Brian Burke-Gaffney

Brian Burke-Gaffney was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1950 and attended St. Mary’s University and Carleton University before leaving Canada for India on a "journey to the East." Arriving in Japan in July 1972, he was ordained a monk of the Rinzai Zen Sect the following year. He left the Buddhist priesthood in 1982 and moved to Nagasaki, where in 1992 be became the first non-Japanese recipient of the Nagasaki Prefecture Citizens Award. He was granted the Nagasaki Shimbun Culture Award in 2016. Currently professor emeritus of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science and honorary director of the historic theme park Glover Garden, he is an authority on the history of international relations in Nagasaki, particularly the foreign settlement period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is the author of numerous books and articles in English and Japanese, including "Starcrossed: A Biography of Madame Butterfly" (EastBridge, 2004), "Nagasaki: The British Experience, 1854-1945" (Brill, 2009) and several other titles available on Amazon.