Hiroya Kawanabe (HK) was born in Kyoto on 10 May 1932. His father, Osamu
Kawanabe, was a teacher of Japanese literature and also a Buddhist
priest, who died in 1934 at an early age. His mother, Tsuya
Fujii-Kawanabe, was a teacher of the tea cer- emony and of flower
arrangement, and had given birth to him at age 38. He attended
elementary school from 1938 to 1945, junior high school from 1945 to
1948, and Kyoto City's Ohki High School, from 1948 to 1951. In March
1945, military requisi- tion of the Kawanabe property, which was
situated in downtown Kyoto, and the subsequent demolition of the family
home necessitated the tearful and hasty removal of only a fraction of
the family's be- longings in a cart (HK 490; numbers refer to the
subsequent 'Lifetime list of publications by Hiroya Kawanabe'). He and
his mother were able to save only a portion of his father's books; his
passion for reading may be due to the influence of his father.
Interestingly enough, during his junior high school and high school
years, Kawanabe tried to improve the method used to catalogue the books
in his school libraries, though he subsequently learned Figure 1. Hiroya
Kawanabe during his convocation address on that the NDC (Nihon Decimal
Classification) was the occassion of receiving Doctor of Science honoris
causa at the the most convenient cataloguing method in com- University
of Guelph, 5 October 1995. Photograph by M. mon use. Schwalbe.