E. Herbert Norman

Egerton Herbert Norman (September 1, 1909 – April 4, 1957) was a Canadian diplomat and historian. Born in Japan to missionary parents, he became an historian of modern Japan before joining the Canadian foreign service. His most influential book was Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (1940) argued that persisting feudal class relations were responsible for government oppression at home and the imperialistic expansion that led to World War II in Asia. During the Red Scare of the 1950s he was accused of being a communist or even a spy, though investigations found no corroboration and he was defended by Canadian authorities. He committed suicide in 1957.

Born and raised in Karuizawa, Japan where his father, Daniel Norman, was a Canadian Methodist missionary in Nagano province. He studied at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. In 1933-1936, he studied at Trinity College at Cambridge University. These were the years when Socialist Party students often moved to the left to join the Communist Party, and Norman came under the tutelage of John Cornford, who soon went to Spain and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. However, while his politics were left leaning, there is a controversy as to whether he became a communist and, more importantly, whether he was a Soviet spy afterward, as were other Trinity students, such as Guy Burgess.

Norman entered the graduate program in Japanese history at Harvard University in 1936, where he studied under Serge Elisséeff, the Russian émigrée Japanologist. He joined the Canadian foreign service in 1939 and received his doctorate from Harvard in 1940. During his time in England, he was a Marxist. "[H]e became heavily involved in the Socialist community and left wing student politics. There are numerous reports suggesting that he would spend his free time recruiting new students into the student socialist body.

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