Boyé Lafayette De Mente


Boyé Lafayette De Mente was an American author, journalist, and adventurer who wrote more than 100 books mainly related to the culture of Japan and the Japanese language. He also wrote widely of East Asia as well as Mexico.
De Mente was born November 12, 1928 in Mayberry, Reynolds County, Missouri. He attended and graduated from McKinley High School in St. Louis, Missouri. From 1946 to 1948, he served in the U.S. Navy as a cryptographer based in Washington, D.C. After that, he joined the U.S. Army Security Agency and was sent to Tokyo to work as a decoding technician. During his tenure with the agency, he founded and edited The ASA Star, an agency newspaper.
During the 1950s, De Mente served in a variety of editorial positions with publications based in Tokyo, including Preview Magazine, Far East Traveler, and The Japan Times. In 1987, he became Associate Publisher of the Tokyo Journal, Japan’s oldest English magazine sold globally. Together with Editor Glenn Davis, they made Tokyo Journal the first publication in Japan to produce a magazine on a computer from scratch using Apple Macintosh computers. He later returned as a regular contributor to the Tokyo Journal, which continues to print articles he left to the magazine in tribute to him. He also acted as an extra in a number of Japanese films in the early 1950s. In 1957, he accompanied the Australian adventurer Ben Carlin on the Tokyo–Anchorage leg of his circumnavigation of the world, together with Carlin becoming the first to cross the Pacific Ocean via an amphibious vehicle. De Mente subsequently graduated from Jochi University in Tokyo, and The American Institute for Foreign Trade in Glendale, Arizona. He was among the first writers to introduce the Japanese terms , nemawashi, kaizen, tatemae-honne, shibui, and wabi-sabi to the Western world.
Boyé Lafayette De Mente died May 12, 2017 in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He was 88.

Published works