JAPAN

[Birgit Kellner]

Rolf Heiner Koch wrote:
>
> >we are here in German and we are fighting against
> >one problem: How we can come to know the sex from
> >the name of a japanese scholar? Is there any trick
> >or no chance to find out the sex by the name?

Linguistic form is, of course, not the only thing to go by. If you know
that a particular scholar has a university position, and if you happen
to know that the person in question is, shall we say, of a reasonably
mature age, chances are that the gender is male. Women in Japanese
academia are a minority, and the field of Indology is no exception to
that "rule", rather, it is one of its rather extreme examples ...


--
Birgit Kellner
Department for Indian Philosophy
Hiroshima University