Ezra Feivel Vogel

Ezra Feivel Vogel (1930–2020) was an American sociologist and sinologist who served as the former director of Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Fluent in Chinese and Japanese, he was one of the few American scholars versed in both Chinese and Japanese affairs. Seven of his works are included here, spanning social science, culture, biography, and politics. His representative works include Japan as Number One, Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb, and Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, as well as Is Japan Still Number One? and a four-volume set on contemporary Japan. His writing grew out of long-term observation and field research, addressing topics such as Japanese family and workplace life and China's reform process in plain prose that attends to how social structures actually operate. He died on December 20, 2020, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 90.