Founders
Thomas and Frances Blakemore
Thomas
and Frances Blakemore spent more than 50 years living and
working in Japan. They established the Blakemore Foundation in
1990 to encourage Americans to develop greater fluency in Asian
languages and to increase the understanding of Asian art in the
United States.
Thomas Blakemore (1915-1994)Born in 1915 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, Thomas
Blakemore graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1936 with
an B.A. in physics, and received his law degree from its Law
School in 1938. |
|
During World War II, Mr. Blakemore served as an Army captain with the Office of Strategic Services in China and returned to Japan at war's end as a Foreign Service Officer. He subsequently joined the legal division of General MacArthur's Allied Occupation staff, and from 1946 to 1949 worked on the review and revision of the major Japanese legal codes. Mr. Blakemore's English translation of the revised Japanese Criminal Code was published in 1950.
In 1950, he took and passed the three-day Japanese bar examination in Japanese, becoming the first foreign lawyer in the post-war period to be admitted to the practice of law with full courtroom status. As founder and senior partner of the firm of Blakemore & Mitsuki, he practiced law for 40 years in Japan with an emphasis on international legal matters. He represented many of the leading American and European companies doing business in Japan.
In 1987 Mr. Blakemore was decorated by Emperor Hirohito with the Order of the Sacred Treasure Third Class for his contributions to Japan's legal system.
Active in the founding of Tokyo's International House of Japan, Mr. Blakemore served on its governing board until his retirement. As a Field Associate of the American Museum of Natural History, he organized and led expeditions for the Museum in search of specimens of a number of Asian mammals, including the Hokkaido bear, the kamoshika and the Iriomote cat. He was an avid fly-fisherman and helped convert the neglected Yozawa River in the Okutama mountains into one of the finest fly-fishing streams in Japan. In later years, he became involved in experimental horticulture and introduced new varieties of fruit trees at his farm in Itsukaichi with the assistance of faculty and students from Japan's national agricultural college.
Frances Blakemore (1906-1997)
Frances Blakemore was born in Rana, Illinois in 1906 and grew up in Eastern Washington, where her family moved when she was four.
She enrolled in the art department of the University of Washington to pursue a degree in painting, sculpture and design. Mrs. Blakemore later related, "In college, all of my contemporaries wanted to go to Paris, but I was different. I wanted to go to Japan." (Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 24, 1986, p. J10). And after graduation in 1935, she did move to Tokyo to pursue her lasting interest in Japanese and Chinese art.
At the outbreak of World War II, she joined the Office of War Information and later served in the Civil Information and Education Division of SCAP during the Allied Occupation.
An active and versatile artist, Frances Blakemore held a number of painting exhibitions in Tokyo and New York, wrote and illustrated books, and became director of exhibits for the American Embassy in Japan. She is the author of Japanese Design Through Textile Patterns (Weatherhill, 1978, Fifth Printing 1984) and Who's Who in Modern Japanese Prints (Weatherhill, 1975, Fifth Printing 1983).
She was a co-founder of Franell Gallery, located for
many years in Tokyo's Okura Hotel, which displayed prints, paintings
and sculpture by Japan's leading modern artists. Her own collection of
Japanese textiles and stencils, now in the permanent collection of the
Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, was exhibited at
museums throughout the United States and Australia.
For a biography of Frances Blakemore see
An American Artist in Tokyo: Frances Blakemore 1906-1997, by Michiyo
Morioka, published by the University of Washington Press, 2008.
Frances Blakemore Asian Art Grants are awarded to enable Americans to discover, understand and appreciate Asian art.
Biographies of Honorary Board Members
Albert Ravenholt started working in Asia before World War II, serving as a foreign correspondent in China, India, Burma, Indochina and the Philippines. In 1947 as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs he studied Far Eastern history and Chinese language at Harvard University. In 1948 he returned to China to cover the civil war. Mr. Ravenholt lectured regularly at major universities in the U.S. after he joined Universities Field Staff International at its founding in 1951. From his base in Manila he covered China and Southeast Asia and has written for Foreign Affairs, The Reporter, the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service and other publications. He is the author of The Philippines: A Young Republic on the Move, and reports for the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year, and the World Book Yearbook. Although a generalist on East Asian and Southeast Asian affairs, Mr. Ravenholt maintains a specialized interest in Asian and tropical agriculture.
Eleanor M. Hadley (1916-2007) was an economist with a notable career in both academia and government. Ms. Hadley first went to Japan in 1936 as the Mills College delegate to the Third Japan-America Student Conference. After her graduation from Mills in 1938, she returned to Japan with a fellowship to study Japanese language during 1938-1940. During World War II she served with OSS and the State Department and in 1946 joined General MacArthur's staff in Tokyo. The focus of her work at SCAP was on zaibatsu dissolution and the development of a Japanese antimonopoly law. In 1947 she returned to the U.S. and received her Ph.D. in 1949 from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She served on the staff of President Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor. From 1956-1965 she was a member of the Smith College faculty. A Fulbright in Tokyo in 1962-1964 led to her landmark work, Antitrust in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1970). Returning to Washington, D.C. in 1967, she was an economist with the U.S. Tariff Commission until 1974, when she transferred to the International Division of the General Accounting Office. From 1972-1984 she was concurrently a member of the faculty of The George Washington University; later she taught at the Jackson School at the University of Washington. Ms. Hadley was decorated by the Emperor of Japan with the Third Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1986, and received the Association of Asian Studies "Distinguished Contribution to Asian Studies" award in 1997.