Edwin O. Reischauer (1910–90) was America's most influential scholar of Japanese history and politics during the 1940s and 1950s, after which he served as U.S. ambassador to Japan between 1961 and 1966. George R. Packard, a special assistant to the ambassador in 1963–65, offers an insider's perspective in this admiring but not uncritical biography. Packard was given access to the original, unabridged manuscript of Reischauer's condensed 1986 autobiography and to his private correspondence from 1961 until his retirement. Packard also draws on interviews with former colleagues, students, and government officials in Japan and the United States. The result is a lively account, written with panache, that excels in describing Reischauer's foreign policy ideas and his conflicted views of the Vietnam War.
Packard portrays Reischauer as genial, down to earth, kind to students, lacking in guile, self-confident, and rarely responsive to scholarly critics. He was also intensely private and so career oriented that he seemed distant from his family. Harvard was the leading American center for training Japan specialists when Reischauer taught there during the late 1940s asnd 1950s, although Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Berkeley, and other institutions also contributed importantly. A partial list of his former students who fanned out across the United States to develop Japanese studies includes nineteen men and, curiously, no women (p. 95). (I knew Reischauer slightly, once entertained him and his wife at my New London home, and first met Packard in 1964 when he was serving in the embassy in Tokyo.)
Born to a missionary-educator family in Tokyo, Reischauer grew skeptical of religions as a young adult but held a more positive outlook on missionaries in East Asia than did his Harvard colleague and occasional rival, John K. Fairbank. Although they competed for resources and influence, Fairbank and Reischauer collaborated effectively in the classroom and in print. Reischauer was a narrative historian with little regard for theory who was widely admired as a generalist. Packard notes that Reischauer emphasized the impact of great individuals in Japanese history and was unfailingly optimistic about the prospects for democracy in that country. As a key U.S. government expert during World War II, Reischauer offered much sensible, if little heeded, advice about Japanese elites. But he also imagined that “there existed in Japan a strongly pro-American element” (p. 70) and, even more fancifully, wrote in 1942 regarding the emperor, “as things are measured in Japan, he is a liberal and a man of peace at heart” (p. 71).
Reischauer's sunny view of the postwar American occupation praised ordinary Japanese citizens for most of the occupation's political success, admiring “the simple earnest, beauty-loving little people . . . [their] simple dignity and serenity that is hard to match” (p. 111). Such generalizations, however benignly intended, seem patronizing in retrospect. Although an anticommunist liberal and fervent proponent of democratic individualism, he called for recognizing the People's Republic of China as early as 1950 and opposed the French effort to reclaim Indochina that ended in failure at Dienbienphu in May 1954. Packard emphasizes that Reischauer personally admired the Canadian scholar-diplomat E. Herbert Norman, even though he disagreed with Norman's partially Marxist-influenced interpretations of modern Japanese history.
As ambassador, Reischauer supported the Japan-United States Mutual Security Treaty of 1952 (Anpo, amended in 1960), fought to end the “occupation mentality” of Americans in Japan and to create more equal bilateral relations, and tried to embolden the faith of ordinary Japanese in democracy. He was contemptuous of Japanese right-wingers as well as leftists. He rather quixotically battled intellectual Marxism among Japanese scholars and journalists and ended up being regarded by many as an apologist for capitalism because he endorsed then-current American interpretations of Japan's modernization. Packard's account of this contretemps is too compressed to give a clear sense of Japanese critics’ views. He likewise oversimplifies the criticism of both Reischauer and modernization theory later offered by a number of younger scholars in the United States. He also gives little attention to Reischauer's role in Japanese–American trade issues.
Seriously wounded in March 1964 by a deranged Japanese youth wielding a six-inch kitchen knife, Reischauer spent months recuperating and never fully recovered. He generated controversy for his sustained and vigorous defense of American policy in Vietnam. Although he privately disagreed with U.S. actions there, he chose not to speak out “because I thought it would weaken my position on Japanese advice” (p. 217). He decided he had no choice but to defend the war, to the increasing dismay of many in Japan; Packard calls this “the worst decision of his life” (p. 220).
Packard commends Reischauer for helping to normalize Japanese relations with South Korea (1965), speeding the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty (1972), and advocating American recognition of the People's Republic of China (initiated in 1972). After he returned to Harvard as a university professor, illness plagued his later years, and as Packard notes, his “historical works on Japan have been largely superseded by subsequent research” (p. 287). A gifted public official and East Asian scholar, Reischauer left his most lasting legacy to his thousands of undergraduate and hundreds of graduate students.
