August 31, 1999
LAWRENCE -- In the summer of 1940, James J. Halsema had finished college and headed to the seventh Japan-America Student Conference in Japan.
Unaware Japan would attack Pearl Harbor the following year, propelling the U.S. into World War II, Halsema kept a diary of his experiences as an American in Japan. Now his diary is being published electronically by the University of Kansas Center for East Asian Studies. Web browsers and people interested in reading the diary will find it on KU's Center For East Asian Studies Web site after Sept. 9. The center's Web address is: http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~ceas.
Now a retired foreign service officer and former journalist, Halsema, of Glenmoore, Pa., will attend a public ceremony at KU at 4 p.m. Sept. 9 in the Sunflower Room of the Burge Union to launch his 1940 diary on the Internet. The Japanese consul general in Kansas City, Mo., and his staff have been invited to join Halsema, KU faculty and representatives of the Japan-America Student Conference from Washington, D.C., at the KU ceremony.
In 1976, KU was the host for the Japan-America Student Conference in the United States. The chair of the 1976 conference, Robert Irving, a KU alumnus living in Lawrence, will attend the launching ceremony.
Grant Goodman, KU professor emeritus of history, who learned of Halsema's diary through casual conversation, encouraged him to share his diary with others interested in modern Japanese history.
Diaries can serve as documents of events, personalities and the evolution of events and trends, Goodman writes in the online introduction to Halsema's diary.
Goodman describes the then 21-year-old's observations of Japan, Korea, Manchuria and China on the eve of the Pacific War to be incredibly astute.
Halsema's childhood and young adulthood was spent in the Philippines where his father was a public works engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After his summer in Japan, Halsema returned to Baguio, the Philippines, where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese on Dec. 27, 1941, and was released in 1945.
From 1945 to 1948, Halsema was a Philippines correspondent for the Associated Press. From 1949 until he retired in 1979, he was a U.S. foreign service officer with overseas information and cultural programs.
Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, (785) 864-8853 or mjdunlap@ukans.edu.