Christopher R. Keener

PERSONAL

I was born and raised in Stonington, Connecticut, a small coastal community on the Southeast corner of the state.

I presently live in the town of Sakaki in Nagano prefecture in the mountains north west of Tokyo. Nagano Prefecture is the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics.

Hobbies? -- Well, I'm striving to allow myself the freedom to have some hobbies and extracurricular interests. Owning and running my own business keeps me a bit busy! Recently, I've become interested in body work (structural integration, psychocalisthenics), hypnotherapy, and simply growing things that are green.

EDUCATION & WORLDLY EXPERIENCE

kamo, inc (1992 - present)

• President and chief bottle washer
  kamo is the vehicle of my pursuits to help bridge understanding between Japanese companies and companies from the US and elsewhere to work better together in projects of high-tech collaboration.
  
  I started kamo right out of grad school because I wasn't ready to become a professorial type. I yearned to get my feathers wet with some real world experience in the hopes that I might have something more valuable to teach to others in later life.

University of California at Berkeley (1985 - 1992)

• Department of Anthropology
  In grad school, I found an environment in which I could finally study the topic which interests me the most: the relationship between technology and culture.

• Dissertation field work in Japan (1990 - 1991)
  For my dissertation research I studied the post-war industrial boom of the town of Sakaki, just east of Kamiyamada. In 1990, there were 400 factories in a town of less than 20,000 (1 in 50 people is president of their own company; who says Japan doesn't breed entrepreneurial spirit!). My dissertation was principally an empirical study ("writing it all down"), but like other scholars who have visited Sakaki, I pondered the reasons why this "miracle" occurred where and when it did.

• Inter-University Center (1986 - 1987)
  I owe the basis for my Japanese language ability to this fine program. Each year 40 fortunate Canadian and American students get immersed in this eight-month intensive language program. Two months out, I knew I was getting somewhere when I started dreaming in Japanese.

Brown University (1981 - 1985)

• Department of Computer Science
  I ended up majoring in Computer Science because it was what came most naturally, but I picked Brown among other places because of its diversity and orientation towards the curiosity of learning. I am grateful for the opportunity to have studied a technology at such depth while pursuing other interests in liberal arts.

• Japanese Language
  From junior high school on, I had studied French and hated it! When I got to Brown, where there was no language requirement, I suddenly took an interest in languages again and chose the furthest thing from French possible. With three years of college Japanese under my belt, I ventured to Japan for the first time and managed to discover I still had much to learn!

Deerfield Academy (1978 - 1981)

While I was a student at Deerfield, it was still an all-boys school; since then the school has followed the example of so many other private schools and gone coed. I think that single-sex educational alternatives should remain available. In my own experience, Deerfield was not only a nurturing environment for scholastic pursuits, but it also enjoyed an unequalled level of school spirit. I believe these would be difficult to maintain in an coed environment because of the natural tensions of puberty.

Back to English home page