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Ideology and Libraries - California, Diplomacy, and Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (Paperback)
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Ideology and Libraries - California, Diplomacy, and Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (Paperback)
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In 1950 Robert L. Gitler went to Japan to found the first
college-level school of library science in that country. His
mission, an improbable success, was documented in an assisted
autobiography as Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School
(Scarecrow Press, 1999). Subsequent research into initiatives to
improve library services during the Allied occupation has revealed
surprising discoveries and human interest of the lives of very
diverse individuals. A central role was played by a librarian,
Philip Keeney, who later became well-known as an alleged communist
spy. A national plan, designed for Japan's libraries, was based
directly on the county library system developed by progressive
thinkers in California, itself a dramatic story. The School of
Librarianship at the University of California and its founding
director, Sydney Mitchell, was found to have deeply influenced key
figures. The story also requires an appreciation of the deployment
of American libraries abroad as tools of foreign policy, as
cultural diplomacy. Meanwhile, library services in Japan were
seriously underdeveloped, despite Japan's extraordinarily high
literacy rate, very well-developed publishing and book retail
industries, and librarians who were far from backward. The
difference in library development lay in the huge divergence
between the ethos of the American public library (dominated by
support for individual self-development and Western liberal
democracy) and the evolving political ideology of Japanese
governments after the Meiji Restoration (1868). After absorbing
authoritarian French and German administrative practices Japan
became a militarist dictatorship from the 1920s onwards until
surrender in 1945. The literature on the Allied Occupation of Japan
is vast, but library services have received very little attention
beyond the creation of the National Diet Library in 1948. The story
of initiatives to improve library services in occupied Japan, the
role of libraries as cultural diplomacy, the dramatic development
of free public library services in California have remained unknown
or little known - until now.
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