Name James Unger | Education Yale University (1975) | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The fifth generation fallacy, The role of contact in the origin, Ideogram: Chinese Character, Literacy and Script Reform in |
James Marshall Unger, (born May 28, 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio), is emeritus professor of Japanese at the Ohio State University. He specializes in historical linguistics and the writing systems of East Asia, but has also published on Japanese mathematics of the Edo period (wasan).

He chaired academic departments at the University of Hawai’i, University of Maryland, and the Ohio State University from 1988 to 2004, and has been a visiting professor/researcher at Kōbe University, Tsukuba University, the University of Tōkyō, the National Museum for Ethnography (Minpaku) in Senri, and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tachikawa. Among various research grants, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Japan Foundation (twice).