Richard Storry, 1913-1982
Brian Powell remembers the Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies and his skill in bringing the history of the Far East to a Western audience.
Richard Storry, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies in the University of Oxford who was a member of the Editorial Board of History Today , and a frequent contributor to the magazine, died at his home in Woodeaton on February 19th at the age of sixty-eight.
Born in Doncaster, Richard Storry was educated at Repton and Merton College, Oxford, where he held a History Postmastership. In 1937, at the suggestion of Edmund Blunden, one of his tutors at Merton, he accepted an appointment as a Lecturer in English at what is now Otaru University of Commerce in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. He taught in Otaru until 1940, when he returned to wartime Europe. Between 1941 and 1946 he served in the intelligence corps in the Middle East, Singapore, India, Burma and in Britain, and he commanded, with the rank of Major, No. 1 Mobile Section, South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Centre, during the battle of Imphal (1944).