March 18, 2025—a date I will never forget. It is the day that Professor Roberte Hamayon, the great French anthropologist, passed away. She was a towering figure in the study of Siberian and Mongolian shamanism and a pioneering scholar who established the foundations for the anthropological study of Siberia and Mongolia in France. At the same time, she played an indispensable role in the development of Japanese anthropology, particularly in research on shamanism.
When I received the first news from my close friend Professor Gregory Delaplace (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Ephe), tears began to flow uncontrollably. In the autumn of 2024, during my stay in Paris, she had been hospitalized and I could not meet with her—an absence I now regret even more deeply.
To me, she was like a lighthouse, and in a practical sense, she was one of my main academic mentors. As one of her students outside France, I would like to take the liberty of recording here some of my memories of her and the st...


