Edwin McClellan
British Japanologist
Edwin McClellan (24 October 1925 – 27 April 2009) was a British Japanologist, teacher, writer, translator and interpreter of Japanese literature and culture.
Biography
McClellan was born in Kobe, Japan in 1925 to a Japanese mother, Teruko Yokobori and a British father who worked for Lever Brothers in Japan. His mother and older brother died when he was two. Bilingual from birth and educated at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, McClellan and his father were repatriated to Britain in 1942 aboard the Tatsuta Maru, a passenger liner requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy to repatriate British nationals from throughout Southeast Asia.
In London, McClellan taught Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies as part of the war effort. At 18, he joined the Royal Air Force, hoping to become a fighter pilot, but his fluency in Japanese made him more useful to Allied intelligence. He spent the years 1944–1947 in Washington, D.C. and at Langley Air Force Base in Maryland, analyzing intercepted Japanese communications.
In 1948, he went to the University of St. Andrews, where he earned a degree in British history and met his future wife, Rachel Elizabeth Pott. At St.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 8, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5346659. VIAF identifies the subject as 108198419. The Library of Congress control number is n85007812. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2009, 1942 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edwin McClellan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.