http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/20...worldwide/
"Longtime readers of The Japan Times will remember Kanji Clinic... With her friendly and encouraging style, columnist Mary Sisk Noguchi helped readers unravel the complexities of Chinese characters, adding an element of fun to a process that is too often fraught with frustration for many learners of Japanese.
Mary's fans were no doubt disappointed when her column ended, and few could have known of her untimely death last year on Dec. 21, [2012], at the age of 56...
... in 1988... Although Mary spoke very fluent Japanese, she wasn't yet able to write well... one day, an older Japanese colleague cited her inability as proof of the commonly held view that only Japanese and Chinese could master kanji. In other words, that it was too hard for foreigners raised in the West...
Mary was very upset by this remark, which became the catalyst for a renewed push to get to grips with kanji. At this point, she came upon the work of Japan-based academic James Heisig... probably best known to students of Japanese for his iconic "Remembering the Kanji" series...
Mary later became friends with Heisig. "Mary was more than just another reader who happened to find something useful in my kanji books," he recalls. "She was a teacher with that rare gift of breathing new life into what was really no more than a private record of my own learning experience. Knowing her was -- I have no other way to say it -- an unexpected grace..."
There was much more to Mary Sisk Noguchi's life than Kanji Clinic, however. She taught cross-cultural communication at Meijo University, where her duties included preparing students for studying abroad; in her private life, she was busy raising two sons...
For much of her adult life, Mary lived under the shadow of cancer, having overcome first cervical cancer as a very young woman and later two bouts of breast cancer. Yet she refused to let this prevent her from pursuing the things she enjoyed, including foreign travel. She visited over 30 countries, many of them with her family.
In the fall of 2011, Mary began experiencing terrible pain, and with the new year came the unwelcome news that her nemesis was back, this time in her brain. Despite her increasingly fragile health, however, she remained active, continuing her columns and making plans for an early summer visit to see family in the United States...
Mary's produced her very last Kanji Clinic column while in the U.S., dictating the words to her son because she could no longer type them herself.
That column was published July 2012. Mary spent the last month of her life in hospice care, in accordance with her wishes, before dying peacefully in December."
"Longtime readers of The Japan Times will remember Kanji Clinic... With her friendly and encouraging style, columnist Mary Sisk Noguchi helped readers unravel the complexities of Chinese characters, adding an element of fun to a process that is too often fraught with frustration for many learners of Japanese.
Mary's fans were no doubt disappointed when her column ended, and few could have known of her untimely death last year on Dec. 21, [2012], at the age of 56...
... in 1988... Although Mary spoke very fluent Japanese, she wasn't yet able to write well... one day, an older Japanese colleague cited her inability as proof of the commonly held view that only Japanese and Chinese could master kanji. In other words, that it was too hard for foreigners raised in the West...
Mary was very upset by this remark, which became the catalyst for a renewed push to get to grips with kanji. At this point, she came upon the work of Japan-based academic James Heisig... probably best known to students of Japanese for his iconic "Remembering the Kanji" series...
Mary later became friends with Heisig. "Mary was more than just another reader who happened to find something useful in my kanji books," he recalls. "She was a teacher with that rare gift of breathing new life into what was really no more than a private record of my own learning experience. Knowing her was -- I have no other way to say it -- an unexpected grace..."
There was much more to Mary Sisk Noguchi's life than Kanji Clinic, however. She taught cross-cultural communication at Meijo University, where her duties included preparing students for studying abroad; in her private life, she was busy raising two sons...
For much of her adult life, Mary lived under the shadow of cancer, having overcome first cervical cancer as a very young woman and later two bouts of breast cancer. Yet she refused to let this prevent her from pursuing the things she enjoyed, including foreign travel. She visited over 30 countries, many of them with her family.
In the fall of 2011, Mary began experiencing terrible pain, and with the new year came the unwelcome news that her nemesis was back, this time in her brain. Despite her increasingly fragile health, however, she remained active, continuing her columns and making plans for an early summer visit to see family in the United States...
Mary's produced her very last Kanji Clinic column while in the U.S., dictating the words to her son because she could no longer type them herself.
That column was published July 2012. Mary spent the last month of her life in hospice care, in accordance with her wishes, before dying peacefully in December."
Edited: 2013-10-18, 8:17 pm
