In Memoriam: Michael Cooper (1930–2018)

Michael Cooper, editor of Monumenta Nipponica from 1972 to 1997, died peacefully in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 31 March 2018 after a short illness. He was just a month short of his eighty-eighth birthday. In Japan, as he would undoubtedly point out were he writing this piece, this is a felicitous marker of longevity. Michael was born in London on 25 April 1930. He paid great attention to people’s birthdays and to remembering them with a card. Perhaps as a gentle reproach to those less conscientious and kind about such matters than he, on occasion he remarked that his birthday could be easily recalled because it was the same as Oliver Cromwell’s.

After completing his secondary education at the Jesuit school Beaumont College, Old Windsor, Michael entered the Society of Jesus in September 1948. He spent the next six years at Jesuit training centers in the United Kingdom and Spain. The time spent in Spain likely fostered the skills in Spanish and Portuguese that he later would put to use in his research on the Western encounter with Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This stage of his education concluded with a year of philosophical studies at Manresa College, London, in 1953–1954.