In 1949, after eight years in Japan and two years as official editor-in-chief of Nippon Times, Kazuo Kawai left the Nippon Times and moved back to the United States to take up a position as a visiting lecturer in history and political science at Stanford University. Officially he remained as editor and was described as “on leave”—his departure was not reported in its pages.
However, when he was interviewed by reporters upon his arrival in San Francisco, he stated frankly that he did not know when, or even if, he would be returning to the Nippon Times. He stated,“My job there was something of an accident. I look at my year back at Stanford as a period of reorientation and experiment. I may decide to stay in academic work.” (During the same interview, he referred to the American occupation of Japan as a “spectacular success,” and contended that increasing international trade was vital to saving Japan from the advance of communism).
As it happened, several factors went into his decision to leave Japan. First, his father Teizo Kawai had died in February 1949. Though Kazuo Kawai’s mother and all four of his sisters were still living in Japan, he may have felt fewer ties binding him there. Also, he was dedicated to teaching. In February 1946, at the dawn of the U.S. occupation of Japan, he had taken a position as part-time lecturer at the U.S. Army Corps counter-intelligence school in Tokyo. Beyond the pleasures of teaching, the lifestyle of a Stanford professor must have felt particularly luxurious to Kawai after the austere conditions of postwar Japan.
Kawai evidently decided to stay in academia following his return to the United States. By 1950 he was referred to in the Nippon Times as a “former editorial writer.” After a second year at Stanford in 1951, he accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, as a visiting lecturer. In 1953, after two years at Ohio State, Kawai was hired as a regular faculty member, with the title of Associate Professor of Politics. He would be promoted by Ohio State to the rank of full professor in 1959.
Kawai also took on various outside assignments. He served as a “Technical Assistant” to the Japanese delegation at the Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco in 1951 (and published a two-part article on the conference in Nippon Times). In 1953–54, he served as a “research consultant” at the Air War College, located at the Air Force base at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama.
The following year he served as guest lecturer at the National War College at Fort Leslie J. McNair. In 1955 he helped direct Ohio State’s summer program on the Far East, created under the auspices of an interdepartmental committee on international studies, and supported by the Asia Foundation and the Japan Society. In fall 1960, he accompanied the students of the International School of America, a travelling prep school, to Tokyo and taught them social science.
In addition to his teaching, Kawai threw himself into a series of writing projects. His first significant scholarly piece following his return to the United States was “Mokusatsu, Japan’s Response to the Potsdam Declaration,” which appeared in Pacific Historical Review in November 1950. In the piece, which drew from his own experience as an on-the-spot reporter around the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Summer 1945, he presented the audacious argument that the Japanese government never in fact intended to reject the Potsdam Declaration. Kawai contended that Japan had been moving toward peace as far back as 1944, and that once the cabinet of Premier Kantarō Suzuki assumed office on April 7, 1945, obtaining peace on any terms was the unannounced but evident aim of the Japanese government.
By July 26, 1945, when the Potsdam Declaration was issued by the Allied powers, Japan was ready to surrender. However, when asked for his reaction to the Declaration, Premier Suzuki—in an excess of caution—used the ambiguous word “mokusatsu,” which could mean either “silence” or “contemptuous ignoring.” The Allies presumed that the latter meaning was the real one, whereas it was more likely the first. Tragically, the Allied Powers then carried out their threats of mass destruction. The subsequent course of events represented a tragedy of errors for which the major responsibility rested with Japanese officials, but also with the Allied powers (including The Soviet Union, which withheld from its partners confidential information that it had on Japan’s readiness to surrender).
In the next years, he published several further scholarly pieces on Japan, including “Japan in the Cold War,” which appeared in World Affairs Interpreter, and “American Influence on Japanese Thinking,” which appeared in the proceedings of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In both, he discussed the future of Japan and the role of the United States. His article “Sovereignty and Democracy in the Japanese Constitution,” appeared in American Political Science Review in September 1955. His article “The Divinity of the Japanese Emperor” appeared in Political Science in 1958.
Perhaps Kawai’s most striking piece during the 1950s was “Our Gadget Civilization: A Japanese View” which appeared in the journal Current History in December 1956. In it, Kawai addressed the question of Japanese views of the United States, and offered a rough summary: “The Americans are good-hearted, but they are simple-minded, immature, uncouth, brash, pleasure-mad, and self-centered. These stock impressions were little changed, save for minor exceptions, by the young American G.I.'s who swarmed over Japan."
Kawai also attracted widespread media attention for his expression of his views at the outset of the Korean War. When North Korea invaded the South in summer 1950, Kawai insisted that the move was predictable—the separation of North and South Korea was entirely artificial, and all Koreans desired reunification: “All Korean industry is in the north, [while] its agriculture in the south. One cannot operate without the other. Furthermore, Korea is a single nation, made up of a single people.”
In referring to U.S President Harry Truman’s decision to send American troops to defend the regime of Korean president Syngman Rhee, Kawai asserted that even if North Korea could be pushed out of South Korean territory, it would not eliminate the illogical nature of the separation between the two countries. In fact, he accurately predicted that the resulting war would be a long and costly one, though he was mistaken as to the reason:
“American troops can expect little help from the army or the people of South Korea. They have no love for their democratic government and little love for the United States. It is quite possible that South Koreans may fight against the American army as guerrilla troops behind the lines.” All the same, he regarded US intervention as a positive thing, because it would restore American prestige in the eyes of the world, “and would show Russia where America stands.”
Kawai’s most important contribution during these years was his book Japan’s American Interlude, published by University of Chicago Press in 1960. The book, which carried a blurb by the great American Japanologist (and later U.S. Ambassador to Japan) Edwin Reischauer, was a history of the postwar American occupation of Japan informed by the author’s active presence in the events he described, Kawai himself described the work as “a personal account based on his direct observation” as editor of Nippon Times.
In the book, he described the Occupation from a Japanese point of view. The Japanese people had been so paralyzed by the shock of wartime defeat that they accepted the Occupation without conflict. In memorable passage, he described the emotions of people listening to Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast. Many Japanese experienced shame, “but most powerful of all was the feeling of profound relief and with this relief peeled forth gratitude to the Emperor for making possible the ardently desired peace which no one had been able to bring until now.” While the Occupation authorities made mistakes, trying to impose democracy too swiftly from above, the American actions were in general “benevolent, constructive, and sound.”
The book was widely and positive reviewed in both newspapers and scholarly journals. Nisei scholar John M. Maki (who had served as an advisor to SCAP in Occupied Japan—but who by his own later account never met Kawai) stated unequivocally in The Journal of Asian Studies, “This is by far the best discussion we have had of the Occupation,” and added that it could be read with equal profit by specialists and general readers alike. Japan scholar Justin Williams recorded in the American Historical Review that Kawai’s book had a master’s touch: “Future students of the period must start from his hypotheses and arguments.”
Following the release of Japan’s American Interlude, Kawai became more in demand as a scholar of Japan. In summer 1960 he spoke in a world affairs lecture series at University of Nebraska. There he proposed that the United States reshape its relationship with Japan and withdraw its military bases from Japanese soil, thereby trading “obsolescent military advantages” for more durable friendship. Sometime in this period, Kawai’s old student Mike Mansfield, by then Majority leader in the U.S. Senate, discovered that he was teaching at Ohio State and invited him to Washington, DC.
Sadly, however, Kawai developed cancer, and died on May 4, 1963, before he could make the trip. His death attracted widespread public notice, with obituaries in the Washington Post and several smaller newspapers. In later decades he became a rather obscure figure.
Kazuo Kawai’s legacy for Japanese Americans, especially in regard to his groundbreaking explorations of his own identity, is hard to evaluate. It will be recalled that in the period before World War II Kawai wrote widely for both Nisei and mainstream periodicals, and expressed his goal of serving as a bridge between Japan and the United States. Disillusioned by the treatment of the Nisei, he referred to himself as a “temporary American,” disavowed any interest in obtaining U.S. citizenship. Instead, he identified himself with Japan and expressed a wish to spend his retirement years there.
It is unknown whether he changed his mind about his identity. To be sure, after spending the wartime period in Japan, he settled in the United States, and resided there for the rest of his life. In 1959 he obtained American citizenship. (After his death, his wife Miyo returned to Japan and buried his remains there). After leaving the United States in 1941, Kawai himself seems not to have written articles on Japanese Americans, or studied their wartime confinement. In a feature that he published in Japan Times at the time of the 1951 Japanese Treaty Conference, he made a rare reference to West Coast communities:
The permanent Japanese population here [in San Francisco] numbers less than 6,000, with Nisei now in preponderance. It makes a poor showing in comparison with the 20,000 in Los Angeles. Whereas "Little Tokyo" in Los Angeles is a garish neon-lit Nisei caricature of the Ginza, San Francisco's Japanese section is an inconspicuous row of tired shops and shabby rooming houses in a rather disreputable neighborhood. It cannot begin to compare with colorful Chinatown, the blatantly synthetic tourist trap. Most Japanese are scattered throughout the city and in the suburbs. The extent to which the Japanese do not stand out in San Francisco may be a measure of the success with which they have been absorbed into the generality of the city's life.
It is perhaps not too much to interpret this last sentence as a validation of Kawai’s goal of resolving his own outsider status.
© 2025 Greg Robinson
