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Apart from several years of judo as a youth in Chicago, his first contact with Japan and Japanese was in Miyazaki and Kyoto early in 1947 with the U.S. Army. He graduated from Northwestern (1949) in philosophy, studied economic history at Strasbourg Universite on a Fulbright, and then spent two years (1951-53) as a graduate student at Kyoto University. He entered the Harvard Graduate School in 1953 and received the Ph.D. in 1959. While writing his thesis he taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst (1957-59), but returned to Harvard in 1959, where he has remained ever since -- except for year long stints as a visiting professor at Kyoto, Tokyo, and Keio universities. At Harvard he taught for many years with Edwin O. Reischauer, John K. Fairbank, Benjamin Schwartz, and Henry Rosovsky, and more recently, with Harold Bolitho, Andrew Gordon and Akira Iriye. He served as Associate Director of the East Asia Research Center (out of which the Reischauer Institute emerged), Director of the Reischauer Institute, Chairman of the Ph.D. program in HEAL, and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (1976-1987). His research has focused largely on the transition from Tokugawa to modern Japan. Among his writings are Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (1961), East Asia, Tradition and Transformation (1989, with John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer), Heritage of World Civilization (2000), and Heritage of Chinese Civilization (2001). He is presently doing research for a book on Fukuzawa Yukichi.

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