Gordon Townsend Bowles oral history interview

1980-08-23/1980-08-24

Bowles, Gordon Townsend; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Gordon Townsend Bowles conducted by Marlene Mayo on August 23, 1980. Gordon Townsend Bowles (June 25, 1904 - November 11, 1991) was born in Tokyo, Japan, to Quaker missionaries. He attended the Tokyo Grammar School, one year of high school at Westtown Boarding School, and graduated from the American School in Tokyo in 1921. He received a bachelor's degree from Earlham University in 1925 and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1935. He remained at Harvard as an associate researcher until 1938, when he left for a one-year teaching position at the University of Hawaii. In 1942, Bowles was recruited to work for the Board of Economic Warfare. According to Bowles, "The Board of Economic Warfare was created to assess Japan's economic potential and what was happening to it, what would happen in the future, and the need to cope with whatever Japan was at the termination of the war, whether it was burned out, bombed out or otherwise, to cope with the occupied areas." (Transcript 2, p.7) The agency changed its name from BEW to the Office of Economic Warfare and then became the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA). FEA was dissolved and, in the fall of 1944, Bowles and others were brought into the Department of State. He was transferred to the Division of Cultural Cooperation, where he initially focused on areas liberated from Japan and then shifted his attention to the reorientation of Japan in general and to educational reform in Japan in particular. Bowles was a member of the 1946 United States Education Mission to Japan. After the end of the Occupation, he taught anthropology at Syracuse University, where he continued his interest in anthropometry and Asia.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

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

Japan; Massachusetts; Monterey

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: 06:00:47 (audio cassette; mp3); Transcript: 101 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-087511