Japan Before Pearl Harbor

choi

Tom Nagorski, Watching the Rising Sun. Ahead of war, the US ambassador to Japan saw reason to hope for rapprochement. FDR's advisers saw Japanese militarism and perfidy. Wall Street Journal, Nov 28, 2022
https://www.wsj.com/articles/our ... ing-sun-11669582638
(book review on Steve Kemper, Our Man in Tokyo; An American ambassador and the countdown to Pearl Harbor.
Note:
(a) Joseph Grew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Grew
(1880-1965; "He is best known as the ambassador to Japan from 1932 [appointed by Republican President Herbert Hoover] to [Dec 8,] 1941" when Japan and US severed tie after Pearl Harbor attack)
(b) If America was so antagonistic against Japan, why should China have fought so hard against Japan, with Chiang Kai-shek depleting his elite forces?
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When Joseph Grew returned to Washington after a decade in Tokyo—the Pacific War now well under way -- he went to see Cordell Hull [secretary of state 1933–1944], FDR's secretary of state. Grew was carrying a confidential report about his time in Japan as the US ambassador. It included a catalog of Japanese belligerence but also an account of what Grew believed to be the Roosevelt administration's failure to seize diplomatic opportunities in the runup to war. His half hour with Hull did not go well. "If you thought so strongly," Hull said, "why didn't you board a plane and come to tell us?" He then ordered Grew to destroy the report—or "we will publish it and leave it to the American people to decide who was right and who was wrong."

Was Grew right to blame Hull, his aides and ultimately Franklin Roosevelt for ignoring his advice and missing a chance to avert war in the Pacific? Or was Grew -- as Hull believed -- a naive diplomat whose empathy for the Japanese colored his thinking? Steve Kemper’s stirring “Our Man in Tokyo” is, in large part, an attempt to answer such questions.

An ambassador's role can be many things: ceremonial, tedious, dramatic even dangerous. In rare instances, it can be as exhilarating and consequential as any line of work. Grew's tenbure in Japan fits squarely in the last category. Grew presented his credentials to Emperor Hirohitoin June 1932 and was still ambassador when he received the news, nine years later, that Japanese aircraft had attacked Pearl Harbor. Serving in Japan, he wrote in his diary, was "like living on a volcano, never knowing when an explosion is going to occur."

Grew was a son of privilege whose family has been in Massachusetts since before the American Revolution. His father assumed that Joa\seph would head for Harvard and then into business. Joseph did go to Harvard but opted for the Foreign Service; his father was appalled. He served in Berlin during World War I, joined the peace commision at Versailles, and took up ambassadorial posts in Denmark, Switzerland and Turkey. Then he landed in Tokyo.

For Americans, Japan in the early 1930s was a welcoming place. American businesses had taken root, US naval vessels docked for layovers, and all manners of American VIPs passed through. Mr Kemper, a journalist and independent historian, includes wonderful asides on the visits of Helen Kelle, Douglas Fairbanks [actor] and Babe Ruth, to name a few. But as the decade wore on, Jaan veered toward extreme nationalism, and the atmosphere soured. By decade's end, Hitler youth organizations had opened shop in Tokyo, and American journalists who questioned Japan's policies were tossed in jail.  

As ambassador, Grew sought out a broad range of Japanese politicians and immersed himself in the culture. He acquired a profound understanding of both moderates and nationalists and of the sources of Ja[amese grievance. He came to believe that there were "two Japans" -- one pacifist and warm-hearted, the other beset by fanatic militarism.

Herein lay the root of Grew's troubles. Time and again the duplicity and aggression of the Japanese would test his faith in diplomacy; But he also resented the fact that Hull and others in Washington ignored the other Japan -- the moderate politicians worth supporting in pursuit of peace. Where Grew saw nuance and reasons for hope, Hull saw Japanese perfidy -- or, as he once said, a "highway robber."

"I seem to be fighting two governments at once," Grew wrote in his diary in 1940. In Washington, he tangled most often with a bureaucrat named Stanley Hornbeck, who ran the Asia desk at the State Department. Hornbeck had never served overseas and, in Mr Kemper's telling, had little time for the opinions of those who had. He buried Grew;s reports, certain that the ambassador was hopelessly soft or naive about Japanese ambitions. All this matter because Hornbeck had a clear channel to Hull, while Grew was on the the side of the world sending cables to make his views known.

Those cables are the spines of Mr Kemper's account. Some tell stories of Japanese troops pouring into China, of the mass rapes and massacres at Nanjing and the bombing of American properties around Shanghai. Grew describes the bombast of nationalists who speak of a new, Japan-centric "Asiatic order" and justify Tokyo's entry into the Axis with Germany and Italy. But in his missives to Washington, Grew regularly counsels patience and engagement with Tokyo. It was his nature to absorb bad news and from the Japanese, set aside his own frustration and then call for statecraft.

"Our Man in Tokyo" is meticulously researched, and Mr Kemper mined Grew's diaries and other primary sources top great effect. As for his central thesis -- that Hull and FDR ignored their man in Tokyo and thus missed the chance to avert war -- it is not always persuasive. With the evidence Mr Kemper offers, one might conclude that the men in Washington agreed with Grew's diagnosis but not his remedies. Grew argued for dialogue and meetings, including a last-ditch, face-to-ace for FDR and Japan's prime minister in 1941. Hull's reflex was to reject such suggestions unless Japan offered concessions: What had Tokyo done to deserve a meeting with the American president? From Grew's perspective, any meeting was worth arranging as the crisis deepened and nightmares loomed.

But it was also Grew who consistently described the futility of engagement. In a September 1940 telegram, Grew wrote that :diplomacy has been defeated." At another point, listening to the empty pledges of a Japanese official, Grew imagined "another headstone in the graveyard of Japanese promises," as Mr Kemper puts it.

Hull and FDR had spent a lot of time in that graveyard, and they had the benefit of intelligence intercepts providing yet more evidence if Tokyo's duplicity. Still, one needn't agree with the author at every point to appreciate "Our Man in Tokyo." It is gripping history, offering both drama and suspense, even when we all know how the story will end.

Mr Nagorski, the global editor at Grid, is the author of "Miracles on the waters; The heroic survivors of a World War II U-boat attack."