Edwin O. Reischauer

Lore & Background

Edwin O. Reischauer was born in Tokyo, Japan, the son of Presbyterian educational missionaries. He attended the American School in Japan before moving to the United States for college, graduating with an AB from Oberlin in 1931. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1939, studying under Serge Elisséeff, and his dissertation translated the Japanese monk Ennin's travelogues in Tang China. During World War II, Reischauer warned the U.S. Navy about the shortage of Japanese linguists, leading to the creation of the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School, and he ran a top-secret course at Arlington Hall for the Army Signal Corps.

Reischauer taught at Harvard for 40 years, co-developing with John King Fairbank the influential survey course 'Rice Paddies' and the textbooks East Asia: The Great Tradition and East Asia: The Modern Transformation. He served as director of the Harvard–Yenching Institute and chairman of the Department of Far Eastern Languages. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him Ambassador to Japan after Reischauer wrote an article in Foreign Affairs arguing that the 1960 protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty reflected real grievances, not a communist plot. As ambassador, he promoted 'equal partnership,' arranged a summit between Kennedy and Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, and embarked on a nationwide listening tour, visiting 39 of Japan's 47 prefectures.

Reischauer's ambassadorship ended in 1966, partly due to his discomfort defending the Vietnam War. In 1964, he was stabbed by a mentally ill Japanese youth; the blood transfusion he received was tainted with hepatitis C, contributing to his death 26 years later. He founded the Japan Institute at Harvard in 1973, later named in his honor.

Reader's Guide

Edwin O. Reischauer's significance lies in his dual role as a scholar and diplomat who shaped American understanding of East Asia and US-Japan relations. As a Harvard professor, he co-created foundational textbooks and trained generations of students, expanding East Asian studies in the United States. His co-development of the McCune–Reischauer romanization system provided a standard for transcribing Korean. As ambassador, he repaired the rift caused by the 1960 Security Treaty protests, advocating for equal partnership and fostering closer ties. His tenure marked a shift from career diplomats to area specialists, setting a precedent for future appointments. Reischauer's legacy endures through the Harvard institute bearing his name and his influence on US policy toward East Asia.

Did You Know?

• Reischauer co-developed the McCune–Reischauer romanization of Korean in 1939 with George M. McCune and several Korean linguists.
• He was stabbed in March 1964 by a Japanese youth with a history of mental illness; the blood transfusion he received was tainted with hepatitis C.
• His mother was instrumental in co-founding the Japan Deaf Oral School, though it was not the first of its kind in Japan.
• Reischauer's farewell lecture at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1981 was so crowded that students competed for seats with faculty and a Japanese television crew.

From the Plains to the Qing Archives

Fairbank was born in 1907 in Huron, South Dakota, into a family whose Congregational ministry lineage stretched back to Massachusetts in 1633. His mother, Lorena King Fairbank, was a women's suffrage activist, and his father practiced law. His education carried him through Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard College, and finally Balliol College at Oxford. At Harvard, the British diplomatic historian Charles Kingsley Webster nudged the young man toward an underdeveloped field: China's foreign relations, since Qing dynasty archives were only then being opened. Fairbank later confessed he knew essentially nothing about China when he made that choice. In 1929 he graduated summa cum laude and went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, where he began learning Chinese and sought guidance from H.B. Morse, a retired Imperial Maritime Customs Service official. By January 1932, he had arrived in Beijing to study under historian Tsiang Tingfu at Tsinghua University, immersing himself in newly available diplomatic sources and Chinese scholarly perspectives that balanced the British approaches he had seen in England.

Forging a Discipline at Harvard

When Fairbank returned to Harvard in 1936, he became the university's first full-time specialist in Chinese history. After the Pacific War pulled him into the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and the Office of War Information in Chongqing, he came back to a postwar America hungry for understanding of East Asia. He launched a master's degree program in area studies, deliberately designed to be multi-disciplinary and aimed at training journalists, government officials, and professionals who did not intend to pursue academic careers. He established the Center for East Asian Research, serving as its director from 1955 to 1973, and later saw it renamed the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His influence extended well beyond the classroom: he raised funds for graduate fellowships, trained a generation of China historians, and placed them across American and overseas universities. He also welcomed and funded researchers from around the world to work in Cambridge, hosting conferences that connected scholars internationally. Paul Cohen, one of his students, observed that the 1950s approaches in the field are sometimes called the Harvard school of China studies.

Books That Shaped a Field

Fairbank's most widely read work, The United States and China, first appeared in 1948 and went through revised editions in 1958, 1979, and 1983. Each edition synthesized the latest scholarship for both students and general readers, and in 1972, ahead of Nixon's historic visit to Beijing, leaders on both sides reportedly read the book. In 1941, he and Edwin O. Reischauer developed a year-long introductory survey covering China and Japan, later expanded to include Korea and Southeast Asia. The course, nicknamed Rice Paddies, eventually produced two influential texts: East Asia: The Great Tradition in 1960 and East Asia: The Modern Transformation in 1965. He also published an expanded revision of his doctoral dissertation as Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast in 1953. Beyond his own authorship, Fairbank co-edited the landmark Cambridge History of China series, which became a foundational reference for scholars worldwide. His ability to formulate basic concepts that could then be tested and refined by others was central to his scholarly method.

A Life Woven into China

In 1932, Wilma Denio Cannon, daughter of Walter Bradford Cannon and sister of Marian Cannon Schlesinger, traveled to China to join Fairbank. They married on June 29 of that year. Wilma, who had studied fine arts at Radcliffe and apprenticed under the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, went on to build her own career in Chinese art history. The couple became close friends with Liang Sicheng, son of the reformer Liang Qichao, and his wife Lin Huiyin, whom the Fairbanks called Phyllis. Through the Lins they met Jin Yuelin, a philosopher trained at Columbia. Fairbank later reflected that these friendships taught him and Wilma to sense the Chinese challenge as a matter of winnowing the past and deciding what to preserve versus what to borrow from foreign sources. Sicheng gave them Chinese names: his was Fei Zhengqing, meaning upright and clear, and hers was Weimei, meaning comforting plum. These personal bonds in Beijing gave Fairbank a depth of understanding that purely archival research could never provide.

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