A Personal Tribute to Shigeo Minowa: A Japanese Renaissance Man Passes

The day turned bleak after I received a telephone call early in the morning on 18 September 2013 informing me that Shigeo Minowa had departed from this world on 30 August at the venerable age of eighty-seven. His distraught family had chosen to immediately inform only a small circle of family and intimate friends of his passing and to convey the sad tidings at a later date to his many colleagues, collaborators, and acquaintances in the worlds of scholarly book publishing, the study of book culture, higher education, and international communication. And so I came to learn of the departure of a dear friend, colleague, and collaborator, as well as mentor and former boss.

Shigeo Minowa was a very unusual person in so many ways. For one, he skillfully demonstrated how a person could be simultaneously an intrepid and astute innovator, businessman, and entrepreneur, and a consummate scholar and internationalist, a concept readily given lip service in Japan, but finding an epitome in Minowa. Born in Tokyo in 1926, he entered the prestigious University of Tokyo and graduated in 1950 from the faculty of economics.

He initiated his entry into the world of publishing books as a business and as a means of disseminating scholarship when he created, in collaboration with two former classmates, his first job by establishing the University of Tokyo Press in 1951. The press, a private enterprise affiliated with the University of Tokyo, went on to become the largest and most successful university press in Japan and one of the premier university presses in the world. It was one of the first non-US-based presses to become a member of the Association of American University Presses while Minowa was at the helm as managing director. Eager to see Japan become more international and for the press to play a key role in making Japanese scholarship and culture known abroad, he set up the International Publications Division in 1969 and brought me on board as chief editor. The Japan Foundation recognized the press's international efforts with a Special Prize in 1990.

Minowa also very much wanted to take part more personally in Japan's internationalization process, and he confided in me in 1974 that it was his dream to join UNESCO to experience life for a while in France with his family. So, in an unheard of move for a Japanese person, in 1975 at the age of fifty he left the company he had helped to create to join the United Nations. His wish to live abroad was put aside when he responded to the Japanese government's request to help oversee the newly created United Nations University in Tokyo. He did this willingly and, among others, with the help of colleagues, eventually laid the groundwork for the establishment of the United Nations University Press. After retiring at age sixty, he became a professor at Kanagawa University, where he set up and taught at the Institute of International Business and Management. In the meantime, he managed to complete the requirements for a PhD degree, which he received from Sophia University in Tokyo in 2002 at the age of 76.

Minowa was one of the founders, and for a time president, of the Japan Society for Publishing Studies, one of the oldest academic societies in the world for the study of book publishing. He also helped to initiate a training program for book publishers in Asia in 1969 under the aegis of the Japan Book Publishers Association, and he introduced an internship program for young Asian book publishers at the University of Tokyo Press in 1973 as one his many undertakings to get the press more involved in helping scholarly publishers in Asian countries to strengthen their skills. He tirelessly organized international conferences involving publishers from Japan and abroad and represented Japan at many book scholarship and book expert conferences in other countries. He served on the advisory committees of several international journals and international scholarly bodies, including the now-defunct International Association of Scholarly Publishers (IASP), of which he was a founding member and also the first...