2020-12-22

Ezra Vogel saw the good in every person and every nation | The Japan Times

Ezra Vogel saw the good in every person and every nation | The Japan Times

Ezra Vogel saw the good in every person and every nation
A son remembers his father, a tireless scholar who remained active throughout his long life

BY STEVEN VOGEL


SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES


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Dec 21, 2020


Ezra F. Vogel, 90, one of the country’s leading experts on East Asia through a career that spanned six decades, passed away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sunday due to complications from surgery.

Vogel studied an extraordinary range of substantive topics in multiple countries from the perspectives of various academic disciplines, retooling himself as a scholar many times over in his academic career.





He was originally trained as a sociologist studying the family in the United States. He devoted two years to language study and field research in Japan in 1958-60, emerging as a specialist on Japanese society. He then embarked on Chinese-language study in the 1960s, before it was possible to travel to mainland China, and became an accomplished scholar of Chinese society as well.

His scholarship spanned from family issues to social welfare, industrial policy, international relations and history. He served as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia with the National Intelligence Council from 1993 to 1995, and maintained a strong interest in U.S. foreign and security policy in Asia from that time. He turned to history in his later years, producing magisterial works on Deng Xiaoping and Sino-Japanese relations.

Vogel’s scholarship was not restricted to any single methodology, but rather reflected his drive to get the story right through whatever means necessary. For his research on the Japanese family, he engaged in intensive ethnographic research with his first wife, Suzanne Hall Vogel, interviewing six families about once a week for a year. He kept up with some of the families over the years, and the family friendships now span three generations.

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Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and author of 'Japan as Number One,' dies at 90

For his first book on China, he relied primarily on interviews in Hong Kong with refugees who had escaped from the Guangzhou region. He was a passionate lifelong student of language, and mastered both Japanese and Chinese. He took pride in his ability to conduct research and give public lectures in both languages.

Vogel will be most remembered for his boundless good cheer and boyish enthusiasm. He grew up in the small town of Delaware, Ohio, the son of Jewish immigrants, Joe and Edith Vogel. His father ran a men’s and boys’ clothing store in the center of town, the People’s Store, and he often helped out. He managed to transfer the effusive friendliness of a small-town shoe salesman to the unlikely corridors of Harvard University and Washington D.C.

He had an irrepressible ability to see the good in every person and every nation, while recognizing nonetheless that many of us fall short of our ideals.

Vogel sustained a network of Japanese graduate students and young scholars at Harvard, the juku (study group), which met regularly at his home in Cambridge until the novel coronavirus pandemic intervened. He hosted smaller groups of students working on China as well. He participated in a reunion of former students, colleagues, and juku members almost every summer in Tokyo.

Celebrated author and educator Ezra Vogel | KYODO

Vogel was a devoted husband and father, who hosted a celebration for his extended family at his home every holiday season for the past 25 years. The 2020 reunion was to be held via Zoom on the day he passed away. He loved keeping up with friends, family and colleagues. Undeterred by COVID-19, he raved about his ability to talk to family and colleagues in Japan, China, and other parts of the world without having to travel.

He and his wife, Charlotte, were supportive companions. Among other activities, they enjoyed running daily for 20 years. When his knees began to falter, they turned to cycling for the last 20 years. He even cycled four miles one day shortly before he died.

He maintained long-term friendships, regularly going back for high school and college reunions in his hometown. He made a major gift to his hometown alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, of the entire royalties from the mainland Chinese edition of his biography of Deng Xiaoping.

Vogel was the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. In 1960-1961 he was assistant professor at Yale University and a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history from 1961 to 1964. He remained at Harvard, becoming a lecturer in 1964 and a professor in 1967. He retired from teaching in 2000.

Vogel was also an institution builder at Harvard. He succeeded John Fairbank to become the second director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He cofounded the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs and served as its first director (1980-1987) and as honorary director ever since. He was chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was director of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). He was chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He also served as co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001).

Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote “Japan’s New Middle Class” (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, “Canton Under Communism” (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America” (1979) was a breakaway bestseller in Japan.

In “Comeback” (1988), he suggested things the United States might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in “One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform” (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published as “The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia” (1991). He visited East Asia every year after 1958 and spent a total of over six years in the region. He returned from his most recent trip to China in January, just as word was first coming out about the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the age of 81, Vogel published the definitive biography of Deng Xiaoping, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” (2011). The book won: the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize; Lionel Gelber Foundation; Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto; Honorable Mention 2012 for the Bernard Schwartz Book Award, Asia Society; Finalist 2011 for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography; a Bloomberg News Favorite Book of 2014; and Esquire China Book of the Year 2012; a Gates Notes Top Read of 2012; an Economist Best Book of 2011; a Financial Times Best Book of 2011; a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice 2011; a Wall Street Journal Book of the Year 2011; and a Washington Post Best Book of 2011. The book became a bestseller in China.

At the age of 89, he published “China and Japan: Facing History” (2019), which reviews the history of political and cultural ties between the two nations over 1,500 years. Vogel hoped that the book would offer an accurate portrayal of how the two countries learned from each other over the centuries, but also serve to encourage the Chinese and Japanese leaders to forge a more constructive relationship going forward. Vogel was also concerned about the state of U.S.-China relations.

Vogel received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received the Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998.

Vogel is survived by his wife of 41 years, Charlotte Ikels; son David Vogel of Cambridge, Massachusetts; son Steven Vogel of Berkeley, California; daughter Eve Vogel of Amherst, Massachusetts; sister Fay Bussgang of Dedham, Massachusetts; and five grandchildren.
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Steven Vogel is a professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of “Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work,” and “Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry Are Reforming Japanese Capitalism.”
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OBITUARIES
Ezra Vogel, top American scholar on Asia, dies at 90

Harvard professor authored 'Japan as Number One' and 'Deng Xiaoping'
Ezra Vogel's latest work, “China and Japan: Facing History,” attempted to tackle the roots of the complicated bilateral relationship through revisiting over 1,000 years of history. (Photo by Maho Obata)
KENJI KAWASE, Nikkei Asia chief business news correspondentDecember 21, 2020 13:06 JSTUpdated on December 21, 2020 17:27 JST



HONG KONG -- Ezra Vogel, a top American scholar on Asian affairs, has died at the age of 90, according to a statement from the Fairbank Center of Chinese Studies at Harvard University on Sunday.

Vogel, a professor emeritus at Harvard, was one of the most influential academic voices on modern Japan and China in recent decades. His son, Steven Vogel, a political-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a tweet that the death was the result of complications after surgery. He added that his father was "completely healthy a week ago."

While Vogel's bestseller "Japan as Number One: Lessons for America" in 1979 established his name as a prominent Japanologist, he published a number of deep analyses on China, including "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" in 2011.


His latest work, "China and Japan: Facing History," was published last year and attempted to tackle the roots of the complicated bilateral relationship through revisiting more than 1,000 years of history.

Vogel was born in 1930 in the Midwestern state of Ohio. His father was a Jewish immigrant, whose sisters and other family members died in the Holocaust.

His first major personal encounter with Asia came during World War II. Some of the graduates from his local high school, many of them just a few years older than Vogel, served and died in the war against Japan.

Vogel learned from that teenage experience, and through his parents, the importance of understanding others in order to avoid another war and live peacefully.

He later was on the brink of fighting in another war, in Korea, after he was drafted by the Army, following his graduation from Ohio Wesleyan University.

After Vogel finished basic training, some of his friends were sent to Korea in the early 1950s and died in combat. He wrote that he was "fortunate" to be assigned to an Army hospital in the U.S. working with psychiatric patients. That led to his pursuit in sociology and mental illness studies at Harvard.

His life-changing moment came when Florence Kluckhohn -- a Harvard anthropology professor in charge of Vogel's doctoral thesis on American families -- urged him to go abroad and widen his horizons.

"Ezra, you are so provincial," she said to the young Vogel, stressing that he needed to see a non-Western society to put things into a broader perspective.

He took up that challenge and received a grant to live in Japan for two years, studying the language and the society after obtaining his doctoral degree in sociology in 1958. His first stay in the country led to the publication of his first book, "Japan's New Middle Class" in 1963, describing Japanese families.

His deep understanding of the country and its people led to additional works, while maintaining and expanding his personal relationships with a wide range of friends in Japan. That brought him to the country virtually every year, although the coronavirus pandemic prevented him from visiting this year.

In one of his last visits to Japan, in 2018, Vogel met with a Nikkei Asia reporter in Tokyo for an interview. The academic insisted on conducting the interview in Japanese, because "we are in Japan."

In the 1960s, Vogel expanded his studies to China and the Chinese language, becoming a leading Sinologist. He is widely known in the Chinese-speaking world by his Mandarin name Fu Gaoyi, although he had never thought about studying China or working as a teacher on the country when he was first offered the opportunity by Harvard in 1960.

This was a time when the U.S. was recovering from the specter of McCarthyism in the 1950s and Harvard was trying to reestablish a solid academic program on modern China by recruiting and nurturing young, able scholars such as Vogel.

He was ambivalent at the beginning, as he wanted to keep his studies and connections with Japan.

"I said I might be interested," he wrote in a preface to his last book on Sino-Japanese history, but that was enough for the university to award him a postdoctoral fellowship for three years to study China's language, society, economy and history.

His first book on China, "Canton Under Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949-1968," was published in 1969. The book involved intensive interviewing, an academic technique he employed throughout his career, with people who escaped from the mainland during the early days of the Cultural Revolution to Hong Kong, where he lived for a year. That won him a tenured professorship at Harvard, until he retired from teaching in 2000.

Vogel's deep insights about and affection toward both Japan and China are what made him unique and invaluable. He was the only American writer to have bestselling books on both countries -- "Japan as Number One" and Deng Xiaoping's biography -- and was widely accepted by people in the respective nations.

Words of condolences poured in as news spread of Vogel's death.

The Fairbank Center, where Vogel served as director between 1973 and 1975 and again from 1995 to 1999, said in a Twitter message that he was "a true champion of our center, an erudite scholar, and a wonderful friend. He will be truly missed."

Richard Samuels, a prominent Japanologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a tweet: "A giant as scholar, public servant, and human being. Tirelessly curious. Terrible loss."

Cui Tiankai, China's ambassador to Washington, also in a tweet, praised Vogel as "an outstanding scholar on China and an old friend of the Chinese people."

For some prominent Chinese dissidents, Vogel's stance on China was not completely welcomed.

"Although I strongly disagreed with many of his views on China, but in my experience of knowing him, I felt that he was a good person with magnanimity," tweeted Wang Dan, one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that ended in a violent crackdown ordered by Deng.

Still, Wang, who now lives in the U.S., had deep respect for Vogel despite their differences. He added in his tweet: "Harvard's East Asian Studies has lost a giant."
===

Ezra Vogel

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Ezra Vogel
EzraVogelInBeijing.jpg
Vogel at the National Library of China in 2013
Born
Ezra Feivel Vogel

July 11, 1930
Delaware, Ohio, US
DiedDecember 20, 2020 (aged 90)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences; Japan Foundation Prize 1996
Academic background
Alma mater
Doctoral advisorTalcott Parsons
Academic work
Institutions
Main interestsEast Asian society, politics, and history

Ezra Feivel Vogel (traditional Chinese: 傅高義; simplified Chinese: 傅高义; pinyin: Fù Gāoyì; July 11, 1930 — December 20, 2020) was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University who wrote prolifically on modern Japan, China, Korea, and Asia generally.

His 1978 volume Japan as Number One: Lessons for America was a best-seller in both English and Japanese, and his 2011 Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China won the Lionel Gelber Prize.

Biography[edit]

Ezra Vogel was born to Joseph and Edith Vogel, a family of Jewish immigrants in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio. He often helped his father in his clothing store, The People's Store. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950, and maintained close ties with his alma mater for the rest of his life, contributing royalties from his books and returning to campus frequently.[1] While attending Ohio Wesleyan, Vogel was a member of the Beta Sigma Tau fraternity (that later merged with the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity).[2]

After two years in the Army, he enrolled in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and took his Phd in 1958, studying under the eminent sociologist Talcott Parsons. In 1960–1961 he was assistant professor at Yale University. He did post-doctoral work on Chinese language and history at Harvard from 1961–1964, where he was appointed a lecturer and eventually became tenured professor. He was director of Harvard's East Asian Research Center from 1972–1977 and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies from 1977–1980. He was Director of the Program on US–Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs from 1980–1987 and was named Honorary Director in 1986. He was Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 1973–1975[3] and 1995–1999.[4] He was the first Director of the Asia Center (1997–1999). He retired on June 30, 2000.[5]

Vogel died in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 20, 2020.[6]

He was married to Charlotte Ikels, professor of anthropology at Case Western University. He had three children with his first wife, Suzanne Hall Vogel: David, Steven, and Eve.[5]

His son Steven wrote that Vogel, who had worked in his own father's store, "managed to transfer the effusive friendliness of a small-town shoe salesman to the unlikely corridors of Harvard University and Washington D.C." He "had an irrepressible ability to see the good in every person and every nation, while recognizing nonetheless that many of us fall short of our ideals."[1]

Scholarly career[edit]

Vogel published dozens of articles, reviews, conference papers, and books on China, Japan, and American-East Asian Relations, and organized scholarly and policy conferences. As head of the undergraduate East Asian Studies concentration (major), he supported students in their initial studies, and as a graduate supervisory he nurtured the careers of dozens of PhDs.[5]

After a book of readings on the sociology of the family, his first book, Japan’s New Middle Class (1963), written with Suzanne Vogel, was based on their ethnographic research in a Tokyo neighborhood where they interviewed a group of families each week for a year. Vogel then turned from ethnography to China watching. He studied Chinese language, read newspapers and documents, and conducted interviews in Hong Kong. Canton Under Communism (1969) was a detailed description of regional government and politics in Guangdong.[1] His 1979 book, Japan as Number One, described those areas where Japan had been successful and the United States less so. “Most Japanese understate their successes because they are innately modest," he wrote, and "more purposive Japanese, wanting to rally domestic forces or to reduce foreign pressures, have chosen to dramatize Japan’s potential disasters”. On the American side, he continued, "our confidence in the superiority of Western civilization and our desire to see ourselves as number one make it difficult to acknowledge that we have practical things to learn”. The book's translation into Japanese was a best-seller and aroused debate among American scholars of Japan.[7]

These were followed by books, edited conference volumes, and articles on industrialization, changes in family structure, political change, and security issues in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and East Asia generally. He published Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), his political biography of Deng, at the age of 81, and at the age of 89 his final book, China and Japan: Facing History (2019).[1] He contributed the royalties for the Chinese translation of his Deng political biography to his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, to promote international study and travel. The University estimated the contribution to be more than $500,000.[8]

He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia with the National Intelligence Council from 1993 to 1995.[1] In 1999, when American forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Vogel was reported as saying that it was not credible that the embassy was bombed by mistake when the C.I.A. used old maps.[9] He later added "I find it hard to believe that anyone would consciously do such a thing and certainly not as a matter of policy. On the other hand I don't find it hard to believe that a massive mistake happened with a series of pitfalls and miscues adding up to disaster." [10]

Since 2000 he organized a series of conferences between Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars to work together to examine World War Two in East Asia.

Publications[edit]

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Ezra Vogel, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses 150+ works in 400+ publications in 12 languages and 14,900+ library holdings.[11]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Selected books and edited volumes[edit]

Selected articles[edit]

  • ——— (1960). "The Marital Relationship of Parents of Emotionally Disturbed Children: Polarization and Isolation". Psychiatry (Washington, D.C.). 23 (1): 1–12. doi:10.1080/00332747.1960.11023198.
  • ——— (1960). "The Emotionally Disturbed Child as a Family Scapegoat". Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic review. 47 (2): 21.
  • Bell, Norman, Albert Trieschman and Ezra Vogel (1961). "A Sociocultural Analysis of the Resistances of Working-Class Fathers Treated in a Child Psychiatric Clinic". American journal of orthopsychiatry. 31 (2): 388–405. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1961.tb02136.x.
  • ——— (1961). "The Go-between in a Developing Society: The Case of the Japanese Marriage Arranger". Human organization. 20 (3): 112–120. doi:10.17730/humo.20.3.w785jx286r2536w4.
  • Rothenberg, Albert and Ezra F. Vogel (1964). "Patient Cliques and the Therapeutic Community". British Journal of Medical Psychology. 37 (2): 143–152. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8341.1964.tb01982.x.
  • ——— (1965). "From Friendship to Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in Communist China". The China quarterly (London) (21): 46–60.
  • ——— (1967). "From Revolutionary to Semi-Bureaucrat: The "Regularisation" of Cadres". The China quarterly (London). 29 (29): 36–60. doi:10.1017/S0305741000047901.
  • ——— (1992). "Japanese-American Relations after the Cold War". Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.). 121 (4): 35–60.
  • Bianco, Lucien, Jonathan Unger and Ezra Vogel (1993). "Universities Service Centre: The Chinese University of Hong Kong". China information. 8 (3): 82–82. doi:10.1177/0920203X9300800311.
  • ——— (2004). "China as Number One a Harvard Professor Warns Japan That It Needs to Respond to China's Rise as a World Economic Power: Fortune Asia Edition". Fortune international. 150 (11): 71.
  • ——— (2004). "The Rise of China and the Changing Face of East Asia". Asia-Pacific review. 11 (1): 46–57. doi:10.1080/13439000410001687742.
  • ——— (2006). "Some Reflections on Policy and Academics". Asia policy. 1 (1): 31–34. doi:10.1353/asp.2006.0013.
  • ——— (2008). "Lucian Pye, 1921–2008". The China quarterly (London). 196 (196): 912–918. doi:10.1017/S0305741008001288.
  • ——— (2012). "Robert Scalapino (1919–2011)". The China quarterly (London). 209 (209): 217–221. doi:10.1017/S030574101100155X.
  • ——— (2013). "Suggestions for Improving Sino-Japanese Relations". Asia-Pacific review. 20 (2): 160–162. doi:10.1080/13439006.2013.868396.
  • ——— (2019). "Roderick Lemonde Macfarquhar, 1930–2019". The China quarterly (London). 238: 291–308. doi:10.1017/S0305741019000705.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Vogel (2020).
  2. ^ "Pi Lambda Phi 2010 Membership Directory". Archived from the original on July 7, 2011. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
  3. ^ Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, pp. 45-58.
  4. ^ Suleski, p. 99.
  5. ^ Jump up to:a b c Harvard University (2020).
  6. ^ エズラ・ボーゲル氏死去　ジャパン・アズ・ナンバーワン (in Japanese). 朝日新闻. December 21, 2020. Archived from the originalon December 21, 2020. Retrieved December 21, 2020.
  7. ^ Johnston (2020).
  8. ^ Hatcher (2013).
  9. ^ "Truth behind America's raid on Belgrade". The Guardian. November 27, 1999. Archived from the original on September 21, 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  10. ^ Edward Neilan (June 15, 2012). "In Tokyo, Chinese embassy bombing debate still rages". World Tribune. Archived from the original on June 18, 2012. Retrieved June 26, 2012.?
  11. ^ WorldCat Identities Archived December 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine: Vogel, Ezra F.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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