Witness to the Twentieth Century: The Life Story of a Japan Specialist

In his autobiography Theodore McNelly describes his experiences as a student of music and French and how he ultimately become a leading American authority on Japanese politics and the Japanese constitution. As a child he acquired an interest in Japanese culture from his mother, who had been born in Japan of American missionary parents. His grandfather explained to him Japan's imperial constitution, adopted in 1889 during the grandfather's residence in Japan. Professor McNelly's first cousin twice removed, Edwin L. Conger, was the U.S. minister to China during the tumultuous Boxer Rebellion in 1900. His mother, a choir director and teacher of piano and voice, taught music to all four of her children. McNelly describes his experience as clarinetist in a boys band that gave concerts one summer on Mackinac Island and describnes the music that the band played. McNelly's father was a public school administrator, and the autobiography gives a notion of how the family, which included four children, was able to sustain a middle class style of life despite the the father's death at an early age and the Great Depression. When his high school performed the Mikado, Theodore sang the role of Pooh Bah, and later, at the All-State High School Music Clinic, his performance as an operatic singer won him a four-year scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin. At the university he sang leading roles in The Merry Widow and The Beggar's Opera. After only three years of high school and college French, McNelly won the title role in Anatole France's play Crainquebille. In his junior year, he played a lead role in Marivaux's Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, and won the Médaille de bronze of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for excellence in French language and literature. He earned an M.A. in French at Wisconsin, and taught French and English at Kemper Military School. McNelly discusses, on the basis of his training and experience, the relative merits of different approaches to the teaching of foreign languages. During the war with Japan, he was recruited by the U.S. Signal Intelligence Service, where he was trained in cryptanalysis and Japanese language. He describes codes and ciphers and the science of cryptanalysis. He helped to translate Japanese coded communications making possible the virtually complete destruction of Japanese shipping. After the war McNelly became an analyst in the civil intelligence section of General MacArthur's Tokyo headquarters, thus acquainting himself with the intricacies of subtleties of Japanese politics. At Columbia University he earned a Ph.D. in political science and Asian studies. His professors, Hugh Borton and Sir George Sansom, had been the principal American and British authors of Allied policies for the occupation of Japan. Under their authoritative direction, McNelly wrote his doctoral dissertation, which until 1991 was the only book-length description and analysis in English of the formulation of Japan's postwar democratic constitution. He was a consultant to the Japanese government's Commission on the Constitution. For seven years in the 1950s McNelly taught college courses in politics and history at American military bases in Germany, France, England, Japan, Okinawa, and Korea, making side trips to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. He describes the effects of World War II on the people of those countries and the reaction in Japan to the emperor's promulgation of a new democratic constitution. McNelly provides his interpretation of the collapse of the Fourth Republic while he was stationed in France. He gives a candid account of his life as a peripatetic bachelor before his marriage to the love of his life at the age of forty. McNelly has taught at Washington University (St. Louis) and Columbia University. During his thirty-year career as a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, he has received numerous grants for research in Japan, and le