James Curtis Hepburn

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Bust of James Curtis Hepburn

James Curtis Hepburn (March 13, 1815, Milton, Pennsylvania – June 11, 1911, East Orange, New Jersey) was a doctor who became a Christian missionary. He is known for the system of transliteration of Japanese into the Latin alphabet. The system is today referred to as the Hepburn system (although Hepburn popularized rather than invented it).

He attended Princeton and Pennsylvania universities and became a doctor. He decided to go to Siam (later changing to China) as a medical missionary, but had to stay in Singapore for two years as the Opium War was under way and Chinese ports were closed to foreigners. After five years as a missionary, he returned to the United States (in 1845) and opened a medical practice in New York City.

In 1859, he decided to go to Japan as a medical missionary, where he opened a clinic in Kanagawa, near present-day Tokyo, and later a school, the Hepburn School (from which the present Meiji Gakuin University developed). He also began compiling a Japanese-English dictionary, which was first published in 1867. The third edition of his dictionary, published in 1887, used a revised form of Japanese romanization devised by a society of enthusiasts for writing Japanese in the Latin alphabet. This form of romanization is now known as Hepburn romanization, and it is often mistakenly said that Hepburn invented it; he is, however, largely responsible for popularizing it. He also contributed to the translation of the Bible into Japanese. Hepburn returned to the US in 1892, and died in East Orange, New Jersey in September 1911 at the age of 96.

Some of Hepburn's noted Japanese pupils include Furuya Sakuzaemon ,Takahashi Korekiyo and Numa Morikazu (沼間守一).