Interview with George Sansom Professor of History at Columbia University, Dr. Carol Gluck (Part 2)

Are there any difficulties, such as the influence of trade wars between the U.S. and Japan to continue your research activities for many years?

Actually, it was the opposite. When I began to study Japan in the late 1960s, Japan was not much in the public eye in many parts of the U.S., including the Midwest where I grew up. When the trade war heated up in the 1980s, talk of “Japan as Number One” (a 1979 book by Ezra Vogel) and its burgeoning economic power fed into the deepening keizai masatsu (economic friction) between Japan and the U.S.

Suddenly, a newly minted Japan historian like me was receiving telephone calls from the New York Times, with a reporter asking questions like “What is happening with Toyota?” (This in response to American auto workers smashing a Toyoto GM car in 1983 in Detroit in protest against Japanese automobile imports). So contemporary issues brought me to participate in public discourse amid a heightened interest in Japan as an economic superpower. One result was that friends in Chicago, who had earlier called me “weird” for studying Japan, now said I was “clever” for having chosen a subject of interest to so many people (!).

Drawn into the public conversation about Japan meant that I had to learn more about contemporary issues, which was good for me as a historian. Although the economy had captured popular attention, I focused on the historical context in my efforts to explain what was going on, and ever since, I have addressed current affairs from the perspective of history. In fact, my work on war memory began with my being asked by the media to comment on the many anniversaries – of Pearl Harbor, of D-Day, of the end of the war, and so on. When I found that public memory about the war in every country did not do justice to the history of the war, I began to study how public memory is created, maintained, and changed, in the hope that memory and history might be more closely aligned. So, far from hampering my scholarly work, Japan’s relations with the U.S. led me to study things I might never have studied had the public interest in contemporary events not included me in general discussions about Japan.

It seems that dialogue is one of your research keywords. What is the relationship between research and dialogue in your study?

This is related to the name, Carol In-Global Context Gluck, that came from my work with the Committee of Global Thought, which is committed to dialogue and conversation in and outside the academy, in and outside any particular country. We don’t lecture to the world; we don’t set the categories of inquiry in advance; instead, we ask open-ended questions, as we did in our global research project on Youth in a Changing World. We don’t say, “What do you think about your government?” but “What’s on your mind? What are the most important issues for you?” If you ask, “What do you think about the UN?” you are setting the agenda. But if you ask “What are you most concerned about in your future or that of your country?’ the answer will be their own not a response to your framing question. Dialogue begins with open-ended questions, because if you already know the question that you want an answer to, your question itself limits the field of response. In recent years, we’ve made this kind of open-ended questioning a signature approach in our projects, and it has produced unpredictable results.

Here is an example. In 2017 after Trump was elected for his first time, we held a day-long online marathon. We started at 8 in the morning, New York time, with a zoom call between New York and Beijing, and we finished at 8 at night, with a conversation between New York and Santiago. During the day we talked with people gathered in New York and at Columbia’s Global Centers in Beijing, Mumbai, Istanbul, Tunis, Amman, Nairobi, Paris, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. Each group included participants from universities, government, non-profit organization, business, and journalism. We asked them what issues were the most pressing in their region.  And all of them -- all of them, from Nairobi to Paris to New Jersey -- said “young people.” This was a surprise, since we expected that they might say international relations, or the economy, or immigration. But no, they all said it was youth that concerned them. This had never occurred to us as the most pressing issue of the moment, so we began a global project on Youth in a Changing World, which engaged groups of young people in workshops around the globe, moderated by the youth themselves, asking their own open-ended questions, in their own languages.  They also had the opportunity later to talk via Zoom with their counterparts in other countries to share their concerns, which had more in common with one another than one might have imagined. Such is the value of open-ended questions.

Dialogue requires listening, not just talking, and it demands real give-and-take. Conversation, listening, hearing what others have to say – it’s much the same with researching, writing, and teaching history, which is after all a matter of human relations, a matter between people, whether they are sitting in front of you or are part of a long-gone distant past. Listening is key in every case. This may explain why I like to talk to people. My husband wonders why I agree to give so many public lectures? I think the reason is because historians like to talk, and more important, to listen to people.  Knowledge discussed, disputed, addressed together with other people is the knowledge that matters. It’s not just writing a book or giving lectures. Certainly in the realm of public memory, what matters is what people think, not what’s written in history books that few read. War memory is social knowledge and needs to be addressed that way. So yes, I do think that dialogue is the way to knowledge and also the way to a better world, as long as listening is as – or more – important as talking. 

As I said, when historians conduct research, they are already in dialogue with the past. Facts may be dead, but they were once generated or experienced by living human beings, with ideas and feelings, worries and hopes. I remember feeling this years ago as a Ph.D. student when I was going through the old newspapers in the Meiji shinbun zasshi bunko collection at Tokyo University for my research on Meiji ideology. I imagined that I was in conversation with the individuals who wrote or appeared in the newspaper articles from the 1890s: Who were those people? Why did they say what they said? Why did they do what they did? In a sense, historians make an effort to hear them, to listen to them.  Doing history is itself a dialogical exercise between researchers and their subjects, so that dialogue is just as useful in approaching the past as it is in understanding the present. 

(Interviewer: OHBA Go, Researcher, Center for Innovative Research, National Institutes for the Humanities)