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Around the Quads

IN MEMORIAM

Herbert Passin, a noted scholar of Japan and former chairman of Columbia’s sociology department, died of heart disease on February 26. He was 86. Passin arrived at Columbia in 1962 as a sociology professor and retired in 1977.

Born in Chicago on December 16, 1916, Passin was the son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants. He attended the University of Illinois, where he received a bachelor’s degree in genetics in 1936, and Northwestern, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in anthropology in 1941. He later taught at Northwestern.
Passin’s interest in Japan took root during World War II, when he began learning Japanese at an Army language school. He arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and worked in General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters as chief of the Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division. After the war, Passin held positions at UC Berkeley, the Social Science Research Council in Japan and Ohio State University. He was Far Eastern representative for the Tokyo-based international magazine Encounter from 1954–57, and from 1959–62 was a visiting professor at the University of Washington.

While at Columbia, Passin chaired the sociology department during three different periods between 1973 and 1977. He also worked as a professor at the East Asian Institute.

Passin helped establish the first Parliamentary Exchange Program between Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, and helped found the Shimboda Conference, which brought together American and Japanese government, business and academic luminaries to discuss relations at the site of Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 landing in Japan. A consultant on U.S.-Japanese relations for American and Japanese corporations and nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation, Passin also was a consultant to two Japanese prime ministers, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Noboru Takeshita. He received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the emperor of Japan in 1984 for his lifetime work in improving Japanese-American relations and for his writings.

Among the books that Passin wrote and edited about Japan were The United States and Japan (Prentice Hall, 1966), Japanese and the Japanese: Japanese Culture Through the Japanese Language (Kinseido, 1980) and Encounter with Japan (Kodansha International, 1982). He was the editor-in-chief of the first Japanese edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1969. An avid bibliophile, he donated 10,000 books from his private collection to the University when he retired.

Survivors include Passin’s second wife, Helen; brother, Sidney; son, Thomas; stepson, Scott Latham; and four grandchildren.

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