Seidensticker was born into a farming family in 1921 and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Colorado in 1942, the same year the US Navy started expanding its school of Japanese language, which moved from Berkeley in California to the University of Colorado, largely because Americans of Japanese descent were then being taken into custody as enemy aliens in the west. Seeking only to avoid the draft, Seidensticker enrolled.
Thus began Seidensticker’s love affair with the Japanese language, which would lead to his becoming one of the most famous translators from Japanese into English, to his working as an academic at the University of Tokyo and, later, Stanford, and to the introduction of generations of English-speakers to the best of Japanese literature. His labours not only made Japanese works of literature available, but also showed English-language publishers that Japanese literature could sell well. To this day – he died in 2007 – he is regarded as one of the finest translators from Japanese into English.
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