Japanese Culture and the Interconnectedness of Everything under the Sun

Join acclaimed author, translator and commentator on Japan, Roger Pulvers, for a thought-provoking keynote exploring Japanese culture.

As part of Questacon’s Australia and Japan: A Day of Discovery, Roger will examine how insights from Japanese culture could help address some of the biggest challenges facing the 21st century. Drawing on Japanese concepts of time and space, he will reveal new ways of thinking about change, connection and our place in both the world and the cosmos.

About Roger Pulvers:

Roger Pulvers is an acclaimed author, playwright, theatre and film director, translator and journalist who has published more than sixty-five books in Japanese and English. In 2017 the feature film of Star Sand, written and directed by him, had wide release throughout Japan. His two memoirs, My Japan: a cultural memoir and The Unmaking of an American, have been praised as forming a unique record of cultural life in Japan in the past fifty years. 

Roger has worked extensively in film, television and theatre. He was assistant to director Nagisa Oshima on the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie, Tom Conti and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and co-wrote the script for the award-winning Japanese feature Best Wishes for Tomorrow. He has twice directed major productions at the Adelaide Festival of Arts; and his translation/adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector toured Australia in a Bell Shakespeare Co. production.

Roger received the prestigious Miyazawa Kenji Prize in 2008 and the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2013; in 2018, Japan’s highest honour, the Order of the Rising Sun; and in 2019, the Order of Australia (AM). Over the past fifty years he has translated prose, drama and poetry from Japanese, Russian and Polish.