Art + Culture

ゲンロン Genron

株式会社ゲンロン About Genron Genron was founded in the spring of 2010 by a team led by author Hiroki Azuma. The Tokyo-based small company has as its mission to open an alternative space for political, cultural and critical discourses, and to envision the new shape of contemporary Japanese culture. Genron’s activities consist of three categories: (1) Operating the Genron Café, (2) Publishing, (3) Managing the Genron Supporters. https://genron.co.jp/en About Hiroki Azuma Genron founder Hiroki Azuma is one of the most influential critics in Japan. Born in Tokyo in 1971, he graduated from The University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and received his Ph.D in 1999. He then acted as a part-time lecturer at Keio University, the vice director at the Global Communication Center, International University of Japan, a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a professor at Waseda University before founding Genron. His specialties include philosophy, transdisciplinary cultural studies, and information society studies, and he has also been the chief contributor of the opinion section of the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s newspaper of record (2010-2011). Among his many writings are the domestic best-seller Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (2001), later translated into 6 languages including English (Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, University of Minnesota Press, 2007) as well as Ontological, Postal, a book on French modern philosophy (1998, winner of the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities), and General Will 2.0 (2011), on political thought. Azuma is also known as a science fiction author, and his Quantum Families (2009) received the 23rd Mishima Yukio Prize. He is constantly active online as well, and his tweets can be read at @hazuma in Japanese, and at @hazuma_en in English. https://genron.co.jp/en

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