Akira Iriye

“History, like science, is an open book. Anybody can study physics and chemistry, no matter where you come from. The same thing should be true to humanity and social sciences. You know I think it is ridiculous to say that only English can study Shakespeare, at least, that is unacceptable to me. Someone from Burma should be able to understand Shakespeare as much as anyone else. In this country in the 1960s, when African American history came to studied professionally, there are some people who think only African Americans can do African American history.”

“When I went to graduate school, in the 1950s, that’s what everyone said, that Americans are very unique. Americans are unique because America is unique. America is unique because of a number of reasons, because of frontier experiences (that’s what Turner said), because our absence of feudalism (some other historians pointed out), and that’s the 1950s. But in the 1960s Americans became more self-critic so to speak, because of the war in Vietnam that affected a lot of historians, and made a lot of people started to see American imperialism and aggression, that kind of thing.”

“The distinction between Japanese and American history lost meaning for me in August 1945 when, upon Japan’s defeat, school children of my generation were told by the American Occupation authorities that whatever we had learned of history up to that point was all wrong and that we must now restudy the past without taking anything for granted... By the same token, the blackening out of passages in school textbooks that were objectionable to the Occupation authorities had impressed on us how easily the past could be manipulated by temporal power.”