The sudden death of Joseph Koshimi Yamagiwa, on the tenth of
December, brought sorrow to his many friends in Ann Arbor and inflicted a
significant loss upon Japanese studies throughout the United States and the
world. He was in the sixty-third year of his age and had completed thirty-one
years on the University faculty.

A native of Seattle, Washington, Professor Yamagiwa attended the
University of Washington and was graduated with distinction from Bates
College in Maine in 1928. The following year he came to The University of
Michigan as a graduate student. Earning his master's degree in 1930, he
remained in Ann Arbor as a staff member of the Early Modern English
Dictionary, then in progress here. He was appointed Instructor in Japanese in
1937, served as Rockefeller Research Fellow in Tokyo from 1939 to 1941,
and completed his doctoral work at the University in 1942.

During the Second World War, emergency programs of language
instruction chiefly occupied him. As director of the United States Army's
Japanese Language Course in Ann Arbor, he supervised the instruction in
the Army Specialized Training Program and later in the Civil Affairs
Training School. He further directed an Army program of Japanese language
translation and served as an analyst for the United States Strategic Bombing
Survey. Returning to a normal scholarly routine in 1946, with the rank of
Assistant Professor, he rose to Associate Professor in the next year and to
Professor in 1953. During the period from 1949 to 1964, he was Chairman
of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures. In 1958, he
was a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University in England.

A universal authority on the Japanese language, Professor Yamagiwa
understood and met the varying demands of lexicographers, of linguists
(both old-style and new-), of teachers, and of men of letters. In belles-lettres
proper, he was a sensitive student and translator of Japanese classics, and
was also a superbly informed historian and critic of modern literature in the
Japanese tongue.

All those scholars who teach Japanese language and literature to
native speakers of English confessed his special proficiency and his wide
learning. Even the scholarly community within Japan held him in high
esteem. On this campus, finally, those colleagues who worked with him in
the burgeoning program in his field, those who joined him in refining
techniques of language instruction, and a host of associates who labored
with him on deliberative and administrative committees, affectionately and
gratefully recall his unfailing courtesy and his spirit of unstinting service.
Speaking for all these, and also for themselves personally, the Regents
of the University mourn the death of this eminent scholar and this most
faithful and companionable man. To his widow, his daughter, and the other
surviving members of his family, they extend their deep sympathy and make
formally known the honor in which his memory is held.