Bowles, Gordon Townsend, August 24, 1980

Gordon Townsend Bowles (June 25, 1904- November 11, 1991), the son of Quaker missionaries, was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1904. He attended the Tokyo Grammar School, one year of high school at Westtown Boarding School, and graduated from the American School in Tokyo in 1921. He received a bachelor's degree from Earlham University in 1925 and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1935. He remained at Harvard as an associate researcher until 1938, at which time he left for a one-year teaching position at the University of Hawaii. In 1942 he was recruited to work for the Board of Economic Warfare. According to Bowles, "The Board of Economic Warfare was created to assess Japan's economic potential and what was happening to it, what would happen in the future, and the need to cope with whatever Japan was at the termination of the war, whether it was burned out, bombed out or otherwise, to cope with the occupied areas." (Transcript 2, p.7) The agency changed its name from BEW to the Office of Economic Warfare and then became the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA). FEA was dissolved and, in the fall of 1944, Bowles and others were brought into the Department of State. He was transferred to the Division of Cultural Cooperation, where he initially focussed on areas liberated from Japan and then shifted his attention to the reorientation of Japan in general and to educational reform in Japan in particular. He was a member of the 1946 United States Education Mission to Japan. After the Occupation, he taught anthropology at Syracuse University, where he continued his interest in anthropometry and Asia.