The Famous Unknown Missionary (and Free Books)

The Famous Unkown Missionary

James C. Hepburn (shown above) was a 19th century American medical missionary in Japan. In Japan, Dr. Hepburn is famous. He founded a clinic in Yokohama in the early 1860s. Due to his contributions to the city, the Yokohama City University School of Medicine named a hall after him.

But this wasn't all. Dr. Hepburn and his wife, Clara, founded a school in Japan that is known today as Meiji Gakuin University, a Christian school in Tokyo and Yokohama with over 12,000 students.

Dr. Hepburn has another claim to fame. Working with another American missionary, a Dutch Reformed minister named Samuel R. Brown, Hepburn helped create the first complete translation of the Bible in Japanese.

Hepburn has some fame in the West. Oddly, though, it has nothing to do with medicine nor does it have anything to do with his being a missionary. Hepburn was also an accomplished linguist. He is credited with the creation of the first English-Japanese dictionary.

And this is why Hepburn is known in the West. To create the dictionary, he came up with a way to approximate Japanese character sounds using Roman letters. He created what is known as the Hepburn romanization system, a phonetic way (English phonetic) to show Japanese using the Western characters. There are other systems out there, and Hepburn's system has undergone modification over the years, but it is the one system with which nearly every Westerner who has ever studied the Japanese language is familiar. This is the basis for Hepburn's fame in the West.

If not for Hepburn, characters like し would be spelled out as "si" instead of "shi," which is closer to its actual pronunciation.

In other words, if not for Hepburn, raw fish on rice would likely be spelled susi instead of sushi.