CARMEN BLACKER WAS a distinctive figure in Japanese Studies in the second half of the twentieth century and a leading scholar of Japanese religion and folklore. She will be remembered chiefly for her magnum opus on Japanese shamanism, The Catalpa Bow. She also published a considerable body of work in the form of papers, lectures, contributions to edited volumes and reviews. This supporting work frequently reveals her methods and assumptions more clearly than the longer book. Nor was her research confined to religion; she also produced notable early work in intellectual history, and more broadly in a senes of biographical accounts of men and women connected to Japan. She was a member of what she herself recognised proudly as cour notable generation’, that included a cohort of scholars of Japan who encountered the language dunng the war such as, in this country, William Beasley, Geoffrey Bownas, Enc Ceadel, Ronald Dore, Charles Dunn, Douglas Mills, Ian Nish and Patnck O’Neill. The group also included scholars who later turned to the study of China, such as Michael Loewe, whom she was to marry, and Denis Twitchett. Her own life seemed to mhent several British cultural, intellectual and scholarly traditions: the intrepid Victorian traveller in the manner of Isabella Bird; the wnter of felicitous prose and cultivated lady of letters, in the general style of her own grandfather, but reinforced perhaps by her long friendship with Arthur Waley; the gifted Oxbndge woman scholar in a world still overwhelmingly dominated by men; and the participant in old-established, London-based learned societies.

Carmen was bom on 13 July 1924, the eldest of three talented children. Her background was international, privileged and colourful. Her paternal great-grandfather, John Blacker, married a woman from a prominent Peruvian political family, and a cousin of Carmen, Pedro Beltran, was to become pnme minister of Peru (1959—61). John Blacker was a bibliophile; his collection of Renaissance book bindings was rumoured, quite unreliably it transpired, to be worth £70,000. His son, Carmen's paternal grandfather, Carlos Blacker (1859—1928), though at one time bankrupt, seems to have recovered to live, mainly abroad, on private means. He numbered Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Anatole France among his friends. Wilde, indeed, called him ‘the best dressed man in London’. Carlos married Miss Caroline Frost, a descendant of a Confederate general in the American Civil War.