Thursday, June 13, 2024
Richard Jacob Smethurst, a noted scholar of modern Japanese history at Pitt for 46 years, died May 4, 2024, at 90.
A memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. June 17 at the Church of the Redeemer, 5700 Forbes Ave., Squirrel Hill.
Dick Smethurst was hired by the history department of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences in 1967 (simultaneously with his wife Mae’s hiring in the classics department). He served as chair (1988-1994), and in the 1990s became a research associate in the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan and in the Business Faculty of Keio University.
He published three books, the first of which was “A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community” (University of California Press, 1974), based on his doctoral dissertation. It is a study of the Imperial Military Reserve Association and related organizations, examining the role they played in rural villages and their promotion of army causes, focusing on the Yamanashi Prefecture.
This was followed by “Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940” (Princeton, 1986), based on interviews with many former tenant farmers whose work dated to the beginning of the century. Smethurst discovered that their memories of pre-war experiences did not match the current scholarly orthodoxy, and that the government drained the peasants through an exploitative land tax, forcing them more and more deeply into tenancy, debt and poverty, causing them to fall prey to the military and radical right. He also found that there was a general increase in rural prosperity over these years, and that the average peasant had “both a better standard of living and a greater sense that he could control his own life than most interpretations of rural society allow.”
He received fierce criticism about the book, especially from those with a Marxist historical interpretation, resulting in one of the most heated debates in the field in that decade in the pages of most of the major journals, in both Japanese and English. Smethurst’s side of the story can be found in the essay, “A Challenge to Orthodoxy and Its Orthodox Critics: A Reply to Nishida Yoshiaki” in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 417-437.
His final major book was “Takahashi Korekiyo: Japan’s Keynes, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). While studying the Japanese economy of the early 1930s, he became fascinated with the life of one of the key economic figures of that period, and shifted his focus to a biography of Takahashi. The book is a mixture of intimate biographical detail and insightful analysis of the finances and bureaucracy of Japan during the long period when Takahashi served as a Bank of Japan official, finance minister (seven times), and, briefly, prime minister, and received widespread acclaim.
He was also a key figure in the creation of the University’s East Asian Studies program, including an interdisciplinary master’s degree. Smethurst and the other members of the program, together with library staff, helped to create an East Asian studies collection whose holdings rival that of more prominent institutions.
He and his wife Mae, who published frequently on noh and kyōgen, as well as Greek drama, regularly hosted Japanese noh and kyōgen troupes, as well as contemporary theater troupes, for performances and workshops at Pitt. They also actively collected Japanese arti prints, which became the basis of a major 2007 exhibit that they co-curated at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh. Together, they amassed one of the largest private collections of Noh block prints in the world, particularly those by Tsukioka Kōgyo, much of which has been donated to the University and were published in the digital archive Tsukioka Kōgyo, The Art of Noh, 1869-1927.
Dick Smethurst was working on Japanese military history and the causes of World War II in his final years. Some of his findings were published in the article “Planning for War: Elite Staff Officers in the Imperial Japanese Army and the Road to World War II” (The Asia-Pacific Journal, November 2020).
He was born in 1933 in Carlisle, Pa., and grew up partly in New Jersey, where he graduated from Montclair High School in 1951. At Dickinson College in Carlisle for his undergraduate years, he majored in history and graduated cum laude in 1955, winning the Morris Prinz prize for outstanding history major. After a stint in the Army as an intelligence officer, he and Mae, whom he had met at Dickinson, married in December 1956.
After studying Japanese at the Army Language School in Presidio, Calif., Smethurst was posted to Japan, Mae followed him, and they both developed a life-long connection to Japan and its people. While in Japan, Dick Smethurst became friends with J. Thomas Rimer, who later would become a noted scholar of Japanese literature and a colleague at Pitt.
Following Smethurt’s Army tour in 1959, the Smethursts pursued graduate work at the University of Michigan. Dick Smethurst received a master’s degree in Japanese Studies in 1961, and he and Mae received their doctorates there in 1968. Mae died in 2019, just short of their 63rd anniversary.
– Andrew Hall, associate professor of Modern East Asian History, Kyushu University, Japan, and a former Ph.D. student of Richard Smethurs