Hiroki Azuma (東 浩紀) (born May 9, 1971) is a Japanese cultural critic, novelist, and philosopher. He is the co-founder and former director of Genron, an independent institute in Tokyo, Japan.

Biography

Azuma was born in Mitaka, Tokyo. Azuma received his PhD in Culture and Representation from the University of Tokyo in 1999 and became a professor at the International University of Japan in 2003. He was an Executive Research Fellow and Professor at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) and a Research Fellow at Stanford University's Japan Center. Since 2006, he has been working at the Center for Study of World Civilizations at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Azuma is married to the writer and poet Hoshio Sanae, and they have one child together. His father-in-law is the translator, novelist, and occasional critic Kotaka Nobumitsu.

Work

Hiroki Azuma is one of the most influential young literary critics in Japan, focusing on literature and on the idea of individual liberty. He began writing inspired by the work of Kojin Karatani and Akira Asada. He is an associate of Takashi Murakami and the Superflat movement. His publishing debut was "Solzhenitsyn Essay" in 1993. Azuma handed the work directly to Karatani during his lecture series at Hosei University which Azuma was auditing. Azuma launched his career as a literary critic in 1993 with a postmodern style influenced by leading Japanese critics Kojin Karatani and Akira Asada. In the late 1990s, Azuma began examining various pop phenomena, especially the emerging otaku/ Internet/video game culture, and became widely known as an advocate of the thoughts of a new generation of Japanese. He is interested in the transformation of the Japanese literary imagination under its current “otaku-ization.” Azuma has published seven books, including Sonzaironteki, Yubinteki (Ontological, Postal) in 1998, which focuses on Jacques Derrida's oscillation between literature and philosophy. This work won the Suntory Literary Prize in 2000 and made Azuma the youngest writer to ever win that prize. Akira Asada stated that it is one of the best books written in the 90s; however, Hiroo Yamagata pointed out that the book is based on the misunderstanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He also wrote Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (2001, lit, Animalizing Postmodernity; translated as Otaku: Japan's Database Animals in 2009), which analyzes Japanese pop culture through a postmodern lens and uses the term "database consumption" to describe a new paradigm of media consumption that consumes elements of a narrative rather than a narrative itself. He has also set up a non-profit organization to encourage cutting-edge critics who might be shut out of the existing publishing world.

Works

Joint works

Novels