Professor Akira Iriye passed away on 27 January 2026. We at Journal of American-East Asian Relations (JAEAR) particularly mourn and commemorate him as a prime mover in the founding of the Journal in 1991, frequent consultant, contributor, and the long-time chair of our Editorial Board of Advisors. He taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Rochester, and University of Chicago from 1969 to 1989. Harvard recruited him back and he remained there as Charles Warren Professor of American History from 1989 until his retirement in 2005.

Coming of age during World War II and achieving scholarly prominence amidst Cold War confrontations and their divisive aftermath led Professor Iriye to dedicate his life to the pursuit of human peace, fostering international cultural exchange, and building reconciliation. He was quiet but firm, articulate, insistent, and vastly productive. He expressed his transnational ideas in clear prose, with little abstract theory, and his work emphasized human interdependence, shared experiences, and collective development. His success required not only multilingual proficiency and immersion in multinational archives but also a global purview, multicultural sensitivity, and crucially, the ability to transcend national historiographies. Such scholars focus on issues of universal human concern—environmental challenges, human rights, migration, pandemics, and the like. Professor Iriye embodied all these qualities. He further possessed the vision and commitment of an academic leader, coupled with a spirit of selfless dedication and intellectual inclusivity. For him, transnational history was not merely a methodological breakthrough but a vital bridge to understanding international relations and world order, and indeed, an essential intellectual platform for realizing a more peaceful human community.

Born on 20 October 1934 in Tokyo, Iriye recalled that for him and his sister Kyoko, the war was an unmitigated disaster and Japan’s defeat was a relief. His grade-school teachers had his class ink-out sections of the official textbooks that were now unacceptable to the U.S. Occupation authorities. He later thought that seeing “history” rewritten overnight may have influenced him to become an historian. Joseph C. Grew, the last pre-war U.S. ambassador to Japan, set up a foundation that sent Iriye to Haverford College, a Quaker liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, a Europeanist, inspired him with a vision of history as a living present and encouraged him to enter Harvard University graduate school in British history. But his advisors, Oscar Handlin and John K. Fairbank, persuaded him to join a new doctoral program in what was then called “American-Far Eastern Relations.” Ernest R. May, member of a younger generation, further inspired him to move beyond diplomatic history and the study of policy-makers into history of foreign relations. ¹

After Imperialism: The Search for a New World Order in the Far East, 1921–1931 (1965) was Iriye’s first major work. Fairbank and May had suggested working on the international crisis of the late 1920s because existing studies, while extensive, had either ended in 1921 or begun in 1931, and had not used Chinese and Japanese material. He delayed publication for four years so he could learn enough Russian. The book not only filled a gap in the historiography of an understudied period but opened a wide international and civilizational lens to include the interplay, mutual constraints, and shifting rivalries among the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. Iriye started from the classic argument that the 19^th Century “diplomacy of imperialism” relied on shifting alliances among the European powers to maintain balance and restrain aggression, and that its breakdown brought on the Great War. He disagreed, however, with the common assumption that the Washington Conference of 1921–1922 was a failure. Iriye’s innovation was first to provide a multifaceted argument that placed Chinese and Japanese voices on an equal basis with European ones. Next, in the 1960s, as diplomatic archives for the period were just opening, Iriye was among the first to utilize sources in German, Chinese, Japanese, French, English, and Russian. The book showed that the U.S.-led Washington Conference and its naval treaties established a foundational structure for peace and stability that earlier studies had overlooked. The American Wilsonian initiative was challenged by Chinese nationalism, Soviet expansion, and Japanese imperialism.

If his first book developed traditional diplomatic history, the second, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (1967), not only appeared with frightening speed after the first, but took “image studies” to a different level. Iriye said that everything Chinese, Japanese, and Americans had written about themselves and each other was a primary source; he was not concerned so much with policy and policy-makers or isolated “images” but ideas and emotions—the “inner” history. He placed these images in intellectual, cultural, emotional, and psychological frameworks, showing changes in power alignments and motifs. Fairbank’s Introduction noted that Iriye was a member of a new generation of scholars “who are not culture-bound” and “are unafraid to put the interests of the human race above that of any particular nation as they look at the historical record.”

The “new generation of scholars” emerged just as the U.S. war in Vietnam revealed the need for historical knowledge of Asia. The American Historical Association had created a Committee on American-East Asian Relations, chaired by May, to support this emerging group. There followed a profusion of conferences whose organizers included Iriye, Warren I. Cohen, James C. Thomson Jr., Waldo Heinrichs, James B. Crowley, and the long-established Dorothy Borg. ² Another sign of the move beyond diplomatic history was the 1967 founding of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). In 1978, at the age of 44, Iriye was elected its President. His presidential address, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” called for and even demanded a “cultural turn.” He argued that a nation constituted a cultural system of shared beliefs and emotions, and international relations should therefore be understood fundamentally as cultural relations; an international order based solely on a balance of power, lacking cultural consonance and coordination among nations, could not achieve enduring stability.

Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (1972) pointed out that “expansionism” did not necessarily mean “imperialism”; all cultures expand, but not all create empire, which takes many forms. Iriye mined American and Japanese debates to show that Japanese reactions to American racism played a central role in the shift from nearly fifty years of friendly relations to “estrangement” and imperialism. Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (1981) took up the fate of Wilsonian hopes, the unresolved estrangement, and why Japan accepted defeat with surprising speed and equanimity. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, the book remains a key work and the epitome of cultural analysis. Despite Japanese wartime brutality and American racism, he suggested, the countries shared economic beliefs, especially in free trade, cultural goals, and opposition to communism and Soviet expansion. Both were ultimately seeking to replace European empires with a Wilsonian international order made up of free-trading democratic nations. The struggle was not over what to do, but who would do it. The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (1987) filled the gap between the two earlier publications, showing how Japan’s violent reaction destroyed the hopeful attempts of the 1920s. To address why Japan chose war, this “international history” put the war in global and comparative perspective; discussing the war in Asia was impossible without discussing European systems. Irrevocable war stemmed from fundamental misperceptions and policy failures all around.

Iriye’s body of work earned high recognition from Cohen, whose 1985 SHAFR presidential address surveyed the vast range of new tools and innovative concepts in American-East Asian relations and concluded that the field was “the cutting edge” of the historical profession. Iriye, he said, was the “quintessential American-East Asianist,” and went on, “I would paraphrase Chairman Mao [Zedong]: learn from Iriye and American-East Asian Relations. ³ Iriye, however, was not a standard-bearer for American-East Asian relations. He did not, for instance, join the Association for Asian Studies, for he saw himself as an historian, not an Asianist. “Two turns” broadly characterize his growing influence on American and international historical communities—the “cultural turn” and the “transnational turn.” In 1988, he was elected president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the first president to be Asian born. His presidential address—“The Internationalization of History”—first endorsed the internationalization of American historical studies, especially the role of non-American scholars, but then insisted on further efforts to internationalize the discipline as a whole. He urged the AHA to forge close ties with foreign associations and advocated research that embraced multiple perspectives and addressed universal themes and concepts. He indicated globally significant topics such as human relationships with nature, beauty and truth, social justice, and the quest for peace. Historians must study not only their own county’s nationalism but internationalism, breaking free from their own cultures and civilizations, transcending the self and national cultures, and recognizing the valuable insights and commonalities found in others.

The revisionist challenge in Iriye’s early work drew disagreement of several types. May and Iriye amicably debated culture and power in a course they team-taught for several years, but basic criticism of Power and Culture also came from Japan scholar John W. Dower. He praised Iriye for treating the two sides as combatants in one global system rather than the earlier East versus West “clash of cultures,” but he objected that Iriye did not define power and culture clearly and so did not take account of groups that did not fit into his Wilsonian story of cross-Pacific agreement. Dower also disagreed with the implication that the war was an aberration rather than a continuation of Japanese expansionism. Herbert P. Bix had even sharper objections. He faulted what he calls “imagistic historiography” and Iriye’s central thesis that “all international relations are relations among ideas” rather than clashes of economic and political imperialisms. ⁴ Some feared that treating the United States as one part of the global system would mean the end of American exceptionalism, which others welcomed.

Iriye modestly but vaguely spoke of revising Across the Pacific, realizing it was outdated even in the questions it asked. Debate about the Chinese revolution became different after the Rise of China than when China seemed poor, weak, and disorganized. The book is still a remarkable advance in concept and technique, but it mentions few if any women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, or minority regional voices, and no popular culture, such as fiction, film, sports, cooking, or music.

Our Journal owes much to Iriye. When the Committee on American-East Asian Relations dissolved, Anthony Cheung decided someone would have to continue its mission. Anthony had been a student of Iriye’s at University of Chicago but dropped out to become a publisher and form Imprint Publications. Iriye gave Imprint the rights to reprint his early books; the sales of Across the Pacific as a college text were considerable. Anthony was relentless. He convinced Iriye, then Cohen, and finally May that the field needed a journal and it was feasible. The first issue of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations appeared in 1992, and its first editors, Michael Barnhart, Frankin Ng, and Robert Johnson, were students of Iriye, as was the later Charles W. Hayford. Iriye himself contributed articles and edited special theme issues, but he later said that he did not like the national focus in the phrase “American-East Asian.” He also objected to the word “relations,” which May had insisted on to show that the journal covered “international relations.” ⁵

Iriye actively supported the JAEAR but his interests grew broader. For instance, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997) told a story of “new globalism” in which academic debates going back to the 19^th Century recognized that building international peace and stable order required cultural internationalism, not exclusive nationalism, and the intermingling of civilizations, not purity. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (2002) moved a step further. Cold War national animosities were ultimately not as significant as the growth of NGO’s (non-governmental organizations), shared cultures, and relations of communities within nations to similar communities in other nations. He employed the concept of global community to interpret the role of international organizations—including non-governmental ones—and their influence on international society. The book’s index has some four columns of organizations with names beginning with “International,” and others ranging from Amnesty International to YMCA, including the Committee on American-East Asian Relations. Iriye contended that a global international community enabled individual societies to become interdependent and coexist peacefully.

Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (2013) offered seminal guidance informed by his own scholarly journey on the “historiographic revolution” of the previous fifty years. In a bibliographic tour de force, chapter-essays characterized and commented on hundreds of books published over the period that showed the development, trajectories, and future of the field. Then, at the age of 88, Iriye joined Petra Goedde in the co-authored International History: A Cultural Approach (2022), an international relations history that foregrounded peoples and their cultures, not nations as such, and explored themes that crossed or ignored borders, like cross-cultural exchange, migration, consumer and youth culture, environmental issues, economic and technological globalization, and the interplay of nationalism and internationalism.

Iriye also maintained publishing platforms with a transnational approach. First, he contributed The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945 to the four-volume Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations that Cohen edited. While part of the foreign relations series, Iriye framed his volume as international history, chronicling the growth of U.S. global engagement during those decades. He accepted invitations for named lecture series at universities worldwide, choosing topics that advanced international and transnational history. China and Japan in the Global Setting (1992), for example, expanded from his 1989 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures at Harvard, argued that power struggles dominated relations between the two countries from the 1880s to World War I; cultural factors and internationalism held significant sway in the interwar period; and economics, trade, and investment became central from the postwar era through the 1980s. A peaceful future would depend on cultural exchange and commonality. Similarly, he developed Cultural Internationalism and World Order from the Albert Shaw Memorial Lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and Global Community from the 2000 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.

On another level, Iriye edited or co-edited volumes which hosted scholars who practiced international and transnational history and explored the possibilities of global history—with Bruce Mazlish, The Palgrave Macmillan Global History Reader (2004); with Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock, The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (2012); and with Pierre-Yves Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day (2012), a 1,200-page reference work with over 400 entries by more than 350 scholars from 25 countries. He also co-edited A History of the World Series, with Jürgen Osterhammel, a six-volume world history for Harvard University Press; with Rana Mitter, The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, which published works such as Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier’s Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (2007). Iriye published too many book reviews and individual articles to list here or even count, and this article has covered only his publications in English, not his substantial output of original works and translations in Japanese.

Xu Guoqi characterized Akira Iriye as a “modern Confucius” in his citation for a Kalamazoo College honorary doctorate in 2001. He generously offered guidance and support to his own students, colleagues, and any earnest scholar who sought his counsel, earning respect and admiration from disciples and peers worldwide. His students and friends showed their appreciation with festschrifts to celebrate his 70^th and 80^th birthdays, respectively. His global honors included in 1982, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2005, the Japanese government’s Order of the Sacred Treasure, in 2013, a Japan Foundation Award, and in 2024 an honorary degree from Japan’s Chuo University.

In an era of profound personal and global uncertainty, Professor Iriye’s moral scholarship and commitment to peace remain profoundly worthy of emulation and remembrance. His legacy is one of prolific publication and mentorship. His passing marks the end of an era, but his intellectual legacy commands awe, and his monumental contributions remain a living memory. Professor Akira Iriye’s tireless modesty and strong advocacy bring to mind a proverb quoted by the classic Chinese historian Sima Qian—桃李不言, 下自成蹊 (táolǐ bù yán, xià zì chéngqī), that is, “the peach and plum trees are silent but (because their fragrance attracts visitors) under them a path is worn,” that is, a “silent influence draws followers naturally.”