Yoshio Sugimoto (杉本良夫, Sugimoto Yoshio, born December 7, 1939) is a sociologist based at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is currently Emeritus Professor.
Early life
He grew up in Kyoto and graduated from Kyoto University in 1964 with a BA in law and politics. He worked for three years as a staff writer for The Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese national daily newspaper, but changed career direction enrolling in postgraduate studies in the United States where he obtained a PhD in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1973.[1][2]
Academic career
Sugimoto moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1973, where he began work as a lecturer/researcher at La Trobe University's sociology department. During his more than 30-year tenure at La Trobe, Sugimoto held the positions of Professor of Sociology and Dean of Social Sciences. He became a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1988.[2] In 1981, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Japanese Studies Centre, an inter-university institution based at Monash University, where he served as Foundation Director in 1981-82 and President from 1985.[3] Sugimoto's work has sought to challenge the prevailing monocultural models of Japanese society which claim it to be uniquely uniform and homogeneous. Together with Ross Mouer, he developed a multicultural model which focuses on cultural diversity and social stratification, contributing to a paradigm shift in this area.[4] Sugimoto's book An Introduction to Japanese Society, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 and now in its fifth edition, "conclusively challenged the traditional notion that Japan comprised a uniform culture and showed how Japan, like most countries, had subcultural diversity and class competition."[5] Sugimoto established a publishing house, Trans Pacific Press, in 2000 that specialises in producing English versions of the works of Japanese social scientists.
