41 - John Sargent: Respected Geographer of Japan

Summary

IN JAPAN JOHN Sargent was known among geographical academics as the key geographer of Japan in Britain in his day. John who died of cancer in Trieste on 10 July 2012 taught the geography of Japan at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for three and a half decades. He first came to SOAS as a research student in 1962 after gaining a First in geography at Leeds University and embarked on the study of Japanese under Frank Daniels, Charles Dunn, Pat O'Neill, Stanley Weinstein and Yanada Seiji before spending more than a year in Japan collecting material for his Ph.D. thesis on the historical geography of Nagoya. During his final examinations at Leeds he had impressed the external Examiner, Professor Charles Fisher (see Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits volume VIII); and, when Fisher became the first head of the newly established Geography Department in 1965, John was appointed as Fellow in Japanese Geography. He became Reader in the 1970s and subsequently succeeded Fisher as head of department, serving in that capacity for seven years. He bore a heavy administrative burden, made all the more difficult by the changing character of the discipline of geography and the decline in popularity of regional geography. In the 1980s he acted as chairman of the Japan Research Centre.

When he was less burdened with administration in the 1990s, he published Geographical Studies and Japan under the Japan Library imprint (1993). This volume which he co-edited with his SOAS colleague, Richard Wiltshire, drew on the papers presented by both British and Japanese scholars at three interlinked conferences held at SOAS, Sheffield and Durham in 1988.

Outside SOAS, he was active in various fields. He served on the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee in the 1980s. Paul Norbury recalls that John was one of the mainstays among speakers at the Teaching About Japan workshops which he organized from 1978 to 1993 on behalf of the Japan Information and Cultural Centre (JICC). These took place at schools, sixth-form colleges and universities throughout the UK.