George Oakley Totten III, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at USC College, whose life’s research promoted peace in the Pacific Rim and worldwide, died of heart failure on March 2 at the home of his daughter, Vicken Totten in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He was 86.

Director of the USC Korea Project and founding director of the USC-UCLA Joint East Asian Language and Area Studies Center, Totten was a former director of the USC East Asian Studies Center and chair of the Department of Political Science.

Fluent in Japanese, Swedish, Chinese, French, German and other languages, he authored, edited or translated 35 books and more than 80 articles relating to East Asian politics in Japan, Korea and China. He also studied the Asian languages system for Romanization – the representation of a written or spoken word with the Latin alphabet.

Totten joined USC College in 1965, retiring in 1992 after 27 years. He remained active, earning a USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. A year later, he delivered the Albert and Elaine Borchard Lecture titled “What Can Be Done to Establish Peace and Stability in Northeast Asia?”

Born July 21, 1922, in Washington, D.C., Totten was the first child of an American architect of embassies and a Swedish sculptress. In 1941, at age 20, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Totten joined the U.S. Army. His language skills prompted his deployment to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war on Moratai, an Indonesian island belonging to the Netherlands.

Although the target of gunfire, he remained uninjured when his division invaded Mindanao, a Japanese-held island in the Philippines. After Japan surrendered, he and others oversaw thousands of prisoners.

In 1948, Totten married Astrid Maria Anderson and earned a master’s from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Yale University. The couple had daughters Vicken and Linnea and was married for 27 years before Astrid died in 1975. Totten later married Lilia Li, a Chinese journalist with a daughter, Blanche Ma-Luk Lemes. They were married for 28 years before Lilia died in 2004.

He spent his final years re-editing and updating Helen Foster Snow’s Song of Ariran, a book about the history of the Korean independence movement and the Chinese Communist movement of the 1930s.

In addition to his daughters and stepdaughter, Totten is survived by six grandchildren.