Edwin O. Reischauer; Far East Scholar, Ex-Envoy to Japan

Edwin Oldfather Reischauer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Japan during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died Saturday of hepatitis. He was 79.

Reischauer died at Green Hospital of Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, the clinic said.

Ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966, Reischauer wrote several books on Japan and on America’s relationship with Japan and Asia. Among his books are “The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity,” and “Japan: The Story of a Nation.”

Reischauer was born in Tokyo to missionary parents on Oct. 15, 1910. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1931. He received a doctorate from Harvard University after studying at universities in France, Japan and China.

Reischauer joined the Harvard staff as an instructor in 1938. He returned after World War II as an associate professor and later was a professor of Far Eastern languages. He also was a director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1956 to 1961.

In 1981, the year he retired as a professor at Harvard, Reischauer created an international political furor by stating, on the eve of a visit to Washington by Japanese Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki, that U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons routinely had visited Japanese ports with official sanction since 1960.

Reischauer had made the comment in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, in which he also called for an end to the polite diplomatic fiction in which Tokyo repeatedly claimed that no U.S. nuclear armament had been “introduced” to Japan. Washington at the same time refused comment on the presence or movement of all nuclear weapons.

Japanese officials suggested that Reischauer may have been mistaken in his recollections because he was ill and old.

Reischauer, then 70, told the Los Angeles Times that he hoped the incident would lead to a more realistic and unambiguous Japanese-American relationship, but that it had been “painful and embarrassing.”

During World War II, Reischauer served in the Far Eastern Affairs office in the State Department and the War Department, specializing in Japanese language training and intelligence.

As ambassador, Reischauer established contacts with opposition leaders, intellectuals, the media and students. He urged America to abandon its “occupation mentality” toward Japan as the nation began its emergence as an industrial power.

His books included “East Asia: The Modern Transformation,” 1965; “Beyond Vietnam, the United States and Asia,” 1967; “The Japanese,” 1977; and “My Life between Japan and America,” 1986.

For his work promoting better understanding between cultures, Reischauer received Japan’s First Class Order of the Rising Sun in 1968.

Reischauer was a resident of Belmont, Mass., and La Jolla.

He is survived by his wife, Haru, who is related to Japanese royalty; a son, Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office; and daughters Ann Heinemann and Joan Simon.