Ronald Anderson oral history interview

1980-09-22

Anderson, Ronald; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Ronald Anderson conducted by Marlene Mayo on September 22, 1980. Ronald Stone Anderson (September 7,1908-February 15, 1985) was born in Seattle, Washington. He received a BA from Stanford University in 1929. That summer, after attending an organized tour of Japan, Korea, and China, he decided to stay in East Asia and find a job. He taught English in high schools in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and Fukuoka, Japan until 1935, when he returned to the United States to pursue a master's degree in history at Stanford. He then taught in a Redwood City, California, high school for several years. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established on the Stanford campus and later, a Civil Affairs Training Program (CATS) for officers, as well. Anderson became an instructor on Japanese education, family life, and religion in those programs. He edited the Army Handbook on Japanese welfare called M354-16 and wrote the history of the CATS program. He wanted to go to Japan to work in the Occupation and was interviewed at the Pentagon in January 1946. After several weeks, he was offered a position and arrived in Tokyo in early 1946, where he was assigned to the Office of Counterintelligence. He wanted to work on education issues, so he immediately took the initiative to be transferred out of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) to the Military Government in Kyoto. There he became Chief Civil Education and Information (CI&E) Officer. He oversaw educational policy in 28 prefectures stretching from Shizuoka to Kagoshima. CI&E was initially responsible for enforcing the basic policy SCAPINs, including eliminating ultranationalism and militarism in the schools and purging school personnel. It moved on to following recommendations from the Education Mission, such as instituting the 6-3-3 method and coeducation, and later to the education legislation of 1947 and after.  In the interview, Anderson addresses censorship of textbooks, school lunch programs with rations provided by LARA, inspections of the school buildings, banned martial arts, teachers' unions, and conferences organized by CI&E, among other topics. In 1949, he returned to the United States to begin a PhD program in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Before finishing his degree, he landed a teaching position at the University of Michigan. He remained there until 1960, when he left to teach at the University of Hawaii. He was initially a visiting professor in the College of Education, but within the year became the Acting Director of the Asian Studies Program.  He continued in Asian Studies until the 1967/68 academic year, when he returned to the College of Education.  He established the Teacher Exchange Program at the East West Center, where secondary school teachers from Asia and the continental United States met to exchange ideas and information. Anderson died in Honolulu on February 15, 1985.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; Virginia; Falls Church

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 04:30:00 (audio cassette; mp3); Transcript: 88 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087502