Hauser was devoted to teaching Japanese and East Asian history over a career of nearly four decades.
William (Bill) Hauser, a professor emeritus of history, is being remembered for his distinguished teaching career and his research on the economic and social history of Japan’s Tokugawa period.
Hauser, who died at the age of 85, taught at the University of Rochester for nearly 40 years—from 1974 until his retirement in 2011, serving as department chair from 1979 to 1985. His intellectual curiosity knew few boundaries: As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago he majored in mathematics, which he followed with a master’s degree in East Asian studies and a PhD in Japanese history, both from Yale University.
Hauser was devoted to interdisciplinary teaching and sustaining the field of Japanese and East Asian history at the University, and had a deep interest in Japanese film. He was also among the first faculty members in his department to draw on film as a tool for the teaching of history, according to longtime colleague Stewart Weaver, the University’s Franklin W. And Gladys I. Clark Professor of History.
“And,” Weaver recalls, “Bill had a wry, ironic disposition, like he’d seen it all before and wasn’t going to let any of it bother him.”
Case in point: in 1991, when the Students’ Association bestowed their Teacher of the Year award on Hauser. “I’m not sure the administration cares. I’m not sure my department cares, but it’s nice to know the students care,” Hauser said in his acceptance speech, vowing to use his $500 prize on a piece of art or toward one of his many trips to Japan.
But his department did care.
Speaking as chair at the time of Hauser’s retirement, Weaver called him a “Japanese historian by instinct as well as training” who was “a central and indispensable pillar of Asian and East Asian studies at the University for almost four decades.”
His undergraduate courses on the samurai, on traditional and modern Japan, on Japan and the Second World War, on women in East Asia, and on East Asian film—the latter his perennial favorite—consistently ranked among the department’s most popular, Weaver noted in his speech on the occasion of Hauser’s retirement.
“Two of Bill’s passions were palpable, and I was lucky to experience both,” remembers long-time colleague and friend Theodore Brown, a Rochester professor emeritus of history and of public health sciences. “I went to his classroom on several occasions and enjoyed watching his joy teaching undergraduates the intricacies of Japanese history. The other was cooking—and eating—and I was lucky to be his guest for dinner many times where he would ‘wok up’ a storm.”
The author of Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Ōsaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1974), Hauser wrote about the Japanese textile trade, about Osaka and its early commercial development, on Tokugawa political authority in Western Japan, and on the samurai and the Tokugawa shogunate. In the 1980s, Hauser’s interests turned toward Japanese family history and the management practices of Japanese family businesses. Later, his research interests shifted toward the portrayal of women and war in Japanese film and the Asian American experience generally.
Hauser is survived by his three sons, Benjamin, Aaron, and Zachary—all of whom are adopted from South Korea and about whom he said, according to his obituary in the Minnesota Star Tribune, that raising them “was more important and meaningful than anything he could publish.”
