FOR RELEASE: April 10, 1998
Contact:
Paul Cody
Office: (607) 255-9737
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a number of polls showed that a majority of Americans believed that Japan had become the number one international threat to the United States -- a fact that struck historian Walter LaFeber as more than a little interesting. LaFeber, Cornell University's Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, tried to read up on Japanese-American relations and found there was no single good book on the subject.
"When I couldn't find something good to read," LaFeber says, "I thought I might try to write something." The result was LaFeber's The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History, published late last year by Norton. On April 8, Columbia University announced the book had won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History for 1998. The Clash, according to Akira Iriye, a Harvard University historian, "will easily become the best history of U.S.-Japanese relations in any language."
The 150-year-old relationship between the two countries began, writes LaFeber, when "U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry used cannon to open a highly reluctant Japan to U.S. interests in 1853."
The countries -- the world's two great economic superpowers -- have always had "two different forms of capitalism," according to LaFeber. "Some 400 years of Japanese history formed a compact, homogenous, closely knit society that, for good reason, is terrified of disorder. It has sought to avoid disorder with a strong central government, which guides the subtle, informal networks that run the economy. For some 200 years, on the other hand, American history has formed a sprawling, pluralistic, open-ended society that, for good reason, is terrified of economic depressions and sought to avoid them by creating an open international marketplace."
Another major source of conflict between the two nations has been distinct and varying views and policies toward China. The purpose of Perry's 1853 ultimatum to Japan was "because Washington officials wanted it as a strategic way station to the potentially rich Chinese markets," writes LaFeber.
Writing in the Washington Post, Don Oberdorfer, former diplomatic correspondent for the Post and journalist in residence at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said, "Despite its crucial importance, the U.S.-Japan relationship has suffered from a lack of historical perspective on the part of policy-makers and the public. Until now no comprehensive and readable account has been available in one volume to record the development of the relationship since its beginning to the post-Cold War era." However LaFeber's The Clash, Oberdorfer writes, fills the vacuum and "succeeds brilliantly."
Walter LaFeber was born in Walkerton, Ind., and came to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1959 at age 26, with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He became a professor in 1967 and gained the Noll Professorship in 1968. His book, America, Russia and the Cold War, published in 1966, is currently in its 8th edition from McGraw-Hill, and two other books, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy Abroad and at Home since 1750, are both in second editions from Norton. Inevitable Revolutions won the Gustavus Myers Prize.
LaFeber has written and co-authored nearly 20 books, dozens of articles, as well as op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Newsday, among others.
He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has lectured at dozens of universities and has appeared widely on television and radio, including on Walter Cronkite's "American Presidencies," PBS's "American Century" and on the BBC's "End of the Cold War?"
Some of the American perceptions of Japan as a threat to the United States stem, in part, from the memories of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and to the feeling that Japan was beating up on the United States economically, especially in the 1980s. But believes LaFeber, who used extensive Japanese and American sources in researching The Clash, the two countries, despite their differences, will probably get along in the future. Getting along is very much in both the American and Japanese economic interest, he says.
"We're going to get along because we have to."
-30-
RSS