was a noted Japanese author. He was also president of the Japan Writers' Association and director of

Keio University Press Keio University (慶應義塾) is the oldest and most highly rated private university in Japan. Due to its age, its campuses have many historic buildings. This article introduces some of the school's notable architecture. Mita campus In 1858, Fuk ...

Biography

Early life

Sakagami was born in Tokyo,

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. After moving several times during his school years ( Akasaka, Kumamoto City, Kagoshima City), he entered

Keio University , mottoeng = The pen is mightier than the sword , type = Private research coeducational higher education institution , established = 1858 , founder = Yukichi Fukuzawa , endowmen ...

where he studied formal logic. In 1960 he took a job with Riken Optical Industry (now Ricoh), which he left in 1995 to become an advisor to the Keio University Press.

Career

Sakagami's first novel, published at age 19, was nominated for the 1955 Akutagawa Prize. His subsequent novels often focused on social groups driven by strong ideologies, including ''Asa no mura'' (Village in the Morning, 1966) which describes the collapse of a community based on a theory of chicken breeding as the ideal organisation of society, ''Keita no sentaku'' (Keita's Decision, 1998) in which the protagonist joins a religious sect in the mountains, and ''Nemuran ka na'' (Should I sleep?, 2004) which describes how a generation devoted to Zen philosophy became entrepreneurs in the

Japanese post-war economic miracle The Japanese economic miracle refers to Japan's record period of economic growth between the post-World War II era and the end of the Cold War. During the economic boom, Japan rapidly became the world's second-largest economy (after the Unit ...

Awards

Sakagami received a number of awards for his writings, including the 1991 Yomiuri Prize for ''Yasashii teihakuchi'', the 1992 Noma Literary Prize for ''Denen fukei'', the Chūōkōron Prize for ''Aru aki no dekigoto'' (An Incident in Autumn), the New Writer's Prize of the Ministry of Culture, and the Kawabata Prize. In 2008 he became a member of the

Japan Art Academy is the highest-ranking official artistic organization in Japan. It is established as an extraordinary organ of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs (文化庁, Bunkacho) in the thirty-first article of the law establishing the Ministry of Ed ...

Sources

10th International Literature Festival, Berlin: Biography
* Japanese Wikipedia article

References

External links

J'Lit , Authors : Hiroshi Sakagami* , Books from Japan
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sakagami, Hiroshi 1936 births 2021 deaths People from Tokyo Japanese writers International Writing Program alumni Yomiuri Prize winners Presidents of the Japan Writers’ Association