(iPoster) U.S. Officials’ Ethnographic Judgments in Aid to Japan and Korea, 1945–52

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Abstract

Drawing on U.S. foreign policy papers between 1945 and 1965, the study documents and analyzes the regularity with which ethnographic characterizations (discipline, adaptability, spirituality, emotional restraint) appear across official and quasi-official texts addressing Japan and Korea. I find that U.S. officials in the early Cold War repeatedly formed and justified assumptions about the “governability” of Japan and Korea— or whether a society (and crucially, whether its people) could be reformed and re-educated as compatible with Western political norms — based on ethnographic characterizations of political temperament, cultural capacity, and moral discipline. Hence, while the study does not claim to establish direct causal pathways between such characterizations and foreign aid allocation, I argue that governability as an evaluative category rather than a neutral institutional property informed expectations about Japan and Korea’s development capacity and anticipated long-term returns from economic reconstruction for the U.S. based on assumptions about the degree to which local populations might internalize Western political norms.

A central theoretical contribution lies in disentangling the concept of governability. Governability is understood as the ability to absorb Western norms, including converting from shamanism to Christianity as well as adopting the norms of liberal, multilateral governance, a logic that continues to form what Andy Baker describes as “paternalistic stereotyping” (Baker 95). While Baker focused on U.S. whites’ perceptions of “poor black foreigners”, the same logic applies: racialized paternalism in U.S. perceptions, whether among foreign policy experts or general public opinion, demonstrates how racial hierarchies continue to shape expectations about which foreign populations are viewed as “governable” (in other words, receptive of Western norms and culture) and consequently deserving of assistance.

The paper follows a three-part methodological design: archival analysis, theoretical contextualization, and ethnographic content analysis. The first component is archival analysis focused exclusively on identifying, extracting, and cataloging keywords related to governance, capacity, risk, political maturity, and developability in U.S. foreign policy documents from 1945–1965. Primary U.S. foreign policy documents include a) the Roger Nash Baldwin Papers (particularly the Japan and Korea: Notes and Materials section); b) State Department diplomatic post records and Bureau of Intelligence and Research reports; c) selected material from the Dale R. Dalgas Papers and William Malliol Papers; c) major U.S. newspaper coverage of and publicized documents directly addressing governance and reconstruction in Japan and Korea. The second component is theoretical contextualization: the paper incorporates contemporaneous theories of animism and racial hierarchy that shaped what counted as governable political behavior. One such example is George Gilmore, a Christian missionary who studied at Princeton and wrote extensively on East Asia. In Animism, Gilmore remarks that Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people were “animists” with “primitive modes of thinking.” Such theories help explain why analogies like Baldwin’s “breed of cats” versus “breed of dogs” appeared plausible rather than inappropriate to policy audiences. This paper also draws from Claudia Brunner’s article asserting that “epistemic violence” constructs how “exploitation of human and natural resources is organized, legitimized, and naturalized” (Brunner 205). This framework informs how U.S. policymakers legitimized judgments of governability (and thus developability and worthiness of investment) through ethnographic characterization. The third component applies ethnographic content analysis (ECA) to both historical and modern sources to examine how keywords function rhetorically and the emotional or ideological work they perform. Following Altheide (1987), this hybrid approach allows the project to: a) quantitatively code tone and evaluative descriptors; b) qualitatively interpret metaphors, analogies, and implicit value hierarchies; c) identify discourses constructing and justifying governability, maturity, risk, or cultural temperament. Together, these methods provide a historically grounded account of how early Cold War U.S. engagement in East Asia relied on a discourse of governability linking political order to cultural value.

Author

• Eojin Park, Princeton University