I HAVE JUST LEARNED THAT CHALMERS JOHNSON HAS DIED. HE WAS A PATRIOT, AND A SCHOLAR. HIS RECENT TRILOGY ON BLOWBACK IS MANDATORY READING FOR ANYONE WISHING TO UNDERSTAND MID-EAST GEO-POLITICS. PLEASE KEEP HIS FAMILY IN YOUR PRAYERS.
Chalmers Johnson, influential scholar of East Asia, dies at 79
Chalmers Johnson was noted for writing that famine was more important than personalities in creating communist China and that 21st century America was 'on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire.'
November 24, 2010|By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
Chalmers Johnson, an influential scholar of East Asia's political economy whose seminal writings forced a reevaluation of both the Chinese Revolution and the Japanese "economic miracle," has died. He was 79.
Johnson, who taught at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California from 1962 to 1992, died Saturday of complications of long-term rheumatoid arthritis at his home in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, said his wife, anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson.
The UC Berkeley-educated Johnson was the founder and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a 16-year-old nonprofit organization devoted to public education about Japan and its place in the world. It is now housed at the University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim.
"He was in many ways America's leading scholar on East Asia, and at the end of his career he blossomed as a famous public intellectual," said Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellow at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim.
A prolific writer, Johnson made his initial impact with the 1962 publication of his dissertation, "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power," which offered a revisionist view of the emergence of revolutionary China between 1937 and 1945.
"He argued that famine more than personalities drove the Chinese political settlement," Hatcher said.
Subsequent to that, Johnson wrote an even more influential book about Japan: "MITI and the Japanese Miracle" (1982), which argued that the government was the major player in the Japanese economy rather than the private sector. (MITI was the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.)
"With this book, Johnson became [known as] 'the godfather' of the revisionist school of Japanese political economy," Hatcher said.
Ken Kopp, associate director of the Center for the Pacific Rim, said that as a writer, a scholar and a teacher, Johnson "not only had an impact in the academic world, but he went on to have a considerable impact in the public sphere."
He did that, Kopp said, "through his most recent works, which were a so-called empire trilogy on what he saw as the pathologies of America's current role in the world."
The three books are "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" (2000), "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (2004) and "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (2006).
Renowned Asia scholar Chalmers Johnson dies at 79
 Chalmers Johnson, a leading Asia scholar who was known for his staunch criticism of American imperialism, died Nov. 20. (Courtesy Of University Of California At San Diego) TOOLBOX    Resize |
By T. Rees Shapiro Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 24, 2010; 10:13 PMChalmers Johnson, 79, a renowned Asia scholar and expert on the economies of China and Japan who later became a fierce critic of the expanded role of the American military in U.S. foreign policy, died Nov. 20 at his home in Cardiff, Calif. He had complications from rheumatoid arthritis.
According to Ellis Krauss, a colleague at the University of California at San Diego, Dr. Johnson was one of the eminent American scholars on the economies and political environments of China and Japan, about which he wrote "seminal, absolutely groundbreaking, influential books."
On China, Krauss said, Dr. Johnson went against the academic establishment by writing that the proliferation of Communism was not an ideological movement but one founded in nationalism.
"It violated people's notions of the Cold War and that Communism was driven by people who followed it ideologically," Krauss said. "That may have been true of the more intellectual people but he was trying to show that ordinary people might follow Communism in China for other reasons as well."
In his research on Japan, Dr. Johnson was one of the earliest observers to identify variations in the U.S. and Japanese capitalistic market economies.
Krauss said Dr. Johnson claimed that Japan was a "developmental state" where "the government played a leading role in promoting growth" to gain an economic advantage over other countries, including "a highly successful challenge to American economic supremacy."
Dr. Johnson's interest in Asia began in 1953, after he graduated with an economics degree from the University of California at Berkeley and became an officer in the Navy aboard a landing ship tank, a shallow-bottomed cargo vessel.
During his wartime service, Dr. Johnson's ship ferried North Korean prisoners back across the demarcation line but often experienced mechanical trouble and was sent to Yokohama, Japan, for repairs.
On China, Krauss said, Dr. Johnson went against the academic establishment by writing that the proliferation of Communism was not an ideological movement but one founded in nationalism.
"It violated people's notions of the Cold War and that Communism was driven by people who followed it ideologically," Krauss said. "That may have been true of the more intellectual people but he was trying to show that ordinary people might follow Communism in China for other reasons as well."
In his research on Japan, Dr. Johnson was one of the earliest observers to identify variations in the U.S. and Japanese capitalistic market economies.
Krauss said Dr. Johnson claimed that Japan was a "developmental state" where "the government played a leading role in promoting growth" to gain an economic advantage over other countries, including "a highly successful challenge to American economic supremacy."
Dr. Johnson's interest in Asia began in 1953, after he graduated with an economics degree from the University of California at Berkeley and became an officer in the Navy aboard a landing ship tank, a shallow-bottomed cargo vessel.
During his wartime service, Dr. Johnson's ship ferried North Korean prisoners back across the demarcation line but often experienced mechanical trouble and was sent to Yokohama, Japan, for repairs.
While waiting for the vessel to be fixed, Dr. Johnson bided his time by learning Japanese and examining the country's culture, economy and longtime turbulent relationship with China.
When he returned to Berkeley in 1955, Dr. Johnson began studying political science and immersed himself in texts related to Asia. For his doctoral thesis, Dr. Johnson explored the rise of the Communist party in China, which he claimed was rooted in a contagious zeitgeist of nationalism shared among much of the country's poor.
To illustrate his point, he compared the rise of Communism in China to that of Yugoslavia shortly after the Germans invaded that eastern European country in World War II, where many peasants became fervently nationalistic and mobilized under the Yugoslav Communist party leadership.
He received a doctorate in 1961 and embarked on a year-long Ford Foundation fellowship in Tokyo. During that time, he revised his thesis and in 1962 it was released as a book - "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945," - the same year he joined the Berkeley political science faculty.
