2004 Autumn - John D. Rockefeller III - John D. Rockefeller IV
JDR IV speaks across cultures
photography by Russ Widstrand / text by Mary Ord
The senator in his Capitol Hill office. The six-panel screen, depicting The Tale of Genji, was painted in the early 19th century in the style of the Tosa school, which favored subject matter from classics of Japanese literature. |
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John D. Rockefeller IV
U.S. Senator from West Virginia
Born in 1937, Rockefeller made his first trip to Japan in 1955, accompanying his parents for the opening of the International House in Tokyo (of which his father was a key initiator). After graduating from Harvard University in Far Eastern Languages and History in 1961, he worked for the Peace Corps and as a VISTA volunteer. His posts in West Virginia have included president of West Virginia Wesleyan College and two terms as governor. Since 1984 he has represented the state in the U.S. Senate. He was instrumental in attracting a Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant to West Virginia, and he continues to work tirelessly to open Asian markets to his state's products.
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John D. Rockefeller IV is an impressive man, not least for the fact that he is a U.S. senator who towers well over 6 feet tall. As a young man he spent three years intensively studying the Japanese language, learning to speak, read, and write with facility. The importance of language in cross-cultural understanding held high importance for his father, John D. 3rd, who worked for the establishment of English-language education in postwar Japan. He fervently believed that the more easily Japanese could communicate beyond their own shores, the more they could contribute to the world. How true that belief has proven to be.
As we compile this first-anniversary issue of Kateigaho International, I reflect on the fruits of JDR 3rd's efforts. In some measure our staff owes to him their ability to publish an entire magazine in the alphabet and words of their second language. So as I struggle to write instructions to the printer in Japanese characters on the magazine's page proofs, I am all the more impressed by the senator's linguistic dedication, spurred by the drive to foster cultural exchange that he inherited from his parents—a drive he carries forward today in his work as a U.S. senator and champion for his home state of West Virginia. In the midst of his busy schedule he graciously invited us into his senate office to discuss his and his family's love of Japan.
MO: I know that your father's involvement with Japan started in 1929 and increased through the '50s with the establishment of the International House in Tokyo, the revival of the Japan Society, and the establishment of the Asia Society... What were your earliest memories of your parents' interest in Japanese culture?
JR: Oh, my father's interest went back, I think to 1929, when he made that first trip and he was just grasped by it. In some senses, nobody else was paying a lot of attention to it. It was not so very long out of the isolation of the Tokagawa period and so he was in a sense discovering something sort of new. He wasn't a missionary, like Ed Reischauer or even John King Fairbank, who was a China specialist—they had missionary parents. He was a citizen who had this interest. And he always believed that if you wanted to understand a country, you had to understand its culture. I believe it too—it was the reason I went there to learn the language. But, more importantly, he believed it.
For example, after the end of the Second World War, the Japan Society in New York had been closed for obvious reasons. He opened it. It was not necessarily an overwhelmingly popular decision, but he opened it and became the patron in a sense. He created the Asia Society, which was about Asia in general, including Japan. And he and my mother took us on many trips to Japan when we were teenagers.
MO: How did their travels and friendships in Japan affect your life?
JR: Well, what do you think? I mean why was it that I went to Japan for three years to study the language? I didn't do the culture part and the art part, but I did what I thought was the most basic, which was learning the language, because at that time there were really very few American, non-military young people in Japan. And so even to this day, a lot of people remember that I was there, because I was sort of tall and thin and all of this, and I was studying their language for three years, 12 months a year, nonstop. Very intense, and that didn't teach me about Japanese art, but it brought me back to finish my studies at Harvard, where I changed my major to Far Eastern Languages and History, which then did involve me with art and culture and all kinds of other things. So in a sense, I think my father had a lot to do with what I did.
MO: How did your parents develop their knowledge of and taste in art? Who helped or influenced them?
JR: A variety of people helped. My father had very distinct tastes in Asian art. My mother was always more into the scrolls and paintings and screens. My father always was more interested in statuary. And I can't explain particularly why, but you could see it in our house as we were growing up, because he would always show you "such and such" a Buddha or some other thing from Japan, or perhaps from Cambodia, or China. He loved that, and he would study them for hours or for months before he would get them. But he had advice. His main advisor—who actually, along with me, gave a eulogy at his funeral—was Sherman Lee, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, who was an expert. They trusted each other. Sherman knew my father's tastes maybe even before my father did. I mean they were that close. And so he was very careful. You remember my grandmother and my grandfather had great interest in Asian art. And that was a time when Americans who were able to do so went through Asia buying incredible masterpieces for minimal amounts of money. I mean it really wasn't quite right, but they couldn't have bought unless someone was willing to sell...
MO: I think the Japanese are honored that your family collected such wonderful art.
JR: Well, I hope they are, but I hope they are also even more honored that they did the art.
MO: When you were in Japan, you spent time with the artist Shoko Uemura?
JR: Yes. What happened was, if you go to Tokyo to the International Christian University where I did my basic language studies, you learn something called Kanto-ben, which is one dialect of Japan. But if you go down to Kyoto or Nara, there's a different dialect. That's called Kansai-ben.
And so I went down for two purposes. I stayed with this family, the Uemura family. She—Shoen Uemura—had been the only woman who had ever won an emperor's prize for art. It was an extraordinary honor, and I stayed with her son Shoko and his family. None of them spoke any English, and I lived with them for six months. I became part of the house and part of the family.
MO: So you were immersed in the culture...
JR: Immersed, and we did things together. I would climb on my bicycle, which you could do in those days and still can—in Kyoto there wasn't as much traffic then, and I would go to Buddhist temples and do all kinds of things. It was just a great freedom.
MO: How did the people you met and your experiences from that time shape your personal aesthetic?
JR: I'll give you a wonderful example, and I'll just pray that my wife doesn't read your magazine.
We have a house here in Washington that has a garden. It's this big backyard and a garden. It was done by Frederick Olmstead, and that is considered a really good thing to have. But he believed, as I do, and as the Japanese do, that gardens are rocks, they are the bark on the trees, they are the rain, they are the moss, they are the greens of the various plants, they are the texture of a little stone lantern, and so on. My wife loves flowers, and so we've had this long dispute. I mean for the last 20 years, we've been fighting over this. I don't want any flowers in the garden, and that comes right from Japan, and it comes right from sitting in temples just contemplating and looking at the beauty—more beautiful in rain and mist than in sunshine always. So we've always had these disputes. Of course, she wins, but I keep my little areas of integrity. That's an example of my taste developed in Japan.
MO: Like your father and mother, you've cultivated business and other relationships in Japan. What do you hope the legacy of that will be?
JR: Oh, the legacy will be two things. One, it will be jobs for people in my state who need jobs, which brings me profound happiness. The other is that West Virginia is a mountain state. It's not on an ocean. It's not enormously international, but I determined that I was going to—through Japan and Taiwan—open up West Virginia to investments by those countries and open up the people. And it was very interesting.
I can remember in 1984 we had a joint venture with a Japanese steel company, and we raised a West Virginia flag, the flag of the company, and a Japanese flag. Well, guess what? The Japanese flag didn't stay up very long. That was only in 1984. Twelve years later, after I had numerous conversations and many, many visits with Dr. Toyoda—I go to Japan anyway on trade missions—Toyota built a plant in West Virginia. And when Dr. Toyoda came to open it, the county, which was a very rural county, let everybody out of school, and every parent and every family was lining the road waving Japanese flags where his car was parked.
MO: You made a difference.
JR: It made a difference, and it shows that people's minds can be opened when there are good things that benefit both sides.
MO: We understand that your Uncle David still eats his meals off Japanese porcelain. Are there elements of Japan in your daily life?
JR: Well, the elements of Japan in my daily life are my books and my Japanese studies, which I'm looking at as we talk, and The Tale of Genji on my wall, which Sharon and I bought in Kyoto in 1967 on our honeymoon. And there is the Ohashi behind you, which is actually a temple rock garden. You can see the rocks. The gold is the life in the rocks, and the white is the sand. It's that whole business of the beauty of Japanese gardens as seen in temple gardens. And then I have a lot of Hiroshige, many other kinds of things, and I have scrolls, which I open up more and more infrequently, because they become more and more fragile. Beautiful things.
MO: Do you have favorite things left to you by your parents?
JR: Yes, I do have some Asian things, but they're not from Japan. They left me some statuary, for example, a Tang dynasty dog from China that's 600 to 900 AD, and I have a beautiful piece from Southeast Asia of a many-armed Buddha, and other things. But in my office, as you can see, the two main things are Japanese paintings.
MO: You bought the screen on your honeymoon?
JR: Yes. There are actually two of them, a pair. I have one of them at our house in West Virginia. And, of course, the importance of The Tale of Genji, which I don't have to explain for Japanese, is that it was written by this woman, Lady Murasaki, who wrote the first novel in the history of the world, in the 11th century, and so we brought it back, and I treasure it.
Articles from the 2004 AUTUMN issue:
Articles from the 2004 AUTUMN issue:
Kateigaho International Edition Issues:
2005 SUMMER - 2005 SPRING - 2005 WINTER
2004 AUTUMN - 2004 SUMMER - 2004 SPRING - 2004 WINTER
2003 AUTUMN - INAUGURAL ISSUE
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