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Foreword
This work has, in a way, been lost for fifteen years. After Hilary Conroy, my father, produced The Japanese Seizure of Korea: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations in 1960 and 1974, many people who valued his voice on international relations, diplomacy, and peacemaking awaited a work of wider scope. He himself had long planned to move out from the very specific terrain of Japan-Korea, 1868–1910, to the whole of East Asia and the Pacific, and even beyond. Yet, life intervened. Other projects, family needs, advancing years, and changing technologies stepped in, and his long-in-preparation work on East Asia and the Pacific remained unfinished, his voice unheard. In the meantime, U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy have suffered from lack of attention to voices like his.
What is this voice that we think is still so valuable? How does it fare, and how can it help in the twenty-first century? How does the fact that my father writes the “old” way in an attempted universal voice hold up in an era when some say that all voices are situated? What does his approach provide that we need? Does it really bridge the two eras?