UCBerkeley: Professor emeritus Donald Shively, expert on Japanese life and cultures, dies
Donald Howard Shively, considered one of the founding fathers in the post-war development of Japanese studies in the United States, died Saturday, Aug. 13, at age 84 from complications of Shy-Drager syndrome. He was in a nursing facility near his Berkeley home. Shively, an authority on Japanese urban life and popular culture during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), was decorated by the Japanese government in 1982 with the Order of the Rising Sun...Much of his work explored the subversion of shogunal law - against luxurious consumption, erotic art, fomenting scandal and dishonoring the elite - by resourceful writers and a rising bourgeoisie...The son of American missionaries, Shively was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1921. He attended the Canadian Academy, a school in Kobe. He graduated from Harvard University in the Class of 1944. During World War II, Shively served as a Japanese language officer in the Marine Corps, rising to the rank of major and earning the Bronze Star Medal...His wife, Mary Elizabeth Berry, a professor of Japanese history at UC Berkeley, recalled him as a "brilliant tennis player, and an even more brilliant, if merciless, punster who loved women, his children, his students, old jazz, hikes in the Sierra, banana plants, Japanese pots and Kyoto noodles."
