Eleanor Harz Jorden, a summer resident of East Chop, Vineyard Haven or Chilmark all her life, died at home in Andover, Mass., on Feb. 18 at the age of 88. The pre-eminent authority on Japanese-language education in the United States, she had been battling progressive multiple sclerosis with great perseverance and emotional courage for more than 35 years.
Dr. Jorden was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Dec. 28, 1920, and educated at local schools, graduating from Packer Collegiate Institute in 1938. She went on to Bryn Mawr (A.B. in Latin, 1942) and Yale, earning a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1950.
While resident in Japan from 1949 to 1955 with her former husband, Bill Jorden, a foreign correspondent with the Associated Press and New York Times, she was director of the Japanese Language Program in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and founded the Foreign Service Institute Language School in the Embassy in 1953. During the late 1950s, while living in New York and Moscow, she did a major portion of the work on Beginning Japanese (with Hamako Ito Chaplin), the dominant Japanese-language textbook in the United States at the university level for close to three decades and now in its 40th printing. She was employed at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, D.C. from 1959 to 1969, chairing the Department of East Asian Languages for most of that time and also chairing the Vietnamese Language Division from 1967 to 1969.
Dr. Jorden moved to Cornell as a visiting professor of linguistics in 1969 and was granted tenure in 1972, the year in which she founded the Full-Year Asian Language Program (FALCON), which continues to be the only full-year, full-time, Japanese language program offered at an American university. She became the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of Linguistics in 1974 and held that chair until her retirement from Cornell in 1987. While at Cornell, she continued to write highly-regarded textbooks on both spoken and written Japanese, including Reading Japanese, an innovative attempt to assist students in developing a capacity to truly read Japanese, rather than merely decode into English. The culmination of her scholarly work was the three-volume Japanese: The Spoken Language (with Mari Noda), published in 1987 and now in its 10th printing, which combined meticulous structural analysis with unwavering attention to social context. Dr. Jorden was also a visiting professor at Williams College (on two occasions), the Universities of Iowa and Hawaii, and International Christian University during these years.
Upon retirement from Cornell, she became University Professor/Distinguished Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center at Johns Hopkins from 1987 to 1991, where she co-authored (with Richard Lambert) an exhaustive study of Japanese-language teaching in the United States that was to have a major impact on government policy toward Japanese-language teacher training in the late 80s and early 90s.
By the late 1970s, Dr. Jorden was widely recognized as the preeminent authority on Japanese-language education in the United States, and for the rest of the century it was uncommon to find an expert on Japan at any American university who had not studied one of her books. She was elected president of the Association of Teachers of Japanese for an unprecedented six consecutive terms from 1978 to 1984 and president of the Association of Asian Studies in 1980. In 1985, for her work in Japanese linguistics and pedagogy, Dr. Jorden was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown by the Emperor of Japan and was the first woman to receive the Japan Foundation’s highest honor, the Japan Foundation Award. She also received honorary doctorates from Williams, Knox and Middlebury Colleges and the University of Stirling (Scotland).
After retiring from Johns Hopkins in 1991, Dr. Jorden moved to the Quadrangle, a retirement community in Haverford, Pennsylvania where she was to live for the next 17 years. She continued to be active, writing books and articles, acting as a director and professor of an intensive Japanese-teacher-training program conducted each summer in a number of U.S. universities, assisting in an advanced English-language program at Bryn Mawr for promising Japanese intellectuals and public servants, participating in community governance, and even teaching Japanese to some Quadrangle residents. A legendary teacher, Dr. Jorden leaves thousands of devoted former students around the world, including the three students she taught up to the day before she left the Quadrangle.
In October of 2008, in failing health, Dr. Jorden moved to Massachusetts to live with her daughter, Telly, close to her son, Temple. She spent her last four months surrounded by her children, including her daughter, Tabi, who visited often from Switzerland, her six grandchildren, and her devoted son in law, Charlie Zanazzi, and daughter in law, Ise Jorden.
What is missing from the foregoing narrative is the Vineyard, which was always the place where Dr. Jorden (“Mudd”) was happiest. Her parents, Will and Ellie (“Curley”) Harz, first visited Edgartown in 1917 on the way back from Nantucket and immediately fell in love with it. Their first summer home was on Siloam avenue, off Sunset Lake, after which they moved to Pall Mall, above Crystal Lake. Curley’s mother soon moved to the Island as well, and lived in the Camp Ground at 2 County Park.
When Mudd was young, it was a world of Vineyard-blue days at the East Chop Beach Club, movies, ten-pin bowling, ice cream, sitting in Union Chapel with Georgie, Chickie and Carly Knight listening to Mr. Elmer on the organ while Curley sang, and, one summer, taking time away from her Sanskrit textbook to drive a tractor for Farmer Greene in West Tisbury. In 1948, it was living on the Island working on her dissertation while her husband, Bill, started his career as a journalist with the Gazette, learning his craft from Henry Beetle Hough.
And for almost 50 years it was sitting on the porch in Chilmark in August before dinner, watching and listening to her family as we grew and telling us Island stories: of swimming during the Hurricane of 1938; of her father, Will (known in his office as the “Mayor of Martha’s Vineyard”), taking a steamer from a pier on the North (now called the Hudson) River in Manhattan to New Bedford and on to the Island every Friday night from June to September for almost 20 years; of Mr. Hough and Scotty Reston first discussing the reorganization of the Gazette on that very porch in the summer of 1968. And it was on that porch that she would tell her grandchildren about the buoy off West Chop: the voice of the Island welcoming her just as Vineyard Haven came into view. The Island is where she will rest, beside her parents, and her children and grandchildren will never get off the ferry again without thinking of her, with more than much love.
This was very well-written and an interesting synopsis, as well. I just wonder who wrote it? Also, I would have liked to know where the nickname “Mudd” came from!
It got started, I think, as a consequence of an “If such-and-such happens, your name will be mud” threat from a friend (at Bryn Mawr?) when the “suchnsuch” occurred–and the “Mudd” stuck.
I was one of Dr. Jorden’s Japanese students at Bryn Mawr College in the summer of 1989. Dr. Jorden was, by far, my most influential teacher; she made it possible for me to enter the FALCON program at Cornell, and, thereafter, provided encouragement during my years in Japan. Dr. Jorden is a Sensei, a guiding light, and I miss her in my world.
I was her student for the summer intensive course at Bryn Mawr. She made us several from Japan who were about to study at Princeton, Harvard, etc., on scholarships such as Fulbright, well prepared not just linguistically but also socially. She made us feel proud calling us a blue ribbon class. I was happy that I gave her Michi Kawai’s Lantern, which she said had told her first of the Pennsylvanian college. I found the book at an underground bookstore on Nassau Street, across the university, which specialized used books. She said she had been looking for the book for many decades. Belatedly, I should say RIP.
Dr. Jorden organized language training at the Foreign Service Institute’s unique Vietnamese Training Center in 1967, and oversaw it until it closed in 1972. VTC trained some 1,800 Americans headed as advisors to rural Vietnam. She was a demanding taskmaster, and her methods worked like gangbusters. I tried to contact her to invite her to a 2007 reunion of her trainees, but was unable to do so. This will have to do.
I studied Japanese with Dr. Jorden at the Foreign Service Institute as a US Army student in 1966. She was an inspiring teacher and for me she was directly responsible for developing a profound love of the Japanese language which continues to this day. I have often wished that one day I would have been able to visit with her and tell her of my experiences in Japan as a Japanese speaker, and my current experiences as a teacher of Japanese. I like to think, though, that she knows this already.
This is a wonderful article and those are very heartfelt comments from Sensei’s students. I can only hope to have a smidgen of this impact on my students. Thanks for sharing your memories.
In 1974 I had to teach myself as much spoken Japanese as I possibly could, in preparation for a year in Japan. Oxford University kindly allowed me access to their language lab, which had Eleanor Harz Jorden’s tape course. For my purposes it stands head-and-shoulders above any other course then available: exceptionally well organised and clearly explained, with first-rate pronunciation guidance. Thanks to EHJ I landed at Haneda airport about 9 months later with a sound language foundation to build on. I’m eternally grateful.
An award from Cornell enabled me to spend a year in Japan in 1960-61, before Japanese was taught at the university, but I met Professor Jorden in Tokyo in the 1990s and took her to Roppongi for drinks after a meeting, perhaps at I-House and organized by alumni. I had used her text (with Bloch) at Seton Hall’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies after a year in Japan. Younger students may not know it but that book was bound on the short side – it was a modified version of a military text…. that was similar to works of fiction made for men and women in the service during WW2. The binding was done to save glue, at a time when most goods were in short supply.