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

Abstract

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