About the Speaker
Dr Ian McArthur is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Japanese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Sydney. In the 1980s, while Tokyo correspondent for the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times group of newspapers, Ian began researching rakugo, the Japanese art of narrating humourous short stories.

Ian’s research into rakugo was sparked by an interest in the Australian-born storyteller (rakugoka) Henry Kairakutei Black, who lived in Japan between 1865 and 1923. In 1992, while at the International Department of Kyodo News in Tokyo, Ian authored a Japanese-language book about Black (Kairakutei Burakku: wasurerareta Nippon saikō no gaijin tarento) published by Kodansha. Then, in the following year, he appeared in the role of Black in a stage play in Kashiwa. In 2002, he completed a doctoral thesis at Sydney University about Black’s narrated adaptations of nineteenth-century European mystery novels as contributions to the reform debate in Meiji-era Japan. In 2009, Ian won the third Inoue Yasushi Award for Outstanding Research in Japanese Literature in Australia for his paper Narrating the Law in Japan – Rakugo in the Meiji Law Reform Debate in the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.