Departures of note

塚本勲 (Tsukamoto Isao) was a Japanese Korean-language scholar and translator, born in 1934 in Osaka's Ikuno district. After studying linguistics at Kyoto University, he developed an interest in the Korean language as one of the origins of Japanese, and taught himself Korean within the zainichi Korean community when no practical reference works existed in Japan. In 1963 he became a founding lecturer of the Korean language department newly established at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, the first such department at a national university in postwar Japan.

In 1965, ahead of the normalization of Japan-Korea relations, he published his Japanese translation of 'Yunbogi's Diary', a children's account of a poor gum-selling boy under the Park Chung-hee regime. The book became a long-running bestseller and was later adapted into a film by director Nagisa Oshima.

Over 23 years and with the involvement of some 300 people, Tsukamoto compiled the 'Korean-Japanese Dictionary' (Chosen-go Daijiten), published in 1986 with roughly 220,000 entries, making it the world's largest Korean-Japanese dictionary. He raised funds for the project by selling ancestral land. He also established the 'Ikuno Korean Books and Materials Room' in 1977 and donated thousands of Korean-language volumes to the Osaka Prefectural Central Library, which opened them to the public as the 'Tsukamoto Collection' in 2002. He retired from Osaka University in 2000 and continued teaching a private Hangul class until late in life.