John Treat

Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures

John Treat, B.A. Amherst College, M.A. and Ph.D. Yale University, professor at Yale since 1999. Proud native of New Haven, you came to Yale in 1976 for graduate studies with the then pre-eminent scholar of modern Japanese literature, Edwin McClellan, and became part of a generation of his students who, like you, are leaders of the field in all the major centers of Japanese studies in the U.S. Like them, you perpetuated McClellan’s commitment to a humanistic approach to East Asian scholarship, but also expanded and altered the field’s theoretical sophistication and its inclusiveness.

After completing your dissertation on the post-war writer Ibuse Masuji, best known for the novel Black Rain, set in Hiroshima before and after the atomic bombing, you began teaching as a visitor here at Yale. That year, 1982-83, brought the Holocaust scholar and humanitarian Elie Wiesel to campus as a visiting scholar, and you have said that your encounters with him inspired and enabled your move beyond your earlier study of Ibuse—published as your first book, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire—to the comprehensive study of Japan’s atomic-bomb literature that became your second and most widely acclaimed book, Writing Ground Zero. 

While teaching at the University of Washington, you made waves with critical articles on Oe Kenzaburo, on the Enola Gay/Smithsonian controversy, and began your work on Korean literature in the Japanese colonial period—now a thriving field that owes much to your pioneering efforts. You also published Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism and Japan in 1999, the year that saw your return to Yale, where you have been Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and of the LGBT Studies Committee and served in many other posts. You were also long-time co-editor of your field’s most important periodical, the Journal of Japanese Studies. Lately, you have turned to the writing of fiction, with one novel set in gay Seattle completed and another in the works. As you bid farewell to the Elm City to reside again in the Emerald City, we prefer to say not “Sayonara,” “goodbye,” but “mata aimasho”—“see you soon!”

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans