Soon, George and the other language officers were reassigned to Japan. A few of them were placed in Military Intelligence, which was located in the large office building in the middle of Tokyo that also served as the Army Headquarters under General Douglas Macarthur. There, George was assigned to a unit working on the question of picking the first new postwar Primer Minister of Japan. He had to be someone clean of any involvement with Japan’s war effort. Of course, none of the Japanese Communists were considered, so the next best anti-imperialists were the Social Democrats and from them a certain Katayama Tetsu.
Katayama was thought to be the most qualified person, who would be acceptable to the American Government. Although he was a Socialist, he was also a Christian, which was a comparative rarity, but being a Christian was highly desirable for popular support in the US, where a “Socialist” was not too much more acceptable than it was to the Japanese electorate. After that first cabinet, there have been no more Socialist Prime Ministers in Japan, only Conservatives. But both the Japanese Socialist and Communist Parties have continued to exist and elect members to the Diet.
After finishing his military service, George returned to Columbia and finished his BA in 1946, then continued for an MA in 1949, before moving on to Yale for another MA in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1954. His first job was to teach Japanese and Chinese government in the Political Science Department at his old Alma Mater, Columbia (where he had actually majored in Architecture). While teaching at Columbia, he used his architectural training in building a house across the Hudson, in a new community called Palisades, NY, just above the New Jersey line.
It was in Palisades that George first met Edgar Snow and his second wife. He wanted to buy his house, because he liked the nouveau Japanese style that George had designed it in. George did not discuss Helen with him, knowing they had been divorced, and George had not yet met her, but George noticed later that his new wife, when doing a book on her husband, cut Helen out of group photos. George was quite displeased with her, and it reminded him of ‘Stalin doing that sort of thing’!
Not long after that, George met Helen Snow, recognizing her in an elevator at a conference. Although they quickly became friends, George did not mention Edgar’s name at first. But right away he spoke about his fascination with the Song Arirang and asked whether it would be possible for him to edit a new edition, if she had no other plans. She was at once amenable. In time George also came to know some of her friends, such as Sharon Crain, a neighbor of hers who helped her in her home near Madison, CT, and Professor Rittenberg, who had been in China and suffered in the Cultural Revolution, and Israel Epstein.
While he was teaching at Columbia, his first wife, Astrid (née Anderson, whose parents emigrated from Sweden), became pregnant. At about the same time, he applied for and, to his surprise, won a grant from the Ford Foundation (together with two other scholars), to do research on socialism in Japan. The West knew little about the first postwar Japanese Prime Minister, who was a Socialist, whom George had come to know while in the Army. Columbia gave him a leave of absence. The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, which was an affiliate of Tufts and Harvard Universities, was willing to administer the grant for them and provide temporary workspace and housing. So he immediately began commuting to Cambridge, MA. The work they did there culminated in his first book, The Social Democratic Movement in Prewar Japan (he was sole author), 455 pp. and Socialist Parties in Postwar Japan (together with Alan B. Cole, and Cecil H. Uyehara), 490 pp. Both volumes were published by Yale University Press in 1966.
Unfortunately, since George did not return to Columbia after one year, the University hired someone else to teach his courses, so, when he completed the Ford Foundation grant, he could not return to Columbia. George had to take a series of temporary teaching jobs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Michigan State, and the University of Rhode Island, before finally settling down at the University of Southern California (USC) in sunny Los Angeles in 1965. He taught Political Science at USC until he retired. George concentrated on China, Japan, and Korea and also served as the first non-linguistics Director of the new East Asian Studies Center.