26.3604, All: Hiroko Hagiwara (1955-2015)

Wed Aug 12 17:34:00 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3604. Wed Aug 12 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3604, All: Hiroko Hagiwara (1955-2015)

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Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 13:26:25
From: Naomi Harada [lang at tmu.ac.jp]
Subject: Hiroko Hagiwara (1955-2015)

 To many linguists’ sadness, Hiroko Hagiwara passed away on July 10, 2015. She was 59 years old.

Anyone who knew Hiroko would immediately recall her gregarious personality; she was very easy to talk to. Those who knew her would certainly be able to picture Hiroko greeting them in her cheerful voice. She had always been the leading figure in the field of neurolinguistics, whose influence was with no doubt immeasurable.

Born in the Yamanashi Prefecture, which is surrounded by numerous high mountains including the much renowned Mount Fuji, Hiroko did her undergraduate study at Nihon Women’s University (Tokyo, Japan). She then moved on to pursue her academic career in the graduate program in linguistics at Tsukuba University, eventually entering the Ph.D. program in linguistics at McGill University. Her achievements at McGill are well described by Professor Lisa Travis on the memorial page for Hiroko at the McGill Linguistics Department website (http://www.mcgill.ca/linguistics/people/inmemoriam) in response to the sad news.

According to her close acquaintances, the encounter with neurolinguistics at McGill was her “road-to-Damascus-moment”: She thought of the field as magnificently innovating and immediately got hooked on the discipline. With ABD, she got her first teaching position at the Kinjo Gakuin University (Nagoya, Japan) in 1984. With strong will, she succeeded in finishing up writing her dissertation while teaching at Kinjo – a task which is not always easy to carry out – and received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 1987.

In 1990, she moved on to Tokyo Metropolitan University, where she owned and ran her own lab and had been productively engaged in numerous research projects till 2015, despite the hindrances such as the radical reconstruction of the academic system at TMU and the subsequent harsh battle between the legislature/bureaucratic body and the faculty alliance.

She was an avid pioneer in the field of neurolinguistics. One of her significant contributions is the emphasis on the integration of linguistic theory and brain sciences – a move that was far less popular at the time. Her research interests were broad – the themes she explored included psycholinguistic studies of the organization of lexicon, neurolinguistic study of phonetic/phonological aspects such as spoken-word processing or lexical pitch-accent processing, the processing of written Japanese with mixed writing systems (Chinese characters and the kana), morphological issues such as the formation of causatives in Japanese, syntactic aspects such as the word-order preference of the object NPs in ditransitive sentences, and the mechanism of syntactic and semantic processing of aphasia, to name just a few. More recently, she had also ventured into language education, cutting into the area of second language acquisition and issues relating to developmental psychology. It goes witho
 ut saying that - with so many influential academic achievements - she had been involved in innumerable academic advisory boards and academic journals.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that she was a great role model for young researchers. Without doubt, so many aspiring linguists-to-be were influenced and encouraged by Hiroko to step into the field of neurolinguistics, as well as many were encouraged by Hiroko’s achievements to take the leading role in large-scale projects. For the linguists of about the same generation, she was also a “comrade” in the child-rearing field – they recall ardently discussing parent issues with Hiroko in between the talks at conferences.

Despite the rather unfair agreement after the reconstruction at TMU mentioned above, she was never discouraged. With a view to establish a novel interdisciplinary research hub, Hiroko launched in the fall of 2014 a new center named “The Research Center for Language, Brain, and Genetics,” which serves as the first large-scale interdisciplinary research center at TMU, based in the School of Humanities. After its first symposium was successfully held in March 2015, Hiroko decided to go on leave. Her colleagues at TMU later learned that her health changed critically toward the end of June, when she was taken to the hospital. She passed away in the afternoon of July 10, hoping till the last second that she would beat the illness and get back to the forefront of the research and education in the near future.

As a pioneer in almost every domain she was involved, she left various anecdotes, including the “legend” that she blasted away the opponents (who would insist that no lab be necessary in the humanities domain) and fetched three office rooms, tearing down the walls between them, and turned them into a laboratory space – an action nobody had done before in the School of Humanities at TMU (and probably nobody will do again). She was also well-known for her astonishingly eye-catching 'pink truck' (http://www.comp.tmu.ac.jp/hagiwara/hagiwara_lab/Project.html),on which she loaded all the equipments for neurolinguistic studies and travelled anywhere where she could find collaborators and participants.

The news of her death spread with tremendous speed domestically and internationally, indicating how much influence she had. A memorial workshop is to be held on August 21, 2015, at TMU. Hiroko will be missed by all of us.

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

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