PASSIN, Herbert 1916-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born December 16, 1916, in Chicago, IL; died of heart disease February 26, 2003, in New York, NY. Educator, government consultant, and author. Passin was a scholar of the Japanese language and culture who helped build relations between U.S. and Japanese governments and businesses. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he earned his bachelor's degree in genetics in 1940 and his master's degree in anthropology in 1941. With the start of World War II he joined the U.S. Army and attended the army's language school, where he learned Japanese and became fascinated by that country's culture. He was stationed in Tokyo after the war and helped with the reconstruction process as chief of the Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division until 1951.

Passin's academic career began in 1952 when he joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley as a lecturer in anthropology. During the 1950s he worked a variety of jobs, including as a researcher for the Social Science Research Council in Japan, a research associate at Ohio State University, the Far Eastern representative of Encounter magazine in Tokyo, and director of the international seminar program at the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris. After a three-year stint at the University of Washington, Passin took a position with the Columbia University faculty as professor of sociology in 1962 and was chairman of the sociology department from 1973 to 1977; he retired from Columbia in 1987 as professor emeritus. Throughout his career, Passin was involved in promoting improved relations between the United States and Japan: he founded the Shimoda Conference in 1967 that was designed to bring government, business, and academic leaders together to discuss issues involving the two countries, and he arranged to create an exchange program between government officials. Passin was also a prolific writer; he was editor of a monthly news column about Japan, served as editor-in-chief of the Japanese edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and wrote a number of scholarly books, including Society and Education in Japan (1965), The Legacy of the Occupation—Japan (1968), Japanese and the Japanese: Japanese Culture Seen through the Japanese Language (1980), and Encounter with Japan (1982). Many of his works were published in Japanese.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

Columbia Daily Spectator, March 14, 2003.

New York Times, March 9, 2003, p. A25.