Roger Pulvers (born 4 May 1944) is an Australian playwright, theatre director and translator. He has published more than 45 books in English and Japanese, from novels to essays, plays, poetry and translations. He has written prolifically for the stage and has seen his plays produced at major theatres in Japan, Australia and the United States
Pulvers has also directed widely in Australia and Japan, both in English and Japanese. He has written original scripts for radio documentaries and dramas that have been produced by ABC (Australia), as well as television scripts for NHK (Japan) and screenplays for feature films.
Early years
Pulvers was born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York on 4 May 1944. Soon after birth, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up, attending Burnside Ave. Elementary School, Louis Pasteur Junior High School (now LACES and Alexander Hamilton High School (1961), at which he was Student Body President.[1]
Early exposure to show business came from annual trips in the 1950s to Las Vegas, where Pulvers saw dinner shows of The Ritz Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr. and other entertainers. Also, his father, Louis (1903–1993), had worked as a lighting technician at Warner Bros. during and after the war, bringing home piles of glossy enlargements of actors on set. His mother, Miriam (1912–2006), had been secretary to William S. Klein, lawyer for the Shubert brothers, owners of New York theatres. In her later years she became private secretary to Bette Davis.
Education
Pulvers was an undergraduate at UCLA, completing the four-year course in three years with a major in Political Science, summa cum laude.
After graduation in June 1964, he went to Bloomington, Indiana to attend a Russian-language intensive course, going from there to Finland, the Soviet Union and Italy. In the Soviet Union he travelled extensively, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Yalta, Riga, Leningrad and Novgorod.
In September 1964 he entered the Russian Area Studies Program at Harvard University Graduate School, living on campus at Perkins Hall. He completed the two-year Master's Course in one year, receiving his MA with a thesis on "The Planning of Soviet Science.”
Pulvers spent the summer of 1965 in the Soviet Union, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland, returning to UCLA to further his studies of Eastern Europe and to study Polish. In September 1966, he went to Poland to do post-graduate work at Warsaw University on a scholarship from the National Students' Association (NSA) of the United States. While there, his interests turned away from political science to film and theatre, thanks to almost daily visits to the theatres and cinemas of that city. In January 1967 he moved to Kraków but was soon to leave Poland due to a scandal involving the NSA and the CIA. Though he was entirely innocent of any connection with the latter organization, he felt that he would never be able to return to Poland or the Soviet Union. He spent three months in Paris attending classes at the Sorbonne until his return to Los Angeles in May 1967. In September of that year he left the United States for Japan.
Career
In the late autumn of 1967, after spending four weeks in Korea to change his visa, Pulvers took up a lectureship in Russian and Polish at Kyoto Sangyo University. He spent five years in Kyoto teaching at that university and at Doshisha University, where he conducted a course in American poetry.
In 1969 he published his first book, a collection of short stories under the title "On the Edge of Kyoto." This was followed in August 1970 by the publication of a short play in Japanese translation, "The Perfect Crime of Mrs. Garigari", in the leading drama magazine, "Shingeki". In 1972 he was one of the winners of an essay contest sponsored by the Mainichi Shimbun. This led to the publication of the essay, "Kenji Isn't Here Now." This was Pulvers' first published work about Japanese author and poet Miyazawa Kenji; and it prompted a long association with the Mainichi Daily News.
In August 1972 Pulvers travelled to Australia for the first time to take up a lectureship in Japanese at the Australian National University in Canberra. It was not long before he was writing articles and stories for The Canberra Times, The Australian, The National Times, Newsweek and other publications, as well as doing regular radio broadcasts for a programs on the ABC. He also produced and directed plays in Canberra. His own plays were produced in Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle and Canberra. On 6 July 1976 he became an Australian citizen.
During the 1970s, Pulvers frequently went back to Japan to continue his involvement in Japanese arts and to be with his many friends who were their practitioners. He became particularly intimate with novelist/playwright Inoue Hisashi, at whose home he stayed. Pulvers also travelled to Europe, especially to Poland, where he was greeted in 1970 by film director Andrzej Wajda. His close friendship with Wajda has continued over the years.
In January 1980 Pulvers left the ANU to become Writer-in-Residence at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne. It was at the Playbox that he directed his own work and that of other playwrights. In the summer of 1982, Pulvers went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to be assistant to director Nagisa Oshima on the film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." After that he returned to Japan to take up the position of literary editor at the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo.
Since the 1980s, Pulvers has published hundreds of articles in the Japanese and world press (the Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Scientist, etc.), as well as books of fiction, non-fiction and translations from Japanese. He has appeared frequently on Japanese television and radio, and acted in the NHK Taiga Drama, "Sanga Moyu."
Since the early 1990s, Pulvers has divided his time primarily between Tokyo and Sydney, with frequent trips to Europe, particularly Poland, Ireland and the U.K. From 1996 to 1999 he was a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design; and from 1999, professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he was Head of the Centre for World Civilizations. He retired in 2013 to devote himself entirely to his writing.
In Tokyo he continued to write articles, including his weekly column, Counterpoint, in The Japan Times, to publish books of fiction and non-fiction, to direct in the theatre, to write screenplays and to act in film. In Australia he most recently directed at the Roxy Theatre in Leeton his translation/adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's "The Government Inspector.”
He wrote the script and directed the feature film of "STAR SAND” on location in Okinawa in 2016. The film was released in Japan in the summer of 2017.
Setting the Stage: Articles and essays about the state of our world today (2005)
新バイブル・ストーリーズ (Shin baiburu sutōrīzu) (2007)
わが友フロイス (Waga tomo Frois = My Friend Frois) (2007)
日めくり現代英語帳 (Himekuri gendai eigochō) (2007–2008)
英語で読み解く賢治の世界 (Eigo de yomitoku Kenji no sekai) (2008)
Delighting in Cultures―世界の中の日本人と日本人の中の世界 (Sekai no nakano nihonjin to nihonjin no naka no sekai) (2009)
英語で味わう名言集 心に響く古今東西200の言葉 NHKギフト～E名言の世界～ (Eigo de ajiwau meigenshū kokoro ni hibiku kokon tōzai 200 no kotoba) (2011)
もし、日本という国がなかったら (Moshi nihon to iu kuni ga nakattara = If There Were No Japan) (2011)
宮沢賢治『銀河鉄道の夜』 (ＮＨＫ100分de名著) (Miyazawa Kenji "Ginga tetsudou no yoru") (2011)
賢治から、あなたへ 世界のすべてはつながっている (Kenji kara anatae sekai no subete wa tsunagatteiru) (2013)
驚くべき日本語 (Odorokubeki nihongo) (2014)
ハーフ (Hāfu = Half) (2014)
こんにちは、ユダヤ人です (Konnichiwa yudaya jin desu) (2014)
星砂物語 (Hoshizuna monogatari = STARSAND) (2015)
10年間勉強しても英語が上達しない日本人のための新英語学習法 (10 nenkan benkyou shitemo eigo ga jyotatsu shinai nihonjin no tameno shin eigo gakushūhou) (2015)
英語で読む啄木: 自己の幻想 (Eigo de yomu Takuboku: jiko no gensō) (2015)
ぼくがアメリカ人をやめたワケ (Boku ga America jin wo yameta wake) (2020)
Books in French
Poussières d'étoiles ( (Star Sand in French translation) Amazon/Crossing France 2017)
Related Research Articles
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.
Kenji Miyazawa was a Japanese novelist and poet of children's literature from Hanamaki, Iwate, in the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He was also known as an agricultural science teacher, a vegetarian, cellist, devout Buddhist, and utopian social activist.
Dave Spector is an American gaijin tarento, television producer, author, and actor based in Japan. Originally from Chicago, he moved to Japan in 1983 after visiting as a producer with the American television program Ripley's Believe It or Not!. He appears regularly as a commentator on several different Japanese television programs, including a Wednesday spot on Fuji TV's daily morning news program Tokudane!, and TBS's weekly Sunday Japon.
Ian Hideo Levy is an American-born Japanese language author. Levy was born in California and educated in Taiwan, the US, and Japan. He is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese, and his work has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes.
Many Japanese words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese language when Portuguese Jesuit priests introduced Christian ideas, Western science, technology and new products to the Japanese during the Muromachi period.
Inoue Hisashi was a leading Japanese playwright and writer of comic fiction. From 1961 to 1986, he used the pen name of Uchiyama Hisashi.
Patrick Harlan is an American-born Japanese entertainer, comedian, and voice actor. He is known for being a member of the comedy duo, Pakkun Makkun, and is also known by his stage name Pakkun.
Genichiro Takahashi is a Japanese novelist.
Yuki Matsuzaki is a Japanese actor who has appeared in movies and on television.
Eiji Ōtsuka is a Japanese social critic, folklorist, media theorist, and novelist. He is currently a professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. He graduated from University of Tsukuba with a degree in anthropology, women's folklore, human sacrifice and post-war manga. In addition to his work with manga he is a critic, essayist, and author of several successful non-fiction books on Japanese popular and otaku subcultures. He has written the Multiple Personality Detective Psycho and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service manga series. One of his first animation script works was Mahō no Rouge Lipstick, an adult lolicon OVA. Ōtsuka was the editor for the bishōjo lolicon manga series Petit Apple Pie.
Christopher Belton is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and a Japanese/English translator working from Yokohama, Japan.
P. G. O'Neill was a British academic and writer on Japanese language and Noh drama.
Yoshimasa Hosoya is a Japanese voice actor and narrator.
Kazuyoshi Kino was a Japanese Buddhist scholar.
Hio Miyazawa is a Japanese-American actor and model. He was born in San Francisco, United States.
Ryota Yamasato, also known as Yama-chan (山ちゃん), is a Japanese comedian and television and radio personality. He rose to fame in the 2000s as one half of the manzai comedy duo The Nankai Candies. Outside Japan he is best known as one of the commentators on the reality television series Terrace House.
Tatsuki Fujimoto is a Japanese manga artist, known for his works Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man.
Adabana is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by NON. It was serialized in Shueisha's seinen manga magazine Grand Jump from March 2020 to June 2021, with its chapters collected in three tankōbon volumes.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a Japanese non-fiction book by novelist Minae Mizumura. First published in 2008, the book argues that the Japanese language and Japanese literature are in decline, in part due to the influence of English as a global language, and in part due to failures in Japanese education. Mizumura's criticisms of contemporary Japanese literature and recommendation to eliminate compulsory English language education generated significant public controversy in Japan.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
