Martin Bronfenbrenner oral history interview

1980-01-24

Bronfenbrenner, Martin, 1914-1997; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Martin Bronfenbrenner conducted by Marlene Mayo on January 24, 1980. Martin Bronfenbrenner (February 2, 1914 - June 2, 1997), a professor of economics, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He received a BA in political science and economics from Washington University in 1934 and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1939.  He taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago 1938-1940 and began working for the U.S. Department of the Treasury during that period.  He enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and attended the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado. He was sent first to Washington, D.C., where he translated sailing directions and blueprints; then to Pearl Harbor, where he conducted prisoner interrogations; and in late September 1945, to Kyushu, Japan, where he was assigned to the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD). He landed in Sasebo, but in early October 1945, he was transferred to Nagasaki, then to a post office in Shimonoseki censoring telephone and telegraph communications with Korea, and then to Fukuoka.  When he left Japan in December 1945, he knew that he wanted to return.  Before he could do so, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and then started teaching at the University of Wisconsin (1947 -1957). In 1949, he joined the Public Finance Division of the Economic and Scientific Section (ESS) of GHQ/SCAP and was involved in recasting of the Japanese tax system, including taxation of foreigners in Japan, the value added tax for the Japanese localities, and Japanese revenue estimates. He left Japan in August 1950, under suspicion of being a Communist. He had been placed on SCAP's purge list. He returned to his position at the University of Wisconsin. He later taught at Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, and from 1971 to 1984 and from 1991 until his death in 1997 at Duke University.  From 1984-1990, he taught at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.  His scholarly work focused on a range of economic issues and Japan, specifically Japan’s economy after the war.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

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

Japan; North Carolina; Duke 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: 01:32:00 (audiocassette; mp3); Transcript: 46 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-087512