James B. Crowley

Professor of History 

James B. Crowley, B.A. the University of Connecticut, Ph.D., the University of Michigan, faculty member at the University of Michigan and Amherst College and at Yale since 1963: your deep interest in Japan and Japanese Studies has been the focus of your teaching and research for nearly forty years. You were the first non-Japanese scholar, and one of the first scholars of any nationality, to access the imperial army archives and other unutilized manuscripts concerning Japanese aggression in Manchuria and China. The outcome of this immersion was an assemblage of massive documentary evidence for your path-breaking book Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy 1930-1938, a brilliant major revisionist interpretation of the Manchurian takeover, which is still a classic in the field. This volume, along with a series of your important essays over the years on Japan and Japanese nationalism, diplomacy, and foreign policy; a volume you edited entitled Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation; and a number of trenchant and discriminating reviews of seminal works on Japanese history, have made a lasting contribution to scholarship. 

One of the most lucid and compelling debaters the colleagues in your field have ever observed, it is said that no one can best you in rapid-fire exchanges on interpretive points, and your quick wit and your unerring ear for blarney have kept many a fellow scholar on the mark. Dedicated department citizen, you have worked tirelessly in Yale’s History department on many committees, especially on the searches for a Japanese historian, which have benefited from your serious and painstaking efforts. Now as you retire and are able to give more time to your family and to the completion of a work commissioned by the East Asian Institute at Columbia University for Volume III of The Road to the Pacific War, as well as to a book on Pearl Harbor, this Yale faculty thanks you for your special scholarly contributions to the world’s understanding of Japan and for your years of loyal service.