Faubion Bowers educated at Columbia University
Biography
Bowers was born in Miami, Oklahoma. He graduated from Columbia University in 1935 and the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1939. Bowers taught at Hosei University in Tokyo from 1940 to 1941.
After the surrender of Japan, he was the interpreter for the advance party of 150 US personnel which flew into the Atsugi airfield on August 28, 1945. As MacArthur's interpreter he lived at the American Embassy with the MacArthur family, and served as interpreter at the initial meeting between MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito. While an official censor for Japanese theater he became its champion.
After the war he taught at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Kansas as Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies. He also served as music editor or reviewer for various periodicals.
Bowers became a respected authority on Asian art and culture, writing scholarly monographs on such subjects as Indian dance and Japanese theatre, as well as a definitive two-volume biography of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin.  His book, Japanese Theatre, was published in 1952 and is highly recommended by James Michener, in his book on Japanese ukiyo-e prints, The Floating World, as "one of the foremost works of scholarship dealing with Japanese culture to come out of the occupation."He was married from 1951–1966 to Indian writer Santha Rama Rau. They had one son who, according to his parents, traveled widely and lived an affluent vagabond existence.Bowers was interviewed for Columbia University's Oral History Project in 1960. He wrote the first full-length biography of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) in two volumes (1970, 2nd edition 1996) and was a member of the Bagby Foundation for the Musical Arts in New York City. He died in New York City on November 17, 1999.
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