Akira Iriye

Akira Iriye (入江 昭) is a Japanese-born American historian and orientalist.

He is a historian of diplomatic history, international, and transnational history.

His first book, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931, based on his PhD thesis, made use of the multi-archival and multi-lingual research which characterizes his scholarship.

Iriye was born in Tokyo, in 1934, and graduated from Seikei High School.

His father, Keishiro Iriye, was trained in law at Waseda University and published on matters related to Japan and international relations both as a legal scholar and journalist.

He went to the United States to study at Haverford College.

where Wallace MacCaffrey interested him in the study of English history.

He graduated in 1957, and accepted an invitation from the Harvard History Department's American For Eastern Policy Studies.

Iriye finished his Ph.D. in history in 1961.

At Harvard, he studied with John K. Fairbank and Ernest R. May.

Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, first published in 1965, surveys nearly two centuries of interaction, but is more than a synthesis of scholarship in the field; it looks at how the thinking elites and policymakers in the three countries interacted, a theme explored in the conference volume Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (1975).

The book presents the argument that the collapse of the "diplomacy of imperialism" after Treaty of Versailles left a vacuum in the East Asian international system, a theme also explored in his 1972 Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911. But his 1981 Power and Culture: the Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 explained in more optimistic terms the almost instantaneous transition in 1945 from racial all-out war to alliance in terms of underlying cultural parallels between the two countries.

As a graduate student, Iriye had been supported by the Committee on American-East Asian Relations, and then joined the new generation of scholars in the field, along with James C. Thomson, Jr. and Warren Cohen.

Along with Cohen, he worked to establish the Journal of American-East Asian Relations.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

This approach used but moved beyond traditional diplomatic history by incorporating cultural perspectives, shown also in his work on the Cold War, including The Cold War in Asia, (1974) and the co-edited conference volumes The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (1977) and The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960 (1990).

However, the focus of his thought was moving in new directions and beyond East Asia.

He has also been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1982.

In 1988, Iriye served as president of the American Historical Association, the only Japanese citizen to do so, and also served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1988, "The Internationalization of History," Iriye pointed out that "at one level, this will necessitate the establishment of closer ties between the American and overseas historical communities. At another level, the effort will entail the search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries. At still another level, each historian will have to become more conscious of how his or her scholarship may translate in other parts of the world."

Iriye began as an instructor and lecturer in history at Harvard; taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago; and accepted an appointment as professor of history at Harvard University in 1989, where he became Charles Warren Professor of American History in 1991.

He was director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies from 1991 to 1995.

In his 1997 Cultural Internationalism and World Order and the 2002 Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World he looked at the growth of NGOs and global consciousness rather than diplomacy, and called for new levels of thought and analysis.

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Akira Iriye, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 300+ publications in 5 languages and 17,000+ library holdings.

He taught at University of Chicago and Harvard University until his retirement in 2005.

In 2005, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, one of Japan's highest civilian honors.

He was also awarded Japan's Yoshida Shigeru Prize for best book in public history.

Since retiring in 2005, he has taught at Waseda University, Ritsumeikan University, and the University of Illinois as a guest professor.

The focus of his research and thinking first turned to the United States, China, and Japan's interactions in the period leading up to the Pacific War, a war which he experienced first hand as a child.