Kazuo Ueda

is a Japanese linguist and scholar. He is Japan's leading Yiddishist.

Ueda graduated from Kōchi University and received a master's degree in German literature from the University of Tokyo. While studying German-language Jewish writer Franz Kafka in graduate school, he learned of Yiddish. He mostly self-taught himself Yiddish, with some aid from Japan's limited Jewish community and multiple visits to Israel. One of two scholars to introduce the study of Yiddish to Japan, Ueda published the first Japanese examination of Yiddish grammar and literature in 1970, the first Japanese book on Yiddish in 1985, and the first Japanese dictionary on Yiddish in 2010. His Yiddish dictionary was the first in a non-European language, besides Hebrew. Beginning in 1969 and until he retired in 2012, Ueda was a German studies professor at Ehime, Kōchi, and Fukuoka University.

Biography

Kazuo Ueda was born in 1943 in Osaka and grew up in the Kyoto Prefecture. He then received a master's degree in German literature from the University of Tokyo. or from a lecturer, , offhandedly mentioning that Kafka was interested in Yiddish theater. He began studying Biblical Hebrew in 1967 while attending the university and then he spent four years learning Modern Hebrew at the Jewish Community of Japan. He often came to Japan's only synagogue for assistance who learned Yiddish c. 1970 while in Bonn. journal article on Yiddish grammar, was the first Japanese examination of Yiddish grammar and literature. It is 267 pages long and includes standard features of grammar books, an introduction to the history of Yiddish, and brief directions to resources and institutions which focus on Yiddish. The book follows YIVO's 1926 orthography while noting Soviet practices. It does not include reader exercises. Stanley Dubinsky and Paul Wexler reviewed it as valuable and competent. They identified its target audience as Japanese specialists in German, the same as Ueda's background, while noting that it does not compare the two as in Ueda's prior work and that it did account for the language's complexity for learners. They had minor criticisms of its discussion of Yiddish grammar sometimes being unnecessarily vague, not in-depth enough, and forgetting exceptions or minor elements; for instance, it transliterates but never defines rabbi and rebbe. This effort made the plays widely accessible. His works often compared Yiddish and German. Ueda attributed an increased interest in Yiddish among Japanese to its significance in Jewish American literature. Ueda later lived on Kyushu and was a professor at the German department of Fukuoka University.

The entry for the non-diacritical alef, the first letter in the Yiddish alphabet. Ueda compiled and edited the unidirectional Japanese-Yiddish dictionary Idisshugo Jiten, which was published by Daigaku Syorin in 2010. In 2012, Sadan estimated that there were less than 20 Japanese fluent in Yiddish, while noting that a larger number had some fluency. Japanese Yiddish scholar Yuu Nishimura credited Ueda's achievements, alongside those of Nishi and the research of others, with making Yiddish more accessible in Japan and spurring an increased interest in Jewish history. and some other works.

Books

Ueda, Kazuo (1985). Idisshugo bunpoo nyuumon / Arajnfir in der jidišer gramatik [Yiddish Grammar Primer]. Tokyo: . — (1993). Idisshugo kiso 6000 go [6000 Yiddish Words for Daily Life]. Tokyo: . — (1995). Idisshugo dokuhon [Yiddish Chrestomathy]. Tokyo: . —; Handler, Troim Katz (1995). Idisshugo kaiwa renshuu-choo [Conversations: Japanese-English-Yiddish]. Tokyo: . — (2002). [Collection of Vocabulary of Judeo-Spanish]. Fukuoka University.