Miriam Silverberg, 57, Japan Scholar
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Miriam Rom Silverberg, a University of California, Los Angeles professor emerita of history celebrated for her writings on modern Japan, died March 16 at a Los Angeles hospital. She was 57 and had been suffering with Parkinson’s Disease.
Silverberg’s scholarship is often required reading for those studying modern Japan. She wrote about militant Japanese women, Japanese popular culture, and Nakano Shigeharu, the poet and cultural critic. She encouraged the study of colonialism through everyday interactions between the colonizer and the colonized.
Published last year, Silverberg’s book “Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times,” examines the nation in the early 20th century, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The era was marked by a self-consciously modern ethos that, Silverberg argued, challenged state ideology and expansionism.
Born Jan. 19, 1951, in Washington, D.C., Silverberg moved with her family to Tokyo at age 9. She remained in Japan through high school and learned to speak Japanese fluently. In 1984, she earned a doctorate in Japanese history from the University of Chicago. In 1989, she joined the faculty of UCLA.
