In MemoriamMichael Cooper (1930–2018)

Michael Cooper, editor of Monumenta Nipponica from 1972 to 1997, died peacefully in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 31 March 2018 after a short illness. He was just a month short of his eighty-eighth birthday. In Japan, as he would undoubtedly point out were he writing this piece, this is a felicitous marker of longevity. Michael was born in London on 25 April 1930. He paid great attention to people’s birthdays and to remembering them with a card. Perhaps as a gentle reproach to those less conscientious and kind about such matters than he, on occasion he remarked that his birthday could be easily recalled because it was the same as Oliver Cromwell’s.

After completing his secondary education at the Jesuit school Beaumont College, Old Windsor, Michael entered the Society of Jesus in September 1948. He spent the next six years at Jesuit training centers in the United Kingdom and Spain. The time spent in Spain likely fostered the skills in Spanish and Portuguese that he later would put to use in his research on the Western encounter with Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This stage of his education concluded with a year of philosophical studies at Manresa College, London, in 1953–1954.

The following year Michael was sent to Japan, where he embarked on two years’ study of Japanese at the Jesuit language program in Taura, Yokosuka. The school’s proximity to Kamakura encouraged exploration of that city’s temples and other sites and led him to become, in the words of the blurb to his historical guidebook Exploring Kamakura: A Guide for the Curious Traveler (Weatherhill, 1979), a “confirmed Kamakura buff.” The same blurb reports that the guidebook is based on “notes taken during his student days.” Later he would often enjoy leading friends and visitors on personal tours to his favorite spots.

In the classroom at Sophia (late 1950s). Sophia University Archives.

Michael spent two further years in Japan teaching English at Sophia University and working in the university’s public relations office before going back to the UK in 1959 for four years of theological studies at Heythrop College, then located near Oxford. Presumably it was during this time that the general course of his subsequent academic path was set. He once mentioned that Pedro Arrupe, later superior general of the Society of Jesus and from 1958 to 1965 head of its Japan Province, instructed him to obtain a degree in anthropology with the idea that he would eventually return to Tokyo and take up the editorship of MN. In 1963 Michael entered the two-year program in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, at the time the usual preliminary step for pursuing an advanced degree there in the subject. Having obtained a diploma in social anthropology, he proceeded to the doctoral course and was awarded his doctorate in 1969.

Oxford was a center of the “cultural translation” approach to social anthropology associated with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, with whom Michael studied. Evans-Pritchard emphasized the importance of immersing oneself in the language and culture of the society that was the object of one’s research. Only in this way could one grasp what things meant in their original context and, on that basis, translate them accurately into the mode of understanding basic to one’s own language. Michael would adopt cultural translation as both a topic to investigate and a principle to apply.

The core of Michael’s dissertation was a translation from the Portuguese into English of the account of Japanese life and customs compiled by the Jesuit missionary João Rodrigues in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The research that Michael did for his dissertation was subsequently published in three forms. In 1973 he brought out a somewhat abridged version of Rodrigues’s lengthy work as This Island of Japon: João Rodrigues’ Account of 16th-Century Japan (Kodansha International). A complete annotated translation eventually appeared under a slightly revised title as João Rodrigues’s Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan (The Hakluyt Society, 2001). Michael produced...