Yoshio Sugimoto


Yoshio Sugimoto is a sociologist based at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is currently Emeritus Professor.

Early life

He grew up in Kyoto and graduated from Kyoto University in 1964 with a BA in law and politics. He worked for three years as a staff writer for The Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese national daily newspaper, but changed career direction enrolling in postgraduate studies in the United States where he obtained a PhD in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1973.

Academic career

Sugimoto moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1973, where he began work as a lecturer/researcher at La Trobe University's sociology department. During his more than 30-year tenure at La Trobe, Sugimoto held the positions of Professor of Sociology and Dean of Social Sciences. He became a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1988. In 1981, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Japanese Studies Centre, an inter-university institution based at Monash University, where he served as Foundation Director in 1981-82 and President from 1985. Sugimoto's work has sought to challenge the prevailing monocultural models of Japanese society which claim it to be uniquely uniform and homogenous. Together with Ross Mouer, he developed a multicultural model which focuses on cultural diversity and social stratification, contributing to a paradigm shift in this area. Sugimoto's book An Introduction to Japanese Society, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 and now in its fourth edition, "conclusively challenged the traditional notion that Japan comprised a uniform culture and showed how Japan, like most countries, had subcultural diversity and class competition." Sugimoto established a publishing house, , in 2000 that specialises in producing English versions of the works of Japanese social scientists.

Awards and honours