professor in the Department of Human Science at Ibaraki University from 1977-1996. He was recently named Dean of the College of Japanese Language and Culture at the University of Tsukuba, where he has been a Professor at the Institute of History and Anthropology and Director of the Program on Japanese History since 1996. Professor Imai has published, edited, and presented a vast number of volumes, articles and lectures on a great range of topics related to Japanese studies. Some of his more recent books include Amerika ni watatta bukkyo bijutsu (Japanese Buddhist Art Objects Preserved in the United States, 1999), Sutehijiri Ippen (Ippen the Recluse-Mendicant, 1999), Shinran to sono kazoku (Shinran and His Family,1998), Ibaraki no Zenshu (The Zen Schools of Ibaraki,1997), and Chusei o ikita Nihonjin (Outstanding Figures of Medieval Japan,1992). Professor Imai was a Visiting Fellow of the Donald Keene Center and a Visiting Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures from September to November 2000. His activities included workshops and seminars with Columbia graduate students in Japanese religion, history and literature, and public lectures at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Illinois, Princeton University, Yale University, and Honganji (New York Buddhist Church).     Japan Studies at Columbia University in New York, Fall 2000 On November 3, 2000, Professor Imai led a symposium at Columbia entitled New Perspectives on Studying Medieval Japan that was co-sponsored by the Donald Keene Center and the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies at Columbia. The symposium involved twenty-two leading scholars from surrounding universities, museums, and institutions, and focused on four topics: Defining "Medieval Japan": New Perspectives; Buddhism, Shinto, and Women's History; History and Art: Dealing with Textual and Nontextual Primary Sources; and The Formation of "Nihon Kenkyu" and US-Japan Intellectual Exchange. Upon Professor Imai's return to Japan, he wrote a book about his experiences as a Visiting Fellow entitled Japan Studies at Columbia University in New York, Fall 2000, which was published by the College of Japanese Language and Culture, University of Tsukuba, in the spring of 2001.