The focus of his research and thinking first turned to the United States, China, and Japan's interactions in the period leading up to the Pacific War, a war which he experienced first hand as a child. His first book, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931, based on his PhD thesis, made use of the multi-archival and multi-lingual research which characterizes his scholarship. The book presents the argument that the collapse of the "diplomacy of imperialism" after Treaty of Versailles left a vacuum in the East Asian international system, a theme also explored in his 1972 Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911. But his 1981 Power and Culture: the Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 explained in more optimistic terms the almost instantaneous transition in 1945 from racial all out war to alliance in terms of underlying cultural parallels between the two countries. Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, first published in 1965, surveys nearly two centuries of interaction, but is more than a synthesis of scholarship in the field; it looks at how the thinking elites and policymakers in the three countries interacted, a theme explored in the conference volume Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations. This approach used but moved beyond traditional diplomatic history by incorporating cultural perspectives, shown also in his work on the Cold War, including The Cold War in Asia, and the co-edited conference volumes The Origins of the Cold War in Asia and The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960. However, the focus of his thought was moving in new directions and beyond East Asia. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1988, "The Internationalization of History," Iriye pointed out that "at one level, this will necessitate the establishment of closer ties between the American and overseas historical communities. At another level, the effort will entail the search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries. At still another level, each historian will have to become more conscious of how his or her scholarship may translate in other parts of the world." In his 1997 Cultural Internationalism and World Order and the 2002 Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World he looked at the growth of NGOs and global consciousness rather than diplomacy, and called for new levels of thought and analysis.
Selected works
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Akira Iriye, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 300+ publications in 5 languages and 17,000+ library holdings.
After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931. Reprinted:.
Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations. Reprinted: Chicago: Imprint, 1992.
Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911.
Warren I. Cohen, Akira Iriye, eds., The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960 .
Fifty Years of Japanese-American Relations
Akira Iriye, Michael J. Barnhart, eds., "Above the Mushroom Clouds: Fiftieth Anniversary Perspectives," Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4.2 : 89–179.
The Globalizing of America
Cultural Internationalism and World Order.
Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World
Holt World History: The Human Journey.
Akira Iriye, . The 1989 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures
The Human Rights Revolution, co-edited with Petra Goedde and William Hitchcock
