Professor Emeritus William D. Hoover earned his B.A. degree from Muskingum College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Japanese History from the University of Michigan. He taught for forty years at the University of Toledo as well as holding visiting professorships at the University of Michigan, Bowling Green State University, Aoyama Gakuin University, and Tokyo University.

Professor Hoover published Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan (Scarecrow Press, 2011), many articles, and has a manuscript on Kawakami Kiyoshi: Interpreter of Japanese-American Relations, and edited other works. He served as the chair of the History Department at The University of Toledo for 15 years.

He enjoys traveling as a way to learn from people around the world and to experience the culture of various countries. He has traveled to more than 50 countries and been on all the continents except Antarctica. He has bicycled in Europe on five different occasions. As a professor of Japanese history, he has lived in Japan for six years and traveled there extensively. He has led three groups of friends to Japan.

He chairs the local Toledo-Toyohashi (Japan) Sister City Committee and has been involved with organizing and conducting many exchanges. For several years he helped run the International Youth Academy in the summer where students from Toledo’s sister cities come to Toledo to stay with host families and study English in a classroom setting.  He coordinates a visit of 23 selected junior high students from our sister city in Japan. For three years he served as Vice-President of TSCI.