Richard Okada


Hideki Richard Okada was Professor of Japanese at Princeton University, in the East Asian Studies Department. He was a specialist in the Tale of Genji, and his most recent work was editing a three-volume collection of academic essays about the novel. His doctoral degree was from the University of California, Berkeley.
His 1977 doctoral thesis, Sagoromo monogatari: a study and partial translation, has been called "one of the most important contributions to the study of classical Japanese narrative to have emerged in the last twenty years " by Richard Bowring of the University of Cambridge.
He died of natural causes on 4 April 2012 in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey.
On 20 May 2017 an independent report conducted by former Attorney General of Massachusetts Scott Harshbarger and others and commissioned by St. Paul's School named Okada as one of thirteen adults at the school against whom substantiated instances of sexual misconduct had been documented. The report described how Okada, as a thirty-seven year old teacher at St. Paul's in the spring of 1982, had sex on multiple occasions with a high school student.

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