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  • Japan and the United States:An Unnatural Intimacy
  • Kenneth B. Pyle (bio)
Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan. By George Packard . Columbia University Press, New York, 2010. xv, 351 pages. $32.50.

At the outset of this long-in-the-making biography, George Packard makes a bold claim for the importance of his subject: Edwin Reischauer was a "scholar-turned ambassador who single handedly changed the relationship between Japan and the United States" (p. ix). Summing up Reischauer's achievement, he writes:

He felt it his duty to educate the American people about the true nature of Japanese history, society, and culture. . . . It is hard to imagine anyone offering the kind of masterly, sweeping, and authoritative account that Reischauer provided for students and scholars as well as general readers. One has only to imagine what the field of Japanese studies would look like today had he shrunk from the task. . . . As ambassador, he helped end the "occupation mentality" and move the two nations toward an "equal partnership."

(pp. 276-77)

Packard is well situated to write a full account of his life. He was close to Reischauer and not surprisingly his biography, although not without occasional criticism of Reischauer, provides a warm and sympathetic assessment of his life. Packard, who planned the biography from the time he served as Reischauer's special assistant in the embassy, kept in close contact with him until his death in 1990, had full access to his personal papers and [End Page 377] to his family and associates, and honored Reischauer by establishing a center in his name at Johns Hopkins University where Packard was dean of the School of Advanced International Studies.

This book gives us a better account than the autobiography published by Harper & Row in 1986 which was not well received. Harvard University Press had earlier rejected the manuscript. The cultural critic Ian Buruma found the autobiography self-important and self-righteous, and the New York Times correspondent in Tokyo, Clyde Haberman, also complained that it was self-congratulatory, replete with "minor details and pointless episodes," and added that it "left the distinct impression that, though the United States commands [his] loyalty, Japan enjoys his love." 1

While Reischauer is rightly acknowledged as a pioneer of academic studies of Japan in the United States who oversaw the training of a generation of scholars at Harvard, his role as a "policy intellectual," writing for a wide audience about U.S.-Japan relations and serving as U.S. ambassador from 1961 to 1966, aroused controversy among a new generation of academics at the time of the Vietnam conflict and later among critics of Japanese mercantilist policies that Reischauer defended in the 1980s. His biography provides a detailed account of Reischauer's career, but to assess the accuracy of Packard's claim for Reischauer's influence, one must consider the nature of the U.S.-Japan relationship that he is said to have singlehandedly transformed. We need to see Reischauer in the broader perspective of the uniquely complex bilateral relationship in which his career unfolded. It will become clear that my own assessment of his influence is more measured.

Unconditional Surrender

As the years of postwar Japan lengthen and we begin to gain perspective on the major themes of its history, and how to conceptualize and periodize them, it is unavoidable that U.S. hegemony over many aspects of Japanese life must be a central theme. Companion to this theme is another: the struggle by the Japanese to escape their dependent relationship with the United States and to own the ground they stand on.

The extent of U.S. postwar domination need not have been so excessive. Its origin lay in Franklin Roosevelt's radical and unprecedented policy of demanding unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. His allies Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had deep doubts about the policy, and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his military advisors opposed it, but Roosevelt made his own foreign policy. Ruling out any confidential discussion [End Page 378] with the enemy as a basis for ending the conflict, Roosevelt cast the war in moral terms as a crusade to rid the world once...

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