Ezra F. Vogel, Eminent Scholar of China and Japan, Dies at 90

After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950, Professor Vogel served for two years in the Army. He then enrolled in a Ph.D. program in sociology at Harvard, where he studied the American family. Midway through the program, he was challenged by Florence Kluckhohn, a Harvard anthropologist and one of his thesis advisers.

“She said to me, ‘You’re so provincial, you’ve never been out of the United States, how can you talk about American society if you don’t have anything to compare it with?’” he recalled in the 2019 Ohio Wesleyan lecture.

Professor Vogel and his wife at the time, Suzanne Hall Vogel, who later became a researcher of Japanese culture, soon packed their bags and left for Japan.

The young couple embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburb, interviewing six families about once a week for a year. The resulting book, “Japan’s New Middle Class” (1963), documented the emergence of the office worker, or “salaryman,” as well as everyday family life in postwar Japan. It became an instant classic.

Upon returning to the United States in the early 1960s, Professor Vogel briefly worked as an assistant professor at Yale University. But with the drawdown of the McCarthy era, new opportunities were emerging for scholars to study China. Soon Professor Vogel was at Harvard, where he studied Chinese language and history as a postdoctoral fellow from 1961 to 1964. He rose to become a lecturer in 1964 and a professor in 1967.

He held various positions at the university over the years, including co-founder and director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations from 1980 to 1987 and director of the Asia Center from 1997 to 1999. In 1993, he took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the national intelligence officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He retired from teaching in 2000.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/world/asia/ezra-f-vogel-dead.html