Ezra Vogel

Ezra Vogel    ( academic)
Vogel at the National Library of China in 2013
Born	Ezra Feivel Vogel July 11, 1930  Delaware,  Ohio,  United States
Died	December 2020 (Age 90)
Nationality	US
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	•  Harvard University •  Ohio Wesleyan University
Mentors	Talcott Parsons
Spouse	Charlotte Ikels
Member of	Council on Foreign Relations/Members 3
Interests	•  Japan •  China •  Asia
US sociologist and intelligence officer who wrote on modern Japan, China, and Korea. Attended Bilderberg/1997 where one of the subjects was How Should the West Look at China?  Founding director of the Asia Center In office 1997 - 1999 Employer Harvard Attended Bilderberg/1997  Director of the Program on US-Japan Relations In office 1980 - 1987 Employer Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Ezra Feivel Vogel was an American sociologist and intelligence officer who wrote on modern Japan, China, and Korea. He was a professor at Harvard University for several decades. Vogel worked as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia with the National Intelligence Council from 1993 to 1995. He attended the 1997 Bilderberg conference, where one of the subjects was How Should the West Look at China?

Background

Ezra Vogel was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio. As a child, he helped his father in the family's clothing store.

Education

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. While at Ohio Wesleyan, Vogel was a member of the Beta Sigma Tau fraternity (later merged with the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity).

He was drafted to serve two years in the U.S. Army without seeing combat during the Korean War. The service involved working for a psychiatric unit of a military hospital.

Career

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 to 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. This was during the Cold War, and would mean connections to the "national security" apparatus.

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

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.

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

Vogel died in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 20, 2020, at the age of 90.

Works

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 between 1950 and 1960. Their goal was to understand the life of the "salary man" and his family, a new group that had emerged after the war. 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. 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.

His 1991 text The Four Little Dragons analyzed the spread of industrialization in east Asia. In Vogel's view, Confucianism played an important role in the industrialization of east Asian economies, given that cultural values of hard work, collectivism, discipline, family, conscientiousness, responsibility, and saving are also favorable qualities for organizing rapid industrialization and an industrializing work force.

Vogel's later areas of research included industrialization, changes in family structure, political change, and security issues in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and East Asia overall. In Beijing, he began to study Deng Xiaoping, following 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. 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).

Vogel worked as a National Intelligence Officer for East Asia with the National Intelligence Council from 1993 to 1995. 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. He later backtracked to "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."

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.

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1997	12 June 1997	15 June 1997	US Lake Lanier Georgia (State)	The 45th Bilderberg meeting

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References

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