A Brill Calendar: April 22

Reischauer's Farewell Address

Few scholars deepened Western understanding of Eastern cultures as fundamentally as Edwin Oldfather Reischauer.

On April 22 1981 he delivered his farewell address to the Yenching Institute he founded at his Alma Mater, Harvard. The audience – one or two generations younger – honoured a ‘legend in his own lifetime’. The speech brought to an end a career and reputation second to none, earned by classics like ‘The Romanization of the Korean Language’ (1939) and ‘East Asia: The Great Tradition’ (1960).

Reischauer took the first steps towards his unique status as a historian, linguist, educator and diplomat without any apparent effort; like the Poet’s ‘leaves to the tree’. The son of an American missionary-couple, he was born in Tokyo on October 15 1910 and lived there for his first sixteen years; becoming as fluent in the language and as knowledgeable about its culture as his Japanese friends. After graduating from Harvard in 1932 and two years of post-graduate work at the Sorbonne and Japanese Universities, he received his Harvard Ph. D. in Eastern languages; just before the outbreak of World War II. Soon after December 7 1941, ‘the day that will live in infamy’, Reischauer joined the War Department of the United States.

Ignorant indifference about Asian cultures & civilizations in the Western World generally (and his nation in particular), found no stronger adversary and more tireless opponent in the 20th century than in Edwin Oldfather Reischauer. His ‘finest hour’ came in 1961, after the US – Japan Mutual Security Act of the previous year, when President John Kennedy appointed him Ambassador at the Imperial Court in the city in which he was born. It is seldom that an American diplomat made a more resounding success of a specific assignment. Doctor Reischauer had truly transformed the relations between both countries, when he resigned from his post after reaching the age of 65.

The Emeritus died September 1 1990 at La Jolla, California; his death being connected to a stab-wound inflicted on him by a deranged Japanese youth in 1964.