Education and Academic Life
Reischauer was born in Tokyo, the son of Presbyterian educational missionaries, and attended the American School in Japan. He graduated with a B.A. from Oberlin in 1931. On his 75th birthday, he recalled publicly that his life aim in 1931 was to draw attention to Asia.
He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1939. He was a student of Prof. Serge Elisséeff, who had been the first Western graduate of the University of Tokyo. His doctoral dissertation was "Nittō guhō junrei gyōki: Ennin's Diary of His Travels in T'ang China, 838–847". The work demonstrates the level of sinological scholarship a student of Japanese was expected to demonstrate at that time.
His forty year teaching career was spent at Harvard, where he and John King Fairbank developed a popular undergraduate survey of East Asian history and culture. This course, which was known as "Rice Paddies," was the basis for their widely influential two volume textbook, East Asia: The Great Tradition (1958) and East Asia, The Modern Transformation (1965). Reischauer wrote both for fellow scholars and for the general public, including Japan: Story of a Nation, which appeared in several editions. He served as director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and chairman of the Department of Far Eastern Languages. In a farewell lecture at the Yenching Institute in 1981, students had to compete for seats with faculty colleagues, university officials and a television crew from Japan. In this crowded scene he said, "As I remember, there were only two graduate students interested in East Asian studies when I first came here: myself and my brother."
In 1956, Professor Reischauer was a widower with three children when author James A. Michener introduced him to Haru Matsukata, who would become his second wife. As teenagers, it turned out, they had gone to the same Tokyo high school, where she had had a secret crush on him. She and her husband became a formidable team. The home they made together is maintained and used today as the Edwin O. Reischauer Memorial House.
In 1973, he was the founding Director of the Japan Institute, which was renamed the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies in his honor when he turned 75 in 1985.
Reischauer was also honored in 1985 by the opening of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which is part of Johns Hopkins University . Speaking at the dedication ceremonies in Baltimore, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, one of Reischauer's former students, described Reischauer as being "what a teacher is meant to be, one who can change the life of his students." At the same event, Japan's Ambassador Nabuo Matsunaga read a personal message from Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who observed, "I know of no other man who has so thoroughly understood Japan."
With George M. McCune, Reischauer in 1939 published the McCune-Reischauer system for romanization of the Korean language which became the most widely used system. Reischauer called the hangul alphabet "perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any language."
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