Ian Buruma (born December 28, 1951) is a British-Dutch writer and academic. Much of his work focuses on Asian culture, particularly that of 20th-century Japan.
He was born in The Hague, the Netherlands, to a Dutch father and British mother. He studied Chinese literature at Leiden University, and then Japanese film at Nihon University in Tokyo. He has held a number of editorial and academic positions, and has contributed numerous articles to the New York Review of Books. He has been noted as a "well-regarded European intellectual."
In 2000 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture — Neoromanticism of writers in exile — in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, The Netherlands. He has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C and St Antony's College, Oxford. In 2003 he became Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, New York.
Since 2005 he has resided in New York, USA.
In 2008 Buruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe."
The Japanese Tattoo (1980) with Donald Richie ISBN 978-0-8348-0228-5
Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1983) ISBN 978-0-452-00738-3
Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986) with James R. Brandon, Kenneth Frampton, Martin Friedman, Donald Richie
God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey (1989) ISBN 978-0-7538-1089-7
Great Cities of the World: Hong Kong (1991)
Playing the Game (1991) novel ISBN 978-0-374-52633-7
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and in Japan (1994) ISBN 978-0-452-01156-4
Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art (1998) with Jodi Cobb
Voltaire's Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe (UK title) (1998) or Anglomania: a European Love Affair (US title) (1999) ISBN 978-0-7538-0954-9
The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (2000) compilation ISBN 978-0-571-21414-3
De neo-romantiek van schrijvers in exil (Neoromanticism of writers in exile) (2000) ISBN 90-446-0028-1
Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001) ISBN 978-0-679-78136-3
Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853—1964 (2003) ISBN 978-0-679-64085-1
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004) with Avishai Margalit ISBN 978-0-14-303487-2
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006) ISBN 978-1-59420-108-0 winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book.
The China Lover (2008)novel ISBN 978-1-59420-194-3
Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010) ISBN 978-0-691-13489-5, with some historical examples of the value the separation of religion and national governance with the separation of church and state as one example.
Grenzen aan de vrijheid: van De Sade tot Wilders (Limits to Freedom: From De Sade to Wilders) (2010) — Essay for the Month of Philosophy in the Netherlands.
Essays
China's class ceiling, published in the Los Angeles Times