2011.4. 18 繼 Toyota 公司打算在宮田蓋大引擎廠
Donald Keene 直呼 胡不歸
Some Japanese Portraits by Donald Keene 日本文學散步
唐納德·基恩(Donald Keene)入籍日本，adult adoption
Lifelong Scholar of the Japanese Becomes One of Them
http://hcjapan.blogspot.tw/2012/04/keenes-love-for-japan-still-growing.html
Donald Keene’s Latest Japanese Adventure
Scholar
Donald Keene, who has dedicated his life to studying Japanese
literature, culture and customs, revealed last week that he's following
another Japanese tradition: adult adoption.
By Yuko Takeo
Donald
Keene, one of the world’s best-known Japanologists, has dedicated his
life to studying Japanese literature, culture and customs. Last week, he
revealed he’s following another Japanese tradition: adult adoption.
Mr. Keene, 90 years old, told an audience in northern Japan that in
March he adopted his long-time friend Seiki Uehara, a 62-year-old
performer of the shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument.
“It felt like the natural course of things,” the former Mr.
Uehara—now Seiki Keene—told JRT on Wednesday. The adoption grew out of a
friendship that started in 2006, and eventually led to Mr. Uehara’s
moving into Mr. Keene’s Tokyo home and helping the older man out with
things like keeping his large collection of books organized.
Adult adoption is a fairly common practice in Japan, with around a
third of all adopted individuals being adults, according to a survey
carried out by the Ministry of Justice in 2010, ahead of stricter checks
for accepting adoption applications. In 2011, there were 81,600 cases
of adoption in Japan. In many cases, adult men are adopted into families
in order to carry on the family name—and sometimes business—when there
are no male descendants.
Mr. Keene, who’s known for books and scholarship introducing Japanese
literature to the West—as well as his friendships with many of the
Japanese literary giants of the postwar period, has no children or other
family.
The pair originally came together over a keen interest in kojyoruri, an ancient form of Japanese musical performance. Mr. Uehara had performed in a similar style—jyoruri—for
25 years, as a shamisen player at the Bunraku-za puppet theater, under
the stage name of “Tsurusawa Asazo V.” He retired in 1997 and returned
to his home prefecture in northern Japan to help his family’s brewery
business, but remained passionately interested in the genre.
Mr. Keene is known as a leading expert on kojyoruri. In November
2006, Mr. Uehara approached the older man backstage, after a Tokyo talk,
to ask whether Mr. Keene would be his mentor on the subject. Mr. Uehara
told Mr. Keene he “had no one to seek guidance from,” the younger man
told JRT.
At the time, Mr. Keene was still teaching at Columbia University,
where he’d been for more than half a century, and spending time in the
U.S. as well as Japan. But following the March 2011 earthquake and
tsunami, Mr. Keene decided to move permanently to Japan and become a
Japanese citizen. That’s when he brought up to Mr. Uehara the idea of
adoption.
“When he’d first mentioned adoption, I thought he was joking,” the
junior Mr. Keene says. “But eventually I understood that he was being
serious.” Now the younger man helps his adoptive father organize his
busy schedule from their apartment in Tokyo, while holding shamisen
performances of his own. The older Mr. Keene gained Japanese citizenship
in 2012.
The pair say their cross-cultural partnership has been smooth so far.
The former Mr. Uehara says his family was delighted at the news of his
adoption, and that nobody close to Mr. Keene raised objections either.
And what does the younger Keene think of his new surname? “I like it a
lot,” he told JRT. “I’ve finally managed to get used to it.”
78歲的寶島歌后紀露霞28日將在國父紀念館舉辦封麥演唱會，昨天他在總彩排時表示，希望聽眾一起在她的歌聲中懷念舊時光，快樂一下。
