[KS] Funeral for Cappy Hurst

Park, Eugene Y. epa at sas.upenn.edu
Thu Jul 7 21:55:31 EDT 2016


Dear all,

For anyone who would like to attend the funeral for Cappy Hurst, it will be on July 15th at 2 pm at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church at 313 Pine Street, Philadelphia.

If anyone wishes to send a card of condolence, the family home address is:

Hurst Family
437 Spruce St.
Philadelphia, PA 19106

You can also write to Cappy’s sons:

Mark Hurst at hurst.mark at gmail.com<mailto:hurst.mark at gmail.com>.
Ian Hurst at ian at hurstconstructioninc.com<mailto:ian at hurstconstructioninc.com>

Yours,
Gene Park
---
Eugene Y. Park
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
Director, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies
University of Pennsylvania
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/people/eugene-y-park

From: Koreanstudies [mailto:koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com] On Behalf Of Park, Eugene Y.
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2016 2:54 PM
To: koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com
Subject: [KS] Obituary: Cappy Hurst

Dear all,

A colleague of mine, Linda Chance of the U. of Pennsylvania, asked me to post this obituary. Although perhaps not widely known among younger Koreanists, late G. Cameron "Cappy" Hurst III, also of the U. of Pennsylvania, was a key figure in laying the foundation for Korean Studies in the US.

Yours,
Gene
---
Eugene Y. Park
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
Director, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies
University of Pennsylvania
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/people/eugene-y-park

G. Cameron Hurst III, 75, historian of Japan and Korea, passed away on June 30, 2016 in Philadelphia.

Born May 7, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, “Cappy,” as we all knew him, had an almost unparalleled depth and variety of experience in his active life, at both his U.S. homes and in Asia. Cappy’s career culminated in a fifteen-year tenure as Professor of Japanese and Korean Studies and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. When he arrived in 1995, recruited by the late William R. LaFleur, the department was called Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Cappy became the first chair of the newly formed East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2005, which since has almost doubled in size on the groundwork that he so tirelessly laid. Cappy took the lead in energizing East Asian studies at Penn, which grew in Chinese and Japanese social sciences and moved toward critical mass in Korean studies from his efforts. He was known for this dynamism in program development: initially having joined the faculty at the University of Kansas in 1969 before he was thirty, Cappy spent two decades there as Professor of History and East Asian studies, becoming director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies as well as chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Cappy was a prolific scholar. His study Insei: Abdicated Sovereigns in the Politics of Late Heian Japan, 1086-1185, published by Columbia University Press in 1976, is still widely consulted in the field. In addition to his focus on the institutional history of medieval Japan, he was a leading scholar of the martial arts, publishing Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery with Yale University Press in 1998. His essays, such as a chapter on “The Kōbu Polity: Court-Bakufu Relations in Kamakura Japan,” in Jeffrey Mass’ Court and Bakufu in Japan (Yale University Press, 1982), “Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushidō Ideal,” (Philosophy East and West, 1990), and “The Warrior as Ideal for a New Age,” in The Origins of Japan’s Medieval World, edited by Jeffrey P. Mass (Stanford University Press, 1997), contributed substantially to the reconsideration of Japanese history. He also published translations from the Japanese. Hurst’s essay “Kugyō and Zuryō: Center and Periphery in the Era of Fujiwara no Michinaga” for Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, a volume from a conference for which he was part of the planning committee, came out from University of Hawai’i Press as recently as 2007.

Cappy was dedicated to analyzing and even intervening in contemporary history as well, often publishing opinion pieces in news outlets such as the Korea Times, the Japan Times, and the Asian Wall Street Journal, as well as contributing to and advising media outlets in the United States. (His charisma far outpaced that of the stereotypical professor.) He was one of only a few academics who could speak to both Japanese and Korean audiences, having acquired subject knowledge and facility in Korean language that nearly matched his prodigious skills in Japanese.

Education outside the university was a keen interest of his: he helped all kinds of groups to a better understanding of and enthusiasm for Japan and East Asia. Cappy founded and led teachers from middle and high schools to Japan in 1997 on the first Phila-Nipponica program, which over the course of eighteen years introduced 160 teachers from the greater Philadelphia area to Japan and then guided them in the production of curricular materials, so as to have an impact on over 50,000 students. He also led the Japan Seminar, a program that similarly selected college and university professors who were not Japan specialists from around the nation and enabled them to add courses about Japan to their institutions’ curricula.

Intellectually restless, he served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle in the early 1980s, a Faculty Associate for Universities Field Staff International, on the Semester at Sea program, at teaching positions in Seoul, and as the Japan Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Equally energetic and skillful as an administrator, Cappy spent terms directing the Associated Kyoto Program housed at Dōshisha University, held a directorship at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, and was Dean at CUNY Lehman Hiroshima College from 1990 to 1992. He was a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute as well.

A passionate and rigorous teacher, Cappy was known for a touch of salt-of-the-earth and a sense of humor that drew many to the study of East Asia. He put students through their paces in reading sources and analyzing terms, and he made names and dates come alive with his dramatic lecture style. In his later career, he taught unique seminars at Penn on North Korea as well as the Occupation of Japan.

Cappy’s own journey in the field began at Stanford University, from which he graduated with a B.A. in History and Japanese in 1963. He took his M.A. in East Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i in 1966, and then headed to East Asian Language and Cultures at Columbia University, completing his Ph.D. in 1972 after study at the Stanford Center, Keio University, the University of Kyoto, and the University of Tokyo, making many connections along the way that he never let go.

The late Fukushima Keidō rōshi, head of the Tōfukuji Zen sect headquartered in Kyoto, toured the U.S. annually, including KU and later Penn at Cappy’s invitation. The master always joked that when he was first introduced to Haasuto-sensei (as Dr. Hurst was pronounced in Japanese), so rapid-fire was Cappy’s spoken Japanese that he thought people were calling him Faasuto-sensei (Dr. Speedy). Kamikawa Rikuzō, the legendary tutor of generations of Japanologists, referred to Haasuto-kun as the Shinkansen, the speeding bullet train of linguists.

The wide web of those who felt privileged to know Cappy is attested in the festschrift organized in his honor by the distinguished historian Karl Friday, Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1830 (Westview Press, 2012). Friday notes the scores of symposia and conference panels and guest lectures that Cappy organized or delivered, and his mentorship of hundreds of students and junior colleagues, concluding that “It would be no exaggeration to say that there are very few students or scholars of Japan whose lives and work have not been touched by Cappy’s efforts.”

An avid golfer and fan of basketball at the University of Kansas with a love of Bobby Flay’s burgers, Cappy had barely given a thought to retiring to pursue such distractions when a series of illnesses sidelined him in 2007. He began to write a memoir of sorts on a series of yellow pads, though this was not completed. Anyone who was fortunate enough to visit Cappy in his last days found him still possessed of an iron grip and a reluctance to let us go.

Cappy is survived by his wife, Nayop (“Chini”) Hurst of Philadelphia, their son, musician and composer Mark Hurst of New York City, and their daughter, feminist artist Dylan Mira of Los Angeles, California, as well as by his first wife Carol Hurst and their son architect-builder Ian Hurst of Lawrence, Kansas, Ian’s wife Hannah and three grandchildren in Lawrence, Henry Hurst, Annabelle Hurst, and Theodore Hurst, and a brother, Stuart Hurst of Denver, Colorado. We lost a great scholar and a good friend, but we take some solace imagining him golfing the links in Hawai’i at last.

Philadelphia, July 5, 2016
Linda Chance
Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Pennsylvania

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