Personal Recollections by Hugh Patrick: An Interview by Edward J. Lincoln

EDWARD LINCOLN: Hugh, you've had a long, distinguished, and not yet completed career in Japan studies. Several years ago you wrote a retrospective on your "personal odyssey" that covered a number of issues about the development of the field of Japanese economic studies.¹ We will tread over some of the same ground, but I have questions on other topics that should be of interest to readers of The Journal of Japanese Studies. Let's start with your career history as an economist specializing primarily on Japan.

HUGH PATRICK: Until my mid-30s, I had a series of three-year plans after I graduated from college. At the end of the third year I'd be in a quite different place from where I thought I was going to be. For example, after I got out of college, the Korean War was on, and it turned out I was 4F so I worked as a civilian for the army. That's how I was sent to Japan, initially for a three-month project, and I was going back and forth between Japan and Korea. I was still a kid and had never seen a poor country.

EL: Had you been to Europe?

HP: I had never been to Europe. I had never been outside of the United States. Before the Korean War started, my dream was to spend a year in England at the London School of Economics or something like that. But the war stopped that and I suddenly found myself alternating between two places. One was a Korea that was terribly poor; it was war-devastated, it was in horrific condition, and it left a lasting imprint on me. The other was also a society that had a long tradition and was sophisticated and was emerging from the devastating loss of World War II, and I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know one word of Japanese when I arrived in Japan. I barely knew that there were four main islands of Japan; I was incredibly ignorant. Having just graduated from Yale, I thought I knew everything, so this dose of reality was a shock. But I was smart enough to know that China and its immense culture were right across the water. Even though we were at war with the Chinese, they were an important part of world as well as Asian history. Realizing that I was in the midst of an important part of the globe, I got very interested in Japan.

Initially, I was intimidated and scared, but I gradually got to know more and more Japanese. My civilian project for the Army kept being extended, so I stayed in Japan for about two years. When the work came to an end, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in Japanese studies to learn more about Japan. To add a personal note, I really wanted to learn more about the country that my new wife was from. At the same time I wanted her to learn how to live in America. I got a masters in Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, but realized I wasn't going to earn a living with that. So I decided to get a masters in economics because that had always been the field I enjoyed the most. Some really outstanding professors got me very excited about economics, including Gardner Ackley, Richard Musgrave, and Wolfgang Stolper. They said, "of course you're going on for a Ph.D.," and that seemed very attractive. So that was a change in the first three-year plan, and I continued on at the University of Michigan in the economics Ph.D. program.

Then I decided if I was going to do a dissertation I wanted to do it on a Japanese topic and get back to Japan. That period, 1957-58...