John D. Montgomery oral history interview

1982-03-04

Montgomery, John D. (John Dickey), 1920-2008; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with John D. Montgomery conducted by Marlene Mayo on March 4, 1982. John D. Montgomery (February 15, 1920 - April 3, 2008) was born in Evanston, IL and raised in Ohio and Michigan. He received a Master's degree in Municipal Administration from Kalamazoo College, before being drafted in 1942. After two years as an enlisted man, he joined the War Department as a Military Government Officer.  In February 1944, he was sent to the School of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia for an eight-week training program and then on to the Civil Affairs Training School at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was there when the Japanese surrendered, and his Japanese language training was cut short. He arrived in Japan in November 1945 as a Labor Officer.  His first assignment was in Kofu, the capital of Yamanashi Prefecture, where he inspected plants to determine if they could be repurposed to manufacture non-military goods. He was subsequently assigned to Motsue, and then Hiroshima, where he volunteered his services for the Hiroshima Reconstruction Planning Commission. After leaving Japan, he studied Japanese history at Harvard, receiving his PhD in 1951. He published. The Purge in Occupied Japan: A Study in the Use of Civilian Agencies under Military Government in 1953. He held a variety of positions before he joined the Harvard faculty in 1963, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. He was also affiliated with Soka University of America, where he was Director of the Pacific Basin Research Center.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

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

Japan; Massachusetts; Harvard University

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: 01:27:00 (audiocassette; mp3); Transcript: 35 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-087574