Forwarding obituary for Jurgis Elisonas by Liam Brockey
Bettina Oka
Dear colleagues,
I am forwarding the obituary written by Liam M. Brockey about Jurgis Elisonas.
The two co-authored an article in Monumenta Nipponica in 2021.
https://dept.sophia.ac.jp/monumenta/article/the-tragedy-of-quabacondono-an-elizabethan-account-of-the-last-days-of-toyotomi-hidetsugi/With best regards,
Bettina
In Memoriam
Jurgis Saulius Algirdas Elisonas passed away after a brief illness on September 17, 2025. Professor Elisonas is known to many in the field of East Asian history by the Anglicized version of his name, George Elison, under which he published extensively on the history of early modern Japan until the early 1990s. Born on January 6, 1937, in Lithuania, Jurgis left his homeland in the course of the upheavals of the Second World War. He was educated as a boy in Bavaria before being sent to Brooklyn, and later to Michigan to complete his education. After completing his studies at the University of Michigan and serving as an artillery officer in Korea, he traveled to Japan, a country whose history and culture he came to know as few outsiders ever do. He was helped in that endeavor by his wife, Toshiko Nakabayashi, herself a native of Kyoto, and under the academic guidance of Edwin Reischauer at Harvard University.
Professor Elisonas enjoyed a long career as a scholar and teacher, originally at Colby College and later on at Indiana University. During his decades as a professor of East Asian studies and History at Indiana, Jurgis gained an international reputation as a leading scholar in the field of pre-modern Japanese history. His gift for languages, especially Portuguese and Spanish—putting aside his talents in Japanese, Korean, and classical Chinese—made him especially well-positioned to examine the first Europeans in East Asia through primary sources. His masterpiece, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (first ed. 1973, Harvard East Asia Center), considered the Jesuit mission from a radically different perspective than previous scholars had employed. This work, truly a modern classic, challenged the hagiographic register so common in studies of mission history. Jurgis’s subsequent works, whether in journals, edited volumes, or encyclopedias, delved into aspects of Japanese culture from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were always marked by his deep erudition and characteristic wit.
Jurgis Elisonas was a mentor and friend to scholars around the world. He was particularly attached to the scholarly community in Portugal and the Netherlands, in addition to his lifelong bond with colleagues in Japan and across the United States. After a long career marked by academic honors and prestigious fellowships, Professor Elisonas retired in 2001 from Indiana University. He remained active as a scholar for the next twenty years, continuing to publish on Japanese history until 2022. Jurgis spent the last few years of his life in Santa Barbara, California, where he lived close by his children and grandchildren. He is missed dearly by his wife and all of his family, as well as by the friends with whom he maintained a rich and rewarding correspondence over the years until only a few months ago.
--Liam Matthew Brockey
Michigan State University
Stephen Turnbull
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