12/08/2026
IN MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND BRENDAN McMULLAN ❤️
It is with enormous sadness that I have learned that my dear friend of more than 30 years, Brendan McMullan, passed away in 2024.
I had been trying to reconnect with Brendan after we lost contact in recent years. Yesterday I appealed through LinkedIn in the hope that someone might still be in touch with him. Thanks to the kindness of one of Brendan’s former connections, I finally received the news I had been dreading.
I know there will be many people from different chapters of Brendan’s remarkable life who may still not know that he has passed away, so I wanted to share this.
I first met Brendan in Sendai, Japan, in the 1990s, when he was an Overseas Lecturer at Tohoku Fukushi University. That meeting became a friendship that lasted for more than three decades.
Brendan was an extraordinary character and an extraordinarily intelligent man.
Originally from Scotland, he had studied at Cambridge and spent around 15 years working as a solicitor in Glasgow and Lerwick before life took him in a completely different direction.
He arrived in Japan in 1991 and spent nine years at Tohoku Fukushi University, teaching English and helping develop the university’s international activities. His adventures during those years ranged from college baseball in Cuba to accompanying Japanese archaeologists through the Russian Far East.
Brendan was a gifted linguist. He spoke Russian fluently, along with French and Spanish, and also acquired Japanese.
After leaving Japan and spending some time back in Scotland, another chapter began in The Hague, Netherlands. From 2002 until 2013, Brendan worked for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as Senior Linguist (English). He subsequently established Brendan McMullan Consulting, working as an interpreter and translator.
His international life even took him to Ukraine, where he was a guest lecturer in interpretation at Pyotr Mohyla Black Sea State University in Nikolaev, now Mykolaiv.
But those are the entries on a CV.
To me, he was simply Brendan — my friend.
We stayed in touch across countries and continents for more than 30 years. We talked, laughed, worked together and watched our lives change. Even as recently as June 2020, Brendan was helping me with a translation project.
Sadly, somewhere along the way we lost contact.
I always thought there would be another conversation.
Discovering now that Brendan died in 2024 has been heartbreaking. There are things I would have liked to say to him and memories I would have loved to share with him one more time.
But more than anything, I feel fortunate that our paths crossed in Sendai all those years ago and that this remarkable Scotsman became such an important part of my life.
I am sharing this particularly for Brendan’s old friends, former colleagues and students in Scotland, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine and elsewhere who may, like me, simply have lost touch and not know that he has gone.
If you knew Brendan, please feel free to leave a memory of him. I would genuinely love to hear your stories and remember him through the many lives he touched.
Rest in peace, my dear friend Brendan.
Thank you for more than 30 years of friendship.
You will be greatly missed and never forgotten. ❤️
Miki
