27 Facts About Edward Seidensticker

Edward George Seidensticker was a noted post-World War II American scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature.

Edward Seidensticker was born in 1921 on an isolated farmstead near Castle Rock, Colorado.

Edward Seidensticker's father, named Edward G Seidensticker, was the owner of a modest ranch that struggled financially during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Edward Seidensticker's mother, Mary E Seidensticker, was a homemaker.

Edward Seidensticker was raised Catholic and was of German, English and Irish heritage.

Edward Seidensticker found Tolstoy most to his liking, the works of Mark Twain the least.

Edward Seidensticker was one of the only two students in his graduating class at Douglas County High School to go off to college, the other being his older brother, William.

Edward Seidensticker wanted to attend an East Coast university, but because of his family's financial situation he grudgingly enrolled in the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Edward Seidensticker, who had been seeking a way to manage through the war without being drafted, saw the Japanese Language School as a solution.

Edward Seidensticker traveled to Washington, DC for a school-admittance interview, the first time he had been east of Chicago, and was accepted.

Edward Seidensticker received basic training with the Marines in North Carolina, after which he was shifted to Camp Pendleton on the West Coast.

In February 1945, Edward Seidensticker was boarded on a ship bound for Iwo Jima.

About a month after General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Tokyo to assume control of Japan, Edward Seidensticker landed with the Marines at Sasebo, a naval base city in Nagasaki Prefecture.

Edward Seidensticker was assigned duties disarming Japanese forces and disabling heavy weapons on the islands of Tsushima and Hirado.

In May 1950, roughly two years after he arrived in Japan, Edward Seidensticker decided the Foreign Service was not his calling and he resigned on his own initiative.

Edward Seidensticker had not been promoted while colleagues had, and had deemed himself not the salaryman type.

Edward Seidensticker suspected his room at the Daiichi Hotel, his billet, was bugged.

Edward Seidensticker taught at Stanford as professor of Japanese from 1962 to 1966.

Edward Seidensticker then joined the faculty at the University of Michigan and remained there for 11 years before being drawn away in 1978 to join the faculty of Columbia University as professor of Japanese.

Edward Seidensticker retired from Columbia in 1985 and was thereafter professor emeritus.

Edward Seidensticker is widely regarded as one of the greatest translators of classic and modern Japanese literature into English.

Edward Seidensticker won the National Book Award in category Translation for his edition of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain.

Edward Seidensticker translated The Decay of the Angel, the last volume of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and several of Mishima's stories.

Edward Seidensticker translated Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters and Some Prefer Nettles and authored important criticism on Tanizaki's place in 20th-century Japanese literature.

Edward Seidensticker wrote widely on Japan, its people, as well as the city of Tokyo.

Edward Seidensticker published his autobiographical observations in Tokyo Central: A Memoir in 2001.

Edward Seidensticker described the latter as "the world's most consistently interesting city".