Hans Brinckmann: Born in 1932 in The Hague, Hans grew up during the German occupation of Holland. Due to the dismal post-war conditions, he had to suppress his hope to become a writer. In order to make a living, he joined a Dutch bank after high school, for a one-year in-house education, in preparation for work in Asia. In 1950 he was assigned to Singapore, and four months later to Japan, where he lived for the next 24 years. In 1959 he married Toyoko Yoshida, a Japanese literature graduate. After reaching the position of area executive, Hans left banking and moved to Buckinghamshire in England, in 1974, to finally devote himself to writing. Economic necessity forced him to return to banking two years later. In 1986 Queen Beatrix made him an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau for ‘cultural and professional achievement’, notably in Japan and the US. In 1988, aged 56, he quit banking for good and after living in Amsterdam, London and Sydney, he returned with his wife to Tokyo again in 2003, where Toyoko died in 2007. In 2013 Hans moved to Fukuoka.

His publications so far include The Magatama Doodle, One Man’s Affair with Japan, 1950-2004 (Global Oriental, 2005), and Showa Japan, the Post-War Golden Age and its Troubled Legacy (Tuttle, 2008), both books also published in Japanese, in Hiromi Mizoguchi’s translation. And three books of fiction: Noon Elusive and Other Stories (Trafford, 2005); The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills and Other Stories (Strategic, 2011); and In the Eyes of the Son (Savant Books, 2014), as well as an English-Japanese book of poetry, The Undying Day (Trafford, 2011), with Brinckmann’s English poems shown side-by-side with Hiromi Mizoguchi’s Japanese versions. Also, The Monkey Dance, a brief memoir of the Winter of Starvation in Holland, 1944/1945. All books were very positively reviewed.

His most recent book, published in 2020 by Renaissance Books in the UK, is The Call of Japan: A Continuing Story – from 1950 to the Present Day. It has attracted many laudatory reviews, including by Roger Buckley for the Japan Society; by Stephen Mansfield for The Japan Times; and by Henry Hilton for Japan Today.

For further information, go to his website https://habri.jp.

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For Brinckmann’s ties with Kyoto, and for his presentation on 1950s Kyoto, please click here. For his amazon page, click here.

For a talk Hans gave at the Japan Writers Conference in 2021 about his lifelong ties with Kyoto, please see this youtube video…https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkQccshzyBOV0ILtCoHmBZA