C. Douglas Lummis is a writer, former professor at

Tsuda College is a private women's university based at Kodaira, Tokyo. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious higher educational institutions for women in Japan, contributing to the advancement of women in society for more than a century. History The u ...

in Tokyo and former U.S. Marine.Japan Focus: Douglas Lummis
japanfocus.org

Life

Lummis was born in 1936 in San Francisco. He attended

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

on a Navy

ROTC The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC ( or )) is a group of college- and university-based officer-training programs for training commissioned officers of the United States Armed Forces. Overview While ROTC graduate officers serve in all ...

contract, and later did three years active duty in the Marines - the last year in Okinawa.Radical Democracy book
ecobooks.com He retired from teaching at Tsuda College in 2000. Lummis' writings - many of which concern Japan's relationship to the United States - are extremely critical of

US foreign policy The officially stated goals of the foreign policy of the United States of America, including all the bureaus and offices in the United States Department of State, as mentioned in the ''Foreign Policy Agenda'' of the Department of State, are ...

.Karel van Wolferen. "The most monstrous lie of the twenty-first century"
karelvanwolferen.com, jottings, articles, books, 19 Sep. 2011 His works include the books ''Radical Democracy'', ''A New Look at

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture'' is a 1946 study of Japan by American anthropologist Ruth Benedict. It was written at the invitation of the U.S. Office of War Information, in order to understand and predict the b ...

'' and ''Japan's Radical Constitution''. He has also published numerous pieces in journals such as ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper tha ...

'' and ''Japan Focus''.

Critical reception

Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...

has called Lummis "one of the most thoughtful, honorable, and relevant intellectuals writing about democratic practice anywhere in the world," while

Karel van Wolferen Karel van Wolferen (born 1941) is a Dutch journalist, writer and professor, who is particularly recognised for his knowledge of Japanese politics, economics, history and culture. Career as journalist, writer and academic After finishing high sch ...

has referred to him as an "eminent observer of the American-Japanese vassalage relationship." Lummis' ideas have been criticized by

Francis Fukuyama Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer. Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...

and others in ''

Foreign Affairs ''Foreign Affairs'' is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and ...

'' and other journals.Francis Fukuyama. "Radical Democracy, C. Douglas Lummis"
Foreign Affairs, September/October, 1996

Bibliography

* Charles Douglas Lummis, Sang-jung Kang, and Toshihito Kayano. ''Kokka to Aidentiti wo Tou n Inquiry into the State and Identity' (in Japanese). Iwanami Shoten, 2009. * Charles Douglas Lummis. ''Radical Democracy''. Cornell University Press, 1997.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lummis, Douglas American male writers Academic staff of Tsuda University 1936 births Writers from San Francisco Living people