John Forman Howes was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 19, 1924. He completed undergraduate courses at Kalamazoo College (1942-1943), Western Michigan State University (1943-1944), U. S. Naval School of Oriental Studies in Boulder, Colorado (1944-1946) and Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts (AB) in history in 1950. From 1950-1961, he attended Columbia University, where he received a Master's in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1965. While working on his graduate degrees, Howes also took courses at Tokyo University (1953-1956) and Kyoto University (1959-1960). In 1961, Howes joined UBC as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1966 and then rose to Professor in 1986. Howes taught a number of courses on Japan in the Asian Studies department: Asian Studies 105, 330, 400, 422 and 423. His main areas of research and scholarly interests focused on modern Japanese history, Japanese pacifism before World War II, life and works of Uchimura Kanzo and Nitobe Inazo, and Japanese cultural history from 1890 to 1945. He wrote and published numerous articles, reports and books in both English and Japanese on a wide variety of Japanese-related topics and actively attended and participated in a variety of conferences and seminars promoting Asian Studies. In addition to his scholarly work, Howes was also involved in the extensive planning and fundraising for the creation of the Asian Centre at UBC.