Dale R. Johnson was born on December 24, 1933 in Heber City, Utah. Following World War II, he lived in Long Beach, California where he graduated from the David Starr Jordan High School in 1952. He went on to attend the University of Utah and in 1959 graduated with a Bachelor’s in Music (piano performance and composition).

Drafted out of his senior year at Utah, Dale Johnson served two years (1957-58) in the military as a member of the 7th United States Army in Seoul, Korea. During this time he studied Korean music with Korea’s most distinguished musician, Hwang Byonggi. Johnson was Mr. Hwang’s first foreign student, and the first foreigner to perform with members of the Royal Court Orchestra in a Seoul radio broadcast in 1958. In addition to music, Johnson also studied the Korean language during his military tour of duty in Seoul.

Dale R. Johnson was accepted with a modest scholarship at the University of Michigan, School of Music in 1960, but discovered that this scholarship was insufficient for him to continue school. He applied for and was awarded an NDEA fellowship to study Chinese. Johnson was eligible for the fellowship due to the number of Chinese characters he had learned during his Korean language study in Seoul. At the University of Michigan, Johnson was a student of Prof. James I. Crump, with whom he maintained a life-long close relationship.

In 1968 Johnson joined the faculty of Oberlin College. A year later, he was named Chair of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. Under his chairmanship East Asian Studies was created as a department, and Chinese was approved as a major. When he started teaching at Oberlin, the Asian curriculum consisted of courses in Chinese language, Chinese literature, Chinese history, and courses in Asian religions. Later more faculty members were added in Government and Art, and language offerings were expanded to include the Japanese language. Courses in Asian sociology were offered from time to time, but no permanent faculty was ever secured. By the mid 1970s the East Asian program at Oberlin was unequalled at any other institution of comparable size. Government grants to sustain and expand the program were awarded to Oberlin over several of the early years.

Dale Johnson resigned his professorship at Oberlin in 1988 after five difficult years in a commuting marriage between Ohio and northern California. He accepted a teaching position at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1988, where he concluded his teaching career and retired in 1993.