Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel Dug Deeply Into East Asian Cultures – Ezra F. Vogel chose a bold title for his 1979 book on Japan’s growing economic power: “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.”
The book, unsurprisingly, sold well in Japan. It also helped establish the Harvard professor’s reputation as a leading American expert on East Asia. He wrote more than a dozen other books, including a biography of Deng Xiaoping in 2011 and a history of Sino-Japanese relations. In the mid-1990s, he served as an East Asia expert on the National Intelligence Council.
He was ahead of the curve in predicting Japan’s steep ascent in the 1980s. But that memorable book title, “Japan as Number One,” later forced him repeatedly to answer needling questions about how he failed to foresee the economic stagnation that plagued Japan from the early 1990s.
The country’s institutions proved less adaptable to crises than he expected, Dr. Vogel said. “I did not argue that Japan had the largest economy in the world,” he wrote in a 2000 follow-up book. “I wrote that the Japanese did many things well, that many of their successes were No. 1 in the world.”
He still thought the U.S. could learn from Japan’s comprehensive medical care and low crime rate. He also found Americans remained resistant to lessons from overseas.
Dr. Vogel died Dec. 20 of complications from surgery for colon cancer. He was 90.
The son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ezra Feivel Vogel was born July 11, 1930, in Delaware, Ohio, where his father owned a men’s clothing store. His mother had worked as a journalist and stenographer before marriage. Growing up near Ohio Wesleyan University gave him early exposure to lectures and concerts.
His parents’ home was strewn with books, and Ezra took charge of tutoring his younger sister, Fay, on topics above her grade level. “Even though our parents had never been to college, we grew up in an almost academic atmosphere,” recalled his sister, Fay Bussgang.
At Ohio Wesleyan, he majored in sociology. For graduate school, he moved on to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1958.
A thesis adviser told him he could see the U.S. objectively only if he spent time overseas. Dr. Vogel obtained a grant and moved to Tokyo in 1958 with his wife, the former Suzanne Hill, and their first son, then a toddler. They lived in a Japanese-style home with a squat toilet and no central heating and learned to sleep on futons.
After a year of studying Japanese, the Vogels spent another year interviewing middle-class Japanese people to study their family structures and habits. In the process, they made lifelong friends and gained insight into Japanese culture at a time when few Americans knew anything about it. Dr. Vogel wrote about his findings in a 1963 book, “Japan’s New Middle Class.”
