Edwin McClellan

Edwin McClellan (October 24, 1925 – April 27, 2009) was a British Japanologist. He was an academic—a scholar, teacher, writer, translator and interpreter of Japanese literature and culture.

McClellan was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1925 to a British father, an early representative of Lever Brothers in Japan, and a Japanese mother, Teruko Yokobori. His mother and older brother died when he was two. McClellan and his father were repatriated to Britain in 1942 aboard the Tatsuta Maru, a passenger liner requisitioned by the Japanese navy (and later torpedoed by a U.S. submarine) to repatriate British nationals from throughout Southeast Asia.

In London, McClellan taught Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies as part of the war effort. At 18, he joined the Royal Air Force, hoping to become a pilot, but his fluency in Japanese made him more useful to allied intelligence. He spent the years 1944-1947 in Washington, D.C., analyzing intercepted Japanese communications.

In 1948, he went to the University of St. Andrews, where he earned a degree in British history and met his future wife, Rachel Elizabeth Pott. At St. Andrews he also met the noted political theorist Russell Kirk, who took him on as his graduate student at Michigan State University. Two years later, McClellan transferred to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago to work with classicist David Grene and economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek. McClellan appealed to Hayek to write his doctoral dissertation on the novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose work was much admired in Japan but unknown in the West. To persuade Hayek of Sōseki's importance as a writer and interpreter of Japanese modernity, McClellan translated Sōseki's novel "Kokoro" into English. McClellan's definitive translation of "Kokoro" was published in 1957.

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