Ezra Vogel 傅高义 , renowned Harvard expert on Asia, dies at 90
Ezra Vogel 傅高义 (July 11, 1930 — December 20, 2020)
I just received the very sad news of the passing of Professor Ezra Vogel.
Professor Vogel is one of the giants in the field of Asian Studies. A sociologist by training, he was perfectly fluent in both Chinese and Japanese and wrote a number of seminal studies. His early work was on the Japanese family and the middle class. He then wrote a very important book in the field of Chinese studies, Canton under Communism, which he followed up twenty years later with One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong under Reform. He became a public intellectual with his 1979 best seller, Japan as Number One. When I went to Japan for the first time in 1986 this book was ubiquitous, and you could practically find it every hotel room, like Gideons Bible. Among his many notable later works was a landmark biography of Deng Xiaoping as well as a history of Sino-Japanese relations. When I last spoke to him he was gathering materials for a biography of Hu Yaobang, Chairman and then General Secretary of the CCP.
Ezra also served in various posts at Harvard, where he was the director of both the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, as well as the first director of the Asia Center. At Harvard, he mentored an extraordinary number of young and promising Chinese and Japanese students, including future Crown Princess and now Empress Owada Masako as well as Xi Mingze, daughter of XI Jinping. My colleague Joe Fewsmith joked that you practically have to be on the Chinese politburo to have more guanxi than Ezra. The same could be said of his wide-ranging circle of friends in Japan.
Ezra also served as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia on the National Intelligence Council from 1993-1995, during the Clinton Administration, a particularly delicate time in the US-Japanese relationship. Together with his colleague and fellow Harvard Professor Joseph Nye who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the US Department of Defense, he helped prepare the groundwork for the Tokyo Declaration and the relaunching of the US-Japanese alliance in the post-Cold War world.
My own memory of Ezra dates back to 1978, when on my father’s introduction (my father was also a sociologist) I met him in New York while just a freshman in college. Ezra was extraordinarily kind and gracious, taking out half an hour to advise me—barely 18 at the time—on Asian and Japanese studies. I have benefitted from his advice and insight many times in the years since, and always was impressed by his fundamental decency as a human being. He was genuinely committed to helping people, and he saw promoting better relations between the US and Asian countries, and between China and Japan, as his personal mission. I am sure that many in the BUCSA community will have their own stories about Ezra. He will be truly missed.
Thomas Berger
Boston University
Additional memorial articles can be found at the following links:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Obituaries/Ezra-Vogel-top-American-scholar-on-Asia-dies-at-90
https://japantoday.com/category/national/update1-ezra-vogel-author-of-japan-as-number-one-dies-at-90
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/21/c_139606886.htm
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/renowned-sinologist-ezra-vogel-dies-at-90
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20201221/p2g/00m/0na/056000c
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14040602