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Fred G. Notehelfer was born to German Missionary
parents in Japan in 1939. He grew up in Tokyo, graduated from the American
School in Japan, and received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1962. His
Ph.D. was taken at Princeton University in 1968 in Japanese History. After
teaching briefly at Princeton he joined the UCLA History Department in
1969. From 1975-1995 he served as the UCLA Director of the USC-UCLA Joint
Center in East Asian Studies and since 1992 he has directed the UCLA
Center for Japanese Studies.
Notehelfer specializes in the late Tokugawa and
Meiji periods. He is particularly interested in the social and
intellectual history of Japan's transition from a "traditional"
to a modern society. He is also interested in what Japanese have done with
universal systems of thought imported into Japan from the West and Asia.
His books include K_toku Sh_sui:
Portrait of a Japanese Radical (Cambridge, 1971); American
Samurai: Captain L.L Janes and Japan (Princeton, 1985); and Japan
Through American Eyes, the Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama,
1859-1866 (Princeton, 1992). He has recently completed an abridged
edition of the Francis Hall journal which has been published by Westview
Press 2001. Recent interests
have also taken him into British art history, and hehas published an
article, “John Constable and the Woodbridge Wits” in the Burlington
Magazine, September 1999. Several
additional articles on John Constable and his paintings have been
completed. He has
published numerous articles and reviews in the Journal
of Japanese Studies, Monumenta
Nipponica, the Journal of Asian
Studies, and other Japan related publications. He contributed the
essay on “Modern Japanese History” for the most recent Encyclopaedia
Britannica . He is currently working on the role of the wealthy
peasant class in the late Tokugawa-Meiji transition the part it played
in the Meiji Restoration. He has served as a visiting professor at
Kyoto University, Doshisha University, and International Christian
University in Japan and at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
He currently serves as the Director of the Board of the
Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama.
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