How Two Graduates of this School Changed Librarianship in Japan

Robert Gitler, class of 1931, was the founding director of the first university-based school of librarianship in Japan, established in 1951 with U.S. Army funding at Keio University in Tokyo, where it still thrives. This is chronicled in his assisted autobiography Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School (1999). (More information)

Inquiry into factors that facilitated the success of the Japan Library School reveals the remarkable contribution of another of our graduates, Philip “Angus” Keeney, class of 1927, who is best known for winning a landmark intellectual freedom case in Montana in 1939. Keeney's important contributions to library services in Japan have remained unrecognized in the USA after he was dismissed as a suspected communist spy in 1947 and he and his wife, Mary Jane, became early victims of the “Red Scare” and the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. I will report on Keeney's achievements as part of the rich mosaic of U.S. influences on libraries and librarians in Japan during allied occupation after World War II.