WMU alumnus had love of humor, Japanese culture

By Megan McDonald
Western Herald

At only 23 years old, Rodger Swan had accomplished many things and touched many people in Michigan and across the globe.

Rodger Swan

The Western Michigan University alumnus passed away suddenly from acute pancreatitis on Tuesday, Jan. 26 in Hanimaki, Japan.

“He had a lot of one-liners. He was the kind of guy that could just walk into a room and he would make everybody laugh and have a good time,” Swan’s brother Brenden Swan said.

Brenden said he described himself as a “modern day Woody Allen” and loved to crack jokes all the time. He was always on the Internet making videos and listening to music.

“I met Rodger in seventh grade and he was the first person to introduce me to George Michael, who became one of my favorite musicians. We flew to Atlanta to see George Michael in the first concert he had back in America in 15 years. Rodger had just got back from Japan at this time in August 2008,” said Jason Elkins, a friend and former roommate of Swan.

“We did a lot of stuff like that, just things between us that everybody else just thought was silly.”

Swan graduated from Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, Mich. in 2005. He received the Medallion Scholarship, a $40,000 scholarship to be applied over four years that WMU offers to students who excelled in high school.

While at WMU, Swan studied Japanese and English. He was a member of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, and worked at WMU’s Writing Center, using his bilingual abilities to help many of the Japanese exchange students.

“He was very much interested, not so much in the Japanese culture the way that a lot of people tend to think about it like anime and video games, but more of Japanese culture in the intellectual pursuits, like the language, the history, the people, and the literature, and he wanted to share this with as many people as he could,” Elkins said.

Because of his interest in Japanese culture and his dedication to his studies, Swan received a full scholarship to study abroad at Keio University in Tokyo for the 2007-08 academic year. He had completed an English major and Japanese minor and graduated from WMU in the summer of 2009.

Following graduation, he was offered a job with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, or JET, teaching English to Japanese students at three different high schools in Hanamaki, which is in the Japan’s Iwate Prefecture.

“He wanted to show people what he was doing in Japan and the culture over there, so he started posting videos online on YouTube and he started getting more and more subscribers, people who were really interested in the same things he was,” Elkins said.

“Then when he died, there were all these people, that none of his inner circle friends even knew about, and there was this huge outpouring of comfort from people I didn’t even know,” Elkins said. “It was kind of strange to think that there were so many people, so many lives he touched and so much he had accomplished.”

Swan’s YouTube videos now have over 9,000 subscribers and counting. After his death, there was an outpouring of grief and support across the world for Swan’s films and videos and a Facebook fan page was created in dedication and memory of him.

Because of Rodger’s passion and dedication for Japanese culture, his family and academic advisor, Jeffrey Angles, Ph.D., have created the Rodger Swan Memorial Fund for Japanese Studies, a scholarship to support WMU students studying Japanese or wishing to study abroad in Japan.

Donations are being accepted for the fund online and by mail. Checks should be made out to “WMUF: Rodger Swan Memorial Fund” and sent to WMU Gift Processing, 1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5403. For more information regarding the fund, Angles can be contacted at Jeffrey.angles@wmich.edu.

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Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 21 2010. Filed under Breaking, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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