John Whitney Hall

John Whitney Hall (born September 13, 1916 in Tokyo , † October 31, 1997 in Tucson , Arizona ) was an American historian and Japanologist . He was a professor at Yale University ( A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Japanese History ).

Hall was born to a missionary couple in Tokyo and grew up in Japan . To attend high school he went to the USA, attended the Phillips Academy and studied at Amherst College with a bachelor's degree in 1938, after which he was an English teacher and representative of Amherst College at Dōshisha University in Kyoto until 1941 . During World War II he worked for naval intelligence against Japan. In 1950 he received his doctorate in Japanese studies from Harvard University under Edwin O. Reischauer (also a missionary's son). From 1948 he was at the University of Michigan , where he in 1952 assistant professor , in 1955 associate professor was and in 1959 a professor of history. He was there from 1957 to 1961 director of the Center for Japanese Studies and often in Japan, where his university maintained a research center in Okayama . Hall studied the files of the leading royal families of ancient Japan there. In 1961 he became a professor at Yale. He was chairman of the Council on East Asian Studies and was a Masters at Morse College from 1966 to 1970 . From 1973 to 1976 he headed the history faculty and from 1971 to 1974 the department of East Asian Languages ​​and Literature . In 1983 he retired. He dealt mainly with Japan from the 17th to 19th centuries (before opening to the west) and the Kamakura period .

He was president of the Association of Asian Studies, chaired the US-Japan Friendship Committee from 1976 to 1980, and worked closely with the Japan Foundation , which financially supported Japanese studies in the United States. From 1968 to 1980 he was chairman of the United States-Japan Conference on Educational and Cultural Interchange . From 1956 to 1968 he was co-editor of the American Historical Review . In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Hall received the Order of the Sacred Treasure in Japan. He had a large collection of Japanese art and was a mountaineer who climbed a lot in Japan.

Fonts

• The Japanese Empire (=  Fischer Weltgeschichte . Volume 20 ). 1968.
  • English edition: Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times . Delacorte Press, New York 1970.
• Japanese History: A Guide to Japanese Research and Reference . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1954.
• Tanuma Okitsugu , Forerunner of Modern Japan . Harvard University Press, 1955.
• John Whitney Hall, Richard K. Beardsley, Robert E. Ward: Village Japan . University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• John Whitney Hall, Richard K. Beardsley: Twelve Doors to Japan . McGraw-Hill, 1965.
• Government and Local Powers in Japan, 500 to 1700 . Princeton University Press, 1966.
• Associate Editor of the Cambridge History of Japan . Cambridge University Press, from 1988

Web links

• John Whitney Hall papers