12 January 2021
Author: Richard Dyck, Tokyo
Ezra Vogel, among the world’s foremost scholars of Asian studies, died on 20 December of complications during an operation. Ezra was a robust 90 years old, actively corresponding with friends and colleagues until the day of his death. This sudden, unanticipated loss of a scholar and close friend was a sad end to a challenging year.
There was nothing in Ezra’s early life to portend his eventual rise to prominence as an Asian scholar. He grew up in Delaware, Ohio a small town 20 miles from the state capital of Columbus. His parents, Joe and Edith Vogel, were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the Vogels were among the few Jewish families in this Protestant Midwestern town. His father owned a clothing store in town, where Ezra helped out after school. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University, where he majored in sociology as an undergraduate. After two years in the army, he entered graduate school at Harvard, where he studied in the Soci