ASJ 130th Anniversary Special Events: 
Joint Anniversary Lecture with the International House of Japan


Summary of Meeting
The last flakes of the season's first snow were still falling as members of the ASJ and International House gathered for a joint meeting, at which Dr. George Packard, President of the United States-Japan Foundation, spoke on "Edwin O. Reischauer: historian, missionary, prophet". The meeting opened with words of welcome from Mr. Mikio Kato, Executive Director of International House, who spoke first of his early contacts with Dr. Packard, who used to spend many hours in a tiny cubicle in International House around 1960 researching for his book "Protest in Tokyo". Another denizen of I. House in those days was Sadako Nakamura, now Ogata, whose husband was with us on this occasion. He also noted that Haru Reischauer was a cousin of Shigeharu Matsumoto, the founder of International House.  

The floor was then taken by Dr. Berendt, who, before introducing the distinguished speaker, began by asking the assembled company to observe a minute's silence in memory of our late Patron, H.I.H. Prince Takamado, which he preluded by reading a tanka specially composed by Fr. Neal Lawrence: 


A shining light gone,
Youthful Prince Takamado dies,
The world weeps for him,
Imperial family star,
Hero and model for all. 


Lecture 2002-12-09
Edwin O. Reischauer: Historian, Missionary, Prophet
Dr. George Packard

Dr. Packard opened by addressing himself to Mrs. (formerly Senator) Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the wife of the US Ambassador, and to Dr. Berendt and representatives of the Ambassador of India, as well as other distinguished diplomats and members of the Asiatic Society of Japan and of the International House. His talk, he said, would touch on the central themes of a biography he is writing on Edwin O. Reischauer. The book is needed, he said, because Reischauer's own autobiography left out much that was important about the man as a historian, missionary and policy analyst. In addition, Reischauer's views have been much attacked and dismissed by critics; it is time to set the record straight. 

As a young Lt. Colonel during World War Two, Reischauer had been asked to brief Army officers on Japanese history in four or five one-hour lectures. When the war ended, he decided to sit down and write these up as a straightforward history of Japan for the general reader without using any reference materials. It was published as Japan: The Story of a Nation. 

What followed was an extraordinarily influential new theory about Japan's modernization process that flew in the face of the current Marxist theory that prevailed in postwar Japan. Rejecting determinism and dialectical materialism as simplistic and insufficient to explain why Japan had modernized when China had not, he traced the origins of Japan's surge to successful modernization back to the latter part of the Tokugawa Era. Late Tokugawa feudalism laid the intellectual, economic and social foundations for modern Japan under conditions of tranquillity and order. 

Champion of a diametrically opposed view was the Canadian diplomat and scholar, E. Herbert Norman, who like Reischauer was born to missionaries in Japan in 1909 (Reischauer was born in 1910). The two men's lives stood in counterpoint from their earliest days: both had boyhoods in Japan, returned to their native countries for college, did graduate work at Harvard, and became influential scholars and policy advisors in their respective governments. 

But Norman espoused a Marxist interpretation of the Tokugawa feudalism, and saw only repression where Reischauer saw the seeds of modernization. The Meiji period was simply an extension of feudalism organized by lower samurai and wealthy merchant allies. Militarism in the 1930s was bound to prevail.  

Their differences would have remained in the academic realm were it not for the fact that policy-makers planning for the Occupation of Japan needed to take a position on the readiness of the Japanese people to accept democracy. Reischauer thought that Taisho democracy, for all its weakness, had prepared the nation to adapt to parliamentary democracy; Norman and other Marxists thought a thorough social revolution was still needed. 

Reischauer's view was accepted and the Occupation was successful in democratizing and demilitarizing Japan. Or was it? A new wave of scholars espousing Norman's view now dominate the field of of Japan studies in the US as well as the media. John Dower and Herbert Bix have won Pulitzer prizes in the past three years for books on the Occupation and on the Showa Emperor which follow closely Norman's way of thinking. Other American scholars of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s are now ensconced in prestigious chairs and teach that the Emperor should have been treated as a war criminal, the occupation was a failure from 1948, and the US was an aggressive imperialist nation seeking to establish hegemony in Asia. Reischauer's views are dismissed as naive or outdated. Japan's democracy is called dysfunctional. Reischauer is said to have founded the "Chrysanthemum Club" -- a group that apologized for Japan and ignored the profound differences between Japan and the rest of the advanced industrialized democracies. 

When President Kennedy named Reischauer Ambassador to Japan in 1961, his leftist critics in Japan charged that Reischauer was using his modernization theory as a counter-offensive to Marxism. In fact, Dr. Packard explained, the theory had been carefully worked out years before and was scarcely an anti-Communist manifesto. Instead, it identified the elements that underlay the experience of those nations that succeeded in modernizing in the 19th Century, in fields such as urbanization, widespread use of inanimate energy sources, broad popular participation in economic and political affairs, widespread literacy, the spread of mass communication and the growth of bureaucracies. 

Dr. Packard rejected as a distortion the charge by critics that Reischauer believed in the "convergence theory," that is, that Japan would come to look "just like us." Japan, he said, would always be Japanese. Democracy succeeded here because it was "made in Japan" by the Japanese people. 

What separates Reischauer from his critics, Dr. Packard said, was his missionary-like faith in the capacity of ordinary people to make wise choices for themselves -- a legacy perhaps from his Protestant missionary father, Dr. August Karl Reischauer (a former Vice President of the ASJ). Edwin Reischauer was once asked why he had not become a missionary like his father, and he replied, with a smile, "Ah, but I am." While his critics looked for some mysterious system or power centre that made Japan "different" and an outlier in international affairs, Reischauer believed to the end of his days that at bottom, the Japanese people were in charge of their own destiny, and could be trusted. 

Dr. Packard said that Reischauer paid little attention to his critics, viewing them as a "sideshow that had already peaked by 1990." All mainstream history attracts revisionism, he contended, and this should be considered a compliment. He did engage in one taped debate for a Harvard radio program in 1989 with Karel van Wolferen, the Dutch author of The Enigma of Japanese Power. After van Wolferen shouted him down a number of times, Reischauer said quietly that van Wolferen was completely wrong, and that "the common people of Japan have a very clear idea of what they want." Van Wolferen, shouting that Reischauer didn't understand the "system" he had described in his book -- a system that could not fail and endangered American security -- stomped out of the interview and refused to allow its broadcast. Six months later the "system" failed: the bubble had burst. 

Dr. Packard concluded by pointing to some of Reischauer's early predictions that proved to be prophetic: that nationalism would prevail over Communism in Asia (1956), that a peaceful and prosperous China would benefit all nations (1956), that the US should never have supported the return of French colonialism to Vietnam (1956), that India would become vastly more important forty years from now (1955), that Okinawa should be returned to Japan (1962), that weapons of mass destruction including germ warfare would be available to poor and backward nations in the 21st Century (1973), and that advanced industrialized democracies would face disaster if they did not reform their education systems to produce children who would understand that they were citizens of a shrinking world' 

Dr. Packard, in a lively question period, described Reischauer's interest in meeting ordinary people through visits to 39 of Japan's (then) 46 prefectures. He almost missed a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk at Haneda because he talked too long at Seikei University. Did he think the Meiji Era was revolutionary? Yes, though the Meiji leaders cleverly camouflaged their revolutionary agenda by acting in the name of the Emperor. Why didn't he confront his critics more forcefully? He was a shy man at heart and had no stomach for ad hominem attack. Besides, he respected their right to criticize him. Was Reischauer a man of the left or right? Definitely he saw himself as left of center, and in fact admired Robert Kennedy very much. He might have served as a Secretary of State for a President Robert Kennedy. 

The meeting concluded with a vote of thanks proposed by Mrs. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, who said she knew Reischauer only through his writings, but recognized him as a historian with missionary zeal and a man of great optimism in difficult times, who had great respect for Japan and a love of its people. She added that she had found the same missionary zeal in Dr. Packard, a teacher open to his students, whom he inspired just as his mentor had done.