Geoffrey Bownas was born in Yeadon, West Yorkshire, in 1923, and studied at Bradford Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Queen’s College Oxford to read classics, but when recruited into the army in 1942 was ‘volunteered’ to learn Japanese and work on Japanese military codes. In 1948, Bownas returned to Oxford to study Chinese, then taught at the University of Kyoto. In 1954, he established the department of Japanese Studies at Oxford, and then became the University of Sheffield’s first professor of Japanese Studies. He retired in 1980, and was made Emeritus Professor. In 1999, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government, and was appointed CBE in 2003. He died in February 2011.