George Oakley Totten III oral history interview

1982-04-03

Totten, George O. (George Oakley), 1922-; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with George Oakley Totten III conducted by Marlene Mayo on April 3, 1982 and March 27, 1983. George Oakley Totten III (July 21,1922 -March 2, 2009) was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Columbia University but left during his junior year to enter the Military Intelligence Service Language School at the University of Michigan. He volunteered to study Japanese in the Army in 1942 and became one of two officers of a Japanese language detachment in Southeast Asia during World War II. He went on Japan to serve as a language officer for Military Intelligence during the Occupation. He then returned to Columbia to receive his bachelor’s and master’s and then his PhD from Yale in 1954. Totten went on to author, edit, and translate several books and articles on politics in Japan, China, and Korea. He also went on to teach, spending several years at Stockholm University and joining the Political Science Department at the University of Southern California from 1965-1992, serving as the Director of the East Asian Studies Center and Chair of Political Science. He became Emeritus in 1992. In 2009, George Oakley Totten III passed away. He was 86 years old.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

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

Japan; Illinois; Chicago; California; San Francisco

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: 01:17:00 (audiocassette; mp3)

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

Filename: prange-087591