On November 3rd (Japan Standard Time), the Government of Japan announced the recipients of its Fall 2009 Decorations.

The recipient's meritorious service towards Japan is as follows:

Gordon Mark Berger
Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Southern California (USC)
The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon

Dr. Gordon M. Berger was born in New London, Connecticut, and spent most of his youth in New Jersey. He went to Wesleyan University (Connecticut), and became the first student ever to study Japanese there. In his junior year, he went to Japan for the first time and fully immersed himself in the Japanese language and culture for a year. After graduating (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1964, he went on to Yale University, where he received an M.A. in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in History (with a concentration in Japanese history). Dr. Berger joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1970, and was the first tenured specialist in Japanese history to teach at USC. Until his retirement in 2008, he taught Japanese history at USC to more than 8,000 students and contributed to the Ph.D. programs of a substantial number of graduate students in various Japan-related fields, including his own.

Dr. Berger served for fifteen years as director of both the USC East Asian Studies Center and the USC/UCLA Joint East Asian Studies Center, contributing significantly to building a solid foundation for the advancement of Japanese studies in southern California and more broadly in the United States. Under his directorship, the Centers successfully secured U.S. federal grant funds and enriched academic programs, graduate fellowships and partnership between USC and UCLA. As a result, the two universities have become a nationally important concentration of resources and talent specializing in the study of Japan and East Asia as a regional entity.

In addition, Dr. Berger has served in numerous important positions, including founding member of the Steering Committee of the Southern California Japan Seminar, director of the California Private Universities and Colleges student exchange program with Japan, consultant for the Japan Foundation, research fellow at the Ministry of Finance in Japan, and paper presenter at the U.S.-Japan Workshop on Urban Earthquake Hazard Reduction. He was also elected by his peers to a two-year term as chair of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

Throughout his career, Dr. Berger has served as a conduit for mutual understanding between Japan and the U.S., addressing a remarkable diversity of research, teaching, and outreach themes related to Japan. He has carried out his personal and professional mission to inform Americans about Japan not simply by lecturing about Japanese history in academic settings, but also by talking to a broad spectrum of interested groups and media about many different dimensions of contemporary Japan. To visiting Japanese, he has provided orientation seminars about the United States to businessmen, local government officials, academicians, and exchange students.

He is an avid fan of sumo, Japan’s national sport, and was for seven years the English-language commentator in southern California for the TV program “Ozumo Digest”. In this role, he came to be well known nationally and locally, as well as among his students, as “Dr. Sumo.”

Dr. Berger’s major book publications include Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931-1941 (Princeton, 1977) and an annotated translation of Kenkenroku: A Diplomatic Record of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95 (Princeton, 1982). He also contributed a chapter on Japanese politics in the 1930s to the well-known seven-volume Cambridge History of Japan.

In Japan, paralleling his activities in the U.S., Dr. Berger has made numerous scholarly and popular presentations in Japanese and published extensively in Japanese academic journals and mass media outlets. Notably, his classical academic study of Japanese political parties published in 1977 was later translated into Japanese under the title Taisei Yokusankai (Yamakawa, 2001).