Warring States Project | Current Research

The only thing to be said about war is that it is peremptory. When it comes, you either answer in kind, or you perish. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 not only sent America to war against Japan, but across another and more familiar ocean, also against Germany. The Pacific war produced an immediate need for speakers of Japanese, to work in the decoding of naval intelligence, but also for teachers of spoken Chinese to pilots who would work with their counterparts, the Chinese pilots who had been resisting Japanese aggression since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937. The first effort led to the Hawaii-based code group under Joe Rochefort, whose team made possible the Battle of Midway, in which, by the narrowest of margins, the tide of that war began to turn. The training of pilots was located at Yale, in the Institute of Far Eastern Languages under George Kennedy's direction. At Yale, as elsewhere, that focus tended to eclipse more classical concerns. Kennedy;s own breakthroughs in the study of the classical texts were not to be followed up, by him or anyone else.

The exclusively contemporary thrust of all this will be obvious. Not long after the war, it took shape as a rejection of classical Chinese studies in favor of the "area studies" which were a legacy of the war effort, One of the new movement's proudest exhibits was a book by Joseph Levenson, showing how much better were the new historians than the old ones. To anyone who knows the territory, the book proves the opposite. But winners do not need logic, and classical studies as such sank into further disesteem, even in its former haven, the academic world. Even scholars who had gained their PhD's under the old system, on a classical subject, turned with evident relief to later and easier topics: Tang poetry, Ming fiction, the May Fourth movement, or whatever.