SNA (Tokyo) — Ivan Parker Hall, author of landmark book Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop, died in Berlin on February 1, 2023, at age 90.

Before I start writing another obituary, please let me pause and talk about our very close relationship: Ivan Hall fundamentally changed my life into an activist researcher in Japanese Studies.

It wasn’t always this way. When I first arrived in Japan during the latter 1980s, I was in fact a cultural relativist. Carefully trained in the non-judgmentalism of the liberal arts, I had the mantra of “who am I to judge Japan?” It had its own way of doing things, and would get along just fine without one white Western interloper (or even the outside world) telling it what to do. As per my classic Edwin O. Reischauer Ivy League training, Japan was one of those precious “culturally unique” jewels that should just be left to flourish in its own way.

That’s why at first I was a devoted scholar of the “Japanese Way.” After all, Japan must be doing something right. Its people were living the longest in the world. Its economy measured per capita had just surpassed that of Americans. It was buying up major world assets on the strength of the Yen. Our next boss, according to movies such as Back to the Future II, was going to be Japanese.

It took just one stint working for an abusive Japanese trading company–and the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble–to disabuse me of those early notions.

But it wasn’t until I became a Japanese university professor that I saw just how much the Japanese system was wasting talent due to racism. Japanese faculty hired full-time were getting permanent tenure from Day One, while almost all foreign educators (who were often more qualified than their Japanese counterparts) were getting permanent, insecure contract work.

Enter Ivan Hall, who summed this situation up most pithily as “Academic Apartheid.”

The abusiveness of this system became absolutely clear during the “Great Gaijin Massacre” of 1992-1994. The Ministry of Education, a institution with a totalitarian stranglehold over Japan’s educational accreditation, funding, and content, made sure that an estimated 70% of foreign faculty over the age of 45 were all summarily fired through contract non-renewals.

It was about to get worse: Asahi Shinbun reported in 1993 that universities had interpreted ministerial directives to mean that all foreign faculty above the age of 50 in the highest salary brackets were to be fired; the Ministry had also ruled out new foreign faculty hires over the age of 35.

Of course, Japanese full-time educators, all on permanent tenure, were exempt from this dynamic, but apparently not for long. The ministry received a recommendation from their University Deliberation Council in 1995 that all Japanese should be put on contracts too.

At last, the ministry had found the perfect ruse to clean out Japan’s education system of the despised obstructionist leftists in teachers’ unions.

Ivan, who at the time was contracted at a prestigious Japanese university, spearheaded a group called Teachers Against Discriminatory Dismissals (TADD) with other concerned foreign and Japanese scholars, lobbying various governmental organs both domestic and foreign to redress this injustice.

They brought up issues of educational reciprocity and exploitation. Imagine the outrage and damage that would have been done to US universities if foreign faculty–and only foreign faculty–were never eligible for tenure-track work? And how about summarily firing long-contributing older foreign faculty merely because they’re suddenly too expensive?

These were explosive issues that might cause any union firebrand to lose their cool over in public.

But not Ivan. He presented the best face of the foreign academic to the Japanese system: a rotund, articulate, and avuncular senior citizen who resembled Benjamin Franklin, talking softly and patiently like your kindly old uncle, cajoling and admonishing like he knew what was best for everyone.

Disarming, earnest, sincere, and ingratiating, Ivan helped make TADD into an effective organization, garnering attention both internationally (including a shocking expose in well-respected Nature magazine) and on Japanese print and TV media. He ultimately shifted the view of Japan as “misunderstood eccentric society” to a “secretive bureaucracy that willfully encourages fundamental inequalities.”

Ivan P. Hall was born in Bulgaria to American missionary parents in May 1932. Always comfortable in intercultural settings, he studied his way from Groton School into elite education, graduating with a Bachelors in European History from Princeton. According to his autobiographical and final book Happier Islams (2016), he entered the US diplomatic corps and posted with the United States Information Service (USIS) at the tender age of 26 at the US Embassy in Kabul. Later he was transferred to Dhaka.

As the Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer, he promoted the English language and American values, often through community outreach and dramatic stage productions. In 1961, he left USIS, disillusioned with the US policy’s short-sightedness towards Islam and Islamic countries, and turned his attention to Asia.

He graduated from Harvard in 1969 with a Doctorate in Japanese History, finding government jobs promoting mutual understanding between the United States and Japan.

Many years later, sitting down for tea and sympathy during his frequent visits to my home in Honolulu, Ivan would regale us with stories of the skulduggery within the US-Japan relationship. His most-repeated tale was of the Americans shutting down Ivan’s Japan branch of the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Education Exchange (CULCON) because the mutual understanding industry in US diplomacy wasn’t overtly rewarding in economic terms, and thus lost support from US President Ronald Reagan’s Milton Friedman-following neocons.

This was a watershed moment for Ivan. According to accounts from friends and family, he started out as a Rockefeller Republican, but after living amongst enough Republicans who saw the world purely in terms of US hegemony or personal profit, he left the comfort of the diplomatic corps.

Still, he didn’t take the typical route befitting his pedigree–a prestigious job at one of America’s elite universities–because, as noted in his autobiography, he was worried about becoming the stereotypically complacent “ugly American” policymaker and pundit, incurious about what life was like for non-Americans within their own societies. Instead, he became a contracted faculty member at Japan’s most prestigious universities, living the life of an academic in a state of perpetual challenge, adding Japanese to his German language abilities, and writing the occasional journalistic piece in addition to his academic research.

That is, until the skulduggery of Academic Apartheid pushed him to the forefront of a movement, and caused our paths to intersect.

I was the one who sent TADD the “smoking gun” of the 1995 University Deliberation Council plans to contract all academics, which I found in my university mailbox.

The timing turned out to be excellent. It further vindicated Ivan’s reports to US Ambassador Walter Mondale and Minister of Education Kiyoko Kusakabe.

Kusakabe publicly and aggressively questioned the intentions of the ministry to “gaijinize” all faculty in Japan, muffling their academic freedom with threats of contract non-renewals.

Mondale in particular wrote a letter of support in which he noted how he’d also gotten the German and British Embassies involved. He spoke in public and remained interested and concerned about the issue for as long as he was ambassador. That support changed the course of Ivan’s campaign.

Ivan returned the favor that I had been able to do for him.

My then-wife was expressing trepidation at whether my involvement with TADD would put my university job in jeopardy. When I mentioned this to Ivan, he did something only he could do. He sighed and whispered to me gently, but with those furrowed disapproving brows, “well, I guess they’ve gotten to you too.”

That was when I realized, after all the bullying from blindly following the “Japanese Way,” which was perpetually subordinating me as a foreigner, that I needed to stop giving up my power voluntarily. From then on, like Ivan, I would seek justice and redress through the Japanese system like any Japanese could. After all, some Japanese can and do protest things that are wrong.

In the end, TADD’s efforts mattered. Shamed by the public exposure, the ministry eventually amended the contract system to allow some foreigners to receive tenured positions as well. Thirty years later, equity is still far distant (the norm remains that foreign full-timers get contracts while Japanese get tenure), but without Ivan’s activism and exposure of the issue, things might have turned out much worse for everyone.

After the issue crested, Ivan saw the writing on the wall and he retired, but he remained an activist. Cartels of the Mind came out in English and Japanese, and it was noted as one of the Best Business Books of 1997 by Businessweek. His follow-up book, Bamboozled: How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and its Implications for Our Future in Asia (2002), was a deeper exploration of Cartels and was reviewed positively by Foreign Affairs magazine. Ivan also served on research boards, spoke at academic conferences, and even taught for a little while in China “to buff up” his Chinese.

He devoted the last two decades of his life to seeing friends and family in New York, Japan, Thailand, Hawaii, and Germany. He visited me regularly, twice-a-year for days on the beachside and evenings mentally editing his memoirs. He assiduously mentored me through my public activism, first with the university contracts issue, then the Otaru Onsens Case (published as Japanese Only in three editions), and finally with my own Doctorate on racial discrimination in Japan (published as Embedded Racism in two editions).

Ivan’s constant encouragement remains in stark contrast to just about every other “collegial academic” I ever knew, suddenly too busy to mentor acolytes when they needed advice and support. Ivan was always there, even as deafness took away his ability to converse, and age-related impairments slowly took away his ability to use the keyboard.

Others have said the same of him. Droves wrote in to share their memories. He was straight-shooting devout Anglican who lived without judging or proselytizing to others; a veteran of a Princeton crew who coached friends’ sons on rowing and training techniques. Above all, his wit, charm, sly humor, and intellectual insights was his gift to those who knew him. His memoir Happier Islams gives a good sense of what he was about.

In his nephew’s words, using his family sobriquet, “Vani was brave, risking ostracism in his small world of Western Japan hands by publishing books calling out the Japanese for their persistent racism and cultural and intellectual xenophobia, and the West for its persistent myopia, naivete, and ignorance.”

Ivan spent his life, using his own words, as “a sidelined heterodox.”

Personally, I suggest we see Ivan’s life in one of two ways: either a template for those who spend a lifetime in pursuit of truth-telling and justice; or as a cautionary tale for what happens to the people who dare to.

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