E. H. Norman and the Task for Japanese History

Abstract

ON THE OCCASION of his death in April I957 E. Herbert Norman, the Canadian ambassador to Egypt and Minister to Lebanon, became another statistic in the Cold War, and gained for a moment the kind of notoriety which he apparently sought to avoid while he lived. Harassed since i95i by professional anti-communist zealots Norman learned, in the midst of the Suez crisis, that his name and reputation had once more been put on the line a few weeks earlier by the U.S. Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Accused of dark dealings in the even darker realm of security, accusations which earlier had been discarded for want of credibility, Norman, already under intense pressure of work, in an apparent mood of severe depression committed suicide. The event dominated both the American and Canadian presses, since the charges against Norman and the suicide itself threatened to endanger relations between the two countries; it was also of considerable concern to Japanese readers owing to Norman's long-time association with things Japanese and the possible implication of one of their more distinguished economists; and it raised the ugly and only half-forgotten memory of Senator Joseph McCarthy's successful exploitation of American fears and phobias. In all this Norman appeared only as another victim, and even when the press and periodical literature invoked the details of the event they did so merely as a further example of the mindless idiocy-indiscriminate anti-communism-which had debased decent instincts and made a mockery of good intention. Yet throughout this literature, much of which today seems like an ancient forgotten past, one will search in vain for an expression of Mr. Norman's achievements in the field of historical scholarship. While the accounts invariably describe him both as a promising diplomat and a renowned scholar, his role as scholar was included only to reveal something about his character and, perhaps, his motivation-not the quality of his intellectual achievements. A shy, sensitive, aloof man, given to Oriental scholarship, Harold Greer wrote in the Nation in the wake of the