INDUCTION CITATION
by
Thomas J. Burns Professor and Chairman

Faculty Committee on Accounting Hall of Fame The Ohio State University

Although non-Western in birth and in citizenship, this newest Hall of Fame member exemplifies the best of the so-called American values namely, the belief in hard work, achievement and education, a continuing willingness to face new challenges, the elusive balance of work and play, and the importance of family life.

His life has been spent in two cultures, the first half in Japan and the second half in America. He was born in Kobe (a port between the mountains and the inland sea — near Osaka), in 1935, the first born of a baker/confectioner who wasn’t doing well as sugar was very scarce and under government control. So the father had time to teach his son arithmetic. When he was six, the boy was sent to an abacus school, which the child loved, to give him a head start. When he was nine and the city was under heavy air attack, he and 100 other fourth graders were evacuated to a temple in Okayama where a young man taught him algebra, for over a year until the war ended.

When he was in tenth grade, his father fired his accountant and told his son to take over. Again he enjoyed it and decided to become a CPA. His father regarded college education as a waste of time because he always believed in on-the-job training. If the father were still with us, he would probably say “sounds great, but so what?

With difficulty the son persuaded the father to let him go to night school starting at a junior college to help him become a CPA. (In Japan, you have to pass a qualifying exam if you are not a college graduate in order to take the CPA exams.) In twelfth grade, he passed the qualifier and shortly after graduating from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto with a Bachelor’s degree in law, he received his certificate at 21 years of age, still the youngest ever recorded in Japan.
At college, he studied under an accounting professor whose academic values were the exact opposite of his father’s. This professor taught an accounting seminar where for the entire semester they read Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (which means “Tailor Retailored”). No wonder the student took 20 years to understand the professor’s analogy between accounting

and the clothes that society wears. No wonder that the student learned to believe deeply in analogy as an engine of his research, as a frequent cause of his laughter, and as a source of his deepest thinking. He has found further inspiration from the analogies of the giants of mathematics, art and music, namely Gödel, Escher, and Bach.

(This professor had a daughter, Tomo, and when he started to date her, naturally, his classmates began to doubt the seri-ousness of the student’s interest in accounting

After college, he was practitioner in Tokyo for three years first with a small firm, then with Price Waterhouse for two busy years, with a few listed companies as clients. He also went to YMCA night classes to learn English and saved his money to come to graduate school in America.

When he was 24, had saved $1,650, and had not received the professor’s permission to marry his daughter, he entered the University of Minnesota. After quickly earning a Master’s de-gree, he went to Carnegie Mellon University (because of his mathematical talent) as a Ford Foundation fellow to earn his Ph.D.
There he was much influenced by three faculty members; Richard Cyert, now Carnegie’s President who changed the doctoral language requirements to include Japanese; Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize Winner, with whom he eventually co-authored a book; and especially his mentor, William W. Cooper, who became his third “father,” and who over a cup of coffee influenced him to write a dissertation in accounting (rather than one in economics or in operations research). After he married the Professor’s daughter, and completed his degree, he went to Stanford. After four eventful years there, (with three colleagues named Jaedicke, Horngren, and Sprouse)1 he returned to Carnegie where he has been ever since (with such colleagues and students as Kaplan, Baiman, Itami, and Sunder).

1Robert K. Jaedicke, William R. Kimball Professor of Accounting and Dean; Charles T. Horngren, Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Accounting; both of Stanford University; and Robert T. Sprouse, Distinguished Accounting Research Professor, San Diego State University (formerly of Stanford University).

2Robert S. Kaplan, Professor, Carneige Mellon University and Arthur Lowes Dickinson, Professor of Accounting, Harvard University; Stanley Baiman, Pro-fessor, Carnegie Mellon University; Hiroyuki Itami, Professor, Hitotsubashi University (Japan); and Shyam Sunder, Richard M. Cyert Professor of Manage-ment and Economics, Carnegie Mellon University.

This gifted professor with an extraordinary memory has consummate skill with the computer. All his life, he has been fascinated by puzzles, words, and games (for example, Shogi or Japanese chess, which complicates the usual game by allowing the use of pieces, captured from the opponent). These and other interests are somewhat comparable to those of the century-old Hall of Fame member, William A. Paton. Like Paton, his large body of work is marked by much originality and subtle reasoning, especially in his triple-entry bookkeeping publications. An interesting illustration of his mathematical strengths are his many abstracts published in Zentralblatt Fur Mathematik dealing with many articles in the field of mathematical logic. Most receptive to discussing his papers publicly, he has appeared 21 times before the 24-year-old Ohio State Accounting Research Colloquium.

“To know the past, one must first know the future” is quoted in his fourth AAA monograph (just published), a quotation by Raymond Smullyan, a CCNY Mathematics Professor, whose philosophical work is the favorite reading of this prolific researcher. His over 100 articles have been published in the leading academic and professional journals of several disciplines, and his many books are frequently published both in English and Japanese and sometimes in French and Spanish.

Devoted to his family, he used to disagree with his wife about which parent got to bathe the babies. They are now his best critics especially of his speeches.
Much honored, he is a past president, a distinguished international lecturer, and an “outstanding educator” awardee of the American Accounting Association, also a past president of the Accounting Researchers International Association, the AlCPA’s literature prize winner four times, and the holder of a professorship named after Hall of Fame member — the late Robert M. Trueblood of Touche Ross — both of which with he has been closely associated. In 1987, he received the highest honor his university bestows on a faculty member, a university professorship.

An accountant who represents the finest traditions of ac-counting and whose election hopefully foretells a world society, this happiest and this humbliest of all accounting researchers who almost — to recall a Disney song — “whistles while he works” and who genuinely believes that all of his achievements are due to others, is inducted as the 49th member of the Accounting Hall of Fame — Yuji Ijiri.