Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan

By Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia

In the 1930s, a cohort of professional human scientists coalesced around a common and particular understanding of objectivity as the foundation of legitimate knowledge, and of fieldwork as the pathway to objectivity. Into the Field is the first collective biography of this cohort, evocatively described by one contemporary as the men of one age.

At the height of imperialism, the men of one age undertook field research in territories under Japanese rule in pursuit of "objective" information that would justify the subjugation of local peoples. After 1945, amid the defeat and dismantling of Japanese sovereignty and under the occupation and tutelage of the United States, they returned to the field to create narratives of human difference that supported the new national values of democracy, capitalism, and peace. The 1968 student movement challenged these values, resulting in an all-encompassing attack on objectivity itself. Nonetheless, the legacy of the men of one age lives on in the disciplines they developed and the beliefs they established about human diversity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503610620

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INTO THE FIELD

Human Scientists of Transwar Japan

MIRIAM KINGSBERG KADIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kadia, Miriam Kingsberg, author.

Title: Into the field : human scientists of transwar Japan / Miriam Kingsberg Kadia.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018934 (print) | LCCN 2019021215 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503610620 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609082 (cloth; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503610613 (pbk.; alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Anthropologists—Japan—History—20th century. | Anthropology—Japan—History—20th century. | Social scientists—Japan—History—20th century. | Social sciences—Japan—20th century. | National characteristics, Japanese—History—20th century. | Japan—Intellectual life—20th century.

Classification: LCC GN17.3.J3 (ebook) | LCC GN17.3.J3 K34 2019 (print) | DDC 301.095209/04—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018934

Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover image: Xiaowutaishan summit team. Source: Keijō Teikoku Daigaku Mōkyō Gakujutsu Tankentai, ed., Mōkyō no shizen to bunka, n.p.

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services in 10/14 Minion Pro

To ROSHAN KADIA

FIGURE 1. Izumi Seiichi, age forty. Source: Izumi Seiichi, Personal History and Application for a Fellowship in Social Science, May 28, 1956, file 5314, box 358, series 609, RG 10.1. Izumi Seiichi. Rockefeller Archive Center.

MAP 1. Izumi Seiichi’s world before 1945. Courtesy of Lohnes+Wright.

MAP 2. Izumi Seiichi’s world after 1945. Courtesy of Lohnes+Wright.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Men of One Age

1. The Origins of Fieldwork in the Japanese Empire

2. Group Fieldwork in Wartime

3. Objectivity under the U.S. Occupation

4. From Race to Culture

5. Others into Japanese

6. Japanese into Others

7. Excavating National Identity in the Antipodes

8. 1968 and the Passing of the Field Generation

Notes

Works Cited

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Izumi Seiichi, age forty

Map 1. Izumi Seiichi’s world before 1945

Map 2. Izumi Seiichi’s world after 1945

Figure 2. Iiyama captures young Mongol women

Figure 3. Iiyama’s photograph of a Mongol woman playing the zither

Figure 4. Xiaowutaishan summit team

Figure 5. American Studies Seminar classroom, Tōdai, 1950

Figure 6. Yanaihara addressing the American Studies Seminar

Figure 7. The imperial couple viewing artifacts from Kotosh

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the following pages I depict Izumi Seiichi as a complicated scholar and person. But I begin this book by celebrating his inexhaustible curiosity and enthusiasm for learning about the world, and I thank him for the incredible adventure of following his career. Izumi gave me eight crazy years in libraries and archives, museums and mountains, beaches and botanical gardens. I followed him to the jungles of Papua and Brazil, the peaks of Jejudo and Karakoram, the pastures of Peru and Mongolia, the spires of Mexico City and Vienna, and the shores of Hokkaido and the Yucatán. And in the end, I was able to visit only a fraction of his field sites.

When research took more than I had, friends and colleagues gave me more than I needed. Thanks are not enough for the laughter, support, and close readings I received from Raja Adal, Jennifer Altehenger, Talia Andrei, Celeste Arrington, Felix Boecking, Corey Brooks, Jamyung Choi, Tim Cooper, Evan Dawley, Fabian Drixler, Will Hedberg, Chris Hess, Nadia Kanagawa, Nick Kapur, Robin Kietlinski, Rachel Leow, Scott Lyons, Reo Matsuzaki, Elizabeth McGuire, Ti Ngo, Lisa Onaga, Saeyoung Park, Meg Rithmire, Caroline Shaw, Seiji Shirane, David Spafford, Karen Teoh, Kenichirō Tsukamoto, Emily Wilcox, Shellen Xiao Wu, and Ying Zhang. For their kind interest, assistance, and feedback on my work, I am grateful to Nobuko Adachi, Jeffrey Alexander, Noriko Aso, E. Taylor Atkins, Paul Barclay, Gwen Bennett, Peter Bleed, Amy Borovoy, Tim Brook, Alan Christy, Connie Cook, Sabine Dabringhaus, Fred Dickinson, Nicola Di Cosmo, Bregje van Eekelen, Josh Fogel, Linda Grove, Jooyeon Hahm, Marta Hanson, Henrietta Harrison, Johan Heilbron, Ulrich Herbert, Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, Inaba Minoru, Bill Johnston, Manfred Jung, David Lurie, Michele Mason, Marlene J. Mayo, Sue Naquin, Nakao Katsumi, Willi Oberkrome, Jürgen Osterhammel, Andrew Port, Christoph Seidler, Mark Selden, Henry D. Smith II, George Steinmetz, Jeff Wasserstrom, Lori Watt, Yamashita Shinji, Andrew Zimmerman, and Kirsten Ziomek. Paul Gootenberg and his pistachios cheered me up and on. I owe very special gratitude, and many gin and tonics, to Ted Bestor. Mary Elizabeth Berry nourished my life and work with the solicitude of a parent.

In my ten years on the University of Colorado Boulder faculty, I have cherished the intellectual sustenance and delightful companionship of my colleagues in history, Asian studies, and other disciplines. I particularly thank Colleen Berry, Céline Dauverd, Lil Fenn, Kate Goldfarb, Fredy González, Elissa Guralnick, Susan Kent, Kwangmin Kim, Sungyun Lim, Adam Lisbon, Mark Pittenger, Paul Sutter, Tim Weston, and John Willis. Before I ever taught my first class, Marcia Yonemoto was my role model and champion.

Opportunities to present aspects of this project helped to revise and refine my argument. For the gift of an invited talk, I thank Nanyang Technological University, the Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference, Trinity College, Princeton University, Stony Brook University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. For including me in stimulating workshops, all gratitude to Nicola Di Cosmo, Chris Hess, Didier Fassin and George Steinmetz, Yukiko Koga, John Krige, Eugenia Lean, Álvaro Morcillo Laiz, Alyssa Wang and Jinsong Guo, and the University of Colorado history department and Center for Asian Studies. I also benefited from presenting at conferences including the Association for Asian Studies, the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs, the Modern Japan Workshop, the Modern Japan History Workshop, the Northeast Association for Asian Studies, and the Society for East Asian Archaeology.

I am pleased and proud to acknowledge the institutions that provided financial support underwriting the preparation of this book. I conceived the idea for Into the Field in 2011, halfway through my term as an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. Much of the research was completed in 2014 and 2015 with the help of an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship at the Columbia University Heyman Center for the Humanities. The Institute for Comparative Culture at Sophia University was my host for a summer of research in Tokyo in 2015; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed me for June and July 2016. I finished a manuscript draft at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Social Science in 2018, nurtured by stimulating conversations on the annual theme: the social sciences in a changing world. Short-term research, residence, and travel funds were provided by the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council (for work in both Japan and Korea), the American Historical Association Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant, the Japan Foundation, the University of Michigan Asia Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, and the University of Maryland Libraries’s Gordon W. Prange Collection. The University of Colorado generously supported research both near and far through the Arts and Sciences Fund for Excellence, the Center for Asian Studies, the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences, the Center for Humanities and the Arts, the Graduate Council for Arts and Humanities, the Hazel Barnes Flat, the Eugene V. Kayden fund, and the Implementation of Multicultural Perspectives and Approaches in Research and Teaching fund.

Most of the research for this book was carried out in archives and libraries. For assistance in Japan, I thank the staff of the University of Tokyo Library, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, the National Diet Library, and the Ethnology Research Archives of the National Museum for Ethnology. In the United States, I received help from the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign University of Illinois Archives, the University of Maryland, College Park Gordon W. Prange Collection, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Special Collections and University Archives, the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library, Stanford University Department of Special Collections and University Archives, and the Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Library. I am also indebted for access to the library systems of Berkeley, Boulder, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, Sophia University, and Waseda University.

Parts of this book have previously been published in article form. Chapter 6 appeared with some modifications as Becoming Brazilian to Be Japanese: Emigrant Assimilation, Cultural Anthropology, and National Identity in Comparative Studies of Society and History in 2014. A version of Chapter 7 titled Japan’s Inca Boom: Global Archaeology and the Making of a Postwar Nation was published in Monumenta Nipponica in 2014. Transnational Knowledge, American Hegemony: Social Scientists in U.S.-Occupied Japan, based on material from Chapter 3, appeared in John Krige’s edited collection How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2019). I am grateful to the aforementioned venues for permission to reprint my work here.

Thanks to the editorial team at Stanford University Press led by Marcela Maxfield and assisted by Sunna Juhn, the publication process vastly exceeded my expectations. The anonymous reviewers selected by the Press transformed the manuscript with their encouraging and helpful comments. Lohnes+Wright furnished the accompanying maps and cheerfully acceded to my many requests for revisions.

My sister and best friend, Jess Kingsberg, accompanied me to Peru on one of my most enjoyable and productive research trips. My brother and also my best friend, Harold Kingsberg, assisted with translations from Spanish, Portuguese, and German; proofread the penultimate draft; and doled out patient support and brunch during our happy year living together in Morningside Heights. My uncle, Warren Gordon, faithfully visited each week of my maternity leave to entertain my baby and deliver chocolate chip cookies. Chandrika, Ratilal, Chirag, and Ronak Kadia enthusiastically welcomed me into their family. I particularly thank Ronak for never forgetting my coffee and for ceding his walk-in closet to an unexpected roommate with many clothes. My love and respect for my parents is unwavering.

Like Izumi Seiichi, my grandfather, Meyer Gordon, was born in 1915 and raised in one country, only to permanently migrate to another in his third decade. Polyglots both, they spoke at least ten languages collectively, overlapping only in English. On opposite sides of a war and a world, perhaps they would have had little to say to each other had they met, yet in writing about the one I have often thought of the other. Izumi passed away suddenly at age fifty-five, but happily, my grandfather lived to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. His first great-grandchild, my treasured son Ethan, was born a week after this manuscript began its journey with Stanford University Press.

I dedicate Into the Field to Ethan’s father Roshan, my beloved husband and my best adventure.

New York City

December 2018

INTRODUCTION

Men of One Age

In 1950, Richard K. Beardsley (1918–1978), an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, launched a landmark field study of Japan. Beardsley had become interested in the country during his four years as a U.S. Navy officer in the Pacific theater in World War II. Selected for strategic training in Japanese, he spent much of his service learning and teaching the language. Now, together with several colleagues and graduate students, he collaborated with Japanese scholars—including veterans of the former enemy forces—to assess political, economic, and social changes in village life in the five years since the end of the war.¹

During the eighteen months he spent among Japanese academics, Beardsley noticed a remarkable pattern:

The senior leaders in each field were men of one age. They had been college students in Tokyo during the effervescent 1920s, and all had broken away from the then prevailing teaching to move in the direction of empirical research. . . . ​For some years, as these young scholars pursued their new gospel, they enjoyed an ecumenical colleagueship that led them to read the same books, talk together, and write for each others’ journals while each pursued his particular interests and inclinations. These men, the first professionals in their respective fields, were still vigorous and active in the postwar years.²

Like Beardsley himself, the men of one age were born in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Coming to maturity at the height of Japanese empire building, they secured the resources of the state and the ear of the masses by producing knowledge that supported imperial sovereignty over Asia and Oceania and rule by a divine emperor. Japan’s defeat in 1945 and subsequent occupation by the Allied powers delegitimized these orthodoxies and left the nation groping for a new identity. Old enough to be held accountable for their jingoism—and worse—the men of one age sought to elide individual culpability and regain professional credibility by propounding a new image of Japan. In a postimperial, Cold War world, they aligned the nation with the putative values of the U.S. bloc: democracy, capitalism, and peace. As spokesmen of these ideals, they exercised intellectual hegemony through the late 1960s. Although subsequent generations have challenged and refined their legacy, it remains potent even today.

The mostly untested but formidable construct of generation captures the evolution of ideology in twentieth-century Japan. In 1927 Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim formulated generation as a category of analysis within the sociology of knowledge, or the study of the social origins and impact of thought. To Mannheim, generations were an abstract phenomenon based upon but not solely determined by the biological rhythms of human existence. As he observed, mere chronological contemporaneity is an imperfect basis for group coalescence. Instead, Mannheim called attention to shared cognitive frameworks, predispositions, and limitations as the foundation of a generation. He attributed such mental structures to common experiences at similar moments in the life course. Mannheim also highlighted the importance of interpersonal relationships to establishing individual and collective identity, interpreting mutually significant occurrences, and providing emotional support.³ By applying his concept of generation, historians have illuminated patterns in reactions to specific historical events, outlined relational networks, and tracked the process of social change.

The use of generational theory to understand ideological shifts in Japan is suggested by its application to the case of its wartime ally, Germany. Virtually from the moment of the defeat of the Third Reich, scholars deployed generation to explore the process of reconciliation, repentance, and reconstruction. As they argue, the 1945 generation (generally identified as the cohort born from 1915 to 1925) assumed the reins of power after World War II and set about the urgent task of rebuilding, while largely failing to address mass guilt for Nazi atrocities. Two decades later, members of the 1968 generation, who reached maturity at a moment of near-global revolution, rejected this pragmatic accommodation and broadly (though nonetheless incompletely) denounced the beliefs and behaviors of their parents and grandparents.⁴

In contrast to the German 45ers, who mostly came to power after the defeat of Hitler, the vigorous and active Japanese leaders described by Beardsley were in exactly the right time of life to steer the nation before, during, and after World War II. They tended to remember 1945 as zero hour: a tabula rasa for all that came after. Their students generally upheld this myth, celebrating their forebears’ academic achievements while declining to scrutinize unsavory wartime episodes. Only with the passing of the longest-lived men of one age in the 1990s were some younger colleagues freed to critique their methods, actions, and legacies. A new influx of Japanese scholars, together with counterparts in East Asia and beyond, devoted themselves to unpacking earlier intellectual subterfuge and dishonesty. Their analyses tend to terminate with 1945, implicitly upholding the fiction of a blank slate.⁵ Upon Japan’s defeat, they imply, a nation of unreflective chameleons opportunistically rejected the prevailing ideologies of militarism, empire, and war in favor of new values including democracy, capitalism, and peace.

In studying the full careers of the men of one age, certain constants appear across this moment long treated solely as a rupture. During the transwar decades (1930s–1960s), a transnational network of professional intellectuals jointly embraced a set of unchanging assumptions regarding epistemology, or how knowledge is created and why that knowledge is valid. These foundational beliefs grounded and even facilitated what has often been represented as an uncomplicated substitution of values in 1945. The resultant collective mentality both distinguished the men of one age from older and younger citizens who shared their era, and bound them into Mannheim’s idea of a generation.

The ideal of objectivity was the epistemological unconscious that anchored this transwar generation. Objectivity was and is generally understood as the faith in some universally applicable truth, pursued through a scientific research method intended to discipline the individual mind of its perspective and bias. First articulated as a scholarly value by European philosophers in the early 1800s, by the end of the century objectivity’s credibility was established throughout the disciplines and well beyond the West.⁶ In the heyday of imperial expansion, the ability to produce objective research allowed the great powers to formulate knowledge of the world that favored their hegemony. In other words, dominating the production of authoritative facts both signified and supported a sense of Euro-American superiority over colonized and quasi-colonial peoples with their own epistemological traditions. Rather than simply accepting this intellectual monopoly, non-Western scholars themselves adopted objectivity to suggest their own enlightenment and to seek parity with the great powers.

Japan, boasting a long history of empiricist scholarship, was among the first non-Western societies to embrace objectivity. The term gakujutsu emerged to denote this concept. Today, gakujutsu is conventionally translated as academic or scientific. However, during the transwar years it connoted a more specific set of assumptions: the quest for universal laws governing human society and the natural world, the use of a comprehensively delineated method to assure rigor in pursuit of truth, and impartiality. Beyond these criteria, gakujutsu remained a strategically vague concept available for manipulation by researchers whose work met few measures of objectivity. The lack of a sophisticated theoretical framing also made the idea of gakujutsu accessible beyond the scholarly world. By the turn of the twentieth century, the term appeared not only in academic books and articles but also in the mass media, imbuing producers of knowledge with authority in the public realm.

Recognition of Japan’s ability to formulate objective knowledge allowed the nation to enter the Euro-American intellectual community, transforming it from a Western into a truly transnational network. Within a few decades of the large-scale introduction of Western learning, Japanese scholars contributed to international academic journals and conferences, visited foreign universities, and hosted researchers from other nations. Shared belief in objectivity enabled multinational thinkers to adjudge, appreciate, and engage with each other’s work, distinguishing and elevating knowledge produced by professionals from that of quacks and amateurs.

Historians have traced the rise of transnational intellectual circuits in the natural sciences and technology.⁷ By contrast, they have paid relatively scant attention to the development of such networks in the so-called human sciences. Although practitioners debate the parameters of that term, at their most basic, the human sciences represent an attempt to address the diversity of humankind. In Europe, the human sciences are said to have originated during the sixteenth century, when the discovery and colonization of the Americas inspired (Christian) speculation on the moral condition and proper treatment of its putatively savage residents. During the Enlightenment, philosophers came to study the behavior of such populations for insight into the early history of their own society, producing a binary of Self and Other. Gradually, the sciences of man, as they were then called, coalesced around the empirical investigation of the beginnings of civilization. By the twentieth century, the human sciences centered on the disciplines most directly connected with this inquiry: anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology. They also engaged many art historians, economists, geographers, historians, folklorists, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and religious studies scholars.⁸

In Japan, the attempt to study Self and Other long predated the advent of Western-style academic disciplines. However, in the modern era the human sciences (jinrui kagaku) acquired new significance in articulating an appropriate position for the nation and empire within the international hierarchy of states. Put simply, exploring Others beyond Japan served to illuminate the essential features of the Japanese themselves. Through the construct of race (jinshu), human scientists divided individuals into populations, related populations to each other and to the geopolitical map, and projected their futures in a changing world. Race was a scientific shorthand naturalizing the power structures enacted by the expanding imperium.

Unlike the natural sciences, in which trusted quantitative methods were long established, the human sciences struggled to arrange numerical data into consistent racial categories. Partly in response, human scientists shifted to the investigation of minzoku, a vision of human difference incorporating not only physiological characteristics but also learned behaviors. By the 1920s, fieldwork, or intensive empirical research on a bounded population, emerged as the dominant scientific approach to minzoku. The Japanese practice of fieldwork grew out of both local precedents and Western influences. The 1922 publication of Polish-born British social anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific is often taken as a convenient global starting point for modern, self-consciously objective fieldwork. The hallmarks of Malinowski’s precise methodological charter still characterize research today: systematic, theoretically informed, holistic data collection; long-term immersion in native life; minimal contact with white society; and communication with informants in their own language.⁹

The acceptance of Malinowski’s methods around the world helped to consolidate the disciplines of the human sciences, offering practitioners a new collective identity as fieldworkers. It further transformed the field into a sanctified space where objectivity was assumed.¹⁰ The transwar generation was the field generation, upholding field methodology as the sine qua non of credible professional research.

Widely acknowledged as the leading Japanese fieldworker of the transwar years was Izumi Seiichi (1915–1970). No single individual can represent a generation—just as the ideal type of generation can never resonate with all the cases it purports to include. Yet Izumi was not simply a representative of his cohort, but its linchpin. Trained as an ethnologist, he secured employment as a cultural anthropologist and achieved renown primarily as an archaeologist. He was extraordinary in his thirst for adventure, administrative skill, and ability to connect with different individuals and audiences. He marshaled a stunning range of funding sources for his research: universities, professional societies, the military, domestic and foreign governments, international organizations, corporations, and the media. Izumi’s output ran the gamut of midcentury communications, including academic articles and monographs, autobiographical works, newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, photo books, writings for children, travel guides and travelogues, radio broadcasts, and film and television documentaries. In addition to his native tongue, he mastered functional Korean, Chinese, English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as a smattering of other languages. From the most elite and influential academic institutions in Japan, he anchored a network of friends and colleagues spanning upwards of a dozen countries. Fellow scholars kept copies of his works on their desks and in their field kits.¹¹ Among the men of one age, he was the man of the age.

Izumi chose research topics, field sites, and audiences that not only reflected but also advanced his nation’s engagement with and position vis-à-vis the wider world. His outlook was exemplary of his generation, adhering to fieldwork as the defining characteristic of objective knowledge production. In practice, however, conviction in universal, scientific, and unbiased facts masked the underlying values imputed to them. Perhaps most engrained among the men of one age was that objectivity, the purported view from nowhere, presumed a male observer.¹² In the 1980s early feminist historians of science controversially argued that, from the seventeenth century on, objective scientific inquiry privileged stereotypically masculine abilities of dominance, detachment, rationality, and transcendence of the body, over intuitive, empathic, and associational modes adjudged as feminine. The resulting masculinization of knowledge posed a cognitive barrier to female participation.¹³ More recent scholarship shifts the focus from cerebral to structural obstacles. By the 1930s, the formative years of the field generation, some elite Japanese women enjoyed opportunities to attend college and pursue vocational training in single-sex institutions. However, Japan’s national universities admitted only men. Women could not attain the qualifications, networks, and knowledges expected of full colleagues in the human sciences. Such research accordingly developed as an almost wholly male enterprise.¹⁴

Despite their exclusion from the formal study of diversity, women performed essential roles in the transwar academic world. When Izumi Kimiko (1918–1997) married in 1941, the good wife, wise mother (ryōsai kenbō) ideal dictated that women almost singlehandedly supervise the household and educate the children, freeing the attention of the family patriarch for external matters.¹⁵ In the nearly thirty years of her union with Izumi Seiichi, she maintained their domestic life in Dairen (now Dalian in the People’s Republic of China), Keijō (Seoul, Republic of Korea), Hakata, Tokyo, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The couple’s friends fondly recalled her excellent cooking and generous hospitality, even on a limited budget. Amid the poverty of war and its aftermath, she cared for Izumi’s widowed mother, and bore and raised four children. All eventually attended college, and her oldest daughter and son earned graduate degrees. Under the most trying circumstances Izumi Kimiko avoided burdening her husband with domestic affairs. When she contracted tuberculosis in 1953, she refused to summon him home from the field or even notify him of her condition until her life was in peril.¹⁶

Yet Izumi Kimiko was more than a good wife and wise mother: she was also an intellectual companion and support to her spouse. Before Izumi found secure university employment in Japan, she worked as a research assistant for his colleagues and drew maps for the U.S. occupation authorities and images for psychologists to present to human subjects for description and interpretation.¹⁷ She accompanied her husband to an archaeological dig in Peru and coauthored a work on Inca treasures.¹⁸ She also joined him on a research trip to Japan’s northernmost major island, Hokkaido, to facilitate his rapport with female informants. Following Izumi’s death, she appeared at international ceremonies commemorating his legacy and assisted in curating collections of his writings. Within two years she had published a memoir, Izumi Seiichi to tomo ni (Together with Izumi Seiichi). Yet, even in her own recollections, Izumi Kimiko is all but invisible, subordinating her contributions and insights to a heroic narrative of her husband’s career. For his part, Izumi scarcely mentioned her in his 1969 autobiography, Yuruyaka na yamayama (Quaking mountains).¹⁹ The unreflective gendering of authoritative knowledge production as a masculine domain precluded the very acknowledgement, let alone realization of the full potential, of Izumi Kimiko and many other women scholars of human diversity.

Objectivity also concealed certain political assumptions. For transwar human scientists it operated less as an actual ideal than as a formula of justification for certain truths held to be self-evident. Prior to 1945 the most salient of these truths was the ascendancy of the legitimate knowledge producers—that is, the colonial powers. Raised in Japanese-occupied Korea, Izumi was both a creator and a creation of imperial epistemology. In the mid-1930s he enrolled at Keijō Imperial University, the first Japanese institution of higher learning established outside the metropole. He became the empire’s first major in ethnology (minzokugaku), an emerging discipline that combined characteristics of anthropology and folklore. As an ethnologist, Izumi studied Others through fieldwork on both physiological characteristics and learned behavior. Japan’s imperial universities, the state, and the military generously sponsored his research in the hope of collecting information to pacify and exploit subjugated populations. Ultimately, the duration of control was too short to apply academic findings to policy in much of the Japanese realm. However, Izumi and his colleagues enjoyed outsize influence in justifying the empire as a hierarchy of confraternal races ruled for their own benefit by the putatively superior Japanese.

Izumi’s maiden field studies, directed research projects among populations in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, reflected this orthodoxy. They represented Japan as an ally of racially related minorities long oppressed by China, the empire’s rival for dominance of the Asian mainland.²⁰ For his senior thesis, Izumi produced a similarly politically inflected ethnography of Jejudo, an island off the coast of southern Korea.²¹ This project was his first, and, as it turned out, only major independent field study. The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 fatefully constrained the possibilities for such research. The expense, hazards, and logistical challenges of operating alone in an unfamiliar war zone moved Japanese human scientists toward a model of collaborative fieldwork involving multidisciplinary teams tackling short-term survey projects. The men of one age initially doubted the objectivity of group studies, so different from the lone hero fieldwork promoted by Malinowski. Ultimately, however, they defended team research as legitimate human science—a stance that enabled them to furnish the government and military with ideological support. Thus validated, group fieldwork survived the war years, and continues to characterize much Japanese scholarship to this day.²²

Within weeks of receiving his university degree in spring 1938, Izumi helped to organize a pioneering group survey of the people of Mōkyō, the newly created Japanese puppet state in the Mongol lands. Upon his return from the field, he served three years in the Japanese army. Discharged one day before the imperial assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he went on to coordinate a navy-backed expedition of hundreds to Japanese-occupied New Guinea. On the island, he and his fellow human scientists studied diverse populations for evidence of a racial relationship with the Japanese. They also pursued strategic information: counting heads for labor mobilization, mapping terrain for military maneuvers, and scouting natural resources.

It was in the field that the men of one age came together as a generation. Team expeditions were both a seminal experience and a rite of passage for transwar Japanese human scientists. With the outbreak of hostilities against the Allies, they largely disengaged from the transnational scientific community. Instead, they developed imperial intellectual networks, even opening ranks to select colonial subjects. The hardships and dangers of working among (often hostile and uncommunicative) peoples in extreme environments and on violent frontiers drew the men together in lasting personal relationships. Conversely, they also bonded through the pleasures of the field experience: a sense of shared adventure, the exoticism of research subjects, and enjoyment of masculine sociability. Many scholars collaborated repeatedly on joint ventures, as faculty colleagues, and in research institutions and professional societies. At home, they united to present the thrills and threats of studying diverse imperial peoples to a curious public, establishing the value of human science in the popular mind and laying the foundations of their postwar influence over national identity.

Japan announced its surrender to the Allies on August 15, 1945. With the liberation of the empire, Izumi and his wife and children were forced to leave their home in Korea to return to Japan—a country they barely knew. For over six years from 1945 to 1952, the home islands were occupied by the Allied powers under the oversight of the United States. Believing that his academic career had come to an end, Izumi quietly devoted himself to assisting destitute fellow repatriates. However, the occupation was a time of continuity as well as change, opening new avenues to Japanese human scientists. The end of the war did not seriously test faith in objectivity as the defining criterion of legitimate and credible knowledge. Instead, what changed after 1945 were the values understood to constitute objectivity. The United States’s victory validated ideals vaunted as characteristically American: democracy, capitalism, and peace. U.S. human scientists, shocked and horrified by the devastation and atrocities of World War II, asserted a new responsibility to create objective knowledge in the service of these values. Democracy, capitalism, and peace formed the goals of modernization, or the ideology that all nations might, with U.S. assistance, achieve its privileged status as a developed society. The outbreak of the Cold War further solidified modernization as a soft-power strategy in the American rivalry for global dominance with the Soviet Union, correspondingly vilified as authoritarian, communist, and militarist.

Japan, the site of the United States’s longest peacetime postwar occupation to date, offered both a test case, and indeed a showcase of modernization.²³ Viewing Japanese human scientists as vital partners in the transformation of society, the occupation was generally pedagogical rather than punitive. As in Germany, the Allies largely declined to prosecute Japanese academics for collaboration with the imperial government. Scholars hired to advise war crimes tribunals understood all too well the pressure on human scientists to support the empire in its time of crisis. Moreover, they saw strategic potential in Japan’s studies of East Asia and Oceania. During the Cold War, American scholars collected, excerpted, translated, and republished Japanese imperial fieldwork to advance their nation’s understanding of the Pacific Rim. For their part, transwar Japanese researchers largely upheld the convenient fiction of their reluctant cooperation with and quiet opposition to the former government. For the rest of their lives, they remained mostly silent regarding their collective complicity with and profit from wartime knowledge production.

The large-scale exoneration of Japanese academics set the stage for their cooperation with the U.S. occupation in disseminating the ideals of modernization. The field generation encapsulated democracy, capitalism, and peace in the formula of the cultural nation (bunka kokka). Joint pursuit of the cultural nation enabled Japanese and American human scientists to renew relations of friendship and sympathy (in Beardsley’s words), to rehabilitate Japan’s scholarly reputation, to position transwar researchers at the pinnacle of postwar academia, and to integrate them into a new transnational intellectual community that both reflected and supported U.S. hegemony. Through imported libraries, courses and lectures, and, most importantly, team fieldwork, American human scientists retrained Japanese colleagues as partners in modernization.

Despite the reality of U.S. control during the occupation, relations between American and Japanese scholars were never so simple as teacher and pupil, giver and recipient, colonizer and colonized. Most American human scientists in Japan were not so much Cold War ideologues maintaining monolithic charge of a U.S. vision for Japan as eager observers of an interesting and novel landscape. Rather than clinging to preexisting notions about the former enemy, men such as Beardsley embraced the opportunity to ground postwar Japanese studies in rich empirical research and local expertise. Meanwhile, many transwar Japanese academics rejected ideological cooptation by the occupying power. The increasing salience of anticommunism to the American geopolitical agenda threatened to undercut the primacy of developing democracy, capitalism, and peace in the recovering nation. Japanese human scientists resisted the subordination of domestic progress to grand strategy. A large number even returned to Marxist convictions they had held as youths in the 1920s.

Irrespective of ideological orientation, Japanese human scientists of the early postwar years came to uphold culture (bunka), broadly understood as learned social behavior, as their primary analytical variable. Bunka mobilized many of the chauvinistic and teleological assumptions of minzoku, the imperial-era construct it partly subsumed. However, to scholars throughout the postwar world, culture suggested greater objectivity in the study of diversity. International organizations such as UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization) helped to transmit the concept to societies throughout the American orbit. In Japan, domestic professional associations including the Japanese Society of Ethnology adopted the study of culture as their primary mission. The University of Tokyo, Japan’s premier institution of higher learning, began to offer courses in American-style cultural anthropology (bunka jinruigaku). Through the efforts of Izumi, who joined the faculty during the occupation, the university built the nation’s first graduate program and undergraduate major in the discipline.

In contrast to wartime ethnology, which emphasized racial commonalities between the Japanese and their subjects as a justification of empire, postwar Japanese cultural anthropology constructed a distinctive, primordial ethnicity as the foundation of the independent nation-state. On Japan’s post-1945 frontiers, certain minorities appeared to challenge this vision. Human scientists accordingly ventured to the field to find evidence of their belonging. Strapped for funding,