THE DEATH OF Dr Carmen Elizabeth Blacker OBE FBA (1924—2009) on her 85th birthday brought to an end the remarkable career of a woman who learnt her Japanese before and during the Second World War and became one of the most ongmal and perceptive scholars of Japan ever produced in Britain. A memorial gathenng held on 14 November 2009 at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where she was one of the founding fellows, brought together a constellation of figures, and heard messages from many more, whose very vanety attested to her wide range of acquaintance and interest: there were Buddhists, folklorists, diplomats, scholars, former pupils and many others.

EARLY YEARS

Carmen Blacker was bom in Surrey, the eldest of three children. Her father was Dr Carlos Paton Blacker, MC (1895—1975), who served in the Coldstream Guards in the First World War, later became a psychiatnst, and was Secretary of the Eugenics Society. Her mother was Helen Maud, daughterof Major A.J. Pilkington. She first became acquainted with Japan through heating her father tell her stones from the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters) and then asked, at the precocious age of twelve, for a Japanese grammar for her birthday. The only such book her mother could find was the third edition of Baba Tatsui's An Elementary Grammar of the Japanese Eanguage which was published in 1904 with an introduction by Arthur Diosy, one of the founders of the Japan Society of London. Carmen must, as she supposed, have been ‘one of the last people to have made serious use of Baba's Grammar’. When she became a boarder at Benenden School in Kent in 1938 she took the book with her and continued going through the exercises.

At Benenden Carmen encountered a girl who had grown up in Japan, Juliet Piggott, who in the 1960s was to wnte several books on Japanese mythology and fairy tales. She was the daughter of Major-General Francis Piggott (1883—1966), who had himself been raised in Japan and later lived there for many years as a military attaché at the British embassy. He was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Japan and he remained stubbornly pro-Japanese and convinced that there would be no war with Japan nght up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.