John Yamamoto-Wilson

Biography

I grew up all over the place, and didn't really have a home town until I went to Cambridge, which is now my adopted home town. After graduating (Magdalene, 1974), I took a year off (mostly in Spain) and then embarked on postgraduate work on early modern translations from Spanish into English. This went downhill after my supervisor died, and I put academic work in the bottom drawer and went to the south of Spain, where I supported a rather bohemian lifestyle by a mixture of teaching, translating, interpreting and playing music. I returned to England in my late thirties and somehow - I'll never quite understand how this happened! - found myself at the age of forty with a Japanese wife and working at a Japanese university. At the age of sixty two I'm still here, our child is turning into a young adult, and the adventures of my youth seem like receding figures on a distant horizon!

A couple of years ago, my university gave me a sabbatical year, which I spent back in the Rare Books room at Cambridge University Library (the same place I did my postgraduate work all those years ago!) writing a book called _Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England_ (Ashgate, 2013). In July 2015 I finally obtained a PhD from Cambridge on the basis of that and other publications. It only took 40 years!

We live in the countryside (Tokyo's a province, not just a city, and has mountains and forests, a bit like upstate New York), and I do a fair amount of cycling, DIY, gardening, cooking, walking the dog and stuff. I also dabble in rare books (Google rare books Japan for my website). I have a wonderful family, wonderful friends in Tokyo whom I love to hang out with, wonderful friends in England, whom I get to see periodically, wonderful friends in Spain... My daughter says I exist in a kind of bubble, called the seventeenth century, and sometimes it takes a bit of time for stuff from the outside to penetrate, but basically I have a pretty good life!