Theodore Bestor

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Theodore C. Bestor (August 7, 1951 – July 1, 2021) was a professor of anthropology and Japanese studies at Harvard University. He was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2012. In 2018, he resigned as director from the Reischauer Institute following an investigation by Harvard officials that found he committed two counts of sexual misconduct.^[1]

Biography

Early life

Bestor was born on August 7, 1951, in

He attended secondary school in Seattle and graduated from Fairhaven College of Western Washington University in 1973. His graduate education was at Stanford University, where he received master's degrees in East Asian studies (1976) and anthropology (1977), and a PhD in anthropology in 1983. During his graduate studies, he spent two years at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo.

Career

He started his career as program director for Japanese and Korean studies at the Social Science Research Council. He then taught at Columbia University and Cornell University, and was a visiting professor at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. He became a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in 2001. He served as the chair of the department of anthropology from 2007 to 2012.

During 2012–2013, he was president of the

In 2013, he received an award from Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs for his contributions to international understanding of Japan. In 2017, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Government of Japan.

In 2018, a Harvard investigation found Bestor committed two counts of sexual misconduct during an interaction with a female professor at a 2017 conference at UCLA. Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences disciplined Bestor for the incident, but allowed him to return to work before completing the required sanctions. The controversy continued as of 2020.^[3]

Personal life

His wife, with whom he co-edited and co-authored many publications, was Victoria Lyon Bestor. She is the executive director of the North America Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources. They have a son, Nicholas (born 1986).

Theodore C. Bestor died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 1, 2021, at the age of 69, from cancer.^[4]

Publications

• Doing Fieldwork in Japan, Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, and Victoria Lyon Bestor (co-editors), University of Hawai'i Press, 2003 (
  ISBN 978-0-8248-2734-2
  )
• Neighborhood Tokyo, Theodore C. Bestor, Stanford University Press 1989 and Kodansha International 1990 (
  ISBN 978-0-8047-1797-7
  )
• ISBN 978-0-520-22024-9
  )
• Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society, Victoria Lyon Bestor and Theodore C. Bestor, with Akiko Yamagata (co-editors), Routledge, 2011 (
  ISBN 978-0-415-86334-6
  )