Tainan Prefecture
Lin was born in 1920 in Tainan Prefecture, Japanese Taiwan (modern-day Tainan, Taiwan) to Lin Mosei and Chai-Hwang Wang. Like his parents, he studied in Japan, graduating from the School of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in 1943. He did postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital.