By Jerome A. Cohen
Clockwise from Left: Minoru Makihara, Takashi Oka, and Ezra Vogel
One was the distinguished scholar Ezra Vogel of Harvard, about whom I wrote last week. Another was the respected journalist Takashi Oka of the Christian Scientist Monitor and, for some years, The New York Times. The third was the dynamic international business leader Minoru Makihara of the Mitsubishi Corporation. The Times and many other papers carried individual extensive obituaries about each one. I was fortunate to know and admire all three.
Ezra, as so many have now agreed, was the model American scholar of East Asia. He was one of that rare breed who could actually do research in both Chinese and Japanese sources and conduct interviews in both languages. His many books have made significant contributions to our understanding of each country’s modern development, and his recent published volume on Sino-Japanese interactions from the beginnings of civilization is an ambitious, innovative and highly readable study that provides invaluable background for the complex, intermittent negotiations again under way. Ezra will also never be forgotten by the generations of students and younger scholars whom he so generously nurtured.
Ezra, I and our spouses knew Takashi Oka and his charming wife Hiro from the year 1963-64 we each spent in colonial Hong Kong on our separate research projects interviewing refugees from the China Mainland from which Americans were then still banned. Tak was covering Mao’s China and proved an informed, balanced, insightful and helpful friend. He had a sense of equanimity as well as humor that made it a joy to share his company. The Okas produced two beautiful girls who became talented young women and eventually friends of the three sons whom Joan and I spawned. I recall seeing the whole family eight years later when our family spent the year in Japan and Tak was based in Tokyo as Times Bureau chief, and the Okas, who had many links to Harvard, overlapped with us again in Cambridge during my tenure at the Law School.
I had a closer friendship with “Ben” Makihara, whose career, like Tak’s, embodied the best aspects of the post-World War II US-Japan relationship. Ben’s upbringing and education in the UK, Japan and the US had given him the perfect background for the international roles he was to play. He had many attributes similar to those of Tak and could be extremely lively on occasion. I will never forget the motorcycle ride he insisted I share with him in the early ‘80s to facilitate his introduction of some little-known Tokyo areas. Never having been on a motorcycle before, I was scared stiff, but Ben proved a reliable guide.
Always a loyal Harvard grad, Ben was supportive of the Mitsubishi Group’s establishment of a chair in Japanese law at Harvard Law School. Like the Okas, Ben and his able wife Kikuko, great-granddaughter of the Mitsubishi Group’s founder, had two talented children. I got to know their son Jun better than their daughter Kumiko because he proved to be a top student at the Harvard Law School while I was still teaching there, and it occurred to me that he would make an excellent and most appropriate first occupant of the Mitsubishi professorship in Japanese law. But Jun decided that he preferred an investment banking career with Goldman Sachs and then others in New York instead of either perpetuating the family tradition at Mitsubishi or embarking on an academic career in comparative law.
Interestingly, the Okas and the Makiharas became linked through the marriage of Mimi Oka to Jun, and the illustrious young couple and their own family have made a much-admired contribution to New York life. Early this month, however, both Tak and Ben passed away within eleven days of each other, and Ezra followed last week. Sic Transit Gloria! Without this extraordinary trio of wonderful human beings East Asian-American relations will be more challenging than ever.