J. Thomas Rimer, who is teaching at UCLA this year at the Paul I. Terasaski Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations, was Chair of the Department of Chinese and Japanese at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught for fifteen years. Prior to then he taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, and at Washington University in St. Louis. He also served for four years, from 1983 to 1986, as the Chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. He studied Japanese literature with Donald Keene at Columbia University, receiving his PhD in 1971.
He has a number of interests in Japanese literature and the humanities. Much of his work in literature has concentrated on the writings of Mori Ôgai, one of the most significant writers of the Meiji Period, but he much enjoyed surveying the whole field of modern literature when he and his co-editor, Van Gessel, at Brigham Young University, compiled a two-volume Anthology of Modern Japanese literature from Columbia University Press, which was recently published. He has written quite a bit on Japanese theatre from various periods, and has translated the writings of Zeami, the fifteenth-century playwright and actor who did so much to create the tradition of the nô theatre, as well as the theatre writings of two important figures in the postwar Japanese theatre, the director Suzuki Tadashi and the critic Senda Akihiko. His collected miscellaneous writings were issued in a volume published by London’s Japan Library in 2004, and he is presently editing a book of essays on modern Japanese art for the University of Hawaii Press, and serving as co-editor of a forthcoming anthology of modern and contemporary drama for Columbia University Press.
He and his family are very much enjoying the California sunshine and the chance to hear so much good music and see so much innovate theatre in Los Angeles. It’s a magnificent city, except, of course, for the traffic!