Professor Hiroshi Morita sadly passed away on 30 December 2024 after 33 remarkable years at Yokohama National University (YNU) in Japan.
This is a personal and professional obituary by Dr Martin Brigham.
Professor Hiroshi Morita was known to us as having international academic expertise, artistic vision, a desire to develop his university, and a deeply human ability to connect and build relationships.
On my first visit to YNU on 15 May 2018, I met Professor Hiroshi Morita, and it was a meeting I won’t forget. As we discussed how to get to a restaurant for a celebratory dinner with YNU faculty to mark the beginning of the partnership between YNU and the International Masters Program for Managers (IMPM), I discovered something about ‘Morita’ (as he had been introduced) that caught my attention. He was the proud owner of a British Racing Green Lotus Elise built in rural Norfolk, England.
I grew up in the Norfolk countryside near the Lotus factory – and my uncle was an engineer at Lotus. My father, by contrast, has always admired Japanese cars for the thoughtful design and exceptional reliability associated with Japanese management and manufacturing. I was curious to know more about why Professor Hiroshi Morita, an academic economist known for his rigour, would own a car known for quirks and unpredictability. Morita said to me he loved his Lotus because of its imperfections; that a Lotus had to be cherished, cared for and respected – the Lotus demanded a relationship not just ownership. We would always talk about his Lotus whenever we met over the years. It helped develop a shared appreciation of each other’s interests.
His thinking felt unmistakably Japanese to me. It embodied the interdependence and mutual trust that underpin relational business ethics that he taught us. Just as the Lotus needed ongoing care to function at its best, Morita also approached his professional relationships with attentiveness, empathy, and responsibility. His respect for the idiosyncrasies of his Lotus mirrored his belief in the importance of nurturing meaningful connections at YNU.
The first meeting told me a lot about Hiroshi’s character. Over the next six years, I would come to know him as an extraordinary academic and colleague, a creative spirit, an institution builder, and a good friend. His intellect, warmth, and imagination made a big impression on me and countless others. Soon after this first meeting, Hiroshi came to Lancaster University in the UK in September 2018 with Kentaro Iijima, Minjin Ota and Professor Satoru Otaka. Dora Koop, Professor Henry Mintzberg and Professor Alex Faria also came to Lancaster and, along with Julie Gabriel-Clarke, Professor Lucas Introna and myself, had many productive and convivial faculty meetings. YNU faculty and staff were visiting in preparation for their first cycle of the Collaborative Mindset module at Yokohama National University, which would begin the following year in May 2019.
Later in the September 2018 visit to Lancaster, we went on a day-long walk in the English Lake District led by Professor Simon Bainbridge. Following in the footsteps of William Wordsworth. Hiroshi brought along an artist’s sketching pad with him and sat observing the landscape at various times of the day in quiet reflection. Later in this faculty exchange to Lancaster, we had a long conversation about collaboration and teamwork. Hiroshi was interested in discussing the ideal team number composition and how this affected the economics and performance of teamwork. I remember it was a precise and detailed discussion about trust dynamics – something I was learning Hiroshi brought to everything he did. At the start of the conversation, Hiroshi showed the drawings he had completed in the UK. I remember thinking that Hiroshi had wide-ranging interests. That he brought creative rigour and integration to both his academic and artistic interests.
During the Covid pandemic, the integration of academic practice and artistic sensitivity was taken to an extraordinary level. Hiroshi innovated a Virtual Tour of the Tōkaidō Road for cycle participants and faculty. With his characteristic creativity and attention to detail, each online session for the YNU Collaborative Mindset began at a particular historic point along the Tōkaidō Road. En route from Kyoto to Edo (modern-day Tokyo), he taught about Japanese companies, Omotenashi hospitality, Japanese relational business ethics, and more. I admired how he involved and enhanced the confidence of current students at YNU, sharing this pedagogical project with them, while demonstrating his commitment to the next generation. He also brought faculty from all five IMPM partner schools together as we sat at our laptops in lockdown.
Hiroshi’s visual and detailed presentations demonstrated his flare and understanding that conveying experiential ideas and concepts online across multiple time zones required a new level and scale of thoughtful crafting beyond academic content – it needed a shared, relational and human-centred experience, a Ba. The virtual tour provided unmatched IMPM in design and impact during a period of remote learning – I still have my online meeting virtual background from The Fifty-three Stations of Tōkaidō by Utagawa Hiroshige that Hiroshi sent me as a reminder of his creativity. Throughout 2023 and 2024, as in-person modules returned, Hiroshi focused on bringing insights from Ohmi merchants and the spirit of Sanpo-yoshi (“good for seller, buyer and society”) to the Collaborative Mindset through the Tōkaidō Road. The Tōkaidō Road videos and presentation materials Hiroshi produced combined tradition and innovation are one of his legacies, and in memory of the future, we will continue to showcase them in his honour.
Professor Hiroshi Morita was Japanese by temperament and I sense cosmopolitan by outlook. This dynamic was also the heart of his academic interests and creative practice. In Europe, he would be called a ‘Renaissance Man’ because of his rounded rigour, artistic vision and cultural depth: he was representative of the purpose and ambition of IMPM and his commitment to internationalisation at YNU through IMPM is a testament to this. His advocacy for IMPM at YNU developed the international partnership in ways we did not always witness but will continue to benefit from. Hiroshi was, in every sense, an institution builder at YNU.
I feel privileged to have known Professor Hiroshi Morita and called him a colleague and friend. Hiroshi is one of the people I always really looked forward to meeting when going to YNU for IMPM. On behalf of IMPM schools, faculty, companies, and alumni globally, I would like to express our gratitude for his invaluable contribution to IMPM in Japan and beyond.
Dear Hiroshi, you will be very dearly missed and long remembered for your academic rigour, creative verve, sense of community purpose and warm, friendly way.
A candle was lit in Lancaster at 09:00 a.m. (UK time) on 7 January 2025 in honour of Professor Hiroshi Morita.
Dr Martin Brigham
IMPM Worldwide Academic Director
6 January 2025