Yamashita Honored by Japan

Religion professor Tadanori Yamashita has been bringing the language and culture of his native land to western Massachusetts for more than thirty-five years—and the emperor of Japan and the Japanese government recently honored him for his efforts with an imperial decoration. On May 10 at a special ceremony in Tokyo, Yamashita was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, class three, for promoting Japanese culture in a foreign country. He and nineteen other honorees, all, with the exception of Yamashita, ambassadors or other government officials, met with the Emperor Akihito (a former schoolmate of Yamashita’s) at a reception at the imperial palace following the award ceremony.

Kunsho¯ , the Japanese system of awarding official honorable decorations, was established in 1875 and serves to offer national recognition of the achievements of people of merit. The Japanese mass media give wide coverage to the conferring of the awards. The Order of the Sacred Treasure is bestowed on men and women age seventy or older and is ranked from the first class to the eighth class, according to the different degrees of meritorious service. The emperor of Japan bestows these decorations based on the recommendations of the Japanese cabinet.

“Professor Yamashita’s

decoration is a very high honor indeed,” said Tadamichi Yamamoto, consul general of Japan in Boston. “The government of Japan does not liberally bestow its decorations. Rather, it closely examines the merits of the individuals nominated for consideration. Of those nominated, only those people whose contributions are deemed real and substantive receive these hallmarks of national recognition.”

No one could view Yamashita as anything other than “real and substantive.” In addition to teaching at the College and conducting research on everything from Judaic law to Zen, he established MHC’s Asian studies department and (with his wife, Nobue Socho Yamashita) Wa-Shin-An, the College’s Japanese teahouse and traditional meditation garden. Off campus, he has devoted himself to teaching Japanese language and culture to the children of local Japanese people (at a school he founded in 1981 and of which he is still the principal) and to providing support for Japanese families who move to western Massachusetts either permanently or temporarily through the Japanese Peoples Association of Western Massachusetts.

Tadanori Yamashita, “who was surprised and honored” upon learning of this honor, has been a member of the MHC faculty since 1963. He is spending the fall semester conducting research in Japan. A graduate of Tokyo University, where he held a Japanese government scholarship, Yamashita received his B.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University.