Ezra Vogel

Ezra Vogel was born to Joseph and Edith Vogel, a family of Jewish immigrants in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio.[1] As a child, he helped his father in the family's clothing store, which was called The People's Store. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950, and maintained close ties with his alma mater for the rest of his life, donating royalties from his books and returning to campus frequently.[2] While attending Ohio Wesleyan, Vogel was a member of the Beta Sigma Tau fraternity ( later merged with the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity).[3]

He was drafted[4] to serve two years in the U.S. Army without seeing combat[5] during the Korean War.[6] The service involved working for a psychiatric unit of a military hospital.[7] After discharge, Vogel enrolled in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard and graduated with his PhD in 1958. His advisor was Talcott Parsons. After two years of field work in Japan, he worked as an assistant professor at Yale University from 1960–1961, but returned to Harvard for post-doctoral work on Chinese language and history. He was appointed as a Lecturer in 1964, later becoming a tenured professor; he remained at Harvard until his retirement.[8]

Vogel was involved with several research groups during his career. He was director of Harvard's East Asian Research Center from 1972–1977 and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies from 1977–1980. He also was director of the Program on US–Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs from 1980–1987, and was named Honorary Director upon stepping down.[8] He was Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 1973–1975[9] and 1995–1999.[10] He was the founding director of the Asia Center (1997–1999). He retired on June 30, 2000.[8]

Vogel was married to Charlotte Ikels, professor of anthropology at Case Western University. He had three children with his first wife, Suzanne Hall Vogel: David, Steven (who became a political scientist), and Eve.[8]

Vogel died in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 20, 2020. He was 90 years old.[11][12]

Vogel published dozens of articles, reviews, conference papers, and books on China, Japan, and American–East Asian Relations, and organized scholarly and policy conferences. He headed the undergraduate East Asian Studies concentration (major) at Harvard.[8]

After editing a book of readings on the sociology of the family, Vogel published his first book, Japan’s New Middle Class (1963; 2nd ed.1971), using ethnographic research he and his wife Suzanne carried out through interviews and observation in a Tokyo suburb (1950–1960). Their goal was to understand the life of the "salary man" and his family, a new group that had emerged after the war.[13] Vogel then turned from ethnography to China watching. He studied Chinese language, read newspapers and documents, and conducted interviews in Hong Kong. Canton Under Communism (1969) was a detailed description of regional government and politics in Guangdong.[2] His 1979 book, Japan as Number One, described those areas where Japan had been successful and the United States less so. “Most Japanese understate their successes because they are innately modest," he wrote, and "more purposive Japanese, wanting to rally domestic forces or to reduce foreign pressures, have chosen to dramatize Japan’s potential disasters”. On the American side, he continued, "our confidence in the superiority of Western civilization and our desire to see ourselves as number one make it difficult to acknowledge that we have practical things to learn”. The book's translation into Japanese was a best-seller, arousing debate among American scholars of Japan.[14]

Vogel's later research areas included industrialization, changes in family structure, political change, and security issues in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and East Asia overall. In Beijing, Vogel began to study Deng Xiaoping, thanks to his extensive interviews with Deng's economic adviser Yu Guangyuan. Vogel co-translated Yu's memoir on China's economic reform, and used it as a roadmap to his thinking on Deng.[15] He continued publishing after his retirement: his last two books were Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011) and China and Japan: Facing History (2019).[2] He contributed his royalties from the Chinese translation of this Deng political biography to his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, to promote international study and travel. The University estimated the contribution to be over $500,000.[16]

Vogel served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia with the National Intelligence Council from 1993 to 1995.[2] In 1999, when American forces bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Vogel was reported by The Guardian as saying that it was not credible that the embassy was bombed by mistake when the C.I.A. used old maps.[17] He later added "I find it hard to believe that anyone would consciously do such a thing and certainly not as a matter of policy. On the other hand I don't find it hard to believe that a massive mistake happened with a series of pitfalls and miscues adding up to disaster." [18]

Starting in 2000, Vogel organized a series of conferences between Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars to work together to examine World War II in East Asia; his intent was to promote reconciliation among the countries and support politicians who wanted to solve the lingering problems from that era.[19] One of the resulting conference volumes was China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945 (2007), co-edited with Stephen R. Mackinnon and Diana Lary.[20]

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Ezra Vogel, OCLC/WorldCat returns 150+ works in 400+ publications in 12 languages and 14,900+ library holdings.[21]

• Suleski, Ronald Stanley (2005), The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University: a Fifty Year History, 1955-2005, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780976798002, OCLC 64140358
• Harvard University (2020), Professor Ezra Vogel
• Hatcher, Cole (January 23, 2013), "Ohio Wesleyan Alumnus Endows Fund to Support International Learning, Travel", News & Media, Ohio Wesleyan University
• Johnston, Eric (December 21, 2020), "Ezra Vogel, Harvard professor and author of 'Japan as Number One,' dies at 90", The Japan Times
• Vogel, Steven (December 21, 2020), "Ezra Vogel Saw the Good in Every Person and Every Nation", The Japan Times

Archives at
Identifiers 990085629120203941  Source digital description
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• Ezra Vogel on Charlie Rose
• "Tributes to Professor Ezra Vogel (1930 – 2020)," (13 January 2020) Harvard University Asia Center.