Renowned Asia scholar Chalmers Johnson dies at 79

In 1982, Dr. Johnson released "MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975," where he reported on the Japanese government's control over the country's capitalistic market.

It was in the research for that book that Dr. Johnson said he initially became disenfranchised with what he would later term "American imperialism" abroad and led him "to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported."

His weakening opinion of the expansion of unchecked military influence on U.S. foreign policy was solidified in 1995 after three American servicemen in Okinawa were convicted of raping a 12-year-old-Japanese girl.

In Dr. Johnson's mind, the troops should not have been stationed in Okinawa - the location of one of the Marine Corps' largest installations overseas - in the first place.

The military leadership, Dr. Johnson argued, suffered from an impulsive need to build and maintain bases in foreign countries that was formed during height of anxiety in the Cold War.

Constructing and keeping U.S. military property and manpower overseas was little more than colonization, Dr. Johnson said. The policy, he added, would ultimately poison America's long-term interests and bankrupt the country not only money but also political clout. Dr. Johnson dissected his theories on American imperialism with a series of books, beginning in 2000 with "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire."

Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein called Dr. Johnson's book a "take-no-prisoners tirade against what he portrays as classic imperial overextension worthy of Rome or the Ottoman Empire" and could be subjecting itself to retribution in which the 1993 "World Trade Center bombings and other anti-American terrorist acts may be just the beginning."

The review continued that Dr. Johnson had effectively issued "a useful and timely alert," but ultimately concluded the book was "marred by an overriding, sweeping and cranky one-sidedness."

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however, Dr. Johnson's theories gained significant traction and "Blowback," became a bestseller.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson was born Aug. 6, 1931, in Phoenix.

At Berkeley, Dr. Johnson met Margaret Sheila Knipscheer, who was enrolled in a class for which he was a teacher's assistant.

"He gave me my only B," she recalled on the phone Monday from their home in Cardiff. They married in 1953. Besides his wife, survivors include a sister.

Dr. Johnson said he was a longtime supporter of the Vietnam War but said he realized too late in life that he should have "stood with the antiwar protest movement."

In a July 2009 op-ed piece in the Times, Dr. Johnson wrote that the more than 800 U.S. military facilities around the world are part of "an in-your-face American imperial presence" that the country could simply not afford.

"Make no mistake," Dr. Johnson wrote, "whether we're being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it."