The story of philanthropy's role in international relations remains largely untold. Considerable attention has been paid in recent years, particularly in the wake of the war in Iraq, to how the American occupation of Japan helped overcome the animosity of wartime to build strong ties between the victor and the vanquished, the United States and Japan. Yet American philanthropists and their partners on both sides of the Pacific played a similarly critical, and altogether indispensable, role in laying the foundation for Japanese and American friendship in the postwar era.

 

Soon after the end of the war, a handful of internationally minded U.S. foundations and philanthropists set out to restore and strengthen the U.S.-Japan relationship.* Although the monetary value of their investment over the next 30 years might be considered modest by current standards - approximately $55-60 million through roughly 4,000 grants - they succeeded in nurturing a web of linkages between various sectors of both societies that have been instrumental in helping sustain close and resilient bilateral relations for more than half a century.

 

The ways in which they contributed to the rebuilding of U.S.-Japan relations have been the subject of a three-year study coordinated by the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE). Headed by Kobe University professor Makoto Iokibe, Harvard University historian Akira Iriye, and JCIE president Tadashi Yamamoto, the research team has drawn on interviews and extensive archival research to piece together a picture of Japan-related foundation activities during the period from 1945 to 1975. The findings will be published in the late spring as an edited volume, tentatively titled From Enemies to Allies: The Role of Philanthropy in Rebuilding Postwar U.S.-Japan Relations, 1945−75. This has been made possible by generous support from a consortium of funders including the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership and nine other American and Japanese foundations.

 

In the immediate postwar era, at a time when the prevailing tendency was simply to transplant American ideals and ideas to Japan, John D. Rockefeller 3rd (JDR 3rd) and other members of the small group of Americans involved in Japan-related philanthropy recognized that, to stand the test of time, the U.S.-Japan relationship would have to be built upon a foundation of mutual understanding and that its strength would depend on the ability to maintain a discourse on the state of the relationship and where it was heading. Therefore, it was important to ground their undertakings in a sense of equality and mutual respect. They often bent over backwards to ensure that projects were driven by Japanese organizers, not American funders or partner organizations, and that leadership came from the Japanese side. Meanwhile, they benefited from the surprisingly strong prewar tradition of philanthropic activity among Japanese industrialists and corporations. Their support was often matched by Japanese funding - despite widespread economic hardship in Japan - and the preexisting networks among various elites proved essential to the success of many of their initiatives.

 

Practically all of these foundation officials had served in government posts at some point, but they were convinced that there was an indispensable role for independent, nongovernmental leadership in helping to build and maintain relations between the two countries. While they shared a common set of values and long-term goals - including democratization, anticommunism, and internationalism - with American policymakers, they calculated that private initiatives, unencumbered by perceptions of governmental control, had a unique capacity to reach out to moderate elements of the left, engage a broad range of public intellectuals in dialogue, and promote interaction that could not be easily dismissed as propaganda. They fervently believed, as one Ford Foundation official put it in a 1962 memo," a foundation can contribute in some areas even more effectively than the government to the restoration of what Ambassador Reischauer has called the 'broken dialogue.'"

 

Generally speaking, the support of the major U.S. foundations and philanthropists was not for relief or the reconstruction of Japan's infrastructure, but rather to strengthen the nongovernmental underpinnings of the relationship. Beginning soon after the close of World War II, the core players - first the Rockefeller Foundation and JDR 3rd, and then the Asia Foundation and the Ford Foundation - focused strategically on the various elements that could promote mutual understanding and dialogue among Americans and Japanese.

 

Much of their attention was on developing professional expertise on each other's country, primarily by strengthening university training in area studies. Nearly one-third of total foundation funding, close to $18 million, went to support Japanese studies. Although U.S. government funding was flowing into the field during much of the period, often dwarfing the amount of foundation money, the capacity of private funding to be apportioned in a focused, innovative, and flexible manner - for example, to set up new area studies centers at key American universities - allowed it to play an outsized role in shaping the field and leading the way for government funding.

 

Meanwhile, they used an additional $2.3−2.4 million to help develop American studies at Japanese universities. This, too, played a critical catalytic role, encouraging independent and enterprising individuals and helping launch several of the central institutions in the discipline. In these politically charged times, private funding was crucial for another reason as well. As Ford Foundation consultant Herbert Passin argued in a 1964 planning memo, it was needed to "remove the taint of cultural imperialism and make the field more respectable" by watering down the association of American studies with the U.S. government, which was the only other major alternative source of funding through most of the period.

 

Person-to-person exchange was seen as another pillar of the relationship, and foundation officials, especially at the Asia Foundation, sought to encourage this through scores of small grants to local exchange organizations as well as through support for individuals so that they could travel and study abroad. Their hope was to expose leaders from all walks of life in Japan and the United States to one another and, through this, to encourage deeper understanding and the formation of networks of likeminded individuals. Of course, some of the funding in Japan, particularly in the early years, was clearly designed to combat the spread of communist ideology and anti-American sentiments, but on a deeper level much of it seemed to be tied to a sort of "missionary quest for individual conversion" based on the conviction that were fair-minded people to have contact with the United States, they would naturally come to respect and admire the American way of life.

 

Foundation officials were particularly interested in promoting intellectual dialogue between leaders from politics, business, media, academia, and other sectors of society. A key goal was to promote intellectual engagement, not just between Japan and the United States, but also Japanese engagement with the rest of the world. Much of this intellectual dialogue was policy oriented in nature, and it involved bilateral and multilateral conferences such as the Ford Foundation−funded Dartmouth Roundtable and Shimoda Conference, numerous joint research studies, and various exchange and dialogue programs that sought to build networks among leaders. Even though they included government leaders, these projects were most effective in promoting free and frank exchanges when convened by nongovernmental organizations perceived as having a degree of neutrality and often possible only with the political cover provided by private funding.

 

Lastly, special attention was paid to creating and strengthening institutions that would serve as bases for intellectual and grassroots exchange between Japan and the United States. In the 1950s, JDR 3rd led the way by orchestrating the revival of the Japan Society of New York and arranging funding for the creation of the International House of Japan, in both cases to help coordinate exchange at the national level. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Ford Foundation and others played key roles in nurturing organizations such as Saburo Okita's Japan Economic Research Center, JCIE, and the Trilateral Commission, all of which helped develop intellectual networks and encourage Japan's intellectual engagement with the outside world. In particular, the foundations recognized and nurtured what might be called indigenous "nonprofit entrepreneurs," people who had the vision, skills, and tenacity to create sustainable institutions.

 

Of course, the foundations and philanthropists active in U.S.-Japan relations in the early postwar era had their share of false starts and failures. They pushed ahead with some projects without sufficient local support, they often underestimated the time and commitment needed to bring real change, and their nongovernmental status never completely insulated them from periodic accusations that they were mouthpieces of U.S. government policy. Nevertheless, their strategy paid off in the long run. By actively working to strengthen the various underpinnings that tie the two countries together, they clearly played a key role in helping to build the strong relationship that we enjoy today.

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* It truly was a small number of foundations and philanthropists that were active in the field during the three decades that are the focus of the study. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York both began working on Asia in the prewar period, and the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his various foundations emerged to play key roles in the postwar era. Later, in the 1970s, a handful of new players appeared on the scene, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and, from 1972, the Japan Foundation.