Edwin Oldfather Reischauer was the leading U.S. educator and noted scholar of the history and culture of Japan, and of East Asia. From 1961–1966, he was the U.S. ambassador to Japan. 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.
more