Edwin O. Reischauer oral history interview

1979-11-01

Reischauer, Edwin O. (Edwin Oldfather), 1910-1990; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Edwin O. Reischauer conducted by Marlene Mayo on November 1, 1979. Edwin O. Reischauer (October 15, 1910 – September 1, 1990), born in Tokyo, Japan to American Presbyterian missionaries, was an author, scholar, diplomat, professor, and leading expert on East Asian affairs . In his youth, he moved back and forth between Japan and the U.S. with his family.  He attended Oberlin College, where he received a BA in 1929 and Harvard College, where he received an MA in 1932 and a PhD in 1939. From September 1943 until the end of the War, he was a major and than a lieutenant colonel in Army Intelligence supervising the liaison between G2, the Intelligence Section of the Pentagon, and the work in Arlington Hall, where Japanese radio intercepts were decrypted. After the war, he was a member of the State Department's State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), where he drafted the first policy on Korea and participated in the planning for the occupation of Japan. In the interview, he describes the training of recruits at Arlington Hall, the conditions in Japan during a four-month Cultural and Social Sciences mission in 1948, and reflects on the roles of the Emperor and of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan, among other topics. He returned to Harvard, where he taught Far Eastern languages and Japanese history over a 40-year period, retiring in 1980. From 1961 to 1966, he served as the United States Ambassador to Japan. In 1990, Edwin O. Reischauer passed away at the age of 79.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

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

Japan; Massachusetts; Cambridge

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: 02:19:00 (audiocassette; mp3); Transcript: 68 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-087579