Privateering versus Pirating Japanese Dictionaries

[Kiipu]

A more important lexicographic project in which I became involved was the pirating of Japanese-English dictionaries published in Japan, which suddenly were in great demand. Since it was wartime and all commercial treaties had been abrogated, the term “privateering” might be more appropriate than “pirating.” With a small fund obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation——Elisséeff and I had the Harvard Yenching Institute republish photographically a series of standard dictionaries, which we innocuously labeled the “American Edition.” These sold like hotcakes, producing big profits, which became a revolving fund for the publication of books that is still in use by the Institute. Had we been businessmen, we would have invested our own money and become war profiteers.

Reischauer, Edwin O. My Life Between Japan and America. Harper & Row, 1986. Pages 90-91.

[Akira Komiya]

Even worse was that at the end of WWI, all assets, including intellectual property rights of German companies in the United States were confiscated and auctioned off by the U.S. Government. Thus, Bayer became unable to sell their aspirin under its own brand in the United States until 1994 when it purchased Sterling Winthrop, the successor entity of Sterling Drug which originally purchased the trademark in 1918.
The efforts made by the US military during the war to cultivate a deeper understanding of its enemy was truly outstanding; for one they trained numerous personnel, many of whom who had no previous exposure to or interest in Japanese to become fluent in the language at the U.S. Navy Japanese/Oriental Language School, and second, they recruited Ruth Benedict, a Columbia University anthropologist, who, I am told, had no previous exposure to Japanese culture, to study Japanese culture, whose work culminated in the 1946 book, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
The father of one of my late brother's class mates, Harry Packard, was a U.S. Marine who graduated from the Navy's Japanese/Oriental Language School and later became an antique collector/dealer, whose collection formed the nucleus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Japanese art collection. The Packard Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Metropolitan Museum of Art