Commentary

Welcome Remarks at the "Japan and the World: Domestic
Politics and How the World Looks to Japan" Conference

by President Richard C. Levin
Yale University
March 9, 2007

Ambassador Kato, Consul General Suzuki, distinguished guests and friends, I am pleased to welcome you this morning to Yale University and to this conference in honor of the memory and legacy of Professor Asakawa Kan'ichi. I know that all of us are grateful to Professor Frances Rosenbluth of Yale and to Professor Masaru Kohno of Waseda University who collaborated to organize this conference, and to the East Asian Studies Council of Yale University under the leadership of Professor Mimi Yiengpruksawan and the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership for their support. And we are greatly honored that our good friend and alumnus, Ambassador Ryozo Kato, is with us to celebrate the legacy of Professor Asakawa.

Yale's connections to Japan are as old as the history of the relationship between Japan and the United States. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan in July 1853, an 1823 graduate of Yale College, George Jones served as an interpreter and as chaplain for the expedition. Another interpreter, Samuel Wells Williams, was later appointed to the Yale faculty in 1877 as a professor of East Asian languages and literatures. Both Jones and Wells participated in the negotiations that culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 between Japan and the United States and which marked the opening of bilateral relations.

By the time Asakawa Kan'ichi came to New Haven in 1899 to enter the Yale Graduate School to study history, sixty students from Japan had studied at Yale. Courses about Japanese language, history and literature had been introduced in the 1870s. Today, academic attention to Japan at Yale spans the full range of humanities and social science disciplines.

Over the past two years, as Yale has re-invigorated its longstanding ties to Japan, I have had the opportunity to learn more about the life and the ideals of Asakawa Kan'ichi. At a time when universities are engaged in internationalizing their curriculum and research, I am struck by how farsighted Professor Asakawa was and how comfortable he would have been in the Yale of 2007. Professor Asakawa recognized that an education without exposure to other cultures from around the world was necessarily incomplete – well before this opinion became widely held.

Having seen how little Japan was understood in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, Professor Asakawa dedicated his life to the enhancement of mutual understanding between Japan and the United States. He reflected this commitment through scholarship and to teaching. Through his curatorship of the Yale University East Asia Library from 1907 to 1948, through his involvement in public affairs to promote peace, and through teaching Yale students over a career spanning 1907 to 1942, Professor Asakawa did his utmost to promote the connections between his homeland of Japan and his adopted home of the United States.

I believe that Professor Asakawa would be pleased by Yale's efforts to educate a new generation of leaders appreciative of Japan's history and its role in the world, and he would be doubly pleased by Yale's recent efforts to strengthen the ties between her and Japan. The Japan – Yale Senior Government Leadership Program, inaugurated in 2006, brought more than twenty Japanese government leaders to Yale's campus to explore topics that increasingly are important to Japan's future. Through such programs as the Bulldogs in Tokyo Internships, the Yale Summer Session in Japan, and the Richard U. Light Fellowship, Yale has committed to exposing the current generation of its students to Japan. Through such programs as the University of Tokyo at Yale Summer Session and other growing connections with the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and other leading Japanese universities, Yale is promoting the cross-cultural understanding that was so important to Professor Asakawa.

The affection that Professor Asakawa felt for Yale was mutual. In December 1941, following the start of war between Japan and the United States, my predecessor, Yale President Charles Seymour wrote a wonderful letter of support to Professor Asakawa. I quote President Seymour: "I can understand how painful these days must be for you and I write merely to tell you of my understanding and to assure you of my intense desire to do all that I can to make them a little easier. You can count upon the appreciative affection of your friends. All that lies in the power of the university will be done to keep your external life normal; anything that any one of us can do to ease the spiritual load you carry, we shall want to do. Yale can never repay with any adequacy your service to her and to scholarship."

To this day, those of us at Yale remain indebted to Professor Asakawa for his work and for his legacy, as we take up the challenge that he has left us: to inspire students to become global citizens who appreciate and engage with ideas and cultures other than their own.