John Embree

John Fee Embree (August 26, 1908 – December 22, 1950) was an American anthropologist and academic who specialized in the study of Japan. He was a professor at Yale University when he was struck and killed by a motorist.

Career Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Embree received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Hawaiʻi in 1931, his Master of Arts from the University of Toronto in 1934 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1937. In 1935–36, as part of his doctoral thesis, he conducted field research in a rural area of Kumamoto on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyūshū. The study culminated in the seminal book Suye Mura: A Japanese Village, published in 1939 by the University of Chicago Press. His wife, Ella Lury Embree (later, Wiswell) conducted the research in Suye Mura alongside him, and subsequently published her own ethnographical work on the subject, The Women of Suye Mura.