Edwin Reischauer was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1910 to American educational missionaries. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1939 and then launched a forty year teaching career there, starting out as a Far Eastern languages instructor and eventually became the director of Harvard’s Yenching Institute. In 1973, he became the founding Director of the Japan Institute at Harvard University, later renamed the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
During the Second World War, Reischauer served as a Japan expert for the U.S. Army Intelligence Service. In 1961, President Kennedy chose him to be the American ambassador to Japan, an unusual choice as Reischauer had a strictly academic background. He was the first Japanese-born and Japanese-speaking U.S. Ambassador to Japan and sought to strengthen the alliance between the United States and Japan. In 1966, he returned to academic life at Harvard.
Reischauer delivered the Beatty Lecture on March 30, 1977, titled "Japanese-American Relations".
Listen to Edwin Reischauer's Beatty Lecture:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8
Audio: Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Archives
Image: University of Chicago Archives
