“There have been a few points in Japanese history when great collections could be made,” says writer, calligrapher and Asian art collector Alex Kerr. “One was immediately after World War II, one was in the ’60s and early ’70s, and one is now. It’s a great time to buy Japanese art. Things I never could have acquired in the past are popping out of collections and estates and showing up at auction.” Kerr is sitting on the tatami-matted floor of his 400-year-old house outside Kyoto, gazing at his favorite Japanese screen, a haboku or splashed-ink landscape from the early Edo period. The screen is one of several hundred Kerr owns; most date from 1600 to 1850, though a few are from the 1500s. This particular screen was popular in the Muromachi period (1336–1573) and is the only extant screen of its type. “It’s basically a few splashes of ink,” says Kerr, “but out of it arise mountains, cliffs, trees, houses—it’s profoundly abstract. It haunts me.”

Kerr, who first came with his family to Japan at the age of 12, is a passionate and knowledgeable collector of classic East Asian art, which he has been purchasing for more than four decades. His collection of antique calligraphy screens is one of the largest in the world, yet in Japan, Kerr is better known as a writer and public speaker. His book Lost Japan won the Japanese equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1994, and his next book, Dogs and Demons, Tales from the Dark Side of Japan (published in 2001 in English and 2002 in Japanese), which Kerr says “tried to combine a study of finance and the bureaucracy with cultural issues to show that Japan’s modern malaise arises from the same causes in all these fields,” is considered one of the most important books on Japan’s troubles. “I’m an author who happens to be a mad collector,” Kerr says with a grin. “The collection is my teacher in many ways, concerning what I write. It’s been my teacher as a calligrapher, because I never really learned from a proper teacher. I learned from the pieces that I owned and traced and copied and studied.”

Kerr attended a grade school in Virginia that taught Chinese and from the age of 9 learned to copy the complex strokes of the characters, “I loved the rhythm of it; it kind of moves around like a dance.” Three years later, in 1964, his family moved to Japan, and young Alex bought himself brushes and ink and began to practice calligraphy. Today, he considers the art form, still one of the defining traits of life in Japan, to be his greatest love. In addition to having an important collection, Kerr is considered by calligraphy experts to be a master calligrapher in his own right, and he sells his art.

Collecting runs in Kerr’s family. The Chinese and Japanese souvenirs his father and grand-father, both naval officers, brought back laid the foundations for his love of Asian art. His mother, who collected Japanese screens and Imari porcelain plates, also instilled in him the passion for ownership. When Alex was a teenager living in Japan, his mother took him to a china shop and asked for Imari ware. “She had just done the equivalent of walking into a Woolworth’s and asking for Limoges,” says Kerr. Yet, the shopkeeper went to the back and returned with a box of 10 Imari plates, which had been sitting there since before the war, and were still wrapped in the ropes from the kiln. “It was like opening up King Tut’s tomb,” Kerr recalls. Many years later, he had the same feeling when buying screens at auction in Kyoto. “I’d find a screen that had been in someone’s storehouse that hadn’t been opened, literally, in 100 years. I’d pull it open and there would be mildew on it, and I realized I might be the first eyes looking at this thing in a century.”

Kerr’s budding interest in collecting was interrupted when he attended Yale (where he majored in Japanese Studies), but his passion was rekindled when he returned to Tokyo as an exchange student in 1972. His first acquisitions were Edo editions of block-printed Chinese classics. “It was incredible what you could find,” he says. “You could go down to the Kanda book district of Tokyo, which is still there, and they were selling on the streets Edo-period editions of block-printed Chinese classics. Real treasures were still available, and for only 50 yen [about 47 cents today] you could buy a hand-printed block edition from 1680 or 1720. These books were so little valued that they were being sold as scrap.”