Interview with Professor Carol Gluck

Sach Takayasu: This is Sach Takayasu of Columbia University, Oral History Master of Arts program. I am honored to interview Dr. Carol Gluck today for the Oral History Project of Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Dr. Gluck, do I have your consent to record your interview today?
 

Carol Gluck: Yes, of course. Thank you.

Takayasu: Please say your full name with spelling.

Gluck: Carol Gluck. C-A-R-O-L-G-L-U-C-K.

Takayasu: Thank you. Today's interview is being conducted, not in person, but remotely using Zoom.  I am calling in from New York City. Dr. Gluck, please, could you tell us where you are?

Gluck: I'm calling in from New York.

Takayasu: Great. Thank you. Professor Gluck joined the East Asian Institute as a first-year graduate student in Japanese history in academic year, 1968–69. She joined the faculty in 1975, culminating in being named to the chair of George Sansom Professor of History in Department of History and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Professor Gluck has made many significant contributions to the historical understanding of modern Japan, international relations, history, writing and public memory. She has trained scores of graduate students who now teach across the United States and around the world. She has long been active in innovative teaching of Asia to undergraduates and K thru 12 students. Professor Gluck is a prolific writer with many publications in both Japanese and English. She has published more than 10 books, including the award-winning Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period, Showa: The Japan of Hirohito, Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon, and the forthcoming Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory.

She has been visiting professor at Harvard, Venice, Liden, Oslo, Paris, and in Tokyo. She lectures regularly in the United States, Europe, and Asia and writes for and appears in the media in Japan and the US. She's a moderator for the Aspen Institute in the United States and Germany, a member of the 2017 National Commission on Language Learning, and a member and adviser to several national and international organizations.

Honors and awards include Order of the Rising Sun Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon from the Government of Japan, election to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected president of the Association for Asian Studies and served a seven-year term as a presidential appointee to the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. She is a recipient of Ford Foundation, Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and other grants. At Columbia, she received the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching as well as the Great Teacher Award, Faculty Mentoring Award for Graduate Students, and the Lionel Trilling Award for her first book.

She is currently co-chair of the Trustees Emeriti of the Asia Society, member of the Board of Directors of Japan Society and the Board of Directors of Weatherhead Foundation, an elected member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she has served in a number of capacities, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. At Columbia, she was a founding member, and for five years, the chair of the Committee on Global Thought, which was established by President Lee Bollinger in 2006. She is the Columbia coordinator of the International Consortium on Asian and African Studies. She is the chair of the Advisory Board of Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, a member of the Provost Advisory Committee on the Libraries, and member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Columbia Global Centers in Paris and Istanbul. She has been a devoted contributor to the Weatherhead East Asian Institute for more than 50 years.

She has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Wellesley College, Master of Arts in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, Certificate from the East Asian Institute, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese History from Columbia University. Professor Gluck has been married to Peter Gluck, an architect, for 54 years. They have two sons, Thomas, also an architect, and Will, a writer, director and producer of films and television. They have four grandchildren. Thank you, Dr. Gluck, for joining us today.

Gluck: Thank you for the very long and very generous introduction.

Takayasu: Before this pandemic, we conducted oral history interviews in person. Today, it's the second week of the fall semester, and many classes, just like with this interview, are conducted on Zoom. I'd like to ask you, how have you been coping with this pandemic?

Gluck: Well, like everyone else, we made an adjustment. We spent a lot of time planning and organizing for the fall semester so that we would be teaching better online than we might have done.

 

And I've done a lot of online seminars and worked all summer so that I now feel that there are ways to communicate online that are not only going to be good for us now, but will be good for us in the future because the one thing we found in the last six months is that we can be global in a moment, that everyone can join us without needing any funds or opportunity to travel. We can connect around the world at odd times of the days and nights so that for those people like me who are engaged in all kinds of global conversations, it turns out that online is a tremendous advantage. It is also an advantage in the United States to reach people who otherwise you wouldn't be able to see face-to-face. So, let's look at the bright side. We've learned—it was forced on us—but we've gotten much smarter about how to communicate, interact online, and that will help us in the future. So that, I think, is the positive outcome of what has been really a great deal of work to understand and accommodate and then to make the most of the online complexities.

 

Takayasu: That is really wonderful. Is there a particular project or a conversation you have had that would not have happened otherwise for the Weatherhead that you would like to share?

Gluck: Oh, there are so many. I mean, I have been online since March. I mean it started, you know, I was supposed to be in Japan the first week in March for a conference and that was at a conference in Tokyo. But we had all kinds of international participants, and we did the whole conference online. That was the very beginning of the pandemic in New York. Since then, so many [conferences] I cannot even explain. I cannot even count them. I mean I have been zooming all summer. It's morning to night. Lots of things with Asia, but also globally, things for the Aspen Institute. All kinds of festivities. Celebrations. It's amazing what can happen when you try. I would say that the communications with Asia—and I've been able to participate when I was supposed to give a talk—I was able to do it even though I was not in Tokyo or I was not in Paris. I would say that I cannot think of anything that was actually canceled completely. It just morphed or changed into an online version. And that ranges in everything from birthday celebrations to memorial services to seminars.

Takayasu: I am really encouraged to hear that you are taking it with such a positive attitude. So, we have covered your introduction, and obviously it is impossible to do justice in the time we have today time to cover the full scope of your career. Although, I do hope to look back to some moments that were, perhaps, informative for the way you approach things at Weatherhead. You know, you could have gone anywhere in any of the top organizations in the world, yet you stayed with and contributed to the success of the Weatherhead. It struck me when you mentioned about today's conversation: "Looking forward to talking about the Institute I love so much." Could you tell us what is it about this institution that you love so much?

Gluck: There is a lot of things. That is a big question.

 

Let me say that the Institute, from the time that I entered it as a graduate student, has been a community of scholars, students, people in New York, people around the world, who are broadly interested in East Asia. They all belong to all kinds of disciplines. It has always been from the very beginning, people in the social sciences, people in the humanities, people in law and business. It's been interdisciplinary from the beginning. People committed to understanding this part of the world, people from this part of the world because we always have really large numbers of people from Asia in the Institute, visiting, or passing through. To have a community of people, always from the beginning, centered actually on the students.

 

Gluck: I was a student. I had nothing to recommend me except that I was a student. And the Institute has been an enveloping community from the beginning. All of the years and decades of alumni, of people who have come through very often they will say, "My home at Columbia was the East Asian Institute. That's where I hung out. That's where I eat lunch. That's where I this. That's where I that. That's where I went to the picnic. That's where I went to. Et cetera." It is the community, the interdisciplinary community, the fact that we are a community. I think that is the first thing to say because I really do think that departments offer one kind of community, but not this kind. And that is because people come to the Institute or will participate in the Institute from all over. This is something that is in the DNA of the East Asian Institute. If you look at the very beginning, the beginnings of the Institute are so clearly definitive of the kind of place that it became.

I don't think people—well, why would they know? People do not really know about the origin of the Institute because it is lost in the haze of time. If you go back to the beginning of the Institute which is actually in the 1930s, people think that area studies institutes were a Cold War product, and most of them were. But actually, the East Asian Institute began way before there was a Cold War. It began before there was World War II, and the language that was used in the '30s. It was the same kind of language. In other words, interdisciplinary people should come together. They should have a broad understanding. They should have the language. The first committee to establish the School of International Affairs and Regional Studies was already in 1944 or something like that. These ideas, and I would say the second part of this, is that it grew out the East Asian Institute or the institutes at Columbia—let's put it that way. The School of International Affairs and the institutes at Columbia grew out of the Naval School of Military, Government and Administration, which was established at Columbia in 1942.

It was 1942–45 when there was a school at Columbia that was run by faculty and also naval officers to train people to deal with the peoples of Asia and the Pacific, once the war was over. This is why it was called Government and Administration. And they used the word "area studies." They say they have to have language. They have to know, this is the language, of the "native customs and institutions." They had to have language. They had to have anthropology. They had to have discipline. And they used the word "area studies." This is all before the Cold War. And that is an interesting thing, because that particular description: You must know language. You must understand what we later called "the culture and society of the regions of the world." We no longer talked about "native customs [laughs] and institutions," but the idea and that you had to have a discipline to this.

So the East Asian Institute actually started that way. What happened was that in 1945, Skyler Wallace, who was the chair of the Government Department—Public Law, Government, Political Science Department—wrote a letter to Rockefeller Foundation and said, "We want to establish the School of International Affairs and Regional Institutes". He asked for the school, and he asked for the Russian Institute first. Again, not yet Cold War, but not in the language he uses. It had to do partly with the people who were Russian specialists at Columbia as there were Japanese specialists at Columbia. So, the Russian Institute was established in '46. The School of International Affairs was established in '46, not quite independently but the name was.

Then, the East Asian Institute was next. It actually began in '48. Another letter to Rockefeller Foundation: "Please give us more money, this time for the East Asian Institute [laughs]." It was the first director, who was Sir George [B.] Sansom, the British diplomat, and his assistant director, whom he actually insisted come with him, Hugh Borton, who was the second director of the Institute. They worked in '48 to organize this place, and in '49 it was launched. It was the first one in the country, the East Asian Institute. This is the beginning of the regional institutes. The original plan was for six of them, and of course, there were more of them in the end.

What I wanted to say about this whole history is these people were amazing people. Sir George Sansom, Hugh Borton. These are people who were very, very important in history, not just in the history of the East Asian Institute. For example, in postwar Japan—in what happened in postwar Japan. The reason why I bring it up is to say this is how the Institute started. It started as an area studies interdisciplinary community of people who were dedicated to what was called then the "collective understanding"—that was the terms they used— collective understanding of East Asia, called then China and Japan. But the naval school covered all of Southeast Asia. They had Malay language and pidgin English and things. For the East Asian Institute, it was primarily Chinese and Japanese. And one more thing I would add historically is that Columbia had Chinese and Japanese studies for decades before there was an East Asian Institute. Chinese studies starts at the beginning of the century. Japanese studies starts in the 1920s. The library collections are already growing and large in the '20s and '30s. The Japanese side was very important for the Institute because the first two directors were Japan-connected. The Japanese library collection was started in 1927 by the first Japanese faculty member here from Japan who was Professor Tsunoda. Tsunoda Ryūsaku. He got a 5,000 volume gift from the Imperial Household Ministry.

Columbia was already there in many ways. Sir George Sansom was invited to Columbia in 1935 by an American historian who had been born in Kobe. He was a missionary kid. He was a colonial historian and didn't study Japan. But he thought that Japan was very important and he invited Sir George Sansom who first taught at Columbia in '35 to '36. His name was Evarts [B.] Greene. And Professor Greene invited him back in 1940. George Sansom came back in 1940, but then because of the wartime, he was called back to the diplomatic service by Britain. But he said, "I'd like to come back." And Greene said, "Come back when the war is over." And he did. He came back in '47.

You can see in the oral history collection, Sir George Sansom's oral history, he talks about how wonderful it was to be there, how happy he was. He also talked about how the dingy "pearl U. of Amsterdam Avenue", meaning the dingy environments of Amsterdam Avenue. "An academic slum," he called it. "I miss it. I am nostalgic for the dingy academic slum of Amsterdam Avenue [laughs]." At that point, the Institute was in a brownstone on 118th Street.

 

The prehistory of the Institute is based on the Japanese and the Chinese studies already there before there was an institute. And this is very important that the Columbia studies of East Asian are nearly as old as the 20th century. Their library collections and their Japanese language instruction and the people who study under Tsunoda became very important. Donald Keene. William Theodore de Bary. These are the great founders of postwar East Asian studies at Columbia. They all started with Tsunoda. Sir George Sansom talked about him in the same glowing terms: "This was the most wonderful spirit."

I say this to say the tradition matters. The fact that the emphasis on language and library and interdisciplinary study and the community of scholars and very close connections to Asia. Not just a study of Asia, but study in Asia with people from Asia. It is not an American thing. I think that is a very long answer to why the East Asian Institute is especially, as it is to so many of us, an unusual place with an unusual storied history.

 

For me to be the George Sansom Professor of History is an enchanting honor—I never met Sir George Sansom because I came to the field after that—to be associated with him and to be associated with all of the people in the East Asian Institute who came before us. All the people on the China side, [A.] Doak Barnett and [C.] Martin Wilbur. This was a great long-lived community and very broad community of scholars in addition to all the Japanese and Chinese whom we know and have kept relations with over the years because of the Institute.

 

When I came, I was a first-year graduate student. I didn't know anything about the Institute. I don't even know how I got there. I mean you enter graduate school in a department. But in those days, if you did anything to do with modern East Asia, somehow you got to the Institute. I mean, we all did. I just don't remember it happening, but it happened right away. At that point, the Institute was in transition between the old buildings, which were before my time. They had torn them down for the current School of International and Public Affairs building. So it was housed temporarily in the upper floor of Kent Hall. They moved into the School of International Affairs, as it was called, then the International Affairs Building in 1971. So, when I first met the Institute, it was kind of all cramped and small in this little place [laughs] because it was temporary.
 

I met Dorothy Borg. I met James [W.] Morley. I met Mary Schoch, who was the staff director of the Institute, who looked out for graduate students and would say to you, "Dear, do you need anything for the summer?" I didn't even know what she meant at the beginning, but she meant "Do you need any supplementary funds?" It was an amazing place. And so we used to talk about Mary Schoch had a drawer. She had a drawer in which she had a sock in which she had money for graduate students [laughs]. It was always a very little bit. But it would help you if you needed to, you know, buy a new dictionary, a new Japanese-English or Chinese-English dictionary. So, it was a very close place, even for first year students. Most of us in those days not only got our degrees but also got a certificate. We got certificates from the Institute which meant we took a certain core set of courses. They were disciplinarily spread, and they also had to include countries other than the one you were studying. You could not just study Japan or China or, later, Korea. Then you joined something called the East Asian Institute seminar, which was quite a miraculous thing because it was a seminar of people taking the certificate. Most of us were Master's level at that point or a little beyond. All the faculty were in the same room. There they were, these great people all sitting around and discussing with us. I mean, it was it was it was an amazing phenomenon, especially for us, first- and second-year graduate students. Most of us were second year by that point when we were in the Institute.

 

There was an intellectual community of people who worked in the Institute program. A bunch of them came from School of International Affairs as it was called then. A bunch of us came from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. There were students from the law school, from business school, some even journalism, who did certificates. They were not getting paid fees [phonetic]. They were getting their law degrees. We were able to meet and know people in every kind of area connected to East Asia, even areas that had nothing to do particularly with East Asia,

 

for example, the wonderful composer and musicologist Chou Wen-chung. He was a Chinese composer. He did study Chinese music, but that was not what he did, yet he was associated with the Institute. Or there was a great chemist, [Koji] Nakanishi. They were not associated in learning about China or Japan. They were from China or Japan, but they participated in the Institute, so we had a kind of university-wide acquaintanceship. That was really special to have music or to have a chemist or to have a, you know, that spread to the wider community. We have a lot of people in the metropolitan area who would come to Institute brown bags or to the university seminars. Some of them were scholars from neighboring institutions, but a lot of them were just people interested in Japan or China or Korea or whatever, who might or might not know the language, but they maybe had worked there.

The community was pretty broad in terms of the people whom you met. That was wonderful for us as students to meet people from what they now call the real world and who were engaged with Japan and had all kinds of experiential knowledge that we did not. At that point, we may have had book learning, but we did not have "that." It was what they would now call a platform. It was a venue, a place, a site where all kinds of stuff happened that you normally would not necessarily have encountered in your own work. I would never have heard the music composed by Chou Wen-chung. I would never have. It was that kind of introduction to learning about all parts of Asia. We all did not just do one country. We all did a lot of other countries that China, Korea, Japan, whichever. It was a real liberal education in East Asia for nearly all of us who went to Columbia, whether they were in the institute or not, because most of us who were in the institute in terms of getting certificates were in modern studies. But the institute from the beginning always included people who were not in modern studies. That broad acquaintance with people and the broad general education in East Asia society, history, and culture—that was a gift of the departments and the institutes working together. Every faculty member in the Institute belongs to a department. There's no Institute faculty. We're all department faculty who are associated with the Institute. It's a tribute to the Institute.

How many of us choose to have our offices at the Institute? That is our home. That is our home. I have been there since I was a graduate student. I had a junior Japan fellowship, and it gave me an office there. I have not left since. I have been there since 1972. In that building. On that floor. Not in the same office. A lot of us, the faculty who could have offices in political science or wherever, are actually on the floor at the Institute on the 9th floor of School of International Public Affair because the Institute is our home. We have a departmental home, too, but the Institute very often is our primary home. And I think that is a tribute to the Institute because the department is the place that hires us. I think that community really works and the fact that we have for years and years had given offices to students writing their dissertations and to postdoctoral students.

Everybody who studied at Columbia who got a PhD or who was writing their dissertation or their MA thesis on the same floor became our network. We have all of our friends who do Korean political science or whatever. It is because we are on the same floor.

 

Being together has made a community, a larger community than the Columbia community. These people are all over the country, all over the world. It is another sign of the East Asian Institute as an intellectual community that people choose to put so much effort into the Institute as well as into the departments and other places that they are associated with. That has been true for decades.

We are just following in the footsteps of those before us. The people who were there in the first and second generation of the Institute's leadership, they set the tone. We sort of stood on the shoulders of giants. Believe me, they invented it. We do our best to carry it on, but they made it. They created it. I think that is special.

 

That was a special historical moment, which is actually '30s and '40s. It was not just postwar. There was a special historical moment in the United States particularly. Sir George Sansom also thought so. He said so in the oral history, "the American openness to Asia" or academic interest in Asia. He found it striking, so there was a moment in the '30s and '40s where there were people—they were two different generations, the '30s and the '40s—who were for different reasons open to Asia or interested in Asia. Those two decades were really what created what became the East Asian Institute and what became actually the area studies model which for a very long time in the '60s and on was criticized for two reasons.

One, it was so associated with the Cold War, which it was. When you got to the '50s, particularly to the '50s, the regional institutes we were associated with knowing the world in order to dominate in order to deal with it. And it was a Cold War phenomenon, certainly the Harriman Institute but also the East Asian Institute and all of the other institutes. The European Institute which was, I think, the next one after East Asia, was founded at Columbia. It was tied up to the Cold War American thinking about the world and the National Defense Education Act which was very clear. "National Defense Education Act:” you can not be any more clear than that. That is where the money came from the '60s on, for fellowships, for language instruction. The foundation that founded the institutes—Rockefeller and Ford Foundation primarily but also Carnegie—they paid for everything at the beginning, not just at Columbia. Everywhere. This is the '40s: '46, '47, '48, '49, and '50. My fellowship to Japan was one of the last Ford Foreign Area fellowships, but after that, the government took over. It was the National Defense Education Act. Those were national defense fellowships that people went to school on in the '60s. So, the area studies became associated with a kind of Cold War mentality or a Cold War institutionalization. That was the first critique, and that was a critique made very strongly in the '60s and '70s during the Vietnam era. That area studies, these institutes, were tainted by their association with national defense and American foreign policy.

The second critique was different. It came from the disciplines, and it is actually later. It is actually more in the '70s, '80s when the area studies model was criticized for being a scholarly enterprise where there is a little bit of "this", a little bit of "that," and a little bit of history and a little bit of "this."  As the disciplines became more aggressive in their methodologies and more self-defining, self-disciplining, particularly in the social sciences, particularly in political science, economics, sociology, the area studies model was considered not to have a disciplinary core. That was another critique. The area studies changed in the '70s and '80s, so that they did emphasize that you needed a discipline plus everything else. There was a kind of recalibration to be sure that people did have a discipline. This is undergraduate because the graduate was always disciplined except for the MA. But, the PhD was never a PhD in Asian Studies. Two critiques.

Now, I am a historian, so here is the long picture. Then you get to the 1990s and particularly the 2000s, and everywhere, the call is for interdisciplinarity. Everywhere around the world, interdisciplinarity in collaboration, interdisciplinarity research, interdisciplinarity "this," interdisciplinarity "that." And guess what? The area institutes were already there since 1940-whatever. As the intellectual and scholarly world changed, in many ways, the area studies posture was ready to be the new kind of area study, which is to say discipline plus interdisciplinarity. When I was president of the Association for Asian Studies in the late '90s, they were still talking about the death of area studies. I looked around and thought, "I don't think so." I think what has happened is that a certain area studies model from certain historical moments is past, certainly the Cold War-associated area studies with American foreign policy, national defense. Past. Certainly, area studies where there is no disciplinary core is past.

 

But if you look at the way area studies, the East Asian Institute, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute now, if you look at the way that the work is done, you can see that the fruitfulness of a new kind of interdisciplinarity across history, across the humanities and social sciences, and across the professional schools and that still insists on language and understanding and knowledge but has strong methodological roots, strong quantitative methods in certain parts of sociology and poli-sci, etc. It is a long story, and we are now in a different moment. I think the Weatherhead East Asian Institute is a perfect example of it. And then you add the word since the '90s which is the G word: Globalization. Now we do not see regions as regions. We see regions as—what I always say, this is my language from the Committee on Global Thought—you see everything in global context. You see East Asia in a global context. It is comparative. It is contextual.

 

Now the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, we do all kinds of things. We do Africa and Asia and connections.

I am the chair of the Committee on Global Thought for a long time, but I am still a Japan historian. That is my bumper sticker. That is my label [gestures placing a label on her forehead]. But I do not see Japan the way I did before. I grew up at Columbia seeing Japan in an East Asia context regionally, never seeing it only nationally. But now, like almost everybody else, I see Japan in global context. Even though I do not write about Europe or Indonesia or whatever, those things are in my mind. The questions I ask are always based on what kind of similar situation I am studying in Japan. How does it look in other places at these times or other times? That is the same truth of area studies. I do not even use the word, area studies, anymore. I have used the word area studies more in this interview than I have in the last 10 years put together because I have boycotted the word because it has too much baggage. People need to drop the bag, so I drop the word. I dropped it a long time ago. I talk about not area studies, but interdisciplinary studies. Whatever you are doing in global context and the Committee on Global Thought is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, pan-university, it has got every professional school in it including the medical school and social work and everything else. It's a matter of whatever knowledge you have or you seek. For my case, I am writing about Japan but always in global context. The East Asian Institute today, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, now functions that way.

I am not saying that the founding generations did not think about the world. They thought about the world because that was the '30s and '40s. They were obsessed with the world, but now it is a different kind of training where the global context, the comparative, all of these things are built into the training to some extent. Those people in the '30s and '40s came by their world by history. The world was forced on them in a way so to speak. I think in the way we educate students today, the world obviously is forced on them, too. But we educate kids in middle school, high school, undergraduates—we train people that way now. We do not wait for the world to. With the global aspect or the transnational, it means something bigger than your own bubble, something larger than your own nation. Something more connected, and more in common with other people, so that connections and commonalities are the words that we use all the time rather than the differences and the other stuff. Not about the others and differences, but about connections and commonalities. I would say that our educational positionality has changed for the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and other international concerns.

They are all like that now. It is not a regional institute in the old, earlier forum. There was a reason it had to be then because nobody had any regional knowledge. People needed to learn all these languages and all this stuff. Now, it's different. Even our students are different because our students come to us with language all the time. In my day, we never came to graduate school with language. I started first-year Japanese at Columbia that same year at a very advanced age, I must say. Now, our students, they come to Columbia College, because they have Japanese or they have Chinese or they have had Mandarin since they were seven or something like that. They learn another language or maybe two. Now most of our graduate students know two Asian languages, if not three. Our students have changed which means the training can change. In my day, most students were not fluent in both Chinese and Japanese. They could read them, but they were not fluent. Today, if our students know Chinese and Japanese, they are fluent in them. It is not a question of just reading and that changes the training.

 

In the Institute you can see that in the way it was developed. First, Korea was added decades ago, and they changed the name of the Department of Chinese and Japanese to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. We have been working on Southeast Asia for years, and we have had it for a long time. We have taught Indonesian. We have taught Vietnamese. And we are still trying to make it a very important part of the Institute. It is not easy, but we are making progress because we have really good people on faculty doing it now. Our Tibetan studies program brought Tibet and Inner Asia. Now, that is more than 20 years old. The definition, or the concept of region, has also changed. There is a whole Pacific orientation now that includes, Oceanic, Pacific kinds of studies and another one that includes border studies that are continental borders on China, which means Inner Asia and things of that sort. Even the concept of what East Asia is or the region is changes. Then you talk about the diasporas, the Chinese diaspora all over Southeast Asia, all over the Americas, and Asian Americans. You can see that the connections are growing and changing, so the connections between Asian studies, Asian American studies changes both of them. Asian American studies used to be all done in English. It was all done on the American side. Now it is two sided. It is the Asian and the American side. It is really changing and very exciting proposition where you have not just interdisciplinarity and professional different kinds of vocational interests but expertise. The places have changed. It's not just China and Japan, and that's really important because that is the way the world goes to.

So that is my long—I'm trying to tell you why I love the East Asian Institute [laughs]. That is the reason. It is the people and the orientation and the openness and the changing-ness of it. The fact that it does not stay in one place. It keeps the DNA. It keeps the community. But it certainly changes its approach, its capaciousness, its curiosity. I think you will find that the students today feel that it has changed. The whole student thing has changed too because graduate training has changed. But I think you will find that the people's fondness for the Institute is pretty consistent over time. You know what they like about it? Why they hang around it, why they come back to it, or why they identify in years later we were at the Institute together—not that we were at Columbia again. We were at the Institute together. That kind of identification is pretty cool. I give tremendous credit to the generations of people who have led the Institute and are leading it now for maintaining and developing and growing, expanding this. These kind of core attitudes. It's a special place. That is why for me, it is the core. It is the center of my Columbia life. And for a lot of us it has been the center from the time we have come to Columbia. There is a whole bunch of generations who feel the same way. Absolutely.

 

Takayasu: Thank you very much for such a rich response to this question.

Gluck : To get me started, right? [Laughter]

Takayasu:  I could definitely feel the passion and so concretely. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. One is, you mention this whole openness—the DNA, the community, the interdisciplinary nature, and how everybody got excited, how you moved into the 9th floor and it made it easier to communicate and collaborate. I understand that you were part of the group that led the $4 million dollar project to redefine the undergraduate education for East Asian studies. In terms of the collaborative work that you have done with other scholars, I think if you could help us understand what it was like for you to be part of that, leading that project. We would love to get to know what you experienced, how you felt about it, now that you mentioned that things have changed, but the DNA is there and the openness is there. So, if you could give a little bit of a contrast like recently, this is like a project that I've been part of. I've been leading and this is how it has changed and how it has not changed.

Gluck: Like everything else I have been saying—it was my project, this one. And it wasn't $4 million, it was $2 million just to be to be clear [laughs]. $2 million was a lot, but it was $2 million. Anyway, like almost everything I have been saying, there is a prehistory to this. The prehistory of the Expanding East Asia Studies Project, ExEAS, that we did. The prehistory of that is a Columbia story because we have not talked about it, but Columbia was a pioneer in the study of Asia for undergraduates. A pioneer. It was that first postwar generation, the people who were trained by Professor Tsunoda—that is to say Professor William Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene and Ainslie [T.] Embree, who was a South Asian, Indian historian. They started in 1949. I think that was the same year or the year before the East Asian Institute was founded. They established the Committee on Oriental Studies. That was the language back then, "Oriental studies." That was designed to create a curriculum in parallel to Columbia's core. Columbia was famous for the core curriculum: humanities and contemporary civilization, art and music. To this day, this is Columbia College's jewel in its crown. Every student reads all the same books and etc. This has been going on since after World War I. It started 1919, the contemporary civilization.

These people who founded, actually not just East Asian studies at Columbia but East Asian studies in the country, there's this generation. They established a counterpart. They're going to have Oriental humanities and Oriental civilizations, so undergraduates would take—we now, of course, call it East Asian humanities, not Oriental—so they would already in '48, '49, they would read the great books of East Asia the way everybody was reading Homer and Shakespeare. They were going to read Confucius and the Tale of Genji. The way everybody was reading all of the philosophical foundations of politics and society in the Western contemporary civilization, they were going to do it in Oriental civilization. And so undergraduate education in East Asian studies was pioneered, again, interdisciplinarily because they used to team teach. You'd have a historian and a literary person in the same room—that was team taught. The idea was that you did not read one kind of thing. There was political science and history and so it was interdisciplinary. They did that for years. They worked really hard to get the oriental version of the Columbia core established. They went through various requirements. Finally, it gets established as something called "Major Cultures" at one point. Now it is sort of a part of the global core. But the reason I bring this up is because undergraduate teaching and East Asian studies is in Columbia College's DNA. It is in the undergraduate DNA, for sure. And that is Professor de Bary and Embree and Keene and those people.

I was brought into that. As a graduate student, I team taught Oriental Humanities with Professor de Bary, and it was quite an experience. I have told the story before because this was in the '70s. I am a graduate student. He is this great figure, and he's—knows everything. And I mean, he is just scary. Wonderful, but scary. And we so we have our undergraduates. They are all sophomores and juniors, and we are all reading the great books. I looked around the room. I forget which book it was. Was it the Tale of Genji? I don't remember. Maybe it was the Analects of Confucius. I look around, and Professor de Bary's book cost $1.95 on the cover of the paperback. My book cost $9.50. The students’ books cost $17.50. And I thought to myself, "Oh my God, he has had that book since 1950 [Laughs].” I got mine in 1970 or 19-something, I don't know. In any case, I thought to myself, "Wow! That is tradition." I team taught with Professor de Bary when I was a graduate student. That was something else. But you see, that's how you get it. That is how you as a graduate student are brought into the tradition. You are brought into East Asian studies for undergraduate. You teach it. Those are the courses you teach. You teach civilization. I also team taught East Asian civilizations with him once, too, and with other people.

The next thing that happens is that I have been socialized, I have been trained to think that East Asian studies should be part of undergraduate learning. This was not the Institute. The Institute was graduate. This is undergraduate. That is who I taught, we taught them. Then I was hired in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and we began to organize a major for undergraduates for all four schools: Barnard, Columbia, General Studies, and to some extent, Engineering but less of course because the engineers took some of the Oriental studies courses, the core, but they were not majors obviously. I became the director of undergraduate studies, and my job was to reorganize the East Asian studies program. At that point in the '70s, I was teaching only undergraduates. So, we did what you did in the '70s, and now you are going to hear a reflection of what I said earlier.

 

East Asian studies located in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Got to have language. Got to have history. You also have to have a discipline. That is the influence of the disciplinary critique of area studies, so all our undergraduates had to choose a discipline and take a methods course in that discipline. The idea was if you are going to write about political science, you need to take international comparative politics. Or if you are going to write in economics, you have to take macro/microeconomics. I did that for 10 years, and I had a great time. I have hundreds of alumni from those days, and many of us are still in touch. Undergraduates love to study this stuff, and they went on to become doctors and, all kinds of lawyers and whatever. But they had the language, and they knew about East Asia.

 

That is the second part. The third part is an East Asian Institute story.

The third part is one of the great treasures and one of the great contributions of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute to Asian studies in the United States. It is our program designed for teachers and students in K-12 around the country and undergraduates as well. This is run by Roberta Martin. You really must speak to her. She has been doing it for 40 years. We are the center. She helped to create the consortium of teachers about Asia. Look on the website at all these materials that we put out. And going to every state and trying to get Asian studies in every state curriculum because in the United States it is state by state. You get Asian studies in New York. You do not have it in Missouri. You got to work for it, and they have been phenomenally successful. It is a consortium of schools across the country that produce materials for teaching, that take teachers to Asia.

In fact, I just re-did my unit on Japan this summer because we keep re-doing our materials. The Association for Asian Studies, it is the magazine about education, about Asia, for teachers. All of this is part of this outreach. And it is phenomenal. You have no idea. This is generations of kids, of students, in all kinds of schools, in all kinds of states, in all kinds of communities who were introduced to Asia as early as third grade and with curricula, in the state curricula, in the actual requirements in some states—actually more states than we realize. All as a result of this effort. This did not happen by itself. This happened under the leadership of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute along with other outreach people at Stanford and the five colleges in Massachusetts, etc. We did not do it alone, although I have to say Roberta Martin is a giant in that field. She did not do it alone because she is so collaborative and collegial. We worked on that for years. In the '80s, I spent a lot of time all over the country. That is the third part.

That is really important because by the time I apply to the Freeman Foundation for expanding Asian studies, I have been doing this for a long time. What we did was take what we have been doing and focus on undergraduate education. We did it collaboratively. It was not for undergraduate education at Columbia. It was for undergraduate education in the community colleges, in the four-year colleges in Morgan State, in Ball State. We made collaborative workshops of teachers, of faculty from all these places that were community colleges. A lot of them were regional because they could get to Columbia, but not all. We gave postdocs to develop new curricula, new syllabi that were designed to be taught to undergraduate curricula where nobody knew anything about Asia. They were not required to. It was not that they had to be interdisciplinary, but they had to be grounded. They could not be coverage courses. This was not the model of Oriental civilizations where we were going to do that. We were going to have subject-grounded courses. The postdocs would develop them, and as they develop them, they would present them to the workshop. And the teachers would say, "Oh, that will not work at Ball State. I am sorry." Then the postdocs will say, "Well, tell me what to do." So everybody taught each other, and we learned how to do this.

You could have a course, let me give you an example, by a Japanese literature guy who is the PhD from Princeton; and he was an ExEAS-postdoc. He developed a course called "Censorship in East Asia and the World." Fantastic. It was that kind of course. It was comparative. It was global. It was East Asia. But it is censorship, a big issue. Anyway, a literary censorship primarily, but not only. We have all kinds of great courses. They are still up. We still maintain the website. And the ExEAS's website, Expanding East Asian Studies.

This was a program where we used the $2 million dollars to bring people together to learn together how to make syllabi that would work in a community college where it was the only course that student would ever have on Asia but would be grounded. That grew out of all of those years that I had been trained and I had learned. Yes, we changed. It was no longer a coverage course, etc. We produced those volumes, Asian-Western world history, one of those I edited, and Asian-Western world literature. These were all designed—those were earlier than ExEAS—to give material to people. So that Columbia's contribution to education about East Asian studies goes way beyond Columbia. And so I made the grant proposal, and I lead it with other people, but it is a Columbia story. It is not a Gluck story. It is built on all of those things. It is built on Theodore de Bary. It is built on Roberta Martin. It is built on the efforts of all of these people to have Asian studies not be something exotic, esoteric and confined to a very small number of people but to be part of the general understanding of the world and not to understand that only in isolation. Not to think of it only as something that is so distinct and special. That is the story of ExEAS, and yes, we got the grant. It was a big shock because I got a letter one day, and I opened it up. It was a $1 million-dollar check. There was not even a letter. I got a check. For a $1 million dollars! It was the first installment. The letter came later, turns out it was just a [unclear], but I remember opening it up like, "Oh my goodness!" [Laughs] Other people had the same experience around the country. The Freeman Foundation was amazing. They support East Asian studies in undergraduate and K-12. They were wonderful. They still are wonderful.

But I remember then thinking, "Oh, my goodness!" We had to create an organization and do it. We did it for four or five years. We had a lot of postdocs. We had a lot of collegial collaboration with people around the country and in colleges. We all learned a lot about how to teach about East Asia in the new way, so to speak. What was then the new way? In other words, we were not going to cover everything. You are not going to do world history and cover every single "whatever." That is not the way we were going to do it. Our people are teaching all over the country. And a lot of our ExEAS postdocs are still using their syllabi [they] developed, but they are using them and a lot of other people are using them because they are up on the web for people to use. I think that is another really important story, and that is an East Asian Institute story. [Pauses and nods] That is an East Asian Institute story. That is the kind of thing that the East Asian Institute could foster that the departments are not constituted to foster. It was located at the Institute. We used all of the people in the Institute. We got everybody involved, and that is something the Institute made possible.

It would have been hard to do if you started to create that without an Institute already there, and especially without Roberta [H.] Martin—without "Robin" Martin and her huge outreach network. Take a look at the website. The Education About Asia. You look at the East Asian Institute, and look at the three or four things that Robin runs, and you see the materials up there. Fantastic. "How to Teach East Asia through Manga": it's a current one right now. It is fantastic. You know that works. You know that graphic novels and cartoons will work. How to teach East Asia through that. Fabulous. There is the material showing the teachers how to do it, so they do not have to be specialists because none of our people teaching these courses that we were talking about, none knew anything about Asia when they started. The premise was the teacher did not have to know anything about Asia either. They did not. This was not a specialist approach. The materials were there, and you can look at the materials. You look at it. You read the manga, the cartoon, and then you can teach it. And that turns out to work. We had spend a lot of time talking to teachers about that.

Listen, this is not a specialist thing. We all teach things we do not know about. That is the nature of teaching. This is just like that, and there will be enough here for you to know for you to do it. And there has been enough materials if you want to find other things out. Getting people to teach what they do not know about, that was another one of our jobs. The way we did it was we modeled it. We did not know about it. If we could teach it, then they could teach us. I mean, literally. There was a pedagogical principle there. You do not have to be an expert to teach this even at the college level. You do not have to have a PhD in something Asian to teach this stuff. I think it also helped us to be pedagogically more creative. You have to be creative. If you have to use your sources differently, you have to. For example, use a lot more primary sources because if you are looking at a cartoon—you are looking at manga. You and the students can look at it together. You do not have to know much else. You are at the same table. On the same page, so to speak. You are equalized. You can both respond to the text.

This is the old system of the Great Books core, but it works. And it is calming for teachers because if the students ask, "What does this actually mean?" You can say, "Well, I will tell you next week. I do not know. It is not here. I will find out." There is plenty there to talk about. It has been pedagogically very fruitful, and we are using that in the undergraduate curriculum and Global Thought. The same kind of approach. We are not teaching a normal subject. That is the long answer, but it is a very important answer because it is an East Asian Institute—it is a Columbia answer, number one.  And, it is an East Asia-Columbia people answer, and it is an East Asian Institute answer. That is why Columbia has led so much in this disseminating of materials, making it available to teach East Asia at all levels of schools and colleges and community colleges, all kinds. And it has been some of the best, most fun we have had. Oh, it has been so much fun!

The teachers are amazing classroom teachers around this country. They are in the trenches. They are amazing. Parents want their kids to know about this stuff—even in the South, in downstate Illinois. They want their kids to know about this stuff. They are not against this. The receptivity is surprising to many people. They just do not know how to do it, but they would love to do it. So working with teachers and even with the Asia Society and with the chief state school officers and things like that. It is very receptive. People are people when you want to know about Asia. It is amazing. This has been going on for—well, in my life, we have been going on since the '80s. We have been doing this outreach stuff. We never had anybody say to us, "I do not want to know about that. My kids do not need to know about that." Nobody says that. Of course, this is the '80s, and everybody had heard about Japan. But still nobody said, "I woud rather have my kids learn double-entry bookkeeping." It was an interesting—what can I say—an interesting voyage around the United States.

Takayasu: That's wonderful. Is there a story of a particular encounter that you could share with us? You have this really happy expression, and it would be just wonderful to hear a personal story.

Gluck: There were so many. The best ones are the kids' responses. I mean, it is when you ask a question, you give a project and what the kids do. I do this all the time in New York City schools. I go into these middle schools in East Harlem, and I get up and I say, "What do you know about Japan?" And their hands shoot up like this. Oh, my God! These inner-city kids, these people, these kids of color, they know a lot about Japan. It is amazing. I always start that way. It changes what they know. What they know changes over time because they get exposed to different kinds of popular culture.

One of the things I remember is that there was a lower school, an elementary school thing. It was an exercise, a project where the teacher made a box and put things in the box that were connected to Asia. A little paper parasol that comes out of drinks. Little stuff that are connected to Asia that would be identifiable by a fourth grader. They would say, "Oh, that is Chinese or that is 'whatever'."

The first part of it was to ask them, "You know what it is? What are these little things?" Mostly everybody could figure out what these little things were. They were kind of crazy things. Depending on the time, it would be a Pokémon card or whatever. Then she said, "Do you think there is anything else Asian, from Asia, in this classroom?" Well, it took a while, but before you knew it, the kids are taking off their clothes [laughs]. "Where is that made?" Then the little boy's shoes are made in the Philippines, but the underpants are made in China. It was hysterical. It was. And it was right. All their clothes were made somewhere in Asia, mostly in China. Also, there was Philippines and there was Vietnam and there was Bangladesh. They took their pencil—they started ransacking their pencil cases. It was fantastic. It was not like this little esoteric parasol that comes out of a drink. It was everything I am wearing, everything I am using. It was pandemonium because the kids were virtually getting undressed [laughs].

Anyway, I loved it because first of all, it was participatory. Then they could ask a question, "Well, why is this made?" Then, they went on. She did not stop with "My underpants are made in China [laughs],” but the point was that it had grabbed their attention. She said, "Who makes them?" And then you got into child labor and I mean, it was really something she did that on the shoes. The sneakers. "Who do you think makes these? And how much do you think they get paid?" It was amazing. She went from this little box—all she had in the in the classroom was this little box. I loved it because the kids became serious, especially with child labor. These are 11-year-old girls making these T-shirts. How much do you think they get? Not long after that big fire in Bangladesh, and the kids got serious. This is why we have clothes that are cheap enough that we can have three pairs. We can have three color T-shirts and stuff. It was amazing. In fourth grade, they got it. They got it. And they also got other stuff. I mean, there was aesthetic stuff. The thing that struck me was how the clothes thing developed.

Takayasu: Thank you. That was very inspiring. I could see why you have been touted as one of the best mentors, and I would love to hear some stories about how you mentor younger generations. Also, it sounds like you were blessed with wonderful mentors yourself through Weatherhead. If you could share some stories about that, that would be great.

 

Gluck: When I say I am standing on the shoulders of giants, we all are. The generation before us who trained us, and that is the generation that dominated, that grew, that developed, that led the field. They led the field in the '50s and '60s. This is the wartime generation. This is Ted de Bary and Donald [L.] Keene at Columbia, and lots of other people I can mention like John [K.] Fairbank at Harvard and Marius [B.] Jansen at Princeton. They all know each other. They came from the wartime generation, or they came from missionary parents. Columbia—Hugh Borton was from a Quaker missionary family. [Edwin O.] Reischauer at Harvard was from a missionary family in Japan. We had a lot of people at Columbia in those days who were not PhD's because that first generation, they were journalists or they were— Doak Barnett was a China guy and Herb Passin, Japan sociologist—they didn't have PhDs. They had Asian experience. But this next generation, the generation that I am talking about, some of them had a little pre-war, like Reischauer, missionary son.

 

But most of them encountered East Asia through the war either by learning language in this country because of the war or because they were in the Navy language school or in one of these schools, I mentioned. The Columbia Army Language School. All these people I'm talking about learned their languages through the Army Navy Language Schools during the war. Not all the people who went to those schools became Asian scholars, but a lot of the Asian scholars did go to those schools.

They came back to these various universities, and they were founding fathers and one mother. There was one mother, Eleanor M.] Hadley. Most of them were men, but there was one economist —actually two—and one language—more than one. There were several. Let us call them fathers and mothers, but mostly fathers. They established Asian studies. And they were people of great generosity of spirit. It is interesting that they work together pretty well, even though they were actually "Harvard-Columbia could be rivals." They worked together to build the field. They worked together to build the Association of Asian Studies. Borton was one of the main founders of it. Ted de Bary was a president, and James Morley was a president. Ainslie Embree was a president, and I was a president. This is not just your own university, but the Association for Asian Studies, the Far Eastern Quarterly, later the Journal of Asian Studies. They built and they worked together to build. Very generous people. Part of it was their generation. But it is an Institute story. It is also an East Asian Languages and Culture story. And it is also a Columbia and Asia story. These people built something that was bigger than themselves, and they had a vision.

Ted de Bary, Donald Keane, and Burton [D.] Watson, these people. Take a look at the list of books and translations from Asia on the Columbia University website. Columbia University Press has one of the largest, deepest lists of titles published, translated from the classics and studies. That is the same group. The Sources of Japanese Tradition, the Sources of Chinese Tradition. These books founded the field by giving materials to people around the country. All from here. Take a look at the Columbia University Press. It is an amazing list. They were building. They had vision. It was amazing. And one of the ways in which they built—they were institution builders for sure—was to mentor younger people. They were so good to people. And let me tell you something else.

I have said this before. I have written it when President de Bary died. I wrote it again when Professor Keane died, and I wrote it when Professor Jansen died. These are people who knew no gender discrimination. They supported us women as graduate students. We did not even realize it was so unusual until later. These standard American men, standard-issue American men—some of them not so standard issue—but none of them feminists. Not in that sense. But they supported us, and we were supported as graduate students and as young scholars. I learned later that it was not true in history departments, for example. I learned that it was not so easy in U.S. history and things of that sort depending on who you had as a mentor. But these people were, and you can see how many of them of their disciples, their students— disciples is a Japanese word for them—are women. So we got supported without discrimination. Even me, I had it. I had two babies in graduate school. That would have been the end. I almost did not get my Ford Foreign Area Fellowship because they were not used to sending women pregnant. But that was not true at Columbia. Nobody said two words about it. I took my orals. I was eight-months pregnant with my second kid when I took my orals.

I want to bring that up because this is a generation that you would not expect, would see women as equally capable. They were great mentors. They supported and did not care where you were. Marius Jansen was at Princeton, but he mentored me. Albert [M.] Craig was at Harvard, but he mentored me. Harry [D.] Harootunian was at Chicago, but he mentored me. I was so blessed. They did not care whether you were theirs or not. We all benefited. Even people today who do not think they benefited did benefit because they created these institutions which are open and supportive of young people and junior people. It was institutionalized. We all felt the same thing. Not everybody was like this. I do not want to say that all the people were, but I was particularly blessed with these particular people I was telling you about. It was not that way in economics at all. It was far less that way in political science. There are differences to the people involved. I am not making a uniform statement, but I am making a personal statement that I had the most wonderful people as human beings and as scholars and models of academic productivity and linguistic capacity. They were impossible. Take a look at them. How could they do that? How could they do everything they did and still write a book a year? They were amazing. They were an amazing generation in terms of productivity because they could administer, they could write, and they could teach. It was something to see, really. They did not just do one part of it. They did it all. And Columbia was a great place to be for someone who did Japan. De Bary did both Japan and China, but de Bary adopted me because I was an intellectual historian. That is what he liked. That is the chair I sit on actually was modern Japanese intellectual history. That was Ted's idea.

Do I think I mentor my students that way? They would be impossible to live up to. Impossible to live up to. But I love my students. I love them. I love being with students. I love being challenged by them. For me, teaching is just the best. I really enjoy them. I work hard, and teaching is not something I take lightly. I love doing it at all levels. For the first years, I taught only undergraduates, and I loved them. And then I started teaching graduate students and undergraduates. And then I started guiding graduate students. I have all these people, they call themselves the "Glucklings." It's nice, actually. The Glucklings are all over the country. They are all over the place. They are all teaching. They are all great. They are all writing. And they are all kind of tied to each other one way or another across the generations. It is a community. It is the East Asian Institute writ large. It is another network of people who came through the Institute. They all did. They all came to the Institute because my people all do modern East Asia. They all came to the Institute. They did not get certificates in the last years because the certificate situation kind of changed. I taught a lot of SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs] students for years until the SIPA curriculum changed about fifteen years ago or whatever. I had mixed SIPA and graduate students in the same class, and that was great because you have people who are going to go into professional this or that and people who were going to be academics. That stopped basically when the SIPA curriculum grew demanding enough that it was hard to do a certificate and a concentration.

What changed was that something else happened. We developed more of these Masters programs. We have one in the Institute called MARSEA, the Master of Arts in Regional Studies: East Asia. We have one, the EALAC [East Asian Languages & Cultures], the MA in East Asian Studies. We have a dual MA in History. And at the history department, I teach in Paris, for Columbia in an MA in History and Literature. I run an MA in Global Thought. I have become a great supporter of MA programs because I understand now that it is a really useful degree for so many people. People come out of college, they do not know what they want to do, they need to figure something out, and they need some more something in order to go. They may need language to develop it, or they may need substantive expertise. The MA is a great springboard, and I teach in five of them. I love them.

 

The reason I bring that up is because the MAs bring people in who are not only going to be a PhD, are not going to be doctoral students or academics. So, when we lost the SIPA component of our classes, we gained the MA component. Those people do every kind of thing. They go in the government. They go into NGOs. They go into business. They go into journalism. They go into academics. I like to keep the mix. I like that mix of students. So now the MA programs which are flourishing, bringing those people together. They also have a lot of international students in them. That is really great. They bring the students so that the classroom becomes really diverse in terms of interest and background. It is wonderful, and it changes everything when the classrooms are really diverse in terms of interesting background.

 

A whole other kind of mentoring that you do, which is this MA thing and watching them flourish is fantastic. You have your undergraduates who remain true to Columbia forever, and then you have your graduate students who are, Glucklings forever, I guess, and then you have your MA students who are out there in the world doing all kinds of stuff. And so the teaching is really exciting. And you learn everything you know, you learn in the classroom. Literally, the scholarship and the teaching go together. Without the teaching, I think it would be very antiquarian to write history without that constant interaction that you have in the classroom. Also, when working with someone on a dissertation, they know everything about this. You know nothing about it. That is by definition, a different dissertation. They are researching something for the first time. So you sit at their feet. You may correct their English, but you sit at their feet. It is pretty cool. And so I do not think it is mentoring so much as just being, interacting, and supporting.

It is true, I support. My greatest prose output, in terms of words, number of words, is letters of recommendation. There is no question. I must have written more than 10 books of letters of recommendations because you write them lifelong. You do not write them just once. You write them over and over again. And I pride myself on writing good letters of recommendation. I take them very seriously. So you do keep in touch. Sometimes that is the way you keep in touch. But other time you keep in touch for all kinds of other reasons. And that is a Columbia thing, too. It happens in every university. But again, I would say the Institute is one of the reasons why it is so cohesive at Columbia. It is why my students who are historians have good friends who are political scientists and literary scholars and whatever, because they did not hang out only in the history department. They hung out at the Institute. And that is something that their networks are bigger, broader. So that is another institute story. Oh, there are so many. There is so much that the Institute gives to people just by doing what it does.

 

And the other thing I have to say, because it is obvious to everybody, is that the Institute spends a lot of time raising money so that it can support people. We have all spent a lot of time raising money over the years. It started with that other generation. The founding generation raised the money for all these chairs. Why do you think we have more than 70 faculty in East Asian studies at Columbia? Not because the university said, Well, I think I am going to do that. It is because those people I mentioned went out and raised chair after chair after chair. To prep professorships in economics, in art history, in religion, in—you name it. And I sit on one, because my chair was raised from the Japan Foundation. But they also raised moneys for fellowships. They are successful in the National Resource Center competitions. We—knock on wood if I can't knock on your microphone—but Columbia has never not gotten a National Resource Center [grant] since it was established, I think in 1969.

 

Every three years, whatever it is, we make a new application and every three years they try not to give it to us. And every three years they gave it to us or two years, whatever it is, because we do what we promise them to do. And that gives our students fellowships and that gives our language instructors salaries and that gives our outreach initiatives funding. So the East Asians Institute raises money to help students and to help the field and to help the university. We provide a lot of money to the university for East Asian studies and we provide and we provide postdocs and stuff. So that is very important. We provide opportunities by raising money that makes these opportunities possible. And that was from the very beginning. That has been true from the beginning. From that letter that I just read . I just read Skyler Wallace's letter to the Rockefeller Foundation. 1945. I love it. Turns out fundraising never changes. Oh, I mean, it is just wonderful. It is the same sort of the same way. You have to know the budget sort of comes at the end and then comes the kicker that says and then we will need this much in 1947, ’48, ‘49, ’50, and ’51, and another $74,000 dollars please. Funny. I think that is important because the university could not support East Asian studies on the scale that we have. Without that, I mean, we have had two chairs in the law school. We have Center for Korean Studies. We have a center for Japanese law. We have this. We have that. That is all [unclear] to raise money. That makes those things possible so that we can do those things. Same with library collections and things of that sort. So the East Asian Institute is a venue for that and is and never stops. I mean, we are always doing it and raising money now for Southeast Asian studies and continuing to raise money for Tibetan studies and et cetera. So I need to say that because East Asian studies does not live on rice alone and lives on bread and lives on money.

Takayasu: And that is a very important point. If there is any particular example of a resultant project that came about with additional funding that you had received, that would be inspiring for people. That would be great. But before we get to that. Love to hear what it was like for you to receive the chair of George Sansom professorship.

 

Gluck: That was umm, yeah, I mean, I really wish I had met him. But the thing about the first book I ever read about Japan was George Sansom's Japan: A Short Cultural History. The second book I read about Japan was George Sansom's The Western World and Japan. That's it. That was the first book I ever read. He was a beautiful writer. And both of those books are books designed for the general reader. They are beautiful to read. They are not academic. And they are mesmerizing. They are fascinating. They are still good. Both of them are still good, actually. I still recommend them to people because not so many books are written for general readers. So I had known him as that way. And I did not know he was at Columbia. I never knew that because I did not know that. I knew Borton. I knew Hugh Borton because he was still there when I was there. And he lived very long, the way Dorothy Borg did. I found out much later when I was on the faculty. It was quite late. I think I found out from Professor Borton that said Sir George Sansom had been the first director of the Institute.

I thought that was really cool because, he is not an American and he is a very famous British diplomat. And he is not a social scientist. He is not a PhD. I just thought it was cool, but surprising. I have to say surprising. I mean, Borton had a PhD in Japanese history from 1937 from Leiden. And so the George Sansom professor of history before me, the first one—I am the second—the first one was Martin. C. Martin Wilbur. Marty Wilbur, who was the third director of the Institute actually, he is the one after Borton. Modern China historian, also a missionary son, I believe. And then it disappeared when Marty Wilbur retired because chairs do not necessarily get sat upon. They can sit there. They are not yet. And so it was a big surprise to me. To be honest, they had to do with my getting a Harvard offer because when you get an offer from Harvard, Columbia decides they should do lots of things for you. Some of the things they want to do for me, I was not particularly interested in, like, giving me a parking space. But they did go through the process. They went through the process of getting approval from the department to appoint me as the Sansom professor. I was so surprised. I didn't know it and I didn't—there had been a hiatus between Marty Wilbur and [unclear]. I did not think about it. So I was enchanted and felt really grateful and felt a little bit like this was karmic. The first book I ever read was by George Sansom. And I was not going to be a Japan scholar at that point. Then I spent a lot of time learning about Sansom and I did a lot of research and I talked to a lot of people, including Hugh Borton. I did a lot of research, a fair bit in the archives about his view of the emperor and his view of the occupation, and his view of the Japanese constitution as "idiotic." Things of that sort. Wonderful. I learned a lot about him and about the consular service in Britain and why he was an ambassador and all that stuff. Anyway. And the more I learned, the more I was impressed. And I thought, Sir George Sansom is a little bit or a lot like the people that I admired. It is a lot like the Ted de Bary's and the Donald Keene’s and the Marius Jansen's and the John Fairbank’s. These guys were from a different time. Their intellectual formation was very similar and being very capacious, not narrowly academic. Feeling a need to increase, enhance the understanding in the world of Japan or China or whatever. They were missionaries for knowledge really. And they had a similar stance. Sir George wrote a lot of books, did a lot of translation. They all did translation. It is another thing they did because it is something that our generation, by and large, never did because it was not academic. It did not get you anywhere. But that generation, part of their missionary impulse was to translate. Professor de Bary's master's thesis is—hard to imagine this— his master's thesis was a translation of Five Women Who Loved Love of [Ihara] Saikaku. Now, if you knew Professor de Bary, he was a thoroughly Confucian gentleman in the Chinese model. He was absolutely a junzi, a Confucian-on-the-Hudson, as we used to call him. And he's translating Saikaku, this sort of, kind of not bawdy, but this, merchant love story with prostitutes. But they all translated because part of their missionary impulse was to get the work of the classics and of the literature and the philosophy into English. And that was the genesis of the Columbia press publications, too. So they translated. They wrote for the general public, so to speak. That whole generation was somewhat similar in that. And so George Sansom and another—there were others in the British service like that. Sir Charles Elliot, the Buddhologist was like that. They wrote their books. They wrote their books while they were on duty. He was a commercial attaché and he is writing books on—, and they had nothing to do, I guess. But he wrote a lot of books when he was supposedly working. So it was a different model, a kind of generalist Asianist.

Our generation was brought up to be specialists. We were brought up in our disciplines, et cetera and so forth. We got a general education, but we were not brought up in that way. They were very similar. And I realized that Sir George Sansom was a very good first director of the Institute in the sense that he really was in the Columbia tradition. When he was here, he hung out with President Butler, the Nicholas Murray Butler, and with what was his name, [unclear] was a political philosopher. His friends were not necessarily—there were not that many Asianists here anyway. But so these were people who—it's a mid century, that's what I said. ‘30s and ‘40s—it's a mid-century kind of intellectual, capaciousness that least we saw in these people and not generalizing, but these people had it. The last thing I would say was so, George Sansom was a good choice. He did fit in with Columbia. I now know why—after I said that work—I knew why he was happy here at Columbia because he fit into it. And I knew why Evarts Greene wanted him because Evarts Greene was like—guy born in Kobe—was an American historian who wanted people to understand Japan. They have this kind of, quote unquote, "missionary impulse" then. And that was a lot of the Columbia Asianist atmosphere, in those days was suffused with those ideas. And so Sansom is a hero to me. And I love it when it happens. Sometimes in England, where I give a bookstore my card to send me the books, they say, Sansom. They know the name. They know the name. But they would not know the name here. And so that makes me feel good and I say, "Yes, that is the Sansom. I am connected to him. I am so honored to be connected to him." So anyway, that is that story. It is a wonderful honor, I have to say.

Takayasu: That is really moving. Thank you so much for sharing that. I know you have been very active in contributing to the publication committee. Are there any projects in particular that you would like to highlight, particularly something that funding may have helped publish books that may otherwise have never seen the light of day?

Gluck: Again, that is another huge subject. That is to say, and here in the first instance, it is a huge subject because the Institute raised a lot of project money from Ford, from all kinds of foundations and things for research projects. And we had multi-year collaborative research projects in the ‘70s. And we brought people in to run them or somebody here ran them. And they all produced books. They all produced studies. And there is a whole list of publications that actually came out of the research projects and they came out because of the funding of the project. They were then a second whole kind of second category [which] is one that I ran for a very long time—and now collaborating, running and inherited from someone who ran it before me, like everything else at Columbia—was the Studies of the East Asian Institute [publication series], which started in '61, I think.

 

The thing about the Studies of the East Asian Institute, if you look at the list, we have a very long list. We have a work that is very, very distinguished list of books. And the thing that is important about it and distinctive is that we, the Institute, the Studies of the Institute are books that we do not publish ourselves. We take on and find publishers for it. We take a manuscript and we pay for a reading for an outside reader too so that we, the author, will have the help of that reader. We then place that manuscript in a press and a publisher. We are the academic equivalent of a literary agent. If you have it, the way an agent works is you get the agent the manuscript and the agent goes to the publisher. It is pure service. One of the nicest things I have ever been involved with. Pure service, because and this is the most important part. We handle the majority, I would say, of our books, are first books. You have just finished your dissertation and you have got a manuscript. And now what? So you come to the Institute.

 

Many of our students—of course, my book, my first book, too. You come to the Institute, and the Institute says, OK, we will get in a reading of your manuscript by somebody here first. Probably your sponsor. And if that person says, I think we should handle this book, we will then pay for an outside reader. And then you please tell us which outside readers you think would be really good and give you a really good reading. OK. We get that reading. And then we go to a press. We ask the author, do you have any presses in mind? Usually they say, I have no idea. We say, Well, we think your book will fit at Cornell or at Princeton, where we have connection with all these press that we are working with them for years and Norton and trade presses in England and—. And we then get in touch with the editor and we say We have this manuscript. Here is the reader's report that we have paid for. Then because we know the editors, they will say, Yes, I think that is for us or not. And so it goes. The thing that is so cool is that because we handle it, we can push the press. We can say, Listen, we need that manuscript. You have to read it now because this guy is coming up for tenure. We need a reading now. Or we can say, Listen, where is the book? We need to see the jacket. First book authors cannot do that. All the time. Very often.

So we can press on. We can. We see the book through and then we advertise it. And we have a booth at the Association for Asian Studies meeting and we can advertise it much longer than the press can because we have fewer titles. So you get a double PR for a longer time. How cool is that? We help people place their books. We have a First Book Prize, which, by the way, was given to us by a staff member who was the staff member for publications in the ‘60s. ‘50s and ‘60s. She retired decades ago and she gave this money to the Institute to give money to a first book so they could spend it for an index or illustrations or whatever. We gave three this year. Isn't it wonderful? So that the reason I bring this up because I think this is typical of the Institute's generosity of spirit. As I say, this is pure service. Really? Yes. Yes. It says Studies of the East Asian Institute. But what we do for particularly first book authors. Now, a lot of people like it so much, they come back for the second or third book. We are not only [for] first book authors. It is a great service. And we work with all kinds of presses and we change as editors change. And so that's a terrific. That is publications.

 

Now, we have other publication series too. We now have a series of translations and we now have a crossover book series which actually I established, which in order to have books that would reach general readers that are not academic only anyway, the publications program has been great for the Institute, but it has been even better for the authors. Really even better for the authors. So I say this is a service because these people, most of them are not Columbia authors. They are just people. I mean, people know about us now. They come to us. I mean, Word-of-Mouth. We handle anybody. We don't care with where they went to school. And so I think this is another one of those Institute services.

 

We have a publication staff person that takes money. We sometimes have to pay some money for subventions or this is or that is. And so, yes, I would say that there is a lot of books out there that would not have come to fruition without us. And a lot of it is some of our knowledge and our experience not so. Not only our money. I have been doing this for 30 years and I have been doing this a long time. And I love it. It is a pleasure to me. It is a pleasure to me to take a manuscript and see it through. We know how to talk to the authors and our wonderful publications assistants who have been wonderful for years and years because, I or the other publications committee people do not do this. A lot of this is done by the publications person. But we know how to develop a dissertation into a book. We have learned. We know what they need to do. We know what to tell people.  And that is priceless because you do not want to be figuring that out yourself on your own, on your book on which your career is going to depend. So publications is great. There are some people who think we should not bother with this. I am not one of them. Because I like all the service sides of the Institute. Because I think it is unique. It is distinctive. I like the outreach. I like the fellowships. I like the community. I regard those all as service sides, all of which with an intellectual core. I mean, we do not publish anything that is not first rate.  Our books win all kinds of prizes, always we win, we always win prizes. Because they are good books. But still the service part of it is important. So that is publications. And I am glad you asked about that, because I think it is great. I inherited it from Herschel Webb when he died. And I am actually grateful. I inherited it because I was his student, not because there was any reason. But in fact, I had worked for a literary agent in the years before I went to grad school. So I kind of knew a little bit about this world. Maybe that is why I like doing it so much. So that is that. Thank you for asking.

 

Takayasu: That is a wonderful story, and I did not know about all of these wonderful services that you offer, and I could only appreciate the value that the authors are getting. You mentioned in your description about some of the generosity of the former staff and some of the roles that they play. Can you give us a little bit of texture of how you have been working with the support staff of the Weatherhead?  What are their roles? What value do they bring?

 

Gluck: There is no Weatherhead without the support staff. They are not support staff. They are Weatherhead. Look, yes, the faculty is Weatherhead because especially those of us who are on the floor or whatever, but including the larger Weatherhead faculty community, which is across the schools and don't live on the ninth floor but are our Institute people. But from the beginning, from what I know—and I don't know, the very beginning. From the beginning, the staff has been the Institute. I mentioned Mary Schoch with her sock drawer. The reason I say this is because so much of what the Institute does, for example, I mentioned that National Resource Centers Grant—that is a nasty proposal. It is huge. It is bureaucratic. It is just difficult. Who do you think puts that together?  Half a million dollars rests on that. And from the beginning. It is overseen by us. But I can not begin to tell you, for example, I will give you—all the stuff that makes the institute run: the Japan Foundation grant, a report we have to do every year since 1972. Every year we have to report down to the penny. Down to the penny for what we spend. And I mean penny. And it is every year. Just finished it this year. The staff does that. Money rides on that. That is a grant. A grand tour. All of the events that we do, the brown bags and the big events and the—staff does that. Everything from—, every aspect from the planning to the PR to the napkins. There is no Institute without the staff.

The staff also does not just do things that have to be done. They have been incredibly creative. Half the ideas we talk about come from them. The idea—oh, heck, my acronyms. What was the name of the fellowship? There are so many acronyms in my world right now that I can not remember one. But it will come to me. But this whole idea of having postdocs across the institutes—with this acronym that I just can not quite remember right now—that came from the executive director. It was her idea. And it has been fabulous. So the Harriman and the other institutes, we all have these postdocs and we share. How cool is that.

 

They have been extremely creative. And the reason they are so creative is they have been, they really are, all nearly all of them all the time, so committed to the place. And they come up with great ideas all the time. The photographic exhibit then and down at the floor of SIPA. That was Laura Warren's idea. She was my assistant. She not only had the idea, she did it. She did the call-for-participation. And she chose the photograph. She hung the photograph. She publicized the photo. Oh, I can't tell you how many things.  Exhibits, all kinds of things. The staff contributes more than execution. They contribute substance, certainly on the budgetary side, to this very complicated budget. We can not do that alone. We can not do it at all. So I just want to say that the Institute staff is that.  And ask our students. Those are the people that they—if they have a problem with their telephone when they arrive or they have not got a housing or they have not got a visa or they have not got the class thing or they have not got the grade, it is the staff. It is the student affairs officer or the whatever.

 

That is who the Institute is, for them. Just like I said, Mary Schoch was the person. I do not even know who was the director at that point when Mary Schoch came to me and asked me—it may have been John [M.H.] Lindbeck. John Lindbeck was not going to come to me and say, Dear, what do you need for the summer? That was Mary Schoch [laughs]. So I think you will find the students see the staff as the person whom they first talked to when they come in and who they stand in front of their cubicle and hang out with and become friends with, especially the graduate students because they are there all the time. So as for me, it is some of my best friends are on the staff.  Over the years, some of my best friends to this day are still the staff, whether they are people who work for me or with me. And I see them all the time. And I see their babies and I see their—. And over the years, this has been going on for a very long time. And we just lost two weeks ago, one of our favorite staff members there for 20 years, she was the publications person, as well as the outreach person, Madge Huntington.

And we are all having a Zoom memorial in a couple of weeks. And the list of people on that list is full of faculty and staff over the ages. Madge was at the Institute for 20 years. She served in all kinds of capacities. And you can tell by the list on that invitation for the Zoom Memorial. It's all the faculty and all the staff across 20 years. Because everybody was that close.

And in fact, they unearthed something that the staff did for Madge's retirement. We have a publication called The Reed, which was a kind of newsletter of the Institute, used to be published in paper. And so they did something called The Madge, and they made a whole mock edition of The Reed all about Madge and to Madge. And they even made a statue that they installed at the front of it, Weatherhead East Asian Institute sign of two socks, because she always walked around in socks [laughs]. So we unearthed that to send to her family, actually.

So to give you an idea of how close we all are, as soon as everybody heard about Madge's, everybody sprang into action. Faculty, staff and everything,  including staff who have not been there for years. Staff that left 15 years ago. So that is the Institute. There is a kind of closeness and people stay for a very long time. Now, not everybody does. A lot of people would come and go. And that was quite right. They would get a degree while they were there and they go. That is what we wanted. That is important. We move on. But there are a lot of people, a number of people who really stayed a very long time. And so there is a kind of family feeling about it that I think—I do not know. I do not know exactly how it happens, but it seems to me that it replenishes itself in different styles with different leadership and the different directors. But I do not think it ever disappears. We used to do different things. We had a picnic every year. There was an Institute picnic. Every year in May, there was a big Institute picnic. We went to Baker's Field with all the kids and all the things. And we played softball. The faculty and the students. We do not do that anymore. That is fine. You do not have to have a picnic [laughs]. But we have great Chinese New Year's parties and great graduation parties. But all that kind of thing replenishes the community spirit. And you mentioned my children before. My children grew up at the Institute. They. Grew up in. The Institute. They grew up there. They were there all the time from the time they were toddlers. They were at every picnic. They were in every picture. So are Robin [Martin]'s kids. And Matti [Madeleine Zelin]'s son and whatever. And my son, who was, of course could run the word processor before anybody else could, he was the first one to put the budget on the word processor. I think he was eleven [laughs]. And I think Debbie Bell paid him like 75 cents an hour [laughs]. It was before we knew how to use it. So my kids grew up there and it was very funny. Couple years ago, my younger son, my Hollywood son, came to bring books back to my office [laughs]. He said, “This place is a lot smaller than I remembered.” And that's because he was like three feet high [laughs]. For him, it was like this [hold the hand far above her head]. And now, of course, he's six foot [laughs], this is very funny. But it was that kind of a place. And I think that that family kind of stuff. Real family. And in addition to our family family, I think that's something that the Institute has fostered from the beginning. And  it was good. It was really good for us. I think it was good for us as a family. I worked all the time so if the kids had not come, I would have never have seen them [laughs]. They used to do their homework there. And everybody was so nice to everybody. It was so nice about it. I have to say. I think the Institute is in that way and continues that. And that staff included, of course, including dogs, dogs, dogs, too. We have some dogs. Yes. Not me. I am not a dog person, but we have had people who bring their dogs all the time. So, it is just I don't know. It is cool. It is cool [laughs]. I like it. I like this. The spirit of it. I really do.

 

Takayasu: I think it is so wonderful how much you appreciate everybody's work. And then the description you give of this incredible community and the warmth. When you shared your story about your children always being there, it explained a little bit about why your second son went into film. I remember preparing for this, I noticed that you used to teach classes on Japanese films ranging from [Yasujiro] Ozu, and back then, all these very liberal directors like [Nagisa] Oshima. I maybe over speaking, but it kind of hinted at work-life integration, which was not even a concept back then, but it did not seem like there was a lot of fight between Oh this is professional vs. This is personal. But it looks like there was certain something about Weatherhead that allowed for this beautiful fusion of what your passion was and then how that positively impacted your children. Is that it?

 

Gluck: I do not know about that because in my younger years—work. It was hard. There was more work than there was life there for a while, I have to say. It was something I could not have done it without my husband.

You can not do what I did without that. I still teach film, by the way. I have always taught film. I teach a film course coming up. I always teach film, but that was not how my son got to go into film. No, my son got to go into film because he was born a writer and he has been writing since he was four. And so he started off out in Hollywood as a writer. And he is still now a writer, but he is a director, a producer.

But I tell you what, what it did do for my kids and it wasn't the Institute so much as it was the time we spent in Japan. The time we spent in Japan was probably the best thing I ever did for my kids. We spent a lot of years in Japan and for both of them in different ways the Japanese experience was formative. It is true that because of that, they were more interested in the Institute and things that were going on there. Particularly, Will, the Hollywood kid, that because he actually came back and became a Japanese major, a Japanese studies major at Cornell. He loved the language. He did not like anything but the language. He loved the language. Language and writing fiction writing. So the Japanese part of their lives was the most important part.  For my architect son it was all the visual aesthetic stuff that he got there. But it is true that they did like the Institute stuff because of the Japan thing, that they were more connected. It was not just where their mother worked. And they did come to some stuff too as they grew older. They both came to the AAS [Association for Asian Studies annual conference] that year, too.  And they went to the—Yes, you are right, there is more.

But I do not want to call it what they call in Japanese, "waaku laifu balansu ワークライフ・バランス [work life balance]." I do not want to call it "work life balance" because it was not very balanced at the beginning. It really was not very balanced and it took a while before—. It was because of my husband that I was able to do that actually because he had to do an awful lot there at the beginning when there was so much to do. But then I do not think so. I think my kids felt that they were, they could not use—. I will be very honest with you. My first book is dedicated—I forget what I said—but it was dedicated to thanks them. I think it was dedicated to my husband. But I think I said , “And thanks, I thank Thomas and William for walking the dog” and the family joke is we never had a dog. No. They know that William said to me at one point when he was very young, "You're not like regular mothers." And I said, "Really?" I said, "Well, what do regular mothers do?" He said, "Well, they walk the dog." I said, "But Will, we don't have a dog." He said, "Well, that's what regular mothers do [laughs]." I said, "Well, OK, then I'm OK. We don't have a dog. I don't have to do that." So that was the joke. But, in fact, I really did not do that. There were some four or five years where I did not walk the dog. And  then I got a more of a balance, but I do not want to tell people that this is an easy work-life-balance thing. The other thing I want to say, to be perfectly honest about it, is if I did not have—I love my family more than anything in the world and I would give anything for them. And I did, in the sense that if I had not finally, jerked work-life balance into better shape—I would have published five more books by now. Because once I got going, I was able to pull back and say these things are more important. And, they are more important than this. So I made a choice. And I am completely happy with my choice. That for me, I was going to have both. Even if I had to let one go more than the other.  Which is why I stayed at Columbia, by the way, to Columbia for my family. More than once I had the opportunity to leave Columbia. More than once. I stayed. I love Columbia. But the reason I stayed was I was not going to jerk my family around, my husband around, which he would not go anyway. But I do want to make it clear that for women scholars, it is better now than it was in my day. We never had maternity leave. Yes. Ever. We never had any. There was no—nothing was allowed for the children thing.  And any help that you get for schooling and stuff like that, we never had. It is a little bit better now. I am very happy about maternity leave. That is a huge help. But still, it is not easy when you are a new assistant professor and all this stuff to do and your kids are small. Right. It is, it is tough. You need to, you need to know that. And then you need to decide, which way you are going to go. And I made a decision, which is that I love my work, but I love my family. And somehow, they are both going to go along. And I. I am not sorry. I am not sorry. And I have another life on top of that which made it more complicated. It is still, which is I have another life in Japan. So everything I write comes out in Japanese too, which means I have to translate and I have to go over the translation and everything I do is double. And I have a Japanese scholarly life and I have a Japanese family, adopted family. So I have another life which takes a lot of time. And if I didn't have to do all that bloody translation and write so much for the Japanese media, do all these things, which I love to do. But as a decision I made that I wanted to be part of Japan, not a scholar about Japan from outside. And that costs. It cost time. It is greatly rewarding. I have a real life there, a professional life, a profile. I have stature and I have friends and colleagues and, just wonderful life. But it is a decision I made to take the time to do that. Every time I start to go over one of these translations I am sorry that I took the time to do that. I am doing it right again now because it is takes twice as long. So I guess my word here is you make your personal choices and I make I make two: one for my family and one for the Japanese scholarly and Japanese public life that I was going to contribute in Japan, not just here and I was going to build in Japan institutionally, which I have done. I was going to help. I was not going to just—, I wanted to contribute. So that decision also costs time. Costs time, takes time. But it is I don't know, I—I love it. I love it. I could not live without my Japanese life. I really could not. At this point, it is that important to me.

And it is important to my family. It turns out important. My architect husband, big importance for him. Design-wise, huge.  And as I said, for my kids. So that worked out.  The family part of the Japan side worked out. Absolutely.  They will all say that.  When my Hollywood son went back last year for the premiere for his latest film, he got up there and spoke Japanese like the radio talent he was. He spoke not just with a perfect accent, but because he was on the radio so much in those days, he had that intonation and he absolutely knocked everybody's socks off. I got shivers. I thought, How did you do that? You haven't been there in 25 years. How did you do that? It is just in him. And so there was this young, handsome star who was supposed to be the big draw for the for the press conference and all eyes were fixed on [laughs] this foreigner speaking television Japanese. Anyway, so that part worked out, the Japan side. But I just don't want to give up. When you talk about my career, I think you have to talk about decisions that are taken, not this was just all everybody can [unclear].  You had to have a family like mine in a university like mine. You had to have the support I had. In every respect. Yes, it was very important that I did not fight. I didn't have to fight. I just had to work. I did not have to fight. I was lucky. I do not say that everybody is lucky. And again, I am back to those people who hired me. I am back to those people who made this kind of place for us. Including all the Institute directors, including, Jim Morley and Gerry Curtis and the people who were directors during those years. Even John Lindbeck, who died when I was a graduate student. But who was a director I think after Marty Wilbur. So they were all, again, supportive. And that meant being supportive of this kind of, work life, women, mother thing.

And having kids around.  Nobody ever said, “Don't bring your kids around the East Asian Institute.” They said, "Don't let him fall out the windows" which was a problem but that was all they said [laughs].

 

Takayasu: Well, I am just so happy that you have all these wonderful people in your life. You have mentioned your other life in Japan. How does the Weatherhead play in that role?

 

Gluck: Well, in lots of ways. I can name a few. One, I have sponsored over the years, visiting professors and research associates from Japan. A lot of them. Who have come and spent anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year here. And it has been a very important, they have said, a very important thing for them, experience for them and that I have done for decades. And then sometimes I raise money for them. If they were a full visiting professor and I got Japan Foundation grant for them or whatever. Sometimes they came on their own money. Depends. The finances were different. Different times. So that brought Japanese here, scholars here from my world. But it also then brought the East Asian Institute back to Japan. And they are all ages and shapes, including young ones and people who are now old or even dead. And that is one way.

 

A second way is I made liaisons and connections with other places, institute-to-institute, numbers of times I have done it, too, not just in Japan. I did it to Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. And we have done it to ANU, Australian National University in Australia. We are a part of this coalition of Asian African Studies Coalition, Columbia is the only North American school there. And that  coalition of universities has been fantastic for our graduate students because we have these annual symposia and they get to meet people from all over the world, from Singapore and from Paris and from Leiden and from London and from Shanghai and Seoul and Tokyo. And so, again, that is an institution building. And we rotate the conference, the symposium—Columbia, last one was there. I think there are eight members now. Columbia symposium was held in 2014. And so, again, those are institutional links. I try to make these links. I just had the e-mail this morning from Tokyo about, We are going to have, a surprise, surprise, you are going to have our next meeting on Zoom. Anyway, yes, surprise.  I made institutional links, and when I can and I have made a lot of interpersonal links.

And the other thing is that I have used the institute community for our graduate students for making affiliations, when they go to Japan, where they affiliate. And vice versa when their graduate students need affiliation. These are graduate students now, not researchers, but people who are our paid graduate students who go to Japan for dissertation research and they need an affiliation for their grant. And so and we have for 30—oh, God, this is the first year we haven't done it. Darn. It's COVID.

Ah, 2020.

This would have been the 32nd consecutive year. You know what, I am going to organize a Zoom meeting. Iam not going to let it go by. Oh, I am so glad. I  forgot about it with all the stuff going on. I will do it. I got plenty of time in November, but I am glad you said it. For 32 years. This is the 32nd. We have had something that we jokingly call the Narita caravan. It is a group of between five and 10 Japanese scholars. [Ryuichi] Narita is a historian, a friend of mine. They come every October or November to Columbia on their own money. On their own university moneys, they bring us a core three to five, and then they bring other people, all different disciplines, literature, history, sociology, whatever. And we do some sort of symposium or some sort of workshop or some sort of this or that. And those people. Every year—they haven't missed a year—in fact, that year that I taught in Paris in 2018, they came to Paris [laughs]. Anyway, they are an incredible reservoir of assistance and mentorship for our graduate students. They meet them all. They hear about all their work because these workshops are all graduate students and faculty. And sometimes they are regional, from Harvard to Duke or from Dartmouth to Duke. Sometimes we have these regional Japan workshops. Sometimes we have them locally. Sometimes we have them, et cetera. They meet the graduate students and those people have been enormous help. And it is so interesting, we always do something different. And now I don't want to let a year go by, so I will do a Zoom one. That will be easy. And so the graduate students and then the Japanese scholars and it is a community of its own. It is more than a network. It is a community now. And because we now have generations and we started in 1988. Can you believe it? So that is an informal institution that has been of enormous importance. We have done research projects together. We have published books in English and in Japanese together of research projects. Quite a number of publications over time where we were editors together, a subset of us are editors here. And so that is the kind of thing that is more than my network. It is big. It is a community now of all kinds of students, including MA students. Anybody interested in Japan.  And these people are all over the place in Japan and they are all over the disciplines. Different universities. So this is a network that is—somebody wants go to Tokyo or Japan, some place to do their dissertation, should we know where to send them. At least we know who to tell them to ask where to send them.  And everybody always comes through just like we come through for their students. I just did one for—he didn't show up because of COVID, but there was a graduate student who is supposed to come. He will come eventually. There is all these bans and stuff they can't. So it is a favor I did. Just like they do a favor. I did a favor for him because he wants to be at Columbia for him to finish the dissertation. He has an American ingredient in his dissertation topic and he needs the archives here. OK, so that is it. This really works. It works because it is all about human relations. It is all about human relations. It is all about what they call in Japanese "human relations." Or Chinese the same. It is all about human relations. It is about over the years repeated things with the same people and new people and the same. And the good fellow feeling and lots of fun and stuff. And we have met all over the damn world. It is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. And I think to me, that is part of our job as Asia scholars, not to be, as I said earlier, not to be somewhat outside studying and studying Asia like it is something outside. But, these are great people. And it is an absolute kick. It really is. And we all enjoy each other. People make a lot of funny mistakes. And that goes and becomes part of the lore, too. And [laughs] it is all good. It is all very pleasant. Even the mistakes are kind of fun. So that is important. The Institute is the center for that. They always come to the Institute, unless we are in a different place or in a much bigger place, we usually meet at the Institute, depending on the size of the workshop. We always have something at the Institute. Even if we made it a bigger place for the graduate students. Everybody gets the same food. Everybody has eaten the same Gluck food for a thousand years. It is always the same Chinese food [laughs].  I make no distinctions.  I run through four Chinese restaurants. They have closed on me. But I have been doing this for years. It is my home cook, Chinese food.

I do it for undergraduates and do for grads. They do for faculty. Everybody gets the same thing. I really do not make any distinctions, but as a result, we just eat in the common room at the Institute. I have a drill. I know exactly where my drinks are, where my napkins are. And I do the same thing over and over again. And everybody recognizes that they don't expect anything better or worse. They expect the same thing and everybody is good sports about it.

But that makes it easy because I can do it over and over again. So even for those people, they get the same thing. Everybody gets to sing.  And that is the Institute and that is what they associate. They associate that Columbia visit with the Institute. That is the place they come to. That is what they know. And we couldn't do it anywhere else, really. I mean I do not have the kitchen that I have at the Institute [laughs]. Anyhow. So all of that kind of sociability for students and for colleagues and for people. And it is just so important, really. It is something that is very Asian of us to be so community focused. Well, maybe, but doesn't matter. It works. It works. We keep up our ties. We don't forget anybody [laughs]. No, if they forget us and we get out of contact, that is a bit—. But we don't forget anybody. We don't we don't. We don't lose touch.

And that is nice.

 

Takayasu: And that is particularly resonant in this time when we are all so isolated.

 

Gluck: I am very glad you reminded me about the caravan because I think I might have missed it this year. It is such a crazy time, but I will get on it right now. All right. And right now, he organizes the Japanese and I organize the American media. You will do that. And then we have got to figure out what our what our topics are, what the themes are and stuff like that. And then we will do it. So I am glad you said so. Yes. I would not miss these things. I would not miss them. They are really—they matter intellectually. Absolutely matter intellectually. But they also matter in human terms for the students and for us. And when these are long relationships. I know Narita because this is typical in Japan, I suppose. Because Narita, who is the disciple, the student of one of my original mentors in Japan when I did my dissertation research. I met him as a disciple.  We met horizontally so to speak, in 1970. We were both little children, basically, more or less. But that was how I met him. Neither of us were professors. We were both—. So that is how long. That is how it goes back. And of course, his students. I mean, my students, until they had the same horizontal all the way up. And that is the Japanese sort of network kind of thing.

 

Takayasu: It is very inspirational. Thank you. It is very inspirational because there are a lot of people who look at relationships very transactionally, and it takes a lot of effort and respect to nurture relationships, particularly in your case, over decades. It is wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. All these stories. Are there things that you would like to share stories around that we haven't covered yet?

 

Gluck: Relate to the Institute. I am sure there are. Like I had forgotten about the caravan till you mentioned. I do not think about all these things. You do not think about all these things. I probably have forgotten things. Maybe not.

 

No, I think the Institute is just going in the right direction. I think the Institute is continuing the good things and adding better things to it, which is what you want. You want expansion and growth. I am a fan, and I think it will continue to be a success. I think it does come down to people. I think nurturing the people, nurturing the connections and all of these things. I think it is part of our jobs. Again, I inherited that idea from others. I did not invent them. I do think that the connections to Asia are important. I do think that undergraduate education is absolutely central. I have been doing it all my life. It is one of my central things. And we are expanding the Committee on Global Thought Undergraduate Curriculum program right now. I love the fact that the Institute, although it is a graduate institution, has always been interested in undergraduate education and K through 12 education.

 

I also think that the Institute has long been known for being involved with comment, contemporary comment and scholarly comment on what is happening in the world. I hope they concluded that the Institute will continue to do that. The Japanese government cannot change prime ministers without calling Gerry Curtis, which, of course, they did twelve times last week, that it is really important that people who do provide historical background for something that is contemporary or what is going on in North Korea and things like that. The Institute has long been a source for people to come to, journalists and writers and things. And I think that is it. I think that is also a service. Not everybody agrees with me.

But this is my position that I believe. This is entirely personal. I want to make clear I am not speaking for anybody else. I, my own world. My own scholarly purpose has everything to do with what is going on in the world today. I have never been somebody who studied the past for the sake of the past.  I do not. I study history because it teaches me about the precedents [laughs] as well as about the past. And I have always felt an obligation to speak publicly.  And on my work on war memory, that is all about an intervention. I do not do war memory. Yes, I am now a historian of war memory globally. I wrote a book coming out on it. I got a bestseller in Japan on it now. But that is not what I do. I am actually a historian of Meiji Japan and other things and a historian of historiography and history. But my war memory is a purposeful—probably failed—intervention in public memory. Because I feel and I am not alone. But as a historian, I feel it is my obligation to try to keep war memory from being so hyper-nationalistic and so inaccurate, so wrong and so indoctrinating and mobilizing for the wrong things. So I started this whole war memory thing because I could not stand the way history was being treated. So what is that? That is a mission. Now, do I do it in a scholarly way? Yes. Everything I do is so scholarly because that is the only thing I can interfere and intervene with.  And that is why I am so happy. Our best-selling book, which is really cool because it is all Columbia students talking and not me. 

I feel we should talk to the press. I talk to the press. But I will only talk as a historian. I will write for the press. I go on television all the time. I do this sort of stuff in Japan. Mostly in Japan, but not only. I feel it is an obligation. When I am in Paris, I do a lot of it.  In Europe because Japan is not as well known. It is much, much better now than it was 20 years ago. So I feel that the Institute's role over the years and it started way back and that is what the original people were doing, people like Doak Barnett and all that, the China hands people.  So I feel that the Institute's role in public is important. I feel that it is very important when somebody contacts Andy [Andrew J.] Nathan about the human rights in China, or they contact me all the time, every time there is a war anniversary, which is every 20 minutes.  There is always an anniversary of the war. But I take it seriously and I work with documentarists and do I succeed? No. But, sometimes, if you are steady enough and you are solid enough and you keep doing the history and you do not preach. You cannot preach. That is the thing. You can make it. You can make a dent. So I just wanted to add that I think the public role of the Institute is important. And I do think we should be in the world. Now, not every scholar should be. That is why I say I speak for myself. Not everybody should be. It is me that wants that, that feels that my scholarship needs to do some work in the world. That's all. That is me. And I do like that. That is what I like, that aspect of the Institute. Even though not everybody has to at the Institute. Not everybody has ever always done it. But, I like the fact that we use what we know to try to be of some informational assistance even if it is in vain. But when half of the Japanese high school kids think that America and Japan fought on the same side in World War II, huh? Hello. Yes, you think, well, maybe we have some work to do [laughs]. They are just saying the same stuff on this. We have the same polls on this side. A lot of high school kids do not know we fought a war against Japan. And nobody knows that America occupied Japan. Nobody—no, body, who's 17, knows that. [laughs] I mean not nobody, but, the polls and the 25 percent. So it is not that I want everybody to know everything, but you need to know a little background about certain things. So anyway, that is the last thing I will say, is that the Institute in public is, I think, another valuable service.

And that is individuals, obviously, not the Institute taking a position. It is just individuals as experts who, when they are called upon, respond. I do not respond to everybody, by the way, because I do not respond to people I think are going to use me. If a Korean paper calls because I know they want to get me to criticize the Japanese so they can use me, I do not do that. You have got to know who you are talking to. So you have to intervene surgically. Let's put it that way [laughs]. Not with a broad brush.

 

Takayasu: I was in Japan the last time, it was in November, and I went to a bookstore and there was your book prominently on the shelf for people to see.

 

Gluck: The War Memory Book. The little book.

 

Takayasu: Yes, "Sensou no Kiokku 戦争の記憶 [War Memory].”

 

Gluck: That best seller.

And as you know, that is Columbia students talking. Yes. So good. I am glad. That was actually one success because that was read by people who do not read me in the newspapers and do not watch. That was read by a lot of regular people. I got an awful lot of, well, opinion on all sides, but the people who were writing were not people I normally reach.

And it was because I was not talking, it was students. It was really great. Anyway, thank you for noticing [laughs].

 

Takayasu: Also you helped me understand better how to think about the war experience. I think it was in this book that you mentioned about events like 9/11 which we just commemorated. "Don't just think about it as just a time-to-time event, but think about the entire context and think about what happened before, the global context and everything." So you have at least one big fan. It was wonderful.

 

Gluck: That makes me very happy [laughter]. I am glad that you felt that way. And I am really glad that a lot of people went in and I am really glad that it was not in my voice but in the students’ voices. And it was nothing I actually intended to do, but it happened. Thank you for seeing it in the bookstore, and I guess, thank you for buying it [laughter].

 

Takayasu: My pleasure. I was going to wrap up this interview by asking you what is your aspiration for the Weatherhead 10, 15, 20 years from now, but I think you have already answered that. So if you don't mind, I wanted to ask just two questions. One is, there are a lot of faculty members who went from faculty to directorship, and you were more than qualified for that role. And yet you chose not to. Can you tell us why?

 

Gluck: Yes, it is another choice. To be honest, I have turned down every administrative job I have ever been offered. I won't go into them, but I have been offered a lot at Columbia. And I have turned every one of them down. Not without thinking. At the beginning when I was younger, I would think, Well, I really need to get my work done. If I do this, I won't be able to get my book written or something like that. Later, I discovered—and this may be just the way I operate—I discovered that I could make so much happen if I was outside the system. I do not mean outside the system as a rebel or a revolutionary, but I mean outside the system as an official, a formal official. And I got to be good at ad-hoc institution building. I got to be good at making things happen, half the times nobody even knew I did it. Those are the best when something will happen and it will be there and it is there forever. Nobody even knows I did it. I decided as I learned that I was doing this, I thought, This is the way to go for me. I am going to do all this stuff and let other people do the official stuff, because it is actually harder to move a university from that position than it is from outside. I talk about what I call a third space. You want to make something happen? Take a third space where there is no contest. You are not fighting somebody who is entrenched in space, number one, or getting the support of somebody in transit space, number two. You are over here [pointing to a separate space]. Over here. And there is nobody there. And you make something happen. You establish something. You make it work. And it sort of works, if it works. And then people start coming to you. And you sort of start going to them and you get institutionalized and you sort of get this and get that. And you haven't fought any battles. In other words, institution-building out in a third space, I have found more successful than trying to change, position A or position B. So I use this now, I do this. I mean, I did not call it a third space until much later. But the Committee on Global Thought is a third space, for example. We are not fighting the departments. We are not trying to do what they are doing. We are making something new. And if it works, they will come and they have come. The students have come [laughs]. And the faculty too. So there is too much time spent in contesting the existing interests, when you are actually the director or the dean or the vice president.

So I am a big third space advocate. That is why I have never been department chair. I have never been. I have never taken and I have been offered some very big jobs. I have never taken any of them because I think I am more effective this way. And it may just be the kind of personality I am, but I am more effective and the things I like the best are the things that nobody even sees my hand in. I mean, some things people see my hand in, but other things people do not even know my hands were in. By the time it was established, my hand is gone because I am not interested in credit particularly. I am interested in institution. I am interested in institution building, if you like, relation building, connection building, sustainability. I want something to go on. I do not want it to "stop when I leave" type thing.  It is so much fun. And I don't think being among these other things would have been as much fun for me. So let's say that I made a choice and I don't think I hurt the Institute by not being director, having had the most fantastic series of directors.

There is no shortage of really good people who can direct. Really. So, if I felt I let the Institute down, maybe I would be upset but I will never let Institute down. The directors have been great and they will continue to be great because the Institute attracts those kinds of people. But that is the answer. That is the honest answer to how I operate. I absolutely love—it is like being a cat burglar. I love this covert kind of thing [laughs]. It is stealth institution building. And it works. It absolutely works. I am very pleased with a lot of the things that are out there and functioning and are not going to go away. So that is the answer.

 

Takayasu: Thank you very much. That was actually fun.

 

Gluck: Now my secret is out. That is okay [laughs]. I am getting closer to retirement. My secret can be out [crosstalk]. Not that I will stop.

 

Takayasu: Good, good. Thank you so much for giving us so much understanding. Your passion is very contagious for the Institute and for what you do. We really appreciate everything you have been doing. And we are rallying for continuing success. We started this whole introduction with your incredible career, but ended the introduction with your family.

 

So I would like to end this interview by asking you—you mentioned you have four grandchildren. How would you like them to remember you when they are at your age.

 

Gluck: I will settle for their remembering me [laughs]. I don't know, I cannot answer that, actually. That is the kind of self-reflection that I don't do much of. Maybe I should do more of it. I don't know. What I really want for my grandchildren—and I see them. I am a big fan of Generation Z. The Gen Z. I think the teenagers today are amazing.

I think if you look at the activism in teenagers around the world, you can take Greta Thunberg. You can take—. They are activists in many ways. They are really engaged in the world, this generation. They care.  They care about social justice and Black Lives Matter. They care about the climate and they care about—. It is an interesting generation.  As a college teacher, I am very conscious, like all of us are, of different generations. We see generations come by more quickly. Sociologically, a generation is 25 to 30 years. But in college, a generation is much shorter than that. We see generations changing. College-age students having one kind of ideas in the ‘70s, another kind of ideas in the ‘80s. And we see them marching rather more quickly. So we are much more cognizant I think, much more conscious of generational change, because our students are. [They] make us conscious.  They come in. They say different things. For a long time in the ‘90s, everybody wanted to go down to Wall Street and work in the finance. Nobody wants to work in—. It is just they have different mindsets. And my feeling is that the generation coming up—. In other words, it used to be—in college now,  they are actually already in college. But they also include younger kids, younger, still younger kids. This is a great generation. My it is my grandchildren's generation. They are so. Aware. They are so woke about lots of things. They are so aware. And what I want for them is to help to change the world, which I think we also need to do. I am not giving up on that, but I want for them not to just live in the world that their privileged situation has bequeathed to them, but to actually change it. And I have real hopes for this generation. I hope I am not wrong. I have faith in this generation. I know that the Youth Envoy at the UN [United Nations], the first one they ever had, who is this amazing young woman in her late 20s from Sri Lanka. She says the same thing. She says—and even the fact that the UN now has a Youth Envoy.

They want to hear the voices of the youth. We have a big project called "Youth in a Changing World" for the Committee on Global Thought. So when I talk about youth, I am not talking about my grandchildren. I am talking about these youth we talk to all over the world in nine different cities and 75 young people. They are amazing. So what I want for my grandchildren, I want for all of them too. I want for them to be able to help make their world a better world so that they can do well. And people around them can do well who don't have the privilege that they are heired to. I don't care what they think of me. I care more what they think about the world, and how they can help to improve it. I think we have a good chance of having them actually have a go at it.

 

Takayasu: Great. Thank you very much for your time today and your insight and your passion.

 

Gluck: Thank you for listening [laughs]. Once you get me going you can see what happens, but thank you for listening.

 

Takayasu: Oh, this was a wonderful way to start my week. Thank you.

 

Gluck: Thank you, Sach.