DEAN Advisor Profile: Professor Simon Partner

For the second installment of the DEAN Advisor Profile series, Editor Sam Yin interviews Professor Simon Partner of Duke University, who teaches Japanese history.

How did you become interested in East Asia? What are some relevant past experiences?
 
I became interested in East Asia during the 1980s. I was a management consultant at the time and everyone wanted to know about Japan, since the Japanese economy was booming. So I learned Japanese and began working on projects related to Japanese business. A lot of the time I was preparing reports on Japanese industries or business practices. This was very useful for me when I became an academic, as consultants have to write concisely and to a deadline!
 
What made you decide to enter an academic field?
 
I always had an interest in an academic career, but I was not thrilled with literature, which was my undergraduate major. As a consultant I found I was fascinated by the back-stories of the companies I was researching. This “historical overview” at the beginning of my report was the bit I enjoyed the most, even though my clients probably just skimmed over it.
 
What do you find most fascinating about studying East Asia?
 
The pace and intensity of social transformation throughout the past century and more. Every generation has seen extraordinary transformation. The life experiences of young East Asians today are so different from their grandparents’ that they might be living in a different country. For example, Japanese grandparents who grew up in the war and immediate postwar experienced real poverty and even hunger. They grew up thinking that the Emperor was a living God and that Japan had a divine mission to govern Asia. Most young Japanese today have grown up with a high standard of living. They say they would not be willing to die for their country and they would not serve in the military unless forced to. In China the contrast is even stronger – grandparents experienced the civil war and severe poverty and upheavals of the war era. Their children went through the Cultural Revolution. China remained isolated from the rest of the world. Young people today share a global culture, travel overseas for study and recreation, and many have never known poverty.
 
Could you please elaborate on your research interests and ongoing projects?
 
I have written four biographies of “ordinary” people – two from the nineteenth century, and two from the 20th (one on an American, all the others on Japanese people). I am most interested in understanding how ordinary people experienced the massive changes of each period of modern East Asian history – which areas they had some control over, as opposed to being just helplessly swept up by events. I am very much a historian from the bottom up. I am currently completing the fourth of these projects, on the life of a merchant from a rural area who lived and traded in Yokohama during the first year of Japan opening up to foreign trade in the 1860s.
 
What is the significance of studying ordinary people’s history as opposed to historical records and formal history? Is there anything unique about people’s history in East Asia compared to that from other places in the world?
 
Studying ordinary people allows the reader to identify imaginatively with those who experienced the past. It could have been us. We see how alike people were to us, and how people’s basic desires for a better life and a measure of comfort and pleasure have not changed. I don’t think ordinary people in East Asia are any different, but the upheavals they have lived through over the past century and a half are on the extreme side. I am actually amazed at how stable East Asian social structures have remained through all the upheavals.
 
What has your experience with DEAN been like?
 
I am incredibly impressed with the commitment of DEAN’s members. The journal, which has seen a lot of changes as it migrated from print to online format, is a really impressive and important endeavor. And frankly DEAN students are much better at organizing East-Asia related events and pulling in a big audience than most faculty members. The annual conference is also a huge undertaking, and a really impressive organizational effort.
 
Is there any event that particularly impressed you?
 
There are many. After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, DEAN organized an event in the Bryan Center with a panel of speakers, some local and some from further away. They skyped in a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing to talk to us on the big screen. They served pizza and the budget was low, but they must have had almost 100 attendees and the event was really interesting.
 
What do you think a student organization like DEAN can bring to dialogue on international affairs and East Asian studies?
 
First, it offers a forum for many young people who might not otherwise have an outlet to share their research and opinions. Second, I think it has been an important training ground for future leaders in many aspects of East Asian affairs. Third, I think it is a great center for the university’s intellectual life. One thing I have noticed is that famous people will say yes to DEAN (say, to visit Duke and give a talk) while they might turn us faculty down! And finally, DEAN has been very effective at connecting student voices across the country and around the world. There are enormous numbers of ethnically based student organizations which sometimes become battle grounds in cultural issues between the nations of East Asia and the US. DEAN by contrast is based on academic interest, not ethnicity – it has an objectivity and scholarly perspective that is hard to find on American campuses.

Sam Yin is a junior at Duke University.