Tracing Footsteps of Absolute Pacifists in Hawaii: Adopted Son Seiki Scatters Donald Keene’s Ashes at Sea

By Futoshi Mori / Japan News Senior Writer

7:02 JST, August 11, 2025

“This is the sea of Hawaii that Dad loved so much. Please rest in peace.”

Seiki Keene, 75, the adopted son of Donald Keene, a Japanese literature scholar from the United States, spoke these words aboard a yacht off the coast of Honolulu. He then scattered the ashes of Keene, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 96, into the sea.

At 12:19 p.m. on June 6 this year, a paper container filled with a small amount of ashes, which could fit in the palm of a hand, drifted away with pink and purple petals on the cobalt blue sea.

Hawaii, located between Japan and the U.S. mainland, is a place with special significance for Keene, where he developed a deep interest in Japan. Seiki wanted to mourn his father here.

Moved by Japanese soldier’s diaries

Keene is known for introducing Japanese literature to the world and for his friendships with famous writers such as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima.

Keene, who was born and raised in New York, encountered Japanese literature in 1940 while studying at Columbia University’s Faculty of Literature, when he picked up Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji at a bookstore. At that time, World War II had already begun in Europe. Feeling depressed, Keene became familiar with the world of The Tale of Genji, which did not depict war, and found peace of mind.

In 1941, when Keene was a senior in college, war broke out between the United States and Japan. Keene sensed that “great calamity was about to befall me” (from his autobiography), but when he learned that the U.S. Navy had opened a Japanese language school to gather information on the enemy, he volunteered to enroll. For Keene, studying Japanese was not only his “favorite subject,” but also meant that he would not have to take up arms and kill people on the battlefield.

After 11 months of intensive Japanese language training, Keene was assigned to the U.S. Navy Language Service and stationed in Hawaii, where he translated various Japanese military documents collected from the battlefields. When he read the diaries of Japanese soldiers who had died in combat, he found some to be highly literary and was impressed, thinking, “This is truly a country of diary literature, dating back to the Heian period.”

Keene wanted to return these diaries to their family someday, so he kept them in a drawer, but his superior officer found them and discarded them, deciding they were unnecessary. According to Seiki, Keene regretted losing them for many years.

Reading The Tale of Genji

The University of Hawaii at Manoa is located north of Waikiki Beach. The spacious campus is lush with tropical trees and filled with birdsong.

During the war, Keene attended lectures on Japanese literature given by Yukuo Uyehara, a first-generation Japanese American who passed away in 1998, while serving in the military. He reread The Tale of Genji, which he had enjoyed as a student, and wrote an essay in Japanese about his impressions of Kikuchi Kan’s novel “Shohai.” Mitsu taka Nakamura, a Japan studies librarian at the University of Hawaii Library who is familiar with Keene, said, “I think Professor Uyehara was also impressed by the enthusiasm of the young American soldier.”

Encounter with a kamikaze plane

However, Keene did not spend his wartime days in peace. He also experienced the harsh realities of battle as a soldier. In March 1945, toward the end of the war, Keene was on a transport ship bound for Okinawa.

Just as the ship was about to land, Japanese kamikaze planes appeared in the sky. Keene, who was on the deck, was so nervous that he couldn’t move and couldn’t think of anything. Just as he felt that he had made eye contact with the pilot of a kamikaze plane approaching him, the plane crashed into the ship’s mast and fell into the sea.

In May 1943, he participated in the Battle of Attu Island in the Aleutian Islands, where the Japanese Imperial Army was completely wiped out. It was here that he saw a dead human body for the first time.

Many soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army refused to be taken prisoner and chose to kill themselves. Keene wondered why Japanese soldiers did not throw their last hand grenades at American soldiers, but instead used them to kill themselves. Recalling that time, Keene told Seiki, “I couldn’t help but feel pity for them.”

After the war, Keene became an outspoken opponent of war. He even avoided watching war documentaries on television because they brought back memories that kept him awake at night.

When Seiki wore black clothes, Keene told him, “I don’t like black because it reminds me of totalitarianism and fascism.” Since then, Seiki stopped wearing black clothes.

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