riflRIN COUNTY FREE LIBRARY

1 nt CLASH

U.S.'IAPANESE
RELATIONS
THROUGHOUT
HISTORY

Walter LaFeber
ISBN 0-393-03950-1 US' ^;?995
CAN. /.9.99

The Clash
When Commodore Matthew Perry sailed

into Tokyo harbor in July 1853, open-

ing Japan to the West, Americans and

Japanese immediately began to clash with each

other. For the past century, this clash has

focused especially on which nation would take

the lead in developing China's economic poten-

tial. The relationship between the United States

and Japan and the competition over China

remain immensely important, highly explosive,

and little understood on either side of the

Pacific.

In part the clash is over two different

forms of capitalism. For four hundred years,

Japanese history formed a compact, homoge-

neous, closely knit society that, for good reason,

is terrified of disorder. On the other hand,

American history has formed a sprawling,

pluralistic, open-ended society that fears

economic depressions and continually seeks an

open international marketplace. These two

styles have led to an increasingly sharp set of

disagreements that continue to escalate.

Walter LaFeber, one of America's leading

historians, has written the first book to tell the

entire story. Using a full array of American and

'
(continued on back flap)
 >yiviv uciificff
\^1

'^ 3 111101743 7417

DATE DUE

Mi
DEC 1 Z
P^i^RBse
> t
S'l^ '*

MAV 2
I i

MAR?_3
m 17 1999

*v
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010

http://www.archive.org/details/clashhistoryofusOOIafe
Also by Walter LaFeber

The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since ij^o

Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central Am-erica

America, Russia and the Cold War, ig4^—igg6

The Am-erican Search for Opportunity, i86^—igi^

The New Empire

The Panama Canal; the Crisis in Historical Perspective

TH
CLAS
A Historyy oi
U, S.— Japan
Relations

Walter LaFeber

W •
W •
NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

Ccypyright © 1997 by Walter LaFeher

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., ^00 Fifth Avenue,

New York, NY loiio.
The text of this book is composed in 11/13 Fairfield LH Light
with the display set in Lucian BT Roman
Composition and Manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
Book design and title page illustration by Margaret M. Wagner
Cartography by facques Chauzaud

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LaFeber, Walter.
The clash : a history of U.S. -Japan relations / by Walter LaFeber
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-393-03950-1
I. United States — Foreign relations — ^Japan. 2. Japan — Foreign
relations — United States. I. Title.

E183.8.J3L34 1997
327.73052'o9— dc2i 96-48565
CIP

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. loiio
http://www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton 8c Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WCiA iPU

1234567890

^
 This book is dedicated to

Dale and Nellie Corson Frank and Rosa Rhodes

Japanese names are usually given in Japanese form, that is, sur-
name first (for example, Yoshida Shigeru). Exceptions are made
when Japanese authors publish in English and give their surname
last (as in American usage), so readers can more easily track down

these references if they wish. In accordance with many English-

language works, long vowel marks have been omitted from Japa-
nese words.
The term "Americans," with apologies to neighbors north and
south, is used synonymously with U.S. citizens for purposes of
word variation and succinctness.
Contents

Preface xvil

I. Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 3

Two Peoples 3

First Encounters with a New West 7

The Appearance of the Americans 9

Harris's Triumphs, Us Assassination ly

The Americans and the Birth of Modern Japan 23

II. Joining tbe Club (l868-1900) 32

Two Systems 32
Two Systems, Two Imperialisms 40

Joining the Imperialists' Club: Ito, Gresham., and the

"Pigtail War" 4^

Clash Over Hawaii ^^

Joining the Imperialists' Club: The "Splendid Little War" and

a Not-So-Splendid War ^y

When Americans and Japanese Were Friends 62

III. Tbe Turn (l900-1912) 6^

Powers and the Boxers 6^

Yam^agata, Roosevelt, and the Russo-Japanese War y^

X I
 Contents X i i

Manchuria: The First Clash 84

The Crisis in California —and Beyond 8y
Manchuria: The Second Clash 92

IV. Revolution. War. and Race (l 9 12-1920) 99

An Old Europe, a New Asia ()()

Yamagata, Wilson, and the 'Frontier" of a Revolutionar)'

China loi
California: 'Another Race Problem" 104

The Tivo-Front War: 1^14-1^18 106

Siberia: The Bitter Choice 116

Paris 120

V. Creating tke New Era: From Washington to

Mukden (1921-1931) 128

Hoover, Lamont, and the New Era 128

Treaties of Washington, Black Chambers of New York City 132

"The Tranquillizing Processes of Reason": The
1924
Immigration Act 144

China Once Again 146

"They Still Need Us—and That Is Probably What Annoys

Them": 7929-7937 753

VI. Tke Slipknot: Part 1 From Mukden ... 760

The ig^os as a Model for U.S.-Japan Relations 160
The Crises in Wall Street and Manchuria 161

Takahashi, Hull, and the Race Between Trade

and Politics
Toward War 1J4
Wars and Actors 182

VII. Tke Slipknot: Part 2 ... to Pearl Hartor 186

Tightening the Knot 186

The Co-Prosperity Sphere igi

The Attempt to Cut the Knot: Pearl Harbor 797

Contents X i i i

VIII. World War II: Tke ClasK Over Two Visions 214

Tenno versus the "Laws of the Machine" 214

California Goes to War: The Relocation Camps, and Hollywood 218

The Failure of the Japanese Machine 223

"We Are Being Played for Suckers": The Enemy Begins to Replace the
Friend in U.S. Postwar Planning 231

Truman and the Destruction of the Yalta System^ 239

The "Double Shock" —and the End 246

IX. To Create a New Japan: Relormin^, Reversing,

Warring (l945-195l) 257

"Give Me Bread or Give Me Bullets" 257

The First Occupation (1^4^—4j) 262

The Second Occupation (i^4j—^o): The Americans 270

The Second Occupation (ig4y—^o): Japanese, Americans,

and Chinese 275
Korea: The War for Japan — "A Gift of the Gods" 283

X. The 1950s: The Pivotal Decade 296

"Japan . . . Has a Unique Capacity for Good or Evil" 296

Deming, Dulles, and the Great Choice: China or Vietnam? ^01

A New Cold War ^10

The Explosion Over the Security Pact (ig^y—60) ^14

XI. A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears (1960—1973) 325

The "Miracle" of Ikeda —and Other "Merchants of Transistors" 325
Kennedy, Ikeda, and the Illusion of "Equal Partnership" 332
Johnson, Sato, and Vietnam, ^^S

Nixon and Sato — or "Trading with the Enemy" ^48

The Nixon Shocks 352

XII. Tlie End of an Era (Since 1973) 359

The Watershed of the Cold War Era 359
Needed: American Bodies, Not American Banks — Or, Japan as
Number One ^6^
Contents X i V

The igSos: From "Ron-Yasu" . . . y/o

. . . to Two Competing Capitalisms . . .

^j^
. . . to "Relations Have Not Been So Low Since ig6o" 379
"The Cold War Is Over, the Japanese Won" ^81

The Gulf War: A Case Study of the Clash ^8^

The iggos: "American Policy in Asia Begins with Japan" 389

Conclusion. Tke Clash: Tke Present in Retrospect ^^6

Notes 4oy

BiDlio^rapny ^61

Acknowlea^ments ^.8l

Index ^8^^

I
"I DO BELIEVE we [in the United States and Japan] do practice differ-
ent forms of capitalism. The differences, I think, are increasingly famil-
iar. What is needed, I think, is a harmonization to some degree, but not
a homogenization."

—U.S. Ambassador to Japan

Michael Armacost, June 1993

"Recent international trends indicate that racial rivalry has yearly

become more intense. It is a striking fact that the Turkish and Balkan
wars of the past ... all had their origins in racial rivalry and hatred.
Furthermore, the exclusion of Japanese in the state of California . . . and
the discrimination against Indians in British Africa are also manifesta-
tions of the racial problem. . . . [After the war in Europe is over] the
rivalry between the white and colored peoples will intensify; and perhaps
it will be a time when the white races will all unite to oppose the colored
peoples."

— Yamagata Aritomo, August 1914

"In the Far East, peace can be permanently secured only if the two
great Powers lying on either side of the Pacific work together in harmony
and understanding. . . . The first evidence of this should be our common
attitude towards the Chinese nation."
— Thomas Lamont, operating head of

J. P. Morgan, in Japan, March 1920

"The question of Sino-Japanese relations is always the essential pre-

occupation of Japan's foreign affairs."

— Pierre Renouvin, La Question

d'Extreme-Orient, 1840—1^40 (1946)

"He pointed out that policy is really a series of responses to chal-

lenges, and that the responses are largely determined by, first, our own
principles of conduct and ethics, and, secondly, our concept of ourselves
as a nation and its past in the world."

—Confidential record of George Kennan

speaking to U.S. ambassadors, 1950
Pref ace

On December -. 1964. the New York Council on Foreign

Relations commemorated the t\vent\ -third anni\ersan" of the Jap-
anese attack on Pearl Harbor by convening a private meetmg to
discuss U.S. -Japan relations. An exchange developed among John
K. Emmerson (longtime State Department expert on Japan), Pro-
fessor James Morley (a distinguished Columbia Universit)^ analyst
of East Asian affairs), and Robert W. Barnett ia top State Depart-
ment specialist on Asia):

Mr. Emmerson thinks it important that recently the Japanese

are not sure whether to call themselves Far East or Far West.
They talk about themselves as a bridge between Communist
China and the West. To Mr. Morlev. the Japanese regard
themselves as hanging between two cultures, rather than
identifying with either one.
Mr. Barnett ex-pressed hope that both of the above analvses
were right, but feared they might be wrong. He had never
seen a Japanese, he said, who China without [1)
talked about
a feeling of admiration for the long Chinese tradition, and (2)
a feeling that any Japanese could outsmart any Chinese over
^
any issue.

Significantly, the discussion occurred as the Japanese eco-

—
nomic "miracle was beginning that is, as Japan surprisingly
emerged to challenge a U.S. industrial powerhouse that had

X V 1 I
 —
Prefa X V I I I

dominated international markets since the end of World War II. The
exchange also took place as American fear of Communist China was
peaking. China had exploded its first atomic device earlier in 1964 and
was condemned by U.S. officials for stoking, if not actually controlling,
the wearisome war in Vietnam.
These words of December 7, 1964, illustrate the three themes of this
book. although (with the significant exception of 1931 to 1945)
First,

Americans and Japanese have generally seen each other as partners in

most East Asian affairs, they have in truth endured a series of some-
times highly dangerous clashes during their 150-year relationship. The
began at the beginning: U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry used
conflict
cannon to open a highly reluctant Japan to U.S. interests in 1853. The
clash extended into the 1990s, when public opinion polls revealed that
with the end of the Cold War, Japanese and Americans saw the other
rather than the Soviet military — as now posing the greatest threat to
themselves.
A second theme is that at the root of these problems has been, and
continues to be, a clash between two different forms of capitalism. A
powerful Japanese finance ministry official explained the difference in
the 1990s by declaring that the United States followed capitalist market
policies, while Japan followed a non-capitalist market policy. This exag-
geration made the point: some four hundred years of Japanese history
formed compact, homogeneous, closely knit society that, for good
a
reason, is terrified of disorder. It has sought to avoid disorder with a
strong central government, which guides the subtle, informal networks
that run the economy. For some two hundred years, on the other hand,
American history has formed a sprawling, pluraUstic, open-ended soci-
ety that, for good reason, is terrified of economic depressions and
sought to avoid them by creating an open international marketplace. In
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, "international" meant
the frontier, the western part of the North American continent, as well
asEurope and Latin America. After the 1840s, "international" has also
meant what Emmerson and other prominent Americans called the "Far
West" — that is, Asia.
Thus the book's third theme; the clash of the two capitalisms has
focused on China. Perry forced Japan open because Washington offi-
cials wanted it as a strategic way station to the potentially rich Chinese

markets. For their part, the Japanese, as Robert Barnett indicated, have
seen China as both a source of their culture and as their own frontier of
opportunity Through the late nineteenth century, Japan and the United
States cooperated in their China policies. They cooperated largely
 —
Prefa

because both so feared the Russian Empire s advance into North China.
After Japan defeated the Russians in 1904-05 as a yellow race tri-—
umphed over a white race with an efficiency that stunned Americans
—
and Europeans the Japanese set about establishing their own empire
on the Asian mainland. By 1915-20, Washington approached flashpoint
with Tokyo over Japan's pressures on China and intervention in Siberia.
The Washington Conference of 1921-22 one of the most signifi-—
cant, and overlooked, diplomatic meetings in American history
resolved these conflicts. But only temporarily. The conference worked
out a deal: Japan received de facto naval superiority in the western
Pacific in return for agreeing to work with New York bankers in devel-
oping parts of China. Even during the 1920s, this deal brought order
neither to Japan nor to an increasingly revolutionary China. After 1929,
the agreement crashed as its foundation, the dollar, collapsed.
Japan s military then took matters into its own hand. The zaihatsu —
those immense, family-based industrial-banking combinations that
—
powered the economy cooperated with the military to try to break free
of dependence on the West. The zaihatsu, as always, received help from
an extraordinary government bureaucracy. As the Canadian diplomat E.
H. Norman explained in a pioneering book published on the eve of
World War II, this military-industrial-governmental phalanx came
together not in the 1930s but during the Tokugawa (1603-1867) and
especially Meiji (1868-1912) eras.^
The United States had deployed powerful governmental-mercantilist
measures of its own — tariffs, immense subsidies to producers and rail-

way builders, currency manipulation — to become the globe s premier

economic power by World War I. Once they climbed to that pinnacle,
however, Americans, not surprisingly, were determined to open up
world markets so their booming factories and farms could find profits
and their burgeoning, pluralistic population could find employment.
They, like the Japanese, focused a business eye on the Asian mainland,
even as Japan moved to seal off parts of that vast market.
Unlike the Japanese, however, Americans viewed Asia as only part
of a larger opportunity. While Japan historically stressed the importance
of East and Southeast Asia for its survival, the United States developed
a global vision that saw those Asians as part of a much larger structure.
Americans and Japanese clashed not only because of China questions,
but because Japan saw the Asian mainland as all-important, while the
United States saw as all-important an open global system that could be
undermined unless East and Southeast Asia became integrated into
that system. In the end, Americans went to war in 1941 because they
Prefa X X

could not resolve their differences with Japan over China, especially
how China was to be integrated into a global marketplace.
The dollar's collapse in the 1930s and then World War Us horrors
only confirmed to Americans that their global vision had to be made
real after 1945. Their domestic order and prosperity rested on it. And
by the mid-i940s, they finally seemed to hold the power to realize such
a vision. A fundamental step was the occupation and restructuring of a
devastated Japan. But, in one of the many entertaining ironies in U.S.-
Japanese relations, Washington officials concluded that Japan could
only survive — —
and be saved from communism if it developed a great
export trade. That decision, in turn, led to the American-supported re-
creation of industrial-banking combinations that could produce com-
petitive exports. It also led to the re-creation of a powerful government
bureaucracy to guide these combinations and gear the overall economy
to meet the needs of this trade. The Japanese, under the leadership of
Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, used the U.S. occupation for their own
purposes. As Yoshida observed, "History provides examples of winning
by diplomacy after losing in war."^
The pivotal part of Japan's policy proved to be control of capital and,
as it turned out, virtual exclusion of U.S. investment. Americans
learned from the 1930s that closed economic blocs (as in Japan and
Germany) and that appeasement (such as the deal made
led to war,
in 1938 at Munich with Hitler) only encouraged aggressors. Japanese,
however, learned two quite different lessons from the 1930s: they should
never again be dependent on outsiders for capital; and that means other
than militarism must be found to exploit frontiers of economic opportu-
nity in East Asia.
The end there. Japanese exporters required both raw
ironies did not
materials and markets. By the late 1940s, U.S. officials had decided that
Southeast Asia would best fulfill both requirements. That these officials
had gone to war with Japan in 1941 in part because Tokyo insisted on
creating a closed "co-prosperity sphere" in Southeast Asia was now irrel-
evant. If Japan did not have an open Southeast Asia, then, as John
Foster Dulles and other top officials warned, it would either be forced
to dump products on the United States, or — —
even worse begin making
Communist China. Out of this U.S. approach came the
deals with
commitment to Vietnam. Out of this approach also came a bitter Amer-
ican-Japanese clash over policy toward Vietnam and China in the 1960s
and after.
While the United States bogged down in the Southeast Asian quag-
mire, Japan opened trade relations with the North Vietnamese Commu-
Prefa

nist regime, made billions of dollars by supplying the U.S.-South

Vietnam war effort, and began moving back into China. Richard Nixon's
historic trip to Beijing in 1972 was like a starter's pistol that set off

Americans on yet another race for the China market. After economic
reforms began in 1978, China promised to be the world's largest econ-
omy in the early twenty-first century. Intense competition for this mar-
ket was obscured — in part by a growing outcry over Japan's immense
favorable trade balance with the United States, in part by the common
interests of the U.S. -Japanese security partnership that targeted the
Soviets and allowed Japan to maintain a small, relatively cheap military
establishment.
Nixon's closest foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, hoped to play
China Japan for American benefit, even if
off against it meant Japan

might build nuclear weapons. The Japanese, he was recorded as telling

the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, "are mean and treacherous but they pur-
sue their own They "will go nuclear at some time.
interest." He said . . .

that the Chinese would worry if the Japanese began to increase their
defense expenditures. He said that it is all right. . . . He said it is good
to keep the Chinese concerned.'"^
A series of events in 1989—91 once again changed the relationship.
First, China's massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square in early June
1989 revealed important differences between the American and Japa-
nese views of whether human rights should receive priority over trading
privileges. Second, the crisis in the Persian Gulf during 1990-91 deeply
embittered the relationship when Japan refused to reverse its post-1945
anti-military policy and help the United States. Even its considerable
financial aid was sent reluctantly, which was not surprising given the
growing differences between American and Japanese interests in the
Middle East. Third, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that had ruled
Japan since 1955 fell apart, the victim of corruption and inept leader-
ship. Fourth, the post-1960 economic "miracle" ended as a result of
overspeculation and, as some would have it, of overregulation by the
powerful Ministry of Finance and Ministry of International Trade and
Industry (MITI). Fifth, the death of the Soviet Union on December 25,
1991, removed the common enemy that helped Americans and Japanese
ignore their differences. Trade and China questions moved to the fore-
front —
so much so that they became weapons used by Bill Clinton to
defeat George Bush in the 1992 election, and then shaped Clinton's
own foreign policies.^
Through all this turmoil, Japan's economic policies changed remark-
ably httle. It continued to guard jealously its capital sources and regula-
Prefa X X t 1

tory society.As U.S. Ambassador Michael Armacost observed, while

Japanese invested hundreds of billions of dollars in American property
and Treasury securities, all foreign investments in Japan amounted to
only 0.3 percent of gross national product —
and were falling. While
Japanese automakers built vast plants in the United States, less than
half the Fortune 500 companies had a presence in Japan, and frequently
those only held a minority stake in a joint venture. The Japanese sys-

tematically gained access to U.S. technology, but meanwhile ensured

that foreigners had little access to their own. A critical part of their

technology was designed for dual use (both civilian and military). Until
1983, Tokyo used legalistic excuses even to prevent export of its defense
technology to its protector, the United States.^
The post— Cold War policies of the two nations will necessarily blend
the new and the old. The new is the redefinition of their security treaty
so it will counter the powerful centrifugal forces that threaten the rela-

tionship. For Americans, the security arrangement gives them their

most effective lever to influence Asian developments. For Japanese, it

allows them to depend on the United States for protection (especially

against a militarizing China), while pouring investment into profitable

civilian goods rather than into military budgets. For Chinese and South-
east Asians, the treaty also provides security — against the possibility of
a remilitarized Japan.
Americans have thus stationed nearly fifty thousand troops and over-
whelming naval and airpower in and around Japan to protect their fore-
most economic competitor and help give that competitor easier access
to a reassured East and Southeast Asia. Such poHcies (and ironies) are
—
deeply rooted in and can only be understood in the context of 150 —
years of U.S. -Japan relations. The differing economic and social sys-
tems, competition over China, the U.S. attempts to integrate Japan into
a Western system on Western terms, often blatant racism all go back —
to the beginnings of the relationship. So does the ongoing argument
over interpreting the relationship's history. The embittered debates in

1995 over how

view the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to
fifty years before exemplified how history was manipulated by both

Americans and Japanese to justify their own policies past and present.
Noone author has examined the entire post-i85os relationship in a
single volume for several decades. This book attempts to do that and,
in addition, to present a quite different history of the relationship than
was provided by the 1995 debates. WiUiam Faulkner famously observed
that 'The past is never dead. It is not even the past."^ He could have
been explaining the clashes between the United States and Japan.
THE CLASH
 —

Irresistible Porce,
Immovable Objecjb

Two Peoples

Americans, were on the move. "Before him Hes a

as usual,
boundless continent, and he surges onward as if time pressed and
he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions," wrote the
observant French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, as he minutely
examined the American in the early 1830s. These people ''daily
quit the spots which gave them birth, to acquire extensive
domains in a remote region," he noted with awe. ''Millions of men
are marching at once towards the same horizon; their language,
their religion, theirmanners differ; their object is the same. For-
tune has been promised to them somewhere in the West, and to
the West they go to find it."^
By 1850, this landed West had largely been claimed by the
Americans. A war for conquest against Mexico between 1846 and
1848 brought California and much of the Southwest into the
Union. A near war with Great Britain, and then panicked negotia-
tions by U.S. officials, had added the Oregon Territory. Suddenly
possessing some of the worlds finest harbors on the Pacific
Ocean's eastern rim, Americans now looked toward a new West
the islands of the Pacific and the countries of East Asia, where
vast populations promised opportunity for trade and profit.
THE CLASH 4

Tocqueville had understood this destiny nearly a generation

before the United States occupied the continent's west coast. "The
Americans [are] destined by nature to be a great maritime people. . . .

They will become, like the English, the commercial agents of a great
portion of the world." he wrote. They produced more than they needed,
they enjoyed superb ports, and they employed cheaper ships and better
sailors than other nations. Moreover, they were already beating the Brit-
ish in Asian trade, especially in a race for the greatest of all Asian
markets, China:

The European navigator touches at different ports in the course of a

long voyage; he loses precious time in making the harbor or in waiting
for a favorable wind. . . . [But] the American starts from Boston to
purchase tea in China; he arrives at Canton, stays there a few days,
and then returns. In less than two years he has sailed as far as the
entire circumference of the globe and has seen land but once. It is
true that during a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brack-
ish water and lived on salt meat; that he has been in a continual
contest with the sea, with disease, and with weariness, but upon his
return he can sell a pound of his tea for a halfpenny less than the
English merchant, and his purpose is accomplished.

In all, Tocqueville summarized with both accuracy and sarcasm, Ameri-

cans "do for cheapness what the French did for conquest" — that is,

develop it into a national system. The Frenchman's sketching of the

U.S. -China trade was largely accurate, although many ships did stop in
California or Hawaii for rest and more trading.^ Notably, the United
States did not open formal diplomatic relations with China until 1844,
about a decade after Tocqueville wrote.
After forging this link with China and occupying the west coast
springboard, American attention to Asia intensified. New technology,
especially the primitive railroads that sped internal commerce to ports,
and the beautiful clipper ships that cut sailing time across oceans, fur-
ther riveted this Far Eastern focus. The British called this region "the
Far East." Washington officials continued to use the term, but in the
ever-expanding arena of American history, it wasmore accurate
clearly
and revealing to think of it as the Far West. A popular American maga-

zine wrote in 1852 that "Twenty years ago the 'far west' was a fixed
idea resting upon a fixed extent of territory"; but now U.S. officials had
discovered "a 'far west' on the isles of the Japanese Empire and on the
shores of China." One editor directly linked the Indians and Japanese:
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 5

"The same law of civilization that has compelled the red men ... to

retire before the superior hardihood of our pioneers will require the

people of the Japanese empire to abandon their . . . cruelty."^

Americans tended to think of Japan and China as two distinct coun-

tries hnked for U.S. traders in one common opportunity. At first the

interest in Japan was not solely for trade, but for using the islands as a
way station to the already mystical markets of China. Sailors washed
ashore from the wrecks of ships once involved in China trade or the
equally lucrative whaling business would be better treated than had
their unfortunate predecessors if the Japanese were taught civilized
manners. From the beginning of this relationship, Americans saw Japan
China as the third point. The Japanese
as part of a giant triangle, with
came to view the United States and China similarly This perspective
shaped Japanese and U.S. foreign policies for the next 150 years.
By the early 1850s, Tocqueville's "great maritime people" thus were
focusing on a civilization profoundly unlike their own. The United
States occupied much of the North American continent; Japan was an
island nation one-twenty-fifth the size. (In the twentieth century, four
of the fifty were each larger than Japan.) The American
American states
continent held great mineral wealth and natural resources; the Japanese
islands were extremely poor except for coal. The United States was
about 75 years Japans state could be traced back unbroken over
old;

2,500 years to 660 B.C. when, as history and mythology held, the first
emperor, Jimmu Tenno, sat on the throne. Over the centuries, and espe-
cially between 600 and 800, Japan adopted Buddhism, Confucian-
a.d.

ism, language, and even administrative practices from the great Chinese
civilization. Americans adopted Christianity, language, and governmen-

tal Western Europe transformed by the post- 1400

principles from a
Renaissance and Reformation. The Japanese language, while grown
from Chinese roots, was extremely difficult to learn, especially in its
written form, and related little to other languages; Americans used
English, and sometimes German, Italian, Spanish, or variants of
French — all related to languages understood over large areas of both
the so-called Old and New worlds. The languages revealed a specially
divisive characteristic: while Japans people were homogeneous — less

than I percent being non-Japanese —the American teemed with peoples

from many European, Latin American, African, and, especially after
i860, Asian cultures. In the United States the melting pot had not
melted and blurred those cultures, but produced a mosaic of peoples.
In Japan, the melting pot never needed to be turned on."*

Perhaps, however, an equally great difference between the two peo-

 —
THE CLASH 6

pies in the nineteenth century (and indeed, long after) lay in their views
of order and, as a corollary, their views of the role their national govern-
ments played in maintaining that order. Tocqueville was amazed at the

ever restless, ever-climbing-upward Americans: "All are constantly

seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation," but "few contem-
on a great scale." The poet Walt Whitman bragged in
plate these things
midcentury that "Yankeedoodledom is going ahead with the resistless
energy of a sixty-five-hundred-thousand-horsepower steam engine." Sel-
dom, if was American society more changing, expansive, explo-
ever,

sively pluralistic, and open to the different cultures and practices of

new immigrants. Americans, indeed, not only rushed westward, but

rushed toward civil war.^
They were free to follow this headlong pursuit of wealth for a number
of reasons. Americans believed they had quite literally been born free
that is, that they were born, or had come to live, in a land free of feudal
institutions (guilds, orders, religious and governmental institutions) and
other restraints found in Europe after 1200. Lacking a feudal history,
Americans wondered why peoples in Europe or Asia were not similarly
unrestrained. Moreover, Americans in the mid-nineteenth century
ruled a vast land that seemed endlessly open for settlement and exploi-
tation. Several million Indians had stood in the way, but they were being

systematically exterminated or contained on reservations. The central

government's role in all this was not to regulate, restrain, or harmonize
the society, but to release it — to provide the highways, canals, currency
policy, and military protection required for the expansion of
tariffs,

Whitmans "Yankeedoodledom." Midcentury America reveled in the

relentless, individualistic, acquisition-for-ascent that Tocqueville had
recorded with jaw-dropping wonder.^
Japan belonged to a different world. A Japanese "constitution" of 604,
attributed to Prince Shotoku, stated in its first article that harmony,
above was most to be valued. That early and forever after ^Japa-
all, — —
nese emphasized harmony, or wa, over acquisition-for-ascent. Not that
passivity was tolerated. Prince Shotoku s document had as Article VIII:
"Let the ministers and functionaries attend the court early in the morn-
ing and retire late. The business of the State does not admit remissness,
and the whole day is hardly enough for its accomplishments." For more
than a thousand years Japanese practiced a strong work ethic. It was an
ethic, unlike the American, exercised within feudal institutions that
formed during the next twelve hundred years, and over a constricted
territory rather than limitless frontiers. Within this space and these
institutions, Japanese leaders beheved, wa alone held back disorder,
anarchy, and destruction.^
 ^

Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 7

Not that disorder disappeared. Japanese history is pockmarked by

and assassinations. In 1942, a New York Times reporter
uprisings, riots,
entitled a book about Japan Government hy Assassination. For fifteen
years after Japan opened to the West, periodic wars, even civil war,
occurred —one reason why then and later leading Japanese linked West-
ern influence and internal disorder. But before and after that era, the
Japanese fervently assumed that society and their own happiness
advanced on the wheels of consensus and harmony, much as Americans
credited their success to openness and acquisition-for-ascent. The
Americans liked to say, "The squeaking wheel gets the grease." The
Japanese proverb ran, "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down."
Long before 1800, officials had discouraged nails from sticking up. As
Buddhism grew after its introduction from China in the seventh cen-
tury, so too did its principles of discipline and mediation. By iioo a new

military class, the samurai ("one who serves"), became the right hand
of the Shogun, a military ruler living in Edo, the present Tokyo. The
Shogun was the center of power. But he and all Japanese swore their
allegiance to the Emperor, whose divine origins extended back to
—
Jimmu Tenno, although his actual power exercised from his throne in
the magnificent and isolated city of Kyoto —
was mostly ceremonial. The
Shogun presided over a system whose key agents were about 260 feudal
lords, or daimyo, who ruled over provincial centers where Japanese daily

life was both focused and governed.^

First Encounters with a New W^est

Propelled outward by the search for gold and Christian converts, and
often guided by the technological discoveries of the Renaissance,
explorers from a new Western Europe moved across the globe in the
early sixteenth century. In 1542, storm-tossed Portuguese sailors landed
in southern Kyushu. They carried firearms which Japanese had never
seen. Seven years later, Jesuit missionaries appeared; the Japanese
allowed them to proselytize. By 1582, the missionaries claimed 150,000
converts, despite considerable language barriers. Suddenly in 1587 the
great miUtary ruler Hideyoshi threw out the missionaries. To make his
point clear, he crucified both foreign and Japanese Christians. Hidey-
oshi then tightened his political links with the samurai and undertook
a "sword hunt" in which all weapons were seized from everyone except
the samurai. Forever after, the holding of firearms by private citizens
was considered unacceptable by the society, and one crucial contribu-
tion to wa was in place.
THE CLASH 8

In 1603 the powerfulTokugawa family began its rule as Shogun, a

rule that lasted for two and a half centuries. In 1640, as if by premoni-
tion, the Tokugawas decided that wa could best be maintained by clos-

ing Japan to the West. Any Japanese trying to leave or return to the
islands could receive the death penalty. To lessen the temptation fur-
ther, the Shogun ended all construction of oceangoing ships. Other

than selected Asians, only a few Dutch traders were allowed contact,
and then only through the artificial island of Deshima, built offshore
near Nagasaki. Trade with China did continue, and government-to-gov-
ernment relations developed with Korea. Otherwise the Japanese fol-
lowed the "closed country" (sakoku) policy. A trigger for this rapid

closing had been a revolt of 1637-38 led by Japanese Roman Catholics.

Trade and Christianity were now defined as disruptive and evil.

As a century of contact with the new Western Europe suddenly

stopped, an interesting paradox appeared: the vigorous people of an
island nation, surrounded by water and possessing ships comparable to

Europe's finest, voluntarily gave up trade routes that already stretched

into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, outlawed the making of
profit (or the taking of new weapons) from Westerners, and largely
closed itself off for the sake of internal peace. This closing off, however,
did not mean stagnation. To the contrary: the Tokugawa energetically
set about defining an orderly Japanese society as the center of Asia;
scholars now see the Tokugawa era as the base of post-i89os, and espe-
cially 1930s, Japanese expansion over Asia. As the less civilized Man-
chus swept over China in the seventeenth century, Japan saw itself as

the old China, that is, as Japan-as-central-kingdom. The Tokugawas

gave refuge to Chinese scholars, and even set up a form of tribute
system in which Korean, Ryukyu, and Dutch envoys paid homage to

the Shogun. Japanese self-isolation before the 1850s thus ironically led
to a self-definition and identity in the handling of foreign relations that
^^
helped propel Japanese expansion over Asia after the 1890s.
The Tokugawa Shogun based his power largely on military capability
and control of about one-quarter of the nation's rice crop. Peace was so

rampant throughout the land that the samurai, with Tokugawa encour-
agement, evolved from uneducated, brave warriors into learned and
highly competitive bureaucrats. This pillar of post-1868 Japan thus
began forming a century earlier. But the bureaucracy and the polity of
sakoku did not mean a lack of creativity. A flourishing middle-class cul-
ture bloomed that produced Kabuki theater, imaginative fashions,
influential painters, and lasting poetry. Important parts of this culture
were centralized in Nagasaki, where Japanese officials kept track of
^^
Western developments through the Dutch traders.
Irresistitle Force, Immovabie Object 9

Until 1800, foreign powers all but ignored Japan. The most aggressive
and powerful, Great Britain, disdained the tea and silk trade conducted
by the Dutch, a trade paltry compared with the British profits from
India, the Americas, and parts of Southeast Asia. In 1814, one British
official examined the record and flatly declared "that the Trade with

Japan can never become an object of attention for the Manufactures

and produce of Great Britain."Other foreign warships, however, now
cruised Japan's coasts, and the captains were not primarily interested
in trade.

Most ominous were the Russians. As they moved across Siberia into
the Amur River region and over to Alaska during the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, they clashed with fishermen from Japan's
northern islands. Both the Kurile Islands and SakhaUn were soon con-
tested by Russians and Japanese. In 1804 the Russian-American Com-
pany asked officials at Nagasaki for permission to trade with Japan so
the company could supply the expanding Russian settlements to the
north. The Japanese flatly rejected the request. The Russians decided
during 1806-07 to teach the Tokugawa a lesson by raiding villages in
the northern islands. The Japanese did not back down. Instead, they
captured a Russian official in 181 and held him for two years until
1

the tsar's officials finally apologized for the raids. Meanwhile, Japanese
writers began to warn that Russia posed the major threat to their coun-
try's security. By the 1840s and 1850s, this feeling grew intense as Japan
watched the Europeans exploit China. After Great Britain's victory over
China in the 1840-42 Opium War, a war that unsettled much of the
Pacific's western rim, the powers scrambled for concessions. The Rus-

sians dispatched Rear Admiral Evfimii Putiatin in 1842-43 to open trade

with Japan, but Japanese resistance and the trade's skimpy rewards led
Putiatin to put his considerable talents to work elsewhere. Ten years
later, Putiatin was again ordered to open Japan. When he entered Naga-

saki Harbor in August 1853, he found he was too late. The Americans
^^
had sailed into the bay at Edo two weeks earlier.

The Appearance 01 the Americans

These visitors had been propelled across the Pacific by their national
credo of "manifest destiny," their growing desire to conquer Asian mar-
kets, and —paradoxically— a fear of deepening internal crisis. The slo-

gan of "manifest destiny" had appeared in a feverishly expansionist

Democratic Party newspaper in 1845 that demanded the conquering of
Oregon, even if it meant war with Great Britain which also claimed
THE CLASH 1

the territory. The slogan came to mean

Americans ("with the calm
that
confidence of a Christian holding 4 aces," as frontier writer Mark Twain
later phrased it) believed they had God-given rights to spread both their

new and successful commerce across the conti-

political institutions

nent, then into Latin America, and to uplift, among others, the
benighted Europeans and Asians.
Driven by principle, Americans aimed also to gain profits. God and
Mammon, the larger purpose and the individual's earthly success, were
seldom far apart in mainstream American society. (In Japan, to the con-
trary, when a larger purpose — a Japanese manifest destiny —did
emerge, was seldom confused with individual acquisition.)
it

Between 1790 and 1853 at least twenty-seven U.S. ships (including

three warships) visited Japan, only to be turned away. In 1832, as part
of his epochal navigation of the Pacific, Edmund Roberts received
orders from the Andrew Jackson administration to make a treaty with
Japan, but he died before reaching the islands. Five years later, the
Morrison, owned by Americans in Canton, tried to enter Japan with the
excuse that was returning shipwrecked Japanese sailors. The crew,
it

however, hoped to Christianize Japanese as well as "trade a little."

When shore cannon opened fire, the Morrison beat it back to China. In
1846, Commodore James Biddle, head of the newly created U.S. East
Asia squadron, carried on heated talks with Japanese officials near
Tokyo Bay, only to have them emphasize they had no interest in trading
with him and that he need not try a second time. To demonstrate their
point, when Biddle tried to force his way onto a Japanese ship a crew
member knocked him down.^^
Meanwhile U.S. whaling vessels worked the rich Japanese coastal
waters and often (as in 1848) forced their shipwrecked sailors on the
unkind mercies of Japanese villagers. Whaling became a metaphor for
the American crossing of the last great frontier of the Pacific, and the
hubris that compelled individuals to challenge those frontiers, when
Herman Melville published Mohy-Dick in when Commo-
1851. (Later,

dore Matthew C. Perry wanted a writer to tell the story of how he

opened Japan to the West, Nathaniel Hawthorne recommended Mel-
ville. Some 140 years later, Melville's work shaped both United States
^'^
and Japanese literary studies.)

Japan moved into still sharper focus after 1840 when Shanghai was
opened to trade. U.S. ship captains followed the shorter way from Cali-
fornia to Shanghai via the north circle route that brought them close to
Japan. The 1846-48 conquests of California ports, along with an accel-
erating industrial and agricultural economic revolution, opened a his-
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 1 1

toric opportunity —but also a potential trap. The opportunity was noted
by Secretary of the Treasury Robert Walker in 1848: "By our recent
acquisitions in the Pacific, Asia has suddenly become our neighbor,
with a placid intervening ocean inviting our steamships upon the track
of a commerce Europe combined." In 1851,
greater than that of all

Hunt's Merchant Magazine warned that U.S. production was already

furnishing "us with a potential danger: constantly augmenting capital
that must seek for new channels of employment." The showdown,
Hunt's believed, would be against the equally aggressive British and
American control of "the whole Oriental trade. "^^
result, happily, in

But manifest destiny had its dark side. As vast new territory was
rapidly annexed, bitter debate erupted between a pro-slave South and
anti-slave North over which section would control the newly conquered
West and its ports. When
Congress passed the Compromise of 1850,
the problem seemed resolved. But many, including Secretary of State
Daniel Webster, feared the crisis had been only papered over. In 1850-
51, Webster even resorted to blowing up a very minor problem with
Austria into a diplomatic crisis so, as he later admitted, he could take
American minds and put them on less divisive for-
off internal dangers
eign problems. Webster, moreover, had long been a leader of the Whig
Party, whose most powerful members included large mercantile houses

deeply involved in international trade. During earlier debates over

whether annex Texas, Webster caught Whig foreign policy priorities
to

perfectly when he proclaimed that one San Francisco was worth twenty
Texases. Using U.S. ports as the springboards to Asia became a Web-
sterian principle. As Secretary of State in 1843, he had written the
instructions that led to the first U.S. trade treaty with China in 1844.
In 1842, moreover, he had penned a declaration, duly announced by
President John Tyler, that Hawaii was to be treated by other powers as
a special U.S. reserve. Webster was creating the first American policy
for the Pacific and China. Japan was next.^^
In May 1851, Webster heard from Captain John H. Aulick, who was
to take command of the East Asia squadron, that the return of seven-
teen shipwrecked Japanese then in San Francisco might provide the
opportunity for "opening commercial relations with Japan." The Secre-
tary of State put Aulick in charge of the mission. Captain James Glynn,
an experienced Asian hand, gave President Millard Fillmore and Aulick
good advice: do not treat Japanese "as being less civilized than our-
selves," do not get into arguments over treatment of U.S. sailors, and
do focus only on obtaining a trade treaty. Moreover, Glynn shrewdly
added, do not ask for exclusive U.S. privileges, but for access to Japan
THE CLASH 1 2

for all nations. Thus the powerful British will have reason to support,
^^
rather than oppose, the American demands.
On May lo, 1851, Webster drafted a letter from President Fillmore to
the Japanese Emperor. Assuring the Emperor that Aulick was on no
religious enterprise, the letter asked for "friendship and commerce," as
well as help (especially coal) for ships that used the northern route to
China. Of special interest, Webster's draft of the note emphasized
recent U.S. triumphs on land and in technology:

You know [Fillmore told the Emperor] that the United States of
America now extend from sea to sea; that the great countries of Ore-
gon & California are parts of the United States; and that from these
countries, which are rich in gold Sc silver & precious stones, our
steamers can reach the shores of your happy land in less than twenty
days. . . .

[These ships] must pass along the Coast of your Empire; storms &
winds may cause them to be wrecked on your shores, and we ask &
expect from your kindness & your greatness, kindness for our men.
. . . We wish that our people may be permitted to trade with your
people, but we shall not authorize them to break any laws of your
Empire. . . .

Your Empire has a great abundance of coal; this is an article which

our Steamships, in going from California to China, must use.

Or, as Webster phrased it to Aulick, 'The moment is near, when the

last link in the chain of oceanic steam-navigation is to be formed," and
'our enterprising merchants [should] supply [that] last link in that great
chain,which unites all nations of the world." Such a dream propelled
many powerful Americans westward across the Pacific after as well as
before 1900.^^
The opening of Japan thus resulted from both the U.S. quest for
China s trade and the technological breakthroughs (especially steam) of
the 1840S. Japan, as Webster nicely phrased it to a friend, was the key
because God had placed coal "in the depths of the Japanese islands for
the benefit of the human family." Aulick, however, fumbled his chance
to become famous. Charged with mistreating a Brazilian diplomat,
Aulick was replaced by Fillmore with Commodore Matthew C. Perry.
The commodore he preferred commanding the U.S.
initially protested:

Mediterranean squadron instead of trying to make yet another attempt

to open Japan. Born in Rhode Island in 1794, Perry had served in the
War of 181 2 under his famous brother, Oliver Hazard Perry (who after
Irresistiole Force, Immovable Object 1 3

one battle in 1813, issued the succinct, soon-to-be-famous announce-

ment: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours")- By 1837 Matthew
had risen through the ranks and commanded one of the first U.S. steam
warships. During the Mexican War he won some fame for helping to

conquer Vera Cruz.

After overcoming his reluctance to become Webster's
ram battering
against Japan, Perry prepared thoroughly. He especially carried on
extensive talks with business figures interested in Asian trade. The com-
modore also demanded greater latitude in his orders from Webster, a
demand the Secretary of State granted just before his death in October
1852. Perry sailed for Japan with ''full and discretionary powers," in Web-
ster's words, but the commodore was to "be held to a strict responsibil-

ity" for his actions. The "discretionary powers" included possible use of
force if the Japanese tried to treat him as they had the unfortunate
Commodore Biddle.^^
Perry's four ships, the Susquehanna, Mississi'ppi (both the new steam
type), Plymouth, and Saratoga, took the long traditional route along the
Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean,
then to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, before approaching
Japan. Then they returned briefly to the China coast and, finally, moved
into Edo (Tokyo) Bay on July 8, 1853. The Dutch had warned the Sho-
gun's government, the hakufu, thatAmericans were coming, but the
Japanese were nevertheless surprised that Perry appeared so soon.
Their surprise mounted when the commodore ignored low-level offi-
cials —
and insisted pointedly as he stood beneath the cannons of his
—
warship on dealing only with hugyo (that is, someone given specific
powers directly by the Shogun). Their surprise changed into near horror
when they further learned that President Fillmore's letter was
addressed to the Emperor as if Emperor Komei were a mere equal. The
stunned hakufu decided to play for time by sending two hugyo to accept
the letter on July 14. They also used their women to appease and dis-
tract the powerful. One U.S. officer recorded that "the inhabitants . . .

by the most unmistakable signs invited our intercourse with their

women." As the historian Ian Buruma explains, "The Americans had
guns, the Japanese lifted their skirts." (A similar drama would be played
out in late 1945.) Despite the diversion. Perry rightly feared that the
Japanese might stall until he ran short of water and provisions; he would
then have to sail away in disgrace. The commodore therefore declared
he was departing for China, but promised to return a year later —with
force — to receive the Japanese response.
^°

The next move was up to Abe Masahiro, leader of the Shogun's coun-
THE CLASH 1 4 1

cil. A
dairmo (and hence known and trusted by most other powerful
lords of these more than one hundred fiefdoms K Abe was a gentle, well-
liked man so shrewd that he had entered the council at age twent\--
four in 1843. A politician who sometimes bent too easily and quickly to
prevailing political winds, he carefully sounded out the daimyo about
the proper response to Peny. These men di\ided. Some knew nothing
of dangerous international situations in the western Pacific. But all

seemed under no circumstances could Japan open its

to agree that

empire to foreign traders; their goods would upset the nations internal
order. But how to inform Perr\' of this when he returned with his war-
ships? Some more powerful dainno ad\ised stalling while the
of the
hakiifii built a modern militan- to deal with the commodore on Japanese

terms. A number, indeed, were willing to go to war with the United

States — after proper preparations.
These dainno demonstrated a fascinating confidence that Japan
could quicklv match the Wests militar\" technolog}; as well as perhaps
profit from that technolog}- in international trade. CW'e have reason to

believe that the Americans and Russians have recently learned the art
of na\igation.'" a t}"pically confident daUmo told Abe; "in what way
would the keen and wise men of our empire appear inferior to the
Westerners if they got into training from today?") Abe knew that the

West, most immediately would not give Japan the needed time.
Perr\-.

Anv doubt of that disappeared when Admiral Putiatin again led his
four Russian ships into Nagasaki harbor just after Perr\- left Edo. The
convenient death of the Shogun gave Abe an excuse to put off Putiatin "s
demands At the same time. howe\"er. Abe removed a two-
for a treat)'.

centun" rule against building large ships and named an admiral of the
new Shoguns na\y. A different Japan was beginning to stir.-^
Putiatin finallv departed just before Perr\- reappeared on Februar\-
24. 1854. This time he brought seven impressive ships and sailed
straight into sight of Edo — before the edg\: Japanese talked him into

mo\ing some forty-five miles west to Kanagawa. As the hakiifii exam-

ined the commodore's demands, the two sides demonstrated their
friendship by exchanging gifts. Perr\^'s legendar\- gifts included a tele-
graph machine, books, maps, and a miniature steam train that the Japa-
nese delighted in operating. On the last day of March 1854, Peny and
the Japanese signed a treat} of Kanagawa dozen pro\is-
that contained a
ions. The first promised eternal peace between Japan and America.
.\nother clause opened to U.S. vessels two ports. Shimoda and Hako-
date, where shipwTecked sailors could also be taken in. .Americans
could move around within a roughly fifty-mile radius of these two ports.
 —
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 1 5

The hakufu agreed to accept a U.S. consul in Japan. But —pointedly

nothing was stated explicitly about trade. Allowing entry into Japans
market was so complex, the Shogun s officials told Perry, that a decision
required a great deal of time. The Japanese, in other words, had no
intention of following the downhill slide of China into dependency on
^^
the wishes and products of foreigners.
After two centuries of dealing only with the Dutch, the 250-year-old
Tokugawa Shogunate opened itself — carefully, narrowly, and fearfully

to the recently born United States. In late 1854, the British, Russians,
and Dutch issued successful demands for access to ports that would
allow them to match Perry's victory. Again, however, the Europeans
received no trading rights. (When Putiatin had to build a vessel to
replace one of his Russian warships damaged at sea, the Japanese
watched intently and soon afterward produced an exact copy.) The
news of Perry's success reached the United States via the Saratoga,
which made the fastest trip yet between Japan and America. The New
York Times bragged that the United States had opened Japan to the
West, and upstaged the Europeans as well, by using "peaceful diplo-
macy, to overcome obstacles hitherto considered insurmountable,"
despite "the sneers, the ridicule, and the contempt" of shortsighted
European and American newspapers. ^^
The Times, however, was also puzzled. The Japanese "seemed
remarkably conversant with the affairs of the United States knew all —
about the Mexican War, its occasion and results. Quite true. Even "

when Perry felt, in the words of a later historian, "like a combination

Santa Claus and conjurer" as he demonstrated the toy railroad, the
Japanese actually knew all about railways from the Illustrated London
^"^
News, to which the Shogun himself regularly subscribed.
More important, the Japanese had kept up with American affairs
since 1797 when officials discovered that the Dutch, short of their own
ships, were sneaking U.S. vessels into Nagasaki under the Dutch flag.

The Shogunate demanded information about these Americans. The

Dutch responded with history lessons that featured the revolt against
the British in 1776 (because, the Dutch emphasized, of cruel treatment
by the George Washington ("a
British), the 1787 Constitution, the great

very capable general" whose name has been given to "a new city"), and
Thomas Jefferson. The Dutch had supported the new nation in the
1770S, so the Shogun heard a pro-American version of the history. By
the 1840S, Japanese used the Dutch to acquire good world geographies,
as well as histories,and exploited their contacts with China, where
U.S. missionaries were publishing material, to obtain fresh information.
 —
THE CLASH 1 6

Then, few Japanese who had Hved in the United States returned
too, a

home and, as one reported in 1851, announced that Americans were

"lewd by nature, but otherwise well-behaved." Japan might have chosen
isolation, but its people, including peasants, were about as well edu-
cated as the British (and more so than the general French population),
and in reality they were not isolated. By 1839 one group of intellectuals
was so active in learning from the Dutch and spreading the information
that several committed suicide fearing their activities embarrassed their
daimyo master in the eyes of the Shogun.^^
The tension illustrated by these suicides —the tension created
between the seeking of outside news to protect Japan, yet the fear that

spreading of such foreign influence could create disorder, perhaps civil

war— shaped the background that foreigners such as Perry never under-
stood. For two centuries, Tokugawa Shogun had assumed
after all, the
that the tightest relationship existed between foreign and domestic poli-
cies. The government had announced, on the basis of its bitter six-

teenth-century experience, that Japan's survival and the maintenance

of internal order required cutting off the inherently disorderly —and
usually uncontrollable — affairs of the outside world. A powerful and
influentialargument was made by a scholar from the domain of Mito,
two days travel from Edo. In 1825, Aizawa Seishisai wrote New Proposals
(Shinron). His work had been triggered by a Shogunate decree that
again, to Aizawas great satisfaction, banned foreign ships. Aizawa
warned that Japanese weakness "for novel gadgets" could "lure ignorant
people" to the spell of "treacherous foreigners." The result, he con-
cluded, would be the internal corruption and decay of Japanese society,
^^
or outright foreign conquest.
Aizawa had reason Not only were foreigners trying to pene-
to worry.
trate Japan. Of equal importance, his own domain of Mito had long
suffered from low agricultural production, natural disasters, and
increased taxation. Famine and revolt threatened to spread. After 1750
economic problems, including natural disasters, forced
especially, these
the Shogun (who was living beyond his means anyway) to tax and bor-
row. The daimyo did the same, and thus the peasants and samurai paid
and suffered even more exploitation. A new merchant class (chonin)
meanwhile arose to provide goods for the nation's growing population
and also make loans to the once-proud samurai. The chonin began to
break apart the feudal restrictions on trade, land transfer, and certain
kinds of new production. Mito's changes and unrest encapsulated only
a small case study of immense Japanese social problems by 1850. The
samurai, for example, became dissatisfied and restless as the Shogun
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 1 7

turned them into bureaucrats. Chonin also grew restless; they wanted
Thus even as Americans,
to rupture the feudal restraints of the daimyo.
Russians, and British approached from the outside, Tokugawa rule was
being internally undermined by spreading frustrations as well as by a
rising price inflation caused in part by the Shogun's own over-
spending.^^
An intense debate was therefore erupting just as Perry demanded
entrance. By the mid-i850s, his appearance helped turn a central part
of that debate into the highly dangerous question of how Japan must
change in order to deal with "the barbarians." The shock of Perry's tim-
ing and success, moreover, transformed a once-restricted discussion
into an explosive public argument. The political stakes rose dramatically

as several fiefs that had never been fully controlled by the Shogun or
the hakufu seized on the debate to challenge the hakufu and try to solve
their growing economic crises by transforming themselves to make their
own domains more efficient. The Shogunate began to endure exactly
what it had long feared: opening Japan to foreign influences was helping
undermine Tokugawa rule and destroying social harmony.

Harris s Triumpns, Ii s Assassination

The clash between Japanese and American systems therefore occurred

initially not in Manchuria in 1910, or China in the 1930s, or the interna-
tional market of the 1980s. The clash came with the first appearance of
Americans Edo Bay during 1853-54. The Tokugawa rule had long
in
been under attack. The Americans did not cause these fundamental
economic and social problems that struck Japan, but they accelerated
the problems and, of special note, created a new and more dangerous
political environment in which the hakufu had to deal with the crises.

For nothing less was happening than an assault on a centuries-old feu-

dal structure that many Japanese assumed to be fundamental for their
own happiness. Americans were the cutting edge of a new world, a
world that had little use for feudal order; a world that valued social
harmony less than individual acquisition; and a world that (unlike the
Shogun's) saw its survival resting not on exclusion, but on a manifest
^^
destiny that required the opening of ports and markets everywhere.
Abe found himself trying to steer a weakening Japan around a radical
turn in its history. He had to steer, moreover, as competing groups
grabbed for control. On one side was the Shogun lesada (1853-58) who,
out of a sense for survival, wanted to exclude the Americans while
THE CLASH 1 8

building up militan" power at home. (The term Shogfiu could be trans-

lated as "barbarian-fighting general. ") He was supported by his onlv
superior. Emperor Komei (who ruled in 1846—67). Komei s ardent xeno-
phobia merely moderated in the i86cs. On the other side were li Xao-
suke. a tough, powerful dainno of Hikone. and Hotta Masavoshi.
daiymo of Shimoda. They believed that increased contacts, even treat-

ies, with foreigners were ine\itable, so should be turned to advantage.

.-Vmid this power struggle, another more serious fight intensified: outlv-
ing areas, especiallyChoshu. in the extreme west, and Satsuma, in the
far south, had never been fully integrated into Tokugawa Japan. Led bv

Choshu, these areas began a major assault on the weakened hakiifii's

powers. The challenges to the central government were supported bv
some intellectuals and political acti\ists who saw the -\merican Revolu-
tion as exemplif\ing the kind of radical change needed to replace the
decaying Shogunate. Many of these wTiters wished to work with the
Americans. But some like Xakaoka Shintaro) thought the 6 Revolu- i —
tion simply a splendid example of how to ex'pel foreigners."^
Abe and the Shogun thus not only had to deal with the Westerners
but to develop a policy that stood the beliefs of two centuries on their
—
head that is, deal with foreigners without bringing about a war while
reconciling the internal debates and facing down Choshu-Satsuma
the
challenge. -\11 of this suddenly came to a head on August 21, 1856.
when a U.S. consul, Townsend Harris, appeared at Shimoda. Harris
announced that the Japanese must now sign a trade agreement with
the Lnited States.
The bland failures of Harriss pre\ious fift\-three years of life gave
no hint that he would succeed in opening Japan to trade after the
worlds leading empires had failed. W ith little formal schooling, he had
risen in New York Citv business circles and even persuaded the citss
Board of Education to establish a school for poor boys that later became
Cit}' College of New York. In 1848, however, his mother died, his china-
importing company began to lose money, and he apparently w as drink-
ing hea\ily Never married, he had few ties left in New York, so Harris
invested in a ship that took him to the Philippines, India, and China's
open ports. As his business prospects darkened, he asked for a L.S.
consuls job at Hong Kong or Canton, then requested that he be allowed
to join the Perr\ mission. Harris received none of these appointments.
Although he was finally offered the consul's position at the backwater
port of Xingpo. Harris turned down its pitiful salar\. At this point, he
heard about the possible consuls job at Shimoda. Backed by New York
friends, but hounded bv stories of his drinking, he decided to take the
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 1 9

long journey back to convince President Franklin Pierce of his abilities

and sobriety. Harris won the appointment, October 1855, and
left in

arrived in Japan ten months later. On the way, he had finally renegoti-
ated a trade treaty with Siam that left him tired and bitter ("the proper
way to negotiate with the Siamese," he concluded, "is to send two or
three men-of-war").^^
Harris was thus no innocent as he approached Shimoda. "I have a
perfect knowledge of the social banishment must endure while in
I

Japan," he had written Pierce, "and the mental isolation in which I must
live. ... I am a single man, without any ties to cause me to look anx-
iously to my home, or to become impatient in my new one." But not
even Harris was prepared for the next fourteen months. As he stepped
off the U.S. warship, the San Jacinto, that brought him from China,
Harris realized that Shimoda, a small, isolated town, had no housing
for him. Local officials who greeted him with surprise told him they
understood the 1854 treaty provided for a U.S. consul only if both
nations wanted one —
and Japan decidedly did not. When Harris
insisted on staying, the officials put him and
Henry C.J.
his translator,
Heusken, a Dutch American hired in New York, in a broken-down tem-
ple five miles from town. "Bats in rooms. See enormous tete de mort
spider; the legs extended five and a half inches as the insect stood,"
Harris recorded. "Unpleasant discovery of large rats in numbers, run-
ning about the house."
He came both to appreciate and be befuddled by the Japanese. They
"are a clean people. Everyone bathes every day," Harris wrote admir-
ingly. But poorer classes "of both sexes, old and young, enter the same
bathroom and there perform their ablutions in a state of perfect nudity.
I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people

so generally correct." Harris was partially reassured only when Japanese

friends told him was protected by
that "the chastity of their females"
"this very exposure [that] lessens the desire that owes much of its power

to mystery and difficulty." Plagued, as he admitted, by too much smok-

ing and exotic food, Harris quit smoking, took long walks, and learned
to appreciate the wild game the Japanese began to bring to him. Heu-
sken, who refused to stop smoking, grew increasingly prickly. ^^
But Harris's central problem was somehow to reach the Shogun's
officials who could make decisions. StaUing, the Japanese told him that

Edo was too distant for him to visit. At one point, believing he was
being lied to by officials and spied on by servants, he shook the Japanese
by picking up a stove (hihachi) and flinging it against the wall.
According to legend, Shimoda officials appeased Harris by giving him a
THE CLASH 2

geisha named Okichi-san as a mistress. Heusken also supposedly

received a mistress. Stories passed down relate that Okichi was then
shunned by her own people for living intimately with a white man. She
took to drinking and finally drowned herself. Nothing in official records
supports these accounts, but Okichi's birthplace in Shimoda became a
tourist attraction, at least five plays were written about her, and in 1958
Hollywood immortalized her in the film The Barbarian and the Geisha.^^
Whether Okichi was a reason or not, Harris grew to admire the Japa-
nese. "I do not think the world contains a people so truly frugal and
plain in matters of diet and dress as the Japanese" he wrote in early
1857. **No jewelry is ever seen on a man. They are a people of but
. . .

few wants." Admiration, however, led to no diplomatic breakthroughs.

Those came from Harris's stubbornness, Japanese internal divisions,
and the hakufus sound information that British warships were again
blasting China open in 1857 and when finished might well use their
cannon to impose ugly trade terms on Japan. Harris's arrival had driven
even deeper fissures between those Japanese who wanted to stall the
foreigners and others who beUeved that the best possible deal should
be made —while quickly copying the West's weaponry. ^^

The key official who was to deal with Harris belonged to the second
camp. Hotta Masayoshi, soon to be the most powerful member of the
hakufu, was also one of the more moderate. Hotta had somehow gained
extensive knowledge of "Dutch studies" —
that is, events in the West.
He wrote later in 1857 that "military power always springs from national
wealth," and that such wealth could be found "principally in trade and
commerce. Japan consequently had "to conclude friendly alliances
" . . .

send ships to foreign countries everywhere and copy the foreigners

. . .

where they are at their best and so repair our own shortcomings." By
March 1857, Hotta's approach led to the first substantive talks with
Harris. The consul was plagued by cholera, little medical help, no news
from U.S. ships on the China coast, and no assistance whatever from
Washington. He nevertheless warned the Shimoda officials that he had
been instructed to tell them that if they continued to delay, the Presi-
dent would ask Congress for the authority to use "arguments . . . they
[the Japanese] could not resist." In June, Harris excitedly recorded that
he had broken through. Shimoda officials agreed to a convention that
opened Nagasaki to U.S. ships, allowed American residency and a vice
consul at Hakodate, enabled Harris to move around Japan more freely,

and settled the exchange rate for Japanese money at a more favorable
level. But this agreement only prepared the way for the most difficult
^"^
step: travehng to Edo and negotiating a full trade treaty with Hotta.
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 2 1

In November 1857, Harris and Heusken approached Edo in a spec-

tacular caravan that aimed to convince all onlookers that Americans

were not to be trifled with. Made up of 250 persons, including 12
guardsmen, two standard-bearers, two shoe and fan carriers, two
grooms, 40 porters carrying Harris's luggage and household goods, and
20 bearers of the sedan chairs on which Harris and Heusken rode, the
procession finally entered Edo on November 30. Always sharply aware
of his possible place in history, the consul wrote that the entry "will
form an important epoch in my life, and a still more important one" for
the Japanese, for "I have forced this singular people to acknowledge the
rights of embassy"
^^
—formal diplomatic relations with the United
States.
On December 7, 1857, Harris had a brief, formal, historic meeting
with the Shogun, who expressed pleasure with the consul's presence
and declared, according to the interpreter, that "intercourse shall be
continued forever. But detailed talks with officials on December 12
"

turned frustrating. Harris notably opened them by explaining two of the

beliefs that drove U.S. policy, then and since: because of the technolog-
ical breakthrough (of steam locomotion), "Japan would be forced to

abandon her exclusive policy"; her wealth and happiness would grow
most rapidly "when developed by the action of free trade." Otherwise
the powers would "send powerful fleets to force Japan open. Hotta
"

thanked Harris for the thoughts, then added "that the Japanese never
acted as promptly on business of importance as the Americans" because
"many persons had to be consulted." Weeks dragged by. Harris began
to complain that Heusken could not solve the mysteries of the Japanese
language: it "does not possess either singular or plural, has no relative
pronoun, nor is the use of the antecedent known. ... I never shall get
to the bottom of the deceptions of the Japanese." (Later observers also
helped explain Harris's frustration by noting that, having considerable
mistrust of verbal skills, communicate feeling
a Japanese preferred to
indirectly and even without language. If these signals were communi-
cated, the receiver, not the sender, was blamed for lacking sensitivity
and intelligence if they were not picked up.)^^
Finally in March agreement was nearly complete, a result of
1858,
Hotta's influence and ominous British and French warmaking in China,
when again Japanese internal divisions stalled the talks. In June, Hotta
carried the day. The treaty, signed opened five
initially on July 29, 1858,
ports to trade between then and 1863, including Nagasaki and Kana-
gawa (later Yokohama); allowed foreigners into Osaka and Edo; permit-
ted a resident minister in Edo and a Japanese minister in Washington
THE CLASH 2 2

with each country's consuls at the other's open ports; protected Ameri-
cans through extraterritoriality (that is, they would be tried only in
American courts); and imposed an import and export tariff that was
fixed extremely low so the Japanese could not manipulate it to keep out
foreign goods. Americans could enjoy freedom of religion as well as own
land for business, residential, and even religious purposes. (Later, in
1859, Harris tried to obtain a provision guaranteeing religious freedom
for the Japanese themselves, but the hakufu quickly rejected it.) Oddly,
one of the great U.S. diplomatic principles, that of most-favored-
nation —
that any trading rights Japan gave to one nation automatically
—
went to others was not included. (This omission was remedied in
August when the British, using Harris's secretary and treaty opened
trade relations with Japan and obtained most-favored-nation rights.)
Of special significance was a provision in Article III:

Americans may freely buy from Japanese and sell to them any articles
that either may have for sale, without the intervention of any Japa-
nese officers in such purchase or sale.

Not for the last time, Americans, with deep suspicions about state
power, tried to remove that power as much com-
as possible in their
merce with Japan. They enjoyed little success in this attempt. Nor
could they become involved in Japan's internal commerce, for foreign
traders were mostly confined to a residential area near the ports.
The Dutch and Russians as well as the British followed Harris into
the Japanese market during August 1858. The American, meanwhile,
followed up his triumph by having a physical breakdown that had been
building since August 1856. Delirious for days, he was probably saved
because the Shogun ordered Japan's best physicians to attend him. Har-
ris nevertheless had his historic treaty and even a letter for President

James Buchanan from the Shogun, the first letter sent by a Shogun to
^^
a foreign leader in 240 years.
Harris knew his demands had divided the hakufu, but he did not
realize he was helping to destroy the 250-year-old Tokugawa rule itself.
For his demands, coupled with the growing internal unrest, had led to
a crisis and Hotta's removal June 1858. He was replaced by li Nao-
in
suke (181 5-1860), a powerful daimyo of Hikone. Tough, determined,
relentless, li became a virtual dictator of the hakufu. Assuming power
in mid-1858, he discovered that the Emperor, sitting in his majesty at
Kyoto, feared the proposed treaty. 'The American affair is a great sorrow
to our divine land," he had told Hotta. The treaty "would disturb the
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 2 3

ideas of our people and make it impossible to preserve lasting tranquil-

lity." Many daimyo sided with the Emperor. But most of them, li

learned, believed the treaty to be inevitable. The alternative of war with

the Western powers was unthinkable.^^
li, moreover, heard in July 1858 that British and French warships had
finished their work in China and might be heading for Japan. He
decided therefore to sign the treaty with Harris in July. The Emperor
had not changed his mind, but he reluctantly went along out of fear
that the Westerners would play on the divisions between his court in
Kyoto and the Shogun in Edo. The rebels who hoped to keep out the
"hairy barbarians and weaken the Shogun never forgave li for easing
'

the foreigners' entry into Japan. On March 3, i860, eighteen samurai

from the rebellious daimyo at Mito, assisted by Shinto priests, attacked
li outside the Imperial Palace. Because it was raining, lis sixty guards
had covered their sword hilts. Before they could uncover their swords,
li lay dead and four guards were dying. The attackers were killed or

captured, but the death of the decisive li left a power vacuum that soon
proved fatal for the Shogun himself. Harris's treaty was already casting
^^
long shadows.

The Americans and tne Birtn 01

Moaern Japan
On February 13, i860, after many postponements, a Japanese diplo-
matic mission of seventy-seven persons left on a U.S. warship for Wash-
ington where formal ratifications of the treaty were to be exchanged. It

was the first such anywhere by a Japanese diplomatic delegation of

trip

this size after two hundred years of seclusion. The trip was difficult.
Few Japanese cared to speak English — too difficult —and so spoke only
Dutch other than their native language. Not many Americans knew
Dutch. The mission included spies who reported on other members.
U.S. sailors found soy sauce and fish foul-smelling and so threw out
most of the Japanese food, forcing the diplomats to eat meat, cheese,
and bread, which they hated.
The high point of the mission's visit was its arrival on June 16 in New
York Harbor. In November 1858, the New York Times had carried an
account from a reporter traveling with Harris who had seen a Japanese
steamer. He asked his readers "to stop here a moment, reflect upon the
strangeness of such a thing." Such a steamer had not existed when
THE CLASH 2 4

Perry arrived five years earlier. Now this state-of-the-art vessel not only

existed, it "could capture any Portuguese man-of-war of her class." In

i860, the Times did not yet want to say that a new era had opened
between "Western Christendom" and the "heathen East." But this
"England of the Pacific," as Japan was now commonly called, could
nevertheless cause a spectacle even in New York City where tens of
thousands went on hoHday to welcome the stolid visiting diplomats.
The Times nicely added, moreover, that it was only fitting that the trip
climax in New York, rather than in "more provincial cities [that is,
Washington] through which they have been dragged as a kind of vulgar
show." For New York, after all, "represents the full grandeur of that
mighty American commerce," which had beaten the military of the
"more arrogant powers" in opening "the hitherto impregnable East.""^^

A more exalted and memorable response came from Walt Whitman,

a New Yorker who had come to see the growing U.S. -Asia ties in mysti-
words that nicely captured central themes of U.S.
cal terms, yet with
diplomacy. The New York Times published his long poem, "The Errand-
Bearers," on June 27, i860, to commemorate the Japanese delegation's
visit;

Superb-faced Manhattan,
Comrade Americanos — to us, then, at last, the Orient comes. . . .

The Originatress comes. . . .

Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musing, hot with passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments. . . .

I, too, raising my voice, bear an errand,

I chant the World on my Western Sea. . . .

I chant the new empire, grander than any before —As in a vision it comes
to me:
I chant America, the Mistress — I chant a greater supremacy. . . .

I chant commerce opening, the sleep of ages have done its work — races,
reborn, refreshed.

The Japanese were not as happy with the moment

was Whitman. as
Americans often shouted insults, as in Philadelphia where one cried
out to a U.S. naval officer, "... is that your monkey you have got with
you?" The puritanical, male-dominated Japanese were notably stunned
by American women, who, as one of the mission noted during a dance,
"were nude from shoulders to arms. The way men and women, both
. . .

young and old, mixed in the dance, was simply insufferable to watch."
One Japanese compared American couples to "butterflies crazed by the
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 2 5

sight of flowers," especially when the men actually gave their chairs to
^^
women.
Whitman's "new empire" nevertheless seemed to be booming by
i860. As Perry and Harris opened Japan to Western trade, Lieutenant
John Rodgers led a U.S. survey expedition through the waters sur-
rounding Japan and along Chinas coasts between 1853 and 1856. After
thoroughly investigating this Great Circle route, Rodgers concluded
that the "commercial possibilities [of Asia] are so vast as to dazzle sober
calculation." At the same time, American merchants and the U.S. min-
ister to China pushed Washington to seize Taiwan, both as a strategic
base and as leverage with which to beat down Chinese opposition to
Western trade. In 1854 to i860, Russia began to discuss the sale of its
Alaska territory to the Americans. The U.S. Civil War stalled the talks
until 1867, when the Russians recognized the reality —Americans
already controlled the commerce around the region —and sold Alaska
Holding Alaska and with formal entry into Japan, the
for $7.2 million.
United States grabbed a secure hold on the Great Circle route to Asia's
'^^
markets.
But Japan itself seemed much less secure, li's murder in i860
occurred in a wave of assassinations that finally washed over foreigners.
Harris noted that gangs of Japanese roamed the streets at night; seven
kilhngs of Westerners occurred in eighteen months. Many of these mur-
ders were done by the hands of ronin, that is, samurai who had broken
loyalty to their daimyo and now, in a Japan coming apart, committed
crimes from political or economic motives. In January 1861, Heusken,
Harris's translator, was killed when he made the mistake of walking
home from the Prussian legation in the dark. The foreign diplomats
demanded retribution, as did U.S. Secretary of State William H. Sew-
ard, justnewly appointed by President Abraham Lincoln. But Harris
successfully held out against any retahation. He instead blamed Heu-
sken, who "should have known better" than to be on foot after dark.
The consul quieted the issue by accepting a $10,000 indemnity from
the hakufu for Heusken's mother, an amount one-tenth the indemnity
the British collected after one of their officials was murdered by Sat-
suma samurai. Harris doggedly remained in Edo even when the other
diplomats left after the British legation was attacked and burned in
1862.^^

Much as the Emperor had feared, the West's intrusions were

undermining Japanese order. Foreigners bought up Japanese gold coins
and resold them in China at great profit. When the hakufu threatened
to stop the traffic, Western officials threatened war. The hakufu there-
THE CLASH 2 6

fore minted cheaper coins, debased the money, and triggered rapid
inflation that devastated the mass of Japanese. Foreign demand for tea
and pushed up prices for Japans people. The Shogun's sudden
silk

desire for Western arms, and the reparations the hakufu had to pay the
West for the murders of the foreigners, drained the country of good
money. The view that the Shogun was becoming a mere frontman for
the Westerners, mistaken as it was, fatally infected the hakufus legiti-

macy. Japan s first extensive contact with the West was turning into a
catastrophe.'^'^

Worn down, Harris returned finally to a United States, itself torn by

civil war, in 1862. He was thus not present to soften the crisis that

erupted between the Westerners and the Tokugawa regime in 1863-

64 — By 1863, the Shogun's poHcy of reluc-
a crisis that led to bloodshed.
tantly agreeing to the foreigners' demands had created a loose alliance
of various daimyo at the Emperor's court in Kyoto. The alliance was
led by the distant clans of Choshu and Satsuma. The group aimed at
undermining the Shogun's power and driving out the foreigners. The
objectives were two sides of the same policy. As the Shogun's govern-
ment in Edo weakened, the ronin became more vicious and the distant
daimyo more daring. On May 24, 1863, the U.S. legation in Edo was
gutted by fire. The new U.S. minister, Robert H. Pruyn (an Albany
Republican politician who had taken the post at the begging of his
close friend. Secretary of State Seward), wanted to believe the fire was
accidental; yet, after all, "repeated attempts have been made to induce
me to leave." Then word circulated that the embattled hakufu was about
to go back on its agreements, close the ports, and regain its power by
moving decisively against the foreigners. Pruyn 's response was direct:
"Even to propose such a measure is an insult to my country and equiva-
lent to a declaration of war." The Edo government strongly denied any
idea of going back on its commitments, but it was clear that the Shogun
was losing control. "^^
On June 25, 1863, the small U.S. steamer Pemhroke was fired upon
by the Choshu when it tried to pass through the Straits of Shimonoseki.
French and Dutch vessels also received fire. On July 16, the U.S. war-
ship Wyoming was hit before its cannon sank several Japanese boats;
five Americans and an undetermined number of Japanese lost their

lives. Ten years after Perry, the first Americans and Japanese had fired

at each other. The Western diplomats decided to cut through the frus-
trating Japanese politics to teach their hosts a lesson. Pruyn asked Sew-
ard for instructions."^^
Seward's responses formed a new U.S. poHcy toward Asia. The Sec-
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 2 7

retary of State s views, moreover, shaped U.S. approaches toward much

of Asia until World War II. Japan, it turned out, was to serve as a labora-
tory case study. Indeed, Seward treated the Japanese even more brutally
than he did the Chinese. And if it were his poHcies that guided U.S.
diplomatic activities for the next three-quarters of a century, it was also
his pohcy that the Japanese vowed to destroy inasmuch as it applied to
them.
Seward had begun his obsession with Asia in the early 1850s (just as
Perry was setting out for the new West), when he was a Whig senator.
Believing that the American continent was soon to become the center
of the world's production and communications, he urged Americans to
take their eyes off the western hemisphere where, he was sure, the
United States was inevitably going to be supreme, and focus on the
incredible potential of Asia, "the prize," "the chief theatre of events in
the world's great hereafter," as he termed it. The key to Asia was com-
merce, "which [,] surviving dynasties and empires continues, as in
. . .

former ages, to be a chief fertilizer" for both Europe and Asia. If com-

merce was the "fertilizer," then missionaries often acted as the plow.
Not especially religious himself, Seward developed a fixation on proslet-
yzing in, of all places, Japan. Not only were "the simple people of Japan"
to be made to respect "the institutions of Christianity"; their attacks
and limitations imposed on Christians were not to be tolerated. He
even urged what his biographer termed a "holy war." Japan's attempts
to recover its internal harmony by moving against Christians "will only
prepare the way for fearful and bloody convulsions. ," Seward wrote . .

the U.S. minister in Edo in 1868. "Humanity indeed demands and

'"^^
expects a continually extending sway for the Christian religion.
To achieve these objectives of expanding commerce and Christianity,
Seward did nothing less than reverse the decades-old principles of U.S.
policy in Asia. Traditionally, the Americans had acted alone (so as not
to be tarnished by acting with European imperialists), and largely stayed
away from the use of force. Competitive goods and peaceful relations,
not gunboats, were to win over Asian souls and money. Seward, how-
ever, believed that the Western powers shared interests in China and

Japan; cooperation could best advance those interests. Given the dis-
traction of their civil war, in any case, Americans needed all the foreign
help they could find to hold on to their Asian trophies. That belief led
as well to the reversal of the second principle: Seward now believed
that U.S. mihtary power had to be applied. His close friend, Minister
Pruyn, understood the Secretary of State's mind perfectly. It was not
any Japanese respect for the "public good" that had opened the country,
THE CLASH 2 8

the minister wrote Seward in 1863; had been "the silent but no less
it

potent utterances of bayonet and wide-mouthed cannon [that] burst

away the Now, he added, "our foothold here can
barriers of isolation."
'"^^
be maintained with the hand on the sword.
. . .

Seward, resembling many U.S. leaders before and after, believed that
having been born free of feudalism themselves, Americans were des-
tined to free others of feudal institutions. Then the ever-moving hand
of Western capitalism and Christianity could justly enjoy access. He
instructed Pruyn to help any daimyo who favored Western trade, "and
thus lead to the ultimate revoking of the feudal system, and of the
exclusive theory of Japan." In the same instruction, Seward ordered
Pruyn work with the other foreign governments. The Secretary of
to
State realized that Western policies could destroy traditional Japanese
society and create large-scale disorder. Not for the first or last time,
U.S. officials willingly accepted disorder, perhaps even civil war, for the
sake of obtaining access for Western goods and missionaries. After all,

Seward candidly wrote, "One can hardly expect anything less than seri-
ous political changes as a consequence of the sudden entrance by Japan
into relations with the other nations." The idea that Americans always
valued order more than the opportunity of profit is, as Seward illus-
trated, a myth."^^
Weeks after arriving in Japan, Pruyn believed that "all the officers of
the Western Powers in Japan are sentinels in the outposts of civilization.
It is here as with our Indian tribes" — strike or be struck. Given these
racial and ideological views, Seward and Pruyn not surprisingly agreed
in early 1864 to commit U.S. force to an international flotilla that would
teach Choshu hard lessons about the power of Western technology,
while opening forever the Straits of Shimonoseki. Officials in London
were even more enthusiastic about using such force, for British citizens
had been especially targeted by ronin. In Japan, the British minister. Sir
Rutherford Alcock, vigorously agreed with Pruyn that all policy toward
"Asiatics" had to "rest on a solid substratum of force," in Alcock's words.
He on Choshu. The only problem for
led the preparations for an attack
Seward and Pruyn was they had little naval power to commit. The major
ships were at home fighting the South. Pruyn finally found a small
sailing boat, the Jamestown, toaccompany seventeen powerful ships
dispatched by the British, French, and Dutch. The Jamestown, however,
could not keep up with the had to charter a privately
fleet, so Pruyn
owned ship, install on it a 600-pound cannon from the Jamestown, and
send it off to uphold American honor. After four days of bombarding
Choshu and suffering a dozen killed in September 1864, the Westerners
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 2 9

seized Choshu s cannon and the straits were open. The Japanese had
indeed been taught a lesson they would not forget, although it was not
^^
precisely the lesson Seward and Pruyn had hoped they would learn.

The New York Times reporter in Japan thought the Japanese should
actually thank Seward, Alcock, and other Western officials for disciplin-

ing Choshu and enabling Shogun to meet his obligations. The Times
the
correspondent nevertheless had to admit, "It will take a long time . . .

to break down the prejudices of millions of the non-ruling classes, who

have for generations looked upon seclusion as their peculiar institution
[a reference to the American South calling slavery its 'peculiar institu-
tion"], and who, in their ignorance and superstition," would blame the
West for Japan's ills. "The masses," he told his readers, "must be made
to feel the benefits arising from trade and contact with civilization." The
Japanese did quickly feel such "benefits." Immediately after the flotilla

attacked, the hakufu agreed to pay a $3 million indemnity for past

attacks by Japan. The Americans, with the smallest ship, received the
smallest share. (It was therefore not onerous in 1883 when the United
States returned the indemnity to warm relations with a different, now
)^^
respected, Japan.
In the Convention of 1866 the powers forced Japan to fix tariff duties
for the foreigners' long-term advantage. But of special significance,
Japan had to promise that would deal with foreign merchants
its traders
directly —
that is, without the support of the government not only in —
Japan but everywhere. The hakufu also had to agree to reverse 250 years
^^
of policy by allowing Japanese to travel abroad.
The treaties of 1858 and after were transformed by the enemies of
the Shogun and the Western powers into weapons to destroy both the
Shogun and the influence of the powers. "Revere the Emperor and
expel the barbarian" became the motto for the rebels at Mito and many
other places. Choshu, despite (or because of) the powers' attack of
1864, regrouped, joined Satsuma in 1867, and helped lead the drive to
destroy the Tokugawa Shogun. In March 1868, an imperial army, led by
Choshu and Satsuma, moved out of Edo to defeat the Shogun's forces.
It occupied Edo in April. The Shogun resigned. A fifteen-year-old

emperor began to rule as well as reign by a proclamation of October 23,

1868. The powers officially remained neutral through the fighting. In
reality, Pruyn sympathized with the Shogun, who had, after all, worked

(albeit most reluctantly) with Perry and Harris. Alcock ironically backed

Choshu."
The victors declared not the creation of a new nation, but the "resto-
ration" of a Japan that had allegiance to the Emperor, whose lineage.
THE CLASH 3

they claimed, went back to Jimmu Tenno. Or, as Robert Smith has
summarized their feat, "Seeking nationaUst revolution, they called it

imperial restoration." The restorationists moved to switch the allegiance

of the Japanese people away from the feudal daimyo, now on their way
to extinction, and toward the Emperor. This was accomplished in part
by taking up the long practice of ancestor worship arguing that all —
Japanese were descended through the centuries from the imperial fam-
^"^
ily, and concluding that hence all Japanese were related.

Until 1868 emperors had been considered so divine that their persons
were not allowed to touch the earth and their subjects could not look
upon them. During the Tokugawa years of 1626 no emperor had
to 1863,
even left the palace at Kyoto unless forced out by fire or other emergen-
cies. But the young Emperor traveled in April 1869 from Kyoto to his

new capital at Edo (now renamed Tokyo, the nation's commercial as

well as political center). He took the name of Meiji, or "enlightened
rule." When the Emperor emerged from his Tokyo palace, he was
dressed in foreign-style clothes and rode in an open carriage for all to
see.Having estabhshed a vital link with the Japanese past through the
Emperor, the victors were nevertheless pointing toward a very different
future. The Charter Oath, signed by the Emperor in April 1868,
declared that councils for discussion of the public's needs would be
established, a declaration that quieted samurai who opposed the new
regime. The Charter Oath also proclaimed that "knowledge shall be
sought throughout the world" —but the objective was "to strengthen the
foundations of imperial rule," not to become Westernized.^^
Restoration paradoxically led to great innovation. Japan meant to
avoid the Chinese example of subjection to foreign powers. The Japa-
nese instead intended to join the powers, but on their own terms, not
the West's. Harmony and a traditional community were to be restored
along with the Emperors authority. In i860, an observant visitor noted
the dividing line between Japan and the West: "It is a singular fact that
in Japan, where the individual is sacrificed to the community, he would
seem perfectly happy and contented; while in America, where exactly
the opposite takes place, and the community is sacrificed to the individ-
ual, the latter is in a perpetual state of uproarious clamor for his
rights."^^

Tocqueville could not have stated it better. Between and 1868

1853
the relentless American determination to break feudal barriers and gain
access for every individual —whether merchant, diplomat, or mission-
ary—had encountered a centuries-old and apparently immovable cul-
ture of Tokugawa Japan. The irresistible force nonetheless helped
Irresistible Force, Immovable Object 3 1

destroy the shell of the unmovable object. A new capitalism triumphed

over an old regime. Now it was be decided: could a different Japa-
to
nese pohtical system — one that continued to value harmony at home
and a strong relationship between the individual and the state adapt —
rapidly enough to obtain Western industrial and military power while
retaining Japanese forms of society? And would this make Americans
happy? Or would they push Japan's society further, to fit the principles
of American capitalism? And how would the Japanese respond to such
pressures? Around these questions, the conflict between Americans
and Japanese built over the next century and a half.
 Joining tne Ctiib
(1868-1900) \

Two Systems
In 1 88 1 , a foreigner wrote in a Yokohama newspaper that "the
Japanese are a happy race, and being content with httle, are not
likely to achieve much." The degree of his error grew as the sen-
tence progressed. In a little more than thirty years, between i868
and 1900, the Japanese built both a nation and an empire. It was
revealing that when a visiting Japanese student at Rutgers Univer-
sity literally studied himself to death, he became a national hero
in Japan. When, however, the Japanese were about to reap the
harvest of their discipline in 1895-96, they were slammed back to

reahty by European powers. U.S. officials notably refused to join

the powers in humiliating Japan. American-Japanese relations
would never be better than they were between 1868 and 1900.^

In part, these warm feelings benefited from lack of contact.

In a rather remarkable parallel development, both nations turned
inward to rebuild societies after each suffered enormous trauma
and destruction in the 1860s. The U.S. Civil War killed 600,000
people, destroyed much and caused massive eco-
of the South,
nomic shifts. Suddenly millions of African Americans were
thrown from slavery into a free labor market. And a president lay
murdered. In Japan, the decline of the Tokugawa Shogun, and

3 2
 —
Joining tKe Glut ( 1868-1900) 3 3

the harsh demands of foreigners backed by cannon, led to civil war,

foreign military intervention, and terrorism. Gone was a 250-year-old
ruling house in a society whose harmony and legitimacy depended on
tradition. Fortunately for Japan, the supposedly 2,500-year-old institu-

tion of the Emperor easily replaced the Shogun as the center for social
harmony, national unity, and political legitimacy.

Americans suffered the horrors of civil war, but at least the majority,
northerners, emerged triumphant. Indeed, they emerged doubly trium-
—
phant their own system vindicated by blood and then that system
transformed into a powerful industrial complex. The United States usu-
ally emerges from its wars more powerful than before. The Civil War
exemplified this rule. The nation's centralization, at the expense of
states' rights, was reaffirmed. Supreme Court decisions, banking and
currency acts, ever-rising national tariffs, a new rail and communica-
tions system largely paid for by the Washington government all led to—
the concentration of incredible power between 1865 and 1900.
During those years, Americans performed the amazing feat of
becoming a great global power while simultaneously settling more land
on their own continent than they had in the previous three hundred
years. The two expansionist acts were intimately related. The U.S. Cen-
sus Bureau announced in 1890 that the four hundred-year-old "frontier"
of white settlement had finally disappeared. Americans turned outward,
especially to Asia, to find in the Far East what many termed a new
western frontier. At the same time, the United States grew into the
world's greatest economic power. Fearful Europeans warned at century's
turn of an "American invasion" attacking their markets. Before the Civil
War, 31 million Americans produced $3 biUion of manufactures but
virtually no steel. In 1900, 75 million Americans produced five times
more manufactures and dominated the world's markets for steel (and
oil, the other critical need of twentieth-century societies).^

This climb up the world s economic ladder cost Americans dearly. In

1873, rampant manipulation of New York banks and exchanges triggered
panic in capital markets. The economy plummeted, laborers lost jobs,
deflation struck. Optimists viewed all this as only another postwar
recession so typical in the American experience. By 1877, however, the
slump had worsened. Laborers suffering massive unemployment waged
the nation's first general strike; it paralyzed much of the Midwest. In
the Pennsylvania coal fields, ten "Molly Maguires —
Irish workers pro-
"

testing the horrible conditions and ethnic discrimination in the mines

were hanged after terrorizing the area.
This was not at all the usual postwar depression. It proved to be the
 ^

THE CLASH 3 4

birth labor of the new U.S. industrial complex. The depression lasted
not several years but a quarter century, finally releasing its grip in 1896—
97. Strikes spread until in 1894 President Grover Cleveland decided
he could restore order in Chicago only by dispatching federal troops.
Secretary of State Walter Quintin Gresham worried in 1893-94 that
such events "portend revolution. Historians
' now label this era the sec-
ond The first, during the 1840s and 1850s, involved
industrial revolution.
steam, coal, and railways. The second was driven by electricity, steel,
and finally automobiles and telephones. The first relied on small, house-
hold-type firms. The second emerged from an incredibly high savings
and investment rate that produced huge amounts of capital for national,
even new multinational, corporations. The first led to Americans open-
ing relations with China and Japan. The second led Americans into
clashes with Japan over China.
Capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie defined the problem as over-
production. The steelmaker handsomely by equipping his steel
profited
mills with the most recent technology bought during the depths of the
deflationary depressions. Carnegie's cheap steel drove competitors to
the wall. On the other hand, a labor leader such as Samuel Gompers
of the new American Federation of Labor traced the crisis to undercon-
sumption and urged that laborers' buying power be jacked up. U.S.
government officials greatly preferred Carnegie's analysis. These leaders
vowed to find foreign markets for the overproduction. When the United
States finally emerged from the twenty- five-year-old nightmare in 1897,
many concluded that burgeoning American exports sounded the wake-
up call. Vital exports, especially industrial goods, were indeed flowing
in increasing amounts to Asia.
Superficially, Japan seemed to be enduring similar political, eco-
nomic, and social experiences. But it did so for different reasons and
much earlier in its industrialization process. Japanese leaders emerging
from their civil war in 1867—68 began to dismantle the Shoguns' old
scaffolding of power. By late 1871, the daimyo had become governors
appointed from Tokyo, and their fiefs reduced to districts. They were
bought off with government bonds that made them affluent and gave
them strong reasons for helping the new government survive. To further
weaken feudal traditions, legal equality was declared. In 1873, the Gre-
gorian Calendar was adopted. New laws were promulgated and carried
out by samurai who had led the fight against the Shogun. A superb
bureaucracy was thus present from the start to supervise modern Japan.
To check opposition and to give opportunity to those with talent
(rather than to those merely well born), the new government destroyed
Joining tke Club ( 1868-1900) 3 5

the traditional, perpetual military class. Instead, universal conscription

began in 1873. The father of the modern Japanese army, Yamagata Ari-

tomo, appointed trusted officers from his native Choshu. After 1878,
this core evolved into an efficient army consciously patterned after the
Prussian model. Yamagata's fellow Satsuma victors of the 1867-68 wars
created a modern battle fleet modeled on the British Royal Navy. Dis-

missing fealty to the daimyo, who now largely existed in history books,

the new mihtary pledged fidelity to the Emperor.'^

The early Meiji government and its military paid bills by confiscating
the defeated Shogun's wealth, and, especially, by raising taxes. The
taxes notably fell on the peasants, who already saw themselves as
unwilling targets of the conscription law. In 1871, the Meiji further uni-
fied the country by declaring the yen to be the common currency. Brutal
economic and price deflations that afflicted the United States
shifts

similarly created unrest in Japan. Amid economic and social turmoil,

however, the Tokyo government drove ahead by extending telegraph
service nationwide, building the first railways, and giving massive state
support to industry. Again, the pattern followed the United States and
other industrializing nations. Factories included government-run muni-
tions and weapons complexes built to break the country's dependence
on foreign suppliers. The Japanese were determined to copy —not
become subject to —the West. But the 1866 tariff treaty and indemnities
imposed by foreigners at the point of their naval cannon sent money
flowing out of Japan. As the West grew richer, Japanese grew money-
poor. Still an undeveloped economy (its main products were rice and
handicrafts-made textiles), the government had few alternatives but to
raise money needed for the military by imposing taxes on rice and land.^
Such pressure finally created an explosion: the Satsuma Rebellion in
1877 (which erupted in the same year as the U.S. general strike). Fueled
by peasant unrest and the frustration of conservatives in Tokyo, the
discontent owed something to the U.S. rebellion of 1776. "Let us be
Patrick Henrys," proclaimed an article of the "Freedom and People's
Rights Movement.' "We might perish, but the unjust laws shall perish
with us!" If the Meiji government looked to the West for inspiration,
such use of Patrick Henry was decidedly not what the Meiji had in
mind. Notably, Saigo Takamori, who led the rebels, had been a hero of
the Meiji Restoration and had helped the Emperor destroy the feudal
clans. But the new government was not to Saigo's liking, especially its
reluctance to attack Korea. The rebels declared they were acting in the
name, and for the sake, of the Emperor. Also in the name of the
Emperor, and with more effect, the government dispatched the new
THE CLASH 3 6

army smash the revolt. Saigo was beheaded, at his own request, by a
to
friend on the battlefield. For the first time, the military's power com-
bined with the Emperor's authority to uphold the bureaucracy's actions.
That victory alsoembossed legitimacy on the military^ ("the Emperor's
soldiers and officials," as they became known) that made criticism of it

nearly impossible.^
Disdaining Patrick Henry, Japan made better use of other chapters
of recentWestern history. Japanese soon became famous for copying
Western machines and some institutions, much as Americans had cop-
ied (the British preferred to call it stealing) industrial processes they
saw in England. The Shogun lemochi sounded the alarm in 1865 when
he concluded that Japan must follow "the example of foreigners in using
the profits from trade to construct many ships and guns, adopting the
strategy of using the barbarian to subdue the barbarian. During the "

previous twelve hundred years, the "foreigner" the Japanese had copied
was China. By the 1870s, however, they viewed the Chinese as corrupt,
—
backward, and bending fatally before the West the results of a long
decline the Japanese believed had begun some two hundred years ear-
lier. Now attention focused on Europe and the United States. Two

objectives ranked highest: to build a military and industrial complex

that could protect Japan from the West's demands; and closely —
related —
to destroy the unequal treaties imposed by the Westerners by

demonstrating that Japanese could be responsible, and as orderly and

modern as Westerners themselves.'
The most popular voice urging this turn to the West was Fukuzawa
Yukichi, an intellectual landmark in Japan's history. Born in 1835, he
had studied Dutch, then learned English when he understood the
meaning of Perry's and Harris's successes. After seeing Europe and the
United States in the 1860s, he returned to write a best-selling book on
the importance for Japan of Western accomplishments. Fukuzawa flatly
believed that Japan must "quit Asia," that is, turn away from Asia and
learn from the "civilized" West. He translated and introduced the text
of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to
the Japanese. "Heaven," he concluded, "did not create a man above
or below another man." Fukuzawa lauded Americans' patriotism, their
"sturdy spirit of independence." He praised Benjamin Franklin (who
became a popular figure in the onward-and-upward society of Meiji
Japan) for living frugally, sleeping little, and seizing opportunities relent-
lessly.

Then, like a thunderclap, Fukuzawa pointed to the fate of the Ameri-

can Indians. They were an early victim of Western imperialism. "Among
Joining tke Club ( 1868-1900) 3 7

the countries touched by the Westerners," he asked rhetorically, "was

any able to maintain real independence?" "[N]ow their expansion
threatens East Asia Uke a spreading fire," Fukuzawa warned. The line

was starkly drawn: "We want our learning independent, not licking up
the lees and scum of the westerner. We
want our commerce indepen-
dent, not dominated by them." And that led him back to Asia, for once
Japan renewed itself, it could find its mission in rexitalizing and
exploiting nearby areas —
above all, Korea. Fukuzawa thus instructed
his many readers how to learn from the West even while Japan's mission
was to focus on Asia.^
This most popular and understanding of Japanese wTiters who closely
studied the West followed the motto, 'Japanese spirit, Western things."
Americans only comprehended half that motto. By 1871, U.S. reporters
in Japan had been stunned by the changes of the past several years.
Railways, schools, colleges, even the once-feudal societs' itself, had all
suddenly opened. Clearly, these observers concluded, the Japanese
must want American-style democracy and capitalism. The foreigners
noted how Japanese newspapers urged rikisha men no longer to strip to
loincloths when working, and to put partitions in pubUc bathhouses to
separate the sexes, because "you must not be laughed at by foreigners."
In reality, the Japanese aimed to comince the W^est to terminate the
unequal treaties. But Americans instead concluded that, inexorably, the
gates of the East were about to swing wide to Western trade and Chris-
tian morals. "The opening of the whole countr\' to foreign trade is now
probable," one correspondent informed his American readers, "even
"^
without a formal demand from any foreign power.
This observer had not been pa\ing attention to leading Japanese poli-
ticians. A representative figure was Iwakura Tomomi (1825-1883). As a

young adult, Iwakura was ardently anti-foreign, then turned more realis-
tic. He understood that opposition to the foreigners could lead West-
erners to force their way in and "interfere in our domestic politics"
while seizing "such territory- as they covet." By 1868, the fifteen-year-old
Emperor Meiji listened to Iwakara, who had helped destroy the Sho-
gun's power —
and had helped remove the uncooperative, anti-foreign
former Emperor by poisoning him. Serving as foreign minister in 1871,
Iwakura became the government's power center. In 1873, he led an eigh-
teen-month expedition of notables to Europe and the United States.
The group spent the longest time, some seven months, in America.
That Iwakura and such other central figures as Ito Hirobumi left Japan
for so long at such a delicate, dangerous point in Japan's histor\^ revealed
how important they and the Emperor considered the journey. The trip's
THE CLASH 3 8

purposes were several, Iwakura told his companions: negotiate to

remove the unequal trade treaties and obtain useful knowledge. He
utterly failed to gain the first objective, although the group made highly
favorable impressions in Washington and London.
Knowing he had to adapt to some Western habits, Iwakura made it

a point not to take along soy sauce, sandals, kimonos, or pickles. (At
one point in the trip, a delegate, driven by hunger for home food, broke
into Iwakura's hotel room to take a jar of pickles presented as a gift by
their hosts.) Iwakura made the single mistake of wearing a traditional
silk kimono for a formal negotiating session with President Ulysses S.

Grant. Realizing his error in wearing "what to our eyes appeared a gro-
tesque costume," as one Washington observer recorded, the delegation
never again appeared in, as the American termed it, "feminine garments
of silks and satins." Instead, he concluded, the Japanese wore Western
suits, and "the gravity of their dusky visages commanded respect. "^^
In a historic speech before the U.S. House of Representatives in
1873, Iwakura declared, "We came for enlightenment and we gladly find
it here." He believed Americans and Japanese destined to be linked by
cords of trade: "In the future an extended commerce will unite our
national interests in a thousand forms, as drops of water will commin-
gle, flowing from our several rivers to that common ocean that divides
our countries." But such trade and friendship, the Iwakura group con-
cluded privately, was to be developed on Japan's terms. ^^
That conclusion became clear when the official record of the remark-
able journey written by a Confucian scholar named Kume Kunitake
became public in 1878. Kume had read widely about his Western hosts.
One source was A Brief Account of the United States by Elijah C. Bridg-
man, a U.S. missionary in China whose translated work circulated
widely in both China and Japan. Kume's 1878 account ranked Great
Britain, France, and the United States as the world's three greatest
nations, and Germany just below. Russia was ranked dead last. A divi-
sion of labor, he believed, was taking shape. The British were admired
for their navy and political institutions, the Americans for their business
skills, the French for their literature and philosophy. His admiration,

however, was highly selective. While noting that Americans maintained

only a small, cheap military force, and that they denounced even that
outfit for milking the Treasury, the Japanese also observed that Ameri-

cans, unlike themselves, were not surrounded by ambitious imperialist

powers. Westerners were polite, but they did not hesitate to use force.
The American Indians, Kume declared in an echo of Fukuzawa's
insight, had too much trusted "Christians who preached, 'Love your
^^
enemy' " Japan should instead trust its military.
Joining tke Club (1868-1900) 3> 9

The important on the journey was the value

political lesson learned

of laws that Westerners called constitutions. These the delegates

viewed as the key to maintaining order because the documents spelled
out rights and responsibilities. Not that the U.S. Constitution fitted
Japan; to the contrary, it allowed too much individualism, corruption,
and influence by wealthy interests. Democracy ''tends to pit the people
against their prince." Once this occurs, Kume beUeved, it is "difficult

to restore social and political stability." France was the first victim of
this evil in the 1790s. It was a recipe for disorder — or worse: "In a repub-
lican form of government, the power of the people gradually expands,
and the power of the government must yield to it. [If] the people . . .

stretch, the government must shrink. If there is a keen desire for

. . .

liberty, there will be a neglect of law." Tocqueville had seldom been

more concise about the problems democracy faced. ^^
In the economic realm, the Japanese admired American and British
skills. But they also heard speech after speech in the United States and
Great Britain instructing them to be open to trade and show faith in a

monotheistic god of These speeches, the Japanese decided, did

profit.

not ring true. American industry and farms boomed behind a protective
tariff raised ever higher during the previous dozen years. The Japanese

saw, moreover, that the U.S. government was everywhere enforcing —

contracts, passing laws to subsidize production, creating government
agencies to help farmers and manufacturers develop the latest techno-
logies, and even (Kume might have noted) giving away the land, the

nation's greatest treasure, so private capitalists could rapidly exploit its

wealth. The Japanese group, prudish and Victorian, was, as the histo-
rian Marlene Mayo observes, "rather terrified by the boldness and
coquetry of American women." The wide-open, acquisition-for-ascent
U.S. society allowed too much public kissing, too vague a boundary
between male and female responsibilities. In Japan, the women were
responsible for the home, the men for the world outside the home. A
man, Kume emphasized, had greater obligations to his parents than to
his wife and children. An intelligent person could thus also learn from
^"^
the West what not to do to create a secure, orderly Japan.
Above all, Iwakura concluded that rapid internal development had
to receive top priority. He and other Tokyo leaders received considerable
help in this domestic effort from the United States. The northern island
of Hokkaido was developed in the 1870s with extensive assistance from
American experts, who taught new farming methods and brought in
fresh breeds of livestock. Banking laws for the nation borrowed heavily
from U.S. statutes. Japanese diplomacy was influenced by U.S. legal
advisers such as Erasmus Peshine Smith, Henry Willard Denison, and
 —
THE CLASH 4

Durham White Stevens, who were to work with the Japanese foreign
ministry. More specifically, once the 1877 rebellion was quelled, Iwa-
kura and his successors determined to create a Japanese constitution
but not along the lines of the U.S. document. ^^
Given by the Emperor to his people in 1889, the new Constitution
established a two-house parliament that could grant individual rights.
(In the United States, on the other hand, individual rights were
assumed — all "were created equal" —and the state was then charged by
the Constitution to protect these rights, not create them.) Suffrage in
Japan was so limited that the elected lower house, the House of Com-
mons, was chosen by i percent of the population. Not even universal
male suffrage was given until 1925. The Constitution was handed down
on February 11, 1889, considered the 2,549th anniversary of the founding
of the Japanese state, was not unexpected when Article I
and so it

declared: "The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by

a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal." Article XIII stated: "The
Emperor declares war, makes peace, and concludes treaties." Sacred
and sovereign, the Emperor held supreme command over the military,
but such a line of authority also provided army and navy leaders with
direct access to the throne. The Diet's responsibiUties lay almost wholly
in the domestic arena. Both at home and abroad, however, only the
Emperor could make the ultimate decision. But such simplicity (much
as did the simplicity of the U.S. Constitution's language) badly misled.
The central question was, who would shape the Emperors decision?
Below the throne, factions based on clans (such as groups from Choshu
and Satsuma), and function (as military versus civilian), soon multiplied
with near-American rapidity. The making of foreign policy in Japan, like
^^
its creation in the United States, became an imdtation for struggle.

Japan's Constitution was written in secret by a small group of men

and put into force without public debate or vote. It nevertheless seemed
to accomplish quickly some of its authors' main objectives as the Japa-
nese, now more secure at home, moved rapidly to join the Western
imperialists' exclusive club.

Two Systems, Iwo Imperialisms

American and Japanese successes in nation building during the 1870s

and 1880S were not isolated events. After i860, Germany and Italy also
consolidated, and they, along with France, put into place new central
governments. By the 1880s, great prizes were falling to peoples with the
 —
Joining tKe Clut ( 1868-1900) 4 1

most powerful industries and armies, and with the most centraHzed
regimes for conducting imperial policy. After 1500, when nearly five
hundred separate countries and nation-states could be counted, the
number dropped, until by the 1860-1914 era no more than fifty existed.
A handful of nations put together the skills and aggressiveness to create

concentrated industrial plants whose products and profits translated

into mihtary power. The resulting new imperialism of the post- 1860
years redrew the maps of Africa and Asia. But Asia, unlike Africa,
endured direct attack from every major imperialist power: Great Britain,
France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States.
The last two arrived relatively late (in the 1880s and 1890s), but with
a sledgehammer impact. By 1910, if not as early as 1902, European
nations were measuring the ground on their own continent for war
among themselves. It thus began to appear that the fate of China and
Northeast Asia might be decided by agreement — or a contest
between the United States and Japan. The clash lay well into the
future. In the immediate post-1868 years, the two peoples seemed to be
moving along roughly parallel, rather than converging, paths.
The differences between Japan and the United States, however, help
explain why within a generation they would move onto a collision
course. Americans were being driven outward by growing surpluses of
production, as well as by domestic riots caused by overproduction and
deflation. This drive was reinforced by a long tradition of American
racism and missionary impulses, two traits that helped rationalize the
opening and subjection of other, differently colored societies. Japan, on
the other hand, struggled with a relatively primitive economy in the

1 870s and 1 was driven toward imperialism by different

880s. It

impulses: the well-justified fears that Westerners were creeping uncom-

fortably close to the home islands, and that these outsiders intended to
dominate Japanese trade. One distinguished historian of Japanese for-
eign policy, Ian Nish, even believes that Japan's view of "this threat
"^^
became something of a national neurosis.
Meiji Japan heeded also a second set of impulses: the need to over-
come dangerous internal unrest by focusing people's attention on over-
seas problems. Japan passed through the most dangerous dissension by
the late 1880s. With the smashing of the Satsuma Rebellion and the
issuing of the Constitution, a Japanese consensus was created in and —
—
imposed on the society. Most notably, at the center of this system sat
the Emperor with his ancient legitimacy. The throne was undergirded
by National Shinto as a state religion, propagated between 1868 and
1875 by new shrines and priests. All-important to Shintoism was the
THE CLASH 4 2

Emperor himself. An education system was developed that systemati-

cally and uncritically taught the virtues of patriotism and allegiance to
the Emperor. Not even mixed formula of worldly and
this carefully
other-worldly controls, however, could stamp out the ultranationalist
groups, even assassinations of leading officials, that contually haunted
Japanese foreign poHcy.^^
Driven, then, by different impulses and systems, the two nations
nevertheless sailed in the same directions by the i88os — that is, toward
Korea, China (especially northeast China or Manchuria), Hawaii, and
strategic western Pacific islands. In those regions, imperial struggles
raged. On one historic principle, both nations' leaders did agree, and
fervently: domestic and foreign policy successes were becom-
stability

ing intimately related. In the United States, policymakers from Seward

to Gresham and beyond assumed that the nation's future had to be
worked out in a global arena. Overseas successes could ease domestic
distresses. As for Japanese officials, they knew that if they misestimated
the Westerners as had the Shogun, they, like he, would not survive.
In 1871—73 these officials tried to renegotiate the unequal treaties,
then dispatched the Iwakura mission to accomplish the all-important
task. Both approaches failed. In 1873 Judge John A. Bingham of Ohio
became the U.S. minister. Astute, sympathetic, proper, Bingham began
to work on easing the tariff treaties. In 1878, his patience paid off. The
United States broke away from the other powers and agreed to restore
tariff decision-making to Japan whenever the other nations made a simi-

lar concession. Secretary of State William M. Evarts, a New Yorker and

disciple of Seward, hoped this policy would make Japan friendlier

toward American merchants. ^^
Cooperation between the two nations extended to a number of lev-
els. The Japanese had asked the Massachusetts Agricultural College to

set up a school and experimental farm in Hokkaido. The Americans

taught not only new farming techniques but also the virtues of Chris-
tianity, mihtary drill, U.S. -style houses, and the motto, "Be Ambitious."
Several of these teachings were already proving to be redundant in
Japan. Philadelphia's great Centennial Exposition of 1876 had as one of
its themes the need to trade abroad "to prevent continued depression."
Asia received much attention. Elegant Japanese exhibits were praised
for their beauty and order but also because, as a Philadelphia newspa-
per observed, "The Japanese have already adopted the American cos-
tume and the progressive spirit pervading the Old World is
in dress,
inclining her people to adopt American ideas and American machinery."
(Notably, then and later, U.S. observers assumed that their machinery
Joining tke Club ( 1868-1900) 4 3

and their ideas were natural traveling companions. Few Japanese made
)^^
such an assumption.
Apparently developing along parallel tracks, the two peoples also
seemed to follow similar expansionist paths. For their part, the Japanese
settled a delicate boundary question in 1875 by annexing the Kurile
Islands in the northeast in exchange for giving Russia the island of
Sakhalin, off Siberia's coast. The deal helped secure Japans northern
borders; it also marked Japan's first deaUngs on equal terms with a
Western power. Tokyo's attention now focused on Korea. In the seventh
century the first war between Japan and China had erupted over Korea.
In the thirteenth century, Chinese and Korean troops tried to invade
Japan through the Korean Peninsula. Three hundred years later the
Japanese did invade Korea, although the results were slight (other than
recharging Korean hatred for Japan). Then, with the Tokugawa's isola-
tionist pohcies, Korean-Japanese relations settled into one of their few
eras of tranquility. When the Tokugawa fell, the Koreans refused to
recognize the Meiji regime in 1870-71 — especially when they realized
the new Tokyo leaders fully intended to limit Korea's long-profitable
trade with Japan.
In 1873, as Japanese grew less patient with Korea — this "stagnant,

stubborn, and shrewd country," as it was viewed — Saigo Takamori

offered to invade the neighbor by himself so that when Koreans killed
him, Japan would have reason to declare war. Iwakura sensibly put a
stop to this (and Saigo instead moved toward his own beheading in the
1877 uprising). Iwakura's pivotal ally, Okubo Toshimichi, captured the
moment by arguing powerfully that the war's expenses could lead to
economic dependence on foreigners while wasting money needed for
domestic development.^^
Saigo 's career was decapitated, but Japan's preoccupation with Korea
grew and intensified. Again the interweaving of domestic and foreign
affairs became clear. The 1873 debate over Korea (and, obviously, over
much been termed the 'great divide" in Meiji policy.
else as well) has
It turned the leaders who had triumphed with the Meiji Restoration in

1868 against one another. It deeply affected domestic policies. The pas-
sion of one debate over Korea even ruptured a blood vessel in the brain
of Prime Minister Sanjo Sanetomi. Iwakura himself was attacked and
severely wounded by persons determined to conquer Korea; the attack-
^^
ers were captured and executed.
But for all the smoke and fire, the initial steps toward an imperialist
foreign policy were measured. In 1871, fifty-four persons from the Liu-
chi'iu islands (or the Ryukyus), which both Japan and China claimed,
THE CLASH 4 4

were by an aboriginal tribe when shipwrecked off Formosa.

killed
Charles W. LeGendre, an American and a former Civil War officer, was
advising the Japanese foreign ministry. He urged the conquest of For-
mosa and brutally avenging the murders. In mid- 1874, Japan landed
three thousand troops to discipline the tribes on Formosa. The Japa-
nese, who had devotedly studied Western international law since Tow-
nsend Harris had introduced it to them, nicely cited appropriate
provisions to show China that it lacked jurisdiction. The Chinese
replied they were governed only by ''truth," not by an international law
that was a device recently cooked up by Westerners. In 1879, Japan
demonstrated (to paraphrase Napoleon) that truth and law were on the
side of the largest artillery. A Japanese force seized the Ryukyus, includ-
^^
ing the chain's largest island of Okinawa.
Korea might well have been the next landing site. In 1874, however,
when Koreans slaughtered the crew of a Japanese ship, the news was
overshadowed by a domestic uproar: the beheading, and public display
of the heads, of leaders of a rebellion against the Tokyo government.
The rebels had, among other aims, demanded the conquest of Korea.
In 1876, the Japanese satisfied themselves by sending two warships and
four transports full of soldiers to enforce new demands: that Korea be
an "independent nation" free of the Chinese relationship; that Japa-
nese-Korean diplomatic relations begin; and that three ports be opened
to trade.Japan clearly was challenging the Chinese Empire as well as
the Korean kingdom. The 1876 treaty marked Japan's first post-1868 step
^^
onto the Asian mainland.
Into this cauldron of Asian crises stepped the United States. Ameri-
cans had taken notice of Korea in 1871 when President Grant, avenging
the Korean slaughter of a U.S. naval crew, sent warships into a Korean
river. After the ships were fired on, the American cannon killed two
hundred Koreans. Japan's more constructive success in 1876 encour-
aged U.S. officials to put relations with Korea on a happier, more
profitable basis. Expansionists from the California business community
and the U.S. Congress pushed Secretary of State Evarts to dispatch
Commodore Robert N. Shufeldt to negotiate with Korea. Reflecting on
the economic crisis of the 1870s, Shufeldt noted that "at least one-third
of our mechanical and agricultural products are in excess of our own
wants, and we must export these products." The commodore also
pointed the direction: "the Pacific Ocean is to become at no distant day
the commercial domain of America." In both 1867 and 1880, Shufeldt
had tried to work directly with the Koreans to open their country, only
to have his ambition of becoming the Commodore Perry of Korea
Joining tke Club 1868-1900)
( 4 5

deflated by the hostile Seoul regime. In 1882, Shufeldt pointedly

opened talks with the Chinese before approaching Korea. The Chinese
seemed friendly, and he explained why to the State Department: a U.S.
treaty with Korea made with China's help "would tend to check the
encroachment of Japan. "^^
The Shufeldt treaty of 1882, the first such pact Korea signed with a
Western nation, opened the country to trade and residence for foreign-
ers, while granting Americans commercial privileges. Shufeldt coldly

rejected the Chinese demand that the treaty explicitly recognize Korean
dependence on China. Having used the Chinese, he now refused to
allow them to use him.
Japan was not pleased that China had been Shufeldts ticket into
Korea. But Tokyo officials thought that given China's decline, they
enjoyed the best position for the newly opened race to exploit Korea.
Or so some Japanese leaders dreamed.

Joining the Imperialists Club:

Ito, Gresnam, and the
"Pigtail War"
Japan had traveled far since 1868, but not nearly as far as most Japanese
believed. The rampant nationalisms of the nineteenth century (and the
resulting tragedies of the twentieth) had need of certain components: a
strong sense of cultural nationhood ("manifest destiny" in the United
States, for example), an efficient central government controUing the
means army that could wield that violence to
of violence, a national
attain governmental objectives, and a growing industrial base that pro-
duced both manufactured exports and arms. By the 1880s, Japan pos-
sessed all but the industrial base.^^
Matsukata Masayoshi intended to remedy this problem. After
becoming finance minister in 1881, he destroyed inflation with a con-
vertible currency, a 20 percent reduction in the quantity of money, new
taxes, and a slashing of public expenditures. Reductions included clos-
ing, or turning over to private individuals, the public operation of factor-
ies and mines. In 1885, the Bank of Japan was created to oversee these
policies. It did so with brutal efficiency. As governmental savings leaped
upward, Japan found capital for its military.^^
It also found capital for internal development. The manufacturing

complex was premodern: food (especially brewing) and textiles

THE CLASH 4 6

accounted for two-thirds of all manufactures. True, by 1893 the country

had built basic infrastructure (2,000 miles of railroads, 4,000 miles of
telegraph lines, 100,000 tons of steam vessels as part of a fast-growing
merchant marine). But Japan was using up its one major home-pro-
duced mineral, coal, and needed imports from Korean and Manchurian
mines. Pig iron and steel production remained pitifully small until the
new century. The most important exports included silk, half of which
went to the United States, and cheaper cotton goods, which were
shipped mainly to China and Korea. Japan somewhat resembled the
American South at this point: a world player in cheaper textiles, but
still in the low minor leagues when it came to iron and steel, two prod-

ucts that separated the real from the aspiring powers. Compared with
the Western Europeans or the northern United States, Japan was an
immature imperialist.^^
One difference, however, sharply separated Japan from the American
South. The former Confederacy's factories (not to mention some of its
schools) had been built by the North's carpetbagging capital. The South
was, in this and other respects, a colony. Japan, however, followed a
fixed, single-minded determination not to become dependent on foreign

investors. Hence Matsukata's boot-camp regimen for the economy in

the 1880S. Hence the diversion of agricultural products abroad for profit
rather than for use at home. Hence the forced savings. Hence the pas-
sion for destroying the unequal treaties. (And hence American experi-
ences with Japanese trade and investment practices a century later.)
Japan intended to join the Westerners, not invite them in.^^
If Matsukata built the economic foundations, Ito Hirobumi was cru-

cial in building political foundations. Born of low-ranking samurai in

1841, Ito ranked as one of the most colorful of this generation's leaders.
His personal life was the history of Japan between i860 and his murder
in 1909. In the 1860s, he had been a Choshu youngster who joined in

the cry, "Honor the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians!" Then, however, he
was chosen to study abroad. His first sight of British warships made him
think realistically. He concluded the "Barbarians" could not be quickly
expelled, only copied until they had to treat Japan as an equal. Ever
after, Ito was sensitive and shrewd in handling foreigners. These quali-

ties became highly polished when Iwakura took him on the eighteen-

month "knowledge-seeking" mission of 1871-73, and again in 1882-83

when Ito went Europe for firsthand study of constitutions.^^
to

By the 1880s, he was a pivotal figure in the highly centralized decision

making that formed the 1889 Constitution. As Ito wrote Iwakura in
1882, the Emperor must be "a cornerstone, secure in his grasp of sover-
 ^

Joining tKe Club ( 1 868- 1 900) 4 7

eign power." But as Japan's first significant prime minister in the 1890s,

Ito also demonstrated a common touch. Unlike his peers, he paid little
attention to tea ceremonies or Noh drama. am content with little and
**I

give absolutely no thought [to] saving money," he admitted. "What I like

best is a geisha companion to entertain me after work." When he died,

many women from restaurants and red-light districts recalled their
friendships with Ito. His passions were the new Japan and women. One
biographer believes Ito was described by a traditional song: "Drunk, my
head pillowed on a beauty's lap; awake and sober, grasping power to

govern the nation."^

Ito's major opponent was Yamagata Aritomo, founder of the post-
1868 Japanese military. Schooled with Ito, the reserved, severe Yamagata
acted like a soldier even when serving as prime minister. Yamagata was
pivotal in winning the top military officers special access to the
Emperor under the new Constitution. At the same time, he detested
political parties and determined not to have them infect the armed

forces. Thus in 1890, as Yamagata desired, voting rights were specifically

denied to priests, the military, and the insane. Elected civilians there-
fore found themselves with little power over the military. Venerating the
Emperor, Yamagata was an expansionist who believed in the traditional
imperial slogan that the throne brought "the four corners of the world
under one roof. " No corner was more important to Yamagata (or Ito)

than Korea. For here, as Yamagata's Prussian military mentors taught

him was the touchstone of Japan's security. And, as he had
in the 1870s,
also concluded in the 1870s, Russia posed the great danger to this secu-
rity. By 1894, Yamagata could put a quarter-million men in the field. The

navy numbered twenty-eight steamships and owned facilities to build

modern vessels and weapons. ^^
Foreign threats, in Japanese eyes, did not include the United States.
This omission was notable. Americans, after all, had quickly pushed on
the Korean door that Shufeldt opened. King Kojong believed (tragically,
as it turned out) that Americans were committed to his nation's best
interests: independence and protection against Japan and China. Some

of the U.S. diplomats who reinforced Kojong's misperception were irre-

sponsible and incompetent: one was a hopeless drunk, another a retired
school superintendent ignorant of diplomatic responsibilities, and most
had been political hacks back home.^^
An exception was Horace Allen, a Presbyterian missionary who
arrived as the secretary of the U.S. legation in 1884. He became the
U.S. minister a decade later, and finally had to be pried out of Korea in

1905. Allen and other Americans worked with the Japanese during the
 —
THE CLASH 4 8

years before 1894 in supporting Korean reformers intent on creating a

fully independent Korea. The missionary-diplomat meanwhile used his
access to the king to enrich Americans with lush concession contracts
for railways and some of Asia's most promising gold mines. Kojong made
all this possible. In his view, Americans were preferable to the neigh-

boring predators, Russia or the historic enemy, Japan. American mis-

sionaries — largely excluded from Japan, discriminated against in China,
and with their faith under bombardment from Darwinism at home
flooded into Korea to find their own market. Koreans may have massa-
cred Western missionaries a generation earlier, but now it was in Korea's
interest to use Americans to separate the peninsula's politics from Chi-
^"^
nese control.
The moment of truth struck in mid-1894. Ito and his foreign minister,
Mutsu Munemitsu, occupied one side of the debate in Tokyo, Yamagata
the other. In July 1894, Ito and Mutsu set the stage when they scored
one of Japan's great diplomatic victories of the Meiji era by convincing
Great Britain to end the unequal treaties. It is notable that, say, unlike
the Soviet Bolsheviks later, the Meiji had not begun to reign by refusing
to recognize treaties already in force. The Japanese instead had
accepted them, then set out to destroy the pacts. Extraterritoriality was
to be abolished in 1899; Japan was to enjoy full control over its own
tariffs after 191 1. Just two weeks after signing the British agreement, the
Japanese moved to become a full-fledged member in the imperialists'

Chinese ships off the Korean coast. Within a

club. Japan's fleet sank
^^
week, Japanese troops moved in mass onto the peninsula.
The war had been triggered by an uprising within Korea against King
Kojong, who then asked China for assistance. The rioters (an outlawed
group, the Tonghaks) were quickly smashed by Korean forces without
China's help. Japan, however, claimed that the Chinese had abrogated
the 1885 Sino-Japanese treaty that promised cooperation in any such
military operations in Korea. More directly, the Tonghak outbreak was
a mere pretext for Japan. Yamagata and his military associates had eyed
the land beyond the Shimonoseki Straits since the 1870s. In 1892, when
the Russians began building their great Trans-Siberian Railway into
Northeast Asia, Yamagata warned the Emperor that the railway would
bring Russian power dangerously close to Japan and create a crisis with
St. Petersburg. Japan's military, along with civilian officials, had also

been searching for a club to beat down political unrest, even rioting,
arising from economic problems. A Japanese official in Washington
admitted to Secretary of State Gresham that the "situation at home is
critical, and war with China would improve it" by 'more strongly
 —

Joining tKe Glut ( 1868-1900) 4 9

attaching the people to the government" — a remark that stunned and

angered the American. Intellectuals such as Fukuzawa fueled the fire

by urging that Japan no longer associate with a declining Asia, but prove
^^
its modernity by treating Asians the way the West treated Japanese.

As pro-war passion grew, Ito tried to avoid a conflict while simultane-

ously wringing quick concessions out of China. But the Chinese, with
a larger military ready to fight (about 350,000 regulars), would not back
down. Ito lost his struggle especially after Foreign Minister Mutsu
moved toward Yamagata's hawkish position. War offered too much
peace home, secure markets and strategic points in Korea, checkmat-
at

ing a Russian movement south, and membership in the imperialists'

club. On July 24, 1894, Japan sank a Chinese transport, killing over
a thousand men and (according to European advisers who survived)
machine-gunning many of the victims in the water. Interestingly, few
Americans blamed Japan for this attack. They preferred the westerniz-
ing Japan to the disintegrating but defiant Chinese. Japan now set out
to show, as one of the nation's pro-war voices phrased it, that "civiliza-
tion is not a monopoly of the white man."^^
King Kojong brandished Shufeldt's 1882 treaty, in which Americans
had solemnly promised to exert their 'good offices if Korea faced dan-
"

ger from a third party. Gresham, however, now flatly refused to respond.
He only declared, lamely, that he hoped Japan would not wage an unjust
war. That same day he told the Japanese privately he had no intention
of helping Korea. As war had approached in July, the British asked
Gresham and President Grover Cleveland to join Europeans in mediat-
ing the conflict. The Americans politely declined. They did not intend
to cooperate pubhcly with the British unless U.S. interests in Asia
required protection. Such interests certainly existed, but they were
mainly China's market and missionary outposts. For their sake, Cleve-
land (the son of a Presbyterian minister and notably sensitive about
missionaries in Asia) increased the U.S. Asian Fleet from one to eight
ships. Gresham, it seemed, had only one major worry: that Japan's reach
would exceed its grasp. He repeatedly warned the Japanese government
that demanding too much from Korea would invite a European counter-
stroke. Such a response, U.S. officials feared (correctly, as it turned
out), could climax in an imperialist scramble throughout Asia threaten-
ing the traditional U.S. open-door policy of keeping China whole and
open to the business people of all nations on equal terms. A loss of that
potentially bottomless market amid the 1890s economic crisis could be
^^
disastrous.
Not for the last time in U.S. -Japan relations, Washington officials
THE CLASH 5

therefore stepped aside while Japan used force. Most Americans

seemed to approve. "J^pan, the Great Britain of Asia" (that is, an island
nation that could sway a neighboring continent) became a common
phrase. So was "Yankees of the East." "Everybody wanted to know, and
knowing, liked the Japs," wrote one observer. The Japanese Secret Ser-
vice built on this goodwill by hiring the highly effective Edward H.
House, an American editor of the Tokyo Times, to propagandize Japan s

views in the United States. When the Japanese attacked the vital Man-
churian base of Port Arthur in November 1894, they discovered the
Chinese had hung heads of Japanese prisoners at the main entry. The
invading troops, in the words of an American reporter, "killed everything
they saw, including children, and beheaded many." This sensational
story oddly strengthened U.S. -Japanese friendship: Americans blamed
the slaughter on Chinese barbarism and compared it to the Native
^^
American savagery that U.S. soldiers had faced.
Washington officials nevertheless realized that dealing with these
"Yankees" required the most careful calibration. Too little support, and
Japan could be humiliated. Too much support, and Korea, perhaps even
China, could shatter, with Europeans rushing in to claim the pieces.
Gresham consequently warned Tokyo again to be careful or "other pow-
ers" could "demand a settlement not favorable to Japans well- . . .

being." His approach won some early rewards. China and Japan each
asked Americans to oversee its property and diplomatic business in the
other's country during the war. But Gresham could not finally protect

Japan from the Europeans. By March 1895, Japan had overwhelmed the
larger Chinese forces. It controlled not only Korea, but the Liaotung
Peninsula that opened into the lush markets and mineral wealth of
Manchuria.
Since August 1894, the confident foreign ministry under Mutsu had
been considering its demands on China, beginning with the control of
railways. As their military triumphs mounted, however, so did these
officials' appetites, until by early 1895 Mutsu intended to take Formosa
and strategic ports in South Manchuria as well as to control Korea. He
calculated that the British and Americans would not object. After all,

under their most-favored-nation treaties with China, these Westerners

would enjoy any access Manchuria obtained by Japan. And indeed,
into
in March 1895, Gresham acted as go-between to expedite the Chinese
acceptance of these terms, plus the Japanese demand of a $135 million
indemnity from China. Russians and Germans, however, proved to be
another matter. The tsar's regime wanted no other government in Man-
churia close to its Trans-Siberian Railway. The kaiser's government
 ^

Joining tke Club ( 1868-1900) 5 1

meanwhile sought outright colonies and naval bases, not merely the
open-door right to compete with the highly efficient Americans and
^*^
British for markets.
On April 23, 1895, the Russians and Germans struck. Joined by the
French, they "advised" Mutsu to return the Liaotung Peninsula to
China. Ito's cabinet stalled, tried to suggest a compromise, then sud-
denly backed down on May 5. Ito feared that the Russians, at least,
were prepared to use force. The Japanese business community wanted
no more war, and the prime minister doubted Japan could survive such
a conflict, especially since the British and Americans had become
emphatic in their silence. As consolation, Japan demanded and
received a $200 million indemnity from China. On May 8, the Treaty
of Shimonoseki ended the war on terms dictated by the Triple Interven-
tion of Russia, Germany, and France."^
It was a bitter blow for Japan. The war had been so popular that even

political squabbling in Tokyo had quieted. In October 1895, Japanese

officials in Korea tried to counterattack by destroying Russian influ-

ence. They directed a revolt against the Korean court. Queen Min was
killed. Americans, including Horace Allen, had, for the sake of their
concessions, switched sides to Russia. Now they tried to help King
Kojong against the pro-Japanese rebels. But again, the State Depart-
ment ordered Allen to back away and scolded him for being involved in
internal Korean politics. Embarrassingly disguised as a coolie. King
Kojong sought refuge Russian (not American) legation. The Japa-
in the

nese coup was quelled, Russian influence grew. Allen moved to make
the most of it. He obtained Korea's richest gold mine, the Un-san, for
a U.S. company. From 1897 until 1939 the American owners earned $15
million of profit from the Un-san mine, despite the post-1905 Japanese
"^^
control and annexation of Korea.
For a moment in 1896, it indeed seemed that Americans might obtain
more from the 1894-95 war than would the victors. When the Japanese
government tried to talk its bankers into investing in Korean railways,
the response was cool. The Mitsui Company expressed interest in Man-
churia's soy beans, not its minerals. Japanese businessmen, in other
words, wanted trade, not investment opportunities. This was most frus-
trating for an Ito government that hoped the war would finally produce
long-term profits for investments as well as strategic security. Now the
conflict threatened to produce neither. Japanese business lacked the
capital and interest to build abroad. Russians and Americans were left

to exploit Korea.
Ito's government had to resign in 1896. Public outrage over the
THE CLASH 5 2

Korean debacle had risen to such explosive levels that the Emperor j
\
issued an imperial edict demanding quiet. By late 1895, Tokyo officials
were already preparing for the next. war by building four battleships.
U.S. shipbuilders and steelmakers swarmed over Japan to obtain con-
tracts."*^

Irony abounded. Amid rioting and economic crisis at home, and

while the State Department followed a hands-off policy, Americans
moved to make fortunes from Korean, Chinese, and Japanese markets.
This sudden emergence of U.S. influence opened a pivotal chapter of
U.S. -Asian relations in a matter of months in 1895—96. Nevertheless,
Japan, despite the Triple Intervention, emerged the real victor. It gained
named by Portuguese
the strategic island of Formosa, (or "beautiful") as
explorers, but claimed by China for two centuries. The decision to
annex occurred after bitter internal bureaucratic struggles. The navy
believed the island to be worth much more than Manchurian territory,
a belief that gained weight as Yamagata's projects collapsed under Euro-
pean pressure. So began a highly difficult fifty-five-year rule over Tai-
wan, as China called it. The beginnings of the rule were ominous:
native Taiwanese quickly, and unsuccessfully, attempted to block the
takeover by declaring their island a republic.^'*
At home, wartime spending and the Chinese indemnity fueled eco-
nomic good times. The government used the indemnity to build the
large Yawata Iron Works, soon a fount for the nation's arsenal. Yawata
was one of many plants that exploited Western technology to bolster
both economic and military prowess. Watching all this, Americans were
mightily impressed. Not even the Triple Intervention seemed to do
more than temporarily slow up the Japanese. "Americans cannot but
wish them success," the Philadelphia Press declared in December 1895.
"Nippon is indeed the day-star of the East." The American Medical
Association surveyed the highly efficient military field hospitals and
announced that "truly the Japanese is a wonderful man." A widely noted
book of 1896 formally bestowed the ultimate compliment: the Japanese
were The Yankees of the East.'^^
Lafcadio Hearn rang changes on this theme in "The Genius of Japa-
nese Civilization," published in Atlantic Monthly and reprinted else-
where. Hearn, born in Greece, had emigrated to the United States to
be a reporter, but after difficult, drunken times in New Orleans, he
headed for Japan in 1890. There he lived like a Japanese, married a
Japanese wife, took a Japanese name, and became perhaps the best-
known interpreter of Japan to Americans between the 1890s and his
death in 1904. "Without losing a single ship or a single battle," Hearn
Joining tlie Club ( 1 868- 1 900) 5 3

wrote in late 1895, "J^pan has broken down the power of China, made
a new Korea, enlarged her own territory, and changed the whole politi-

cal face of the East." All this was "astonishing," but equally so, he
thought, was that even as the Japanese powerfully wielded "Western
industrial invention," they changed little inwardly and emotionally. They
remained Japanese. Their laborers continued to get along in clothes
that cost 75 cents and with belongings that "can be put into a handker-
chief." Yet these people had been "highly civilized" for a thousand years.
Americans, Hearn warned, required too much: "We must have meat
. . . windows and fire; hats, white shirts, and woolen underwear
glass
... all of which a Japanese can do without and is really better off with-
out." Hearn then drew a conclusion: "Hence his present capacity to
threaten Western manufacturers."^^

Clash Over Ha^vaii

Hearns gentle warning about a future conflict quickly came true, but
not quite in the form he prophesied. Indeed, the turn of American
attitudes toward Japan was remarkable —and ominous. Consider
Hawaii.
The first U.S. settlers reached the islands in 1820. Missionaries and
ship crews working the profitable Pacific whaling industry, they rapidly
infiltrated the economy and politics. The Kanakas (native Hawaiians)
soon sarcastically termed Americans "the Missionary Party." A U.S. con-
sul, deeply disturbed that the missionaries were using tricks to buy up
native-owned land, called them "bloodsuckers," who lived "like lords in
this luxurious land disturbing the minds of these children of Nature
with the idea that they are to be eternally damned unless they think
and act as they [the missionaries] do." The major turn occurred in the
1860S-70S when whahng declined and a sugar industry developed. In
1875-76, a U.S. -Hawaiian reciprocity treaty was signed. It opened the
vast U.S. market to Hawaii's sugar. An economic boom now reshaped
"^^
the islands' society
Vigorously growing sugar exports required ever larger amounts of
cheap Chinese were the first imports, but racial tensions devel-
labor.

oped, along with a fear they were too apt to abandon the sugar planta-
tions to set up their own shops in towns. In 1868, the initial Japanese
laborers arrived, thanks to a direct agreementbetween the Hawaiian
and Japanese governments. The Japanese emigration might have ended
there, for most poorer Japanese did not wish to leave their ancestors'
THE CLASH 5 4

lands. But the situation changed in the i88os when Matsukatas eco-
nomic policies disciplined Japan's economy and unrest.
into recession
Looking for their own new frontier, and encouraged by Tokyo officials
who began to envision Hawaii as well as Korea as Japan's new outposts,
the number of Japanese in Hawaii leaped from a few to 24,400 in 1896.
Both Americans and Japanese had converged on Hawaii after the 1870s
because economic conditions athome pushed them out on this Pacific
frontier. U.S. interest further intensified when the reciprocity treaty was
renewed in 1886 and contained the added provision that Americans
would gain access to the potentially magnificent harbor on the Pearl
River. Now more than sugar was involved. As President Grover Cleve-
land declared, "Those islands, on the highway of Oriental and Austral-
asian traffic, are virtually an outpost of American commerce and the
'"^^
stepping-stone to the growing trade of the Pacific.
The had been integrated into the American commercial drive
islands
westward. An earlier drive had produced Perry's confrontation with the
Japanese. After 1877, a more sophisticated and powerful thrust, gener-
ated by new industrialism, turmoil, and riots at home, was climaxing in
another confrontation, but with quite a different Japan.
By the 1890s, Tokyo officials, who had cooperated in moving emi-
grants into Hawaii, knew their people were suffering humiliating dis-

crimination, were waging strikes and enduring arrests, because of bad

wages and working conditions. Between 1890 and 1893, those condi-
tions worsened in Hawaii for everyone: a U.S. reciprocity act of 1890
allowed Cuban sugar into the United States at a more favorable cost
than Hawaiian. As political tensions grew, white planter interests struck
in February 1893 to overthrow Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani. At the cli-
mactic moment, the feverishly pro-annexationist U.S. minister, John
Stevens, ordered 150 sailors to land from the USS Boston to help the
plotters. The new government quickly negotiated annexation to the
United States. American economic power in the mid-Pacific had grown
to the point that simply by manipulating tariff rates, Washington offi-
'^^
cials could ignite a revolution.
President Cleveland and Secretary of State Gresham inherited this
crisis when they entered office in March 1893. Cleveland had been
forced out of the presidency between 1889 and 1893 by Benjamin Har-
rison, whose administration had been ready to annex Hawaii in early
1893. Cleveland and Gresham were not ready. They feared the U.S.
Constitution could not extend that far across water into predominantly
non-Anglo-Saxon regions, without snapping. Moreover, they wanted no
colonies, especially colonies redolent of Republican gunboat diplomacy
 ^

Joining tKe Glut ( 1868-1900) 5 5

Besides, they had what they wanted without the headaches of daily
governing: a white man's government, control of the economy, and de
facto possession of the islands' most promising harbor. The Democratic
New York World caught the policy exactly: "Annexation in any real sense
is not necessary or desirable," for a simple protectorate could secure
"the interests of our citizens there and the convenience of our com-
"50
merce.
Racism also infected U.S. policies. All imperialism contained some
racism, but in the United States variety it cut in two directions: anti-
imperialists argued that Caribbean or Central American areas should
not be annexed because the United States already had enough prob-
lems absorbing people with brown or black skins, while imperialists
insisted that Hawaii must be annexed to protect American whites far

outnumbered by Hawaii's major racial groups Hawaiians, Chinese, —

Japanese, and Portuguese. Some 7,200 white Americans lived amidst a
total population of 109,000. The past commander of the U.S. Asiatic
squadron, George Belknap, was "convinced . . . that Japan was anxious
to enlarge her [possessions]and find colonial homes for some of her
surplus population. He quoted a Japanese naval officer as saying, "We
"

aim to make Japan the England of the Pacific." The new Honolulu
government vowed not to let that occur. Apparently only one Japanese,
a policeman, was allowed the right to vote in all Hawaii.^
In March- April 1897, two events threw Japan and the United States
into direct conflict. First, the white Hawaiian government turned back
two shiploads of Japanese immigrants on the grounds they were outside
the islands' laws. Tokyo bitterly protested such treatment to the point
that a battleship sailed in April to protect Japanese citizens. The Hawai-
ian foreign minister shot back that his country had the right to stop
any "individuals dangerous to the community in its moral, sanitary, and
economic interests." Realizing such words went too far, the regime tried
to cool Tokyo down by turning the crisis over to arbitration. Then the
second blow struck. A new President, William McKinley, picked up
where his Republican predecessor had left off in 1893. McKinley moved
to annex Hawaii. Believing in the exercise of strong central governmen-
tal powers, Republicans had little fear the Constitution might be over-

stretched. McKinley and his advisers, moreover, never concealed their

ambition to make Americans supreme in world markets. Hawaii held a
key to Asian markets. U.S. officials, led by the young Assistant Secre-
tary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, carefully noted who was sending
^^
a warship to keep that key out of American hands.
McKinley and Roosevelt fully realized that annexation could create
THE CLASH 5 6

a flashpoint with Japan. In the spring of 1897, Roosevelt rushed ships

toward Hawaii while warning McKinley about the power of Tokyo's
fleet. On June 21, 1897, the Japanese foreign minister told Americans
that annexation could disturb "the general status quo in the Pacific" and
"endanger the actual and important treaty rights of Japan in Hawaii."
While denying that Japan held any "designs" on the islands, he indi-
rectly blamed Americans for circulating "mischievous reports" about
Tokyo's intentions. McKinley flatly denied each statement. The U.S.
Fleet went on alert. It received orders to stop the Japanese if they tried
to use force to take Hawaii. The response could include extending the
Navy's own "protectorate" over the islands. In Japan itself, U.S. sailors
on leave were attacked by angry Japanese. McKinley's annexation treaty,

however, became entangled in partisan politics and fights over a new

tariff bill. It failed to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate
during 1897.^^
The crisis, as both sides knew, had only quieted, not ended. "The
United States," Roosevelt told an Ohio audience, "is not in a position
which requires her to ask Japan, or any other foreign power, what terri-

tory it shall or shall not acquire." During one of their regular carriage
rides around Washington, the usually cautious McKinley surprised Roo-
sevelt in September by telling him that he had been "quite right" in
^"^
pubhcly criticizing the Japanese.
Roosevelt now pushed the administration to build six more battle-

ships, in part so the U.S. Pacific Fleet could "constantly be kept above
that of Japan." He received vibrant public support from the nation's
best-regarded naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan. In June 1895,
Mahan had pubHcly observed that Japan's sudden appearance "as a
strong ambitious state" not only "fairly startled the world," but deserved
attention because Hawaii was "occupied by Japanese and Chi-
largely
nese." In a private letter to his good friend Roosevelt on May i, 1897,
Mahan was more explicit: Japan's navy directly threatened Hawaii; U.S.
future interests were to face greater dangers in the Pacific than the
Atlantic. It was, moreover, in the interest of the Russians (whom
Mahan especially feared and despised) to have the United States and
Japan at each other's throats. And so Mahan nicely instructed Roose-
velt: "Do nothing unrighteous; but as regards the problem take the
islands and solve afterwards" any political and constitutional prob-
first

lems. Roosevelt told the new U.S. Naval War College that it should
study a specific war problem: "Japan makes demands on Hawaiian
Islands," and the United States responds with force while experiencing
"comphcations" with Spanish-held Cuba.^^
Joining tKe Club (1868-1900) 5 7

Suddenly on December 22, 1897, Japan withdrew its protest against

possible U.S. annexation, but asked that its citizens' rights be protected
on the islands. Two weeks later, the State Department thanked Japan
while saying nothing about Japanese rights. The threat of a clash over
Hawaii ebbed, but its root causes — a struggle for control of the Pacific
—
and the treatment of Japanese citizens lingered. Why had Tokyo
backed down? Because a new crisis stood virtually on its doorstep. As
for McKinley, he faced three crises, two on his own doorstep and one
nearly on Japan s.

Joining the Imperialists Club:

The "Splenaid Little W^ar and a
Not-So-Splenaid W^ar

McKinley s first crisis was the birth cry of Americas industrial power-
house. Rapid growth in the production of U.S. goods had created a
deflationary economic depression whose depths were reached in 1893-
96. By early 1897, as McKinley and his near-senile Secretary of State,
John Sherman of Ohio, entered office, the economy seemed to be
recovering. Given the previous twenty-five years of economic hell, how-
ever, few were confident. McKinley quickly moved to protect the
domestic U.S. market, while creating sticks and carrots to force other
nations to accept American exports, in the 1897 Dingley Tariff.
One target was Japan. By 1894-95, observers warned of a Japanese
invasion, with the light infantry being silks, linens, and cheap textiles
that flowed out of Japan's factories. Higher duties were quickly imposed
so that, as one Paterson, New Jersey, silk manufacturer said, "underval-
ued Japanese goods could be kept out of the country."^^
Merely stopping the influx of cheaper Japanese goods, however, was
no solution for a twenty-five-year depression. That solution popped up
in 1897 when gold was discovered in Alaska and South Africa (so the
amount of money circulating in the United States began to increase),
—
and when exports accelerated especially in such prime second indus-
trial revolution products as steel and locomotives.

The economic relief allowed McKinley to concentrate on his second

crisis, a revolution in Cuba. Its roots reached back to 1868, when

Cubans rebelled against a corrupt, declining, slave-ridden Spanish colo-

nialism. That upheaval was finally quelled by 1878. Then in 1894 when
a mere U.S. tariff change discriminated against Cuban sugar exports.
THE CLASH 5 8

the island's economy slumped, unemployment and revolution

rose,
—
erupted in 1895 this time with vocal support and financing from pri-
vate U.S. citizens. As the revolution intensified, $50 miUion of Ameri-
can property was threatened. When Spain clearly could not keep order
in Havana during early 1898, McKinley sent a warship, the Maine, to
anchor off the capital. In February, a mysterious explosion blew up the
ship and killed 250 U.S. sailors. McKinley reacted carefully. It was not
clear the tragedy had been caused by Spain (later investigations indi-
cated it probably had not), and the U.S. miHtary was not quite prepared
for war. The President moved toward a showdown, but at his own pace
and after being certain that war expenses would not push the nation
back into depression. ^^
By early 1898, McKinley faced a third critical problem, the problem
that also confronted Japan. In 1897, after two of its missionaries were
killed in China, Germany demanded as indemnity a major Chinese
port, Kiaochou, on the strategic Shantung Peninsula, long desired by
Japan. Germany received the port, as well as valuable railway and min-
eral concessions. The kaiser thereby unleashed an imperialist scramble
to bite off other choice portions of the dying Chinese Empire. Russia
consolidated its position in Manchuria and tried to increase its influ-
ence in Korea. Ito, again holding power in Tokyo, was relatively pro-
Russian compared with other Japanese leaders (especially those in the
military), but his approach to St. Petersburg was largely rebuffed. So
Ito joined the race and asked for a sphere of influence in Fukien Prov-
ince (that faced Japan's new colony of Taiwan), as well as railway con-
cessions. France continued to nibble away at China's southeastern
boundary. Then the major question arose: What would the world's
greatest power, Great Britain, do — especially since it controlled 70 per-
cent of China's trade and preferred to keep the Chinese market whole,
not chopped off and colonized by London's imperial rivals?^^
The British had one possible ally — the United States — in keeping
China undivided. In January to March 1898, they approached McKinley
for cooperation. Americans now realized they had a large stake in Asian
developments. Literally hundreds of newspaper and journal articles
trumpeted the vast importance of U.S. industrial exports moving into
China. In some instances, the argument ran, entire factories like the —
giant 25,000-spindle textile plant in Cordova, Alabama totally —
depended on the China market. These economic demands were loudly
seconded by missionary interests proclaiming that "God has placed us,
like Israel of old, in the center of nations" to awaken Asia 'out of sleep,"

so it can "combine with America to make the Pacific Ocean the chief
Joining the Glut 1868-1900)
( 5 9

highway of the worlds commerce." Less noted was that Japan had
become the more profitable market for Americans, and without help
from missionaries. U.S. exports to Japan amounted to $20 million, more
than twice those to China. On average, each Japanese bought $9.60 in
American goods annually, each Chinese 9 cents' worth. But then, Chi-
na s potential market for U.S. industrial goods was much greater than
Japan's, and certainly China (through no wish of its own) was much
more open to the missionary word.''^
McKinley understood all of this. During 1897, his administration
labored to open China's interior to U.S. business and missionaries. The
President sharply separated friends from enemies. As his mouthpiece,
the powerful New York Tribune, phrased it in mid-March 1898: "As
between Russian rule and Japanese rule, a large share of the civilized
world would choose the latter every time. Slav-Tartar-Cossack rule
means tyranny, ignorance, reaction. Japanese rule means freedom,
enlightenment, progress." U.S. officials, moreover, were convinced that
sheer desperation had forced Japan to desert the open-door approach
and join the race for colonies. If the United States and Great Britain
provided help, the Japanese would work to prop the door back open.
Given the Cuban crisis, however, McKinley could not join the British
—
and Japanese at least not yet. In mid-March, Washington told London
that no cooperation was possible until Cuba was pacified. In April, to
McKinley's horror, the British carved off the Chinese port of Weihaiwei
^^
for themselves to counter the German and Russian moves.
Late that month, McKinley and the Congress declared war on Spain.
The President quickly delivered one swift strike to deal with his prob-
lems both on the doorstep and in the Pacific. From the start, he eyed
Spain's colony in the southwestern Pacific, the Philippines. He and the
young Roosevelt had fully discussed the Philippines' possibiHties during
their buggy rides. Left alone in the Navy Department on February 25,

1898, the hyperactive Roosevelt sent orders to U.S. ships to prepare for
war. The next day a surprised president rescinded most of the orders,
but not the directive to Admiral George Dewey, commander of the U.S.
Pacific Fleet then in Hong Kong. McKinley's decision was not acciden-
tal. The plans sent Dewey had been carefully created by U.S. naval
planners (not Roosevelt) over several years and personally approved by
the President. The war against Spain set these plans in motion. The
outbreak of fighting in Cuba generated great support. "Even Bostonians
have at last a chance to show they have emotions," wrote a skeptical
Henry Adams. Those emotions reached high pitch when Americans
learned that Dewey's ships had —with little effort and quite inaccurate
 THE CLASH 6

PRIBILOF IS.
1910
•
•••V r'*^'
ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
1889
/

. ^ Liaotung •"^
'-
Pen
Port
Arthur. _ PACIFIC OCEAN
'
REA
Shantung.^ { ] __/^ /JAPAN
MIDWAY IS.
CHINA 1867
Pescadores Is. .. Bonin
HONG Ji^ ,' Islands HAWAIIAN IS.
KONG y^/} FORMOSA
ivwiNU^ -• • 1898
(y (TAIWAN)

^ -Kwangchow ' Mariana WAKE I. 1899 ^»

^ Bay m PHILIPPINE : Islands

JOHNSTON I. 1858
Ha^l^8°^ —GUAM 1898
S-' ,^ Marshall
.^ .
-'.. Islands KINGMAN REEF 1858
/ PALMYRA 1898
HOWLAND I

'^''o/Zne-' Islands' 5AKER

BAI
/
//I!1897
Gilbert _, EQUATOR
0<=vi Islands
Solomon
^CH^EAST lND\tS
^-v
Islands

SAMOA IS. 1889

New ' -,
Fiji

Hebrides\\ Islandsa.

Early Twentieth-Century
U.S, Interests in tne Paciiic
^ Dates indicate year of acquisition or occupation by U.S.

shooting —destroyed the decrepit Spanish flotilla in Manila Bay on May

I, 1898.^^

Even before receiving word from Dewey, an anxious McKin-

official

ley dispatched twelve thousand troops to occupy Manila. The President

also moved quickly to annex Hawaii. "We need Hawaii just as much
and a good deal more than we did California," he told his private secre-
tary. "It is manifest destiny." Senate opponents raged that the Philip-
pines and "parts of Asia" would be next: "this Hawaiian scheme is but
the entering wedge that cleaves a way open for empire." The critics
were correct, but McKinley outfoxed them by skirting the Senate and
Joining tke Club 1868-1900)
( 6 1

asking instead for annexation by a joint resolution — a procedure requir-

ing only a simple majority of the House and Senate. Hawaii was
annexed in June 1898.^^
By August, Spain had surrendered. InMcKinley
September,
appointed John Hay Secretary of State. Returning from London where
he was serving as U.S. ambassador, Hay intimately knew what was
required to reopen the door to China. Having served as Abraham Lin-
coln's private secretary, and then becoming a wealthy industrialist. Hay

also was highly sensitive to the political and economic meanings of

foreign policy for Americans. Finally, in late autumn 1898, McKinley
ordered the U.S. Peace Commission in Paris to demand that Spain
surrender not only Cuba and Puerto Rico but all the Philippines as
well. As a result of the "splendid little war" (Hay's phrase), the United
States now controlled the strategic Philippines that were to be "the
pickets of the Pacific, standing guard at the entrances to trade with the
miUions of China and Korea, French Indo-China, the Malay Peninsula,
and the islands of Indonesia." Or so said the powerful New York banker,
and McKinley's assistant secretary of the Treasury, Frank Vanderlip.^^
But there was a problem. McKinley's attempt to extend formal U.S.
power across thousands of miles of water and over millions of non-
whites raised storms of protests. The President's fight to obtain Senate
ratification for his peace treaty was therefore touch and go until the
evening of February 4, 1899, when
White House telegraph informed
the
him that Filipino nationalists had fired on U.S. troops. Even riding a
new wave of patriotism, the treaty barely obtained the needed two-
thirds vote in the Senate several days later. McKinley suddenly found
himself enmeshed in an escalating war that lasted more than three
years, took the lives of several thousand Americans and several hundred
thousand Filipinos, and, at times, was fought on a subhuman scale.
U.S. policy in Asia now rested on a naval base at Manila and an
informal alliance with Japan and Great Britain, the only other two pow-
ers interested in the open door. Or as Mahan portrayed the developing
global power struggle, the seapowers of Great Britain, Japan, and the
United States were pitted against the land powers of Russia, Germany,
and France. For Americans, it was a contest of good traders versus evil
colonizers.^"*

U.S. policy required a cooperative Japan. During the war of 1898, the
Japanese had been preoccupied with German and Russian moves in
nearby Manchuria, but worked to stay on good terms with Washington.
Ambassador Komura Jutaro,one of Japan's most distinguished diplo-
mats, moved easily in America as he enjoyed strong friendships from
THE CLASH 6 2

his three years at Harvard Law School and an internship at a New York
City law firm in the 1870s. A former American teacher of Komuras
during the 1870s in Japan told much about Komura — and the American
view of Japanese —when he wrote that the diplomat was "a typical prod-

uct of the new Japan." Thanks to Perry, the teacher rejoiced, the Japa-
nese were now "a rejuvenated race." Heavily involved in pushing Japan
into war with China in 1894, Komura knew Asian affairs intimately. In
Washington he tried, without success, to guarantee the rights of Japa-
nese in Hawaii and California. Komura also attempted to protect his
nation's trading rights in Hawaii. But U.S. officials had decided that the
^^
open door no longer applied to the newly annexed islands.
Komuras major task, however, was to pour oil on the friction arising
from McKinley's annexation of the Philippines. When the 1898 war
erupted, Japan had declared neutraHty (its first such declaration in the

post- 1 853 era). Tokyo nevertheless leaned toward the United States,

especially in May, when it appeared for an instant that Dewey's fleet in

Manila Bay might have to fight not Spain but a German flotilla. The
kaiser had designs on the islands. Given the humiliating encounter with
the Triple Intervention and the kaiser's grab for Manchurian ports, Ger-
many was, along with Russia, the last nation Japan wanted to hold the
Philippines. During a critical moment in the summer, a Japanese war-
ship moved to the side of Dewey's vessels to The act
show friendship.
received much applause in the United States. When, however, McKin-
ley hesitated in mid-1898 to annex the Philippines, Japan made a move.
After all, some of the islands were closer to Japan's new outpost of
Formosa than was Cuba to the United States. In September 1898,
Tokyo not only asked McKinley that its "immediate concern" be consid-
ered, but gently offered to be "associated" in any American plans for

the islands. With equal gentleness, the President rejected the offer.
Japan accepted the result, given the German alternative. In Formosa,
moreover, the Japanese had their hands full pacifying the indigenous
people. When Filipinos took up arms against Americans in early 1899,
Japan —despite the rebels' pleas to Tokyo for help —did nothing to hurt
^^
the new colonizers.

When Americans and Japanese were Friends

The quarter century after 1873 was pockmarked in both Japan and the
United States with economic and social crises. It also was highlighted
by both nations' emergence into the inner circle of imperialists. Ameri-
Joining tke Clut ( 1868-1900) 6 3

ca's leading political humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, had his sage Irish
character, "Mr. Dooley," comment on the results of Commodore Perry's
1853 exploits: 'Th' throuble is whin the gallant Commodore kicked opn
th' door, we didn't go in. They come out." The Japanese coming out was
driven by fears of insecurity, especially along the Sea of Japan, and
by state-devised policies economic self-sufficiency policies about
for —
which, in such crucial regions as Formosa and even Korea, the private
^^
Japanese business community demonstrated little interest.
Americans meanwhile were driven by their second industrial revolu-
tion (that after 1873 produced wondrous amounts of both goods and
labor upheavals),and a racism that helped justify actions in Hawaii, the
Philippines, and China. During this era of their hectic relationship,
Japanese and Americans were attracted to each other by common inter-
ests in opening China, working with Great Britain, checking and turn-
ing back German and Russian colonialism, and working out solutions
to problems in Hawaii and the Philippines. So far, Washington and

Tokyo had gotten along because of these common interests,

officials

and also because whenever a clash loomed, Japan retreated.

By 1900, common interests went beyond common imperial objec-
tives. During the post-Civil War era, and especially in the depression-

ridden 1890S, Americans went overboard for sports — college football,

basketball (invented in 1891), and, above all, baseball. Historians have
explained such enthusiasm in terms of rapid urbanization, which cre-
ated critical masses of participants and audiences, new transportation
systems, and a displacement that transferred economic and social frus-
trations into sport. An 1877 listing of the most popular sports in Yoko-
hama, Kobe, Tokyo, and Nagasaki listed racing, cricket, yachting,
rowing, track and field. But baseball, professionalized in the United
States only eight years earlier,was already widely known. The Yokohama
Cricket and Athletic Club, with a Hneup of entirely English names, was
an early baseball powerhouse. In 1873, Horace Wilson introduced the
game at what is now Tokyo University. Hiroaki Hiroshi, who had stud-
ied in Boston so was already a doomed Red Sox fan, put together the
first regular Japanese team in 1878 from Shimbashi railway employees.

By the 1890s, Tokyo schoolboys were challenging the Yokohama Club.

The Americans first condescendingly refused, then finally agreed to
play —and were humiliated by the schoolboys 29-4, 32—9, and 22—6.
Only when the Americans brought in ringers from visiting U.S. war-
ships did they finally win. Baseball had captured and captivated Japan,
^^
as it had the United States.
That both peoples shared such common passions and emerged as
THE CLASH 6 4

fellow members of the imperialists' club, however, hardly meant they

were thinking alike. In 1896, Lafcadio Hearn concluded a study of
American and Japanese pictures by observing that "Japanese art reflects
the . .perception of natural law in form and color, the perception of
.

natural law in change, and the sense of life made harmonious by social
order and by self-expression." But Western art "reflects the thirst of
pleasure" and "the unamiable qualities which are indispensable to suc-
cess in the competitive struggle." Hearn had "gone Japanese," according
^^
to some Western readers.
Even so, his words rang true. As Japan vigorously moved into late
nineteenth-century capitalism and imperialism, profound differences
remained between that island nation and the Western members of the
club. Within just seven years, those differences led officials in Tokyo
and Washington to contemplate war between the United States and
Japan.
Xhe Xurn
(1900-1912)

In a mere twelve years, between 1900 and 1912, the United States
and Japan turned from friendship to rivalry. The reasons for the
historic turn were blatant racism and more subtle differences over
imperialism. In 1900, the two nations' soldiers stood side by side
in the bloody, shell-pockmarked streets of Peking. By 1912, Japan
had sealed off Korea and much of South Manchuria while angry
Washington officials vowed to pry open those closed doors. Each
began to see the other as a probable enemy in a not-distant war.
And for the first time in any significant fashion, questions about
the all-important arena of China divided, rather than united,
Americans and Japanese.

Powers and tne Bo xers

Americans emerged from their blink-of-an-eye war against a hol-

low Spanish Empire with their sense of destiny gorged. They now
held Hawaiian and the Philippine bases to realize their manifest
destiny in Asia. The way finally lay open to exploit the long-sought
China market. Their closest allies in the quest were Japan and
Great Britain, both sharing a professed devotion to the open-door
approach instead of the colonial policies followed by Germany,

6 5
THE CLASH 6 6

Russia, and France. Great Britain, however, was becoming suspect to

some U.S. Forone thing, London primarily valued India, the
observers.
jewel in the British crown, and was willing to bargain over China in
order to protect that jewel. For another, the British seemed to be on the
downward slope of world power. Their surprising defeats at the hands
of South Africa's Boers in 1 899-1900 stunned pro-British officials in

Washington and Tokyo. 'The American calf is now too old to get much
nourishment from sucking the dry teats of the British cow," Henry
Adams chuckled after the 1898 war. That view of Great Britain, how-
ever, was not shared by the Japanese.^

U.S. interests in China were growing. During the new century's first
decade, Americans sent nearly 3,800 Protestant missionaries to spread
the gospel around the world; 3,100 were in China. Most missionary
organizations had supported the war against Roman Catholic Spain and
now wanted the fruits of that effort. "God is beating down the long-
closed doors," declared the non-sectarian Christian Missionary Alliance
triumphantly in April 1898.
Trade seemed to follow U.S. missionaries rather than simply follow
the flag, as it did in the case of Japanese and some European imperial-
ism. Exports to China remained at roughly i percent of all U.S. exports
($14 million out of $1.2 billion exports in 1899), but observers stressed
three features of this trade. First, China seemed to hunger for the prod-

ucts of the burgeoning U.S. industrial complex. More than 90 percent

of American exports China were manufactured goods, a percentage
to
unobtainable in industrializing markets such as Western Europe or
Japan. Second, China's potential, the apparently bottomless needs of
its400 million people, could be the world's great market in the new
—
century if China escaped the heavy hand of European colonization.
U.S. -manufactured exports had astonishingly multipUed four times
between 1895 and 1890. Third, some industries completely depended on
China's market. One South Carolina cotton mill owner told Secretary of
State John Hay China remained open or textile factories
that either
would endure cutthroat competition in the American market: "You can
at once see what the importance of the China trade is to us. It is every-

thing." Investors were also being sucked in. Railroad baron James J. Hill
planned to make his Great Northern rail system a funnel to Oriental
knew
markets. President Cleveland was surprised to discover that Hill
more about Japan and China than anyone the President had met. And
no wonder. Cleveland learned that Hill "had spent more money than
the government in sending competent men to Japan and China to study
"^
the need of those countries.
TKe Turn (1900-1912) dl

In 1899-1900, as the great powers circled around the dying Manchu

dynasty in Peking, American popular and business journals sprouted
stories about China's future. Doubters were few, but well placed. Wor-
thington C. Ford, a former U.S. Treasury official, argued in 1899 that
the Chinese market could never amount to much because purchasing
power, not mere numbers, counted. Besides, Ford suggested ominously,
if China did develop, cheap labor could bankrupt Western factories.
its

The large majority of observers, however, agreed with Brooks Adams, a

grandson of John Quincy Adams, the eccentric brother of Henry, and
a close friend of the up-and-coming Theodore Roosevelt. Brooks was
convinced that he had discovered a "law" of history. He concluded that
whichever nation controlled the centers of money exchange also con-
trolled the world power. In a widely read essay published just after the
1898 war, he warned that whoever controlled Chinese markets could
control the exchanges. The was "between the maritime and the
battle
unmaritime races" (that is, between the Americans, the Japanese, and
the British, on one side, the Russians, French, and Germans on the
other). The United States had to have Chinas markets "or run the risk
of suffocation."^
Japanese officials agreed in gentler terminology. Between 1898 and
1900, three different cabinets came to power in Tokyo, then disappeared
just as China seemed about to dissolve in anti-foreign revolution. Not
even the venerated general, Yamagata Aritomo, could provide decisive-
ness and continuity. In late 1900, Ito Hirobumi regained power. This
time he led a political party, the Seiyukai, that added a new, highly
unpredictable feature to Tokyo's politics. Ito's innovation infuriated
Yamagata and others (especially in the military) who beheved that
national welfare was too important to be left to such bizarre political

factions. All the governments, however, reached some agreement on

the central foreign policy question: Should Japan concentrate on China,
where the economic payoff could be rich, or on Korea, where the strate-

gic security payoff could be high? In 1898-1901, these officials chose

"^
China over Korea.
The choice was made for a number of reasons. Japan, resembling
the United States, had discovered profits in the China market. Since
the 880s, Japan had transformed itself from a relatively undeveloped
1

agricultural society into a rapidly industrializing complex. The implica-

tions for foreign relations were immense: the percentage of overseas
trade to gross national expenditure doubled to 23 percent, and while
the bulk of that trade in the 1880s had been with the West, by 1900
about half was with Asia. In Asia, unlike trade with the West, Japan
THE CLASH 6 8

was becoming the industrial center, the profitable hub of the system.
During 1895 to 1900 alone, Japan s exports to China, especially in cotton
yarn, more than tripled. Japanese surplus capital remained small, but
its surplus products were growing and hence becoming dependent (as

were some of America s) on keeping the Chinese market open to all on

equal terms. When the brilliant diplomat Komura
Jutaro returned from
his posts in Washington and St. Petersburg to take over the foreign
ministry in 1901, he argued that the government must strive to protect
and support Japanese involved in the China trade. This led to another
reason why China was given preference over Korea: Japan lacked the
capital to exploit Korea. Fearful, moreover, that any further move across
the Japan Sea could alienate Great Britain while infuriating Russia,
Tokyo governments wisely decided to cooperate with the powers in
China. Russia, as Yamagata and others had long argued, would have to
be dealt with sometime, but not now, given the crises in China. Ito had
long argued that Russia was to be stroked, not taunted. Korea, in turn,
was to be handled with caution, given the memory of the Triple Inter-
vention against Japan in 1895-96.^
Americans and Japanese thus shared some common interests when
the Boxer uprising paralyzed parts of China and killed foreign mission-
aries and diplomats in 1899-1900. The Boxers (more fully, Boxers
United in Righteousness) grew out of anti-foreign movements that
multiplied in the post-1860 years when China was victimized by the
powers. The Boxers and the railway
especially targeted missionaries
schemes that aimed to place these arteries under foreign control. Thus
the revolt also targeted the collapsing Qing (Manchu) dynasty that for-
eigners pressured into handing out the concessions. The powers' scram-
ble for Chinese territory in 1897-98 was the final straw. Comprised
mostly of peasants, and including militant women's groups, the Boxers
moved toward Peking, murdering Christian missionaries and converts
along the way.^
The uprising complicated an already growing crisis for Americans
and Japanese China. In April 1899, the British and Russians had
in
given themselves zones for railway monopolies. Russia also threatened
to discriminate against non-Russian shipments over its railways in
North China. The U.S. legation in Peking warned Hay that "the situa-
tion for China grows more critical, day by day Panicked messages from
'

U.S. exporters reached the McKinley administration. The Secretary of

State had to act. Hay believed fervently in the marketplace's power to
produce a happy society run by aristocrats-by-merit like himself. Hating
both the new labor unions and the irresponsible rich who wanted to fix
The Turn 1900-1 9 12)
( 6 9

(rather than expand) the marketplace, Hay saw China as the ultimate
test. His successes as a politician, author, industrialist, and diplomat
had gained admirers among fellow aristocrats. "You have indeed led a
life eminently worth living, oh writer of books and doer of deeds!" Theo-

dore Roosevelt wrote his good friend in 1899, "and, in passing, builder
of beautiful houses and father of strong sons and fair daughters."^
Between September 6 and November 21, 1899, Hay set a landmark
in American history by sending the powers "a Declaration for an Open-
Door Policy with Respect to Trade with China." The Secretary of State
asked that within each power's sphere in China, "equal treatment in
trade and navigation for the commerce and industry of the United
States and all other nations be guaranteed." This first open-door note,
the Japanese government decided, was welcome. As the Tokyo cabinet
observed, "the monopoly of interests in China by a few powers will be
eliminated and the territorial integrity of China will be preserved." But
the cabinet carefully added that Japan would accept Hay's terms only
if the other powers agreed to abide by them. Such agreement appeared

unlikely. Great Britain had earlier pleaded for U.S. cooperation in

China. Now it and the implied
disliked Hay's lone ranger approach
threat to British rail monopolies. Even so, with slight enthusiasm and
various qualifications, the British, Germans, Russians, French, and Ital-
ians did join the Japanese in accepting Hay's note by April 1900.^
Meanwhile, parts of China burst into flames. "Boxers increasing,"
U.S. Minister Edwin Conger wired Washington in May 1900. "Nine
Methodist converts brutally murdered the movement has developed
. . .

into open rebellion. Many [Chinese] soldiers disloyal." Between

. . .

June and early August 1900, the Boxers laid siege to the foreign com-
pounds in Peking while killing the German minister and other foreign-
ers. The powers finally decided to send in troops. President William

McKinley, amid his own reelection campaign, used his newly acquired
base at Manila to send 2,500 soldiers to Peking. This act set a crucial
constitutional precedent, for McKinley deployed the troops and war-
ships without congressional authorization, and not merely to protect
U.S. citizens but to punish a foreign government. Since the Manchus
had joined the Boxers, the Chinese government responded by declaring
—
war on the United States a declaration ignored by the United States,
which did not deign to reply.^
Tokyo's initial response was more cautious than McKinley's, even
after the Boxers killed a high Japanese official in Peking. Three times
the British asked Japan to send military help before the cabinet
responded. It finally dispatched the largest number of troops (22,000),
 —

THE CLASH 7

and they fought the most effectively of all foreign contingents to lift the
siege, at last, on August 14, 1900. Some 76 foreigners (out of nearly

1,000) had lost their lives; about 180 others were wounded. Japan
emerged heroic. "What extraordinary- soldiers those little Japs are!" Vice
President-elect Theodore Roosevelt exulted privately in late 1900. "Our
own troops out in China write grudgingly that they think the Japs did
better than anv of the allied forces." Unfortunatelv, Roosevelt later
added, "The American, German, and English troops are the only ones
that have not committed cruel and wanton outrages on women and
children." The Japanese were "ver\' callous in their cruelt}^," although
"their commanders took more pains to stop the cruelty" than did other
officers. As for the Russians, Roosevelt's dislike poured out: they were

"brutal rather than cruel, showing themselves to be heavy animals

"^^
rather than fiends.
U.S. officials' fixation on Russia was becoming all-consuming. As
thousands of the tsar's troops headed toward Peking in July 1900, both
W ashington and Tok\^o intensely debated how to get them back beyond
Chinese boundaries once the Boxers were destroyed. On July 3, 1900,
Hay sent a second open-door note. This time he asked that all powers
observe and uphold "Chinese territorial and administrative" integrity
in other words, that Russia not seize the opportunity to colonize parts
of Manchuria. To Hay's surprise, all the powers, including Russia,
agreed to the note. Agreement, of course, did not mean obser\'ance.
Russian officials were deeply divided between war and peace factions,
so much so that they too had hesitated before dispatching troops. Sena-
tor Henr\^ Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a Roosevelt intimate, told
the State Department's Asian expert, William W Rockhill, that "The
most significant thing about it [the Chinese crisis] to my mind is the
break down of Russia. ' By late August, however, Russian troops were
refusing to leave Manchuria. The situation swung dangerously just as
McKinley entered the final weeks of his reelection campaign against
the charismatic Democratic Party nominee, William Jennings Br\an of
^^
Nebraska.
For 150 years, Americans' belief in the open-door policy — that is, as

Hay once defined it, a fair field and no favor for all traders—has been
as firm and fundamental as American love of sports (where again, the
pla\ing field is supposed to be fair to all). Tokv^o, however, has blown
hot and cold in its response. This difference readily explains the enmity
after 1905, as well as why the two nations heatedly disagreed after the
1960s. But for several pressure-packed months in mid-1900, McKinley
nearly ditched the hallowed principle.
TKe Turn (1900-1912) 7 1
THE CLASH 7 2

The reasons were both domestic and At home, Bryan and the foreign.
Democrats blasted the President's use of troops to keep China open. If
U.S. traders and investors moved into China, the Democrats warned,
China's cheap labor would mean that she "would hecome the great
. . .

worksho'p to fill the markets of the United States," while U.S. capital
would Chinese labor instead of "American labor. Americans who
hire '

"
love 'the open door' would see western civilization crippled." Bryan
. . .

called imperialism the central campaign issue. He had Andrew Carne-

gie's milhons to back up his assault on McKinley's policies. ''Mr.

Dooley" sarcastically supported Bryan in the widely read humor column

written by Finley Peter Dunne: "We ar-re th' advance guard iv Western
Civilization . . . and we're goin' to give ye [Chinese] a railroad so ye can
go swiftly to places that ye don't want to see. ... A counthry that has
"^^
no railroads is beneath contempt.
In China itself, Russia and Britain maneuvered to partition choice
portions of the d}ing empire. McKinley considered grabbing a strategic
slice himself to protect the growing U.S. interests. From a sickbed in
Newport, Rhode Island, Hay pulled the President back from the edge.
The United States had no alternative, the Secretary of State instructed
McKinley, but China by cooperating, especially wdth the
to play for all

British and Japanese, in maintaining the open door. Believing that U.S.
interests could be protected by "moral" power or American forces alone
was "mere flap-doodle." At the same moment, Italy proposed a face-
saving compromise that calmed the rivalry in Peking and provided the
tsar with an excuse to retreat in Manchuria. McKinley stayed with the
open-door principle, the crisis passed, Bryan fumbled away his cam-
paign while the Republicans ran a well-financed race, and the President
won reelection in a landshde.^^
But Hay, it turned out, wanted the best of both worlds, colonial and
open door. While supporting his notes, the Secretary of State, appar-

ently without embarrassment, sounded out Japan to see whether it

would oppose a U.S. lease on Samsah Bay, in Fukien Province. Japan
had tried to obtain rights in Fukien, especially because the province
faced newly seized colony of Formosa. Hay's approach not surpris-
its

ingly hit a solid wall in Tokyo. Cool officials quoted back to the Ameri-
cans the open-door principles that prohibited such leases. Hay backed
off, then redoubled his efforts to push out the Russians and prop up a

crumbling China. In the Boxer Protocol of September 7, 1901, ten West-

ern powers plus Japan forced China to pay a $318 million indemnity,
and worse, be permanently stationed in
to accept foreign troops to
Peking's foreign quarter and other strategic areas throughout the coun-
The Turn (1900-1912) 7 3

The United States tried to reduce the indemnity. Such a large

try.

amount left China open to financial pressure from the powers who
wanted to finance it. In the end, the American share was largely used
to help educate Chinese students United States. Japan received
in the

relatively little out of the settlement, given its large military commit-

ment. Short of capital, as usual, the Japanese could not join others in
the profitable financing ofChinas bonds to pay the indemnity They
went along with the deal anyway to show a cooperative spirit with the
^"^
imperial powers.
Ito, indeed, seemed nearly frantic to demonstrate that spirit. "One
says that the Japanese and Chinese are of another race and that the
yellow race will always have a tendency to draw together and unite
against the white race," the prime minister told the Belgian ambassador
in 1901. "Nothing is farther from the truth or more absurd." Japan
wanted to establish a "progressive government in China," but "in coop-
eration with the European nations. Our interests in China are iden-
. . .

tical with those of the industrial powers of both worlds. All our efforts

are directed toward the development of our trade and industry, and the
big [China] market which is at our door must be open wide to us."
McKinley had not said it better. But in September 1901 the President
was killed in Buffalo, New York, by an assassin's bullet. In 1909, a
Korean nationalist assassinated Ito in Manchuria. By 1909 their succes-
sors were talking much less about American-Japanese cooperation.^^

Yamagata, Roosevelt, and the Russo-

Japanese >Var

The Chinese Empire was gravely weakened by the Boxer intervention

(or the "foreign intervention," as Chinese later termed the Boxer epi-

sode). The remains were Chinese nationalism and

rapidly filling with
explosive big-power rivalry. One of the worst fates that can befall a
nation befell China: it became utterly unpredictable. Some astute Japa-
nese officials believed the upshot would be "a complete change of gov-
ernment" in China. Western observers more dimly saw a possible
radical turn in Chinese affairs. Like the Japanese, Westerners most
cared about maintaining foreign rights in Chinese markets. The powers
thus faced an awful dilemma when dealing with China before 1949:
they wanted to make continual demands on
Chinese government they a
hoped could deliver concessions, but do so without it becoming a Chi-
THE CLASH 7 4

nese government that because of the concessions became a target of its

people's xenophobia. The West and Japan thus tried to figure out how
to have it both ways: a China weak enough to be dominated by foreign-
^^
ers, but strong enough to resist the demands of its own people.

The United States and Japan dealt with this dilemma differently,
and, for all the talk about open doors, for different reasons. Americans
wanted markets. Japanese wanted markets and security. Americans
cared most about open economic competition in Asia. Japanese cared
most about Russian military forces. U.S. officials found the worst of
their domestic upheavals behind them, in the horrors of the 1890s, and
sought economic expansion to keep such protests in the past. Japanese
officials feared that without changes the worst of their public protests
lay ahead. Japan had open mainland markets, control and exploit the
to
long-despised Koreans, and drive back Russian forces who refused to
keep their agreements of 1901 to evacuate Manchuria. Indeed, in a
secret deal that the Japanese discovered, China and Russia had agreed
that if the tsar's troops left Peking, China would help Russia build rail-
ways in Manchuria that linked up with the great Trans-Siberian railroad
system. With China's help, Russia was practically settling on Japan's
doorstep.
Japanese officials discussed this growing danger amid unpredictabil-
ity at home. Since Emperor Meiji had been guided by a group
1868, the
of elder statesmen known as the genro. From Satsuma and Choshu (the
two provinces that led in the overthrow of the Shogun), the five
remaining genro in 1904 averaged sixty-six years of age. In 1901, for the

first time, they failed to solve a political crisis by putting a genro mem-
ber in the prime minister's chair. One genro, Ito, stepped down while
another (and Ito's longtime political opponent), Yamagata, finally was
able to place of his younger followers, Katsura Taro, in the top govern-
mental position. Even as this generational change threatened to shake
Japanese politics, Ito tried to counterattack by using his Seiyukai politi-

cal party as a base. The party had little support from the public. Bearing
small resemblance to grass-roots American parties, Seiyukai was made
by for, and with But some of the eUtes, especially Yama-
elite officials.

gata, parties. In a cunning move during 1903, Yamagata polit-

hated such
ically beheaded the Seiyukai by having Ito promoted to the Emperor's
Privy Council, a job that forced Ito to cut party ties.*^
Yamagata also moved to strengthen the military's hand in this transi-

tional period. In 1900, the prime minister established the principle that
only high, active-service officers could serve as ministers of the army
and navy. He excluded civilians from overseeing the military and gave
TKe Turn (1900-1912) 7 5

the military a virtual veto power over Japanese politics. Yamagata further
checked civilian politicians by helping to insulate the bureaucracy
against them. The begun in the i88os, had
Civil Service examinations,
created an elite, powerful corps of bureaucrats. By passing through the
so-called Dragon Gate into government, this eHte saw itself as ''servants
of the Emperor." By 1900, the best and brightest of Japanese men (quite
unlike those in the United States) wanted careers not in law or business
but in government. As bureaucrats, they would enjoy enormous pres-
tige, power, and a status above that of most politicians. Yamagata s

moves between 1900 and 1904 significantly shaped Japanese politics for
^^
nearly the next half century.
More immediately, he shaped those pohtics by helping Katsura stay
in power as prime minister from 1901 to 1906. Member of a Choshu
samurai family Katsura had closely studied the new German military,

then distinguished himself as an officer under Yamagata in the 1894-95

war. Named a viscount and a general by 1898, Katsura was nevertheless
looked upon as a temporary prime minister in 1901. This view suddenly
changed when, to the surprise of many, Komura Jutaro quickly accepted
his offer to become foreign minister. The rising star in the foreign policy

firmament, fresh from diplomatic successes in Washington and the

Boxer crisis in Peking, the Harvard-educated Komura was on his way to

becoming perhaps the greatest twentieth-century Japanese diplomat. ^^

Komura had close ties to the United States, and he held great respect
for British tradition. (When he died in 191 at age fifty-seven, the two
1

books on his bedside table were Tennyson and the Oxford Book of
English Verse.) Above all, however, he was a Japanese nationalist and
expansionist. Komura believed that Japan needed Manchuria, both to
block Russian power and to exploit the markets. He also concluded that
the open door was not the answer. Japan remained too weak to com-
pete: "our commercial capitalists have not yet reached the stage of
development at which they could compete equally with those of other
countries under such new privileges." The open-door principles were
fine for Americans and British. Their industrialization enjoyed a head
start over Japan s and they had access to rich raw materials. Open doors

did not work as well for Japan. Komura's thinking marked a historic
transition in Japanese diplomacy from a willingness to work with the
United States along Hay's principles, to a realization that being able to
exploit those principles was beyond Japan's power. And that thinking
was shaped by Komura's reading of the new industrial revolution. ^°
Between 1901 and early 1904 an epic struggle erupted between Ito's
group and the Katsura- Komura government. Ito feared war with Russia
THE CLASH 7 6

and deplored dependence on Great Britain and the United States. He

thus advocated "exchanging Korea for Manchuria" that is, Japan —
would receive a free hand in Korea in return for recognizing Russia's
free hand in Manchuria. On the other hand, Komura's policy aimed at
obtaining rights in both Korea and Manchuria. He thought a confronta-
tion with Russia was ine\atable. Any deal with the tsar, as Ito urged,
would necessarily only be a "short-term remedy." To clear the way, and
establish the necessary power alignment, Komura aimed for a formal
alliance with Great Britain and an informal understanding with the
United States. He knew all about the U.S. aversion to formal alliances.
Since the near-disastrous alliance with the French between 1778 and
1800,Americans had kept free of overseas ties so they could freely pur-
sue their own interests. Such going-it-alone was the real definition of
their own "isolationism." In early 1904, a U.S. reporter asked Komura
whether an American-Japan deal could be worked out so "the Philip-
pine Islands could be the garden, Japan the factory, China the market,
and the United States the banker." Komura replied that Japan was fully
ready to intensify its manufacturing. He added that the Japanese badly
needed Philippine products, especially tobacco and sugar. The foreign
minister politely did not add that such a neatly integrated operation was
to be worked out on Japanese terms, not necessarily on those of the
^^
banker.
Komura's aggressive approach triumphed on January 30, 1902, when
Great Britain and Japan signed an alliance that shook the international
terrain. The treaty, recognizing Japan's special interest in Korea, further
provided that if other powers attacked one of the signatories, the other
would come to its aid. In a stroke, Komura put Korea at Japan's disposal.

He also prevented any more Triple Inten entions from robbing Japan of
its conquests, and began to integrate the world's greatest naw with
Japan's fleet inwar planning along the western Pacific. For their part,
the British forestalled a possible Japanese-German deal. They could
now preoccupy Russia with Japan in Northeast Asia so the tsar would
"^
have less time to pressure Afghanistan and threaten India.
The surprised Russians began to bend by evacuating some troops
from Manchuria in 1902. By 1903, however, the retreat stopped. Japan
and Great Britain quietly urged Chinese officials to put more pressure
on the Russians. The United States, already recognized as an informal
member of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, also pushed the Chinese who —
instead backed away. "We have done the Chinks a great service, which
they don't seem to recognize," declared the State Department's ranking
Asian expert William Rockhill. "It will never do to let them imagine
TKe Turn ( 1 900-1 9 12) 11

they can treat us as they please." After all, "the only power they need
"^^
fear is Russia.
The Katsura-Komura government meanwhile accelerated war prepa-
rations. To ensure a consensus in the cabinet, Komura approached St.
Petersburg for a settlement. Russia did not respond for fifty-two days.
When the answer appeared in October 1903, was sobering: the tsar
it

demanded complete freedom of action in Manchuria while limiting

Japan's in Korea. Even Ito and the (relative) pro-Russian faction lost

patience. Katsuras patron, Yamagata, at last had his chance to seize

Korea and drive back Russia, objectives he had harbored since the
1870S. He now presided over a powerful mihtary. Between 1890 and
1919, these forces consumed about 30 to 50 percent of Japan's annual
budgets (some 10 to 20 percent of total national income). The policy
acclaimed by nearly all officials was fukoku kyohei, or "enrich the nation
and strengthen its army."
The business community was less united. Sounding much Amer- like

ican business just before the 1898 war, many Japanese worried that war
would further destabilize an already depressed economy. But others,
especially cotton textile producers, demanded Manchurian markets and
were willing to fight Russia for them. Again sounding like U.S. business
in early 1898, one newspaper decided in early 1904 that this "end-
finally
"
less 'uneasy peace' was "worse than ... a temporary war." Japanese
resembled some Americans in yet another way: while deeply divided
over the importance of the new Darwinian and social Darwinian beliefs,

a number of expansionists cited them to demonstrate Japanese superi-

ority. Pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps since 1868, the
Japanese had shown they were the fittest, that they stood atop the evo-
lutionary ladder along with a few other great powers. Further expansion
(especially over the less fortunate Chinese) was in a future that all
^"^
enlightened and worthy people could glimpse.
By early 1904, Japan was in a war frenzy. U.S. Minister Lloyd Gris-
com reported to Washington that "The Japanese nation is now worked
up to a high pitch of excitement." If no war occurred, "it will be a severe
disappointment to the Japanese individual of every walk of life. The
people are under such a strain that the present condition cannot last

long." A Japanese
war song chanted that Great Britain, "Lion, Lion, the
king to the Beasts," now "approves of us, and America sympathizes with
us in the war for civilization." The lyrics were correct: Komura had
carefully kept President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hay informed
about his talks with Russia. He knew that the Americans quietly, but
fully, supported Japan. Yet on February 4, 1904, when the Imperial Con-
THE CLASH 7 8

ference decided to wage war, was not done without fear. The army
it

figured it had only a fifty-fifty chance of defeating Russia; the navy

expected to lose half its fleet. To avoid such disaster, the government
launched a surprise strike that destroyed part of the Russian fleet at

Port Arthur, and landed troops in Korea before the tsar received a decla-
ration of war.Americans and British applauded such ingeniousness.
U.S. Minister Horace Allen told Washington that since "These people
[Koreans] cannot govern themselves," a "civilized race" like Japan
should take over "these kindly Asiatics for the good of the people and
. . . the establishment of order and the development of commerce." Of
course, Allen was confident Japan would keep Korea "open" to all for
"^^
"development of commerce.
At the same time, Japan dispatched an old friend of Roosevelt's Har-
vard days, Kaneko Kentaro, to Washington for talks with the President
about how the conflict could end. As the historian Shumpei Okamoto
observes, Japanese officials thus were "thinking of ending the war at
the time of beginning it." Roosevelt and most Americans thoroughly
sympathized with the Japanese position. At the 1904 Louisiana Pur-
chase Exposition in St. Louis, the Japanese, one reporter wrote, were
no longer seen as "half-developed, peculiar people" who made "toys and
knickknacks," but as "one of the first nations of the world." Another
writer breathlessly explained in Darwinian terms that Japan's quick tri-

umphs over Russia were understood by anthropologists as resulting

from "the complexity of the blood." Resembling Anglo-Saxons, Japanese
were "the most complex" people in Asia. (The writer also admitted that
anthropologists actually knew little about Japanese.) At the Portland
Exposition in 1905, a journalist fantasized over the profits to be made
from 800 million Asians, "half of the population of the entire world,"
when "they wake up after the Russo-Japanese war. . . . The day when
the Pacific shall be transformed into an American lake will come even

earlier than Seward's prophetic vision grasped." Such optimism rested

on one assumption: that a victorious Japan would open Asian markets
to Americans. ^^
Not everyone trusted the Japanese. U.S. investors poured $55 million
into Russia by 1906. Some made fortunes in helping build the Trans-
Siberian and other transportation networks. Powerful Republican Party
figures, including Civil War hero and railway entrepreneur James Har-
rison Wilson and New York attorney John J. McCook, tried to persuade
McKinley and Roosevelt that Russia could be a and less
more profitable
dangerous partner than Japan. The two presidents were not moved. The
arch-expansionist Republican senator from Indiana, Albert J. Beveridge,
 ' —
TKe Turn (1900-1912) 19

then warned that if the Japanese and British gained control of Asia,
American goods would be shut out. Only Russia's market and coopera-
tion, the Hoosier senator argued, could make U.S. involvement worth-
while. Roosevelt's closeHenry Adams took another, more
friend
ominous, approach: "Everybody is interested, and excited, and all are
anti-Russian, almost to a dangerous extent [Adams wrote privately in
1904 as the Russo-Japanese War erupted]. I am the only — relative

Russian afloat, and only because I am half-crazy with the fear that Rus-
sia is sailing straight into another French revolution which may upset
all Europe and us too. A serious disaster to Russia might smash the
whole civilized world.
Adams understood a fundamental fact about this era that too few
others saw. Japan and Russia were both backward, brittle societies,
compared with the rapidly industrializing Americans and West Europe-
ans, and given the terrible precariousness of each of these societies,
any setback could trigger a string of internal catastrophes. Americans
were being driven outward by their successes and divisions at home,
but both Japanese and Russians were being driven outward by weak-
ness and divisions at home. Adams's choice was not merely to be
friendly toward Russia. He wanted to quit the search for Asian markets.
Adams suggested building a tariff wall around the United States to shut
out cheap Asian goods. Perhaps then, he speculated, Asians could sort
things out for Asia, while Americans could keep their system going at

least several more generations.^^

The ebullient occupant of the White House pooh-poohed his friend's

dark outlook. Roosevelt had closely studied America's Asian destiny. He

had been tutored by Brooks Adams and Alfred Thayer Mahan on
also
the need to develop and protect (by force if necessary) Asian markets.
His country was entering the Pacific Century, Roosevelt passionately
believed, and Japan was fighting America's fight against Russia.
Although heavily racist (when he especially wanted to demean some-
one he called them a ''Chinese"), and believing that race was a primary
determinant in history, TR had little belief in social Darwinism. The
President recalled that social Darwinism could be championed by
ardent anti-imperialists (as WiUiam Graham Sumner), as well as by
imperiahsts. He preferred Lamarckianism, with its suggestion that
superior races could improve the characteristics of the inferior. Social
Darwinism in the United States (and Japan) was too complex to lend
itself as an easy explanation for imperialism or anti-imperialism. Cer-
tainly Roosevelt considered it unimportant that the "Japanese are of an
utterly different race from ourselves and . . . the Russians are of the
THE CLASH 8

same As he had eadier noted, Russians posed a ''more serious

race."
problem" to future Americans than did even Germany, while "Russians
and Americans have nothing whatsoever in common." Roosevelt
. . .

even later bragged that in 1904 he had warned France and Germany not
^^
to interfere against Japan, a boast without documentary evidence.
At the same time, Roosevelt understood he was dealing with dyna-
mite. As he wrote in one letter: "if the Japanese win out, not only the
Slav, but all of us will have to reckon with a great new force in eastern
Asia. ... If, moreover, Japan seriously starts in to reorganize China and
makes headway, there will result a real shifting of the center of equilib-

rium as far as the white races are concerned." In another letter of mid-

1904, he wrote that over lunch he had told his old friend. Baron Kaneko,
that Japan "might get the 'big head' and enter into a general career of
insolence and aggression" that could turn out to be "very unpleasant for
Japan." Roosevelt apparently suggested to Kaneko that Japan follow its

own Monroe Doctrine in Asia — that is, civilize and order, but not con-
quer, the region. (In the 1930s these alleged Rooseveltian remarks were
resurrected by an imperialist Japan.) The President also told Kaneko
that Americans could learn from Japan about how to deal with "the
misery in our great cities," but the Japanese "had to learn from us the
ideal of the proper way of treating womanhood." Kaneko agreed. In all,
the President noted to his intimate friend, British Ambassador Cecil
Spring Rice, in June 1904, if the Japanese "win out it may possibly mean
a struggle between them and us in the future; but I hope not and
believe not."^^
How to avoid the "struggle" haunted Roosevelt during the next four
years of his presidency. He failed to find an answer, other than
retreating from Asia and leaving it to the Japanese. Not wanting either
the "despicable" Russians or the Japanese with their "big head" to tri-

umph, TR hoped "that the two powers will fight until both are fairly

well exhausted." The peace terms would then "not mean the creation
of either a yellow peril or a Slav peril." It was a pious hope. The well-
drilled front-line Japanese forces overran ill-prepared Russian reserv-
ists, then in early 1905 won tougher battles at Port Arthur and Mukden.
Mukden cost Japan at least 41,000 casualties and Russia nearly 60,000.
But Russian resources seemed Umitless; Japans were not. "While the
enemy still has his powerful forces in its [sic] home country," Yamagata
warned, "we have already exhausted ours."^^
Some Americans stepped forward to help replenish Japan's
resources. They were led by leading Jewish investment bankers in New
York City who had witnessed, or personally endured, the atrocities com-
TKeTurn (1900-1912) 8 1

mitted by Russians against Jews, especially between the early i88os and
the Kishinev Massacre of 1903. These pogroms produced both a wave
of Jewish immigration into the United States and anti-Russian mea-
sures by the U.S. Congress, including economic retaliation. Roosevelt,
who valued Jewish friends and political support, condemned the tsar's
brutalities, although more privately than publicly.

After the already-strapped Japanese treasury failed to float large loans

in London and New York during April 1904, Jacob Schiff, the powerful
head of the Kuhn, Loeb investment bank, took charge. He worked with
his friend. Lord Rothschild, of the great European banking house, to
block Russian loans in London and Paris. Schiff then put together for
Japan the first major flotation of foreign securities successfully offered
in New York City. In all, Schiff helped Japan sell Americans four bond
issues that totaled nearly $350 million, or almost half the cost of the
entire war for Tokyo. For the third loan, Kuhn, Loeb sought $95 million
for Japanese war bonds, but received $500 million in subscriptions in
only several hours. These loans marked the birth of Wall Street as a
force in international diplomacy. One journal noted that it had "never
known which the United States was not an active partici-
a conflict in
pant where there was anything like the unanimity of opinion or intensity
"^^
of sympathy which is felt in the republic for Japan.
Despite Schiff s herculean efforts, by April 1905 Japanese officials
found themselves in a bind. On the one hand, Katsura and especially
Komura had enlarged the primary objective from Korea solely to Korea
and Manchuria. Elated and overconfident, they aimed, yes, to remove
the Russian danger from South Manchuria, but also replace it with
Japanese power. They believed they could do this without stepping on
the considerable U.S. economic interests in Manchuria. Throughout
1904-05, Komura reassured Roosevelt that Japan only wanted to defeat
Russia; otherwise Tokyo would accept the Asian status quo. (Komura
especially pushed this line after the Russians told the President that
once Japan obtained Korea, the Philippines would be next.) Komura
was not being quite straight with the person whom the Japanese hoped
might mediate their victory. But his government s bind was tighter. For
as their victories grew in number, and as the Japanese endured the
terrible financial and social strains (not to mention 81,000 dead), they

—
came to expect riches from the war that is, they expected a large
indemnity as well as territory from the tsar. Katsura and Komura knew
better. Japanese officials realized they now faced a Russian army three

times the size of Japan's. The tsar had used the Trans-Siberian line to
move fourteen trains a day and transfer 500,000 troops from Europe. ^^
THE CLASH 8 2

As early as March 8, 1905, Japan had quietly approached Roosevelt

for his good offices to help end the war. The tsar, however, was not
ready to deal. Despite the Bloody Sunday outbreak in January at St.
Petersburg, a violence that anticipated the outbreak of the Russian Rev-
olution, the tsar awaited the climatic battle of his Baltic fleet. For nearly
eight months those ships had sailed eighteen thousand miles from the
Baltic Sea, around Europe and Africa, then through the Indian Ocean,
to engage Japan's in the Battle of the Japan Sea on May 27-28. To
the world s amazement, the Japanese won a complete victory. Roosevelt
believed that "Even the Battle of Trafalgar could not match this. I could
not believe it myself. ... I grew so excited that I myself became almost
like a Japanese, and I could not attend to official duties. The President "

now pressed Tsar Nicholas (this 'preposterous Uttle creature" who was
"unable to make war" and "is now unable to make peace") to negotiate.
But the initiative for Roosevelt's good offices, unknown to the Japanese
^^
people, came from Japan.
For his part, Roosevelt wanted that war ended quickly before "Japan
will drive Russia out of East Asia." It was "best," he told Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge, that Russia "be left face to face with Japan so that each
may have a moderative action on the other." In a June 16, 1905, letter to

his British friend. Spring Rice, Roosevelt described the victors: "What
wonderful people the Japanese are! They are quite as remarkable indus-
trially as in warfare." He acutely noted two unusual features of Japans
effort. Even while fighting Russians, the Japanese were able to increase
their exports into the China market. Moreover, their new steamers car-
rying this export trade were wondrous: they "are not allowed to compete
with one another," but only with foreign ships, and the Japanese usually
won. Roosevelt then expressed fear: "In a dozen years the English,
Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the
trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than
"^"^
they do any other nation.
Roosevelt did not attend the peace conference at Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, in July and August 1905. From Washington and his home,
Sagamore on Long Island, however, he oversaw every detail. The
Hill
Russian delegation was headed by Count Sergei Witte, the creator of
the Trans-Siberian rail system and highly respected by U.S. leaders.
Komura led Japan's group, but only after Ito turned down the job, prob-
ably because as a skilled politician he knew the Japanese people were
going to be furious about the results. Komura also understood the
dilemma. He agreed with an aide who noted the people were sending
them off with cries of "Banzai!", but the return cry could be "Bakayaro"
TKeTurn 1900-1 9 12)
( 8 3

(You fool!). Komura, and with good reason:

Military leaders mistrusted
they had wanted peace before Russia's sheer numbers ground down
their forces. But Komura wanted empire. They won their demands that
the skillful foreign minister must not exceed his instructions and had
to remain in close touch with Tokyo. His instructions listed "absolutely

essential" items that were to be obtained: a free hand in Korea and

control of South Manchuria, including the key railway. "Comparatively
demands were to obtain an indemnity and all of Sakhalin.
essential"
Once Komura obtained the former demands, he could give up the latter
^^
group, if necessary, to obtain peace.
For Komura, one issue shaped the conference and, indeed, much of
the U.S. -Japan relationship that followed: the Japanese need to become
financially independent so they could expand on the Asian mainland,
especially in Manchuria, on their own terms. To have such freedom, a
Russian indemnity was absolutely necessary. Otherwise, Japan would
have to continue borrowing in New York and London, both to pay the
ruinous war expenses and to have capital for projects in Korea and
Manchuria. One question burned: Could Japan develop an Asian
empire on its own terms, or must it bow to the open-door, non-coloniza-
tion terms of Washington? The foreign minister believed there was no
choice.
Roosevelt tried to set the tone at his first meeting with Komura and
Witte when he cut through a fight over protocol by grabbing each man
by the arm and taking them through a doorway to dinner at the same
time, then making everyone stand up while eating from a round table.
Komura, given the results on battlefields and oceans, believed he
should be treated more equally than Witte. The foreign minister quickly
wrested Russia's agreement to the "absolutely essential" demands for
Korea and Manchuria. But on the orders of the tsar, who beHeved that
Russia might have lost some battles but had certainly not lost the war,
Witte stood fast: no indemnity ("Russia will not pay even a kopeck," the
tsar exclaimed), no cession of Sakhalin, no Hmiting of Russia's fleet in
^^
the western Pacific.
Komura up the conference and return to
publicly prepared to break
Japan. At the last minute he was overruled by the miHtary and the
genro, including Ito, who instructed him to compromise. On August 29,
Komura proposed giving up the indemnity if Russia left Sakhalin. After
a long silence during which Komura 's bitterness no doubt grew, Witte
accepted. Japan now held Korea, South Manchuria as a protectorate,
the southern half of Sakhalin, and had removed Russian power from
the Japan Sea. Roosevelt, it turned out, won the Nobel Peace Prize for
THE CLASH 8 4

his efforts — a prize that the critics of the war-loving, big-game-kiUing

Roosevelt found richly ironic, if not flabbergasting.^^
But no more flabbergasting than the Japanese people found the
peace terms. When they learned there was to be no indemnity, offices
were hung with mourning crepe. Chanting "Constitutional Government
at Home, ImperiaUsm Abroad," even relative moderates expressed out-

rage. In September 1905, anti-peace riots rocked Tokyo. How much

they were fueled by anti-Americanism is in dispute, but Japanese police
records revealed that mobs surrounded the U.S. legation, and Ameri-
cans were attacked at the Imperial Hotel. When a gruesome picture of
the heads ofKomura and Roosevelt dripping with blood appeared, the
crowd cheered. Komura quietly returned to Tokyo, fearing for his life.
Admiral Togo Heihachiro, hero of the naval battles, was welcomed by
^^
cheering throngs.

Manchuria: The First Clash

During months in the United States, Komura grew even

his several
more fearful of American open-door principles. They would not make
Japan more self-sufficient inside an Asian empire. Important American
opinion, moreover, had cooled toward Japan. The Florida Times-Union
captured the essence of other editorials, including those in New York
City newspapers, by writing that, "Japan may not want the earth, but
her plenipotentiaries have evidently made a pretty good break at it."
Roosevelt remained outwardly friendly. His desire to balance Russia
against Japan was known, however. During the war his feelings became
clearer when he wrote privately, "I am not at all sure that the Japanese
people draw any distinctions between the Russians and other foreign-
ers, including ourselves. I have no doubt that they include all white

men as being people who, as a whole, they dislike, and whose past
arrogance they resent; and doubtless they believe their own yellow civi-

lization to be better. . . an oriental nation, and the individual

. Japan is

standard of truthfulness in Japan is low." The President concluded that

Americans, in the end, had to depend not on Great Britain ("she is
pretty flabby"), but on the U.S. Fleet. He consequently reinforced units
in the Philippines. TR also worried over Japanese in Hawaii, who out-
numbered the white population. According to the U.S. governor of the
territory, they were becoming "insolent" because of Japan's mihtary vic-
tones.
On the immediate question of Korea, however, Roosevelt quickly
TlieTurn 1900-1 9 12)
( 8 5

made a deal that helped seal that nation's fate. Forgotten were the 1882
American assurances to Korea that "if other Powers deal unjustly or
oppressively with either Government, the other will exert its good
offices ... to bring about an amicable arrangement." No matter that
Minister Horace Allen had assured Korea's Kojong, now a self-styled
emperor, that Americans would not leave him in the lurch. At least by
early 1905, Roosevelt had decided that Japan might better be engrossed
in Korea than in China or California. In mid-1905 he dispatched Secre-
tary of War William Howard Taft for an inspection trip to the Philip-
pines, with a detour to Tokyo. Taft was accompanied by Roosevelt's
spectacular twenty-one-year-old daughter Alice. She loved to shock
onlookers by smoking in public and wearing a boa constrictor around
her neck. Once when a friend criticized Roosevelt for not making his
daughter behave, TR responded, "I can be President of the United
States — or ... I can attend to Alice." Not even the energetic Roosevelt
could do both. Alice was a reporter's dream. As Taft, Alice, and their
eighty-person entourage docked at Yokohama in July 1905, they
expected the usual stiff, polite greetings the always-correct Japanese
bestowed on foreign dignitaries. Instead, they were met by huge fire-

works displays, vast crowds of people waving and bands playing

flags,

American songs. Lodged at an imperial home, they were given the

unparalleled honor of being shown the Emperor's gardens. Reporters
from both the United States and Japan followed Alice everywhere.
The reporters made a mistake. While Alice was attracting crowds,
Taft met quietly with Prime Minister Katsura on July 27. Taft began by
declaring that Americans discounted those "pro-Russians" who warned
that Japan would next attack the Philippines. He knew the Japanese
wanted the islands under a friendly nation rather than an "unfriendly
European power." Katsura agreed "in the strongest terms," then added
that all these stories about "the yellow peril" threatening California and
U.S. interests in China were "malicious and clumsy slanders." He
added that he hoped the United States, Great Britain, and Japan could
formally ally. Katsura understood, however, that this was not in accord
with American tradition. True, Taft replied, but the United States
wanted to work with its two friends "as confidently as if [it] were under
treaty obligations." Seizing the opening, Katsura said that something
had to be done about Korea. There would be no Asian peace if that
nation fell "into her former condition." Taft jumped in: in his opinion
"Japanese troops" should establish a "suzerainty" over Korea so Japan
would control its foreign relations.
Out of this exchange came the Taft-Katsura agreement that Roose-
THE CLASH 8 6

velt approved four days later: the Japanese recognized America's hold
on the Philippines while the United States recognized Japan's full con-
trol of Korea. This executive agreement, one of the first important such

agreements made by a president on his own, avoided possibly embar-

rassing ratification debates in the U.S. Senate. The agreement was also
sealed in secrecy. The Taft-Katsura deal was not known publicly until
the historian Tyler Dennett discovered Taft's memorandum in the Roo-
sevelt Papers nearly twenty years later. The United States, the first

Western nation to recognize Korea in 1882, became —

at Japan's request,
which Roosevelt immediately met —the first nation to withdraw its dip-
lomats from Korea in 1905. The young romantic secretary of the
departing U.S. legation in Seoul, Willard Straight, was enamored of
which he compared to "the stam-
Alice, but not of her father's policy,
pede of rats from a sinking ship." Straight found himself "hating the
Japanese more than anything in the world." In a few years he was in
the forefront of the American drive to block Japanese expansionism in
Manchuria. "^^
More immediately. Foreign Minister Komura began to block the
United States in Manchuria. He was now supported by Yamagata, and
the army, who meant to ensure that Russians never again threatened
Korea. Roosevelt had suggested strongly to Japan that Manchuria
should be fully returned to China and open to all on a fair-field-and-
no-favor basis. Komura assured both Washington and London he
agreed. He significantly added, however, that "peace and order" had to
be guaranteed, and he implied the Chinese could not provide such a
guarantee.
In October 1905, the great U.S. railway builder Edward H. Harriman
appeared in Tokyo to take advantage of Japan's financial dilemma by
offering to buy the South Manchurian Railway. He planned to place it
under joint U.S. -Japanese control and make it a pivotal section of a
globe-girdling transportation network. Prime Minister Katsura, as well
as officials of the Mitsui and Mitsubishi zaihatsu, liked Harriman's offer.
They saw him as a pipeline to American money; they also believed
the Russians would never challenge a U.S. -Japanese partnership. But
Komura, freshly returned from Portsmouth, strongly dissented. He
warned that Harriman's ties to Wall Street capital made him much the
The foreign minister urged that Japan instead raise its
stronger partner.
own money and work with the disintegrating Chinese government to
ensure Japan's hold on South Manchuria. Komura then killed Harri-
man's proposal with a disingenuous argument: Since Japan was not sov-
ereign in South Manchuria, it could not enter into such an agreement
TKe Turn (1900-1912) 8 7

with the American. The foreign minister next strong-armed the Chinese
into ceding the Japan in December 1905.
South Manchurian Railway to

A frustrated Harriman angrily compared Komura with Machiavelli."^^

One voice issued a warning: given dependence on Great Britain
its

and the United States, Japan was moving too rapidly. Ito Hirobumi had
earlier worried to his private secretary about "the attitudes of our peo-
ple." ForJapan ''ignores the proper rights and interests of other
if

nations and behaves outrageously national ruin is certain.

. . . Our . . .

people must constantly be warned that 'the high tree encounters strong
wind.' "
He fought Komura's aggressive foreign policies, only to be
named in 1906 as Japans first consul general over Korea. On May 22,

1906, Ito lectured the new cabinet of his protege, Prime Minister Sai-
onji Kimmochi, and British officials had
that in recent days both U.S.
vigorously protested because Manchuria under Japanese control was
less open to Western goods than it had been when under Russian. Ito

warned that if this Manchurian problem was mishandled, the penalties

could be severe: Koreans would seize the chance "by reaching out to
and souls."
Russia, as Japan has yet to win over their hearts
In a prophetic moment, Ito added that Japan had to work with, not
exclude, China in Manchuria. A hostile policy could trigger Chinese
"nationalist intentions" and "xenophobia." Finally, in another war
against Russia or China, "Japan needs to keep the British and Ameri-
cans happy and sympathetic towards us for financial reasons." Con-
vinced, the Saionji cabinet decided to reopen parts of Manchuria and
replace Japanese military administration with Chinese. Japan s business
community was notably relieved; China and Western money
its links to
markets were reinforced. Japan's mihtary was not relieved. Its ambitions
had grown since 1904, and its officers believed that Manchuria had to
"^^
be fully controlled for strategic and economic reasons.
Ito's temporary victory proved pyrrhic. While traveling through Man-

churia in 1909, he was killed by a young Korean nationalist. After learn-

ing the assassin's motives, Ito's last words were "what a fool. The next "

year Japan completed its annexation of Korea. After 1945, when Korea
finally became free of Japan, Ito's assassin was immortalized by having
"^^
his statue erected in front of Ito's former Korean residence.

The Crisis in Caiiiornia — and Beyond

By Americans marveled at Japan's triumphs in Korea and South
1906,
Manchuria. So did others. The British, Germans, French, and Ameri-
THE CLASH 8 8

cans raised Japan s diplomatic standing from legations to the top rung
of "embassy." Japanese diplomats were to be recognized as ambassadors
rather than mere ministers. Ito may have feared for Japan's future, but
not many Americans agreed. They instead agreed with Finley Peter
Dunnes Mr. Dooley who thought the Japanese had become almost
supernatural: "[A] Jap'nese rowboat cud knock to pieces th' whole [US]
Atlantic squadron. They use guns that shoot around th' corner.
. . . . . .

On land they ar're even more tur'rible. A Jap'nese sojer can march three
hundhred miles a day an'subsist on a small piece iv chewein' gum. . . .

Above all, th' Jap'nese is most to be feared because iv his love iv home
an' his almost akel [equal] love iv death. He is so happy in Japan that
he wud rather die somewhere 's else. Most sojers don't like to be kilt. A
Jap'nese sojer prefers it." It was not the last time Americans caricatured
Japanese abilities. But in this humor column, Mr. Dooley was much
closer to the truth when he observed, "A subjick race is on'y funny
whin it's raaly subjek. About three years ago [1904] I stopped laughin'
'"^"^
at Japanese jokes.
Californians shared both Mr. Dooley 's racism and his failure to find
Japanese funny. Problems in the Golden State had begun in 1882 when
the U.S. Congress for the first time restricted immigration, but only
from China. By Chinese labor was being replaced by the thousand
1891,
and more Japanese who entered the United States each year. In 1890,
about 2,000 Japanese lived in California; by 1900, there were 24,000,
many flowing out of thenew U.S. territory of Hawaii. Japanese from
Hawaii (and Canada) swamped a 1900 Gentlemen's Agreement in
which Tokyo officials had promised to curtail emigration. The San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, prodded by the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League,
began to warn of a growing "Yellow Peril," especially those foreigners
whom condemned for offering "labor for less than a white
Californians
man can live on." The immigrants from Japan, moreover, were con-
demned for staying in their own neighborhoods, reading their own
newspapers, strongly supporting their own people, and, in all, not
assimilating. This "Yellow Peril," however, seemed limited to northern
California. Oregon, Washington, and especially southern California
condemned the growing anti-Asian agitation, not least because, as the
Los Angeles Times noted, these areas needed farm and orchard labor. In
early 1906, James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad, told
Japanese officials he was employing over twelve hundred of their citi-

zens and wanted three to five thousand more. The officials replied they
were trying to limit emigration to improve relations with the United
States, but Hill continued to advertise in California and Hawaii for
"^^
Japanese labor.
TKe Turn (1900-1912) 8 9

That same San Francisco earthquake destroyed

year, 1906, the great

many schools. In October the Board of Education ordered, allegedly

because of lack of space, that all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean chil-
dren go (sometimes at a great distance) to a segregated Oriental Public
School. The timing was not thoughtful: Japans Red Cross had just sent
a quarter-million dollars to help California's earthquake victims. The
Japanese government strongly protested the segregation of its citizens.

A leading Tokyo newspaper cried: "Stand up, Japanese nation! Our

countrymen have been humiliated. Why do we not insist on send-
. . .

ing [war] ships? Roosevelt was furious at the "idiots" in California. The
"

tension over Portsmouth, and especially Manchuria, the defeat of the

white race in 1904—05 by Asians, the realization that Japan could easily
endanger the Philippines — all this sharpened the President's tart-

tongued views about parochial Americans. In his annual message of

'"^^
1906 he called the school board's act "a wicked absurdity.
The President and Secretary of State Elihu Root summoned San
Francisco school White House, where Roosevelt dic-
officials to the

tated a deal: the segregation order was to be rescinded in return for the
Japanese promise (the so-called Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907) to
allow only non-labor relatives of laborers already in America, or laborers
who owned property, to leave for the United States. Roosevelt helped
quiet Californians by issuing a proclamation barring Japanese laborers
in Mexico, Canada, or Hawaii from the United States mainland.
In a letter of 1905 to his close friend Senator Lodge, the President
condemned California's action
— "as foolish as if conceived by the mind
of a Hottentot." He moved on to discuss growing Japanese power, the
intensifying competition over "oriental markets," and concluded — as he
did in a number of personal letters at this time —by expressing confi-
dence During 1905 to 1908, the
in the U.S. battleship fleet. possibility
of war between Americans and Japanese was much in the air. Since
1900, the U.S. Navy had risen from the world's seventh to the third or
second largest, just behind Great Britain and probably Germany. Japan's
ranked fifth. The Americans, however, had to patrol two oceans and
were presiding over a large number of Marine Corps interventions in
the Caribbean region. Japan could concentrate its forces in the western
Pacific. The Panama Canal, which Roosevelt had begun to build in a fit

of expansionism in 1903, would not be usable until 1914. Rumors flew

that Japan might attack the Canal before it opened. Those rumors were
—
unfounded, but in 1907 as anti-Asian riots again erupted in Califor-
nia —^Japanese naval planners carefully reexamined the importance of
the future Canal. The Imperial Defense planners saw the United States
as a primary potential enemy. They feared, moreover, that the Canal
THE CLASH 9

would allow .-Vmericans to move more efficiently into China s market. "^^
In 1906, Roosevelt and his militant ad\isers began their first system-
atic planning for war against Japan —
War Plan or.\nge. It concluded
that, first, Japan was now a possible enemy in the Pacific; and second,

U.S. forces could probably defend Guam and Hawaii, but not the Phil-
ippines. In one sense, Roosevelt now found himself back with Lincoln
and Seward: the nation's open-door interests in China and Manchuria
had to be protected by cooperative diplomatic and militar\' efforts with
allies, not by the world's second-greatest fleet, which lacked the power

to act unilaterally in Asia. The United States, in other words, seemed

as dependent on Japan for the maintenance of stabilit}^ and openness
in Asia, as Japan was dependent on the United States for capital. Cer-
tainlv Roosevelt, to his embarrassment, found himself having to change
his mind about the Philippines. As a Republican vice-presidential can-
didate in 19CC, he had condemned the anti-annexationists with such
fervor that he lost his voice. Just seven years later, the Philippines, as
Roosevelt admitted, "form our heel of Achilles. They are all that make
"^^
the present situation dangerous.
For months, however, the President fought the notion that historic
U.S. interests in Asia depended increasingly on Japanese cooperation.
He hoped that the U.S. Fleet would give him and his successors the

power to deal with an uncooperative Japan, while — unilaterally if nec-

essarv' —protecting American interests in the trans-Pacific West. To
demonstrate this unilateral power in the late spring of 1907, he decided
to send the fleet on an around-the-world cruise.
A majority of i\merican newspapers favored this showing of the flag,
although the Neiv York Evening Post warned it could "heighten the bad
feeling against the Japanese and
. . .encourage the talk of war."
. . .

Other critics worried that Japan would seize the moment to invade
Hawaii, or perhaps even attack California. The problem, however, was
not to project U.S. power into California, but 5,000 miles away into
Asia.The Japanese cordially invited the warships to visit. The "Great
White Fleet" finally Tokvo during October 1908, after a ten-
arrived in
month voyage. The sixteen first-class cruisers were greeted tumultu-
ously, not by the suspicious anti-foreignism that had tormented Perrv"

and Harris, but by hundreds of thousands of Japanese waving the Stars

and Stripes and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in English. Over —
the 434 days of sailing, the ships spent more power in salutes than had
been shot off in the entire 1898 war. But the Asian balance of power
never changed. Moreover, Roosev^elt was embarrassed to learn that it
was now clear that U.S. posts in the Pacific could not adequately ser-
The Turn (1900-1912) 9 J

vice the fleet in wartime. During the cruise, the ships even had to bor-
"^^
row coal from the British.

The fleet's American problems with Japan

cruise merely highlighted
rather than solving them. For example, fear was rising, not only from
Californians but from U.S. missionaries in Japan. When the Japanese
Edict of Toleration in 1873 legitimated Christian proselytizing, the mis-
sionaries took it coming conversions rather than for what it
as a sign of
was: a move to appease the Western powers so they would dismantle
the unequal treaties and treat Japan as an equal. The 138 American
missionaries of 1883 grew to 723 in 1900, but Japanese Christians sys-
tematically took over the movement from Westerners. The Emperor's
1890 Rescript on Morals, moreover, emphasized how much more
acceptable were Shinto and Confucian values for the state. Fifteen
years Japan no longer had
later, to appease the missionaries. John R.
Mott, the hyperactive evangeUst who founded the Young Men's Chris-
tian Association, worried about Japan's "almost insane patriotism," then
pointedly asked, "Japan is leading the Orient —but where?" Motts
warnings were counterbalanced in 1907 when a group of prominent
Americans led by Lindsay Russell, an attorney, and his friend Hamilton
Holt, founded the Japan Society to develop understanding between the
^^
two countries.
Russell and Holt had their work cut out. The 1905 triumph, in the
words of a later scholar, "had made imperialists of all Japanese, even
those as yet unborn, who were to learn of the glory of the Japanese
victory from their primary school books. " That imperialism, however,
focused on nearby Asian regions, not Hawaii or California. Foreign
Minister Komura embodied this view. Believing thatJapan had become
a "semi-continental power" in Asia, he warned that "we should avoid
scattering our people in the foreign countries [such as the United
States] where they are lost."^^

Roosevelt gradually acknowledged the inevitable: Japan controlled

South Manchuria. His moment of truth arose in late 1908. Willard
Straight, still detesting Japan after serving as U.S. consul general in
Harbin, Manchuria, tried to work with Chinese officials to build a
South Manchurian bank-rail system to counter the Japanese railroads.
The twenty-eight-year-old diplomat was driven not only by his racism
but by a romantic determination to win — in Kipling's phrase
— "the
great game of empire." Straight excitedly rushed back to
Washington to
obtain Roosevelt's agreement to build the competing rail line. But the
Japanese, who had been watching Straight, reached the White House
first. In November 1908, Secretary of State Elihu Root and Japanese
THE CLASH 9 2

Ambassador Takahira Kogoro agreed to maintain the status quo in the

Pacific and respect China s independence and "integrity. In his instruc-
"

tions to Takahira, however, Komura deUberately refused to use John

Hay's open-door phrase of China s "territorial integrity" Komura cleverly
argued that such a phrase was unnecessary and, indeed, insulted
China. In reality, the omission meant that Japan kept its hands free to
carve off South Manchuria from China's rule. Straight's dreams of
checking Japan in Manchuria were becoming nightmares. ^^
Roosevelt and Root knew that particular game was up. The Secretary
of State favored the Japanese position. Perhaps the most powerful cor-
poration lawyer in the country before he entered government, Root
loved order and industrialization. Japan, he believed, represented both.
China represented and France had
neither. In 1907, moreover, Russia
already moved to recognize Japan's control of both Korea and South
Manchuria. Root now joined the Europeans by signing another execu-
tive agreement with Japan. When the Secretary of State suggested the

Root-Takahira agreement might be given to the Senate at least for com-

ment, TR was direct: "Why invite the expression of views with which
we may not agree?" Roosevelt's response rephrased his earlier remark:
"Ido not much admire the Senate because it is such a helpless body
when efficient work for good is to be done. "^^

Manchuria: The Second Clash

During 1908, Roosevelt quietly pulled the fleet back to Hawaii, thus
giving up hope of defending the Philippines. Two years later, a U.S.
Army officer reported to his brother from Manila that "The Blue foxes,
Americans, are defending the islands against the Red foxes, Japanese."
The war games' results reinforced Roosevelt's conclusions. "The Japa-
nese could land 100,000 men in a week," the officer worried, "and not
"^"^
miss them," so the maneuvers were "somewhat out of proportion.
The military imbalance in the western Pacificwas half of Washing-
ton's problem in the region. The other half, closely related, was the

belief that Asian markets were essential if the terrors of the 1890s were
not to be repeated, but the reality that Japan was closing off some of
those markets. This was a terrible dilemma that Roosevelt left for his

handpicked successor, William Howard Taft.^^

As Roosevelt's one-time diplomatic troubleshooter, Taft had visited

Japan four times and China three. The new President's Secretary of
State, Philander C. Knox, was also experienced. Knox had been a pow-
TKeTurn (1900-1912) 9 3

erful Pittsburgh corporate lawyer who helped put together the first bil-

lion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, before serving in the Senate

between 1904 and 1909. Knox intimately knew the needs of America's
second industrial revolution that had appeared after the Civil War. Both
men believed U.S. productivity required open Asian markets. They also
assumed that the government must help American financiers and pro-
ducers compete with the great business-government cartels of Ger-
many, Japan, Great Britain, and France for international markets. Taft
reorganized the Department of State and gave it the modern face by
setting up specialized geographical bureaus (such as assistant secretary
for the Far East). As Taft said, it was to be "a thoroughly efficient instru-
ment in the furtherance of foreign trade and of American interest
abroad." The Taft-Knox approach became famous as "dollar diplo-
—
macy" or "substituting dollars for bullets," as the administration came
to define it. Willard Straight, at age twenty-nine the first holder of the
new State Departments Far East bureau, nicely defined "dollar diplo-
macy" as "the financial expression of John Hays 'Open Door " to protect
"China's integrity."^^
With these policies, Taft, Knox, and Straight were on a collision
course with Japan. The Japanese economic machine was heading full-
tilt for the Asian mainland. The key industrial sector, textiles, targeted
Manchurian as well as other Chinese markets. Japan was finally accu-
mulating some surplus capital of its own. Most notably the government
helped set up the South Manchurian Railway Company in 1906: 99,000
shares were for sale, but more than 109,000 bid. The center of capital
holdings concentrated on a few rich merchant bankers, led by Iwasaki,
Mitsui, and Sumitomo. These firms had helped the government in the
late nineteenth-century wars and now, in turn, were being helped by
^^
the government.
This intimate relationship had deep roots that went back at least to
Tokugawa Japan when the Shogun had granted trading monopolies. By
the turn of the twentieth century, these powerful financial houses, or
zaihatsu, were becoming powers in Asia. They remained, however, at
least a generation behind the United States (not to mention Great Brit-
ain) in accumulating capital resources. The sale of the South Manchu-
rian Railway shares was a success story because the government
handsomely supported these ventures with subsidies and contracts. ^^
In June 1907, Japan signed a fisheries agreement with Russia that
contained a secret provision: Russia recognized Japan's special interests
in Korea and South Manchuria, while Japan recognized Russia's special
interests in northern Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. Despite this deal,
THE CLASH 9 4

military officials in Tok\^o continued to believe that another Russian war

was only a matter of time. By 1914, nearly half the government's budget
would go to the military and war debt service. Japan, historians have
noted, seemed to be developing two governments, one military and one
• •!• 59
civilian.

Komura brilliantly moved to shape a consensus foreign policy

between the two factions on September 25, 1908. He succeeded, nota-
bly, as the U.S. Fleet steamed toward Japan and as China turned more

unpredictable. Amid a whirl of change, Komura laid out his strategy to

the cabinet. He first assumed that the aUiance with Great Britain "is

the main pillar of this empire's foreign policy." As power

for Russia, its
had declined and the tsar could well join in a deal to di\dde Manchuria
permanently. Komura and the cabinet then agreed that Manchuria was
to be held. No "third country," that is, the United States, was to be
allowed to be "tempted to inten^ene " in that region. Discussing the
United States specifically, Komura emphasized that given its "impor-
tance to our own commerce," friendship was necessary — despite "a
handful of [American] figures" who were "suspicious" of Japanese
intentions. Above all, the festering immigration problem should be
resolved so it would not poison relations with Washington over larger

Asian questions. ^^
Komura's aim was obvious: Develop South Manchuria and check
Russia, but go to all lengths to retain British and American friendship
and —more specifically —access to the capital surpluses in the City of
London and Wall Hence the pivotal importance of the new
Street.
Root-Takahira understanding. Komura became one of the long line of
Japanese officials who emphasized, in his words, that "What this empire
needs most is the import of capital and technology." The cabinet conse-
'^^
quently endorsed "joint ventures with westerners.
Manchuria by obtaining new rail
In 1909, Japan further closed off
and mineral concessions from China. The most active U.S. business
group on Asian affairs, the American Asiatic Association, and its
mouthpiece, the New York Commercial, stepped up their condemnation
of Japan's activities in Manchuria. A widely known mining executive
and investor, John Hays Hammond, warned that American's economic
interests "run counter to those of Japan." Once established in Korea
and perhaps Manchuria, Hammond added, the Japanese would be "our
most formidable competitor in the Far East. " At the same time, a skillful

publicist. Homer Lea, spread his ardent anti-Japanese beliefs in The

Valor of Ignorance; other widely read books followed his lead. William
Philipps, an expert Asian observer, summed it up in 1908: "Shall the
 —
TlieTurn ( 1900-1 9 12) 9 5

United States use its influence to preserve the integrity of China or

shall weManchuria go to Russia and Japanese influence?"^^
let

For Taft and Knox, this was a rhetorical question. Since 1905, when
he had visited Asia and become well acquainted with E. H. Harriman's
grandiose plans for Manchuria, Taft understood the enormous stakes
being played for the imperial powers. For his part, Knox believed that
only when U.S. capital gained a central role in the rail systems could
the indispensable open door be guaranteed in China and Manchuria.
Roosevelt might be willing to retreat before Japan s immediate military
strength and political position. Taft and Knox, however, decided to play
for one of the richest of all prizes, the whole of Manchuria. Straight
ever the anti-Japanese agent, ever the imperial dreamer —rushed back
once again to China as a representative for a U.S. banking group (that
included J. R Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb) to help Taft and Knox win the
^^
great game of empire in northern China.
Straight quickly obtained Chinese approval to build a railway that
would compete with Japan's South Manchurian line. The Chi-
directly
nese of course saw Straight as the perfect foil to check both Russia and
Japan. But not even the Chinese were prepared for what happened
next.
In November-December 1909, Knox sent notes to Japan, Russia,
France, Germany, and Great Britain that tried to use Straight's project
as a weapon and Japanese positions in
directly to threaten the Russian
Manchuria. Knox demanded that St. Petersburg and Tokyo allow their
railways in Manchuria to be placed under both international control
and the open-door principle. In one of the more breathtaking proposals
in twentieth-century American diplomacy, Knox challenged Japan's and
Russia's expanding colonial empires with American open-market capi-
talism. Knox defined the stakes to Komura on December 18, 1909: the
U.S. government had decided "that the most effective way" to preserve
China's control in Manchuria, and thus to have China "under the all

practical appHcation of the open door and equal opportunity, would be

to combine all Manchurian railways under an economic, scientific, and
impartial administration." In a press statement, Knox went further.
Nothing would afford "so impressive an object lesson to China and the
world," he declared, as "the sight of the four great capitalist nations
Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States — standing
together for equality of commercial opportunity." Komura must have
understood that with that sentence Knox apparently saw Japan as a
threat to —
rather than a member of
"^"^
—
the club of "great capitalist
nations.
THE CLASH 9 6

Knox and Taft's miscalculation was truly of heroic proportions. Any

hope for taking a step toward this neutralization plan depended on the
cooperation of the British, Japan's great and explicit ally. Privately, the
Foreign Office in London blasted Knox's interference as an "ill-consid-
ered and fantastic proposal." For its part, Japan told Knox that its posi-
tion in South Manchuria, after all, resulted in part from Roosevelt's
good and had been reconfirmed by Root in 1908. But for
offices in 1905
Knox the unkindest cut of all occurred on July 4, 1910, when Japan and
Russia reached a new agreement. It divided Manchuria into a Russian
sphere in the north and a Japanese sphere in the south. Knox had driven
the two former enemies into an embrace. As one historian later
observed, in his quest for the open door, Knox had "nailed that door
"^^
closed with himself on the outside.
Japan could annex "South Manchuria to-morrow," a top British diplo-
mat told his Foreign Office colleagues, and no European power could
prevent it. Nor should the British try, given their alliance with Japan,
and given that southern Manchuria already was "a Japanese province."
Only "the regeneration of China could stop Japan, this official con-
"

cluded, and that "prospect seems infinitely remote." Theodore Roose-

velt agreed. In personal exchanges with Knox and Taft, he condemned
their poHcies for worsening an already shaky U.S. -Japan relationship.
The influential naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, a close friend of
Roosevelt's, also came to terms with the new
Before 1907,
Japan.
Mahan had admired how the Japanese blocked the Russians, upheld
open-door principles, and heaped praise on his naval theories; he
assumed they shared U.S. policies about the open door. They were "the
grain of mustard seed," Mahan said of the Japanese, a "regenerating
force" for Asia. By 1910, however, Japan had become a "problem state"
that threatened Asia. Mahan now suggested that the United States not
seek "the object of supremacy in the Pacific, " but draw a line along the
Hawaiian Islands and use the Navy to defend the U.S. interests east-
ward from Hawaii. How such a fleet would ensure entry into the vast
Asian markets for the growing glut of American production a problem —
that had obsessed Mahan in the 1890s —he now left unasked.
^^

Japan followed up its victory in Manchuria with the full annexation

of Korea in 1910. Then came another triumph in 191 1. For nearly a half
century had worked to destroy the treaties imposed on them
its officials

in the 1860s that robbed Japan of the right to control its own tariffs and
some of its ports. In 191 1, Japan approached the British for a revision of
their commercial treaties. When London officials raised complications,
the Japanese shrewdly switched and began talking with the United
TlieTurn 1900-1 9 12)
( 9 7

States, where the immigration problem continued to fester. A treaty

was worked out in February 1911: the Americans gave concessions on
tariffs while the Japanese promised to continue to restrict emigration

to the United States. The British and the other powers quickly followed
the American lead. Japan finally regained full control over its foreign
trade.^^
The 1900 to 1912 years provided a string of horrors for U.S. hopes in
Asia. By the time he left office after his doomed reelection bid in 1912,
Taft had little else to show for his efforts than the 191 treaty. "Taken as
1

a whole, British Ambassador James Bryce told the Foreign Office in

"

London, the President's annual message in December 1912 "has almost

as little value as an exposition of the broad and general lines of the
United States poHcy as it has of literary excellence." The new President,
Woodrow Wilson, was not nearly as experienced in or knowledgeable
about foreign policy as Taft, but understood that the U.S. approach to
Asia, especially Japan, demanded a fundamental rethinking — some-
thing Wilson thought he was eminently qualified to do regardless of his
ignorance about Asia.^^
Japan was also at a crossroads in 1912. The Emperor Meiji died after
a reign of forty-four years. It had been a triumphant era: victories over
China and Russia, the annexation of Korea, a protectorate over South
Manchuria, near realization of the long quest for economic autonomy,
freedom from foreign-imposed treaties, the writing of a constitution

patterned after European models but protecting Japanese traditions

necessary for preserving (or restoring) harmony within the society. The
distinguished Western scholar of Japan, Sir George Sansom, observed
that in the Meiji era, "power was now in the hands of men who had
been brought up as soldiers and were schooled to drastic action. . . .

Most foreign observers who were acquainted with the great figures of
the Meiji period are agreed in thinking that there was a great fall in the
"^^
quality of statesmanship after they had departed from that stage.
Leaders of Japans new industrial-banking giants, such as Mitsubishi
and Mitsui, agreed with powerful government officials that the West's
technology might be borrowed and adapted. The West's capitalism and
its attendant social and cultural values, however, could not be safely

accepted. Control was all-important: expansion abroad in quasi-West-

ern style for harmony at home Japanese-style. The Japanese saw no
contradiction. As they consoHdated their gains in Korea and Manchu-
ria, for example, they passed the Factory Law in 191 1 that legislated
a weak minimum-age protection. Corporations meanwhile instituted
paternalistic programs ensuring a laborer's loyalty to a single firm. The
THE CLASH 9 8

"uniquely Japanese style" of utilizing labor began not after 1951, but a
half century earlier.
Despite the triumphs of the Meiji era, however, two enormous prob-
lems remained. First, Japanese society was not harmonious. It endured
constant upheaval, not least from assassinations, pubUc protests (as in
1905), and civilian-military rivalry. Second, Japanese expansionism
might have resembled European imperialism, but Americans saw no
resemblance to their own expansionism —an expansionism which disa-
vowed coloniahsm on the Asian mainland and pledged itself to Chinese
territorial integrity. Taft, Knox, Straight, and now Woodrow Wilson
intended to contain Japanese expansionism in Asia —and elsewhere,
including parts of Latin America.
The United States, after all, thought its domestic system unique as
well, a system that produced the incredible wealth and social fluidity

so valued by Americans. Indeed, American society had become so fluid

and disorderly after 1873 that it also became imperialistic abroad to
restore order at home. One difference stood out: while Americans
believed their exceptionalism could be exported —whether by mission-
aries, corporate leaders, or education advisers —the Japanese saw them-
selves as too unique to be such proselytizers. Japan thus preferred
colonialism, for that strategy fixed markets, solved security questions,
and allowed the colonizers to adjust other cultures forcefully but quietly
behind high political walls.

The between the Americans and Japanese systems thus

great clash
—
began over China a China careening toward revolution.
Revolution, vvar,
ana Race \
(1912-1920)

An Old Europe, a New Asia

Between 1914 and 1918, European civilization nearly destroyed

itself. No nation gained so much so cheaply from the carnage as

Japan. The acceleration of its imperialism was phenomenal. That

imperialism, however, ran headlong into a newly powerful United
States that — —
Europe verged on suicide was replacing the Brit-
as
ish as the globe's leading economic and military power. For both
Americans and Japanese, war was indeed the health of the state.
As the two non-European imperial powers began reshaping
global relations, they also moved toward conflict over China and
with each other. China, for began the era with a three-
its part,

century-old monarchy, and ended, in 1920, enduring the convul-

sions of a great twentieth-century revolution. U.S. and Japanese
leaders feared, but little understood, the upheaval's dimensions.
Japan had the most to lose. When the Manchu dynasty collapsed
in February 1912, the Japanese industrial economy was being
driven by textile exports. China, along with Hong Kong and Kwan-
tung Leased Territory, took three-quarters of Japan's cotton goods
exports.By 1910, overall trade with China was five times that with
Korea and Taiwan combined.

9 9
THE CLASH 1

Japan's triumph in conquering China s profitable cotton yarn market

provided a case study of new Asian capitalism. Japan won out over
American exporters not because of superior technology or availability of
raw materials. It won because direct help from the Tokyo government
manipulated currency so Japanese investors enjoyed a competitive
edge. It also succeeded because Japanese did not follow Western-style
vertical integration that combined purchasing, manufacturing, and mar-
keting under single ownership (the kind of integration that made Carne-
gie Steel and Standard Oil giants). Instead, "J^P^r^^se-style vertical
integration, "
as the historian Sherman Cochran calls it, was developed:
coordinating the entire process from a central office, but leaving factory
ownership in China to Japanese on the spot who exploited the local
family networks by hiring Chinese to run the factory. Asian family ties
proved to be more powerful than American capital ties. The Chinese
and Japanese economies seemed to grow symbiotic: China supplied
vast amounts of raw materials for Japan's heavy industry, then took back
much of that industry's production and absorbed Japanese investment.
Of China's nearly i million textile spindles in 1913, Japanese owned
about 250,000.^
The China market grew in significance just as some Tokyo officials
feared that the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 would allow the
United States to accelerate its invasion of Asian markets. That fear of
an economic Armageddon, moreover, arose amid economic crises in

Japan itself. Between 1904 and 1913, the Japanese suffered a severe
unfavorable balance of trade. The gap was covered in part by foreign
loans and printing of currency. These Band-Aids did little to halt the

inflation that by 191 3 brought the nation to the edge of disaster. As the
situation deteriorated, the army and navy competed bitterly for

increased budgets. The struggle brought down several governments

between 191 and 1914. Military expenditures were becoming over-
1

whelming; they amounted to 15 percent of the total budget in the 1880s,

then reached 48 percent during the period 1901— 10. A major boost came
from naval officers' fears that competition over China, immigration
issues, and the opening of the Panama Canal were rapidly leading to
war with the United States.^
Across the Pacific, Americans were also waging an intense debate
over their politics, economy, and China policy. But as their system dif-
fered from Japan's, so did their debate. The differences can be under-
stood by comparing the policies of Yamagata Aritomo and Woodrow
Wilson.
Revolution, War, and Race (1912-1920) ] 1

Yama^ata, W^ilson, and tne "Frontier" oi a

Revolutionary Cnina

Born in 1838, Yamagata was shaped by his mihtary experiences during

the upheavals of the 1860s. His success at uniting the anti-Tokugawa
clans, Satsuma and Choshu, and then establishing a mihtary system
that enjoyed virtual veto power over civilian cabinets, laid two founda-
tion stones for the Japan of 1868 to 1945. Before 1912, Yamagata twice
headed governments. After 1912 he wielded immense power as one of
the few remaining, venerated, elder statesmen, or genro, from the Meiji
era. (In his magnificent seaside villa at Odawara, the general built a

shrine to the Meiji Emperors spirit.) He also venerated the bureau-

cracy —an agent, in his view, for loyally carrying out the Emperor's
wishes and for blocking the new political parties, which he viewed as
corrupt mouthpieces of a dangerous public opinion. His foreign poHcies
were shaped by a fixationon seizing parts of Asia that would make
Japan both strategically secure and economically independent. Hence
the seventy-four-year-olds demand in 1912 that Japan (especially the
army) profit from China's upheaval by formally occupying southern
Manchuria. When the Saionji cabinet refused, Yamagata told Katsura,
"^
"I am truly and mightily indignant for the sake of our country.
many Japanese, led by intellectuals, workers, and some busi-
In 1912,
nessmen, hoped the new Taisho era (the name given the 1912—26 reign
of Emperor Yoshihito, who replaced the Meiji Emperor) would usher in
more open, less military-dominated governments. These groups
believed a major generational change was at hand. In 1913, as it became
clear that Yamagata's generation was holding on to power, rioters took
to the streets. They forced the resignation of the government. For the
first time, masses played a decisive role in bringing down a cabinet.
Japan had taken its first democracy
tentative steps toward a Taisho
that marked the next dozen years. Yamagata, other genro, and especially
the military hated the turbulence, which they blamed on the political
parties. And they feared the disorder because it struck just as China
and Europe were edging toward explosions of their own. Yamagata was
convinced that Japan was being sucked into a worldwide race war:

Recent international trends indicate that racial rivalry has yearly

become more intense [he told the government in August 1914]. It is

a striking fact that the Turkish and Balkan wars of the past ... all
had their origins in racial rivalry and hatred. Furthermore, the exclu-
THE CLASH 1 2

sion of Japanese in the state of California . . . and the discrimination

against Indians in British Africa are also manifestations of the racial
problem. . . . [After the war in Europe is over] the rivalry betw^een
the white and colored peoples will intensify; and perhaps it will be
a time when the white races will all unite to oppose the colored
peoples.

After all, if the European bloodshed was "a struggle between the Slavic
and Germanic races," one could "imagine how much more fierce the
struggle between the yellow and white races will be." Yamagata hoped
to exploit, if not avert, this tragedy by drawing "closer to China," and,
in the meantime, strengthening Anglo-Japanese ties. Improving rela-
tions with the United States was important, but ranked a distant third
on his priority list.'^
Woodrow Wilson, Virginia-born in 1856, then raised in Georgia, also
grew up amid war, racism, and political upheaval in his case, the Civil —
War and the bitterness of Reconstruction. Wilson's and Yamagata's
worlds then moved was the
farther apart. Yamagata's political center
Emperor, Wilson's his conception of American individualism. Yamagata
saw the danger as civilian poHtical partisanship, Wilson the new indus-
trial and banking corporations that threatened to strangle the individual.

If Yamagata's policies were fueled by a passion to use the army to find

security and independence for Japan, Wilson passionately hoped to use

a more democratic government to reform (or, as he liked to say,
"restore") the economic world of corporate America before class warfare
erupted. "For whatever we say of other motives," the American declared
when he was a well-known political scientist in 1898, "we must never
forget that in the main the ordinary conduct of men is determined by
economic motives. Or, as he phrased it as a reform governor of New
"

Jersey in 191 1, "A new economic society has sprung up, and we must
effect a new set of adjustments. ' "Adjustments' in this different, post-

1890s imperial America required active government led by a powerful

"^
president: "It is evident that empire is an affair of strong government.
Wilson knew he worked inside a developing American empire. The
turn, he calculated, occurred with the War of 1898, when the nation
found its landed frontier disappearing after four hundred years of con-
tinual expansion, then "turned from developing its own resources to
make conquests of the markets of the world." Resembling Yamagata,
Wilson viewed the world and made more explosive by the
as infected
question of race. As a white man raised in the South and elected by a
Democratic Party that depended on all-white southern (and some
Revolution, War, and Race (l9 12-1920) 1 3

northern) political machines, his racism was not exceptional. Indeed, it

was so traditional that Wilson focused on what he believed to be a new,

more dangerous problem: a growing "empire" whose economic system
threatened to destroy American society as it rushed from individualistic
nineteenth-century competition on a continent to giant twentieth-cen-
tury corporations dividing global markets.^
Wilson intended to discipline corporations and avoid class war by
waging peaceful economic warfare abroad. When he entered the presi-
dency in 1913, he knew little During the 1912
else about foreign policy.
campaign, Wilson declared in several speeches that U.S. industries had
"expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they can-
not find a free outlet to the markets of the world." As he had earlier
noted, Asia was pivotal, "the market for which statesmen as well as
merchants must plan and play their game of competition, the market
to which diplomacy, and if need be power, must make an open way"^
Taking that remarkable statement to its logical conclusion, Wilson
declared that the open-door policy had been "not the open door to the
rights of China but the open door to the good of America." Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt grew to hate each other for personal and policy
reasons, but on Asian issues they agreed, as Roosevelt phrased it, that
Americans were witnessing the "expansion of the frontier of the United
"^
States westward to the interior of China.
In March 1913, Wilson began trying to use China as a tool to reform
corporate America. He faced the question of whether he would stay in
the six-power consortium, as William Howard Taft and Willard Straight
had pieced it together in 1911-12, so U.S. banks would enjoy equal rights
with the other five powers in developing China. In 1913, however, a new
China was coming under the control of a military strongman. Yuan
Shih-k'ai. Believing that Yuan favored "the development of China by
foreign capital," Straight hoped that Wilson would keep Americans
inside the consortium. Straight was even prepared to cooperate with
the despised Japanese: "We might all be better off if these httle devils
had charge of China's destiny after all," he wrote only half in jest. "They
could not run any monopoly game and then, like the Manchus, they
would be so corrupt after a few generations and so softened by riches
"^
. . . that they would no longer be a military menace to us honest folks.

Wilson rejected Straight's views. Two reasons for his decision stood
out: the consortium was dominated by giant bankers who had shut out
smaller firms, and the United States could not control the consortium.
The President preferred returning to a traditional go-it-alone policy that
allowed many American firms to compete for all of China's develop-
THE CLASH 1 4

ment projects while remaining separated from Japanese and European

imperialists.^^
The President destroyed the consortium without consulting either
the other five powers or his State Department's Asian experts. Only
Secretary of State WiUiam Jennings Bryan, appointed for his political
importance despite Wilson's disdain for his intellect, knew about and
sympathized with the President's decision before its announcement.
The radical nature of Wilson's new direction was limited. He recognized
Yuan Chinese leader despite the military man's disinterest in
as the
democracy, and stayed with Yuan even after he declared himself the
new Emperor. Wilson thus joined a long line of U.S. officials who held
contradictory hopes: that China would somehow become a democracy,
but also remain orderly and whole for the sake of foreign interests.
Straight, furious, concluded that the China market had been lost. A
State Department memorandum of August-September 1913, however,
declared the U.S. intention to develop Sino- American trade "to the full-
est extent." U.S. firms "should have opportunity everywhere to compete
for contractual favors on the same footing as any foreign competition."
Wilson was hardly pulling out of China. The United States and Japan
remained on a collision course. ^^

Caliiornia: "Anotner Race Problem

Within two months after Wilson deserted the consortium, that collision
seemed so imminent that U.S. naval officers prepared for war. Tension
had built for months. Early in 1912, rumor spread that Japanese business
interestswere purchasing a strategic area of Mexico's Baja California.
Japan's government denied any such purchase. William Randolph
Hearst's anti-Japanese newspapers nevertheless loudly rang the alarm.
In the Senate, Henr>^ Cabot Lodge wheeled out a large cannon from
the nation's diplomatic arsenal —the —
Monroe Doctrine aimed it at
Japan, and loosed the charge with what came to be known as the Lodge
Corollary to the doctrine. In 1823, the senator announced. President
James Monroe had banned further foreign "colonization" in this hemi-
sphere. "By the word colonization' we also cover action by companies
or corporations by citizens or subjects of a foreign state which might do
. what the Monroe Doctrine was intended to prevent." The Senate
. .

roared through his resolution 51-4. During the next two decades, the
State Department deployed Lodge's Corollary at least four times. In
every instance it aimed to stop Japanese from obtaining Mexican land.^^
Revolution, War, and Race (l 9 12-1920) 1 5

Lodge spoke Theodore Roosevelt, embarked

as his intimate friend,
on a losing presidential election campaign against Wilson and Taft.
"Japan-bashing," as it was later termed, was featured in the campaign,
especially because California had begun to debate laws to ban Japanese
from owning land. Since the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement, immigration
from Japan had declined. Only about fifty thousand Japanese lived in
the state. Many were welcomed for providing reliable field labor. Some,
however, scrimped and saved enough to purchase their own land. Such
success honored a great American tradition, but one California Demo-
cratic Party leader called Japanese "a non-assimilable people, clever and
industrious," who take "farms from . . . white men
com- in destructive

petition" and threaten to make California "a Japanese plantation" where

"republican institutions [will] perish."

Similar words were heard from a strong Wilson supporter, James D.

Phelan, wealthy real estate speculator, former mayor of San Francisco,
and later a U.S. senator. Phelan warned Wilson to make his views clear
if he hoped to carry California. In May 1912, the New Jersey governor
wrote Phelan that he favored "exclusion (or restricted immigration). The
whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make
a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the
Caucasian race." "Their lower standard of living as laborers," Wilson
added," will crowd out the white agriculturalist and is, in other fields, a

most serious industrial menace. Oriental coolieism will give us

. . .

another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our lesson."
^^
Phelan brandished Wilson's letter during the campaign.
When California moved to ban Japanese from owning land, the
newly elected President dispatched Bryan to talk sense with the state
legislators. The Secretary of State had little luck. Wilson tried to suggest

wording that would accomplish the legislature's goal without offending

Japan, but Californians refused to cooperate. Most American journals
repeated the New York Word's opinion that the state's legislation was
"ridiculous"and out of proportion to the problem. Again, however,
Hearst's newspapers loved the law and whipped up anti-Japanese feel-
14
mgs.
U.S. naval officials' apprehension grew. In Tokyo, a crowd of twenty
thousand cheered as a politician urged that the Imperial Fleet steam to

California to protect Japan's citizens and dignity. Stories spread that

the fleet was preparing to seize Hawaii and the Philippines. Repeated
complaints by Americans that, after Japan barred U.S. citizens from
all,

owning land in Japan produced no effect on Tokyo officials. In mid-

May 1913, Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, a naval operation planner, told
THE CLASH 1 6

Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels that "war is not only possible but even
probable. The admirals asked permission to move more ships into the
'

Philippine and Hawaiian areas. Wilson flatly refused. He wanted to do

nothing that might further alarm Japan. The Joint Board of the Army
and Navy insisted, then a leak appeared in newspapers that revealed the
admirals' request. Furious, Wilson abolished the Joint Board. Tensions
cooled, but California's Webb-Heney Alien Land Act of May 9, 1913,
became law. Yamagata's views on the importance of race were rein-
forced.^^
At a press conference in May, Wilson declared his admiration for

Japanese achievements. A military mortality rate of only 2 percent from

disease in the 1904-05 war, for example, demonstrated a ''scientific
superiority over any other modern nation" that ''impresses the imagina-
tion." Moreover, "they can adapt what they take to their own uses so
perfectly" On the other hand, the President added, the Cahfornia legis-
lation arose because "we do not want to have intimate association in
our life with the Japanese." He noted a "feeling on our part that they
are noton the same plane with us. That, of course, is something that
"^^
diplomacy itself cannot handle.

Tke Two-Front War: 1914-1918

Wilson admired the Japanese, but preferred they not live in California.

He also concluded that fewer Japanese ought to work in revolution-torn

China. Between 1914 and 191 8, he and Japan waged a two-front war.
One they fought together, finally, against Germany. The other they
fought diplomatically against each other. The first war was over Germa-
ny's place in world affairs. The second was over China's place in the
development of the Japanese and American systems.
The second war's intensity could be partly explained by economic
problems afflicting Japan and the United States when Europe walked
into the abyss during August 1914. Bedeviled by inflation and long-term
unfavorable foreign trade balances, the Japanese economy was finally
accelerated by the selling of vast amounts of goods to European bellig-
erents and by rushing into Asian markets suddenly deserted by Western
imperial powers. Tokyo also moved to intensify development in Man-
churia, Korea, and Taiwan.
The United States economy suffered from shorter-term problems as
it spiraled downward in mid-1914. At first, Americans lent to neither

side. Money was the "worst of all contrabands because it commands

Revolution, War, and Race (l 9 12-1920) 1 7

everything else," moralized Bryan. Within fourteen months, however,

Americans grew rich by loaning money and selling food, clothing, and
—
arms to anyone with enough credit which meant largely the Allied
powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Japan prospered and the
United States emerged as the globe s center for capital.
The would end someday soon, while the China market
war, however,
would supposedly go on forever. And as Americans positioned them-
selves to exploit the European war, Japanese moved to exploit the Chi-
nese upheaval. Some such as Straight even viewed the Chinese
revolution as largely a Japanese invention. In 1896, the first thirteen
Chinese students had arrived in Tokyo; by 1914, many more Chinese
were studying in Japan (in 1905, eight thousand arrived). A Pan-Asianist
movement hatched in Tokyo, nourished by the defeat of the Russians
in 1905 and now inspiring revolutionaries who hated the West, seemed
to be The ''Yellow Peril" in California or
rising in the far U.S. frontier.
Hawaii was small change compared with events in China. In Tokyo,
meanwhile, out of near political chaos Okuma Shigenobu emerged as
prime minister in 1914 to seize the opportunities presented by the Euro-
pean war. Okuma was championed by Yamagata and the army.^^
Now seventy-six years old, this son of a samurai had learned to
admire the U.S. Constitution —but not individualistic American soci-
ety —from an American missionary during the 1860s. At first opposed to

military conquests in the 1870s, Okuma soon pushed for seizing Taiwan,
Manchuria, and Korea. Ironically, he also became head of the Chinese
Peace Society. Finance minister from age thirty-four to forty-three,
Okuma became rich from military contracts supplying the forces that
quelled the 1877 rebellion. Later he forged close ties with the Mitsubi-
shi zaihatsu. When revelations of corruption drove him from office in
the early 1890s, he helped build a political party that ultimately pro-
pelled him back into power as premier in 1898. From that height,
Okuma opposed the U.S. annexation of Hawaii, which he had targeted
as a Japanese protectorate. Corruption charges again drove him from
power, this time for sixteen years. Okuma occupied himself by founding
Waseda University, soon to be a distinguished institution free of govern-
ment oversight. In 1914, Emperor and genro turned to him as a last
the
resort. He brought with him a checkered political past, close ties to

the Iwasaki family that owned Mitsubishi, great vanity, a rampant Pan-
Asianism (he once claimed, to the anger of British officials, that even
India looked to Japan for deliverance), and a marked dislike and fear of
^^
the United States.
Between 1914 and 1916, Okuma and his foreign minister, Kato Komei,
THE CLASH 10 8

dominated policymaking. Born with the next generation of leaders in

i860, Kato, unlike Okuma, was a professional diplomat who enjoyed a
meteoric rise to become minister to Great Britain at age thirty-four,
then foreign minister in 1900 and again in 1906. He, like Okuma, mar-
ried into the Iwasaki family He also shared Okuma's short temper,
belief in Japan's manifest destiny, and willingness to use force in
1^
China.
Kato's mistakes soon turned out to be as large as his ambition. He
believed he could ignore the genro and take the British for granted as
he moved to China under a de facto Japanese protectorate. Such
put all

a protectorate would also destroy the U.S. open-door policy once and
for all. His first steps were taken in 1911-13. As ambassador to Great
Britain, Kato thought he and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey agreed
that Japan must expand. Sir Edward, however, had Manchuria in mind,
not central China, where British interests profited. Kato either misun-
derstood Grey or, more likely, thought that in the right circumstances
^^
the British would acquiesce when Japan imposed order on China.
The golden opportunity opened with the European war. Japan first
declared its neutrality. Then the British asked for naval protection in
the Pacific. Kato successfully argued that joining the British could pro-
duce rich rewards; these included the seizure of German possessions
in China and the Pacific. Thus occurred the long-awaited revenge for
Germany directing the Triple Intervention twenty years earlier. The Jap-
anese seized the strategic German base at Kiaochou on the Shantung
Peninsula (and deployed German prisoners to breweries where Asahi
beer was born). They then invaded the kaiser's colonial possessions in
the northern Pacific — the Mariana, Marshall, and Caroline Islands.
Another white nation stood humiliated. Japanese power was poised to
strike south and west. Ambitious Tokyo students began to study the
Malay and Dutch languages. Highly impressed, the British asked Kato
^^
for military help in Europe. He flatly refused.
Japan fought World War I for its Asian interests, not for its allies'

survival. In early 1916, for example, when Okuma thought Germany

might have something attractive to offer, Japan secretly talked with Ber-
lin officials about a separate peace. "When there is a fire in a jeweller's
shop, the neighbors cannot be expected to refrain from helping them-
selves," aTokyo official had explained in 1914. Wilson and the State
Department were not amused. When war began, a frightened China
had asked Washington to protect the status quo in the Pacific. Bryan
duly issued such a request of the powers. Only Germany agreed. As
Japan seized German possessions north of the equator, the British took
Revolution, War, and Race (l9 12-1920) 1 9

those to the south. China again complained, but State Department

Counselor Robert Lansing — a conservative New York lawyer who had
sympathy for disorderly, disintegrating empires told the Chinese
little —
that while American friendship for them was "sincere," it "would be
quixotic in the extreme" for the United States to become entangled in
^^
Asia over Japan s anti-German actions.
Kato and Okuma's stars also seemed to be perfectly aligning in China
itself. When the Chinese Revolution appeared in 191 1, two leaders were
in the forefront. Sun Yat-sen moved from the south while Yuan Shih-
k'ai used his military forces to control the north. Japanese policy also
divided. Tokyo officials disliked the radicals around Sun and, like Wood-
row Wilson, preferred a predictable monarchy over the unknown repub-
lic that Sun championed. Giant zaihatsu, however, led by Mitsui and

Mitsubishi, funneled arms and money to Sun in return for a promise

of future economic concessions. Sun ultimately became the revered
godfather of the Chinese Revolution, but in 1912-14 Yuan twice blocked
him, seized full power for himself, and forced Sun and other southern
^^
leaders to find refuge in Japan.
As the cannons roared in Europe, Yuan listened politely while the
Japanese explained their interest in Kiaochou and additional Manchu-
rian railways.Yuan replied diplomatically and insincerely that yellow
races should not "make friends of Europeans and Americans who are
of the white race" — that is, those who will be "powerful white adversar-
ies" after the war. Kato put such remarks together with his own belief
that the British would tolerate Japanese expansion in China. The result
was an integrated, detailed set of demands drawn up by Kato and his
subordinates.
In January 191 5, Kato, trying to maintain utmost secrecy, handed
these so-called Twenty-one Demands to Yuan's regime. The list was
impressive. Japan would acquire all German rights in Shantung (Kiao-
chou); receive vast concessions in South Manchuria and Inner Mongo-
ha, including an additional ninety-nine-year lease to the South
Manchurian Railway; control a rich iron and coal company in central
China; and obtain essential control of Fukien Province just across from
Taiwan. The final, or fifth, set of demands was the most stunning:
China was to hire Japanese political, financial, and military advisers;
give Japanese the right to build temples and schools; and grant permis-
sion to Tokyo to construct three railways between the pivotal Yangtze
^"^
River area and the southern coast.
The most dangerous Far East crisis of World War I was at hand. Kato
believed neither Europeans nor Americans could stop this diplomatic
 ' »

THE CLASH ] 1

Ine Development oi tne

Japanese Empire, 1861 — 1945
s

U. S. S. R. Kiska/ I

Midway j-

Is. I

^ I

§1
o
"I
"ol
Marshall Is.: trl
El
~l
Si
f'
SI
^ I

§1
I
/

2000
^^ ^^- -^ miles
I

AUSTRALIA 3000 km

Strike. With Japan's leases on Manchuria's railway lapsing between 1923

and 1940, moreover, this might be the last opportunity to save them on
Tokyo's terms. Of course, the secrecy did not hold. U.S. Minister to
China Paul Reinsch learned about the demands in late January 1915.
A noted scholar of China from the Univ^ersity of Wisconsin, Reinsch
was a tough, passionate defender of China and an outspoken critic of
Japan. Believing that only the United States could safely bring China
into the twentieth century, he saw the Japanese (and, to only a slightly
lesser extent, their partners the British) as the villains. The Twenty-one
Demands were the "greatest crisis yet experienced in China," Reinsch
Revolution, War, and Race (1912-1920) 1 1 1

instructed Wilson and Bryan. If Kato succeeded, the open door would
close forever: "The independence of China and equal opportunity of
western nations are at stake." Wilson paid little attention. He was
caught up in defending U.S. neutrality, mourning the death of his first
wife, and ardently courting his second. The President, moreover, saw
little wrong with the more civilized (as he defined them) helping out

disorderly neighbors. After all, he had sent, or was about to send, U.S.
troops into Mexico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua. Bryan did
ask Japanese Ambassador Count Chinda about the fifth set of
demands. Chinda, an experienced diplomat who had gone to school in
the United States, denied this set existed. Bryan's long poHtical rela-
tions with Tammany Hall should have taught him better, but he never-
theless declared, *1 trust the Japanese Ambassador."^^
On February China published the fifth set of demands. In
i8, 191 5,

London, Grey was appalled. He ratcheted up the pressure on Tokyo

until in May Kato finally dropped the fifth set. Wilson and Bryan, mean-
while, excoriated Japan for lying. But they knew they needed Japanese
cooperation in Asia, Europe, and, not least, California. They also had
no military force to face down Japan in China. In the game for the open
door, Wilson held few good cards.
On March 13, the Americans consequently accepted the first four
sets of demands (and thus Japan s new hold on Manchuria and even
Shantung) by using a fateful phrase. The United States recognized that
between Japan and these
"territorial contiguity creates special relations

districts." The phrase had been suggested by Lansing, who hoped that

in return Japan would cooperate in California and drop the fifth set of
demands. By early May, Wilson believed Japan was not backing down.
On May 5, Bryan sent a tough note warning Japan and the other powers
that Washington would not surrender its rights in China. Six days later,
he reaffirmed loudly "the international policy commonly known as
. . .

the open door."^^

The Chinese accepted most of the first four sets of demands, but
rejected the fifth set. Despite this limited victory, Kato was in deep
trouble at home. He had issued the demands without consulting with
the genro, who, he believed, were too old and too cautious. The elder
statesmen, however, still commanded the Emperors ear and were furi-
ous that after they had spent forty years courting the West, Kato's bum-
bling diplomacy threatened to cancel their efforts —and embitter the
British — in a single strike. In May 191 5, they forced Kato to resign.
The episode had already further poisoned Japanese-American relations.
Reinsch's anti-Japanese warnings seemed validated. The Hearst news-
 5

THE CLASH 1 1 2

papers trumpeted a series of articles entitled "Japan's Plans to Invade

and Conquer the United States." The contents of the series were
pirated from a Japanese novel, while accompaming pictures were
highly doctored photos from the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1894—95.
Readers knew none of this. Other than Hearst, Wilson and Bryan
seemed to be the big winners. They thought their tough notes had saved
China and doomed Kato. In truth, it had been Grey, using his leverage
within the Anglo-Japanese alliance, who had forced the genro to act.^^
U.S. officials nevertheless deplored Grey's behavior and grew deeply
suspicious about the Anglo-Japanese alHance. The British, after all, had
shown little open door until their interests in central
interest in the
China were directly endangered. Nor had Grey gone out of his way to
support the Americans, doubtless because a real open door in China
could undermine British as well as Japanese holdings. Grey even
bluntly told Wilson's closest adviser, Edward M. House, in May 191
that Japan required Manchuria since "North and South America, Africa
and the British colonies were closed against her citizens. "^^
A wonderful irony threatened: acting as a supposed ally, Japan was
using the European war as cover for destroying seventy-five years of
U.S. policy in Asia and creating a "Yellow Peril" beyond even Hearst's
imagination. Formulating a response fell to Lansing. In June 191 5, the
suave New Yorker became when Br\^an
Secretarv^ of State resigned after
a dispute with Wilson over handling German submarine warfare. Lan-
sing, unlike Br\an, wanted the United States to enter the war on the
side of the British. By 1916, Wilson understood the countr\^ would prob-
ably have to fight, even as his supporters reelected him with the slogan,
"He kept us out of war. For Lansing, therefore, the pivotal problem in
"

Asia was how to contain Japan once Americans became enmeshed in

European war.
Wilson and Lansing devised two containment poHcies. First, they
swallowed hard and admitted that Wilson's go-it-alone policy of 1913,
which aimed at wTCcking the six-power consortium, had only left the
Japanese to go-it-alone. By 1916, Japan was accelerating its economic
offensive in China with a massive set of loans. The President knew the
consortium had to be rebuilt, although its walls could now be only four-
sided (the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan). Reinsch
\igorously opposed the plan. He urged that Americans use their new
war-gotten wealth unilaterally and drive Japan back in a kind of holy
war for the open door.
In the histor}^ of American diplomacy, unilateralism —
or isolationism,
as it is usually called —
has always been a tactic, not an immutable prin-
With his Black Ships and their cannon hovering in
the background, Coynmodore Perry deploy'ed his rnen
to meet the Japanese commissioners at Yokohama on
March 8, 18^4. (Library of Congress)
 ii
Commodore Pern', in the flesh, ivas a resented,
distinguished-looking naval officer. But, as this
Japanese drawing illustrates, his involuntary hosts
had a quite different view of him. {Corhis-Bettmann
and Asahi Shiwhun Publishing)
ABOVE. Perry, his officers,

and crew give a formal

dinner, complete with
toasts, for the Japanese
commissioners. Note the
cannon and the hand.
(Library of Congress)

LEFT. A portrait of

Townsend Harris, 'painted

by James Bogle in 1855,

the year he was appointed
consul general to Japan.
(City College, New York)
The first Japanese mission to the

United States in i860 took particular

interest in American technology.
(Library of Congress)

OPPOSITE. Yamagata Aritomo — the father

of Japanese militarism and strategist of his

nation's expansionism onto the Asian
mainland between the i8jos and World
War I. [Library of Congress)
c
vrv

.V
Artist's rendition of marines
defending the U.S. Legation
in Peking. (AP/Wide World
Photos)

OPPOSITE ABOVE. During their widely noted visit to Japan in

summer igo^, Alice Roosevelt (the President's daughter) enrap-
tured the press, hut, quietly, William Howard Taft (at her left)

reshaped U.S. -Japan- Korean relations. Here they leave the

Resting Palace in Yokohama en route to Tokyo. (Library of
Congress)

OPPOSITE BELOW. Count Sergei Witte, Baron Rosen, President

Roosevelt, Baron Komura Jutaro, and Takahira Kogoro at the

1905 peace negotiations. (Underwood & Underwood/ Corhis-

Bettmann)
ABOVE LEFT. Elthu Root,
the father of the American
"establishment, " tried to
cem^ent U.S. -Japanese
friendship, especially in
igo8 and at the 1921—22
Washington Conference.
(Corhis-Bettmann)

ABOVE RIGHT. Baron

Saionji — adviser to
emperors, the last of the
genro who modern
created
Japan — in 1920, on the
eve of the Washington
Conference. {Library of
Congress)

RIGHT Skilled gambler,

aware of U.S. power,
fully
Yamamoto Isoroku planned
the Pearl Harbor attack
reluctantly. Here he is

shown as Japan's naval

attache in Washington,
February 1926. (Library of
Congress)
Revolution, War, and Race (l 9 12-1920) 1 1 3

ciple.Americans have usually joined multilateral efforts when they held

control. Wilson quit the consortium in 1913 because he could not con-
trol By 1917, he and Lansing recreated the consortium because they
it.

thought Americans could control it.

In mid-1918, Lansing explained to Wilson that China desperately
needed money, and given the wartime circumstances, 'That leaves Japa-
nese capital in control." U.S. money had to go in to counter the Japa-
nese. Since sufficient amounts of dollars would enter China only when
Wilson offered his full support, the President gave it. If the plan worked
out, results could be mind-boggling. Because the British and French
were bankrupting themselves to fight the war, they would be dependent
on U.S. capital. In a new consortium, Americans could control three
votes to one for Japan. Money was gushing into New York City, more-
over, in amounts the Japanese could not match. At first, Tokyo officials,
not blind to these circumstances, opposed joining the new consortium.
As the Japanese press put it, the powers were using the United States
"as a check" on Japan. British pressure and American power, however,
proved to be too much. Wilson bluntly announced in 1916 that having
become "the creditors of the world," Americans "can determine to a
large extent who is to be financed and who is not to be financed." By
mid-1918, the American Group —
led by J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers'
National City Bank, and twenty-nine smaller banks whose inclusion
satisfied Wilson's desire for a more open capitalist system
^^
was inside —
the new consortium.
Wilson's growing fear of Japan, as well as his racism, dramatically
appeared during the historic weeks of early 1917 when he agonized over
whether to ask Americans to die in Europe. On the one hand, he had
to respond to Germany's all-out submarine offensive that was sinking
U.S. ships. Moreover, he knew he had to enter the war if he hoped to
^°
enter the peace negotiations as an equal after the conflict.
On knew that American entry could win an
the other hand, Wilson
all-out victory for the Allies, who by no means shared his vision for a
different, more democratic postwar world. That point was driven home
in 191 5-16 when the Allies signed a series of secret treaties that divided
German possessions among themselves. Americans were not consulted
as Europeans formally gave Japan most of what it wanted of German
territory in the Pacific theater. Of particular interest, Wilson began to
worry aloud about the damage to "white civilization" if Americans died
alongside Europeans. Or, as he told the cabinet on February 5, 1917, if

"in order to keep the white race or part of it meet the yellow
strong to
race — ^Japan, for instance, in alliance with Russia, dominating China
 ^

THE CLASH 1 1 4

it was wise to do nothing, he would do nothing, and would submit to

. . . any imputations of weakness or cowardice." Lansing tried to push

Wilson forward and over the edge to war by arguing another perspec-
tive: if Germany won, it would join Russia and Japan "which are
—
almost as hostile to democracy as Germany and which have similar
ambitions of territorial expansion '
—and then divide up the globe, with

Japan targeting the west coast of the United States.^

Either way, Wilson's decision for war rested in part on his evaluation
of how best to protect the interest of "white races" against Japanese
power. In the end, Lansing's arguments and Wilson's urge to mediate
the postwar peace prevailed. The President tried to innoculate himself

against his Allies, however, with a remarkable speech in Congress on

January 22, 1917. He demanded a "peace without victory," a peace that
replaced a world of imperialism with "a community of power." The Pres-
ident declared that he sought a globe free of "entangling alliances"
(such as the Allies' secret treaties?). He asked that all nations "adopt
the doctrine of President Monroe, " by which he meant that "no nation
should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people." In
April, he finally joined Japan and its European Allies in war, but only,
he emphasized, as an "associated power" because "we have no alHes."
Wilson thus went to war to win a miUtary victory with the Allies, but
more importantly to win a new world after the war despite the Allies.
It would be a neat trick.^^
His reference to the Monroe Doctrine rang false. The Japanese,
resembling every other nation except the United States, viewed the
doctrine as a convenient rationale for controlling neighboring territory.
After was how Americans long treated neighbors in Latin
all, that
America. Tokyo officials had become transfixed with the idea of the
doctrine because they beheved they had a right to employ a similar
doctrine in their region. Again, Japan wanted not only to join the impe-
rialists but obtain all the rights and pri\aleges of the club.

No Japanese wanted to join the club more than did Viscount Ishii
Kikujiro. He arrived in Washington during September 1917 to exchange
"frank views concerning problems in China," as he later phrased it in

hismemoirs. In distinction and diplomatic experience, Ishii was unsur-

passed in Japan. Born in 1866, graduated from the prestigious Law
School of Tokyo Imperial University, he became a protege of Komura.
On he served in Korea, in China during the Boxer upris-
this fast track

ing, in California when the immigration issue exploded, as ambassador

to France, and, finally, as Kato's successor as foreign minister during

191 5-16. Fluent in English, well connected in New York, the urbane
Revolution, War, and Race (1912-1920) i I 5

Ishii had scored with Wilson and Lansing in 1916 when rumors flew
that if Mexico —
whose revolution Wilson had tried to control until he
—
even sent in U.S. troops went to war with the United States, Japan
would help the Mexicans. Ishii flatly declared that any such aid "is out
of the question and absurd." He was, after all, sensitive to the meaning
of the Monroe Doctrine. He also understood the importance of Ameri-
can public opinion. The New York Times lauded the viscount's skill at

billiards and even his singing as a "parlor entertainer."^^

The newspaper would have been less enchanted if it had heard Ishii
and Lansing argue over China. The Secretary of State planned to tie up
Japan politically, as well as with the consortium, while Americans sank
deeper into the European bloodbath. He therefore asked Japan to reaf-
firm the open door and disavow closed spheres of interests in China.
Ishii had no intention of taking such vows, especially after Japan's
secret pacts with the allies cemented its hold on Manchuria. Foreign
Minister Motono Ichiro, moreover, ordered Ishii to "secure, in whatever
form, America's clear understanding of Japan's special position in
China." New York capital was welcome in Manchuria and Inner Mon-
golia, but only if it passed through Japanese hands. Ishii thus now
argued that his nation's rights in China resembled U.S. rights under
the Monroe Doctrine: they "exist regardless of the recognition of other
nations." Japan wanted recognition as well of its "paramount interests"
^"^
in Manchuria.
Lansing asked whether the term "pecuhar interests could be substi- "

tuted. The China market could in time became a Japanese-con-

entire
trolled arena if "paramount interests" were admitted. "Paramount
interests," Ishii replied, was the term U.S. officials had used to justify
their interests in Mexico. "As there was no difference between . . .

Japan's interests in China and the interests of the United States in

Mexico," the viscount thought his own words appropriate. No record
has been found of Lansing's facial expression at that point, but he man-
aged to say that the phrase was too radical. He also probably knew that
Japan had used the "paramount interests phrase in an Anglo-Japanese
"

treaty about Korea —

just before Tokyo fully annexed Korea.
On November 2, 1917, the dueling halted and a formula developed
that from the American view became the second containment policy to
control Japan. The Lansing-Ishii agreement, expressed in a letter from
the former to the latter, declared that "territorial propinquity creates
between countries. Given Motono's instructions, Ishii
special relations"
had performed this part of his job well. The United States recognized
that Japan had "special interests" in China, especially in those areas "to
 —
THE CLASH 1 1 6

which her possessions are contiguous," which meant Manchuria (and

also the freshly seized Shantung?). In return, Ishii joined Lansing in
declaring that China s sovereignt)^ must not be impaired. They promised
to "adhere to the principle of the so-called 'open-door' or equal opportu-
nity for commerce and industr\^ in China." Lansing and Wilson, how-
ever, demanded more. In a secret protocol not published until 1938
(when the State Department released it amid an even greater crisis with
Japan over China), both nations agreed not to take "advantage" of the
European war "to seek special rights or pri\aleges which would abridge
the rights of subjects of other nations." Thus Japan promised to keep
^^
its hands off U.S. and Allied interests in China during the conflict.

Lansing was satisfied. Willard Straight was ecstatic. He declared the

agreement to be the "most constructive thing" since Hay's open-door
notes of 1899— 1900. Reinsch and the Chinese, who knew nothing about
the secret protocol, were not ecstatic. Lansing heard from the U.S. post
in Peking during 1918 that 'The present government is so much under
Japanese influence" that the Secretary of State would have to "bring
pressure on Japan" if he hoped to save anything in China. As the Ameri-
can and Japanese systems maneuvered for advantage in Asia, Wilson
could conclude that the consortium and the Lansing-Ishii agreement
were not sufficient as ties that bound. ^^

Siberia: Tne Bitter Choice

If the struggle over China were not enough, by late 191 8 Wilson faced
a more immediate crisis with Japan. It erupted in Russia and its results
helped shape U.S. -Japanese relations, as well as the larger international
arena, for much of the twentieth century.
In Februar}^ 1917^ the tsar had been overthrown by a social demo-
cratic regime that could not both fight Germany and reform Russia
tasks trulv bevond anv mortals. The regime deteriorated until Novem-
ber 1917, when it became the victim of a Bolshe\ak takeover led by V. I.

Lenin and Leon Wilson and Lansing approved of the Februar\'

Trotsks^.

regime, but quickly feared and hated the Bolsheviks. Lansing con-
cluded they mainly appealed and mentally deficient."
to "the ignorant

Such hatred heightened when Lenin damned the Europeans and Japa-
nese by publishing the secret treaties that divided up the postwar world,
—
and when even worse in Wilson's mind Lenin moved to make peace
^^
—
with Germany.
These political earthquakes shook Allied capitals in quite different
Revolution, War, and Race ( 1 9 1 2-1920) i i 7

ways. In Washington, Wilson saw Lenin as a fellow visionary, but one

who had a radically different and revolutionary plan for the postwar
world. During January 1918, the President answered the challenge with
the Fourteen Points speech that outlined his own hopes for the peace.
He treated Russia as he and Lansing had tried to treat China when
they dealt with Ishii: handHng of Russia "will be the acid test
the Allied
of their good will," and the country was not to be carved up by Germany
or any other neighboring predators. In London, British officials feared
a "Germanized" Russia and the loss of the region s immense resources.
They therefore asked their alliance partner in Tokyo to take over the
Trans-Siberian Railway, a daring move that Lansing immediately con-
demned as the first Anglo-Japanese giant step to dominate Russia. ^^
In Tokyo, most officials viewed the British proposal as heavensent:
inone stroke, the Japanese army could create a huge buffer zone for
Manchuria while seizing one of the world's richest raw material banks,
— —
and thus finally move the empire to economic independence. But
arguments over how and when to deal such a stroke deeply divided
the shaky government of Terauchi Masatake, a career army officer and
another protege of Prince Yamagata. In June 1917, Terauchi tried to
impose some order on policymaking by creating a Foreign Affairs Advi-
sory Council of nine members who supposedly spoke for the military,
the leading clans, bureaucrats, conservatives, and liberals. The advisory
council became a vital —sometimes the only—channel for moderates
to restrain miUtants. worsened an already ramshackle decision-
But it

making process. At times the advisory council divided between go-it-

alone anti-Russian military (led by Yamagata) and more cautious civil-
ians (led by Saionji, one of the few remaining ^enro). As Tokyo govern-
ments suffered paralysis, the military, especially the army, seized the
day.^^
In January 1918, London proposed that the Allies land forces at Mur-
mansk in northern Russia — to keep caches of weapons out of German
hands —and at Vladivostok on Siberia's Pacific coast. Six months of ago-
nizing debate now tormented Tokyo and Washington. The Japanese
army quickly forwarded a plan to secure the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
The government, and Yamagata, also wanted to move
led by Terauchi
quickly, but warned that Japan had to follow the American lead. Wil-
son's cold response to the British proposal was a yellow light. His and
Lansing's public lectures about the evils of slicing up China or Russia
soon turned yellow to red. On March 5, 1918, the State Department
bluntly told Tokyo that intervention could generate "hot resentment"
inside Russia and play to the "enemies of Russia" both inside and out-
THE CLASH 1 I 8

side. As Yamagata warned government, Japan had to be careful

his
because "I regret to say that we count greatly" on Americans and
. . .

British for money and material. The effect of the United States cutting
off steel shipments to Japan in 1917 (to conserve steel for the American
war effort) made the prince's point unanswerable. Japan was becoming
the great Asian power, but it stillneeded the Americans. ^°
The Allies now waited for Wilson s decision. The President was con-
vinced that keeping Russia whole, while not doing anything that gave
the Bolshe\iks new reasons for rallying Russians against the capitalist
nations, remained the "acid tests" of policy. He turned back at least six

Allied requests for intervention between January and July 1918. On

March 3, 1918, however, Lenin and Trotsky made peace with Germany
at Brest Litovsk. Fear spread through the West that the Bolsheviks

planned to use Russia as a springboard for launching revolutions abroad

while (somewhat contradictorily) they opened their resources to Ger-
man exploitation.
Lansing and Wilson's views hardened. Having urged a "peace without
victory" a year earlier, the President furiously demanded on April 6,

1918, "Force, Force to the utmost" against Germany. "Force without stint

or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right
the law of the world." Wilson's counsels, however, were split over where
to apply this force. Lansing urged intervention against the Bolsheviks.
Colonel House urged caution. House had a personal network of young
liberals scattered strategically throughout Washington, and one of
them, William Christian Bullitt — a wealthy, handsome mainline Phila-
delphian working in the State Department —rained messages on House
demanding that he restrain Wilson. "I am sick at heart because I feel

that we are about to make one of the most tragic blunders in the history
of mankind," BuHitt wrote his mentor. A U.S. landing at Vladivostok, as
the British urged, would lead to bloodshed and chaos, then the use of
massive force, and at the end, "the Germans will control European
Russia and the Japanese will control Siberia." Bullitt believed that only
Wilson, by aligning with Lenin, could keep Russia whole and out of the
hands of Germany and Japan. Baldly put, Bolshevism was preferable to
Japanese imperialism.^^
Wilson suffered as the Allies screwed up the pressure. "I have been
sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible to do in
Russia," he told House. "It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my
touch." In May, the quicksilver was transforming into steel. Sixty thou-
sand Czech troops, who had been fighting the Germans, began moxang
eastward after the Brest Litovsk treaty so they could find transportation
Revolution, War, and Race (l 9 12-1920) 1 1 9

to the Western Front. As they and Bolsheviks clashed in Siberia on

July 2, the Czechs asked for outside help. Fifteen days later, Wilson
announced that U.S. troops would enter Russia in a limited interven-
tion. About five thousand w^ere to join British forces at Archangel to

guard Allied stores. Some seven thousand others were to enter Vladivos-
tok, ostensibly to help the Czechs reach the Western Front. Clearly,
however, Wilson also intended that the troops watch the Japanese, who
would now surely come in and, as well, help anti-Bolshevik forces. The
President's decision closed the divided ranks in Tokyo. Despite blunt
U.S. signals that any Japanese intervention should be limited, Prime
Minister Terauchi disingenuously construed Wilson's response as giving
Japan the green light to send troops beyond Vladivostok, and to "rein-
force our troops depending on the developments of the situation." Thus
was sown, in the words of the historian Hosoya Chihiro, "another seed
of trouble which grew into the Pacific War" of 1941."^^
. . .

The original seven thousand Japanese troops who landed in Siberia

during August 1918 soon multiplied to eighty thousand. When con-
fronted about the high number, Japan's foreign minister answered,
"Force is spirit!" —an answer one Japanese historian describes as so
"Orientally mystic" that the U.S. ambassador could make no sense of
it. Japan's army chief of staff issued orders quite different from Wilson's.
The troops, he secretly ruled, were to create "a nucleus of anti-Bolshe-
vik elements, " help Japanese civilians who were in the region for "the
development of natural resources," and —above —keep the U.S. and
all

other foreign troops as far as possible from Manchuria. A first Japanese

targetwas the Chinese Eastern Railway, once controlled by Russia in
northern Manchuria and now, in 1918, operated by an Allied group led
by an American. By August 19, 191 8, as the U.S. troops arrived, the
Czech forces had largely left the region. The Americans and Japanese
nevertheless remained, for their true missions (watching each other and
helping anti-Bolsheviks) clearly were more important than their ostensi-
"^^
ble mission (helping Czechs).
In Washington, Viscount Ishii, now Japan's ambassador, worked
feverishly to keep rising tensions from boiling over into a full-fledged
crisis. It proved difficult, for by early 1919 Tokyo officials aimed, in their
words, to "develop to the utmost the autonomous organization in Sibe-
ria" and "remove . . . existing restrictions " not only on exploiting natural
resources but the "operation of industry." William Bullitt was beside
himself. Everything had gone wrong. Lenin and Trotsky remained in
power. The Japanese remained entrenched in Siberia. U.S. troops were
mired in Russia long after the war ended on November 11, 1918, and
THE CLASH 12

Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris two months later to create a new

world. U.S. -Japanese relations were clearly most awkward starting
^"^
points for such a creation.

Paris

Tension between the United States and Japan during the war was exem-
plified by the film which President and Mrs. Wilson saw in
Patria,

Washington during March 1917. Produced by William Randolph Hearst,

Patria showed Japanese and Mexican troops looting, murdering, and
raping as they invaded the United States. Wilson told the film distribu-
tor that the movie was 'extremely unfair to the Japanese." He asked
that it not be screened at such a delicate time. The film continued to
45
run.
In addition to the differences over Siberia and Shantung, Japan was
also using the war as an opportunity to undercut Americans and Euro-
peans in profitable Asian markets, especially in textiles and sometimes
through corrupt means. Japanese producers, for example, won ciga-

rette-paper markets by perfectly copying the paper that had dominated

those markets, even down to the "Made in Austria" on the label. Much
worse lay ahead at Paris.

Preparing for the conference, Japan was again of two minds. In one,
Japanese were rightly proud that they attended as one of the five great
powers. More specifically, they were the first non-white race recognized
by the white nations to deserve top-five ranking. Japans wartime
exploits gave white powers little choice. Besides seizing strategic terri-
tory, imposing many of the Twenty-one Demands, and occupying parts

of Siberia, Japan's trade boomed as exports quadrupled between 1914

and 1917. As its industrial population nearly doubled during those years,
Japan strengthened its role as the manufacturing hub of that half of the
globe stretching from the western Pacific across China to the Urals and
the Black Sea. Nearly 80 percent of Japanese continued to work the
land, but their capitalist economy was transforming from commercial
to industrial."*^
But another mind also existed. This one was in continual turmoil as

debates raged over whether the military, bureaucrats, new political par-

ties, or shifting coalitions of all three were to rule the country. In Sep-
tember 1918, the fresh capital inflow, rampant speculation, and the
needs of troops in Siberia raised costs until riots over rice prices toppled
the Terauchi government. The riots spread to mining areas. Even with
Revolution, War, and Race (1912-1920) 1 2 1

their new economic prowess, moreover, Japanese knew they remained

dependent on Americans for capital and such vital products as steel.
The new prime minister, Hara Takashi (also known as Hara Kei), under-
stood the vulnerability. Soon admired as the "Commoner" because of
his newspaper background and leadership of the popular Seiyukai polit-
ical party, the sixty-two-year-old Hara was also an ultimate insider who

had brokered and calmed the intense rivalry between the army and navy
over budgets between 1914 and 1918. Sometimes compared with the
British prime minister, David Lloyd George, as a political genius, he
also seemed to emulate Lloyd George s personal life by leaving his wife
"^^
and living with a courtesan in a seaside villa.
As his diaries revealed, Hara understood that Japan needed the
United States. He went out of his way to reassure American visitors
about Shantung and Siberia. His words were carefully phrased. Shan-
tung, for example, was to be discussed after the peace treaty was writ-
ten. Japanese forces were to evacuate Siberia after they and the
Americans agreed on mutual withdrawal. Of particular importance,
Hara told U.S. Ambassador Roland Morris that he wanted to cooperate
in China. Morris, however, also cabled Lansing in late 1918 that the

Japanese wished the peace conference to recognize, explicitly, "the

equality of the yellow race." The demand created consternation in
European capitals that ruled over millions of non-white peoples. Nor
was it well received in Washington, where a southern-based Demo-
cratic Party ruled over a segregated nation and racist Californians.
Hara entrusted the sensitive mission to Paris to seventy-year-old
Prince Saionji Kimmochi, one of the five remaining genro. Saionji
departed for Paris with his mistress, two attending physicians, and the
head chef of his favorite restaurant. He had been the first noble to wear
Western clothes at the Imperial Palace, one of the first to cut his hair
short inWestern style, had studied law in France, and enjoyed extensive
contacts because of his diplomatic service in Europe. In Paris, Saionji's
role turned out to be largely ceremonial. He left negotiations to others,
especially Prince Chinda, the ambassador to Great Britain. In truth,
Hara and the advisory council were, with good reason, so fearful of a
possible explosion at home and so sensitive to the immense stakes in
China that they dictated policy almost daily to the Japanese delegates. '^^
The center of U.S. power, on the other hand, lay in Paris itself, once
Woodrow Wilson arrived in triumph. He took little advice from anyone,
other than Lansing and House. The Presidents main concern, indeed
was to create a League of Nations that would right the
his obsession,
wrongs of the war and keep the peace thereafter. He obtained his
THE CLASH 1 2 2

League, finally, when

was April in Paris. But negotiations since Janu-
it

ary had been so protracted and bitter that his health was breaking. He
probably suffered a small stroke in April. The British, French, Italians,
and Japanese could then focus on their main objective: dividing up
the German Empire and ensuring that that empire would never again
threaten them. Wilson fully understood that Hara and Saionji aimed to
secure Japan's hegemony in East Asia. Thus Japan would remain in
Shantung and the northern Pacific islands, perhaps Siberia. Thanks to
the secret treaties, the British and French would support Japan's
"^^
claims.
The President The Japanese need for capital,
did have cards to play.
especially to develop Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea, led them to New
York City's newly rich banks. In 1916, moreover, the President — nearly
as angry at the British-Japanese alliance as at German submarine
attacks —proposed the largest naval building program in history with
words privately uttered to House, "Let us build a navy bigger than
[Great Britain's] and do what we please. " Just as he boarded the George
Washington to steam to Paris in late 1918, he proposed building ten
more battleships and 146 smaller vessels. Pointedly, the fleet's biggest
ships were dispatched to Pacific stations. As new docking facilities went
up at Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, the Navy said it was ready for "any move-
ment, offensive or defensive, across the Pacific. " Naval planners proph-
esied that in another conflict, "the most probable combination against
us would be Germany, Austria, and Japan." (At the same time, Japanese
naval planners viewed the United States as their most likely enemy in
a new war.) To do battle with the giant banking-industrial combines,
the zaihatsu, as well as with the great European cartels, Wilson had also
pushed through legislation giving U.S. corporations new weapons to

fight for foreign markets. The weapons included the Federal Reserve
Act and the Webb-Pomerene Act allowing businesses to combine to
conquer markets abroad in ways that would be illegal at home.^^
Wilson's major problem at Paris, however, turned out to be whether
any amount of power could tame Japanese, and French policies.
British,

Wilson found himself now controlling the world's greatest economic

and military power; but it was not enough to have his way with Japan.
His two closest advisers gave Wilson quite different opinions about
how to deal with this problem. House had long hoped that the great
nations could work out a neat partnership for dividing up the less effi-

cient, unruly parts of the world (including China), then develop these
areas, profit from them, and "civilize" them. This self-styled "Colonel"
from Texas was only an informal adviser, but he knew how to work on
Revolution. War, and Race 1912-1920) ( I 2 3

Wilson. "Never begin by arguing," House once observed, but "discover

a common hate . . . get the President warmed up, and then start on
your business." Another successful tactic was flattery, House's specialty
and Wilsons addiction. The colonel combined this art with a global
view that impressed the President. The Japanese could only be brought
into a Wilsonian world order. House declared, by helping them develop
Asia and recognizing that their place in the "East ... is in some degree

superior to that of the western powers." Otherwise, he warned, "there

will be a reckoning."^
Lansing's advicewas quite different. He urged reducing Japanese
influence in China until it was at least no greater than that of the white
powers. He wanted Japan largely out of China not because he took
seriously Wilson's emphasis on "self-determination," a Wilsonian princi-
ple that had captured the world's imagination. Lansing knew that nei-
ther Wilson nor House nor any of House's bright young men (such
as Bullitt or Walter Lippmann) had ever thought through the term's
implications. As a lawyer and conservative, Lansing indeed feared the
infinite meanings of self-determination, especially when the explosive

term was combined with the collapse of centuries-old European

empires. Lansing worried about Shantung less because of any Chinese
right to self-determination than because pushing the Japanese out
would weaken their position throughout Asia. He agreed with Reinsch
in Peking that "the Japanese military masters not only endangered U.S.
"

short-term commercial interests but were clumsily fueUng anti-foreign

feelings among Chinese. "Mr. Lansing observed that the attitude of the
Japanese was extremely disquieting, particularly in . . . China, minutes
'

of a January 1919 meeting of the U.S. delegates in Paris read, "and that
he felt that this was the time for us to have it out once and for all with
"^^
Japan.
Given conflicting if passionate advice, faced with a possible breakup
of the conference over a wondrous number of and sometimes
issues,
confined to bed by his physician because of exhaustion, Wilson faced a
determined Japan. The Japanese, moreover, now raised perhaps the
most explosive question: the racial equality clause. The demand did not
only arise from Japan's acute sensitivity to the issue of race (or as the
historian Shimazu Naoko later wrote, "Japanese sought to gain the sta-
tus of honorary whites and nothing more"). Tokyo officials also feared
that Wilson's League was itself a suspect organization suspect —
because Wilson and Lansing might use the League to butt into Japan's
business in Asia. If they could not stop its creation, the Japanese were
intent on limiting the League's capacity as a troublemaker. Hara thus
THE CLASH 1 2 4

tried to insert the racial equality principle into the League's Covenant
itself. House privately lobbied the Japanese, tried to moderate their
demands, and finally succeeded
removing "race" from the resolution.
in

On April ii, 1919, the Japanese proposed that the League of Nations
Commission include in the Covenant's preamble "the principle of the
equality of Nations and the just treatment of their nationals. "^^
Immediately, Lord Robert Cecil rose to speak for the white nations
of the British Empire, especially Australia, whose prime minister raged
against such proposals. Cecil declared he personally agreed with the
Japanese. He "realised the importance of the racial question"; the pro-
posal, however, "opened the door to serious controversy and to interfer-
ence in the domestic member nations. The "claims of the
affairs" of

International Council of Women," Cecil noted, could not be included

in the Covenant for precisely the same reasons. Viscount Chinda
shrewdly responded that Japan had said nothing about "race" or "immi-
equaUty of nations." Japanese opinion was
gration," but only about "the
so strong, Chinda added, that Japan might not join the League "unless
satisfied on this point." Wellington Koo, China's delegate, supported
Japan.
The appearance of a yellow race coalition may have been more than
enough for Wilson. He announced his opposition to the proposal
because, he declared, the Covenant already recognized the equality of
nations. Baron Makino, of the Japanese delegation, failed to see what
Wilson saw and demanded a vote. The Japanese amendment passed
II— 6. Wilson, chairing the commission, then ruled that the amendment
failed because it "had not received unanimous support." As the Presi-
dent quickly admitted, other provisions had passed by a mere majority,
but such "strong opposition" existed against Chinda's proposal that the
measure should not be declared approved. Wilson doubtless had in
mind the "strong opposition" that would appear in the U.S. Senate that
was going to have to ratify the Covenant. Wilson's sensitivity was keen;
after all, as President he had begun formal segregation in the federal
government. He and Cecil probably also had in mind the first Pan-
African Congress, then meeting in Paris, which was plumping for an
end to discrimination and colonialism. Its fifty-seven delegates included
sixteen from the United States, one of them W
E. B. DuBois. Chinda
played to this global audience when he demanded that the vote and
Wilson's ruling be on the public record. The Japanese did win this
point.
Chinda then dug in for another fight —one he was going to win, or,

again the Japanese threatened, they would not join the League. This
Revolution, War, and Race (1912-1920) 1 2 5

Struggle was over the economic and railway concessions seized

rich
from the Germans in Shantung. They were willing to return sovereignty
over the area to China sometime in the future, the Japanese argued,
but they intended first to exploit the prize. Their position seemed
impregnable. As Baron Makino directly told Wilson, Sino-Japanese
treaties of 1915 and 1918, as well as the Allies' secret treaties, had
endorsed Tokyo's view. The Chinese delegation claimed the 191 5 treaty
had been extracted at gunpoint, but the Europeans, especially the Brit-
ish, decided the real choice was between Japanese order and friendship

or Chinese chaos and xenophobia. Nor did House seem to disagree

with that formulation.^^
Wilson nevertheless valiantly attempted push Japan out of Shan-
to
tung. He even hoped to use such a precedent to weaken British and
—
French claims in China as well the reason, no doubt, why Britain's
Lloyd George and France's Georges Clemenceau now let Wilson fight
alone. Japan must follow not its ''rights" but its "duties to China," Wil-
son began his sermon to the Japanese on April 22, 191 8. They therefore
"might forego the special position they had acquired and China . . .

might be put on the same footing as other nations. There was a lot
. . .

of combustible material in China and if the flames were put to it the

fire could not be quenched for China had a population of four hundred

million people." Yes, Makino answered coolly, Japan appreciated "the

—
open door,' " but as he neatly alluded to the Europeans humiliating
—
Japan in 1895-97 not everyone had shown such appreciation for open
doors in the past.
"They are not bluffers," the President worried privately, "and they will
go home unless we give them what they should not have." So Wilson
surrendered. He argued that a League with Japan in it could better
straighten affairs out later. Lansing, who viewed the fight as disaster for
the open door, condemned the deal as peeling off the "shell" of sover-
eignty to China while giving the "economic control, the kernel ... to
Japan." Young liberals on the U.S. team, led by Bullitt and Herbert
Hoover, prepared to resign. In China, students and intellectuals moved
into the streets on May 4, 1919, to protest the decisions at Paris. The
Chinese Revolution entered a new phase. "Of all the defeats of Presi-
dent Wilson," wrote the acute young British official Harold Nicolson,
the Shantung settlement was "the most flagrant. "^^
Wilson had yet one more clash with the Japanese. They demanded
that they be allowed to keep the former German islands. London
agreed, in return for Tokyo's agreement that the British Empire could
control former German colonies south of the equator and in parts of
THE CLASH 1 2 6

Africa. The President did not consider these colonies ready for self-

determination, but neither did he want the imperialist nations to own

them outright. In the end, a mandate system evolved: Japan, Great
Britain, and other powers could run the colonies. They did so, however,
under League mandates that gave the organization the right to check
on the possessions. As the New York Times admitted, control of the
island chain from the Kuriles to Taiwan ''via Bonin, the Ladrones, Mari-
ane and Caroline Islands" gave Japan, "according to the highest military
circles . control over the whole Pacific Ocean front of Asia."^^
. .

House tried to buck up Wilson by admitting that the deals with Japan
were indeed "all bad," but also necessary to clear out "a lot of old rub-
bish with the least friction and let the League of Nations and the new
era do the rest." The President said he had done all he could with the
"dirty past." For many, however, Wilsons scrubbing left far too much
dirt. In Korea, for example, hope had risen when the President pro-

claimed the principle of self-determination, then fallen when he paid

no attention to Koreas independence proclamation. The declaration
drowned in blood when a Japanese army stopped an uprising with kill-
ing and burning. That American missionaries worked with the rebels
^^
doubtless did not escape Tokyo's attention.
The bitterest blow to Wilson's dream was delivered in Washington.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee
that had on the President's handiwork, headed the largest group
to act
of opponents. Calling Japan "the coming danger of the world" and "the
Prussia of the Far East," Lodge damned the Shantung deal as "one of
the blackest things in the history of diplomacy." The powerful Republi-
can had long hated (and envied) Wilson on a personal level, but many
leaders, such as Elihu Root and Philander C. Knox, joined Lodge to
pour condemnation on the Paris agreements — especially Article X of
Wilson's Covenant. This provision appeared to commit the members to

protect the status quo. If such an interpretation were correct, it meant

members might be obligated to send their own troops to preserve
Japan's hold on Shantung, or the Japanese and British hold on their
^^
new colonies.
These conservatives were joined by two other sets of opponents.
"Irreconcilables," led by Progressive Republican William Borah of
Idaho, wanted nothing to do with a League in any form, but, especially
in Borah's case, disliked and feared Japan as much as Lodge. The other
set, the young liberals, were led by Bullitt, Hoover, and Lippmann.

Lansing returned to Washington committee quietly that

to tell Lodge's

he, like Bullitt, thought Japan had received too much simply to keep it
Revolution, War, and Race 191 2-1920)
( i 2 7

in a League that was (as Bullitt publicly quoted Lansing as saying)

^^
"entirely useless." In 1920, Wilson fired his Secretary of State.

By 1921, the Senate had twice voted on and twice rejected Wilsons
League. A major link uniting the President's wildly different opponents
was a fear —
and dislike of Japan. Wilson had failed not surprisingly
since he attempted to create a new order in a world based on the old
order existing in Japan, the British Empire, France, Italy, and the
United States. The greater threat to that old order was not Wilson, but
^^
revolution in Russia and China.
The brilliant anti-war voice, Randolph Bourne, had the last word. "If
the war is too strong for you [Wilson] to prevent," Bourne asked in 191 8,
"how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mold to your
liberal purposes?" Disciplining an ambitious Japan was left to the very
forces Wilson thought he —
had brought under control Wall Street and
Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson s Republican opponent in the 1916 elec-
tion. These forces set about building a new order on the foundation of

the dollar, rather than of the League. The new structure received rave
reviews from other wealthy architects, but, as they all soon learned, it

had been built on sand.^^

 Creating the*f^ew
From W^asnin^ton
Mukaen
(1921-1931)

Hoover, Lamont, and tne New Era

"during the whole of my six years of service at Tokyo I never

remember an interval of any long duration in the controversies
between America and Japan," British Ambassador Sir Conyn-
gham Greene told his colleagues in London in September 1920.
The Japanese fought against U.S. immigration policies and
believed the Americans were blocking them in Asia, Greene
wrote. On the United States side, "there was, and is, the very
general American dislike and distrust of Japanese Imperialism,
militarism and treatment of subject races, such for example, as
Korea, together with a widespread suspicion as to Japan's ulti-

mate aims in connection with the control of the Pacific." Wash-

ington officials would not have disagreed with this assessment,
nor would they have disagreed with the Canadian prime minister
who told the British ImperialConference some months later that
only "three major powers" remained in the world —
the United
States, Great Britain, and Japan. The difficulty was, U.S. officials
concluded, that their problems with Japan in Asia came out
of the unfortunate fact that two of those three "major powers"

1 2 8
Creating tke New Era: From Washington to Mukden (l921-193l) 12 9

were Japan could act irresponsibly in Asia because it enjoyed

allied.

protection from its alliance with the British. If war flashed over China
(as it had twice in recent memory, 1894 and 1900), Americans could
find themselves squeezed from both East and West by the two
allies.^

minds of U.S. officials, however, such an alliance was even

In the
more evil because it had been precisely such blocs of power that had
colhded and caused the 1914 to 1918 cataclysm, then, at Paris, spewed
out the wartime secret treaties —
like so many distorted offspring from

—
hideous parents that ate away and finally destroyed Woodrow Wilson's
dreams of a better world. In 1921, Wilson lay slowly dying in his Wash-
ington, D.C., home, but American dreams of a better world, including
an orderly and open China, were not dying with him. It quickly became
apparent that the new Republican administration of Warren G. Harding
had definite ideas about destroying what Harding disparaged as the "old
order" so it could create what came to be known in the 1920s as the
"new era."
The new world order was to be based on the dollar, as the President s
prize catch for his cabinet. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover,
repeatedly explained. Orphaned at age seven in 1881, the Quaker-born
lowan graduated from the new Stanford University and then quickly
became a multimillionaire engineering and business executive by devel-
oping enterprises in such distant areas as China and Russia. He gained
an international reputation as a highly successful U.S. Food Adminis-
trator during World War I and then as an adviser to Wilson at Paris. He
was, as observers concluded, one of the few participants at the peace
conference who survived with his reputation enhanced. Hoover was a
walking example of the enlightened American capitalist who served
what he considered to be the world's higher purposes, whether those
purposes involved distributing food to the starving in wartorn Europe
or helping to stop the spread of Bolshevism in 1919 by threatening not
to distribute food to East Europeans who voted for Communists.
Hoover personified his own philosophy of "American Individualism,"
as he entitled a widely noted essay of 1922. Traditional virtues of individ-
ualism, he emphasized, were to be preserved in the new era of industri-
ahsm and capitalism by a voluntary cooperation among entrepreneurs,
who would stand up to the "emery wheel of competition," as Hoover
phrased it, and not look to the state for bailouts or unfair advantages. It

was a set of views that had little in common with the recent develop-
ment of Japan's society. Both in his theories and in his actions first as
Commerce Secretary and then as President between 1929 and 1933,
THE CLASH 1 3

Hoover was the central figure in the American attempt to create a better
^
world order.
The Americans to that world, he stressed, had to be
relationship of
intimate. There was no other choice. As the country's economy sank
into a postwar recession in December 1920, the newly appointed cabi-
net member told the American Bankers Association that "our welfare is
no longer isolated from the welfare of the world." The "vicious eco-
nomic circles" of boom and bust could "be broken in one way only.
That is by the establishment of credits abroad. . . . We have reached
the position of many European Hoover lectured,
states before the war,"
"that if we would continue our advancement and prosperity we must
enter upon foreign enterprise." The credits underwriting that "foreign
enterprise" naturally had to come from the private marketplace. Gov-
ernments involvement "would lead to evil ends," such as "political pres-
sures by foreign countries and by nationals within the U.S."^
The United States could largely shape the terms of how the globe
would develop after the war. Hoover told Secretary of State Charles
Evans Hughes in early 1922, because "America is practically the final
reservoir of international capital." An early test for his worldview
occurred in U.S. -Japanese relations between 1920 and 1923, when it
turned out that the "reservoir" was difficult to pump, if not too polluted
for use. The drawer from this particular part of the reservoir was
Thomas Lamont, the operating head of the J. P. Morgan banking firm
in New York and, as it turned out, the key to the second consortium's
operation that was set up by Wilson and Robert Lansing in 1918. Raised
in a Hudson Valley Methodist parsonage and graduated from Harvard
in 1892, Lamont rocketed upward in the New York City banking world,
especially after he was persuaded to join Morgan in 191 1. At the end of
his life in 1946 he could say he still knew little about "the techniques
of banking," but with his sharp mind tempered by an "unconventional"
but "engaging personality" (as one friend put it), Lamont knew how to
conduct economic diplomacy. The Morgan house itself had garnered
immense power by using its ties to London's capital sources to develop
the post-Civil War U.S. industrial and transportation complexes. Now
in the 1920s, as Hoover indicated, Morgan and Lamont, not London,
seemed in command of the world's financial reservoir."*
To Lamont and Wilson's anger, however, the Japanese refused to

drink except on their own terms. In early 1920 U.S. -Japan relations had
again grown tense over Shantung, the racial equality clause, the Sibe-
rian interventions, ominous measures by both nations to build great
fleets of warships, and as usual — —
^Japanese moves in China. The con-
sortium, Lamont noted during 1919 in Paris where he was advising Wil-
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden 1921-1931)
( 13 1

son, seemed to which is going to prevent

be "the one practical thing left

Japan from having a free hand in China. ... I have had any number of
people say to me that unless the Consortium actually functioned as
outlined, our hope for any kind of square deal in the Far East was gone."
Certainly the American Group —
made up of New York City's most pow-
erful banks along with those of Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other
cities —
was an impressive weapon.^
The Japanese, however, were less impressed. When Lamont and his
peers from Great Britain, France, and Japan sat down to work out the
details of the consortium, Japan quickly moved to exclude Manchuria
and Mongolia from the new group's reach. Tokyo officials saw the value
of melting in with their Western colleagues for handling deals in central
China, where growing revolution targeted foreign properties, but they
were not about to help the other three powers especially the capital- —
rich Americans —
reopen the door to southern Manchuria. An angry
Lamont responded that 'The Consortium had no plans whatsoever" for
Manchuria and Mongolia, but to exclude the two regions explicitly
could destroy the members' pledge (in which Japan joined) not to
"attempt to cultivate special spheres of influence."
Lamont's fears were not veiled: "In the Far East, peace can be perma-
nently secured only if the two great Powers lying on either side of the
Pacific work together in harmony and understanding. . . . The first evi-

dence of this should be in their common attitude towards the Chinese

nation. . . . On this point, America . . . offers to become Japan's
partner.
The State Department tried to helpby threatening Japan with the
release of the still-secret protocol of the Lansing-Ishii agreement in
which the Japanese had promised not to gain privileges in China at
the expense of the other powers. Tokyo was unmoved. Lamont then
threatened to drop Japan and have a three-power consortium, only to
be stopped by the British, who understandably feared the "excommuni-
cation" (as they phrased it) of their best friend in the Far East. The
New Yorker privately told the British he had "great disappointment with
the . . . unbusiness-like methods" of the Japanese, and expressed
"amazement at Japan being treated as a first-rate Power instead of being
regarded as a third-rate Power, which in his opinion be nearer the
truth." His British listener. Ambassador B. Alston, agreed on Japan's
"dilatory ways" and lack of efficiency everywhere but in the military.
Government officials in Tokyo seemed "overworked and worn out."
"Super-efficiency is perhaps the prize myth of Japan," Alston believed,
"but it is foreign writers, not Japanese, and visitors and self-styled inves-
tigators who have created the myth."^
THE CLASH 1 3 2

Lamont worked out a compromise: the bankers would recog-

finally

nize Japans economic interests in Manchuria and Mongolia, but gov-

ernments would not. State Department officials killed the compromise:
they refused to allow the explicit recognition of any part of China, even
South Manchuria, as being outside the reach of the open-door policy
Lamont was now as furious with U.S. as with Japanese officials. It was
clear, however, that the bankers were willing to overlook Manchuria
while playing for the rest of China, but the State Department — led by
young officials such as Stanley K. Hornbeck, who had been alienated
at Paris by Japanese policies — insisted on playing for all of China. On
May II, 1920, Lamont and Kajiwara Nakaji, president of the Yokohama
Specie Bank (Japan's central institution for conducting overseas busi-
ness), exchanged letters that contained a workable compromise: instead
of crossing off Manchuria, the bankers simply promised not to interfere
with the Japanese-owned railroads that actually controlled the region's
affairs.^

The Lamont-Kajiwara discussions had been well oiled by magnifi-

cent parties hosted by such zaihatsu as the Mitsui and Mitsubishi com-
bines,and climaxed by a visit to the twenty-five-acre estate of lakes and
gardens owned by Baron and Baroness Iwasaki (the family that founded
Mitsubishi) in the very center of Tokyo. True, the Japanese had set
spies on Lamont to the extent that they once took hotel rooms on both
sides of his, and another time he simply handed a cable to a spy who
was straining to look over his shoulder during a train trip. But the Mor-
gan firm now had links with Japan that exceeded its ties with China
and approached those with Great Britain. The path had been cleared
for a massive flow of capital from New York to Tokyo, not as it turned —
—
out for the development of China, but for the development of Japa-
nese holdings in Manchuria. When Hoover began to ghmpse this result,
he had second thoughts about the virtues of unbounded individualism.
Nevertheless, the Lamont-Kajiwara agreement opened the way for the
most important diplomatic conference of the 1920 to 1941 era, a confer-
ence that marked the high tide of U.S. -Japan relations during the first
half of the twentieth century.^

Treaties Wasnin^ton, Black Cnambers

01
01 New York City

Both Americans and Japanese grew wealthy from World War I, but by
1921 both suffered from a postwar economic recession. The Japanese
Creating tKe New Era: From Washington to Mukden (l921-193l) 13 3

not only suffered more, but felt considerably more insecure than the
Americans. The 1918 rice riots, involving at least 700,000 protesters,
indicated the mass reaction that could occur among an increasingly
politicized population. In 1920-21, as war demand disappeared, prices
fell severely, especially for raw silk producers (whose largest foreign
^^
market was the recession-plagued United States) and rice growers.

The economy rebounded only after the terrible 1923 earthquake,

when government spending rebuilt devastated cities. Meanwhile, "the
rise of the masses," as the historian Bamba Nobuya has called it, accel-

erated. Individualism, or "the awakening of individuality," had entered

Japan in part when Japanese compared the militarism of the German
Rousseau and Locke of Western Europe.
kaiser with the writings of
The comparison was notably appreciated by a middle class that had
emerged during the previous generation and was well educated
(between 1895 and 1925 the number of high school students increased
nearly ten times, and the number of universities shot up from two to
thirty-four). In Osaka and Kobe, amusement parks appeared, as did
—
new theater in which women played the roles in contrast to classical
Noh theater where men took all the parts.
Accompanying these transformations was the rapid growth of mass
media. As magazines, journals, and newspapers multiplied in number
and sold by the millions, radio broadcasting began in 1925. Westerniza-
tion appeared in clothing styles and in "hiding-the-ear" hairstyles that
replaced traditional upswept hair. A democratic surge was reflected in
the growing power of political parties which, while not comparable in
organization and effectiveness to the two U.S. parties, exerted consider-
ably more influence than they had a generation earlier. The genro (the
elder statesmen who had advised the Meiji Emperor) meanwhile were
dying off. By late 1924, only Saionji Kimmochi remained. Demands for
universal male suffrage intensified, demands that Hara Takashi's gov-
ernment and Seiyukai Party refused to meet in 1920—21. Hara, known
as the "Commoner" because of his political skills, wanted nothing to do
with democracy American-style (a style, that to the puzzlement of many
^^
Japanese leaders, had just given the suffrage to American women).
The rise of the masses, as Hara well knew, was part of a global move-
ment let loose in part during 1917-20 by Lenin's and Wilson's principles.
In Japan, this trend was accelerated by a new American Studies pro-
gram at Tokyo University led by Natabe Inazo, who argued that the
spread of democratic thought made the analysis of the United States "a
very important task for the Japanese." Such developments posed a terri-
ble dilemma for Japan's leaders. Their analyses of World War I clearly
THE CLASH 1 3 4

demonstrated that Germany, with all its vaunted military power, had
finally failed because of political reasons. Now Japans domestic politics

seemed to be increasingly chaotic. Tokyo officials could not protect

their society by following the Tokugawa example and withdrawing from
the world. In any case, the world war had dramatized how Japan now
depended on the wider world for its existence, not least in that the

conflict demonstrated that future naval power was to be driven by oil,

not coal —and Japan had no oil.^^

Japan faced severe internal crises by 1921. Further, it was also clearly
overextended abroad. On January 9, 1920, the United States finally
announced it was pulling out of Siberia, which had proven to be uncon-
trollable, and pressured the Japanese to follow its example. Tokyo offi-

cials replied that they intended to remain. Irritated Americans warned

they would not tolerate any Japanese attempts to take over Siberian
railways. Under continual pressure, Hara finally was planning to remove
troops from Siberia when in March 1920 the Bolsheviks massacred 122
Japanese soldiers and civilians at Nikolaevsk. The cabinet bitterly

divided over how Hara finally appeased the militants by

to respond.
ordering a costly intervention on the Siberian coast.
Foreign policy problems were getting out of hand. Japanese troops
were fanning out in expensive, unprofitable operations. Anti-military
feelings boiled up among the Japanese people. Draft evasion reached
record heights. Some officers quietly refused to wear their uniforms on
their way to work. Cries of political corruption meanwhile rang out
against Hara and his colleagues. Ties with zaihatsu pocketbooks became
so blatant that Hara s Seiyukai Party regime was known as the "Mitsui
Cabinet" (ministers of the Kenseikai Party, when in power, were termed
the "Mitsubishi Cabinets"). But some of the zaihatsu were ready to be
more realistic about military spending, given the bubbling disorder at
home, and they were helped by smaller businesses, especially in the
Osaka area, which attacked Hara for not vigorously working to cut back
arms spending. At no point did serious debate touch on Japan's control
of South Manchuria or its growing ambitions in central China. The
debate centered on the best and cheapest means to protect these vital
^^
interests.
Lamont's visit had signaled a brilliant solution: Cooperate with the
United States to gain access to its reservoir of dollars. By late 1920,

U.S. politicians, moved by their own nations economic problems and

disillusionment with war, were ready to join business in working out a
new peacetime order. was the sudden realization in 1920-
The catalyst
21 that the major powers were embarked on a costly race to build battle-
Creating tKe New Era: From Washington to Mukden 192 1-1931)
( 13 5

ships fleets. In December 1918, Wilson had asked Congress to build 156

new ships; two years later, announced they

the Japanese and British
intended to try to keep up with the Americans. None, not even the
United States, could afford such a race. The new League of Nations
declared that it planned to hold a conference to limit arms. This
announcement struck fear in the hearts of Senator William Borah (R:
ID) and others who had just fought Wilson and had succeeded in keep-
ing the United States free of the League. On December 14, 1920, Borah
made headlines by introducing a joint resolution that proposed talks
with the British and Japanese aimed at reducing naval building over
the next five years by 50 percent. "J^P^^i sincerely desires to support"
disarmament, Borah declared, "but can not in safety to herself do so on
account of the attitude and building program of this [U.S.] govern-

ment." In mid-1921, the Senate and House overwhelmingly passed Bor-

ah's motion, as peace groups mobilized on Capitol Hill to shape the
foreign policy of the new Harding administration. The President, Secre-
tary of State Hughes, and the powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
(R: MA), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had rather
^"^
different ideas, however.
Lodge agreed with New England friends who wanted Japanese nei-
ther emigrating to the United States nor controlling the western Pacific.
There was 'not the slightest danger" of war with Japan, the senator
believed, "if Japan understands that she cannot get control of the
Pacific."Lodge and Hughes's conclusions meshed with those of the
U.S. Navy's War Plan orange of 1919, which concluded that Japan
posed no danger to the United States itself, but was in a position to
close the open door to China and endanger much of Southeast Asia.
The Navy separated company from the civilians, however, on the ques-
tion of how to handle Japan. Hughes believed that a naval-building race
could not protect U.S. interests. He instead aimed to limit arms while
destroying the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Both the Japanese and the Brit-
ish could then be made dependent on U.S. cooperation. Washington
officials understood, moreover, that London would probably go along
with this policy because its valued dominions — led by Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada —feared that the alliance was becoming nothing
more than a shield behind which Japan made forays into Siberia, Shan-
tung, and even central China.
On July 8, 1921, Hughes preempted the British, and raised Japanese
suspicions, by calling for a conference in Washington to deal with a
wide range of arms and diplomatic issues. Hara quickly tried to exclude
Asian questions from the agenda. Hughes had already ruled out dis-
 " —
THE CLASH 1 3 6

cussing immigration, but he would go no farther. Fearful that the con-

ference was for "the arraignment of Japan, ' and that the Anglo-Saxons
were preparing to gang up on them, the Japanese stalled. But the pres-
sures at home and from Washington were too much. In late July 1921,
^^
Hara agreed to send a delegation.
When Hara pressed him for specifics, Hughes continued to be irri-
tatingly vague, but the Secretary of State was making very careful prepa-
rations. He asked E. L. Neville, a State Department expert on Japan,
to brief him on Tokyo's policies. On June 15, Neville responded with a
twenty-four-page memorandum. It stated flatly that Japan intended to
control Chinese affairs and prevent the disintegration of China. The
Twenty-one Demands, Neville noted, demonstrated these intentions.
Across the Pacific lay a different world; "Japan and the Orient generally
. have no desire to be known as Christian nations. They are Bud-
. .

dhists and ancestor worshippers. ... As a principle of state policy," they

want no "such rev^olutionary doctrine as the personal salv ation of Chris-
tianit). Buddhism in Japan is a chauvinistic, miHtant and prosletyzing
force of no mean proportions." An object of this "force" vv^as to control

China and "her industrial resources," even if it required war, for Japan
Neville was convinced
—
"is determined to work out her salvation and

that of China as well upon the basis of 'Asia for the Asiatics.'
Neville beheved such militant, nationalist groups as the Black
Dragon Society exemplified this strain in the society. Japan "needs the
resources locked up in the mainland of China, and perhaps of Siberia
as well, for otherwise it faced "industrial ruin, and ev^en starv^ation."
"

Japan never was enthusiastic about John Hay's open-door policy, the
adviser emphasized, and, he believ^ed, the Japanese could only be
stopped by "superior force." They did confront a central problem: Japan
"has not the money to develop these concessions. She needs western
help. " Once Japanese had capital, however, "they will then be in the
position of mediator between West and East, and will control both the
investments in China, and the products which the investments hav^e
created. . . . No other nation, since the collapse of Russia ... is in any
position to dispute Japans political, military and economic position in

the Far East."^^

Hughes accepted assumptions (Japan intended to dominate
Neville's
Asian affairs), but not his conclusions (no nation could dispute Japan's
position in the Far East). By late summer his strategy was formed. First,
the Anglo-Japanese aUiance had to be destroyed. In 1920-21, Japanese
and British officials began discussing the renewal of the pact. The out-
going Wilson administration seemed willing to accept the renewal with
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKln^ton to Mukden 1921-1931)
( 13 7

some changes. Hughes, however, so strongly opposed it that when the

Britishambassador made the mistake of referring to the treaty, the dis-
tinguished Secretary of State launched a temper tantrum: the shaken
ambassador reported he had "never heard anything like Mr. Hughes's
excited tirade outside of a madhouse." The United States, the Secretary
of State warned, would see any renewal as aimed at itself, and renewal
would only encourage Japanese imperialism. The British tactfully
replied by noting that "when they had a bad elephant in India, they put
him between two good elephants to make him behave, and this might
be tried in the case of Japan." But Hughes wanted no one else in the
center ring cracking the whip, especially if the other trainer might
threaten to side with the elephant. He intended to ensure that in any
crisis, the British were free to side with the Americans —and especially
to side with their interpretation of the open-door policy rather than with
Tokyo's version that always seemed to end with a "special position" for
Japan.
Once the 1902 alliance was buried, Hughes could move to his next
back the race in naval armaments. U.S. naval planners
objective: roll
had concluded that war might well erupt with Japan, and they had
worked out detailed, and expensive, battle plans. With Borah's
onslaught, and Hughes's removal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance danger,
such planning could be scaled back. The planners, moreover, were
embarrassed in January 1921 when, after Billy Mitchell and others
argued that airpower would soon dominate over seapower, an airplane
actually sunk a former German battleship in a demonstration off North
Carolina. The final blow came when Lodge privately told officials that
given other pressures. Congress would not spend the money to build a
^^
huge Pacific fleet.
On November 11, 1921, a day that Harding proclaimed to be a
national holiday, Hughes and the other conference delegates from nine
invited nations (not, notably, including the Soviet Union) attended the
burial of the Unknown Soldier at ArHngton Cemetery. The solemn cere-
monies made vivid the waste and folly of war. The next day, Hughes
arose at the conference's opening session and stunned the world by
proposing "a naval hoUday," in which "for a period of not less than ten
years there should be no further construction of capital ships." Ships
under current construction were to be scrapped. He then provided
carefully worked out, highly precise figures on how much tonnage each
nation should destroy. His arithmetic added up to 500,000 tons
remaining for Great Britain and the United States, and 300,000 tons
for Japan. The galleries, populated especially by members of Congress,
THE CLASH 1 3 8

exploded in a "tornado of cheering/' according to one obsen^er. The

loudest U.S. peace advocate, WiUiam Jennings Bryan, burst into tears.
The British, led by Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, soon joined what
^^
was now a Hughes bandwagon.
The Japanese refused to get on board. Politely but insistently they
demanded at least a 10:10:7 ratio, rather than the 10:10:6 proposed by
Hughes. Their naval officers had decided that this higher ratio was
required to protect Japan's interests in Asia, especially if the alliance
with London expired. The naval plans and budget had been agreed
upon only after tough political fights. Hara exhibited great skill in ham-
mering out compromises among the miUtary. Now Hughes threatened
to blow up the results. He, like Perry nearly seventy years earlier, was
the outsider threatening Japan's deUcate poHtical order.
Especially for three reasons, however, Hughes, like Perry, succeeded
in having his way. First, Japan's naval officers were themselves badly
divided over spending priorities. With good reason, they feared that if
they dug in their heels, Hara would join with the army and further
reduce the navy's share of a shrinking economic pie. They knew, more-
over, from their own analyses that they could never win a naval race

against the Americans. (Harding was indeed ready for such a race. "It
all comes down to this, he said privately. "We'll talk sweetly and
"

patiently to them [Japan and the other powers] at first, but if they don't
agree then we'll say 'God damn you, if it's a race then the United States
is going to go to it.' ") Especially aware of this danger was a leader of
Japan's delegation. Admiral Kato Tomosaburo, who was ready to accept
10:10:6, but only if the United States further limited its own military
^^
buildup in the Pacific.
Kato's position indicated a second reason for Japan's final accep-
tance. Its delegation was led by men who believed that the powers had
entered a postwar world that demanded an end to the old, pre-Wilson-
pre-Lenin imperiahsm. New tactics had to be tooled to realize Japan's
objectives. These men did not generally differ from militant factions
who targeted Manchuria and China for Japanese interests, but they
differed from those groups by emphasizing the need for cooperation
with the West and using instruments of trade, rather than going-it-alone
with the instruments of war. Kato was a fringe member of this group.
Several years earlier he had believed the United States was Japan's great
enemy in Asia; but by 1921, while fearing U.S. power, he concluded that
adapting to the new world was necessary. The best-known examplar of
the fresh approach was Shidehara Kijuro, Japan's ambassador to the
United States and chief delegate to the conference. Indeed, his influ-
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden 1921-1931)
( 13 9

ence was such that the 1920s became tagged as the "Shidehara era" of
Japan's diplomatic history.
Born and graduated from prestigious Tokyo University, Shide-
in 1872

hara rose rapidly in the diplomatic service through his talents and his
marriage to the daughter of Iwasaki Yataro, founder of the Mitsubishi
zaihatsu. Shidehara's mastery of English and wide contacts throughout
the West made him a favorite in the United States. He was committed
to advancing Japan's power into Asia, but wanted, if at all possible, to

work with the Americans. He thus astutely supported Hughes by help-

ing to write an amorphous Four-Power Treaty (signed by the United
States, Great Britain, France, and Japan) that replaced the Anglo-Japa-
nese alliance. The treaty bound the four signatories only to "consult" in
case of a crisis in the Pacific. Shidehara also helped out by convincing
Admiral Kato, austere, reserved, to wear and wave to
civilian clothes

American crowds. Kato hated every minute of it, but newspapers soon
complimented the "charming admiral." Another delegate was ninety-
year-old Baron Shibusawa, Japan's leading financier. When aged four-
teen, he later claimed, he swam out to sink Perry's ship with a knife
borne in his mouth. Since then, he had grown considerably more
sophisticated. Resembling Kato, Shidehara, and many other Japanese,
Shibuzawa feared future conflict with the United States, especially over
China. Thus this Japanese trinity of admiral, statesman, and financier
worked with Hughes to build a new Pacific order. ^^
Just as the conference was to begin, Hara was assassinated (stabbed
in the heart) at the Tokyo Railway Station. The young murderer repre-
sented a group of Japanese that condemned the government's corrup-
tion, including involvement in opium smuggling and scandals in the
South Manchurian Railway. Tokyo's politics again turned chaotic, but
its policymaking did not, in part because of the trinity's leadership in
Washington. Hughes was aware of Japan's policy discussions, because
he was reading the most important messages being sent between the
delegates and Tokyo.
These interceptions of the secret Japanese messages were a third
reason why Hughes largely obtained his objectives. The intercepts were
the work of Herbert O. Yardley — born town of Worthington,
in the tiny
Indiana, a dropout from the University of Chicago after one year, then
an extraordinary poker player and railway telegraph operator in Worthin-
gton until he decided to take the train to Washington, D.C. He arrived
during World War I, government job sending cable
so quickly obtained a
messages. Yardley swiftly proved to awestruck superiors that he could
easily decode supposedly top-secret messages coming into President
 —
THE CLASH 1 4

Wilson. Soon the young Hoosier was set up on 38th Street in New York
City, in part for secrecy, in part because the State Department budget
was not supposed to be spent within the District of Columbia for such
a residence. He had access to all the cable traffic touching the United
States. In this house —
which became known as the "Black Chamber"
Yardley and his staff decoded thousands of messages to and from
embassies in Washington during the war and also during the conference
^^
in Paris.
Threatened with being one of the many postwar unemployed, in
early 1920 Yardley scored what he considered to be his greatest triumph:
he cracked the highly complex Japanese code. Indeed, Yardley deciph-
ered at least eleven different codes the Japanese used, as they some-
times jumped from one to another in mid-sentence. Thus Hughes read
the secret Japanese message of July 15, 1921, in which Hara said his
government would participate in the conference and, most reluctantly,
discuss China but not Manchuria. After Hughes set up a special New
York—Washington courier service, U.S. officials "read the messages" of
Japan "before they have their morning coffee," Yardley proudly wrote.
In all, his team decoded sixteen hundred cables during the conference.
On November 28, 1921, he deciphered the telegram he considered "the
most important and far-reaching that ever passed through [Black
Chamber's] doors." It was Tokyo's first indication to the Japanese dele-
gates that they could accept Hughes's insistence on a 10:10:6 ratio in
battleships, if Hughes continued to pressure them to accept, if the
newly completed giant battleship Matsu could be saved from the scrap-
heap, and if the United States promised not to fortify further its bases
in the Pacific. As Yardly noted, Hughes now only had to maintain the
pressure: "stud poker is not a very difficult game after you've seen your
opponent's hole card."
On December 12, was struck. Japan accepted the
1921, the deal
10:10:6 ratio and Hughes accepted the Matsu as an exception while
agreeing not further to fortify U.S. bases in the Pacific —although he
carefully exempted Hawaii from the agreement and also insisted on a
formal end to the Anglo-Japanese alliance. He made the agreement
after Lodge and other senators assured him that "Congress would never
consent to spend the vast sums required in adequately fortifying these
islands." When U.S. naval officers protested, Hughes silenced them.
He had been helped by Herbert Yardley, but also by Thomas Lamont.
Admiral Kato's decision to compromise turned on the central question
of where Japan could obtain enough money for development, even war:
"The answer is that there is no country other than America that could
Creating tke New Era: From Washington to Mukden (l921-193l) 141

oblige Japan with the foreign credit required —and this would obviously
not be forthcoming if America were the enemy. ... At all costs Japan
"^^
should avoid war with America.
The Five-Power Treaty finally set the ratios at 5:5:3:1.7:1.7 for the

heaviest ships of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and
Italy, respectively Thus for every 5 tons of U.S. or British warships,

Japan could have 3 tons of warships, while France and Italy could each
control 1.7 tons. The agreement allowed Hughes to destroy the Anglo-

Japanese alliance with the Four-Power Treaty agreed upon the next day,
December Throughout the arguments over ship ratios, the British
13.

had angered Japan by siding with Hughes. A badly wounded lion after
World War I, Great Britain had begun reducing commitments in the
Pacific and —
especially at the urging of its dominions was increasingly —
depending on the United States for security, not Japan. (Indeed, by
mid-1922, Balfour and other top British officials feared that war with an
expansionist Japan could break out in two or three years.) The alliance
had outlived its original purposes, especially that of ganging up on Rus-
sia, which was now absorbed at home with its own revolution. With

the new treaty replacing the aUiance, Hughes, as Lodge phrased it,
"substituted a four-power agreement to talk for a two-power agreement
to fight."2^
The stage was now set for the climax of the conference, a nine-power
pact (signed by the Five-Power Treaty signatories plus the Netherlands,
Belgium, Portugal, and China). This agreement incorporated formally
for the first time John Hay's open-door policy into international law.
The treaty was not a favor granted to China. Indeed, U.S. and Japanese
delgates treated the Chinese as third-class participants who were con-
tinually informed, not consulted, about decisions. The 1919 revolution
remained threatening as Sun Yat-sen's movement controlled Chinas
south, and Hughes carefully refused even to recognize that Sun existed.
The Chinese leader responded by refusing to accept any of the confer-
Former Secretary of State EHhu Root, now a powerful
ence's decisions.
elder statesman and a leader of the U.S. delegation, bluntly declared
that China was not a full-fledged member of the family of nations.
Strongly pro-Japanese, Root fervently believed that the United States
would never use force to maintain the open door in China — a major
reason why Japan received de facto naval superiority in the western
Pacific from the Five-Power Treaty^"^
Hughes agreed Americans would never be willing to die for
fully that

China's territorial integrity. He was determined, however, to use all

means short of force to keep Japan from closing off more of China. He
 —
THE CLASH 1 4 2

came up with an ingenious solution by asking Japan to sign in public

what it had signed secretly in the Lansing-Ishii agreement of 1918
that is, that the Japanese would not seek any special rights in China at

other nations' expense. Root, who drafted much of the Nine-Power

Treat)^ then demonstrated why he was perhaps the country's best law-
yer. He accepted Hughes's proposal to protect China and coupled it
with a line from the Lamont-Kajiwara deal of 1920 that exempted Man-
churia from the open-door principles. The Japanese were then prepared
to sign the pact. Under Hughes's unrelenting pressure, thev also agreed
to return Shantung to China, although continuing to hold the region's
key railroad. The Chinese bitterly and unsuccessfully protested the
entire arrangement, but since they had no alternative, they also finally
signed. The Nine-Power Treat}' did not protect China. It only protected
the right of the other signatories to exploit China according to certain
understood rules. The powers continued to control Chinese tariffs,

treat}' ports, and key rivers (where they kept their own warships).-^
With the rules for the interwar game in the Pacific and Asia worked
out, the powers then disposed of lesser, but nevertheless irritating,

questions. Yap, a former German island taken from Japan, was seven
hundred miles from the Philippines and in a strategic position to control
trans-Pacific cable traffic. .After U.S. protests and more pressure from
Hughes, Tok}'o agreed to allow the .Americans and Dutch to use the
island for their own private cable systems. The Secretar}' of State was
also determined Japan from Siberia, especially after Tok}'o offi-
to e\ict
cials began dropping the phrase about their "special interests in Rus- "

sia's East — the

same phrase used when they took over South
Manchuria. Hughes warned Japan the United States would not recog-
nize "any claim or title arising out of the present occupation. " Japan
agreed to pull out.^^
Finally, the Japanese even agreed to "throw open " to the second con-
sortium options on loans, including to railways, in Manchuria and Inner
Mongolia. They thus surrendered much of the point that had nearly
destroyed the consortium (and Lamont's temper) in 1919-20. They
could do so now, however, because the Washington Conference
agreements were The Five-Power Treaty gave them naval supe-
in place.
riorit}' in the western Pacific. The Nine-Power Treat}- (through Root's
courtesy especially) recognized their hold on Manchuria. Before the
conference, one Japanese delagate feared that it would be "an attempt
to oppress the non-Anglo-Saxon races, especially the coloured races, by
the two English-speaking countries. " The conference instead turned
out to be a contest between several races to decide how China could
best and most safely be exploited.^
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden ( 1921-1931) 14 3

Everyone except China went home with reasons to be satisfied. With

their naval superiority in East Asia and the U.S. pledge not to fortify
further western Pacific holdings, the Japanese were safe from American
attack across the central Pacific. But because Japan could not fortify its
own Pacific islands (the Caroline, Marshall, and Mariana group), the
Philippines, Hawaii, and California also seemed safe. For everyone
except some frustrated U.S. naval officers, Hughes emerged as the hero
who in a single stroke saved governments billions of dollars in arms
expenditures, institutionalized the open door, destroyed the Anglo-Japa-
nese alliance, and settled the problems of Shantung, Siberia, and Yap
all areas in which, notably, Woodrow Wilson had failed. And the United

States had not had to make a single political alliance. (Indeed, the word
"isolation"was first used to describe U.S. foreign policy when a British
reporter, Edward Price Bell, wrote in November 1922 that American
policy was moving gradually "from isolation into partnership." As is well
known, however, partnership does not necessarily mean commit-
ment.)^^
The success of the Washington Conference ultimately was to rest
not on the ability of the diplomats to manipulate the treaties' terms, but
on the talents of the private bankers, such as Lamont and Shibusawa,
to maintain an international flow of dollars. In 1922, the consortium,
led by Lamont, declared that its purpose now was to carry out the Nine-
Power Treaty and help China find "a settled state of government." Thus
the bankers, in both Manchuria and China, also believed they had won
at Washington.
Indeed, other than China, the only loser at the conference was Her-
bert Yardley As peace set in, his Black Chamber lost its governmental
funding. By he supported himself by writing books that revealed a
1931
past that not even 1930s movies could top. In one 900-page book, Yar-
dley revealed every Japanese message decoded for the Washington Con-
ference. The U.S. government immediately confiscated the book,
keeping it partly censored for more than sixty years and passing laws
(still in force) that prevent such revelations. Yardley worked in 1938 for
the Chinese secret police (a posting where the young Theodore White
recalled him as a man of "unrestrained enthusiasms," including "drink,
gambling, and women"), helped the U.S. government during World War
II, and at the end of his life supported himself by publishing a best-
seller. The Education of a Poker Player, Including Where and Haw One

Learns to Win. The book, unlike the Washington treaties, long remained
highly influential.^^
THE CLASH 1 4 4

"Tne Trancjuillizin^ Processes oi Reason ':

Tke 1924 Immigration Act

A proud Secretary of State declared in 1923 that "we are seeking to
establish a Pax Americana maintained not by arms but by mutual
respect and good will and the tranquillizing processes of reason."
Hughes's "reason" no doubt referred to the Washington
and treaties

their economic corollary, the Lamont-Kajiwara agreement. The term

had no relevance to the growing American debate over immigration,
which climaxed with the 1924 Exclusion Act, a measure that poisoned
U.S. -Japanese relations for decades. The act was fathered by Congress-
man Albert Johnson (R: WA), who declared that "our capacity to main-
tain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien
blood." was signed by President Calvin Coolidge, who, as Harding's
It

Vice President, had pubUshed an essay praising Nordic supremacy and

claiming that when "Nordics" intermarried with lesser ethnic groups,
their children were degenerate. ^^
The1924 act arose out of fears that immigrants such as Asians and
Eastern Europeans were about to flood into the country again after the
hiatus of World War I. In the decade before 1914, the highest numbers
of immigrants (until 1989) arrived at U.S. shores. An act of 1917 imposed
literacy tests, and a 1921 act for the first time set numerical quotas. For
the exclusionists, however, these barriers were hardly high enough. The
1920s were a "verdant springtime of American racism," as two historians
have aptly characterized a decade introduced in 1919-20 by bloody race
riots in several cities, then contaminated by agricultural and mining

recessions that threw millions of Americans, especially African Ameri-

work and into cities. A new Ku Klux Klan targeted Jews
cans, out of
and Roman CathoHcs in the North and West. Out of this witch's brew
came Johnson's proposals that resulted in the 1924 legislation, also
known as the National Origins Act because it allowed new immigration
on the basis of the origins of those already in the United States. Since
those origins were carefully based on the 1890 Census, it blatantly dis-
criminated against Poles, Italians, Asians, and East European and Rus-
sian Jews who had arrived in large numbers after 1890.^^
For the Japanese, it was known as the Exclusion Act, because for
them itwent beyond numerical quotas to exclude directly "aliens ineli-
gible for citizenship" —
code words meaning only the Japanese. Hughes
tried to stop this blatant discrimination by writing Johnson that "the
Japanese are a sensitive people and unquestionably would regard [such
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden (l921-193l) 145

a law] as fixing a stigma upon them." The Secretary of state warned that
the act "would largely undo the work of the Washington Conference."
He pointed out that if the Japanese were at least given quotas as were
all other groups, even fewer (about 250 per year) would be admitted
than were entering under the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement. His words
had no effect.

Japanese Ambassador Hanihara Masanao tried to help by writing a

was done in part at Hughes's sug-
polite but firm letter of protest. This
gestion. The Secretary of State read and approved the letter, which
included the phrase that 'grave consequences" could result from the
law. U.S. newspapers and such anti-Japanese senators as Lodge cried
that the two words were a "veiled threat" to the United States. The law
then was whipped through Congress (323-71 in the House; 76-2 in the
Senate). An embarrassed Hanihara was quickly replaced as ambassador
by the redoubtable Viscount Ishii. "I am greatly depressed," Hughes
wrote a friend. "Japan cannot threaten anybody" because of its eco-
nomic dependence on Americans and others. But the Senate had "in a
few minutes spoiled the work of years and done a lasting injury."^^
Hughes's opposition to the law actually attracted much support in
the United States. That support simply was not in Congress. San Fran-
cisco newspapers, and especially the business community, took up the
Japanese cause, but they were overwhelmed by California labor's and
the Hearst newspapers' anti-Japanese cries. Most of the east coast
opposed the law, and twenty-four prominent Americans — led by
Thomas Lamont —publicly apologized for the legislation to the Japan
Society in New York City. Missionaries, especially Sidney L. GuHck,
who had long worked in Japan and America for closer relations, lobbied
for a new act to rectify the old. Gulick was so effective that numerous
anti-Japanese groups mobilized in opposition to his work during 1925 to
1930. The groups stopped any attempted revision of the exclusion provi-
sion, and the onset of the depression in 1929—30 ended any hope of
changing the law.^^
The Japanese saw the 1924 act as reaffirming their conclusion drawn
from the clash with Wilson over the racial equality clause in 1919:
Americans preached universal principles but practiced national dis-

crimination. The act especially hurt Shidehara, who became foreign

minister in the June 1924 cabinet of Premier Kato Takashi. Perhaps the
leading Japanese voice to urge the new diplomacy of peaceful trade
expansion and cooperation, especially with the United States, Shide-
hara was at long last in the position where he could break down Japa-
nese militarism, parochialism, and nationalism. Instead, on July i, 1924,
THE CLASH 1 4 6

when Shidehara made his maiden speech as foreign minister, the 1924

act went and mobs tore down the Stars and Stripes at the
into effect
U.S. Embassy. Shidehara had to apologize to the Americans, then track
down the culprits. One Japanese committed se^pfuku in front of the
U.S. Embassy; another tried to murder the American consul in Yoko-
^"^
hama.
Shidehara attempted to put the best face on the crisis by teUing
the Diet, not quite accurately, that Americans only wanted to exclude
Japanese (because "J^P^ri^se are to Americans what oil is to water"),
and did not mean to imply Japanese were inferior. He also noted that
the United States had the right to control its immigration — a remark
that doubtless reminded his listeners that they too prohibited foreigners

from owning land, kept out Chinese laborers, and discriminated heavily
against many non-Japanese, including other Asians. Many nevertheless
took quite a different view. One author wrote that the 1924 act was the
"most unprecedented humiliation in the recent fifty years of Japanese
and argued that "rampant Americanism," not Bolshevism, most
history,"

endangered Japan. Some were so angry that they tried to organize a

boycott of American movies. But here Japanese — especially the young,
who wore Harold Lloyd glasses and styled their hair like Clara Bow and
—
Mary Pickford drew the Hne. The boycott was an abysmal failure.
^^

The act had the effect of a ticking time bomb on Japan's policies. At
one level, many Japanese who wished to emigrate looked elsewhere,
especially toward Brazil, where they created a large colony in the 1920s.
The Tokyo government worked closely to help these emigrants with
subsidies and schools, even after anti-Japanese acts began to appear in
Brazil by the decade's end. On another level, American racism led Japan
back to the Asian mainland: if the United States wanted to play by such
rules, conservative Japanese argued, they should instead work with the

"colored races in Asia." In 1928, the first Manchuria Youth Congress

called for a "Manchuria-Mongolia autonomous state" built on "racial
harmony" of Japanese and Manchurians (but not Chinese). The 1924
Exclusion Act turned into a pivot that swiveled Americans inward,
while pushing the Japanese away from Shidehara's cooperative poHcy
^^
of the 1920s toward the Kwantung Army's conquests of the 1930s.

China Once A^ain

In the end, of course — in 1941 —

was the question of China that led
it

the United States and Japan into war. Both Hughes and Shidehara
Creating the New Era: From Waskin^ton to Mukden (l921-193l) 14 7

understood during the 1920s that they were dealing with a different,
deeply divided, and less controllable China; but neither diplomat tried
to limit the expansion of his nation's interests into China.
China was torn by warlords who controlled various parts of
In 1922,
the vast country. The gods of history, however, were to smile on Sun
Yat-sen's Kuomindong movement in the south. Since he had helped set
off the revolution in 1911-12, Sun had tried to work with both Japanese
and Americans; but in 1922, as Hughes refused to deal with him, he
was driven out of his stronghold at Canton. Sun and his briUiant young
military aide, Chiang Kai-shek, turned to the Soviets. The Chinese
Communist Party was born. Meanwhile, in 1923, Sun demanded Chi-
na's control of its own customhouses and foreign trade. Hughes went

to President Calvin Coolidge for consultation, and the President, in a

Coolidge-like response, tersely said, ''I think the naval units should be
sent." U.S. warships joined those of other powers in a naval demonstra-
tion not because the United States feared communism, but because
the Coolidge administration was determined to maintain imperialist
controls over China's trade. Otherwise, U.S. attention fixed on eco-
nomic opportunities. Between 1914 and 1930, U.S. investments in
China tripled, to $155 million. In 1931, the United States replaced the
Japanese as the leading supplier of goods to the Chinese. American
missionary and philanthropic enterprises accounted for an abnormally
large part ($69.3 million in 1926) of the U.S. overall investment. "The
importance of the Rockefeller Foundation [deeply involved in educa-
tional and medical projects] is not to be underestimated in China,"
Hoover was told.^^
Notably, little American attention was on the now-famous consor-
tium. 'The object of the old consortium" of 1911-13, a British official
later wrote, "was to save China from foreign aggression. The object of

the new consortium was to save China from herself." As a friend once
unsuccessfully tried to explain to Woodrow Wilson, however, the most
one can do is to help others; they have to save themselves. So it proved
to be in China. Refusing "to be persuaded that foreigners knew better
than they did what was good for China, " as the British official noted,
the Chinese ignored the consortium. The banking group did not make
one major loan to China after 1922. Which does not mean that dollars
were not going into China. They were, but under the control of individ-
ual banks, or — on with some horror through
as U.S. officials looked
^^
—
Japanese who were moving into Manchuria and North China.
Such use of dollars fit in well with the Shidehara approach. As Prime
Minister Takahashi summarized in 1922, "Armed competition has
 —
THE CLASH 1 4 8

become obsolete, but economic competition is growing in intensity."

—
The objectives control of China's markets and raw materials, espe-
cially in its northern and central provinces —remained traditional, but
the Japanese tried new and cooperation
tactics of trade, investment,
with the United States and other Western powers. As Taisho democracy
reached its peak, Shidehara's policies went on the offensive in South-
east Asia, the Middle East, and —
especially —
China to "develop oppor-
tunities for expansion for our nationals abroad," as he phrased it. It was
a climactic test for a highly delicate democracy and foreign policy that
were closely related. And it proved to be a tragedy of Japanese history
that these highest stakes rested in part on developments in China and
the dollar in the United States. For as Shidehara took power, the Chi-
nese Revolution moved into a new, brutal, anti-foreign phase, and the
dollar became wildly unpredictable.^^
Americans remained Japan's best customer through the 1920s by tak-
ing about 40 percent of its exports. Much of that, however, was in silk
and silk goods, while China —whose overall trade doubled during the
decade (was the long-mythical China market finally becoming real?)
absorbed Japan's rising stream of industrial exports. In 1926-27, Japa-
nese trade with China finally exceeded Great Britain's. China was
becoming the profitable market that allowed the Japanese to import
the foodstuffs and raw materials on which their prosperity depended.
Shidehara thus believed that while Manchuria was vital, Japanese inter-

ests in that area could not be allowed to endanger the tremendous

opportunities further south. So he was a China-firster, as he explained
in a speech in 1924:

[On] our restricted islands we suffer from a population increase of

700,000-800,000 annually. There no alternative but to

is, therefore,
proceed with our industrialization. It follows from this that it is
essential to secure overseas markets and this can only be done by
adopting an economic diplomacy. If we try to cure our economic
problems by territorial expansion, we will merely destroy interna-
tional cooperation. Japan, being closest to China, has an advantage
by way of transport costs and she has also the greatest competitive
power because of her wages. It must therefore be a priority for Japan
"^^
to maintain the great market of China.

It is ironic that Shidehara's tenets of cooperation and economic

expansion actually offended U.S. officials. For his idea of cooperation
meant, in part, cooperation with the Soviet Union, which the Ameri-
Creating tke New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden ( 1 92 1-193 l) 14 9

cans so detested that they had refused to recognize that the Communist
regime officially existed. A Soviet-Chinese courtship of 1923-24 had
angered Washington policymakers, but it stunned those in Tokyo.
The new Soviet presence directly challenged the Washington
agreement on China. By Japan quickly adjusted by leaving north-
1925,
ern Sakhalin, making trade agreements, and then restoring diplomatic
relations with Moscow. The growing China-Russia-Japan coalition led
one U.S. official to warn "that there is a menace to the entire West in
such a combination seems self-evident." A few, such as Senator Borah,
understood that the State Department's fear and dislike of the Soviets
made impossible any hope of using them to contain Japanese expan-
sionism. But Shidehara's idea of cooperation posed another dilemma as
well to Americans, for he also intended to cooperate, to some degree,
with the Chinese Revolution. In 1925 and 1927, when the powers dis-
cussed possible intervention to stop Chinese attacks on foreigners, Shi-
dehara was reluctant to go along. He did not want Western power to
—
move between Japan and China nor, especially, to turn angry Chinese
Nationalists toward retaliation by boycotting foreign goods."*
If Shidehara's ideas about cooperation offended Washington officials,
his (and Wall Street's) views of economic cooperation drove those offi-

As Lamont had demonstrated, and Hoover knew in

cials to frustration.

detail, the Japanese wanted to work with the United States "to develop

China" (as an aide told Hoover in 1921) because "they are convinced
that they are not in a position to do it without assistance." Tokyo-Wall
Street ties were indeed tight. After the massive earthquake of 1923, in
which over a hundred thousand Japanese died, J. R Morgan handled a
$150 milhon earthquake loan and led private efforts to send assistance.
Japan's powerful zaihatsu, the House of Mitsui, rebuilt its bank in the
image of Morgan's building at 23 Wall Street. But the Americans went
farther. Throughout the 1920s they floated loan after loan to Japan, and

to Hoover and the State Department's anger, much of this money went
"^^
to build Japanese railways and plants in Manchuria and China.
Wall Street, Hoover and the State Department's Far East experts
charged, was doing nothing less than using U.S. dollars to help the
Japanese close the door to Manchuria and perhaps even central China.
Hoover had told Hughes in 1922 that he wanted American money to
develop industries at home, not used for bailing out "unbalanced bud-
gets or the support of armies" abroad. Nor was it to be loaned to foreign-
ers unless U.S. "contractors and builders of equipment" have "an equal
chance to compete on equal terms with other foreigners." Hoover and
Hughes tried to pressure Wall Street into clearing its foreign loans in
THE CLASH 1 5

Washington to ensure that the money supported, rather than undercut,

U.S. foreign poHcies. The attempt to bring the bankers in Hne with the
pohcies was a failure. Hoover and Hughes were in a terrible dilemma,
Hoover because according to his own view of capitalism too much gov-
ernment interference could lead to fascism or socialism; Hughes
because too much interference would aUenate the Japanese needed —
to cany out the provisions of the Washington treaties or the bank- —
ers —needed to carry out his reconstruction plan for Europe.'*^
Department officials responsible for the Far East were beside
State
themselves. They wanted the bankers to use the consortium (where the
Japanese could be closely watched) to advance U.S. interests and Chi-
na's development. Instead, the financiers ignored the consortium,
ignored China (where risk-free money could hardly be made amid the
revolution), to work bilaterally with the Japanese in Manchuria and
northern China. Wall Street had no "adequate conception of the pres-
ent as a special moment ... to build a great financial port of entry for

American influence and commerce in the new 'far West' of Eastern

Asia," State Department expert Stanley Hornbeck lamented. By the
mid-i920s, the historian of J. P. Morgan writes, the bank's new^ clients

were Japan, Germany, and by chance that the bank

Italy: "It was strictly

became involved with three future enemies." Hoover and Hornbeck,

among others, would have doubted whether chance had much to do
with it."^"^

Shidehara, unlike Hoover, was finally undone not by Wall Street, but
by economic malaise home, the Japanese army's growing restlessness
at

over his China-first instead of a Manchuria-first policy, and the Chinese

Revolution. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomindong forces moved out
of the south, consoUdated their power over much of China, and
marched into Nanking, where they destroyed foreign property, mur-
dered foreigners (including a U.S. citizen who was vice president of
Nanking and were stopped only after American and British
University),
gunboats opened fire. The United States, Japan, and Great Britain
demanded that Chiang pay a large indemnity while promising never
again to harm foreigners. He flatly refused, turning instead to his first

order of business, which was the killing of all the Communists he could
discover within the Kuomindong. Washington refused to recognize
Chiang's government. Amid these crises, Shidehara's party fell from
power in 1927. He was bitterly attacked for not involving Japan with
an international force that was to teach the Kuomindong respect for
foreigners and their propert}^."^^
In 1926, the Emperor Taisho had died. His son, the young Emperor
Creating tke New Era: From WasKin^ton to MuWen ( 1921-1931) 15 1

Hirohito, began the Showa was to stretch through most of the

era that
twentieth century. In 1927, General Tanaka Giichi's Seiyukai Party
swept into office. Tanaka became prime minister and also replaced Shi-
dehara as foreign minister. Born in the resurgent province of Choshu
in 1863, a protege of Yamagata's, he was a military man who had little

respect either for politicians (although he was a political leader himself)

or for diplomats (although he had served in the legation in St. Peters-
burg). Tanaka knew the United States and admired Germany, but it was
his experiences in Russia that made him a leading advocate of the Sibe-
rian intervention of 1918, and —
like most of his army colleagues a fer- —
vent voice for controlling Manchuria as a barrier against Soviet
expansion. His Manchuria-first policy was also driven by his hatred for
Communist revolution (he suddenly arrested a thousand suspected Jap-
anese Communists and radicals in early 1928), and his fear of Chiang
Kai-shek's move northward after 1926.
Tanaka damned Shidehara as "weak-kneed," and worse, for his 1924
to 1927 China policy. The general was not wholly adverse to cooperating
with the powers. In 1928, for example, he agreed to sign the Kellogg-
Briand pact that artlessly outlawed war. Tanaka knew, of course, that
the United States had stripped away the original French proposal,
which had been aimed at Germany, until the remains left in the treaty
were lifeless. Signing it was not for either Japan or the United States a
major step toward international cooperation. As a disciple of Yamagatas,
schooled by ex-samurai in the highly nationalist idea of kokutai (the
national weal — literally, the national body) that became personified in
the Emperor, Tanaka became between the Meiji expan-
a pivotal link
sionists of 1894 to 1912 and the Showa militarists of the 1930s and
46
1940s.
This linkage was demonstrated in June 1927, when Tanaka's policy
toward Asia was announced: as long as Japanese interests were not
harmed, the Chinese could put their country in order as they thought
best; in Manchuria, however, Japan had a special "obligation" to main-
tain peace and order. Part of the "obligation" required fresh talks with
J. P. Morgan to obtain capital. Before going to Tokyo, Thomas Lamont
believed he had obtained a green light from Secretary of State Frank
Kellogg to make a $30 million loan that clearly was going to be used by
the South Manchuria Railway Company. But when the deal became
pubhc, the Chinese government protested, and some American news-
papers loudly warned that Lamont was helping Japan close the door in
Manchuria. The head of Morgan attempted to launch a propaganda
campaign of his own, but the State Department advised that the loan
THE CLASH 1 5 2

be postponed. Tanaka simply went instead Bank and

to National City

obtained $20 million for the Oriental Development Company, which,

despite its more neutral name, was immersed in Manchurian business.
Few newspapers noticed. Hoover had long since given up trying to bring
Wall Street into line with U.S. policies, and State Department experts,
such as Hornbeck, concentrated on China while largely accepting Japa-
—
nese power in Manchuria especially if the alternative was the anti-
foreign, highly unpredictable, revolutionary regime of Chiang."^^
That kind of reasoning was to paralyze U.S. officials in 193 1 when
Japan's mihtary finally seized Manchuria. In 1928, similar silence per-
vaded Washington when Tanaka moved to discipline Chinese forces in
Shantung by sending in twenty thousand Japanese troops for a stay of
several weeks. The Chinese asked for help from the League of Nations,
which, as Japanese militarists doubtless noted, made no important
response. U.S. silence also rang out in May 1928 when Tanaka decided
to fix the northern warlord, Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin), whose
armies were trying to link Manchuria with North China. Chang was
threatening Japan's interests in Manchuria and endangering the ambi-
tions of Chiang Kai-shek, who moved his armies northward to deal with
the problem. Intent that neither Chinese leader would have his way in
the north, Tanaka ordered Japanese troops to disarm Chang's troops in
a key part of Manchuria. As Chang moved from Peking to Manchuria
for a discussion of the problem, he died when his train was blown up
on June 4, 1928. Japan's Kwantung Army, whose officers feared Tanaka
would be too lenient in handling Chang, assassinated the Chinese
leader, then brazenly tried to cover it up by claiming to have found some
dead Chinese who had set off the bomb. When General Tanaka moved
gingerly in punishing the Kwantung Army, the new young Emperor,
for one of the few times in twentieth-century Japanese history, subtly

intervened and forced the prime minister to resign.'*^

Tanaka 's attempt to control Manchuria had turned out to be a disas-

ter. The Kwantung Army demonstrated that it could act with virtual
impunity against the wishes of Tokyo officials, even against a distin-

guished general. The murdered Chang was replaced by his son, Chang
Hsueh-liang (Zhang XueUang), who defied Japanese plans by pledging
loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang now stood on the brink of uniting
all of North China. In December 1929, his Kuomindong flags flew over

Manchuria's important government buildings. Chinese who had long

hated Japan's pressure began to fuel anti-Tokyo activities. The Kwan-
tung Army, determined not to take mere half-measures when the next
opportunity arose, replaced its leader with Itagaki Seishiro and Ishiwara
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKington to Mukden 1921-1931)
( 15 3

Kanji, both of whom were prepared to act on their own and with force.

Into this cauldron came Shidehara in 1929 for his final term as foreign
49
minister.
Broken in spirit and body, Tanaka died in 1929, shortly after leaving

power. He was to be remembered later by Americans of the 1930s and

1940s for the so-called Tanaka Memorial, a document in which the
general supposedly laid out Japan's plans for conquering China. In real-
ity, the Memorial was a highly successful piece of Chinese propaganda.
Tanaka nevertheless remained a link that helps explain how Meiji Japan
transformed into the Japan of the 1930s. As for Shidehara, he was to be
remembered as an instructive aberration, a "might-have-been" if only
his worldhad not begun to disappear in 1929. But then, many people s
worlds began to disappear that year.^^

Need Us and l nat Is Probably

"Ttiey Still —
Wbat Annoys Tkem": 1929-1931
By Japan s decade-long moves toward mass democracy and Shide-
1930,
hara's commercial foreign policies were buried under an avalanche of
economic disasters. In the United States, another era was also ending
beneath the collapse of a corrupt New York stock market and a thimble-
rigged banking system. The 1920s could have been called the private-
dollar era, for U.S. bankers, led by international figures such as Lamont,
had been relied on by U.S. officials to rebuild wartorn Europe, cement
good relations with a democratic Japan, undercut Chinese (and other)
revolution with development, and all the while make the United States
the hub of world production. As Hoover and Hornbeck lamented as
early as 1922, the bankers were not cooperative, for large loans went to
Germany, Japan, and Latin America for increasingly dubious ventures,
while American farms, mines, and some specific industries (such as
textiles) lost their competitive advantage and suffered throughout the

decade. This suffering meant that millions of Americans lost their pur-
chasing power. As the gap between poor and rich widened, bankers
sent hundreds of millions of dollars abroad, often in get-rich schemes
that quickly collapsed. By 1927-28, as overseas opportunities dwindled,
investors turned to the New York stock market, where they boosted
prices by pouring in millions of dollars they had borrowed.
It was the last rosy glow of a body before it bursts an artery. When

investors could not cover loans in 1929, stock prices plummeted 50 per-
cent in four months. Economic downturn had already begun abroad.
THE CLASH J 5 4

especially in Western Europe, and also in Japan, which had been bor-
rowing from the Americans. The more dramatic decline was to occur
in 1930-31, after the American fall was fully felt. U.S. unemployment
was at 3 percent (1.5 million) in 1929 and cUmbed until it reached 25
percent (12.6 million) in 1933. As the gross national product sank unbe-
lievably from $104 billion in 1929 to $56 biUion in 1933, Congress tried
to lift the economy by its bootstraps when it passed the Smoot-Hawley
Tariff Act in July 1930 that imposed the highest rates on imports in the
twentieth century. Exports from Japan were suddenly hit with a rate
rise of 23 percent, and this market was sliced at the same time that the

United States was overtaking Japan in trade with China. At Washington

and New York's demand, the diplomacy of the 1920s had largely rested
on dollars. Now, other nations could neither obtain dollars from the
bankers nor earn dollars from sales to Americans. The foundation of
U.S. post—World War I diplomacy washed away in a tide of bank fail-

ures and protectionism.^^

Newly elected President Hoover did not know which way to turn. In

1926,he had argued that with the end of the four hundred-year frontier,
Americans must look abroad: "Our exports will tend to decrease
because our easily cultivable [sic] land is now well occupied. The day
of unlimited lands is over. If we volume of our
are to maintain the total
exports and consequently our buying power for imports, it must be by
steady pushing of our manufactured goods." By 1930, however, many
world markets were mired in depression. As U.S. tariffs rose, so did
anti-American policies abroad. Even in 1928, U.S. -British relations had
been so bad that one high British diplomat believed that 'war is not
unthinkable between the two countries." Two years later, it seemed they
verged on declaring economic war on each other. Hoovers hope that
Americans could lift themselves up to prosperity by selling abroad rap-
idly disappeared.
In 1931, Hoover argued that the United States was more self-con-
tained than any other power, so if it could "get its own house in order,"

affairs internationally would improve. But that solution implied quick

governmental help, and the President continued to agonize over how
far "the state" could become involved before it corrupted "the develop-
ment of the individual." After lunching with Hoover, close friend and
Assistant Secretary of State William Castle recorded in mid-1930 that
"He looks pretty worn. ... He says that the present Senate pretty nearly
represents the breakdown of representative government. ... He is tired

and fairly discouraged." On New Year's eve, 1930, Castle observed,

"Someone said to someone else, 'I hope that 1931 will be better than
Creating tKe New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden 1921-1931)
( 155

1930/ and the answer was, 'If it is not it will be non-existent.' " Castle
"^^
added: 'The poor President could hardly be in a worse state.

By mid-1931, Hoover held two hopes: that the depression was

tight to

only an extra-sharp swing of the business cycle in which an equally

sharp upward turn would propel him to reelection in 1932; and that
the few remaining overseas friends —
above all, Japan would remain —
cooperative. He especially hoped, as he said in one speech, that such
friends would help in quelling the political instability that now affected
three-quarters of the world's population. Both hopes were utterly
destroyed within months. The depression was not a working out of the
business cycle but the result of massive problems in U.S. and world
economies that were to be solved only with the next world war. And a
frustrated, depression-wracked Japan was preparing to turn violently
against the West.^^
During 1927-28, most major world economies had enjoyed a boom
except those of Great Britain and Japan. The Japanese were recovering
from their 1923 when major scandals paralyzed their
earthquake disaster
banking system. Due to failures, the number of banks suddenly plum-
meted 25 percent, to about one thousand. The zaihatsu profited as Mit-
sui, for example, bought up assets cheaply while greatly enlarging its

already vast influence. As economic power concentrated, in early 1930

Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke decided (in part because of persis-
tent U.S. demands) to put Japan on the gold standard, the same stan-
dard that regulated most of the other industrialized nations' economies,
led by the American. His timing could not have been worse. As Asia
fell into revolution and depression, vital Japanese markets disappeared.

When the American economy sank, so did Japan's leading customer. In

1929, the United States (with 43 percent) and China together absorbed
67 percent of Japan's exports. But most parts of China that were not
chaotic were anti-Japanese, while increasing numbers of Americans
had little money with which to purchase Japanese goods.
Having promised to support the yen with gold, Inoue now watched
hopelessly as Japan's trade lost a full 60 percent of its specie reserves
as gold flowed overseas. In 1929-31, U.S. prices fell 27 percent; but
Japanese prices dropped 35 percent. These were led by all-important
prices of silk, which depended on the American market and made up
two-thirds of Japan's exports that earned dollars in the United States.
Silk prices sank 50 percent in 1930 alone, and the all-important cotton
textile price dropped nearly as much.^"^
Having tied itself to Wall Street and the U.S. market in the 1920s,
Japan's economy now found itself tied to sinking stones. Two out of
THE CLASH 1 5 6

every five Japanese families depended on silk for cash income. As the
value of silk exports was almost slashed in half, some Japanese families
faced starvation. The many who grew rice, the price of which similarly
fell by nearly half in 1929—30, also faced ruin. The crisis of the peasant

class directly affected the army because it was largely recruited from
this class. Some peasants tried to find work in manufacturing. They

became part of a massive influx into urban centers that had begun
before World War I. Militant labor leaders tried to organize this mass
in the 1920s, but got nowhere. Low-wage female textile operators were
impossible to organize, as were male peasants who did not like unions.
Supply, in any case, more than met labor demand. And businessmen
emphasized that unions were not necessary anyway: "In our country,"
the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce bragged, ''relations between employ-
ers and employees are just like those within a family." This was known
as the "warm-feeling principle," or as one observer phrase it, "a sort of
"^^
benevolent despotism.
Whenever leaders of any organization begin talking about "family," it

is advisable for all other members to be on guard. Having in many cases

been promised job Japanese workers discovered in 1930 that
security,

the number of their unemployed had shot upward 47.5 percent since
1925, to 323,000. One summary of the economic scene noted the precip-
itous fall-off of exports, thenadded that Japanese government figures
showed that "an average of 500 people had committed suicide in Japan
during each month in 1930. The major cause was believed to be the
lack of employment." The government itself resembled Hoover's: it did
little. More accurately, its resources were put at the disposal of the

largest industrial-banking families, the zaihatsu, while small business

people, workers, and farmers faced, alone, an increasingly vicious mar-
ketplace.
A stunned American author in the New York Times Magazine of
March 2,had discovered that in late 1929 more than eight hun-
1930,
dred Japanese were political prisoners, locked up "for the expression of
radical opinions or for plans or acts to carry those opinion into effect."
The author, James T Shotwell, a distinguished political scientist, noted
that these figures revealed "the extent of social and political unrest,"

and had been a "revelation" to most Japanese. He believed the unrest

could mushroom, especially among the young, who had to make "an
apparently impossible adjustment between an industrially modernized
nation and a philosophy of which connects nation and family with
life

a mythological past," particularly the past represented by Shintoism and

its "divine Emperor." Younger Chinese, Shotwell argued, could rally
Creating tke New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden (l921-193l) 157

around a radical twentieth-century nationalism, but their Japanese

counterparts had to reconcile a 2,500-year mythical past with the terri-

ble realities of a turbulent, industrialized present that destroyed the

traditional values embodying that past.^^
and village life

In early 1932, a fanatical young nationalist from one of those villages

gunned down Inoue. The murderer told police he did the deed because
the finance ministers deflationary policies had destroyed rural society.
Several weeks later, another of Thomas Lamont's friends. Baron Dan
—
Takuma who had built the financial base for Mitsu zaihatsu was shot —
by another member of an ultranationalist brotherhood. This assassin,
also from a rural area, apparently acted because Baron Dan and Mitsui
had made tens of millions of dollars by betting against their own nation's
currency in international markets. Both killers received light sentences
and were out of jail in several years.
During early 1930, William Castle glimpsed another side of this
nationalism and mistrust of the West. American executives of General
Electric and Truscon Steel told the State Department official that
"There is clearly a strong tendency to get rid of foreign management in

Japan. . . . More and more the Japanese want to get all manufacturing
into their own hands without any outside help at all." After personally
visiting GE
and Ford plants in Japan, Castle concluded that the Japa-
nese campaign to buy only homemade goods "is really the culmination
of anti-foreign feeling which has grown for years. ... It is obvious that
they still need us —
and that is probably what annoys them."^^
Against this darkening background, Shidehara, who had returned as
foreign minister in July 1929, made one last effort to rekindle the hopes
of 1921-22 and reverse the disastrous policies Tanaka had tried in 1927-
28. In his old spirit of cooperation, Shidehara even ordered Japanese
gunboats to join U.S. and British vessels that intervened jointly during

1930 at Changsha to protect foreigners from Communist attacks. He

also moved to follow the Americans and British by recognizing China s
tariff autonomy in return for trade concessions to Japan. Throughout,

officials in the navy, and especially the army, damned Shidehara for
moving too slowly and being too much in lockstep with the West.^^
Shidehara and Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi's greatest diplo-
matic triumph (as well as President Hoover's) occurred at the 1930 Lon-
don Naval Conference. The Washington agreements had not placed
limits on cruisers and other auxiliary ships. When the three powers met
at Geneva in 1927 to set such limits, the British and Japanese proposed

ratios that the Americans quickly rejected. After the other two delega-
tions refused to budge, angry U.S. congressmen agreed with their naval
 "

THE CLASH 1 5 8

officers' requests and passed bills to build fifteen heavy cruisers. The
depression, however, forced Hoover to cut spending, especially naval
appropriations, and with Shidehara now in power, prospects brightened

for a deal.

Japan demanded a 10:107 ratio. Negotiations resulted in agreement

on 10:10:6 in hea\y cruisers with the possibilit}' of Japan rising to 70
percent in 1935. There was to be equality among the three powers in
submarines. Japan's naval officers protested strongly, but Shidehara and
Hamaguchi (fresh from an overwhelming election victory) overruled
them and ordered acceptance of the ratio. Economic constraints and
the need for cooperation with the West required acceptance. Castle
had hoped to make the pill sweeter for Tokyo by fashioning a fresh
immigration treaty to replace the hated 1924 act (this "blot on America's
reputation for fairness," Castle called it), but Congress was not agree-
able. On the other side, Shidehara admitted that regardless of the ratio,
Japan would not attack the Philippines, for "even if an initial attack
were successful it would be the beginning only of a war which in the
end must be the ruin of Japan. "^^
Castle placed his finger on the point was now shaping relations
that
with the Japanese: "J^P^i^ [that is, the militar\^ the mass newspapers,
—
and much of the public] believes not the Government, perhaps that —
we are building our naw with the thought in mind that we shall have
to fightJapan on account of China." U.S. militar\' planners accepted
the point even if Castle did not. Japanese strategists such as Admiral
Kato Kanji (who remarked, "We must . . . gain control over the iManchu-
rian government war with the United States") also
in preparation for

accepted the point even if Shidehara and Inoue did not. The foreign
minister plainly defined the relationship between the growing economic
depression and Japan's naval plans: "we will not sacrifice our plans for
a tax reduction in order to build warships, particularly in view of the
fact that our revenues are decreasing. " On
Hama- October 27, 1930,

guchi joined Hoover and British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in

a historic international radio hookup to applaud the London agreement.
They had "opened a new^ chapter in the historv' of human ci\ilization,
Hamaguchi declared. ^*^
Japanese naval officers launched a savage propaganda campaign
against Hamaguchi. They cried that he had violated the right of the
divine Emperor and themsekes to determine mihtary^ questions. Such
accusations, and Inoue's financial policies, w^hich seemed to be w^orsen-
ing the economy by sacrificing militarv- expansion to budget cutting,
poisoned the political air. On November 14, 1930, a twenty-three-year-
Creating tJie New Era: From WasKin^ton to Mukden ( 1921-1931) 15 9

old member of an ultranationalist society condemned both Inoue's poli-

cies and restraints on Japan s military, approached Hamaguchi in Tokyo
Station, saluted, then shot him in the stomach. In April 1931, the badly
wounded Hamaguchi finally resigned. And in August this victim of the
London Naval Conference and the economic depression died. Shide-
hara remained foreign minister, but radical military officers had proved
their point. A military made up of men from the suffering villages was
ready to follow those officers.
Amid these and other disasters. Castle believed that Hoover "proba-
which the Presi-
bly feels like getting tight," but because of Prohibition,
dent himself supported, he ''has not the wherewithal." Everywhere
—
Hoover looked, traditional American policies whether arms limits,
open-door cooperation with Japan, or the temperance movement
seemed to be conspiring against him. Amid all this came yet another
great disaster: Mukden.^
 Ine SlipknotT Part
From Mukden . •

Tke 1930s as a Model for

U.S. -Japan Relations

For the United States and Japan, World War II's roots ran back
to September 1931, when the Kwantung Army struck to place all
Manchuria under Japanese control. The causes and results of that
invasion exemplified the major themes of U.S. -Japan relations
after Perry's arrival at Edo Bay. In the years before the attack, U.S.
had tried to integrate Japan into the Western system on
officials

largely Western terms. The Lamont-Kajiwara and Washington

Conference agreements of the early 1920s acted as gangplanks
which Japan used to board the ship of American capitalism. By
193 1, that ship not only threatened to sink but the ship's officers
seemed to be trying to keep passengers from the lifeboats, porous
as they were.
Some Japanese, having long doubted the ship's seaworthiness,
had been building their own vessel. For example, the mihtary,
cooperating with zaihatsu and smaller businesses, moved to fash-
ion a different capitalism (indeed, some thought it anti-capitalist),

which integrated Japanese values into an economic system that

challenged, not complemented, the American system. The mih-
tary 's effort was hardly new. Since the 1860s, Japanese leaders had
tried to create a self-sufficient system. What was new in
the 1930s (unlike the 1850S-60S, 1918-22, 1970s, or 1990s) was

] 6
 TKe Slipknot: Part 1 16 1

that it ended not in compromise or silent surrender but in a Gotterdam-

merung.
And once again this clash of different systems occurred in large part
over the question of how, and by whom, China was to be developed and
made As Perry's mission arose out of U.S. interests in China, as
orderly.

the Washington Conference arose out of the need to regulate clashes

in a revolutionary China, as the need to revive Japan rapidly after 1947
I
arose out of the necessity of deaUng with a China turned Communist,
so World War II in the Pacific arose from the inability of either Japanese
or Americans to resolve the central question of China. Even when bit-
terly divided, partly revolutionary, quasi-Fascist, quite corrupt, and

wholly uncooperative, the Chinese, during the 1930s, were the Sirens
whose song lured American and Japanese mariners to their fates.

ine Crises in W^all Street and Manchuria

Manchuria was comprised of China's three northeastern provinces. Its

413,000 square miles made it more than one and a half times larger than
Texas. Its Liaotung Peninsula, repeatedly fought over by the powers,
opened on the east and north by the Soviet
into a vast region bordered
Union, the west by Mongolia, and the west and south by China itself.
Political control of Manchuria since 1907 had been divided between the
I Russian operation of the Chinese Eastern Railway in the north, and the
Japanese control of the South Manchurian rail system in the south. By
1931, both were coming under attack from Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese
Nationalists, who intended to reclaim the region. Japan's Kwantung
Army was the barrier Chiang had to breach.
The Japanese were highly dependent on Manchuria by 1931. They
had over hundred miles
a half-billion dollars of investment; nearly seven
of rails that carried lumber and especially coal and ores on which
Japan's industry relied; and several ingenious operations to draw oil
from shale and coal which the navy helped develop for its ever-growing
needs. As Japan's overall exports fell a disastrous 43 percent in value
during 1929-31, Manchuria and its 30 million people took on enormous
importance for both raw materials and markets for Japanese goods. That
importance ramified as the rest of Japan's traditional overseas market
—
above all, the United States sank further into depression, and as
Chiang Kai-shek's forces stirred up the 29 million Chinese who made
up 90 percent of Manchuria's population. Observers noted by 1931 that
while Japanese trade with these areas had declined since 1929, com-

I
THE CLASH 1 6 2

merce with Formosa and Korea, which Tokyo completely controlled,

had risen dramatically. One lesson seemed to be that trade followed
political power. By 1931 the slogan "Export or Die" never had more
meaning for Japanese.'
The Kwantung Army understood that lesson, especially since its
commanders through the late 1920s had been closely tied to the Mitsui
zaihatsu. But to understand how Japan came to invade Manchuria, and
transform its own government in Tokyo from civilian-controlled to mili-
tary-dominated, requires understanding two other developments that
prepared Japan for its rendezvous with tragedy.
The first was the idea known as "total mobilization." This idea arose
in part out of the realization that World War I had been won by nations
thathad most effectively created self-sufficient industrial economies.
Germany, long a model for Japanese military and political experts, had
not organized itself as well as the United States or Great Britain. Some
in Japan believed the Germans had gone to war too early, well before
they had control over raw materials and industrial operations needed to
fight total war. "Total mobilization" also arose out of the grinding eco-
nomic decline that wore down Japan in the 1920s and seemed to cUmax
with the bank panic of 1927. In 1925, under the leadership of Takahashi
Korekiyo, the government established the Ministry of Commerce and
Industry (MCI) that was to be central in industrial planning. Educated
in part in the United States during the late 1860s when still in his teens,

Takahashi intimately knew how Americans had used tariffs, subsidies,

and other state devices to create their second industrial revolution.
MCI, however, went beyond the Americans' development of state
far

power. It recruited some of the best and brightest graduates of Tokyo

University, who pushed laws through the Diet that allowed the setting
up of giant state-licensed cartels to accelerate exporting. Many officials
who shaped Japans industrial offensive in the 1950s and 1960s first
appeared as staff for MCI
and other governmental agencies in the
1920s, including future prime ministers such as Kishi Nobusuke.^
This new industrial policy pulled state and private corporations into
a symbiotic relationship that focused especially on military production.
In 1927, a breakthrough occurred. In return for helping the government
retrench by cutting four divisions, the army won the establishment of a
central planning agency, the Cabinet Resources Bureau, that exercised
authority over every corner in Japan for industrial mobilization. The
Bureau quickly worked out programs that would be required by two
years of total war. During a ten-day test run in 1929, the Japanese mili-
tary actually took over the plants, and much of the poUtics, in three
TKe Slipknot: Part 1 16 3

large industrial centers, including Osaka. A network for economic con-

trol by the military was being created even as Foreign Minister Shide-
hara tried to limit the military's influence over foreign policy.^
This growing military influence was a second development of the
1920s that explained the Japan of the 1930s. Since the late nineteenth
century no civilians had been allowed to lead the army and navy minis-
tries. The military continued to exercise virtual veto power over the
formation of new cabinet governments. Even in civilian posts, the mili-
taryoccupied about 28 percent of the positions between 1885 and 1945.
By 1924, only one elderly genro, Saionji Kimmochi, remained to counter
the armed forces' pressures. The Imperial Military Reserve Association,
created in 1910, became by the 1930s perhaps the most powerful patri-
otic lobbying group. This grass-roots organization was especially strong
in the depression-hit rural areas. One of its major goals became organiz-
ing campaigns urging leniency for the assassins of leaders such as Hara,
Inoue, and Dan, whose patriotism was suspect. The army started a
National Defense Women's Association in 1932. If there was effective
pubhc opinion, it tended to support highly nationalist, aggressive poli-
cies rather than the cautious approaches of those such as Shidehara."^
When the worldwide depression struck full force, Japan had already
been suffering considerably. The future did not seem bright. "Japan's
possibilities for industrialization are limited," one Western expert wrote
in 1930, "and there seems to be no prospect that Japan can attain a
position of major importance as a manufacturing nation." But analyses
of the economic crisis had been started by the nationalists, and the
military had established institutions to support alternative policies.
Matsuoka Yosuke, soon to become a central figure in the U.S. -Japanese
tragedy over the next decade, told the Diet in early 1931, "The economic
warfare of the world is tending to create large economic blocs. In "

Japan, Matsuoka declared, "we feel suffocated as we observe internal

and external situations. What we are seeking is that which is minimal
for living beings. . . . We are seeking room that will let us breathe." The
Kwantung Army was prepared to find the room.^
That army was named after the tip of the strategic Liaotung Penin-
sula, which Japan had held since 1905. By 1931, this force was not only

a highly self-conscious military unit but a tight-knit seminar that under

its leading staff officers. Colonel Itagaki Seishiro and Lieutenant Colo-
nel Ishiwara Kanji, developed its own ideology. After studying in Ger-
many between 1922 and 1925, Ishiwara became known as the army's
leading theorist on strategy. He was not, however, the usual by-the-book
strategist. A devoted follower of the thirteenth-century Buddhist priest
THE CLASH 1 6 4

Nichiren, who persistently defied authorities with his teachings but

accurately predicted foreign invasions, Ishiwara believed that 2,500
years after Buddha's death, or around the year 2000, a world government
would come would appear, however, only after unprece-
into being. It

dented horrors of war resulting from foreign threats to Japans existence.

Borrowing from a contemporary teacher, Kita Ikki, Ishiwara concluded
that Japan was to be saved not by the corrupt zaihatsu or politicians but
by its military. Saionji noted the military's assumption: "We say never
rely on parliamentary policies." The army would create a greater Japan,
one that conquered the resources needed for prosperity, and in which
the state used these resources to help the proletariat and limit incomes
of the rich. By 1928, middle-ranking army officers, influenced by Ishiw-
ara and determined to gain economic self-sufficiency for Japan, came
together in an association called the Isseki-kai (literally, one-stone [for

two birds?] organization).^

Many in the Isseki-kai, again following Ishiwara, believed their vision
faced both long-term and short-term enemies. The long-term enemy
—
was the United States the only power, they believed, which possessed
the resources and manifest destiny to carry it into a global conflagration
with Japan over the question of who was to control Asia. But that was
in the distant future. The immediate enemy was China. This was a
switch; until the late 1920s, Russia had been considered the main men-
ace. The Soviets, however, had turned inward under Joseph Stalin
(although Kwantung leaders did believe that later the Russians would
try to avenge the 1904-05 war). Now Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomindong

was driving northward to reclaim the railways and other concessions

seized by Japan after 1905. The growing Sino-Japanese confrontation
centered on the South Manchuria Railway, where each side persistently
probed the other's intentions.^
September 1931, rumors of possible war swept Tokyo. Led
In early
by Shidehara and Saionji, government officials told senior army officials
to cool the situation. Tatekawa Yoshitsugu of the General Staff was
instructed to carry the message to the Kwantung Army. Tatekawa
arrived in Mukden (the provincial capital and military center) on Sep-
tember 18. He went with other officers to the Kikubun, a Japanese
restaurant, where he drank until, according to some accounts, he was
lying on the floor. Other accounts, noting that Tatekawa shared Ishiw-
ara and Itagaki's views —
and perhaps even forewarned them of the mes-
—
sage he was carrying believe the staff officer faked his drunkenness
so he did not have to deliver the message. Tatekawa might have even
actually helped plant the explosion that rocked the railway at Mukden
 TKe Slipknot: Part 1 16 5

Manchuria —Target of
Imperial Rivalry until 1949
500 miles
—I

800 km

U. S. S. R.
, I I Railroads
i-n-ru-u Great Wall
Provinces

^'^'\
v.^
u.

M A\N c L,

Tsitsihar ^ ^_ /

Harbin //
(Pinkiang) '

VChangchung ]
V O A^ (Hsinking) I

^^> Vladivostok

Mukden ^

SEA OF
o^^^_J(Antung

KWANTUNG- -Dairen JAPAN

'
>
_l \
rt'"-'
Port Arthur
Weihaiwei
C « (

Tsingtao

Kft/.01/1/

\
SEA
! ^v/\
^
/?
_c^
THE CLASH i 6 6

thatSeptember night. Fighting broke out between Japanese and Chi-

nese troops. By morning, the Kwantung Army held Mukden and was
expanding its control over surrounding territory. Its officers claimed that
the bomb had been set by the Chinese and even conveniently spread
several Chinese bodies around the explosion site. But authorities in
Tokyo and other world capitals quickly concluded that the army had
blo\Mi up its own railway tracks as an excuse to conquer Manchuria.^
So, Saionji recorded bitterly in his diar\; "it had finally happened."
The government divided bitterly. A shocked Shidehara understood the
army's new conquests could not be handed back to a Manchurian gov-
ernment that was coming under Chiang's influence. The high command
was split; civilians and militar\- alike nevertheless worked feverishly to
keep Kwantung troops out of North Manchuria, where they could clash
with the Soviet army. The Emperor equivocated. Saionji feared advising
him to call back the army because the Manchurian officers might not
obey. Shidehara and Inoue condemned the attack, but by the end of
—
September units from Korea clearly moving v\ith the central militarv"
—
command's approval helped Kwantung forces fan out over much of
Manchuria. Kvv^antung officers now planned to announce that Manchu-
ria was to be absorbed by Japan. The uproar in Tokv^o and Nanking,

however, instead led the officers to set up a multi-racial, autonomous

state of Manchukuo, ostensibly under the control of Manchurians,
actually under the aegis of the Kwantung Army^
For Americans who had recently fought a "war to end all wars,' the
invasion was confusing, its brutalitv^ shocking. U.S. missionaries and
journalists in Mukden sent back gruesome stories about Chinese
onlookers being shot in cold blood. The Hoover administration issued
statements asking that the fighting stop and the Japanese retreat. In
truth, U.S. officials were paving little attention to Manchuria. They
had more immediate crises on their mind. "He pointed out," recorded
Assistant Secretary of State WilUam Castle after an August 193 1 talk
with Hoover, "that Chicago today could not pay its bills or its wages."
Detroit and Los Angeles seemed on the verge of economic panic.
"There seems to be no light through the clouds in any direction, Castle "

concluded nine days before the Kwantung Army struck. The British
went off the gold standard in September, thereby destroying any hope
Hoover had of uniting the most powerful industrial nations' policies
against the depression. From now on, it was everyone for themseWes,
politically and economically. Secretary of State Henry Stimson, with his

eyes on Latin American revolutions and European economic disasters,

simply wished the League of Nations would quit "nagging"' him about
^^
the Manchurian bloodshed.
TKe Slipknot: Part 1 16 7

And if the Japanese government was deeply divided over the inva-
sion, so,on a smaller scale, was the American. Castle was strongly pro-
Japanese. Born in Hawaii in 1879 to one of the islands' leading families,
he had served as chief of the State Department's Western European
Affairs desk, then as assistant secretary of state, before his close friend,
the President, named him special ambassador
Japan during the 1930 to

London Naval Conference. Castle saw the Japanese as the only hope
for order in Asia. China was ''totally unreliable," but a nation "where
there are immense American interests." Westerners could thus never
give up extraterritorial rights until 'a modern and honest judicial sys-
tem" appeared in the distant future. In 1930, Castle could not conceive
that Americans would "go to war over the open door, nor over Japanese
annexation of Manchuria." Fortunately, he added, "Japan has no inten-
tion of annexing Manchuria." When the Kwantung Army proved that
prophecy wrong. Castle wanted "to keep out of it altogether," in part
because "we ought not to risk losing our one useful friend in the Orient.
How I wish," he signed, "the damned unnecessary thing had not hap-
^
pened."^
Castle represented the Theodore Roosevelt-Elihu Root strain of
U.S. policy that saw Japan as a force for order. Stanley Hornbeck, the
State Department's reigning Asian expert after 1928, represented the
Willard Straight-Paul Reinsch strain that believed cooperation with
China offered the great opportunity, and Japan posed the great danger.
Indeed, Hornbeck, after being Colorado's first Rhodes Scholar, in 191
received his doctorate under Reinsch's direction at the University of
Wisconsin. He taught in China, witnessed firsthand the clashes with
Japan over Chinese questions at Versailles in 1919, then occupied lesser
State Department posts until becoming head of the Far Eastern Divi-
sion in 1928. Hornbeck's views of Asia shaped U.S. policy until the
attack on Pearl Harbor.
Those views had at their core a central contradiction that continually
undermined U.S. policy from the 1840s until the Communist conquest
of 1949: a commitment to exploring the potentially tremendous China
market through the open-door policy, but believing that since "the ques-
tion of the peace of the Far East Hes with China," that country had to be
strong. If, of course, China was would (as Chiang repeatedly
strong, it

demonstrated) move to shut the open door and threaten Japan. Horn-
beck resolved this contradiction no better than did other U.S. officials.
Nor was he any more willing to go to war over China than was Castle.
He admitted that Chiang's nationalism veered "toward violence of utter-
ance and action" against Japanese property. He even had to "ruefully
agree" with Castle that perhaps Japan's control of Manchuria was to be
THE CLASH 1 6 8

preferred. —
was Hornbecks and American foreign policy's tragedy
It —
that in the end he tried to reconcile these contradictions by beUeving
that Japan would become hopelessly mired in China, and that it was in
the U.S. interest to allow this to occur. Japan would then be so vulnera-
ble that it could not attack the United States. Such a conclusion was
not only proven to be totally wrong; it assumed that the Chinese people
whom he admired and vowed to protect would patiently endure years
^
of horror. ^

between their pro-Japanese and pro-Chinese views, Castle and

Split
Hornbeck nevertheless agreed about Secretary of State Stimson. "He is
a man of small intellectual caliber who is in a place too big for him,"

Castle believed in late 1929. Castle, a Harvard graduate of 1900 who

proudly wore his "Naughty Nought" sweater into old age, never
approved of Stimson surrounding himself with advisers from his alma
mater, Yale. In late 1931, Castle concluded that Stimson disliked him
because "I did not go to Yale, am not a rich New Yorker, and above all,

was not appointed by him." For his part, Stimson recorded in his mem-
oirs (in the third person, as befitting a gentleman of his generation) that

accepting Castle just because he was a Hoover protege was a bad "mis-
take which Stimson often regretted," in part because Castle "did not
"^^
share Stimson's basic attitude.
The causes of the State Department's paralysis during the early Man-
churian crisis, however, went deeper than personality. Stimson liked
Shidehara personally and wanted to put no pressure on Japan that
might embarrass the foreign minister or "arouse all the national spirit
of Japan behind their mihtary people." Having served as U.S. Governor-
General of the Philippines, Stimson thought, "I know something about
the attitude of mind of those peoples" in the Orient. (This was an inter-
esting comment especially because it was not until four months later
that Stimson discovered — to his great surprise — that the Japanese navy
had long fought the army's plans to attack Manchuria.) He told the
cabinet that Western treatymaking "no more fit the three great races of
Russia, Japan, and China, who are meeting in Manchuria," than "a
stove pipe hat would fit an African savage." The Secretary of State's
racism earlier led him to tell a for once receptive Castle that, on the
extraterritorial issue, "he did not want to be driven by China, that after

all the White races in the Orient had got to stand more or less together."

Such \dews led Stimson to conclude in September and early October

1931 that China needed disciplining and Japan could administer it.
—
Then, too, many Americans especially Stimson were highly sensi- —
tive about condemning Japan for policing its unruly neighborhood when
 TKe Slipknot: Part 1 16 9

the United States had recently sent troops into Nicaragua, Haiti, the
^"^
Dominican Republic, and Panama.
Hoover certainly agreed with Stimson's reasoning. "Neither our obH-
gation to China, nor our own interest, nor our dignity requires us to go
to war" over Manchuria, he told his cabinet. Another time he suggested
that would not be a bad thing if Mr. Jap should go into Manchuria,
*'it

for with two thorns in his side —

China and the Bolsheviks he would —
have enough to keep him busy for awhile." If, in other words, Japan
wanted to drive back revolutionary forces in China and the Soviet
Union, Hoover totally sympathized. U.S. public opinion was, as usual,
divided. Washington officials paid little attention to it or to the divided
business community. The highly respected journalist Walter Lippmann
reflected the confusion when he wrote in late September 193 that no 1

I one could "determine the aggressor " in Manchuria any more than one
could "determine who first jostled each other in a crowded subway
4. • "15
tram.
Within a month, that view radically changed. Japanese planes
bombed Chinchow, an administrative capital close to the Great Wall
and distant from the original attack at Mukden. Stimson, finally under-
standing the gravity of the crisis if still backing and filling in his
responses, embarked on a four-step progression in U.S. pohcy whose
climax in 1932 set that policy for the remainder of the 1930s. In the first

stage, he tried to work through the League of Nations to enforce the

1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war. A U.S. representative even
sat inon the League's deliberations. This approach, however, lasted less
than a week. Stimson had the uneasy feeling that the organization was
trying to pass the responsibility to the United States. He insisted that
"we must not take the baby off the lap of the League." Stimson
remained torn between his belief that "a firm stand" had to be taken
against Japan, and, as he confidentially told reporters, that Japan was
"our buffer against the unknown powers" China and the Soviet
of
Union. The State Department felt better on October 22 when the New
York Times published a shrewdly crafted statement signed by Japanese
Finance Minister Inoue with the title "Inouye Says Japan Is Eager to
Retire." Inoue's statement calmed both the money markets and the
State Department. But only temporarily, for it had been written secretly
by a frightened Thomas Lamont while Inoue's days both in the —
finance ministry and on earth —were numbered. ^^

The failure of Stimson's flirtation with the League, combined with

Japan's drive toward Chinchow, set off a second U.S. initiative: an
attempt to impose economic sanctions. Lippmann, who had down-
THE CLASH 1 7

played Japan s aggression, drastically changed his tone in October. The

Japanese were intent not merely on quelling "local disorders," but exe-
cuting "a carefully prepared and far-reaching plan" to control South
Manchuria. The columnist warned that if the other eight signatories of
the Nine-Power Treaty did not act to save China, their influence in the
"whole Oriental world" would disappear. Japan would meanwhile set a
"revolutionary precedent" that could rapidly spread. This fear, later
called the "domino theory" of American foreign policy, began to domi-
nate Washington officials' thinking. South Manchuria might be closed
off by force and few U.S. interests affected, they reasoned, but if Japa-
nese troops moved to the Great Wall and beyond into northern China
itself, a century of the open-door policy would be at stake. Stimson now

believed that Japan was "in the hands of virtually mad dogs," with its
army "running amok." When, however, he and Hornbeck suggested that
the League impose an embargo on Japan, and that the United States
quietly cooperate. Castle and Hoover would have none of it. Japan
would rightly take the embargo as an act of war. Castle argued. Tok\^o
would then be justified in blockading Chinese ports leaving the —
United States the most unpleasant options of surrendering all rights in
China or declaring outright w^ar on the Japanese. Whichever option was
chosen. Castle warned, "If there is anything left of the stock market
that little w^ould disappear. . . . The [American cotton growers in the]

South would not willingly see the sick man [the U.S. economy] mur-
dered in his bed. The world is not inclined to take another material
. . .

kick in the face to maintain the sanctity of treaties which it is not

convinced have been violated."^'
On December lo, 1931, the Wakatsuki cabinet fell the victim of the
worsening depression and the Kwantung Army. With it fell Shidehara
and Inoue. As Saionji noted, "From the beginning to the end, the gov-
ernment was made a complete fool of by the Army." The deposed minis-
ters were replaced by the riv^al Seivoikai Party and its leader, Inukai
Tsuyoshi, who had moved up after Tanaka's death. Close to the militarv;
Inukai shared its doubts about the value of constitutional politics. His
new Secretary of War, General Araki Sadao, was known as the "darling

of the young officers." In November, Shidehara had stopped the driv^e

on Chinchow only through the direct intervention of the young Showa

Emperor. Now Inukai reversed that position. Japanese troops took
Chinchow, and, despite U.S. warnings, drove into Jehol, which was
beyond the Great Wall.
A stunned Stimson then mov^ed his policy to a third level. On January
7, 1932, he announced, with Hoover's approval, that the United States
TKe Slipknot: Part 1 17 1

would not "recognize any treaty or agreement" between China and

—
Japan that impaired the rights of Americans especially those rights in
the Nine-Power Treaty guaranteeing the open door. Stimson believed
non-recognition had teeth because it discouraged U.S. bankers from
sending credits for Japan to use in Manchuria. Tokyo officials were
surprised, but made little response. This Stimson non-recognition doc-
trine, as it came to be known, was ultimately accepted by Franklin D.

Roosevelt after he was elected in 1932. It did not slow the Kwantung
—
Army especially after Stimson was publicly isolated for nearly two
months because no other nation, notably not even Great Britain,
expressed support for his doctrine until March 1932.^^
By then the world had been shaken by Japan's bombing and shelling
of Shanghai. Relations in that cosmopolitan city had spun downward
afterChinese effectively boycotted Japanese goods. Shooting erupted,
the large International Settlement (including sixteen hundred Ameri-
cans) was endangered, and on January 24, 1932, Japan landed eighteen
hundred troops to restore order. Tokyo officials and the Kwantung Army
disliked the diversion, especially since they feared possible retaliation
by Western powers. On January 28, Japanese planes bombed the Cha-
pei section of Shanghai, a killing of civilians that horrified much of the
world and anticipated the mass bombings of populations a decade later.

Hoover, at Stimson's urgent request, sent reinforcements for the thir-

teen hundred U.S. Marines stationed at Shanghai. Otherwise nothing

else could be done. Hornbeck noted to Stimson that "the havoc of mod-
ern warfare" had spread over non-participants. Stimson wrote on the
"^^
margin of this memo: "Civilization itself will collapse.
But no one could devise an effective response. Business journals did
not want to threaten Japan. Remedies such as economic sanctions, one
paper argued, were "more to be dreaded than the disease." But the
journals did insist on preserving the open door to China. When Finance
Minister Inoue was murdered on February 9, 1932, Lamont, despite the
kiUing of his friend, was soon helping the Japanese government set
up a propaganda bureau in the United States. Stimson, and especially
Hoover, did not want to confront Japan or even open up arms sales to
China. The Secretary of State did, however, phone British Foreign Min-
ister Sir John Simon to ask for a common approach to uphold the open-
door principles in the Nine-Power Treaty: "Japan is much more afraid
of a Union between you and us," Stimson accurately noted, "than she
is of the whole League." Sir John tried to explain away the bombard-

ment of Shanghai, then refused to act with a Hoover administration

whose internationalism and willpower he doubted. Lippmann publicly
THE CLASH 1 7 2

wrote that Simon was not weak, but simply represented "a Tory imperi-
alist government which bottom sympathized with Japanese action in
at

Manchuria. Indeed, Japanese officials calculated that they and the

'

British could, as they had since at least 1902, work in a common imperi-
alist club to exploit China. Tok\^o officials also noted the strength of
U.S. -Japan economic compared with those of the United States
ties,

and China, and believed Hoover would not act against them. They were
correct: the President told Stimson he "would fight for the continental

United States as far as anybody, but he would not fight for Asia."^^
Amid these disheartening events, Stimson moved to the fourth and
final level of his response. On pubhc letter
Februar}' 23, 1932, he sent a
to Senator William Borah, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
The Secretary of State used the letter, most of which was wTitten by
Hornbeck, to announce that if Japan \iolated the Nine-Power Treaty,
the United States would not be bound by the Washington Conference's
Five-Power Treaty. In other words, if Japan continued to violate the

open-door principles, the United States would begin rebuilding its

Navy. The on the Japanese was not dramatic. They began pulling
effect
out of Shanghai in March, but did so because they wanted to focus on
North China, not because of Stimson's pressure. His was largely a "pol-
icy of bluff," as Stimson himself later phrased it.^^

In February, the Seiyukai Party and the Inukai government won a

landslide election victory; but it was meaningless. The militar\; not elec-
toral politics, moved the nation's policies. The military's power became
vividly clear on May 15 when several army and naw officers, in midday,
gunned down seventv^-five-year-old Prime Minister Inukai in front of

his daughter-in-law and grandchild. One brave Japanese editorial uTiter

saw the act as the ultimate breakdown of the society: it was "more . . .

a massacre than an assassination, and more ... a preparatory^ movement

for revolution than ... a massacre." Neir York Times correspondent
Hugh Byas later noted that "a significant trinity^ had fallen banker —
[Inoue], capitahst [Baron Dan Takuma], politician [Inukai], each victim
the highest representative of a class," each gunned down, Byas charged,
so a pure Japan of "soldiers and patriots" could be returned to the
Emperor."^
Inukai s removed the last important semblance of civilian gov-
killing

ernment in Japan until after World War II. He was replaced by Admiral
Saito Makoto, while Uchida Yasuya became foreign minister, and Araki
Sadao, the fenent militarist, remained minister of war. Handsome,
known bon vivant while married to the daughter of a millionaire,
as a
and formerlv head of the South Manchurian Railwav; Uchida, before
TKe Slipknot: Part 1 i 7 3

he power in late 1933, went far in destroying the foreign ministry's

left

influence and enhancing the army's power. As foreign minister during

1918-21, he had told the U.S. ambassador that China seemed destined
to have foreign dynastic rulers: "Tarter, Mongol, Manchu emperors.

Why not a Japanese Emperor?" U.S. officials recalled and widely circu-
lated the story in 1932. By August, the Saito-Uchida cabinet decided it
would woo Americans "by an appropriate allocation [sic] of the open
door," but nevertheless defined the United States as "the greatest obsta-
cle" to Japan's plans in Manchuria and Mongolia. Certainly that obsta-
^^
cle was not the League of Nations.
Throughout 1932 a League Commission, led by A. G. R. Lytton of
Great Britain, investigated the Manchurian episode. On December 10,
1932, the Lytton Report, in a remarkably even-handed assessment of
the crisis, seemed to blame Chinese nationalism and disorder as much
as Japanese militarism. But it refused to recognize Japan's regime in
Manchuria (now renamed Manchukuo by Tokyo), and its Japanese-
imposed head, Henry Pu-yi, as a front for the militarists. The report
asked for the protection of Japanese rights, but demanded the restora-
tion of China's territorial and administrative integrity. Stimson and
Hornbeck called the report a "magnificent achievement." Japan called
it Manchukuo and in March 1933 walked out of the League.
an insult to
Not that much of an alternative existed: the Kwantung Army's advance
^^
into North China made any negotiations with the League ludicrous.
As he was leaving office in 1933, Stimson wrote that four years earlier
he and Hoover believed the world would remain at peace because of
"definite economic and evolutionary facts." Instead, of course, the eco-
nomics collapsed and evolution transformed into devolution. "In Japan,"
Stimson wrote his mentor Ehhu Root in late 1931, "the cause of Mr.
Hyde against Mr. Jekyll has in large measure been victorious, and my
efforts on behalf of the latter without much seeming result." Then and
later, Stimson placed much of the blame on Hoover, Castle, and Simon

for Mr. Hyde's victories. But given the Secretary of State's fear of Chi-
nese nationalism, hatred of the Soviet Union (which was the only power
in a position to move and reluctance even to aid China
against Japan),
militarily, Stimson exemplified —
and was not an exception to the —
dilemmas of U.S. policy in 1931-32. Hoover and Stimson, as well as
Lamont, believed that American-style capitalism, duly embodied in its
political dimension by the Washington treaties, could undergird U.S.-
Japan cooperation. By 1932, that capitalist system seemed to be in a
freefall ("depression has degenerated into a panic," Castle recorded in

his diary, "and nobody seems to have the slightest idea as to the way
THE CLASH 1 7 4

out"). The new U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew, could write
Stimson in 1932 that "It is very unlikely that the Mitsuis or Sumitomos
[zaihatsu] would allow their immense foreign . . . interests to be endan-
gered by a super-reactionary movement." Grew should have known; he
was and though he did not learn to speak
a highly experienced diplomat,
Japanese during the next nine years he was stationed in Japan, his wife
Alice spoke it fluently —
and she was Commodore Perry's granddaughter
as well. But as Grew told the new U.S. President, Franklin D. Roose-
velt, Japan was "menacing" because of its spirit "a spirit which per-
—
haps has not been equalled since . . . the Mongol hordes followed
Genghis Khan in his conquest of Asia." For FDR and Asia, it was not a
happy historical analogy.^^

Xakanasni, Hull, and the Race Between

Trade and Politics Toward War

Certainly imperialism seemed to be a profitable enterprise

Japan by for
the mid-i930s, even as the Western industrial powers continued to slog
in depression. Its unemployment numbered 500,000, one-tenth that of
Germany and one-twentieth of the United States. By 1935, national
income was climbing to historic levels, although many rural and fishing
villages continued to suffer. The volume of Japanese exports in 1936
broke all previous records. Much to Tokyo officials' dismay, imports
persistently exceeded those exports, but that was one reason why the
Japanese people enjoyed an ever higher standard of living during the
1930s —and no doubt a major reason why they supported the army's
passion for combining expansionism with an emphasis on traditional
values. That combination seemed to be both reassuring and
^^
rewarding.
To the horror of U.S. officials, Japan was moving ahead economically
—
because it was pulling in politically that is, it was centralizing poli-
cymaking and creating a tightly managed yen bloc encompassing For-
mosa, Korea, Manchuria, and North China, with Tokyo at the center.
The guiding hand was that of Takahashi Korekiyo, finance minister
from late 1931 until 1936. A close reader of John Maynard Keynes's
work, the seventy-eight-year-old Takahashi began in 1932 by inflating
prices with low discount rates and massive government deficits. He
meanwhile protected balance of payments by ignoring the gold standard
and allowing flexible exchange rates. In the trade centering on the yen
bloc, exports shot up from 24 percent to 55 percent of all trade between
Tke Slipknot: Part 1 17 5

1929 and 1938, while imports doubled, to 41 percent. Despite the falling
silk trade after 1929, the United States remained Japan's number-one
overseas customer (and Japan was the third-best trading partner of
Americans). The long-term prospects of the U.S. market were uncer-
tain, however, especially after Stimson and Hornbeck hinted at impos-
ing economic sanctions on Japan. Takahashi's measures were
administered by ''the new bureaucrats," as the press called them, who
were alienated from i920S-style market capitalism after the 1927—31
crashes, and who worked with the military to mobilize the economy.
Much as in post-1951 Japan later, the bureaucrats brought considerable
order out of the economic chaos. But they did so by further weakening
a rudderless ministry that could not devise tactics to deal with the new
bureaucrats or the military^^
The great private companies, the zaihatsu, led by two giants, Mitsubi-
shi and Mitsui, had to adjust to the military-bureaucratic demands for
a return to traditional values and unquestioned patriotism. The zaihatsu,
however, never lost control of their own destiny. They cooperated with
and profited from the imperialism. In their supposed tenko (conver-
sion), the zaihatsu actually did not have far to go. By 1931-33, private
business was under a cloud. Mitsui, led by Baron Dan Takuma, had
made a huge profit in currency speculation that drove down the yen's
value. He paid for this speculation with his hand of an life at the

enraged assassin in 1932. Mitsui and its hundred or so companies then

did a tenko, set up a patriotic foundation, sold shares to the public, and
worked closely with the military. Mitsubishi did much the same under
its slogan "To foster harmony and to revere the spirit of harmony" and —
thus to serve the state. By the mid-i93os, Japan had, relatively, the high-
budgets in the world (43 percent of the overall national
est military
budget, compared with 18 percent in the United States), and zaihatsu
profits rose as the nation went on a war footing. Mitsubishi's Heavy
Industry division increased 150 percent between 1932 and 1936 because
it made ships, and tanks. The Nissan group's revenues
airplanes,
increased nearly thirty times between 1931 and 1934, largely because
of a Nissan-government partnership to accelerate industrialization in
Manchuria. The military, with its strong anti-capitalist sentiment, tried
as late as 1940 with 'a new economic order" to bring the zaihatsu fully
under state control, but it never fully succeeded — nor, given the zaiha-
tsus cooperation, did it need total control to accelerate growth. Under
Finance Minister Takahashi's reign of 1931 to 1936, what was good for
the militarizing state was good for the zaihatsu.
In United States, meanwhile, the new President, Franklin D. Roose-
 —
THE CLASH 1 7 6

velt,was trying to limit the damage inflicted by the Japanese invasion

of Manchuria and, more important, the post- 1929 economic crash. He
approached the Asian crisis by taking over Stimson's two policies: the
non-recognition doctrine, and the warning that if Japan violated the
Nine-Power Treaty, the United States would no longer be bound by the
naval limits in the Five-Power Treaty On a dark, cold, rainy early Janu-
ary morning at Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park, New York, the newly
elected President warmed Stimson by saying that "he fully approved of
our policy in the Far East; that his only possible criticism was that we
did not begin it earlier." FDR, as on so many occasions, told in detail
how he personally knew Asia well because his grandfather had been
involved in the China trade. *'He said," Stimson noted, "that it was his
belief that Japan would ultimately fail through economic pressure," and
that China would prevail against this attack as it had against so many
others over the centuries. As for Japan's militarism and the murdering
of "liberal leaders," Stimson saw these as only "a temporary reversion by
Japan to the old position of a feudal, military autocracy." FDR agreed. ^^
On May 31, 1933, Japan and China signed a truce, but by now the
Kwantung Army controlled Manchuria (or Manchukuo) to the Great
Wall, and its The Chinese
influence reached well into North China.
remained bitterly divided between Nationalists and Communists. The
State Department also gathered evidence to show that Japan, contrary
to its Washington Conference pledges, was fortifying its mandated
Pacific islands. At a private meeting of the New York Council on For-
eign Relations, Japan's former delegate to the League, Matsuoka
Yosuke, told the movers and shakers of New York and Washington that
"China needs reorganization" and that "Force, and only force, can bring
such a project to fruition. " "The spread of Communism in China," he
warned, "is Matsuoka said he knew Ameri-
a cause of anxiety to Japan."
cans disliked Japan's expansion. But the two nations were close trading
partners, and Tokyo did not intend to close the open door to China:
"You could cripple our industries by retaliatory measures. I think your
heads are with us in spite of your prejudice. I think your hearts are with
"^^
China in spite of your common sense.
Matsuoka s pairing of American racial and economic attitudes was
neat, but Roosevelt's first approach to Japan had less to do with eco-
nomic retaliation, and much more to do (as he had indicated to Stim-
son) with aiding China. The President announced he would build up
the Navy to treaty strength, then set aside nearly a quarter-billion dol-
lars for "public work" of this kind. More directly, he helped China
despite the State Department's warning that the country was immersed
TKe Slipknot: Part 1 111

in chaotic, multiple revolutions. The aid took various forms: a $50 mil-
lion credit from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for wheat and
cotton exports to China; U.S. airplanes and pilots (including the famed
speed flyer Major Jimmy Doolittle) helping —and in many ways being
the Chinese air force; allowing Curtiss-Wright Corporation to build a
$5 million airplane factory at Hangchow; and pushing a subsidiary of
the U.S. government-subsidized Pan American Airways to take over
parts of China's civil aviation. Japan's response in 1934 was blunt. For-
eign Office spokesman Amau Fiji issued a statement that emphasized
Japan's "special position" in China, and —with specific reference to
China's new and military advisers
airplanes —warned
that Japan would
sternly oppose "any attempt on the part of China to avail herself of the
"^^
influence of any other country in order to resist Japan.
This "Amau statement" caused a sensation in the West, although the
State Department made no direct public response. The statement was
actually based on diplomatic instructions by the new foreign minister,
Hirota Koki, to Japan's minister in China. Hirota, facing rising Chinese
nationalism on the mainland and unrest at home, vowed to complete
Japan's "mission in East Asia" despite opposition from other powers. In
May 1934, Hirota had even tried to undercut U.S. policy by proposing
that the Pacific region be divided into American and Japanese spheres
of influence. He was Japan's central foreign policy figure between 1933
and 1937, and while often vacillating, his commitment to the "mission"
in China was so intense that in 1946 he was executed by the Allies as a
war criminal for crimes against Chinese civilians. Hirota and Amau's
fear that Americans were helping China was of course well founded.
Roosevelt refused to become directly involved by mediating the war, as
the Chinese begged him to do, but —
in a typical Rooseveltian maneu-
ver— he moved so indirectly that as one admirer later noted, it could
have broken a snake's back. Such U.S. publications as News-Wee\, Lit-
erary Digest, the New York Times, and especially The New Refuhlic
detailed in early 1934 how U.S. planes and advisers flowed to help
Chiang Kai-shek's regime. News-Week drew the lesson: China now had
a good air force, and its "powerful fleet of planes equipped with incendi-
ary bombs might do terrific damage to Japanese cities, practically all of
which are at least 50 percent of wooden construction."^'
The more the Japanese tried to extend their hold in North China,
the less secure they became. In 1932, they had tried to justify their
aggression by floating the idea of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.
Viscount Kaneko declared in a widely noted article that in 1905, Theo-
dore Roosevelt, in the intimacy of the President's study at Sagamore
THE CLASH 1 7 8

Hill,had strongly ad\ased such a doctrine because "Japan is the only

nation in Asia which understands the principles and methods of west-
ern civilization." But the President had warned Kaneko that Japan must
"obsen^e the American policy of the 'open door ... in China." Since
TR had used U.S. troops freely in the Caribbean region to enforce his
version of the Monroe Doctrine, the implications for Japans actions of
1931-32 were obvious. U.S. observers, however, were having no part of
it. The originalMonroe Doctrine aimed to maintain the political status
quo in the Americas, Hornbeck told Secretar}^ of State Cordell Hull,
but Japan's version aimed at altering the economic status quo in the
"is

Orient in favor of Japan." Hornbeck had put his finger on the catalyst
^-
in the intensifying U.S. -Japan clash.
The American refusal to blow air into Tok\^o's trial balloon of a Japa-
nese Monroe Doctrine seemed be underlined in November 1933
to
w^hen Roosevelt formally recognized the So\iet Union. Apparentlv no
records of the talks between the President and Foreign Minister Maxim
Lit\anov that led to recognition were kept. The So\iets and their leader,
Joseph Stalin, however, clearly wanted the Americans to help them in
(as the Soviets phrased it) "breaking that country^ [Japan] as between
the two arms of a nutcracker." Stalin preferred a U.S.-Japan-So\det non-
aggression pact as the nutcracker. FDR, however, had no intention of
making such a direct inter\^ention in Asia, nor did he want to exchange
his indirect anti-Japanese policy for a blunt public position. Certainly
the Japanese were afraid by late 1933 of being surrounded by the two
large powers, but Hornbeck and others reassured Japan that the United
States did not view recognition of the Soviets as an anti-Japanese act.
When the Soviets discovered the U.S. reluctance to work with Stalin
directly against Japan, \\ ashington-Moscow relations quickly cooled to
the freezing point. Stalin then turned in Januarys 1935 to protect himself
(a tactic he used with Hitler to greater public attention four years later)

by stunning the West and formally dealing with Manchukuo. He even

^^
sold northern Manchuria's central railway to Manchukuo.
If, as Stalin discovered, U.S. officials intended their political ties to

be minimal, their economic ties were to be expanded. This dichotomy,

American tradition since at least 1801, when
of course, had been in the
President Thomas Jefferson vowed "no entangling alliances, but did all
he could to accelerate U.S. exports. In the 1930s, political obligations
were to be minimal, in part so economic marketplaces could be max-
imized. Marketplaces were not to be bound by politics, but opened
through competition and an absence of political restraints. This historic
U.S. policy slammed up against Japan's determination to integrate Man-
Tke Slipknot: Part 1 17 9

chukuo and as much of North China as possible into its own system.
Roosevelt, and especially his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, saw two
great dangers in the Japanese course: not only did it prevent Americans
from having equal access to important Asian markets amid economic
depression; but only the American approach could prevent the creation
of warring political blocs and instead lay the foundation for long-term
world peace.
economic remedies seemed still to exist.
In 1934, the chance for such
U.S. officials, led by Hornbeck, a skeptical Roosevelt, and an enthusias-
tic Hull, enticed Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Act (RTA), and

to supplement it with a governmental Export-Import Bank. The bank

was truly historic because it brought the U.S. government's financial
support directly into the marketplace to replace the bankers —who had
for two centuries financed the nation's exports until they destroyed
themselves in the late 1920s. Hull was the central figure in these new
economic policies. An avowed disciple of Woodrow Wilson's freer-trade
internationalism, the former Tennessee congressman had a fanatic's
faith that closed trading blocs (the kind the Japanese, Germans, and
even the British were constructing) led to poHtical blocs, and that those
in turn created friction that invariably flamed into war. No one under-
stood Hull better than Dean Acheson, his assistant secretary of state
between 1940 and 1944. "His hatreds were implacable," Acheson
recalled, and he usually "got" his enemy The handsome sixty-three-
year-old Tennessean, "with almost fanatical single-mindedness," as
Acheson phrased it, turned all of his considerable passion to obtaining
"
'mutually beneficial reciprocal trade agreements to reduce tariffs' on a
"^"^
basis of equal appHcation to all nations.
Hull's RTA would remain the foundation of U.S. trade policy
of 1934
sixty years later at the twentieth century's close. In the mid-i930s, how-

ever, his deliberate economic approach faced a wall of opposition in

Asia. Prominent Americans who had lost confidence in the Japanese

beheved that wall would never be scaled. Thomas Lamont not only
began turning against Japan but worked to push the British to oppose
"a military clique in Tokyo that acted much like 'young German Nazis."
"

In 1934, as well, the 1924 best-seller The Great Pacific War, by Hector
C. Bywater, appeared in a second edition. Bywater's profoundly gloomy
—
prophecy that American naval weakness in the Pacific combined with
clashing U.S. -Japan interests equaled war —
not surprisingly mirrored
the U.S. Navy Department's pessimism. Then came one of the more
disastrous legislative measures in the history of American diplomacy,
the Silver Purchase Act of 1934. Passed at the demand of western silver
THE CLASH 1 8

interests thatwere led by the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, Key Pittman of Nevada, the act drove up silver prices until
silver from China —
whose currency was based on that metal flooded —
into world markets. The already disorganized Chinese economy turned
even more chaotic. In a particularly bloody irony, silver smuggled from
China to Japan was used by the Kwantung Army to finance its rape of
China.^5
In 1935, Hull's plans received another heavy blow when Japan's
objections led the other four nations to end the 1922 Five-Power Treaty's
limitations on naval construction. It died because the United States
refused repeateddemands from Tokyo for a more favorable ratio in
warships. Hornbeck led the opposition to any compromise with the
Japanese. He was beginning to believe that if the alternatives were
either to accept the continued Japanese penetration of North China in
1935 or explicitly surrender the open-door principles, he would prefer
to accept Japan's invasion —
Hornbeck concluded, despite all their
for,

victories, the Japanese had become mired in an indecisive struggle that

was draining their strength. Over time, U.S. principles would be vindi-
cated. Other leaders also refused to give up hope over the long term.
"The one point that should be kept constantly in mind by American
business is trade opportunity, in China," declared the business execu-
tives belonging to the National Foreign Trade Council in 1935. 'It is a
field which now offers, perhaps more surely than any other, the greatest
promise of expanding trade." If, of course, there was time.^^
Top Japanese officials agreed with part of Hornbeck's assessment:
faced with a China and an economy
dangerously unpredictable
demanding more and more raw materials, they were running out of
time. In 1936, splits within the army over policy toward China became
explosive when Finance Minister Takahashi tried to cut back rapidly
rising governmental expenditures by reducing the rate of the military
budget's increase.
On February 26, several hundred young army officers occupied gov-
ernment buildings, murdered Takahashi and three other high officials,
then cut off Tokyo's communications with the outside world. They
claimed to be dedicated to purifying Japan by restoring the Emperor's
full powers. They intended to do this, the rebels maintained, by
attacking the zaihatsu and civilian politicians who had corrupted the
society (and also, of course, back the military increase
had tried to cut
in the budget). After several days, the Emperor's opposition and an
Imperial Guard of fifteen thousand loyal soldiers put down the rebel-
lion. But the '2/26" events' effects rippled on. In the chaotic aftermath
The Slipknot: Part 1 18 1

of the aborted coup, one army group, the "control" faction that included
Tojo Hideki, became dominant. This "control" group wanted to move
quickly to prepare Japan for possible wider (not only Asian) war by
mobilizing the people and the economy. Because of the "2/26" events,
the military gained an even heavier hand over terrorized civilian politi-
cians and the foreign ministry. The militant nationalism received justi-
fication from a group of intellectuals who founded the Showa
Kenkyukai Association in late 1936. Although Kenkyukai initially

included liberals, it fell into the hands of ultranationalists who vowed

in the name of the Emperor to free Asia from Western influences and
place it under the "guidance" of traditional Japanese values. The "West-
ern concept of freedom" was to be replaced by the "Eastern concept of
morality"^^
The "2/26" developments also sharpened the fight between army and
navy leaders over the specific direction of Japan's expansion. The navy,
dependent on wanted to place greatest emphasis on Southeast Asia
oil,

and less on North China. The army, more ideological and intent on
systematic control of Asia's economy intended to build a "new China."
In August 1936, the members of the cabinet of Hirota Koki formerly —
foreign minister, now prime minister —
tried to reconcile their differ-
ences with a document entitled "Fundamentals of National Policy." The
document's "Three Principles" undergirded Japan's future expansion.
The principles were not modest. They included driving out the "tyranni-
cal"Western powers from East Asia, developing cordial relations with
other Asian peoples, and developing a powerful economic bloc with
China that could be extended into Southeast Asia. The Japanese people
were to be mobilized for these missions with "sound thoughts." The
United States was seen as a long-term problem, so the navy was given
^^
additional resources for a buildup.
The immediate danger, however, lurked in North Asia: the Soviet
Union. In September 1936, Hirota and the military nearly pulled a dra-
matic coup by negotiating an anti-Comintern pact with Chiang Kai-
shek. If they had succeeded, the Soviets would have been further iso-
lated, the Chinese split off from the Soviets, and Chiang made more
dependent on Japan. But Chiang refused to bite. On November 25,
1936, Japan instead signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany.
Publicly, the agreement seemed bland. Secretly, it provided that if the
Soviet Union attacked or threatened either Germany or Japan, the other
nation would consult to determine how to "preserve their common
But Americans as well as the Soviets paid a price for this pact:
interest."
the Japanese military's success in obtaining the treaty struck a body
THE CLASH 1 8 2

blow at the foreign ministry's hope to maintain some Hnks with the
Americans and British as it had done in the 1920s. Thus, out of long
historical themes —
assassinations at home, ambitions in China, and the
further weakening of U.S. -Japan relations
^^
—
emerged the beginnings of
the Axis alliance.

W^ars and Actors

The 1936 alliance began a five-year era in which Japan moved from
weakness to weakness and the United States from weakness to

strength. The Japanese tried to overcome their weakness. The Ameri-

cans often seemed to try to overcome their strength. Overall, the 1937—
41 years were the most instructive in the post-1853 relationship. They
not only vividly demonstrated Japan s dependence on that relationship,
but how each time the Japanese tried to use diplomacy or military force
in Asia to break the dependence, the dependence only tightened. The
relationship resembled a slipknot in which the more Japan struggled
against it, the tighter it became — until, finally, the Japanese Empire

strangled.
In late 1936, that empire seemed to be on the move to new conquests
in North China and to gains in the industrial complex developed by
the zaihatsu. Appearances deceived. Theorists such as Yamada Seitaro
warned that the miUtary campaigns distorted the economy while failing

to improve the enormous rural population whose living conditions

lagged a century or more behind. The glow of the export economy that
had appeared since 1932 hid the economic cancers massive internal —
imbalances, dependence on the United States for everything from oil
to machine tools to export markets —
that ate away at Japan. Mean-
while, China seemed to be growing stronger. In December 1936 at Sian,
Chiang had been captured, and nearly executed, by dissident generals
who wanted to end the civil war against the Communists so they could
focus fully on kilHng Japanese. Chiang escaped. A "united front" of
Nationalists and Communists briefly formed. The Chinese began to
move north against the Japanese invaders. Meanwhile, with the help
of British financial experts, the Chinese economy dramatically
"^^
improved.
In June 1937, Prince Konoe Fumimaro rode
power as primeinto
minister on the hopes of the senior politicians and the Emperor that he
could fashion a settlement in China. "To some extent carried along by
forces which were beyond his comprehension," as the historian Ian
Tke Slipknot: Part 1 18 3

Nish has observed, Konoe was to be a pivotal, and sad, figure. He

seemed, one diplomat noted, to be a "shy squirrel sheltered in the deep
forests." The protege of the last genro, Saionji, who was instrumental in
making him prime minister, Konoe had been born in 1891 to one of
Japan's most prestigious families. He had flirted with socialism while
studying at Kyoto University, and even translated Oscar Wilde's The
Soul of Man Under Socialism was
into Japanese, until in the 1930s he
attracted to Fascist thinkers. A more consistent theme in his life was a
bitter view of the West for its selfishness and racism, which he had

encountered at Paris in 1919. Nor did he ever forgive the United States
economic disaster in 1929. But he sent his son to
for its failure to avert
America for his college education, and while visiting him in 1934, Konoe
was astounded by the anti-Japanese feeling. In a speech the following
year, he declared that Colonel Edward House's approach during World

War I had been correct: the "monopolization of world resources by

"

the Americans and British had to end, and an "international new deal"
instituted to help have-nots such as Japan take care of their growing
populations."*^
Konoe took over the government in 1937 amid rumors that Japan's
North China Army was about to deal with Chiang on its own terms.
The prime minister tried to short-circuit the move, but on July 7, 1937,
Chinese and Japanese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge south
of Peking. The military convinced him that the incident was only the
tip end of a Chinese offensive, perhaps supported by the Soviets, that

required a tough response. Konoe allowed reinforcements to be sent,

fighting escalated, and Japan and China were soon enmeshed in all-out
war. Ishiwara, who had done much to trigger the Manchurian invasion
in 1931, now warned that Japan had taken the wrong turn. He and
his colleagues wanted Konoe to concentrate on building a long-term
economic powerhouse in Manchukuo that could give Japan the assured
base for future empire. Instead, Ishiwara warned, China threatened to
become for Japan "what Spain was for Napoleon," that is, "an endless
bog." A year later, Japan had captured Chiang's capital of Nanking and
installed its own puppet government. But the fighting only intensified.
Chiang refused to discuss peace terms, conflicts between Soviet and
Japanese troops erupted along the Manchurian border, and war
demands were destroying Japan's vital export industries. The "bog"
"^^
turned out to be quicksand.
Roosevelt responded to the 1937 invasion with a range of actions, few
ofthem effective and some of them embarrassing. He was playing a
weak hand, and all of his low cards were showing. In mid-1937, just as
THE CLASH 18 4

the war recommenced, the U.S. economy spun into the sharpest
dechne in its history. FDR's attempt to balance the budget, along with
overspending, created a crash of profits and stock prices. The New Deal
had failed utterly in its attempts to find a peacetime solution for the
1929-33 collapse of the system. Roosevelt also failed to gain control of
foreign policy. In 1935, Congress began to pass a series of Neutrality
Acts that — in an attempt to prevent a replay of the process that sucked
Americans into World War I — rigidly controlled and sometimes prohib-
ited trade with belligerents. When the Sino-Japanese conflict intensi-
fied in late summer 1937, Roosevelt skirted the dilemma by refusing to
recognize that war existed. He thus did not have to recognize that the
Neutrahty Acts applied. Americans continued to sell arms toChina
(some $9 million worth over the next year), and to send vast amounts
"^^
of oil and raw materials to Japan.
When non-interventionists demanded that the President acknowl-
edge a war existed and that U.S. goods not fuel the conflict, FDR
weathered the storm. Nevertheless, his first public response to the 1937
conflict was merely a pious statement by Hull that condemned the use
of force and neglected even to mention Japan. The administration was
divided. One faction, led by Hornbeck and Secretary of the Treasury
Henry Morgenthau, wanted to protect U.S. interests in China through
a military and economic buildup that, they assumed, would force Japan
to back down. Hornbeck and Morgenthau did not believe that the Japa-
nese had the wherewithal, or the nerve, to confront the United States.
Opposed were Hull and Ambassador Grew in Tokyo who warned that
sanctions could lead to war and, at the least, undercut relative moder-
ates such as Konoe and Saionji who were trying to rein in the militarists.
Hull, with his ear to the ground of Capitol Hill, also feared that any
aggressive action could unloose the fury of congressional '"isolationists"
'^'^
who would further and Roosevelt's hands.
tie his

In August and September 1937, Japanese planes badly wounded the

British ambassador to China and bombed civilians in Nanking. Such
killing of civilians still aroused condemnation in the West. The British

approached FDR with the idea of jointly imposing economic sanctions,

an idea U.S. officials quickly mistrusted because of its source (were the
British again trying topush the United States into protecting their colo-
nies while they appeased both Japan and Hitler?). The President
instead decided to speak out on October 5, in a Chicago speech given
in the shadow of the Chicago Tribune Building, where the nation's most
powerful "isolationist" newspaper was published. Condemning the
"international lawlessness" in China, he urged that the "90 percent who
 TKe Slipknot: Part 1 18 5

want to live in peace under law" use "positive endeavors to preserve

peace. " He suggested that an attempt be made to "quarantine the

patients" against the "disease" of aggression. A stunned Hull, who had

not known about these words, feared the anti-interventionists' outrage
would paralyze U.S. policy. Some loud opposition to the United States
joining any such quarantine was indeed heard in the Senate, but the
general response was more favorable than Roosevelt had expected. In
any event, the President might well have decided he no longer needed
I the "isolationists' " votes for domestic programs, so he could defy them
in foreign pohcy."*^
If so, was quickly called. The League of Nations
Roosevelt's bluff
had been waiting since 1932 for the United States to take such a lead.
Now the League asked the Americans to meet with other powers in
Brussels during November 1937 to explore the President's suggestion of
a "quarantine." The Soviets arrived ready to accept any help from the
West. They had been involved in repeated clashes with Japanese troops
along the Manchurian border. Japan, however, refused to attend. And
the Western powers, especially the Americans, refused to take China
seriously; they even lectured the Chinese delegation to correct the con-
ditions (that is, aggressive nationalism) that had led to the war. The
Brussels Conference taught a number of lessons: the other powers and
the United States could not cooperate to stop Japan; the Americans did
not yet see the Chinese as so important as to be worth a war; and
now the younger Roosevelt had reversed the earlier Roosevelt's famous
dictum about speaking and carrying a big stick. About this time,
softly
FDR shook hands with Orson Welles and told him that since America
had two great actors, it was a fine thing they now had met. At Brussels,
the Soviets and Chinese, among others, had demanded to see one
actor's script and found the relevant pages blank.^^
 Tke SlipknotT Part 2
• . . to Pearl Harbcfr

Tigntenin^ the Knot

In December 1937, and during early 1938, Japan rewrote the

plot. Before those months, the United States had feared Japan's
invasion of China because of the threat to the open door. U.S.
officials nevertheless did little, in part because Tokyo leaders sig-

naled Washington that they understood the importance of U.S.

interests in the region and wanted no confrontations with Ameri-
cans. Japan even hired Ralph Townsend, a former U.S. consul in
China, as a propagandist to convince Americans that Japan was
"fighting the white man's battle against Chinese nationalism.
"

Then, on December 12, 1937, Japanese planes sank the U.S.

gunboat Panay, on the Yangtze River close to Nanking where the
ship was to help evacuate foreigners. Three Americans and an
Italian citizen died, many were wounded, and some of the victims
were machine-gunned in the water. U.S. diplomats were on the
vessel, as was a Fox Movietone cameraman and several journaHsts.
Two Standard Oil ships were sunk at the same time. They con-
tained hundreds of Chinese just evacuated from Nanking, many
of whom died, although the exact number has never been known.
All the vessels were clearly marked. Anti-interventionists
responded to the fear of war by proposing the so-called Ludlow
Amendment to the Constitution. It would have required

1 8 6
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 18 7

a nation-wide referendum before the country could go to battle, unless

it was actually invaded. Roosevelt had to launch an all-out lobbying

effort before the House narrowly killed the amendment, 209 to 188.

Amid the debate came news of the Japanese "rape" of Nanking. Japan's
troops massacred at least 155,000 Chinese civilians (China later put the
figure at 300,000). The New York Times reported that especially after
newspaper reporters left the city, "atrocities of all kinds reached an
unprintable crescendo."^
Tokyo quickly moved to deflate the crisis by effusively apologizing
for the sinking of the Panay, paying all of the U.S. demand for $2.2

million in reparations, and promising to control the rampaging troops

in Nanking. At the same time, the Japanese government effectively
closed much and turned the
of the Yangtze River trade to Standard Oil
commerce into a Japanese monopoly. The open-door policy was not
following the Japanese flag. Nevertheless, with the apparent settlement
of the Panay, U.S. opinion, as measured by editorials in leading newspa-
pers, grew more friendly to Japan and less supportive of China in early

•938.
Roosevelt did not follow that trend. To his Dutchess County neigh-
bor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, the President specu-
government spending was the only way to keep the
lated that all-out
economy together until he left office in 1941. "He wants to shoot the
whole works as far as spending is concerned, Morgenthau concluded "

after one conversation, "and ... he is really scared to death." FDR thus
worked with Congress to pass the Naval Act of 1938, which authorized
the spending of $1.1 billion over ten years to build a "Navy second to
none." The bill marked the first time the U.S. Fleet went above the
treaty limits set in 1922 and 1930. Congress, moreover, doubled aircraft
strength by authorizing the building of three thousand warplanes. The
fleet would not quickly catch up with Japan, which had begun its own
program, nor did military planners think the western Pacific could be
defended. But these ships, and the beginning (and highly inadequate)
buildup of bases such as Guam, signaled that Roosevelt's Pacific poH-
cies had begun moving down a new path.^
The President secretly sounded out the British about joint blockade
plans, only to have a "douche of cold water," as one U.S. official put
it, poured on the plans by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain —who
disliked FDR personally, thought the New Deal quite weird economi-
cally, and believed the Americans most undependable diplomatically.
On May 28 and June 4, 1938, Japanese planes killed a total of 1,500
civilians and wounded 2,600 more in indiscriminate bombings of Can-
 —
THE CLASH 1 8 8

ton. Roosevelt responded by allowing stepped-up militan^ aid to China,

while asking U.S. manufacturers not to sell aircraft or parts to Japan.
This "moral embargo" was also a departure, but the pressure was not
all "moral." TheDepartment announced that export licences for
State
such items would be difficult to obtain. These goods were essentially
cut off by late summer 1938. FDR received strong public support from
the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression,
an active, well -financed group led by former missionaries in China. On
the other side were exporters determined to hold on to Asian, especially
Japanese, markets. Their exports to Japan during the 1930s actually
peaked in 1937. One business journal condemned the "quarantine"
speech, but congratulated FDR for not being militaristic after the Panay
attack.^
In 1938, Roosevelt ignored these business voices to cut further cer-
tain kinds of trade. After suffering eleven years of w^ar aimed at creating
a more self-sufficient Japan, the militarists instead found their economy
more vulnerable than ever to the U.S. sanctions. Nawa Toichi, a leading
Marxist scholar, warned that Japan was trapped: the more it produced
militarily, the less it had to sell to the West, and thus the fewer goods

it could import from the West —

above all, oil and machine tools
needed for the nation's industrialization and future self-sufficiency. The
war in China, he obser\^ed, only worsened the crisis. i\rmy officials
reached the same conclusion. Not only was Japan growing more depen-
dent on goods from the United States but military manpower was
spread thin. Half of the available troops were embroiled in China. That
statistic w^as increasingly ominous because it meant the army was \ti1-
nerable in northern Manchuria, w^here it w as clashing with the Soviets."^
Nor w^ere militar\- officers pleased that zaihatsii profits fattened even
as the manpower needs and the economic self-sufficiency plans suf-
fered. Strengthened by intermarriage (especially between the Mitsui
and Mitsubishi combines), the giant companies were monopolizing for-
eign trade. The economy as a whole might be precariously weak to
support expanded war in China, but Mitsui Life Insurance Company
w as headed tow ard an 862 percent profit in 1939. Efforts by the military
to bring the zaihatsii under tighter control continually failed. One for-
eign ministry- official captured the dilemma by declaring that Japan's
attempt to find resources by exploiting China resembled "an octopus
eating its own tentacles." When Foreign Minister Ugaki tried to stop
the cannibalizing by approaching the Chinese for talks, he received no
response. In August 1938, the army resumed its own search for a solu-
tion bv attacking Hankow. Tw o months later, Hull \igorously protested
the growing threats to U.S. interests in Asia.^
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 18 9

Out of the growing crises, and in response to Hull, came Prince

Konoe's declaration of November 3, 1938, that Japan sought a "New
Order" in East Asia. In the pronouncement, and in separate notes to

Hull, Konoe declared that Chiang Kai-shek no longer spoke for China;
that Japan would reconstruct China on its own; and that a "tripartite
relationship of Japan, Manchukuo, and China" would "create a new
. . .

culture and realize a close economic cohesion throughout East Asia."

Outside interference was not to be tolerated. Open-door principles
were irrelevant in China as they now were Konoe pointedly noted —
in much of the world. Such views were not new. Konoe had been mak-
ing many of these arguments since he had turned bitter over Anglo-
American policies at Paris in 1919. What was new was Japan's deepen-
ing economic and political problems —
the kind that forced it to pay for
its trade imbalances by shipping abroad nearly half its gold reserves by
late 1937. The Konoe government believed that the potential economic
catastrophe could only be avoided by creating a new regime in North
China and Manchuria that systematically exploited the region for
Japan's interest. But he also left open the possibility that everything
to the south in China was to remain open for American and British

interests.^
If Konoe hoped this last provision might appease the Americans, he
was wrong. In April 1939, FDR
more of the U.S. Fleet to the
shifted
Pacific so British ships could remain in European waters. The move was
interpreted in editorials as an American guarantee of British holdings in
the Pacific. The President did not discourage such speculation. (The
speculation was not entirely correct. In mid-1939, Japan threatened
British interests at Tientsin. The United States simply looked the other
way and the Chamberlain government, immersed in preparations for
war in Europe, had to cut a deal with the Japanese.) When Roosevelt
asked for further reductions commerce with Japan, Thomas
in U.S.
Lamont, U.S. Steel, and Alcoa were among those who broke off pend-
ing deals. Alcoa's action blocked much of Japan's aluminum supply.^
In early July 1939, Japanese planes bombed Chiang's capital of
Chungking and U.S. China were mistreated by Japan's sol-
citizens in
diers. Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan proposed on July

8 that Roosevelt give the formal six-month notice required to end the
191 U.S. -Japan trade treaty. A leading non-interventionist, Vandenberg
1

wanted neither to help nor fight the Japanese, but his proposal received
support from those who did want to draw the hne. For once the 191
treaty was terminated, the U.S. government would be free to impose
economic sanctions. Congress never voted on Vandenberg's resolution,
nor did it have to: on July 26, 1939, Hull told Japan the treaty was to
THE CLASH 1 9

end the following January. Watching this from outside the government,
William Castle warned that 'These pin pricks" would drive Japan into
Hitler's arms and bring on a Pacific war. FDR's intention was no doubt

just the opposite: increasingly preoccupied with the European crisis, he

hoped to make Japan understand how vulnerable it was to U.S. pres-
sure. Once it understood, Japan would back away from "new orders" in
Asia and allow the President to concentrate on Europe. After all, Japa-
nese dependence on the United States seemed to deepen as the war
with China dragged on.^
China indeed resembled quicksand, and the more Japan fought, the
—
deeper it became mired and the more it needed U.S. goods. Konoes
escape the quicksand destroyed his ministry in January 1939.
inability to
His successor. Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro, tried to plot an escape by
following a complex, high-stakes approach of strengthening Tokyo's
relations with both the Axis and the Anglo-Saxon powers, while in —
classic triangular diplomacy — trying to play one side off against the
other Japan, however, not only lacked the power and imagination to
play such a high-stakes game but was pitted against two players whose
cynicism exceeded all others: Hitler and Stalin. On August 23, 1939,
the world, especially Japan, was stunned by the Nazi-Soviet pact that
freed Hitler and Stalin to divide Eastern Europe. Germany's invasion of
Poland a week later began World War II in Europe.^
Japanese officials could hardly believe it. Thinking that Hitler was
an ally, they discovered instead he had made peace with their potential
enemy, and had done so without the courtesy of even asking for their
opinion beforehand. C'After all," Saionji told a friend, "Japan is being
treated by Germany and Italy like a small Balkan nation, isn't it?" And
if Germany and Italy win, "we must realize that Japan will be even more

under their thumb than now.") Hiranuma's government soon fell. Tokyo
officials could only declare neutrality in the European conflict. They

then quickly approached the Soviets to settle their border disputes,

which had produced heavy casualties by mid-1939. At Nomonhan,
between Mongolia and Manchuria, Japan indeed suffered its greatest
military defeat in forty years. The borders were never fixed, but the
fighting did stop. The peace pleased Stalin because it allowed him to
turn toward Europe; it pleased both BerUn and Tokyo because Japan's
mihtary could turn south to threaten British, French, and Dutch colo-
nies, while extracting vital oil and raw materials from them.^^
Tke Slipknot: Part 2 19 1

The Co-Prosperity Sphere

Out of these disasters in mid- 1939 came a plan, drawn up largely by
senior and middle-level army staff officers, that called for a Japanese-
controlled bloc to exploit Southeast Asia's raw materials and markets.
This objective became known as the "co-prosperity sphere." European
influences were to be replaced in the "sphere" by Asian power, although
Japanese officials never drew up a specific plan of how this was all to

be accomplished. The term stated an ambition, not a detailed process.

The phrase was another attempt to persuade Asians that Japan's control
of their resources would work to their mutual benefit.
Japans involvement in the region had deep roots. As early as the
seventeenth century, Japanese saw themselves, rather than a corrupt
China, as the model and the center for much of Asia. Between 1923
and 1939, about 10 percent of Japan s exports, 9 percent of its imports
(including about half its iron ore), and 6 percent of its overseas invest-
ment were involved in Southeast Asia. These transactions centered on
the Dutch colony of Indonesia, the British colony of Malaya, and the
American colony of the Philippines. Less important was the French
colony of Indochina. Watching Japan closely, the British War Cabinet
of Winston Churchill decided that "the Japanese, who are a prudent
people" and "fully occupied" in China, would not "embark upon such a
mad enterprise" as seizing vital points such as British-controlled Singa-
pore.^^
U.S. officials were not as sanguine. Any hope they had about Japa-
nese prudence largely disappeared in May-June 1940 when Hitler
quickly seized France and the Netherlands, then stood poised to invade
Great Britain. As their spring military offensive in China cost tens of
thousands of casualties, Japanese leaders looked for economic relief to
the southern Pacific. They warned the European colonies to stop send-
ing war materiel to the Chinese. MiUtary planners, afraid, as the histo-
rianHosoya Chihiro has noted, of "missing the bus" provided by the
Nazi Elitzhreig, accelerated plans for a southern advance. Both they
and civilian officials, however, hoped they somehow could exploit the
^^
colonies without further alienating the United States.
Such hope was an illusion. As Europe fell to the Axis in the summer
of 1940, Roosevelt, even in the midst of a precedent-shattering cam-
paign for a third presidential term, beefed up the Pacific Fleet, worked
with Congress to pass bills that vastly increased the Air Force, and
narrowly pushed the nation s first peacetime conscription act through
THE CLASH 1 9 2

the legislature. On the same day in July 1940 that he prepared a message
to Congress asking $4 billion increase for the military, the Senate
for a
confirmed his choice for Secretary of War: seventy-three-year-old Henry
Stimson, now an outspoken memories of
interventionist with bitter
dealing with Japan in 1931—32. FDR also signed the National Defense
Action Act in July 1940, which gave him the power to cut off the export
of goods he deemed necessary for the U.S. defense effort. With this

ingenious measure, the President stopped the sale of some forty items
(including aircraft and machine tools), while claiming they were needed
at home and was not being discriminated against. He did
that Japan
^^
not stop scrap metals and oil, the items Japan most needed.
As Ambassador Grew commented in July, the U.S. economic policy
was now a ''sword of Damocles" hanging over the Japanese. Finding no
escape from the war in China, that same month the Emperor again
turned to Prince Konoe to form a government. Konoe, despite reserva-
tions of the Emperor and close advisers, appointed Matsuoka Yosuke as
his foreign minister, and the dour, tough, dominant member of the
army's "control" faction, Tojo Hideki, minister of war. Born in 1880,
Matsuoka knew Americans and their language well from his degree at
the University of Oregon. Unlike Kaneko, Katsura, and others who had
studied in the United States, Matsuoka's judgment about Americans
did not match his experience. His judgment was shaped more by his
serving as a top executive of the South Manchurian Railroad Company
in the 1920s and 1930s, and by his growing dislike of Japan's political
parties. It was also molded by a hot temper, great vanity, and a ceaseless
—
need for public acclaim the kind he received in Tokyo during 1933
when he dramatically led the Japanese delegation out of the League of
Nations. By 1940, Matsuoka was a loud voice urging that Japan fully
support the Axis powers, in part so the Japanese could more effectively
exploit the crumbling colonial empires in Southeast Asia.^"^

The mention of the soon-to-be-famous "Greater East Asia Co-

first

Prosperity Sphere" appeared in a press release from Matsuoka on

August I, 1940. The Associated Press noted that heretofore the term
had been "East Asia," meaning northern China, but now "Greater" was
added, to allude — as Matsuoka declared directly at a press confer-
ence — to the colonies, especially Indochina and Indonesia. Japan
intended to expand not only its military power but its language and
culture to create an Asian common meeting ground at the expense of
the European colonials. During a celebration at New York's Astor Hotel
of the 2,600th anniversary of Japan's founding, leading non-interven-
tionist and Roosevelt-hater Hamilton Fish (R: NY) noted the new Japa-
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 19 3

nese "Monroe Doctrine," then excused it with the remark, "What's

sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." This, however, was going
to be quite a gander. In a secret paper of July 30, Matsuoka defined
Japan's future sphere as including Indochina, Thailand, Malaya,
Borneo, the Netherlands East Indies, Burma, India, Australia, and New
^^
Zealand.
Everything Hull had tried to achieve since he had entered the State
Department was aimed precisely at destroying such regional blocs and
Japan's (or any non-American) "Monroe Doctrine." Roosevelt, with less
passion, agreed. Fearing that Japanese and German military-based car-
tels were dividing up and organizing these blocs, FDR declared in 1940

that the United States could not live "as a lone island in a world domi-
nated by force." The State Department and the New York Council on
Foreign Relations conducted studies strongly supporting Hull's view
that such blocs, run by Fascist governments, could strangle American
capitalism. U.S. business understood the danger. In its 1939 and 1940
annual meetings, the national Chamber of Commerce asked that
"Every possible effort ... be made to develop and maintain trading and
business opportunities for Americans in China equal to those of any
other nation, in accordance with traditional American pohcy." The
"drastic and unfair " restrictions found in parts of China, the chamber
declared, called out for U.S. government actions. Interestingly, this
business voice did not necessarily want Chinese control restored; it
^^
wanted law and order, not revolution, and open, not closed, doors.
In September 1940, all these views were put to the test when Tokyo
signed a pact with the Nazi puppet, Vichy France, that allowed Japa-
nese troops into northern Indochina. China was again the target: the

Indochinese bases enabled Japan to tighten pressure on the Chinese.

But the Japanese had also moved into colonial territory. From Washing-
had significantly risen because both the
ton's perspective, the stakes

British and the Americans were receiving vital materials, such as rub-
ber, from this region. On September 26, the slipknot tightened again

when Roosevelt banned the export of scrap iron and scrap steel on
which Japan depended. The next day, Matsuoka moved to escape the
trap. The New York Times four-column headline read: japan joins axis

ALLIANCE SEEN AIMED AT U.S. The Axis partners of Germany, Japan, and
Italy pledged to work with each other to create a "new order" whose

terms in Europe would be decided by Germany and Italy, and in

"Greater East Asia" (whose boundaries were left undefined) by Japan.
The Japanese were also to be the final arbiter of what the "open door"
in China meant. Of special note, the signatories promised to help one
THE CLASH 1 9 4

another, even militarily, if one was "attacked by a Power not at present

involved
^^
in the current struggles" — that is, by the Americans or
Soviets.
In Tokyo, a stunned Grew, who had believed war was avoidable, said
that with the Axis pact, saw the constructive w^ork of eight years
"I

swept away as if by a typhoon, earthquake, and tidal wave combined."

Matsuoka and Konoe hoped the pact w^ould scare Americans from a
confrontation with Japan. A leading Tokyo newspaper, Asahi, w^arned
that if Washington's policy grew tougher, "ine\itably" a "catastrophe"
w^ould result. And U.S. opinion did divide. Eleanor Roosevelt led the
pressure on her husband to retaliate by cutting off oil. FDR refused; he
believed that such a cut-off would drive the Japanese south in force.
Business voices agreed with his decision although for other reasons: "If

we don't sell to Japan, the British and Dutch will," as an oil executive
phrased his justification for supplying the Japanese military^ machine. ^^
In one area, the Axis pact did transform U.S. -Japan relations. The
ranking interventionist organization, the Committee to Defend America
by Aiding the Allies, led by the famed Kansas newspaper editor William
Allen White, for the first time linked aid to Great Britain with aid to
China. Americans, most of whom knew little about how FDR was turn-
ing up the pressure on Japan, began to see the possibility of a two-front
war. Roosevelt neutralized such fears during his successful run for a
third term by announcing that "your boys are not going to be
in 1940
sent into any foreign wars." His Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie
of Indiana, who had patriotically supported FDR's increased aid to the
British and Chinese, privately exploded over Roosevelt's remark: "That
hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me."^^
Roosevelt won. Matsuoka and Konoe fared much worse. They lost
their bet that the Axis alliance would scare the United States away from
a confrontation now certain to climax in a two-ocean war. On this piv-

otal point, Japan's naval officers, who had consistently warned that any
Axis alliance would create a U.S. -British phalanx against them, were
proven correct, and the Japanese army —which wanted the alliance to
frighten the Soviets —wrong. For
Matsuoka was naiv^e enough
his part,

to believe he might use the United States to force China into a Japa-
nese-dictated peace. Once the war in China ended, then (according to
a secret policy statement of July 27 dictated by the militarv^ and
approved by Konoe) Japan could strike south, seize oil facilities, and
break its dependence on the United States. Thus Matsuoka and the
other drafters saw the Axis alliance not as leading to war with the
—
United States, but the opposite a device to frighten Americans away
Tke Slipknot: Part 2 19 5

from war as Japan finally realized its Asian objectives. Konoe, Saionji,
and the Emperor had grave doubts. They feared the United States
would not back down and the Japanese were thus moving headlong
toward war.
Konoe bitterly blamed the military for his troubles, but he had made
a major contribution to their cause by destroying the remaining political

parties in July 1940 because, he claimed, they were too and pre-
liberal

vented the uniting of the state. Konoe urged Japanese to dedicate them-
selves to kokutai (the national weal) by pledging obedience directly to
the Emperor. The military, who constitutionally enjoyed privileged
access to the Emperor, certainly did not object. Within four months,
the confused Konoe regretted what he had done both in regard to

destroying the party system and, to a lesser extent, signing the Axis
pact. But at least that pact might be salvaged by using it to pressure the
Soviets into an agreement —one that would free Japan from its northern
concerns, allow it to concentrate forces to the south, and settle a range
of issues, including Soviet aid to China and opening Russian economic
^^
resources to Japan.
Perhaps, Tokyo officials reasoned, a deal with Moscow could also
send an effective warning to Roosevelt not to challenge Japan — a "dou-
ble-strategic point of view," as Hosoya has characterized Matsuokas
approach to checking the Soviets and Americans simultaneously. It
also, of course, was aimed primarily at obtaining resources and freedom

of maneuver so that the war with China could somehow be ended. In

early 1941, the army argued for a quick strike south against the British
and French colonies, then a return of the forces to northern China
before the Soviets could respond. This could be accomplished, army
planners believed, without drawing Americans into the war. The navy
vigorously disagreed and finally convinced the army that an attack
against the European colonies would automatically trigger a war with
the United States. Such a conflict could be waged for two years before
shortages, especially of oil, would slow the Japanese war machine. The
military thus required a large, immediate buildup to win a quick war,
and it had to be assured that the Soviets would behave while it was
occupied in the South Pacific.^
Matsuoka, again naively, believed his plans were finally coming
together. In March and Europe for talks with
April 1941, he traveled to
Hitler and Stalin. Headstrong and self-centered, Matsuoka paid little
attention to German hints of plans to attack the Soviet Union. The
Germans paid little attention to his hints that he hoped to expand the
Axis pact to include Stalin. On April 13, Matsuoka and the Soviet leader
THE CLASH 1 9 6

signed the neutrality treaty with Japan that Stalin had long wanted. To
last for five years, the pact obligated the two nations to pledge that if

one were attacked, the other would "observe strict neutrality throughout
the entire duration of the conflict." In an instant, the Soviets had their
hands free to face Hitler —although Stalin, always mistrustful, kept
large troop contingents close to Manchuria until he was certain that
Japan was moving south. For their part, the Japanese military could
strike the European colonies and Japan's northern flank would be
22
secure.
Americans were shocked. Not only were the Soviets neutralized, but
Stalin gave a body blow to the Chinese. He had been sending more
military aid than had any other government to help China. But the
Soviets secretly told Chiang they intended to keep the aid flowing and
encouraged him to continue killing Japanese. Roosevelt quickly moved
to help by quietly allowing U.S. airmen to resign from the service to

form a 'Volunteer" air force in China. Thus the famed Flying Tigers
were born. The President also stepped up other types of aid, and, at
Chiang's request, dispatched a U.S. political adviser — Owen Lattimore,
a distinguished scholar of Asia from The Johns Hopkins University.^^
If Americans were surprised by the neutraHty pact, however, the Brit-

ish were elated. For a year. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his

foreign minister, Anthony Eden, had been trying to bring Roosevelt into
the war. Frustrated, Churchill undertook an appeasement policy toward
Japan during those moments in 1940-41 when he feared the United
States would remain on the sidelines and the British might face Japan
alone in Asia. Eden also worried that Matsuoka who "is in an abnor- —
—
mal frame of mind" aimed to parlay the neutrality pact into another
deal with Washington that would neutralize the United States in the
Pacific theater. After April 1941, however, Churchill and Eden had many
fewer fears that Americans would manage to stay out of the war. By
June, the President sent China bombers that had the range to attack
"Japanese industrial areas," and
—— as Chief of the Military Staff George
Marshall put it later that year "set the paper cities of Japan on fire."^"^
Meanwhile, throughout April and May 1941, Hull and Japanese
Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburo exchanged drafts and ideas that usu-
ally hitdead ends when the Secretary of State demanded that Japan
must leave China, swear off mihtary conquest, and pledge itself unalter-
ably to the open door. Nomura worsened an already highly sensitive
process by misrepresenting Hull's views back to Tokyo. In one message,
the ambassador even indicated the Americans were prepared to recog-
nize Manchukuo. Nomura, despite his long personal friendship with
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 19 7

Roosevelt, begun during their World War I days in Washington, was

not the best choice for the post. A professional naval officer with little

diplomatic experience, the sixty- four-year-old ambassador provided a

case study of how Japan s diplomacy deteriorated when military person-
nel moved into pivotal overseas embassies after the mid-i93os. Nomura
himself declared publicly in late 1940 that "I am not meant to be an
ambassador," for a sailor on land was "quite hopeless . . . like a stranded
boat;'25
Japan's central problem in June 1941, however, was not Nomura. It

was Matsuoka's diplomacy. On

June 21, it came crashing down when
German armies invaded the Soviet Union. The foreign minister admit-
ted to the cabinet that he had miscalculated, then shocked his Usteners,
and revealed his own mercurial behavior, by proposing that Japan make
the most of it and also attack the Soviets —
despite the neutrality pact
he had personally signed with Stalin two months before. One cabinet
member, not believing his ears, asked Matsuoka to repeat what he said,
which he did. Pro-Axis to the end, Matsuoka wanted to grant Germany's
new request that Japan attack the Soviets from the east. After a week
of intense discussion, he was overruled. The military knew Russian
troops enjoyed a two to one advantage in the north. Konoe feared that
Roosevelt, who had immediately begun sending aid to the Soviets,
would retaliate against Japan. In any case, preparations were under way
for the occupation of the remainder of French Indochina. That occupa-
tion, the army and navy believed, would bring no significant U.S.

response. The move was needed economically (Japan faced rationing

and threats of unrest), and strategically (Indochina could be a spring-
board for assaults on its mineral-rich neighbors). On July 2, 1941, the
Imperial Conference approved occup3ang southern Indochina. Matsu-
oka, in the words of the historian Ian Nish, "was discarded like a spent
shot." Disgraced, he never again held a diplomatic position and was
judged too mentally unbalanced to stand trial in 1946 for war crimes. ^^

The Attempt to Cut tne Knot: Pearl Harbor

U.S. intelligence kept Roosevelt well informed of Japan's movements

south. In September had been broken, and the
1940, Japanese codes
intercepts — —
codenamed magic allowed U.S. officials to listen in on
the many secret Japanese diplomatic and, after the Pearl Harbor attack,
the military messages, magic was actually masses of raw data which
the ill-coordinated American intelligence offices never learned to sort
 1

Tke Japanese Penetration u.

of Asia, 1941
\.
Controlled by Japan, December 1941

600 miles
X
1000 km

OUTER
M N G L I /^

S I N K I A N G
^— ^ N N G
I S I A
/
THE CLASH 2

out and digest until after the war began, but it did keep Roosevelt and
Hull apprised of Japanese intentions, at least until several days before
the Pearl Harbor attack.
On July i8, 1941, FDR told the cabinet that Indochina would proba-
bly be occupied in two to three days. When asked what he planned to

do, he shocked some members by giving a lecture which concluded the

United States should do and especially not shut off oil, because
Httle,

then Japan would attack the Dutch East Indies' rich petroleum stores.
Such an attack would mean war in the Pacific. After some debate, the
cabinet decided to freeze Japanese assets in the United States. Roose-
^^
velt also agreed to cut off high-grade aviation gasoline.
Much more than that fuel was cut, however. The freeze order was to
be carried out by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a promi-
nent Washington lawyer, conservative Democrat, and after 1939, an out-
spoken interventionist whom FDR had appointed to the department in
February 1941. Faced with having to make specific decisions about sell-

ing fuel to visiting Japanese ships, Acheson interpreted the order so

strictly that a virtual embargo on oil was suddenly slapped on Japan.

The embargo did not become apparent until after early August. Mean-
while, back in Tokyo, military planners led by ambitious, middle-level
army officers had concluded that FDR's freeze order meant they would
be unable to wage war for more than two years unless South Pacific
resources were seized. Their forces moved into southern Indochina on
July 27-28, again after a deal with the Vichy French. When Roosevelt
finallyfound out about Acheson's interpretation, the President appar-
ently believed he could not countermand the oil cut-off without
appearing to give in to Japan's aggression. "Dean Acheson telephoned
me in great triumph," Secretary of the Interior and fellow hard-liner
Harold Ickes recorded in his diary of August i. "No crude oil at all can
be imported [sic] for Japan from our Pacific Coast. . . . Moreover, we
no more of Japan's silk."^^
will take
The United States had been supplying 60 percent of Japan's oil.
When the supply stopped, Roosevelt's warning about the probable
results made him a prophet. In November 1941, Acheson told Hull that

"the freezing controls had brought a great stillness over trade and
financial relations" between the two countries. The prophet, however,
was reluctant to trumpet his wisdom. When asked earlier, at a press
conference on July 29, about "export control in relation to the Far East,"
the President replied, "I don't think there is any news on it." The leading
America First, nevertheless understood the
anti-interventionist group,
consequences. While condemning Japan's aggression, it also criticized
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 1

FDR's freeze democracy or even of ourselves

as "not in the interest of
but in the interest of Britain's indefensible empire in the East." Other
critics argued that it was all an "Asiatic question," not involving Ameri-

cans. One senator made fun of a supposed Japanese threat by announc-

ing that Tokyo "will outfit soldiers with snowshoes, so they can
. . .

climb over the [Rocky] mountains and get at us." The American
. . .

First group could grab headlines, but it, like most Americans, thought

U.S. involvement more likely in Europe than in Asia, so it concentrated

^^
on European affairs.
Americans did not want to know the truth about the imminence of
such a war, and Roosevelt had no compulsion to tell it. He knew, proba-
bly from the time of the collapse of the Hull-Nomura talks in May-
June 1941, certainly from the crisis over Indochina in late July, that
Americans and Japanese were accelerating down the road to war. (In
midsummer, Tokyo even ordered the disbanding of Japan's professional
baseball league. The St. Louis-based Sporting News condemned the
Japanese as ingrates and claimed the game's virtues never "penetrated
their yellow skin.")
By July, Hull, as he was prone to say, thought everything was going
"hellward." He told Stimson that the time for "appeasement of Japan
"

had passed. The time had arrived. The move into

for a "firm policy"
southern Indochina proved that Japan was trying to surround not —
leave —
China. FDR and his advisers consequently not only imposed
the freeze, but after late July extended large lend-lease shipments to
China, ordered more aircraft for the Flying Tigers and for U.S. bases in
the Philippines, and set up a Far Eastern Command under General
Douglas MacArthur —who had retired in 1937, served the Philippine
government until 1941, and was now being called back by Roosevelt to
^^
head U.S. forces.
FDR grew reticent as well when he met Winston Churchill at their
Atlantic Conference off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941.
Churchill wanted him to give a virtual either-or warning to Japan: Either
leave Southeast Asia or face "a war between the United States and
Japan." The President refused. FDR said he was ready to press Ger-
many in the North Atlantic, but he would not yet further squeeze Japan,
largely because his military planners needed time to build up forces in
the Pacific. The farthest he would go was to tell Ambassador Nomura
on August 17, after returning from Newfoundland, that if Japan took
another step in using force, the United States would immediately take
"any and all steps" necessary to protect its "rights and interests . . .

safety and security." Nomura reported these words to Tokyo. Of equal

 —
THE CLASH 2 2

importance, he told his superiors in September (in a message U.S. and

British inteUigence intercepted) that at the highest levels the Ameri-
cans had not only determined to cut off oil for Japan but aimed at "an
"^^
economic stoppage over the whole field.
That message was read in a Japan whose military grew in power while
the economy threatened to sink from critical to chaotic. For a year,
sugar, gasoline, rubber, and cotton had been rationed. As exports to
overseas civilian markets dropped, so too did capital needed for imports,
even for imports of the raw materials that went into steel. Konoe tried
to bring some order in August 1941 by setting up government-authorized
"control associations" to oversee supply and production. The zaihatsu,
however, managed to capture the associations, conditions little

changed, and the military again found it could not adequately control
production. The economy increasingly resembled, as Ambassador Grew
privately described it mass of heterogeneous forces pulling
in May, 'a
in all directions." On September 6, Konoe's government decided to give
the United States one more chance for an economic and diplomatic
settlement. If nothing came of it, Japan was to prepare for war in late
October.^^
Konoe moved to circumvent the military and break the logjam by
dealing directly with Roosevelt at a summit meeting, perhaps Hono-
in
lulu. Grew, still hoping for the best, argued that the United States had
the leverage to obtain and guarantee a settlement. He knew, as his
private secretary later phrased it, that "Every time a taxi went around
the corner Japan had less oil." Grew was joined in his optimism by
Eugene Dooman, a longtime expert on Japan and the ambassador's top
Born of Episcopal missionary parents in Japan fifty years earlier,
adviser.
Dooman had been intimately involved in handling Manchurian and
arms-limitation problems before joining Grew in Tokyo during 1936.
Fluent in Japanese, sure of his own judgments, Dooman was especially
proud of knowing the best and least known Tokyo restaurants. He and
Grew thoroughly sympathized with Konoe's last-ditch effort, even as
they realized that Japan's probable terms — troop withdrawal from Indo-
china only after a settlement in China, recognition of Japan's special
position in Indochina, and restoration of normal U.S. -Japanese trade
were impossible for Roosevelt to accept. But at least these terms could
provide a starting point for give-and-take. In a "Dear Frank" letter of
September 22, 1941, Grew told the President that Konoe "sees the hand-
writing on the wall and realizes Japan has nothing to hope for" from the
Axis aUiance. He "will go as far as possible, without incurring open
rebellion in Japan." Grew ended with the warning that it was "highly
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 3

unlikely that this chance will come again," or that any other official

could control the "military extremists ... in their ignorance of interna-

tional affairs and economic laws."^^
Grew and Dooman lost the argument to the two leading China
hands, Stanley Hornbeck and Joseph Ballantine, who advised Hull in
Washington. Born in 1890 to missionary parents serving in India, Ballan-
tine graduated from Amherst, joined the Foreign Service, then served
inJapan but spent much of his time in China before his friend, Hull,
brought him back to head the Far Eastern Division in 1941. Ballantine
and Hornbeck believed that the central point could not be compro-
mised: Japanese withdrawal from China. Only after that pullback could
all else —
Indochina, the Axis alliance, restoration of trade be more —
easily settled. Ballantine especially worried that a deal with Konoe
would resemble the Lansing-Ishii agreement of 1918 that is, a U.S. —
recognition of Japan's paramount position, this time in China, in return
for merely a temporary peace. He also warned that if Americans were
pulled in as a mediator between China and Japan, as Konoe might try
to do, they could find themselves serving as a mere shield for further

Japanese aggression. Finally, Ballantine doubted whether Konoe, after

he returned home, could force the military to support any agreement
^"^
that FDR could accept.
Hornbeck went further. He argued that the United States not only
could not, but need not, compromise on the pivotal question of China.
The war had already left Japan so "half-beaten" and "substantially
exhausted" that Tokyo "has no intention of making war on the United
States." Hornbeck even argued that if Konoe offered to withdraw imme-
diately from China, the United States should think twice about agree-
was a complete change of government in Tokyo),
ing (at least until there
because it was the China morass that limited Japan's ability to cause
problems elsewhere. Of special note, Hornbeck and Ballantine argued
that the prospect of a summit would have a "detrimental" effect on
—
China, and might even lead as the U.S. Embassy in Chungking was
—
warning to Chinese-Japanese peace talks if Chiang thought the
Americans were considering "a 'regional detente' with Japan." Hornbeck
apparently floated a remarkable proposal that any summit should
include Chiang, a menage a trois which neither the embattled Konoe
nor the secretive Roosevelt showed any interest in joining.^^
On September 25, 194 1, Nomura handed Hull Japan's proposals for
a settlement. It was the last such paper the Japanese gave the United
States before they decided they had to go to war. Protesting that it
shared the American desire for "peace in the world, Konoe's govern- '
THE CLASH 2 4

ment downplayed the 1940 Axis pact: if the United States entered the
European War. Japan "would decide" its course "entirely independently"
in interpreting its obligations under the pact. The paper then moved to
the core of the crisis: the United States was to act as a peacemaker in
China and work for peace along Japanese Hnes. .-Vmericans could not
resort to other "measures" — that is, send aid to Chiang Kai-shek. Sino-
Japanese trade would be carried on peacefully "in conformity" with the
principle of non-discrimination. The United States would "without
delay resume "normal trade" with Japan. Once an "equitable peace"
existed in the Pacific area, Japanese troops would withdraw from Indo-
china, and .-Vmericans would ""alle\iate" their ""mihtar\- measures" in the
region — a reference to the militar\" buildup in the Philippines. On Sep-
tember 29, Grew cabled Hull to beg him to take the proposals seriously
and not demand that Japan meet L.S. preconditions (especially on
China before Roosevelt would agree to meet. If preconditions were
I

demanded. Grew warned, Konoe would fall and be replaced with ""a
military' dictatorship which will lack either the disposition or the tem-

perament to avoid colliding head-on with the United States. "^^

On October 2. in his hotel apartment, Hull responded by reading the
riot act to an already disheartened, fatigued, and pessimistic Nomura.

Hull said there had to be a '"meeting of the minds before any summit.
He handed the ambassador a statement which demanded Japan agree
to four principles that elaborated the open-door policy: respect for terri-

torial integrity non-interference in other nations internal affairs, the

principle of '"equalits" of commercial opportunit}; and change in the

Pacific region only through peaceful means. More explicitly. '"The with-
drawal of Japanese troops from China and French Indochina would be
most helpful in making known
Japans peaceful intentions."
. . .

Nomura read the statement, then replied that "the only point on which
he anticipated difficult}' in . . . reaching an agreement" was the U.S.
demand that Japanese troops leave China. If that were required before
Japan realized its aims in China —the protection of Manchukuo.
obtaining economic resources, forcing Chiang to behave and cooperate
with Japanese interests —then the Konoe government would collapse.^
The China hands, Hornbeck and Ballantine. had won the debate
against the Japan hands. Grew- and Dooman. Roosevelt would not go to
a summit until Konoe accepted the preconditions. In mid-October,
Hull unloaded his worries on a top Japanese "The Japanese official:

invasion had resulted in the establishment of many monopolies in

China and many special pri\ileges and benefits which probably . . .

accounts for the main desire of Japan to keep troops in China.' This
Tke Slipknot: Part 2 2 5

point wasmade more colorfully on October 13 when Undersecretary of

State Sumner Welles jousted with the Japanese Embassy's second-in-
command, Wakasugi Kaname. Why, Wakasugi asked, could not the two
nations reach an "understanding" on all other ''fundamental" points 'and
leave the China question in abeyance"? "I said," Welles recorded, ". . .

this question was very much like asking whether the play of 'Hamlet'

could be given on the stage without the character of Hamlet. The Min-
"^^
ister laughed loudly and said he fully understood my point.

So did the Tokyo government, although it was not laughing. Konoe,

who had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, convened a cabinet meet-
ing on October 14. The war minister. General Tojo Hideki, noted that
the early October deadline for the war-or-peace decision had passed.
He demanded a decision to mobilize troops. When objections were
raised that diplomacy required more time, Tojo exploded. He warned
that any withdrawal of troops would be a condemnation of all Japan's
efforts in China, and would also threaten Manchukuo, perhaps even
Korea. Either mobilization had to be authorized or the army must stop
its war preparations. The navy, which had long fought the army over

war objectives, went along in what one Japanese historian has called
—
"group think" even though the navy had no master plan to fight a long-
term war. Japanese troops in China, Tojo emphasized, were "the heart
of the matter, and after too many concessions to the United States,
"

"^^
Japan must not surrender the "heart.
Two days later, Konoe resigned. Tojo became prime minister. Born in
1884, the son of a samurai who became a lieutenant general, Tojo had
been educated by the army, posted early to Germany, and earned notori-
ety as a commander Kwantung Army. The powerful force in the
in the
army's "control faction" that demanded full mobilization of the society
for all-out war, he urged close cooperation with Germany. The new
prime minister was driven by long-held, bitter resentment against the
United States for its hostiUty toward Japan on such issues as China,
immigration, shipbuilding ratios, and trade. Highly intelligent (his nick-
name was "Razor Brain '), Tojo was also characterized by one of his best
biographers as "churlish," "naive and aggressive," a by-the-book soldier,
a simple person of great discipline — and with great hatred, especially
toward the West, which he believed was led by the United States in its

determination to dominate East Asia. Despite this background, the

State Department's Far East Division told FDR that Tojo was "a Konoy
"^^
[sic] adherent and a 'moderate.'
To call Tojo a "moderate" was a case study of situational ethics
applied to diplomatic terminology. Japan's leadership, indeed the entire
 ^

THE CLASH 2 6

context of Asian politics, had moved so far toward militarism that a

leading proponent of mobilization and hatred of the West could be
defined as "moderate." The bankruptcy of Japanese politics was better
explained by Konoe when, through an aide, he secretly informed Grew
about Tojo's assuming power: "It would be impossible at the present
time to form a civilian Cabinet with a liberal tinge." "There is in Japan
no civilian of adequate eminence to take over the office of Prime Minis-
ter. .Consequently the succeeding Cabinet must be composed pri-
. .

marily of military men." They were now the only Japanese "capable of
bringing about the downfall of the government.""^
Chiang Kai-shek, the pivotal point for both U.S. and Japanese diplo-
macy, was another example of relative terminology. A militarist, tied to
some of the most corrupt and criminal elements in China, anti-West-
ern, even anti-capitalist as Americans understood the term, Chiang was
a highly unlikely ally of the Western democracies. But then so was
Joseph Stalin in 1941. The need for Chiangs cooperation, even while
disdaining his revolutionary background, fascist beliefs, and anti-West-
ern attitude, explains why U.S. officials, and especially Hornbeck,
seemed to care less about ending the war in China than using that
war to squeeze Japan until it transformed its own government and paid
obedience to Hulls (and John Hay's) larger principles.
Throughout the 1930s, Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese
peasants, standing steadfastly against the Japanese invaders, as por-
trayed through the best-selling novels of Pearl Buck, the widely
acclaimed film The Good Earth based on Buck's romantic perception of
China, and the millions of copies of Life and Time magazines that were
published each week by Henry Luce, born in China of American mis-
sionary parents. But these views of China did not shape U.S. poHcy
after 1937. If they had, Americans would have been fighting in Asia long
before December 1941.
U.S. policy was driven, rather, by Hull and Hornbeck's growing anger
that Japan intended to use military force to cordon off large parts of
Asia to obtain economic self-sufficiency — the open door and Pan-Asian
ideology be damned. By October 1941, the differences among U.S. offi-

cials were not over whether, but how, Hornbeck per-

to stop Japan.
suaded many, including Hull and FDR, that the slipknot would
continually tighten as the Japanese struggled against it. Japan would
not try to cut that knot (that is, declare war), because it knew it could
not defeat the United States. Sooner or Hornbeck concluded, the
later,

slipknot would choke off the militarists. Grew was not persuaded. On
November 3, 1941, he told Hull there were those who believed the mili-
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 7

tarists would collapse "shortly . . . from the depletion and the eventual
exhaustion of Japan's financial and economic resources." But those who
believed this, the ambassador warned, "unconsciously" assumed "that a
dominant consideration would be Japan's retention of the capitalistic
system." Grew emphasized that Japan would not soon collapse precisely
because it did not have a capitalist system as Americans understood the
term. Despite continual economic crisis and the depletion of "Japan's
national resources," the economy worked sufficiently to make Japan
resistant to U.S. economic strangulation —
and to allow Japan to go to a
war with the United States that "may come with dangerous and dra-
"^^
matic suddenness.
The last, sad, meaningless discussion of these points occurred
between November 20 and 27. It was mere shadow-boxing. The main
event was scheduled to begin in two weeks. But the events of late
November summarized why the final bout was to be held. On Novem-
ber 20, Nomura handed Hull Japan's final offer. It differed little from
previous proposals. Nomura, however, was now accompanied by
Kurusu Saburo, a fifty-five-year-old professional diplomat who, as a
young man, had served in Chicago and New York as a consul (and, most
unusual for a Japanese official, had married an American woman). In
1940, as ambassador to Germany, he had negotiated the Axis pact in
Berlin. Tojo had dispatched him to help the worn-out Nomura and
string along discussions until Japan was ready to attack. Kurusu and
Hull soon began arguing over China. Kurusu dismissed the Nine-Power
Treaty and its open-door provisions as "twenty years old and out- . . .

moded." Hull shot back that Japanese militarism in China was "not
'"^^
unlike Hitlers methods.
On November 26, the Secretary of State gave Nomura and Kurusu
the last (as it turned out) set of U.S. proposals. The offer, Hull stressed,
was only "tentative." It hinged on the American insistence that Japan
had to accept the open door and "withdraw all military, naval, air, and
police forces from China and Indochina" before the United States
would allow trade and oil to flow again.
Kurusu blasted the document. "The Washington Conference treat-
ies," he declared, "had given the wrong idea to China," and "China had

taken advantage of them to flaunt Japan's rights." The proposals, he

concluded, were "tantamount to meaning the end." Which they were.
Hull had actually considered offering Japan a three-month deal in
which Japan would receive oil if it reduced its troops in Indochina. The
War Department, desperately in need of time to build up the Pacific
forces, supported the idea. But Chiang Kai-shek had, in Hull's exasper-
THE CLASH 2 8

ated words, "sent numerous hysterical cable messages to different Cabi-

net officers" and killed the proposal. Both the Chinese and the British
"^"^
wanted Americans war sooner, not later.
in the
On December i, an Imperial Conference in which the Emperor par-
ticipated gave final approval for the military strike on Hawaii. The
attack had been thoroughly discussed and agreed upon a month before
by the real decision-making body, the Liaison Conference, which had
been created in November 1940 to bring together the most important
cabinet members and the Military Chiefs of the General Staff. The
Emperor was now expected to approve, not change the earlier decision.
At that earlier meeting on November i, the mood had not been trium-
phant. Tojo and Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori invoked Japan's sneak
attack on the Russian fleet in 1904 as the kind of success that could
occur. Togo recalled that thirty-seven years earlier the army's vice chief
of staff had viewed the prospects for victory as only "fifty-fifty," but
Japan triumphed. Tojo declared to the doubters, "You have to plunge
into war if there is some chance, however slight, of winning victory."
On November 21, hope swelled slightly when Hitler
Japanese officials'

secretly assured them that if they went to war against the United States,
so would Germany. Nevertheless, that same day, magic and Signals
Intelligence (sigint —
the British counterpart to magic) intercepted a
Japanese Foreign Office instruction to its diplomats emphasizing that
Japan now aimed at "the complete expulsion of British and American
military and naval strength in china." Then came the admission of
weakness: in dealing with China, the Japanese must "avoid exhaustion"
so "we have enough war potential to face up to a lengthy world war.'"*^
The problem at the center of Japanese policy was that if Japan did
not go to war, it would collapse internally and lose everything it had
shed blood for (Manchukuo, parts of China, Indochina) quite soon; if
it did go to war, it could lose everything later —unless the United States
was forced to make peace before Americans could gear up their tremen-
dous industrial and military potential. The one U.S. official who best
understood the fundamental Japanese weakness was Hornbeck, and he
had the misfortune to say one week before the attack on Pearl Harbor
that given itsproblems Japan would not go to war soon.^^
As for Roosevelt, he was still, as he told Secretary of the Treasury
Morgenthau in May 1941, "waiting to be pushed into this situation."

Morgenthau correctly observed that FDR did not want to "lead us into
war." In earlyNovember, the President asked his cabinet whether the
public would support him if he used naval power to stop Japan's south-
ward advance, or did he need some "incident"? Unanimously, the cabi-
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 9

net told him he had public support and no incident was needed.
Roosevelt made no
response. At this time, 73 percent of Americans
polled believed the U.S. Fleet could defeat the Japanese navy, and only

3 percent disagreed. Racism shaped such a view. Secretary of the Inte-

rior Ickes, for example, had dismissed the threat of a sneak attack a
when he wrote in his diary, "It seems
year earlier to be pretty well
'"^^
understood now that the Japanese are naturally poor airmen.
If Roosevelt did little to lead, or to prepare Americans war pub-
for
licly, he did much more quietly. If he was '"waiting to be pushed," he
put himself and the nation into the position to be shoved easily into
war. By autumn 1941, the United States was sending troops to Iceland,
extending a protectorate over Greenland, freezing Japanese assets, cut-
ting off Japan s oil, pledging an American response if Japanese troops
attacked the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) or British colonies, and
secretly convoying goods sent to the British through German subma-
rine-infested waters. When the America First Committee tried to pull
the United States back, the President not only criticized it publicly. He
secretly ordered the FBI to wiretap anti-interventionists' phones and
suggested that the Justice Department start a grand jury investigation
"^^
of America First.

On November 25, 1941, FDR and his top advisers, including Hull,
Stimson, and the chiefs of the military services, stated the issue pre-
cisely. "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese]
into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much dan-
ger to ourselves," Stimson recorded. "It was a difficult proposition." The
difficulty came from their knowledge that a large Japanese naval force
with five infantry divisions on board was steaming south, possibly to
attack Dutch or British holdings. Roosevelt told the British that a Japa-
nese attack would bring U.S. "armed support." He apparently planned
to tell the world of this pohcy on December 8. magic intercepts also

told U.S. officials that the Tojo government had decided war with the
United States "may happen sooner than expected," and it would occur
in the "South" —
not in the "North," that is, not against the Soviets. By
December 6, Washington officials believed the Japanese force intended
to strike the Kra Isthmus, the narrow, highly strategic portion of the
Malay Peninsula. Although warnings about possible war had been sent
to Hawaii as early as November 27, FDR and his military chiefs did not
"^^
believe those islands would be initially attacked.
Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, however, was making last-minute prepa-
rations for a naval and air force attack on Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto
remains one of the most fascinating of twentieth-century Japanese lead-
THE CLASH 2 1

ers. Born into a large family in 1884, adopted in 1916 by the Yamamoto
family, which needed a male heir, he graduated from one of the Naval
Academy's most distinguished classes. The five foot three, 125-pound
officer was a hero in the 1904-05 war, in which he lost two fingers
and suffered wounds over his body when an overheated gun blew up.
Shimbashi's geisha district, which he knew intimately, greeted him as
"Eighty sen," because a geisha's regular charge for a manicure of ten
fingers was 100 sen, or one yen. Posted to the United States in 1919, he
studied English at Harvard and read widely in American history ("I like

Lincoln. . . . [H]e's great not just as an American, but as a human

being"). Yamamoto came to love American football, once going out of
his way to see the Iowa-Northwestern game in Chicago. His passion,
however, seemed to be gambling, which he had probably learned during
a visit to Monaco. Legend had it that he won so much money in a

Monaco casino one time that he was forbidden to return. When he

came back to the United States as naval attache from 1926 to 1928, and
again when he traveled by train across the country in 1934 en route to
the London Naval Conference, he devoted much time to playing mah-
jong and cards, especially poker.
His closest staff officer recalled that Yamamoto "had a gambler's
heart." He demonstrated such a heart when he bet during the interwar
years that the future of the Japanese navy and, indeed, global security,
depended on airpower. As an instructor at Japan's Naval Staff College
in the 1920s he stunned students by emphasizing that the fleet's future
rested on having enough oil and airplanes. As commander of the
Kasumigaura Aviation Corps that gave birth to the Naval Air Force after
1930, he devised the basic training for pilots flying over the oceans.
After being promoted to vice admiral in 1934, Yamamoto worked with
the navy leaders who opposed ties with the Axis. Although unsuccessful
in cutting those ties, he became commander in chief of the navy in

1939. He quickly understood that Japan could no longer "adjust our

relations America through diplomacy." If war which he
with —
—
opposed did come, he believed Japan had to destroy the U.S. Pacific
Fleet or be destroyed itself. War planners in Tokyo said that an attack
on Hawaii could not be successful. In early spring 1940, Yamamoto
decided it could succeed, if it employed enough airpower. In the United
States he had learned, among other things, to love football, speak his
mind ("Only an asshole would say anything like that" was sometimes
heard), and admire the potential of American power. He predicted
accurately that the next war would be won by repeatedly conquering
islands, building airfields, then bombing heavily before moving on to
TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 11

conquer the next stretch of ocean. The United States could do this, but
"Do you think that kind of thing is possible with Japan s present indus-
trial capacity?" When, however, his pessimism was overruled by Tojo
(for whom he had little respect), Yamamoto nevertheless took his ulti-
^^
mate gamble.
On November 25, the fleet, which included six aircraft carriers, left

a secret rendezvous point in the Kuriles to sail —without radio contact,

without dumping garbage or oil cans that could leave a trail, without
lights at night —toward Hawaii. U.S. had no idea where the
intelligence
fleet was located. Because of magic, U.S. officials did know on Decem-

ber 6 that Japan planned a major step. A thirteen-part intercept of a

message sent from Tokyo to Nomura was in front of the President that
Saturday night. Tokyo delayed in sending the crucial fourteenth part,
that ordered a break-off in diplomatic relations, but U.S. intelligence
officers were decoding the last section at 5:30 a.m. Washington time, or
about eight hours before the attack was to begin. These officers could
not, however, locate Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall (who
was taking his usual Sunday morning horseback ride) or other cabinet
officers until about 10:00 a.m. An hour later, Marshall finished reading
the dispatch and sent a warning to the military in Hawaii, but by radio
rather than by the scrambler phone on his desk which, he feared, the
Japanese had been intercepting. The radio message reached San Fran-
cisco. Because of bad weather over the Pacific, it then went by Western
Union telegram to Honolulu. Two hours after Yamamotos first bombs
fell from the sky, a young Japanese-American messenger handed Mar-

shall's warning to military authorities in Hawaii.^'

In minutes the 183 Japanese planes and submarines killed 2,500

Americans, destroyed 152 of 230 U.S. planes, sank five of the six best
battleships in the Pacific Fleet, and damaged a dozen other vessels. An
hour later a second attack destroyed additional ships and aircraft. The
destruction of the Pacific Fleet was avoided only because three aircraft
carriers and their escort vessels were at sea, and —
due to a rare planning
error by Yamamoto —
the planes missed fuel and repair facilities in
Hawaii. (All but two of the battleships were reclaimed, repaired, and
fighting by 1944.) Japan had violated international law by not declaring
war before the attack began. More to the point for Hull, Nomura and
Kurusu did not hand him the note breaking off relations until after he
knew the attack had begun. The two Japanese had been instructed to
deliver the note at 1:00 p.m. Washington time, but because of delays in
decoding, the paper was not ready until nearly 2:00 p.m. By then the
attack had been under way for forty minutes. Hull had already read
THE CLASH 2 1 2

the message through courtesy of magic. He glanced at the paper, then

declared that ''In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a
document more crowded with infamous falsehoods ... on a scale
. . .

so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this
planet was capable of uttering them." Nomura and Kurusu left without
^^
any response.
While Hull exploded, other U.S. and Allied officials were relieved.
Stimson recorded that when he heard of the attack, "my first feeling
was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come
in a way which would unite all our people." Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, who had been urging full U.S. involvement, was equally
"^^
direct when he phoned FDR: "This certainly simplifies things.
Perhaps the major argument that day in Washington occurred over
Roosevelt's war message to Congress. Stimson wanted FDR to blame
Hitler and have Congress declare war against Germany. Hull sought
personal vindication by asking that the message spell out in detail the
negotiations that had led to the tragedy. Roosevelt overruled both and
decided to send the short message that began: "Yesterday, December 7,
1 94 1 — a date which will live in infamy —
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the Empire of Japan." . . .

Admitting only that the damage at Pearl Harbor was "severe," he added
that Japan had also attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philip-
pines, Wake Island, and Midway Island. The Senate and House passed
the war resolution with only one negative vote (Representative Jean-
nette Rankin, a pacifist from Montana who had also voted against going
to war in 1917). Stimson's (and FDR's) concern about Germany was
removed when Hitler declared war against the United States on
December ii.^"^
The Japanese declaration of war had a quite different opening: "we,
by grace of heaven. Emperor of Japan, seated on the Throne of a line
unbroken for ages eternal, enjoin upon ye. Our loyal and brave subjects.
.
." The Emperor's declaration focused on the Chinese, who, "reck-
.

lessly courting trouble," had "compelled Our Empire to take up arms."

The Americans and British, "eager for the realization of their inordinate

ambition to dominate the Orient," had supported China and were

"inducing other countries" to join them in a policy against a peaceful
Japan that "endanger[s] the very existence of Our Nation." It was a
succinct statement of how Japan read the historical record quite differ-
^^
ently than did Hull, although both versions centered on China.
Those readings of history merited close attention. As a distinguished
historian of Japan, John Whitney Hall, phrased it, "For if we accept, as
 TKe Slipknot: Part 2 2 13

we must, the fact that Japan did not attack the United States out of
sheer madness, then it becomes possible to imagine situations in which
other nations rationally driven to extremities might find peaceful coexis-
"^^
tence with the United States impossible or at least unbearable.
The Japanese had taken this course, as Admiral Yamamoto exempli-
fied, with few illusions. A week earlier the Emperor had met with nine

former prime ministers, not one of whom urged war. Most warned
against fighting the United States for, as one said, such "ideals" as an
I Asian Co-prosperity sphere. Upon hearing of the Pearl Harbor attack,
the recent prime minister. Prince Konoe, supposedly said, ''It is a terri-
ble thing. ... I know that a tragic defeat awaits us at the end." Nor, in
the first hours of fighting, as the United States suffered the greatest
military disasters in its American leaders have illusions
history, did

about what lay ahead. A stunning example occurred late on December

8, when an aide phoned Stimson with the dramatic news that "an

enemy fleet was thought to be approaching San Francisco." The Secre-

tary ofWar thanked the aide for the information, "but suggested that I
didn't know anything that could do to prevent it." Stimson instead
I

went to bed. He was soon aroused by a call that declared the report
was false alarm. The war that climaxed nearly ninety years of relations
between the United States and Japan was going to be long and bloody.^''
 VIII
World War It:
1 ne Clasn Over
1 wo Visions

T enno versus tk aws oi the Macnin

In 1 96 1 , as he looked back over the sweep of U.S. -Japanese rela-

tions, Assistant Secretar)^ of State Walter McConaughy sorrowed

over the tragic climax of December "One of fate's bitterest
1941.
ironies, " McConaughy declared, "was that America should find
itself at war with Japan without really knowing who the Japanese
were.
The same comment, of course, could be made about the Japa-
nese understanding of Americans in 1941. Each people had too
often seen the other through the distorted lenses of racism and
parochial national interests. But on the central issue, each under-
stood the other quite well. For their part, Japanese officials were
determined to protect their society's traditional values by breaking
its long dependence on theWest (and increasingly on the United
States) through the creation of a "new order" in Asia that centered
on China and was defined and controlled by Japan. U.S. officials
were equally determined to protect their society's political-eco-
nomic system by entering an open door to Asian resources, espe-
cially China's, and —
in a further giant step —
integrating this open
Asia into a world free of totaHtarian-controlled economies. That

2 1 4
World War II: The Clasn Over Two Visions 2 i 5

determination intensified as the U.S. gross national product (the sum

of all goods and services Americans produced) amazingly doubled to
$200 between 1940 and 1945. This fantastic increase not only
billion

finally overpowered Japan but made vivid the American need for an
open, workable, global postwar marketplace.
These differences in outlooks and objectives led to war between
Americans and Japanese. The differences also explained why the two
sides differed fundamentally in their wartime objectives, and why the
tragedy had to be fought not to a compromise peace, but to a blood-
filled unconditional surrender that was so traumatic for both sides that

they bitterly argued over it even a half century later.

Americans called the conflict a world war. The Japanese, however,

termed it the Pacific or Great East Asian War. Asians, from Tokyo's
perspective, were to be freed of Western imperialism so they could be
released from the West's seeming addiction to virtually no-holds-barred
marketplace competition. Instead, Asians were to be integrated into a
"Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." That vision had deep roots
in Japanese history. But it was also a deeply divided vision, with one

voice telling Japanese they should believe they had many common and
equal interests with other Asians, and the other — increasingly predomi-
nant —voice assuring the Japanese that their narrow, militant national-
ism was to lead, and if necessary subjugate, other Asians. As late as
World War I, Japanese emperors were identified on documents as Kotei,
a term that was used for other, even Western, emperors as well. In
December 1941, however. Emperor Hirohito's declaration of war was
signed Tenno —the only such divine sovereign in the world allowed to
be associated with saving Asia through the ancient Japanese Imperial
Way. As war began. Prime Minister Tojo Hideki disdainfully dismissed
those who held to the "old idea that Japan should deal with all countries
as equals." He set up an East Asian ministry whose job was to plan,
then usher in, a Japanese-led Asia.^
Washington on the other hand, saw Asia as only one piece
officials,

of a global puzzle, and not necessarily the most important piece. In the
short run, they believed. Hitler, not Tojo, posed the greater danger
because Germans controlled the greater military machine. The United
States made no plans for an East Asian ministry, but instead drew up
extensive blueprints for an indivisible world that would prosper in a
new era. Americans did not think small.
The absolute need for such incredible worldwide vision was well
stated by Will Clayton, a Texan who headed the world's largest cotton
brokerage house, and then joined Roosevelt as the State Department's
 —
THE CLASH 2 1 6

top economic official. In early 1941, Clayton traced the catastrophes of

the 1930s "back to the Industrial Revolution . . . over a century and a
half ago. " For then the "basic, unchangeable laws of the machine' began
generating growth and progress, but also "production and more produc-
tion ' that demanded "free movement . . . throughout the world." Hitler
(and, Clayton could have added, the Japanese) tried to deny "this law"

by creating centralized, compartmentalized economic blocs that placed

"severe strain on our traditional way of life." Those blocs had to be
destroyed, free markets globalized. Then, as Henry Luce (the founder
of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines) wrote in widely read editorials of
mid-1941, the world could enjoy an "American Century." The scope of
this "Century" was boundless: the United States had "to be responsible
for the world environment in which she lives." The New Deal, Luce
continued, had failed to "make American democracy work" on a mere
national basis. It thus had to work "in terms of a vital international

economy and . . . international moral order." The famous publisher told

Americans to think big: "For example, we think of Asia as being worth
only a few hundred millions [of dollars] a year to us. Actually, in the
decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero or else it will —
be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are
the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence." The
myth of the great Asian market, then, could finally be changed into
reality —
if that market became part of a global "great American cen-

tury.

Later, during the fateful summer of 1941, Roosevelt had moved to

create such a century by demanding that Prime Minister Winston
Churchill agree to the universal principles of the Atlantic Charter
principles, such as open and equal access to markets, that were preemi-
nently American and certainly not associated with British colonialism.
During early 1943, in an incisive and prophetic analysis, Britain Foreign

Office officials agreed that the United States would try to control much
of Asia's trade, but not through a narrow approach: those "trade rela-
tions will be conditioned by the post-war world situation and by the
degree to which the principles in the Atlantic Charter supersede ten-
dencies toward economic regionalism." The same idea was stated more
publicly that year by Wendell Willkie, the Wall Street lawyer from Indi-
ana who had run a surprisingly strong race against FDR in 1940. The
title of his book One World was also the thesis for a work that sold 3

million copies within a year.^

Americans believed they had to hurry to achieve this one world.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's personal military chief of staff.
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 i 7

noted in his diary in September 1942 that the war in the Pacific must
be accelerated at any cost: "if Japan is allowed sufficient time to consoH-
date its gains in Asia and induce the Asiatic people to accept Japanese
control[,] the future of America in the Pacific will be hazardous at
least." Racism permeated both sides in the war and fueled the hatreds
and brutahties in that conflict to a greater degree than in Europe. Per-
haps, however, no aspect of that racism was more important than the
U.S. fear that unless Japan was not merely beaten but destroyed to
the point of unconditional surrender, Americans would face an Asian
phalanx. Leahy talked with Roosevelt's diplomatic troubleshooter. Gen-
eral Patrick J. Hurley, in 1942, then agreed with Hurley's view that
unless Japan suffered defeat, "in the near future that nation will suc-
ceed in combining most of the Asiatic peoples against the Whites."
Few, however, approached the apocalyptic vision of Herbert Hoover,
whom many powerful Republicans still considered the "Chief":

When the Japanese take Burma, China and organize the forces of
the discontent in India [the former President wrote a Tulsa newspa-
per owner in early 1942], we are looking in the face of something
new. The white man has kept control of Asiatics by dividing parts
. . .

of them each against the other . . . and generally estabUshing an arro-

gant superiority. Universally, the white man is hated by the Chinese,
Malayan, Indian and Japanese ahke. . . . Unless [Japanese] leader-
ship is destroyed, the Western Hemisphere is going to confront this
mass across the Pacific. Unless they are defeated, they will demand
entry and equality in emigration and there will be in twenty-five . . .

years an Asiatic flood into South America that will make the Nazis
look like pikers. . . . And we will have to go through with it until we
have destroyed [Japan]. That may take a million American lives and
eight or ten years, but it will have to be done.^

In the end, of course, Japan could not mobilize Asians into the i

billion potential enemies (as Roosevelt once phrased the number)

because the Japanese believed in, and paraded, their own racial superi-
ority. That they did so was not surprising. They had long thought of
themselves as a unique and superior people (and believed they had
the military, political, and cultural accomplishments as evidence). Their
ascendancy to world power between i860 and 1920 occurred during the
heyday of supposedly scientific racism in the West, a pseudo-science
the Japanese studied closely because they and other Asians were so
often the victims of it. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, the Japanese
 ^

THE CLASH 2 1 8

racism that drove the great war effort was based not on science but on
history. The source of Japan's greatness and ultimate victory, according
and government propagandists, was
to novehsts, cartoonists, journaUsts,
the Emperor, whose origins went back 2,600 years to Emperor Jimmu,
a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess. No other people could claim
such a hneage. Other races "were filthy and impure," the Orwellian-
named Thought Bureau of the Ministry of Education declared in 1937.
American liberalism and so-called individualism were especially filthy,
some leading Japanese publicists preached, because such terms only
disguised the rich exploiting the poor, the destruction of community,
and the "ugly plutocracy" of the Jews. One cartoonist considered the
English language so dirty that he portrayed Americans speaking into
garbage cans. Thus to racial theorists such as those in the so-called
Kyoto School, the Japanese were fighting a "holy war." Such historically
based racism led the "yellow" and "colored" races in Asia, as well as the
"liberals" in America —
to borrow widely used Japanese terms to fight —
to the death against Japan.
To break dependency on the West and realize a 26-
a century-long
century-long claim to uniqueness, 1,140,429 Japanese were killed in
action between 1937 and 1945, 485,000 against U.S. forces. Another
240,000 were missing in action. Some 953,000 Japanese civilians died,
668,000 from Alhed air raids on the home islands. If Americans with
their greater population had been killed in proportion, about 4 million
would have died or been missing in action. Instead, out of the 16.3
million who served in the U.S. forces (Japan's peak strength was about
half the number of the U.S. forces at peak strength), 405,399 were killed
in the wars of the Pacific and European theaters, as they defended the
principles that were to give meaning to Luce's American Century.^

Caliiornia Goes to W^ar: Xne Relocation

Camps, and Hollywood
In 1942, the dream of an American Century seemed to face extinction.
The first months of the war ranked among the worst in American his-
tory. The effects of the Pearl Harbor attack turned out to be so devasta-
ting that President Roosevelt refused to reveal the damage publicly.

The Japanese unleashed quick, triumphant invasions throughout the

southwest Pacific that took apart colonial empires the Europeans and
Americans had assembled over the past century. Describing the Pacific
situation in early 1942 as "very grave," Roosevelt feared that Japan was
World War II: Tke Clask Over Two Visions 2 1 9

moving into such a dominant position that it would be "most difficult

to eject her."^
The military' crisis intensified the century-long racism. The result
was summarized later in the conflict by the famous U.S. war correspon-
dent Ernie Pyle: "In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and
deadly as they were, were still people. But out here [in the Pacific] I

soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhu-
man or repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice."
More broadly, U.S. State Department officials were convinced that
"democratic institutions are incompatible with the Japanese philoso-
phy." Such beliefs, and the military crisis, not only shaped U.S. actions
west of Hawaii but dramatically changed the lives of 80,000 U.S. citi-

zens in California. These Americans had been born to Japanese families

who had arrived before the 1924 Exclusion Act; such older Japanese (or
Issei) were thus ineligible for U.S. citizenship. The Issei were neverthe-
less rounded up with the younger, U.S. citizens {Nissei —whose average
age was just nineteen), and nearly 120,000 placed in "relocation camps"
as a national security measure These "concentration
in early 1942.
camps," as government documents called them, marked the most fla-
grant breaking of civil rights in the country during the war.^
The camps resulted from a combination of fear, racism, intense polit-
ical pressures, and judgments by usually balanced officials who became
unbalanced during the early 1942 crises. The Japanese Americans in
California were largely highly successful farmers who provided much
of the food for the state's stunning growth during the post-1920 years.
They had been unjustly attacked for driving whites off the land. These
farmers were easy targets for racists who had been working Western
politics since the late nineteenth century. In 1942, the socioeconomic
competition that fueled the racism was easily disguised beneath the
rhetoric of national security. On January government report
25, 1942, a
declared that Japanese Americans in Hawaii had been involved in "sub-
versive activities" —an unsubstantiated charge that triggered an ava-
lanche of letters on Washington demanding the rounding up of the
supposed subversives. As the Los Angeles Times editorialized, "A viper
is nevertheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-
American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an
American. "^^
Officials, especially elected politicians, needed little prodding. Earl
Warren, California Attorney General in 1942 (and later a distinguished
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), observed that "some of our
airplane factories in this State are entirely surrounded by Japanese land
THE CLASH 2 2

ownership or occupancy," then warned that Americans Hved in a "fools

paradise" if they did not believe that "the enemy" had planned "a wave
of sabotage." Americans knew and understood "Germans and ItaHans.
. But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different
. .

field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound." Not

for the first, and Japanese Americans were seen

or last, time, Japanese
to be the mysterious and unknowable. Those who spoke out for the
Japanese community tried to explain, as one observed, that "we can't
help being Japanese in features." But "My mother Japan over 30
left

years ago," and that nation "is not the Japan of today." She had instilled
in her children "courtesy, loyalty to the Stateand country in which we
are, obedience to parents." If those traits happened to be part of Japa-

nese culture, no reason existed to be "ashamed" of them.^^

Warren's arguments, however, easily carried the day. As late as Febru-
ary 10, 1942, Secretary of War Henry Stimson worried that rounding
up suspects because of their " 'racial characteristic' " could "make a
tremendous hole in our constitutional system." Attorney General Fran-
cis Biddle agreed and refused to have anything to do with a forced

evacuation of U.S. citizens. Stimson's top assistant, former Wall Street

lawyer John McCloy, disagreed: "If it is a question of the safety of the
country," then "why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me."
Biddle finally bent when Stimson was swayed by McCloy and Warren's
views. On February 19, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which gave
Stimson power to define military areas "from which any or all persons
may be excluded." The military commander on the west coast. General
John L. DeWitt, quickly placed nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans
behind barbed wire in ten concentration camps that were located from
California to Arkansas —
sites where "no one had lived before and no

one has lived since," in historian Roger Daniels's words. ^^

DeWitt was well suited to endure the job. As early as 1923, he had
planned a similar operation in Hawaii if war erupted with Japan; in
1941, 1,400 Japanese were duly interned on the islands. The number was
no larger, in part, because Japanese labor was necessary for Hawaii's
economic survival. On the mainland, the camps were placed next to
Indian reservations; whites wanted no one with Japanese features
nearby. The sites were policed by armed guards and dogs. A U.S. immi-
gration official caught the historical moment when he declared, "This
is our time to get things done that we have been trying to get done for
two cases of 1943 and 1944, the U.S. Supreme
a quarter of a century." In
Court declared Roosevelt, Stimson, and DeWitt's work constitutional.
In a third, and unfortunately late case of December 1944, the Justices
World War 11: Tke ClasK Over Two Visions 2 2 I

ruled that a loyal U.S. citizen could not be interned without specific
charges.'^
In 1943, the Secretary of War told the President that because U.S.
forces were now winning the war, justification for the camps had disap-
peared. Roosevelt, however, refused to end the incarceration until after
he safely won reelection in November 1944. By then, Stimson had
ordered the drafting of young Nissei men. Some resisted; 263 were con-
victed for trying to avoid service. But 3,600 entered the war, mostly in
the 442nd Regimental —
Combat Team a segregated Japanese-American
force that fought in Europe and became the U.S. Army's most decor-
ated unit. Nissei soldiers were among the first to liberate, and experi-
ence the horrors of, the Dachau concentration camp. Other Japanese
Americans, however, suffered little change. Some 2,500 were taken to
Seabrook, New Jersey, where they worked in vegetable processing. They
remained to form a community that continued to flourish a half century
later.These people recalled that they had traveled east in railway cars
with shades drawn so midwesterners would not think they were being
invaded, or would not try to attack the travelers because a local citizen
had lost a relative in the bitter Pacific fighting. The Japanese-American
experience, unfortunately, was not unique. The Canadian government
also relocated 21,900 persons of Japanese extraction — 17,000 of whom
were Canadian citizens —even though the nation's highest-ranking mili-
tary officer testified they posed no threat. These people were not
allowed to find new homes until 1949.^"^
In the United States, not until 1952 could all Japanese finally become
naturalized citizens. Not until 1981 did a presidential commission finally
conclude that the camps were 'not justified by military necessity. . . .

The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race
prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Not until
1988 did survivors finally receive some compensation ($20,000 each) for
their suffering. The money was given over violent objections from an
aged John McCloy It is notable that the 264,000 German aliens never
suffered such treatment between 1941 and 1945. Even twenty-six U.S.
Fascist leaders were initially indicted, but Washington authorities
moved to dismiss their case. Most striking was the comparable treat-
ment of Chinese. In 1943, the U.S. government actually repealed the
1882 Exclusion Act so Chinese could become naturalized U.S. citizens.
The difference was not just that China was an ally and Japan was an
enemy, but that an active Chinese lobby, located on the east coast,
aligned with humanitarian groups to take advantage of the crisis. No
^^
such lobby appeared for Japanese Americans.
 —
THE CLASH 222

Hollywood films both captured and intensified this particular racism,

which was summarized by General DeWitt's belief that "A Jap's a Jap
it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. The "

films especially grasped the insight of Samuel Eliot Morison, noted

historian and a rear admiral (so appointed because of his naval histor-
ies), who declared, "We were back to primitive days of fighting Indians

on the American frontier; no holds barred and no quarter." In Holly-

wood, Pacific jungles replaced the western wilderness, and lawless Jap-
anese assumed the roles of lawless Native Americans. To ensure that
audiences could tell good Chinese from evil Japanese, Henry Luce's
T'l-me magazine published an article, "How to Tell Your Friends from

Japs. (Japanese, for example, walked like "a conqueror," while Chinese
"

walked easily and you knew one, moreover, you knew them
relaxed.) If
all: famous filmmaker Frank Capra's Knoiv Your Enemy Japan told —
audiences that Japanese were merely "photographic prints of the same
negative." Destination Tokyo dramatized cultural differences: "The Japs
don't understand the love we have for our women, said debonair Cary
"

Grant, who played the leading role. "They don't even have a word for it
"^^
in their language.
Notably, the government's overseer of propaganda, the Office of War
Information (OWI), tried to tone down Hollyavood's treatment of Japa-
nese. OWI feared these films hurt the war effort by intensifving Ameri-
can racism. The fears were well founded. Public opinion polls showed
that a significantly higher number of African Americans than white
Americans believed they would be treated better by Japanese invaders
than by German soldiers. Elijah Mohammed, who later led the Black
Muslims, was jailed because he insisted on declaring that he favored
Japan so American black people could be freed by another colored peo-
ple. And, of course, the ramifications of the racial confrontation

stretched well beyond the supposed American melting pot. and OWI
other observers understood that a historic turn was being taken on a
global scale; they warned that Americans had to reset their cultural
compasses to na\agate the turn. Pearl Buck proclaimed that racial awak-
ening in Asia had to be accompanied by an end to racial discrimination
at home — if for no other reason than to undercut Japan's racial propa-

ganda in both places. Walter Lippmann declared in early 1942 that

Western nations must reverse course: they "must now do what hitherto
they lacked the imagination to do putting away the 'white man's
. . .

burden' and purging themselves of the taint of an obsolete and obvi-

ously unworkable white man's imperialism."^'
Americans thus confronted a two-front military struggle. They also.
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 2 3

like their enemies, faced a further challenge: reexamining deeply rooted

stereotypes and prejudices that threatened to weaken the war effort at

home and destroy the war's objectives abroad.

The Failure oi tne Japanese Machine

In 1942-43, neither Japan nor the United States enjoyed the luxury of
having the time to consider long-term perspectives. For Americans, the
war threatened to turn from being critical to becoming a catastrophe.
In 1942, a Japanese general in Southeast Asia caught both the racism
and the urgency of his nation's plans when he told his troops, "With
one blow you will annihilate the blue-eyed enemy [the Americans and
British], and their black slaves [the colonized Asians]." Hong Kong,

Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), Singapore, and

Burma soon fell. Then came quick victories against tough U.S. resis-
tance on Guam and Wake Island that opened the Solomons, even Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, to conquest. General Tojo Hideki s government

planned to cordon off Asia with a military fence stretching from the
Aleutians to Burma (perhaps India), with the fence protected by outly-
ing sentries at Guam, Wake, and, if all went well, the Solomons and, to

the north, Midway. Behind this iron and steel barrier, Japan could force
^^
the Americans and British to discuss peace on Tojo's terms.
A seemingly decisive and, for Americans, humiliating conflict was
fought in the Philippines, a critical hinge in the fence. The U.S. com-
mander. General Douglas MacArthur, was an already famous son of the
U.S. general who had quelled the Filipino insurrection against the
United States between 1899 and 1902. Douglas had been first in his

1903 West Point class, distinguished himself fighting against Mexicans

in 1914 and Germans in 1918, was a general at age thirty-eight, and Army

chief of staff in 1930 at age fifty. He went to the Philippines to organize

the islands' military, then stayed on as commander of Filipino troops
after he retired from U.S. service in 1937. As war approached in July

1941, Roosevelt reappointed him commander of U.S. forces in the Far

East.
FDR ordered MacArthur to prepare a large force of the new B-17
bombers war occurred, to kill, Japanese. MacArthur
to frighten off, or, if

disliked the order, in part because he mistrusted the Air Force, in part
because he did not want his beloved Philippines made a prime target
for Japanese air attacks. Although he had at least a ten-hour advanced
alert of Japan's invasion, MacArthur left the B-iys on the open runways.
THE CLASH 2 2 4

Enemy planes easily destroyed half the U.S. long-range bomber force
on December 8. When Japanese ground forces invaded,
in the region
MacArthur's ego and romanticism overcame his judgment. Instead of
retreating to the fortress at Bataan peninsula and fighting a drawn-out
battle that might stall Japans advance, he threw 150,000 troops at the
invaders' 43,000 men, was overwhelmed, and lost the supplies and
munitions necessary for holding out on Bataan. Somehow Americans
and Filipinos fought on until April, when the survivors were captured
and taken on the horrors of the "Bataan Death March." MacArthur had
long since left, on Roosevelt's orders, with the highly publicized promise
"^^
that "I shall return.

Burma. The U.S. commander. General

Allied forces also retreated in
Joseph ("Vinegar Joe") Stilwell, caught how Americans felt throughout
the Pacific theater: "We got a hell of a beating and it is humiliating
. . .

as hell." A Japanese seaplane, launched from a submarine, even

dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon in September 1942 to try (unsuc-
cessfully) to ignite forest fires. Bombs attached to balloons later
launched from Japan did kill an Oregon family, and similar devices
landed as far south as Texas. FDR and the Democrats paid a price for
these disasters when they suffered massive defeat in the 1942 congres-
sional elections. The New Deal was dead, to be replaced by "Dr. Win
the War," as FDR himself phrased it. But amid this shift, the President

never changed his decision to place a higher military priority on Europe

than on the Pacific. "It is of the utmost importance that we appreciate
that defeat of Japan does not defeat Germany," he instructed U.S. diplo-
mats in July 1942, but the "defeat of Germany means the defeat of
Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life."^^

Despite this Europe-first policy, U.S. power mushroomed so dramati-

cally that by late 1942 the Army and Air Force had about the same
number of troops (350,000) in the Pacific as in Europe. The Navy actu-
ally placed the majority of its power to the West, including four critical

Air Force carrier task forces. On April 18, 1942, a dramatic breakthrough
occurredwhen Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle led sixteen B-25
bombers off the carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo. (The successful takeoffs
in heavy seas with the ships rising and falling some 50 feet were remark-
able feats in themselves.) The raid became a catastrophe for some of
the airmen. Out of fuel before they could land on Chinese bases, eight
were captured by Japanese; three were executed in October, an event
FDR carefully kept hidden from the public for six months. Hollywood's
highly popular Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, however, dramatized the
crews' bravery, the courageous Chinese help, and Japan's vulnerability.
World War II: TKe Clask Over Two Visions 2 2 5

The most important result of the raid was Tojo's decision to respond by
concentrating Japanese forces to destroy the U.S. Fleet and its carriers,
^^
rather than continuing the assault toward Australia.
This decision turned out to be one of the most disastrous of many
disastrous decisions Tokyo officialsmade during the war. Once again
the brilliant gambler, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, was brought in to
devise a plan to destroy the U.S. Fleet. Yamamoto launched a decoy
invasion of the Aleutians to draw off part of the U.S. forces, then struck
at Midway Island (south of Hawaii) to destroy or bottle up the rest of
the American ships. After that, he hoped, Roosevelt would want to
discuss peace terms. But in a first engagement northeast of Australia
on May 3-8, 1942, two U.S. carrier task forces handed Japan its initial
military setback. This Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval engage-
ment in which opposing ships never saw each other; it was entirely
conducted by air strikes. Yamamoto's belief that airpower could decide
wars, and his fear that given time America s latent power could destroy
Japan, were both coming true. He did not know that the U.S. naval
commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz, had the immeasurable advantage
of being able to read some Japanese military codes. FDR was pouring a
half-billion dollars annually into the supersecret Communication Intel-
ligence (comint), and by mid-1942 its intercepts led Nimitz to rate its
value as equivalent to an entire U.S. fleet, comint located the doomed
^^
Japanese ships in the Coral Sea engagement.
COMINT also tracked Yamamoto's ships as they approached Midway,
where the turning point of the Pacific War occurred. Between June 3
and 5, 1942, Nimitz ignored the decoy Aleutian invasion to concentrate
his forces at Midway. Informed by comint, on June 4 and 5 his planes
—
caught Japanese aircraft refueling on the carriers the same four carri-
ers that had carried out the Pearl Harbor attack —
and sank many of the
planes along with the four carriers. The Japanese made enormous
errors, not least when they divided their naval forces among the Coral
Sea, Aleutian, and Midway theaters, then allowed Nimitz to trap the
slowest fleet that was tied to the invasion forces headed for Midway.
The back of Japanese naval power was broken, although massive,
^^
bloody battles lay ahead.
The U.S. counterattack ran along two tracks. The first was MacAr-
thur's infantry-led drive in the southwest Pacific that targeted the Phil-
ippines and islands to the north close enough to Japan for air strikes.
The second was Nimitz's navy-led assault through the central Pacific
that moved toward Japan along the paths charted by the thirty-five-year-
old (but often updated). War Plan orange. In August 1942, another
 s

^ "^SE "'^
/ co/n/tVo"l
4/
O

AUSTRALIA
 ••

chatkdfO
^^V^ .5^ALASKA
.^^y/^ ^ (U.S.A.)
en. (

J^feutian isian-^ •*
Kiska «

1
TKe War in tne Paciiic,
1

1
1942-1945
1

I
1
Areas controlled by Japan, 1942
1

t <- • •*• Major Allied air offensives

^L Major battle
^^^
ii iMidway '^ ^^^^
ml
/ CO,
m,
2|
/ 2'
c <l
-)|

Wake oi
•

SI o
<^
,

X
/
/
1944 Tt
1

1
-7
liwetok^^ f ..y

1
Marshall'- ".
— m^ i

/
1
Kwajalein-
•" •
Islands ^V '

.
"'".,,

Makin 1

— Tarawa'^d^
>y^^
'Gilberi'T
1

/ \

EQUATOR

gainville Islands/

olomon
1

/
y
•

Islands

/
/

.Guadalcanal / "'•, ••

* •

*-*
^RAL ^\ New
^ \ Hebrides
EA *

-Fiji t

Island s
N
Cale'donia^ • •
D 2000 miles
1 1

1
1
...^ . . ..,
1 1

3000 km
THE CLASH 2 2 8

decisive victorybegan with the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon

Islands southeast of New Zealand. But a half-year of the bitterest fight-
ing lay ahead, including seven naval engagements in which Yamamoto
destroyed twenty-four warships and killed ten thousand U.S. sailors in
Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey's fleet. Halsey ended this engage-
ment with only two carriers, but also with Guadalcanal. Yamamoto lost

twenty-four ships and thirty thousand of his forces, including some of

his best pilots. On April i8, 1943, Yamamoto was in the Solomons when
U.S. planes, tipped off by comint, took off from Guadalcanal to "get
Yamamoto." They located and shot down his plane. His death was
crushing to Japanese morale, but Tokyo authorities never considered
changing the codes that comint read almost like an open book.^"^
As early as December 1942, Tojo had to admit to the Emperor that
the Allies were taking the offensive. By then as well, Prince Konoe had
formed a small, conservative, secret group to plot how to stop a Soviet

occupation, and maintain internal order, should Japan lose the war.
These Japanese leaders were confirming Churchill's words to Roosevelt
just after December 7, 1941: "The resources of Japan are a wasting fac-
tor. The country has been long overstrained by its wasteful war in

China. They were at their maximum strength on the day of the Pearl
Harbor attack." In 1942-43, the Americans alone produced nearly twice
as many planes (one every five minutes) as the combined Axis plants.
The United States was on its way to spending $288 billion directly on
the war between 1941 and 1945, while Japan could find only $41.2 billion
(which was even less than China's $49 billion). As the large Japanese
warships settled to the bottom of the Pacific and survivors were worried
over oil supplies, Admiral Halsey replaced his losses in 1942 with three
new fleet carrier task forces, and added five more in 1943. He also

enjoyed easy access to the world's leading oil producer, the United
States.
Japanese decision-making meanwhile became more confused as the
— —
new U.S. knot this one in the form of arms began tightening as early
as May had to give special priority to obtaining
1942. Tojo's cabinet
steel, airplane gasoline, and machine tools —
all of which Japan had

once largely obtained from the United States. Japanese economic plan-
ning was poor, as was their ability to mount an effective air defense

system (a weakness Doolittle's raiders exploited), and their decision

making in rebuilding their air force. They received insignificant help

from Germany, despite Hitler's promises about cooperation. In the end,
Tojo and Hitler fought separate wars while Roosevelt and Churchill
masterfully coordinated their forces. Stalin was not always a willing
World War II: TKe Clask Over Two Visions 2 2 9

Allied partner, but by mid-1943 his army had destroyed 300,000 Ger-
mans at Stalingrad alone, taken the offensive, and made clear to the
depressed Japanese that Hitler was not only becoming a loser, but that
their historic enemy in Moscow might soon be able to extend powerful
armies into East Asia. Although Japanese forces were already badly
overstretched, Tokyo officials nevertheless held thirteen to fifteen divi-
sions in Manchuria just to keep an eye on the Soviet Union and, mostly,
sit on their hands. This error in decision making, together with the
twenty-five and more divisions tied down in the bottomless morass of
the China war, ruined Japan's abiUty to confront ever-increasing U.S.
and British forces. In September 1943, the Emperor approved a decision
to forget about the Co-Prosperity Sphere and to pull back the main
defensive line. In stark contrast to such belt-tightening, the United
States built a shipwhose sole task was to produce 5,100 gallons of ice
cream per hour for Americans in the South Pacific. ^^
The Japanese did not, however, lose their fanatical devotion to the
Emperor's cause. Americans first encountered that fanaticism in May
1943 on the Aleutian island of Attu when 2,500 Japanese virtually com-
mitted suicide in fighting to the last man against 12,000 U.S. soldiers.
Attu became famous for Japanese self-destruction, especially after Time
magazine ran the story (later reprinted in Reader's Digest) with a title,

"Perhaps They Are Human," and the answer, essentially, that the Japa-
nese were not. Fanaticism, however, could take different forms. At Gua-
dalcanal, U.S. Marines began to collect Japanese skulls as trophies,
make necklaces from the teeth, and set about "pickling" the ears. Life
magazine's "Picture of the Week" in May 1944 showed a Phoenix, Ari-
zona, woman staring at a Japanese skull on which her boyfriend in the
Pacific had written a thank-you note. Tokyo propagandists blasted the
picture as comparable to the treatment Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, and
African Americans had long suffered at American hands. A Pennsylva-
nia congressman gave Roosevelt a letter-opener supposedly carved from
a Japanese armbone, then apologized for giving "so small a part of the
Japanese anatomy. This time an uproar occurred in the United States
"

(led by Roman CathoHc and Protestant church leaders), as well as in

Japan. No such incidents were recorded as U.S. forces fought in the
European theater.^^
Japanese fanaticism on the battlefield slowed down the inexorable
Allied advance after late 1942, but Tokyo's policies in the former colonial
areas of Southwest Asia proved disastrously weak in mobilizing that
region for the war. The historian Theodore Friend notes that the Japa-
nese liked to tell the fable of Momotaro (or "Peach Boy"), who went
THE CLASH 2 3

south to fight demons and won with only the help of his dog, a monkey,
and a pheasant, then returned home with wealth piled into a wagon
pulled by the animals. Japanese (like Americans) loved stories about
the small defeating the mighty. They also liked to think that the natives
(or, in this fable, the animals) sided with them against the devil. A
leading Japanese general told Southeast Asians that the slogan hakko
ichiu ("Everyone under one roof") also meant "All nations are brothers."
At first, the peoples to the south did look to the Japanese as "brothers"
who would help free them from the white colonials. In one sense, that
indeed was how it worked out: early Japanese victories destroyed the
remains of colonial legitimacy, and the ensuing occupation became a
hothouse for native independence movements that matured and tri-
umphed after 1945. But contrary to hakko ichiu, Southeast Asian and
Japanese cultures were quite different, and the differences widened as
Japan treated the regions peoples as racially inferior. For example, the
leading Burmese nationalist, Ba Maw, after first siding with the Japa-
nese military, soon concluded that "few people were mentally so race-
bound and in consequence so totally incapable of understanding
. . .

others or of making themselves understood by others." In French Indo-

china, the exploitation and skewing of the economy was deadly: at least
a million people died of starvation in northern Vietnam during 1944—
27
45-
Expecting cooperation. Southeast Asians instead found that Japan
expected them to sacrifice wholly for Tokyo's war plans. A case study
occurred in the Philippines, an American colony since 1898. The
United States had promised independence, but many Filipinos were
nevertheless willing to work with Japan in 1942. When local Philippine
leaders moved too slowly for its liking, Tokyo dispatched military offi-
cers to take command. They stopped all political activity. Their inability
to obtain investment and shipping slashed invaluable Philippine iron
ore shipments to Japan to only 10 percent of pre-1941 amounts. Because
Tokyo dictated that its colony of Formosa was to be the empire's sugar
producer, the rich Filipino cane fields were diverted to making liquid
fuel or planted in cotton for Japan's needs. Such changes occurred not
through consultation, but by orders that often began, "You are hereby
informed. As unrest spread and economic activity declined, the
. .
."

Japanese promised to work with independence movements. They even

announced principles that were the counterpart of the Allies' Atlantic
Charter. But actions spoke louder than words, and as the war contin-
ued, Japan tried to govern and exploit the Philippines as if the islands
resembled the Manchukuo of the 1930s. When Americans returned in
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 3 1

1944—45, most Filipinos welcomed them as liberators and even

"brothers;'28

"W^e Are Bein^ Played lor Suckers The :

Enemy Begins to Replace tne Friend in U.S.

Postwar Planning

American diplomatic plans during most of the war revolved around

hopes for China, much as Japanese plans for Asia had historically
revolved around the Chinese. Roosevelt and his closest advisers pro-
fessed faith that with Japan s destruction, China would emerge as their
closest ally in the region. Indeed, as FDR phrased it, Chiang Kai-shek
and his people were to join the United States, Great Britain, and the
Soviet Union as one of the world's 'Tour policemen." Roosevelt did not
at all intend to turn Asia over to Chiang. He mused that Americans

were to keep the peace in the western hemisphere, and "the United
States and China would be charged with keeping the peace in the Far
East." It was, of course, to be Chiang's China. The Communists of Mao
Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), expanding their influence from their northern
strongholds, were not to be trusted as policemen. If it all worked out,
the President candidly remarked in private, China could be used "as a
useful counterpoise to the Soviet Union." He had no doubt but that
Chiang would line up with him against Stalin and also against
Churchill, who mistrusted China and blasted the Chinese leader as the
American "faggot vote." British officials suspected, with good reason,
that the Americans intended to replace them as the major foreign eco-
nomic power in China (a transition well on the way to apparent comple-
tion by 1943). Washington officials, their sense of mission and survival
magnified by war, intended to westernize China so it would not "take
the wrong path
^^
—
like the Japs," in the words of a top London dip-

lomat.
More immediately, Roosevelt wanted to encourage Chiang to con-
China was also the centerpiece of U.S. military
tinue fighting Japan, for
plans for Asia. As the U.S. Navy and Marines under the direction of
Nimitz drove across the central Pacific, and MacArthur's armies cut
their way from Australia northward toward the Philippines, air bases in
China were to be launching pads for reducing Japan's cities and indus-
tries to rubble. China, along with India, was also to be a hub from

which Burma, Hong Kong, and other occupied regions were to be Hber-
 ^

THE CLASH 2 3, 2

ated. Not the least important of those regions was French Indochina
(Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), for FDR believed in 1943 he had
Chiang's agreement to replace bad French colonialism with good, coop-
erative Sino-U.S. supervision after the war. (Roosevelt held no hope
that the Vietnamese and their neighbors were ready for immediate inde-
pendence.) The Japanese understood the U.S. plans for China, and
countered with their own. These revolved in part around their puppet
government of Wang Ching-wei at Nanking. Tokyo officials announced
grandiose projects in December 1942 and mid-1943 to work with and
strengthen these particular Chinese groups. Japan even offered to sur-
render its concessions in China, if the war worked out properly. As
fearful of the Communists as was the United States, the Japanese
repeatedly urged Chiang to discuss peace terms before Mao's forces got
out of hand.^°
Both the Japanese and the Americans once again discovered that
neither could shape China's politics. The moment of truth for FDR's
China dreams finally came on the battlefields during 1943—44. Chiang's
determination to keep his armies intact for a future showdown with the
Communists led him to turn away as the Japanese launched offensives
in both Burma and China. General Stilwell, fully frustrated by Chiang's
refusal to fight, explained the Burma disaster by telling a reporter, "We
are allied to an ignorant, illiterate peasant son of a bitch called Chiang
Kai-shek." As planes from U.S. bases in China were prepared for bomb-
ing their home islands, the Japanese prepared offensives to destroy the
airfields. American pilots flew one of the world's most dangerous routes
from India across the Himalayas into China to supply the massive force
of seven hundred B-29 bombers on these bases. Navigating through
some of the globe's worst storms, in planes loaded with twice the weight
for which they were designed, the airmen looked down along a route
pockmarked by crashes. The transport planes themselves were so new
and dangerous that they unexpectedly blew up: "We always flew with
the bomb bay doors open to let the gas fumes escape," one airman
Chiang meanwhile flatly defied FDR's requests to do his part
recalled.
by committing Chinese troops (supplied and often trained by Ameri-
cans) to help the forces in Burma or defend the bases in China. He
calculated that Roosevelt had no alternative but to help him, at what-
ever cost to the United States, and that Americans would willingly con-
tinue to die to supply air bases in China. Chiang could thus leave
fighting the Japanese to the U.S. Air Force while he prepared for the
more important war against the Communists.^
By May 1944, FDR told his cabinet he was "greatly concerned" about
World War II: TKe Clash Over Two Visions 2 3 3

the "outlook" in China, and hoped that Chiang "must realize this and
could not let America down after America had pinned such faith and
hope on China as a World Power." Japan then launched a major offen-
sive to destroy the air bases in Southeast China and to link up with

Japanese troops in French Indochina. In August, FDR begged Chiang

to allow Stilwell to take command of Chinese forces so the bases could
be saved. Stilwell recorded that "I handed this bundle of paprika to the
Peanut [Chiang]. . . . The harpoon hit the little bugger right in the solar

plexus. ... It was beyond turning green and losing the

a clean hit, but
power of speech, he did not bat an eye." Within a month, however,
Stilwell and Roosevelt both blinked. Chiang forced FDR to recall the
general. As the President did so he began as well crossing off China as
^^
a potential postwar policeman.
The growing view of Chiang s KMT (Nationalist) was expressed
Party
by Life magazine reporter Theodore White: it was "dominated by a cor-
rupt political clique that combines some of the worst features of Tam-
many Hall and the Spanish Inquisition." "We are being played for
suckers" by the Chinese, White warned. Such pro-Chinese voices as
Pearl Buck, a British official chuckled, were being quieted: "An Ameri-
can once listed the two recent national disasters as Pearl Buck and Pearl
Harbour." The State Department bluntly told Roosevelt that "Chinese
military resistance is disintegrating." The military disaster most preoc-
cupied FDR's advisers, but their growing pessimism about postwar
China was also intensified by fascist, anti-U.S. policies in the economic
and social realms. A detailed British analysis of American business
opinion in late 1944 concluded: "For the American enterprise system
seeking new fields of activity the economic nationalism of the [KMT]
extremists was hardly preferable to Communism." A near-perfect meta-
phor occurred in early 1945 when FDR sent the vain,
for U.S. policy
pompous General Patrick Hurley to China on an important mission.
Hurley insisted on shipping over a huge Cadillac for his own use. The
auto ran three weeks, broke down, and Hurley could not find the neces-
^^
sary parts in China.
Resembling the Cadillac, broken-down China poHcy was becoming
a
less relevant for U.S. planners. MacArthur, and especially Nimitz,
seized the bases necessary for sustained air attacks against Japan. Nim-
amphibious forces overcame Japanese suicide attacks to take
itz's

Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands during bloody fighting in November 1943.

The admiral jump 2,000 miles and seize
accelerated his schedule to
Kwajalein and Eniwetok islands, a daring move that cut off powerful
Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands. Those bases were then bombed
THE CLASH 2 3 4

into submission during the remaining months of the war. In mid-1944,

U.S. forces leaped another 1,000 miles west to take the Marianas and
seize vital air strips. The triumph did not come cheaply. As the invasion
forces hit Saipan, the Japanese Fleet gathered itself for one last effort in
the Philippine Sea. With near-perfect intelligence, effective new radar,
talented pilots and sailors, and fifteen aircraft carriers, the American
ships and planes destroyed the Japanese flotilla (including three carri-
ers), and brought down nearly five hundred enemy aircraft. "The Great

Marianas Turkey Shoot," as it was quickly labeled, finished off Japan's

once-proud naval air force that Yamamoto had inspired. Seizing the
now-vulnerable Tinian and Guam bases, Nimitz's troops prepared
^"^
extensive airfields in the Marianas.
Saipan, little more than twelve miles long and six miles wide, mean-
while became the scene of terrible losses for the 2nd and 4th Marine
divisions, who took two thousand casualties in moving the beachhead
one thousand yards the first day. The Americans were astonished by
fanaticism of Japanese who had held the island since seizing it from
Germany by Tokyo that Americans would rape, roast
in 1914. Told
babies, and skin adults alive, many civilians blew themselves up with
—
grenades or jumped off high cliffs where families pushed their chil-
dren off and then followed, often running backwards so they would
first

not see the final step. At the end of the 24-day battle, 29,500 of the
31,600 Japanese troops had died, while 3,225 Americans perished and
13,400 more were wounded or missing. But the lethal B-29 bombers,
each holding 10 tons of bombs, now had their bases. "Our war was lost
with the loss of Saipan," Vice Admiral Miwa Shigeyoshi later said, for
"^^
the Americans "could cut off our shipping and attack our homeland.
Nimitz's forces moved farther in eight months than had MacArthur's
in two years. When the general tried to take the island of Papua to

regain the offensive, he had to regroup after his troops suffered one
of the war's highest casualty rates. Australian troops took most of the
casualties, although MacArthur systematically froze Australian officers
out of his decision making. The general was nevertheless determined
to drive on toward the Philippines. With the help of the Army's code-
breakers in the ultra program (who made a major breakthrough in
January 1944 when Japanese codebooks were captured), MacArthur
could plot precisely the enemy's main forces. MacArthur's main prob-
lem was to overcome Roosevelt's reluctance to spend American lives on
what was becoming an unimportant strategic objective MacArthur's —
—
beloved Philippines when compared with Nimitz's (or European)
operations. The general allegedly threatened that if the Philippines
World War II: The Clash Over Two Visions 2 3 5

were bypassed, he would take American people just as

his case to the
FDR prepared to run for a fourth term. Whatever the political back-
ground, on October 20, 1944, MacArthur sent his Sixth Army into Leyte
and, wading ashore, uttered his famous "I have returned." (To ensure
proper coverage, the general repeated the performance for cameras
)^^
three more times.
On October 23-25, the Seventh Fleet and Admiral Halsey's aircraft
carriers from the Third Fleet destroyed four carriers, three battleships,

and fivehundred planes at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Again, the cost was
high. The Americans lost two small carriers and three destroyers in
history's largest naval battle. Even then, the Japanese were not giving

up. Between October 25 and 28 off Leyte, the first kamikaze suicide
planes scored direct hits on U.S. ships. With most of their well-trained
pilots killed, the Japanese surprised Nimitz by creating this "Divine
Wind Special Attack Corps," which needed little special training for
their suicide missions.
MacArthur had bragged that since only poor commanders suffered
heavy losses, he would take the major Philippine island of Luzon, and
the capital, Manila, at low cost in lives. But the battle for Manila
between February 3 and March 3, 1945, was one of the war's bloodiest.
About 200,000 Japanese died in ferocious fighting. More than 100,000
Filipinos were killed by U.S. shelling and, especially, indiscriminate
Japanese brutality. A captured Japanese document instructed soldiers
to destroy suspect Filipinos, but waste little ammunition. This led to
forcing Filipinos (men, women, and children) inside houses, burning
down the house, then bayoneting any who tried to escape. Vicky Quar-
ino, the daughter of a later Philippine president, recalled seeing her
mother and sister killed by Japanese gunfire, then watching a Japanese
and spear her on his
soldier toss her two-year-old sister into the air
bayonet. Americans suffered 47,000 casualties and nearly twice that
—
number of non-battle casualties a remarkably high figure that would
have raised embarrassing questions about MacArthur's tactics if the
information had been made public. Manila probably suffered more
^^
damage during the war than any Allied city except Warsaw.
Using Saipan's bases, the U.S. Air Force began bombing Japan sys-
tematically in November 1944. The raids had little effect until a veteran
of the European air wars. Major General Curtis E. LeMay, was given
command. The cigar-chomping LeMay discovered that the planes were
trying to drop heavy-explosive bombs from 25,000 feet where the newly
discovered jet stream often blew the planes off course. He quickly
ordered his pilots instead to release incendiaries and napalm from 5,000
THE CLASH 2 3 6

feet on Japan's wood-constructed cities. The resulting fires, whipped

into infernos by high winds, began to incinerate the cities. The bombers
were helped by an earthquake and tidal wave that struck Japan on
December 7, 1944 — a coincidence that led
"^^
FDR to tell Churchill that
"Even the Almighty is helping.
But the pilots of the "Divine Wind" also believed the supernatural
was on their side. Throughout January 1945, the suicide planes sank
ships and inflicted over one thousand casualties off the Philippines
until Japan ran out of aircraft (not out of pilots). Worse lay ahead. U.S.
forces invading Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, found themselves in the
bloodiest campaign in Marine Corps history. During five weeks of brutal
fighting, 6,821 Marines died and nearly 20,000 were wounded, as they
employed flamethrowers and dynamite to kill nearly all the 21,000 Japa-
nese who fought from caves on the eight-square-mile island of rock and
black sand. Americans, however,now held a strategic air base just seven
hundred miles from Tokyo. With LeMay working his crews to exhaus-
tion, U.S. planes burned down major Japanese cities. The night of

March 9-10, 1945, some 300 B-29S killed at least 84,000 in a single raid
on Tokyo. The raid targeted one of the world's most densely populated
areas where more than 135,000 people per square mile lived. Flames
turned so hot that water boiled in canals, while glass liquefied and ran
in the street. Apparently ten U.S. bombers were destroyed by the
updrafts of the heat.^^
But even as the U.S. offensive accelerated toward the home islands,
the Japanese were humiliating Chinese forces and their American sup-
porters. The Washington was direct and historic. In February
effect in

1942, FDR had established an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign

Policy, under Secretary of State Hull, whose subcommittees on Japan

were dominated by such old China hands as Stanley Hornbeck. As

Hornbeck phrased it, "It will be possible for us to get along without
Japan in the postwar world," and, again, would be quite possible for
"It

us to let the Japanese nation disappear." Or so the China hands wanted

to believe. They were supported by many Republicans who had been
anti-interventionist in the late 1930s and now took out their frustrations
by vowing to outdo others in revenging Pearl Harbor and carrying out
the supposed historic American mission in China. Ambassador Lord
Halifax told London officials that Washington gossips believed "The
Administration is fighting the Axis —the Republican Party is fighting
Japan.-^o
By 1943, these China hands on the advisory committee found them-
selves losing ground to Japan hands. Seldom numbering more than
World War II: Tne Clasn Over Two Vision* 2 3) 7

eight or ten, this Japan faction was a tight-knit, experienced group led
by Joseph Ballantine, Eugene Dooman, Hugh Borton of Columbia Uni-
and other knowledgeable scholars including George Blakeslee
versity,

of Clark University By 1944, the group was dominated by former

ambassador Joseph Grew. As rising concern over postwar China gripped
Washington and quietly
in 1944, this faction carefully, systematically,

laid plans for reviving a defeated Japan. They were immensely helped

by Chiang's corrupt, uncooperative regime and by Admiral Nimitzs

conquests, which by late 1944 had largely removed the U.S. need for
"^^
China's air bases.

The Japan hands' deliberations did not shape FDR's decisions at the
November 1943 Cairo Conference when he met with Chiang and Win-
ston Churchill. But Roosevelt's actions at Cairo gave invaluable help to
the Japan hands. To the world's surprise (and, to a certain extent, each
other's), the leaders announced the AUies would fight until Japan and
Germany surrendered unconditionally. Roosevelt did not aim the policy
primarily at the Japanese and Germans. He hoped instead to reassure
a restless Joseph Stalin, who was becoming prickly as Soviet troops
sacrificed miHions of lives while Roosevelt and Churchill stalled in
opening a second front in Western Europe. The announcement never-
theless promised to strip Japan of Manchuria, Formosa, Korea, and the
Pacific islands seized from Germany in 1914. As Hugh Borton later
observed, FDR's decision at Cairo settled vital postwar territorial issues
in the Pacific and allowed the Japan hands to concentrate on central
political issues. The decision also unilaterally established a postwar pol-
icy of utmost importance: Japan would not be allowed to live by
exploiting its old colonial Asian empire, but would have to integrate
itself within a much larger, U.S. -dominated economic system.
"^^

By May 1943, the Japan hands had developed a paper that discussed
all sides of the emotionally explosive question of whether to keep the
Emperor as an institution after the war. The paper did not explicitly
take a position, but it was clear where the writers' sympathies lay — so
clear that Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who wanted to
eliminate the Emperor, attacked the document. Such formidable oppo-
sition did notslow the Japan hands. In October 1943, Borton circulated
a paper that set out many of the essential points that were to govern
actual postwar policy toward Japan. First, he recommended thorough
constitutional changes that included retaining an emperor with limited
powers; destroying possible military control by making the cabinet
responsible to the legislature (Diet), while giving the Diet control of the
budget; and removing the military from other spheres of political deci-
THE CLASH 2 3, S

sion making. Second, Borton proposed a U.S. -style bill of rights. Third,
U.S. authorities, he suggested, should try not to impose these funda-
mental changes by force or fiat, but use education and economic pres-
sures to convince the Japanese they should institute the changes
themselves. As light a hand as possible was to be used — a remarkable
suggestion given the racism and bloodshed that drenched Japanese and
American memories. These proposals were also startling when com-
pared with plans for a defeated Germany, where Allied authorities
planned radical change for Hitler's former Reich; FDR even talked
loosely of mass castration and forcing Germans to obtain their food
from soup kitchens. "^^
In 1944, Hull set up a higher-level planning group, the Postwar Pro-
grams Committee. The Japan hands, with the savvy Grew leading the
way, were ready to impose their ideas on the new committee. A Febru-
ary 1944 paper by Borton again examined the Emperor question from
various sides, but favored retention. After all, Borton argued, if the
Atlantic Charter's self-determination principles were to be taken seri-
ously, the Japanese would clearly determine to keep the Emperor. Bor-
ton added that retention would also allow the Emperor's (rather than
the suicidal military's) agreement to a surrender. The Japan hands
emphasized that the Emperor could be a force for postwar "stability and
reform" in a highly uncertain country. Everyone agreed, however, that
the Emperor was no longer to be considered divine or superior to other
rulers. The Japan hands further agreed that Japan must be stripped of

all miUtary forces. If some units were later deemed necessary, their

officers were to be cut off from all political decision making. Uncondi-
tional surrender, the Japan hands concluded, was not to mean annihila-
tion. Japan was to be rebuilt and reformed, not torn apart and

humiliated. Finally, all this was to occur in a united Japan undivided by

occupying armies or different administrations. The United States was
to run the show. The similarity of these plans to the actual policies
applied to postwar Japan is extraordinary.'^'^

So, too, is the wartime economic planning. An influential secret

paper came from Robert Fearey, once Crew's personal secretary in
Japan, now in 1944 a State Department official. With the fall of the
imperial empire, Fearey argued, Japan's tragic mentality about the need
for forming, exploiting, and — especially —expanding economic blocs
could be destroyed. In its place could be an enlightened policy that
gave Japan "access to world resources on a par with other nations,"
remove a need for colonial empires, and lead the Japanese to find their
raw materials and markets in a global marketplace formed by multilat-
eral relationships. The success of political reforms, Fearey believed.
World War II: TKe Clash Over Two Visions 2 3 9

depended in the long run on the success of economic reforms. U.S.

officials sought to recreate the Japan of the 1920s —the Japan of Shide-
hara, of Thomas Lamonts banking friends, of a nation integrated into a
U.S. -created system. Only this time there was to be no military alterna-
tive, and policies were to be rooted in the State Department's long-held
views rather than in Wall Street s short-term profit seeking."^^
The Japan hands thus had a coherent set of postwar plans in place
by the autumn of 1944 when Chiang defied FDR and as U.S. Ambassa-
dor W. Averell Harriman in Moscow warned the President about Soviet
postwar ambitions in Asia. ''Unless we take issue with the present pol-
icy" of Stalin, Harriman warned, ''there is every indication the Soviet
Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved.
This policy will reach into China and the Pacific as well when they can
turn their attention in that direction." FDR understood the danger as
he prepared for summit talks at the Soviet Crimean port of Yalta in
February 1945. He apparently did not study the Japan hands' papers,
but most of his deals at Yalta did not undo their core plans. Without
consulting Chiang, Roosevelt cut deals with Stalin in which the dictator
recognized China's sovereignty in Manchuria and promised Sino-Soviet
friendship talks. In what became known as the "Yalta system," FDR's
major goal was less to make the Chinese a U.S. -led world poHceman
than shrewdly pushing Chiang and StaUn together so the Chinese
Communists would be isolated. Roosevelt gratefully gave Stalin the
southern half of Sakhalin (the island Japan had seized from Russia in
1905), the Kurile Islands off the Siberian coast, control of the Chinese
ports of Port Arthur and Dairen, recognition of Stalin's dominance in
Outer Mongolia, and de facto power over the Chinese Eastern Railway.
In return, Stalin uttered the words FDR especially wanted to hear: a
promise to enter the war against Japan once the European conflict
ended.^^

Truman and the Destruction 01 tne

Yalta System

Roosevelt now admitted one of

policemen had quit on him.
that his
"Three generations of education and training would be required before
China could become a serious factor," he remarked in early 1945. While,
however, he improvised tactics, FDR did not surrender his strategic
vision. In 1944he had warned that "world business, after the war, must
be expanded on a basis of nondiscrimination and of freedom from
excessive barriers and restraints. The policemen were to ensure that
"
THE CLASH 2 4

such barriers came down. In the Pacific, the number of police was
down to and perhaps two: Roosevelt fervently believed that
three,
Churchill only wanted to recreate the British colonial empire. ''All they
want is Singapore back," FDR said with disgust. He had once worked
to replace the French colonials in Indochina, perhaps with Chinese
influence. In early 1945, however, when Japan destroyed the remnants
of the pro-Axis French regime and took over direct control of Indochina,
Roosevelt agreed to avert his eyes while French and British troops
moved to liberate the region. Dealing with the British had nevertheless
become so distasteful to U.S. officials that they went along with Con-
gress's desire to cut off all lend-lease aid to Great Britain after victory
was won in Europe, except the very minimum needed to carry on the
fight against Japan. Washington also later decided that neither indepen-
dent French nor Dutch troops should be allowed to join in the final
battles against Japan. In Asia, Washington policymakers seemed peril-
ously close to trying to create an American Century single-handedly"^^
U.S. power, FDR and his advisers decreed, was to be greatly
strengthened after the war by taking over an array of Pacific bases.
Notably, the Japan hands agreed that the United States should hold
former Japanese islands as part of a network for both security and post-
—
war commercial air travel a form of travel that promised to be the new
frontier of postwar commerce. Just before his death in April 1945, FDR
supported the idea of U.S. trusteeships, under United Nations supervi-
sion, over the islands on which American bases would be built. In real-
ity, as Roosevelt probably realized, this policy led to the Territory of the
Pacific Islands (Carolines, Marianas, and Marshalls) coming under de
facto U.S. control while conveniently being called a UN trusteeship.
By mid-1945, U.S. officials also intended to take over Okinawa and the
adjoining Ryukyus, with their Japanese inhabitants, because of the
"^^
islands' strategic importance.
Okinawa became a deUcate question, partly because of its vital loca-

tion, partly because Japan had controlled it, partly because the con-
quest of the island during the spring of 1945 had been unusually costly
and brutal even by the Pacific War's blood-soaked standards "an Asian
—
Gotterdammerung," as historians later called this three-month battle for

an area less than half the size of Rhode Island. Fighting only 360 miles
from their home islands, kamikaze killed 5,000 American sailors while
destroying or disabUng 28 ships. (In all throughout the war, 1,228 kami-
kaze pilots lost their lives while sinking 34 U.S. ships and damaging 288
others.) Japanese troops killed 10,000 Americans in two Army and two
Marine divisions, wounding 30,000 more before being annihilated while
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 4 1

suffering more than 100,000 dead. Both of the top U.S. and Japanese
commanders were killed, as was the famed war reporter Ernie Pyle,
victim of a sniper's bullet. At least 100,000 Okinawans died. U.S. planes
caught the giant 72,000-ton battleship Yamato built in the 1930s in —
open violation of the 1922 Washington naval agreements en route to —
Okinawa and sank it along with three thousand of its crew in the largest
single loss of Hfe in naval history. By April 7, 1945, U.S. planes were
using Okinawa bases to bomb Japan. Later that month, Nimitz's new
blockade of Japan claimed its first victim when Tokyo had to close the
port of Nagoya."*^
On June 18, 1945, plans for the invasion of Japan (codenamed Olym-
pic) received final approval. Doubts, however, were already rising over
whether U.S. troops would ever have to storm the home islands. U.S.
warships tightened the blockade until the Japanese tanker fleet and
merchant marine were virtually paralyzed. Bombing became so intense
that Washington officials began to see it as a laboratory study. The raids
gave '*us a chance to find out whether air power can bring a nation to
its knees or not," as Robert Lovett of the War Department phrased it.

Lovett and the Air Force assured Stimson (whose old-time morality and
gentlemanly concern about civilian casualties were not shared by most
other officials) that pilots dropped their bombs on military targets. By
August had destroyed most of 67 cities, killed
1945, however, the planes
300,000, wounded some 400,000, while losing 437 bombers, mostly due
to mechanical failures. (In comparison, more than 3,000 bombers were
lost over European targets.) Stimson worried about getting "the reputa-
tion of outdoing Hitler in atrocities." Few other officials shared the Sec-
retary of War's concern. But the publisher Oswald Garrison Villard
bitterly wrote that "What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw,
and London has now become heroic first in Dresden and now in
Tokyo."50
Given the tightening and sea noose, the central question became
air

how many Allied (mainly American) lives would be lost in an invasion

of the home islands —
or whether an invasion was even necessary. The
Joint Chiefs of Staff's plans projected a November landing on Kyushu,
i

the southernmost of the islands, then using the area as an air base from
which to pound the rest of the country, and finally — if Japan still held
out — to invade the Tokyo plain on March i, 1946. The struggle over
these plans between the Navy (which wanted to tighten the blockade)
and Army (which thought only infantry could end the war) was intense.
Less intense was the argument over possible costs. Americans had lost
more lives in just the January-to-june 1945 Pacific battles than during
 ^

THE CLASH 2 4 2

the previous three years in that theater. In June 1945, President Harry
Truman feared another Okinawa "from one end of Japan to the other."
Twenty years later, he recalled his fear that as many as 750,000 Ameri-
can casualties, with 250,000 killed, might have occurred. In mid-1945,
however, the top strategic planners concluded that with 767,000 troops
used in the planned November i invasion of Kyushu, there would be
31,000 casualties in the month, with about 25,000 dead. The March
first

I, 1946, invasion would cost another 15,000 to 21,000 American dead.

The lower estimates were horrific enough. The War Department began
planning for possible gas warfare in November; knowledge gleaned
from ULTRA intercepts indicated Japanese fears that they could not deal
with gas. According to General Marshall's later recollection, as many as
nine atomicbombs were to be readied for use to reduce casualties.^
By midsummer 1945, however, another, and as it turned out more
real and more ominous danger appeared to haunt Washington. Within
twenty-four hours after FDR died in April, President Truman told Sec-

retary of State Edward Stettinius "that we must stand up to the Rus-

sians at this point and that we must not be easy with them." Truman
said this while knowing little, if anything, about the actual state of U.S.-
USSR relations, and knowing virtually nothing about the deals Roose-
velt, Churchill, and Stalin had cut at summit meetings. The new Presi-

dent spoke partly out of his deeply rooted anti-Soviet feelings, and
mostly out of a personal insecurity that understandably marked his early
months in office. Stettinius accurately told Truman that "a very tough
exchange of wires between Stalin and the President" about European
questions had occurred just before FDR died. But at Yalta, Roosevelt
and Stalin had worked out an agreement on Asia. As an informed Rus-
sian scholar later noted, Stalin saw himself as "an heir" of the tsars who
had scores to settle with Japan, and he was willing to obtain revenge
(and some valuable territory) while subordinating the interests of Mao,
whose growing power and peasant-based communism aroused deep
suspicion in Moscow.^^
The Yalta arrangements fit U.S. interests — as long as Truman
believed he needed Soviet help to defeat Japan. By May 1945, that belief
was disappearing along with the cold weather in Washington. Japan was
obviously on the ropes. The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that an "early
Russian entry into the war ... is no longer necessary." In a June 18
meeting, Admiral Ernest J. King, the Navy's top uniformed official, said
flatly that the Russians were "not indispensable" and need not be

begged "to come in. In a May note to Grew, however, Stimson warned
'

that the issue was perhaps moot since the Soviets were going to enter
World War II: Tke Clasli CX-er Two Visions 2 4 3

the war anyway

—"on their own
and poHtical basis with little
military
regard to any political action taken by the United States." Nor could
they be kept out, "unless we choose to use force. Stimson considered '

reopening the Yalta decisions, but decided that not "much good will

come of a rediscussion at this time." The powerful, fervently anti-Com-

^^
munist Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, agreed with Stimson.
Truman rejected Stimson and Forrestal's advice. He was determined
to dismantle the Yalta agreements. But first he had to find out what
they were. Truman did this, he thought, by appointing James F. Byrnes
to replace the handsome, inconsequential Stettinius as Secretary of
State. Byrnes had been at Yalta with FDR before returning to help sell
the agreements to Congress while parading his supposed inside knowl-
edge. The South CaroUnian was an insider: a former Supreme Court
Justice, known as an "assistant President" to FDR, and confident that
he had the vice presidency in 1944 until FDR
and Democratic bosses
picked Truman. So now the real President turned to this admired politi-
cal fixer in the belief that "it s the only way I can be sure of knowing
what went on at Yalta." In reality, Byrnes knew only a small part of what
went on at Yalta. FDR, typically, had used Byrnes for his own purposes,
then shunted him aside when the President met secretly with Stalin.
Truman and Byrnes, for example, were not pleased in late May 1945 to
learn that Stalin had told Harriman that the Soviets expected to share
in the Japanese occupation. At Yalta, FDR had apparently never made
clear the U.S. intention to keep Japan as a single occupation zone under
an American commander.^"*
Truman not only intended to clarify that point, but at the upcoming
summit (planned for Potsdam, Germany) to estabHsh the open-door
policy in Manchuria and elsewhere in the region. He received a strong
push from Herbert Hoover, whom FDR had refused to invite to the
White House but who was soon welcomed by the new President. The
Russians "were Asiatics" and so "did not have the reverence for
agreements that was current among Western nations," Hoover told Tru-
man without Hoover urged that the Soviets be kept out, Japan
irony.

demilitarized, Manchuria returned to China, and Korea and Formosa

kept under Japanese control. The Japan hands were certainly not willing
to go that far. Above all, they wanted to kill the colonial empire so that
the Japanese would have to be integrated into an American-led global
system.
They did share Hoover's belief that Japan —not China—should serve
as Washington's Asian hub. By mid-1945, moreover, they were riding
high as their leader, Joseph Grew, ran the State Department while, in
THE CLASH 2 4 4

the much-used phrase, "Byrnes roams." The Japan hands' main objec-
tives were now to keep the occupation wholly under U.S. control and
to ensure that the Emperor be preserved to "prevent chaos." If the
"emperorship" was pulled down, they warned, "the Japanese themselves
would take it right back as soon as our backs were turned, and we
cannot very well occupy Japan permanently." General Marshall and the
Joint Chiefs agreed because, as they told Truman, the military feared
that only the Emperor could convince fanatical Japanese in "outhang
areas as well as in Japan proper" to surrender peacefully When, how-
ever,Truman broadcast a message to the Japanese on the day Germany
surrendered (May 9, 1945), he refused to modify "unconditional surren-
der" with Grew's pet phrase that the Japanese should determine "their
future political structure." Truman was apparently fearful of U.S. politi-
cal repercussions if he implied the Emperor could remain. Byrnes regu-
^^
larly reinforced those fears.
The President understood that to pick apart the Yalta system, prevent
Stalin from seizing valuable territory, guarantee the open door in Asia,
and build the Japan he and Grew's friends wanted required more mili-
tary' and diplomatic leverage than even he possessed in June 1945. But

great hope materialized on April 25, when Stimson briefed him for the
first time about the atomic bomb. The President learned that a bomb

would be available during the summer; that the Americans and British
monopolized the necessary materials; and that the Soviets were spying
on the project.
In May 1945, the secret eight-person Interim Committee of scientists
and headed by Stimson (who had established it to discuss the
officials

possible use of the weapon) argued heatedly. With some dissent, the
committee agreed that the bomb should not only be employed against
where "the greatest psychological effect
a military target, but in an area
against Japan" could be registered, and also so the weapon's importance
would "be internationally recognized." Stimson finally "agreed that the
most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large num-
ber of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses. " In other
words, civilians were to be targeted. The Interim Committee quickly
rejected a mere demonstration; it feared, among other reasons, that
the device might malfunction or the Japanese observers might not be
sufficiently impressed. On May 28, Truman agreed to meet Stalin and
Churchill at Potsdam in mid-July On June 6, the Interim Committee
recommended to the President that the bomb be dropped as soon as
possible on a Japanese Stimson overruled an angry Brigadier Gen-
city.

eral Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project that was build-
World War 11: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 4 5

ing the weapon, by removing the ancient city of Kyoto from the target
hst. Although full of industry, Kyoto had once been the Emperor's
home. Stimson wanted no "bitterness" that "might make it impossible
during the long postwar period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that
"^^
area [of Eastern Asia] rather than the Russians.
Forrestal questioned using the bomb at all. The Secretary of the Navy
represented his service's belief that its blockade and airpower could
force Japan to its knees without either an invasion or an atomic bomb-
went much further. Really, he asked, do "we
ing. Forrestal's objections

—
want to Morgenthau those islands do we want to destroy the whole
industrial potential (as former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Mor-
'

genthau had wanted to reduce Germany to a pastoral economy). The

Soviets, Forrestal believed, posed the real danger. The pivotal question
was "should it be China or Japan" that Americans should use as a
"counterweight." Believing that the Japanese were the best bet, he
wanted their postwar economy to recover quickly. Forrestal later
lamented that so "little thought" was given to the larger "relationships"
that had to pivot around Japan and Germany if Asia and Europe were
to be orderly, healthy, and non-Communist.^^
Truman and especially Stimson shared Forrestal's anguish, but unlike
him, they saw the bomb as the answer. For them, the immediate prob-
lem was to keep the Soviets as far away from the home islands as possi-
ble. The atomic bomb was the only weapon in Truman's arsenal that

could both end the war quickly and impress Stalin with overwhelming
U.S. power in East Asia. In June, Stimson even worried that Japan was
already so bombed out that, as he told Truman, "the new weapon would
not have a fair background to show its strength." The President
"laughed and said he understood." In that same conversation, Stimson
urged Truman to postpone the Potsdam Conference "until the first
bomb had been successfully laid on Japan." Then "quid pro quos" could
be obtained from StaHn, including the settlement of the "Polish, Ruma-
"^^
nian, Yugoslavian, and Manchurian problems.
Truman decided to go ahead with the conference. When it opened
just outside the rubble that had once been the city of Berlin, on July

17, 1945, the President — —

an avid poker player knew he held two aces.
The first was the successful test of an atomic device in the New Mexico
desert the day before. The power of the explosion stunned observing
scientists. "I am sure," said one, "that at the end of the world — in the
last miUisecond of the earth's existence — the last man will see what we
saw." Truman received the news in code: "Baby satisfactorily born." He
was, Stimson noted, "tremendously pepped up" by the message.
THE CLASH 2 4 6

Churchill even called Truman

changed man." The President believed
"a
he now held what Stimson had termed "your master card in your hand."
But Truman had another ace: Tokyo, he knew from U.S. inteUigence
intercepts, had asked the Soviets to mediate a peace by modifying the
unconditional surrender terms. The President also knew that Stalin had
coldly turned aside the initiative. The dictator could obtain much more

from the powerful United States than from a devastated Japan, espe-
cially if Truman kept his part of the Yalta arrangements.^^
Stalin personally called Truman recorded. "He'll be in
on the 17th,
the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about. ... I
—
can deal with Stalin. He is honest but smart as hell. The President "

thus realized how close Japan was to surrender, even without the drop-
ping of an atomic bomb. The dictator indicated he remained pledged
to entering the war, but added that he had not yet been able to make a
^^
deal with Chiang's regime.
Truman used that opening to begin dismantling the Yalta system.
FDR had promised Stalin control of Dairen; Truman instead followed
a State Department briefing paper's advice by successfully pushing the
dictator to recognize the open-door principle in that vital commercial
entranceway.The President bragged to Stimson he had "clinched the
Open Door in Manchuria. The next morning when Stimson told Tru-
"

man the details of the atomic test, "The President again repeated that
he was confident of sustaining the Open Door policy," Stimson
recorded. Having learned about the device's incredible power, Truman
and Byrnes then turned against the Soviet entry into the Asian conflict.
The President concluded the "Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.
I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland." The

bomb was not only to end the war but make the Yalta agreements on
Asia irrelev^ant. and when
Stalin understood the thrust of the policy,
Truman finally told him about the bomb on July 24 (without mentioning
it was an atomic device), the dictator, to the President's dismay, was

passive — a pose shaped by his knowledge from spies about the Manhat-
tan Project, but also by the realization (as a later Russian historian
phrased it) that in a game with these kinds of stakes, a poker face vv^s
necessary.^^

Tne "Double Shock — and tne End

On July 25, Truman gave the order for the new bomb to be used against
Japan. The next day, the Big Three powers issued the Potsdam Declara-
World War II: The ClasK Over Two Visions 2 4 7

tion demanding ''the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed

forces" before the islands suffered utter devastation. It said nothing
specifically about the new weapon, nor did it mention the Emperor's
future. Stimson wanted to assure the "Japanese on the continuance of
their dynasty," but Byrnesoutmaneuvered him. This sequence of events
was important. Contrary to Truman's later claims, he secretly ordered
the bomb to be dropped before he knew that the Japanese had not
accepted the Potsdam ultimatum. He could, of course, have canceled
the order. But the sequence, as well as other evidence, suggests that
the President was concerned less with Japan's ultimate surrender
—
which, as he repeatedly noted, was imminent than with ensuring that
the surrender occurred as early as possible and preferably before the
Red Army could forcefully redeem the promises made at Yalta. An alter-
native might have been not to use the bomb, but instead to tighten the
blockade, step up air attacks, and perhaps invade Kyushu. Such an
alternative, however, would certainly result in Soviet troops moving far
into Manchuria, Korea, and, perhaps, in the final stage into Japan
itself.^2

The Japanese continued to approach the Soviets for help while

urgently discussing in Tokyo the need to maintain the Emperor. U.S.
intelligence kept Truman fully appraised of these external approaches
and internal Japanese discussions. On August 6, the Air Force prepared
to deliver the first atomic bomb. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, pilot of the
Enola Gay that was to drop the bomb, learned from the advance
weather plane that conditions over the target city of Hiroshima were
good. At 8:15 A.M., from 31,000 feet, the 9,000-pound bomb was
released. Its detonation was timed forty-three seconds later so the blast
would have the largest possible radius above ground.
When the weather plane had turned back, Hiroshima authorities
sounded an all-clear signal. Thus tens of thousands, in this city of a
half-million souls, were on their way to work or school. The center of
the explosion, within one-millionth of a second, rose to 5,400 degrees
Fahrenheit. appeared 3,000 times brighter than the sun. A fire-
A light

ball formed. Out of the fireball emanated thermal radiation that

accounted for fully one-third of the bomb's energy. The radiation
instantly scorched humans, trees, houses. As the air heated and rushed
upward, cold air flowed in to ignite a firestorm that by 11:00 a.m., three
hours after the bombing, was burning more than 50 feet per second.
Between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., a whirlwind whipped the flames to
their peak until more than eight square miles were virtually in cinders.
Black, muddy rain, full of radioactive fallout, began to drop. It was so
THE CLASH 2 4 8

sticky that people thought it w as oil. The rain was cold. People shivered
even as the fires spread. Fourteen-year-old Takahashi Akihiro was so
badly burned that he jumped into the river, where he watched corpses
float by. Estimates run that 80,000 to 100,000 died immediately, includ-
ing 12 captured, imprisoned U.S. Navy fliers. An estimated 40,000 later
died of atomic-bomb illness — radiation that destroyed the healthy cells
and the immune system. Kuboura Hirota noted that 'people walked
like ghosts. They wanted to drink and they were crying and calling for

their family and they lay down and up and they died."^^
couldn't get
Truman learned of the blast while en route home on his ship from
Potsdam, i-^ngrv^ that the radio station he was listening to made only a
simple announcement of the event before returning to its regular pro-
gram, he told friends, "This is the greatest day in history." In a public
announcement, Truman declared that "the force from which the sun
draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the
Far East." U.S. officials did not know exactly what had happened
because of the "impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke" (as the War
Department put it) above the cits'. For the next twent\'-four hours, the
Japanese, including a badly shaken emperor and fanatical army leaders
who announced they were prepared to fight to the last man, continued
to hope that somehow the So\iets would help so the surrender would
not be unconditional. Tok\o officials knew quite well that U.S. and
USSR global \iews were diverging, and they hoped to exploit the grow-
ing gap. On August 7, Foreign Minister Molotov finally agreed to meet
the Japanese ambassador, Sato Naotake. To Satos stunned surprise,
Molotov handed him a declaration of war effective the next day against
^^
the Russians" historic rival.

As the Red Army began overrunning the Kwantung Army on August

9, a B-29, nicknamed "Bock's Car," and carr\dng an atomic bomb, veered

away from Kokura after a weather plane radioed that heavy clouds
shrouded this primar\- target. The aircraft flew to the backup target,
Nagasaki, and dropped its lethal cargo at 11:02 a.m. Because of clouds
the bomb was dropped by radar. The weapon, made from plutonium,
had a total energ\' greater than the Hiroshima bomb, but as a result of
topography, the blast effect was less. It instantly destroyed four square
miles. A \iolent fire developed about two hours after the explosion.
Estimates placed the number killed by the blast and radiation at about
sevent}^ thousand. In a letter to the U.S. Federal Council of Churches
of Christ, Truman declared, "When you ha\e to deal with a beast you
have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless
true."^^
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 4 9

Second atomic bomb

Augusts, 1945.
At least 40,000-70,000 killed.

The President, however, now had another immediate problem (it is

"to our interest," he told the cabinet, "that the Russians not push too
far into Manchuria") to complicate the first (obtaining Japans surrender
unconditionally). His fear of the Soviets did not diminish when, on
August 10, Molotov encouraged the Americans to reject the Japanese
surrender offer of that day, then pressed Ambassador Harriman for a
Soviet role in the Japanese occupation — a request Harriman quickly
called "absolutely inadmissible." When Molotov dangled the hint that
U.S. cooperation in Japan might indicate how cooperative the Soviet
army would be in Eastern Europe, the ambassador refused to bite. Sta-
THE CLASH 2 5

lin, intent on creating at least a buffer state in Manchuria, dismantled

industrial facilities in the region for shipment westward. He secretly
ordered Chinese and Korean Communists to prepare "to construct the
Northeast" after the Red Army was finished looting. Equally revealing
was Stalin's comment when he opened talks with Chiang Kai-shek's
regime about postwar Asia: "In the past, Russia wanted an alliance with
Japan in order to break up China. Now we
want an alliance with China
to curb Japan." Even after the second atomic bomb, Stalin believed the

Japanese would quickly rebuild and "war may come in lo, 15, 20 years."
Most revealing of all was a Red Army officer's ominous remark about
the atomic bomb, a remark quickly relayed to Truman: "A revolutionary
technical discovery; nevertheless we shall hold Manchuria. "^^
Stalin even parachuted troops into Port Arthur and Dairen to ensure
quick control of those prizes. Truman's fears were not misplaced. Soviet
documents released in the 1990s showed Stalin preparing to invade
northern Japan itself about August 25. The central question for Truman
was whether he could obtain Japan's surrender before the Red Army
reached the home islands. It was a question the President and Byrnes
mishandled during the ninety-six hours after Tokyo Radio announced
on August 10 that Japan was ready to surrender if the Emperor's prerog-
atives were not prejudiced. During those hours of August 10 to 14, more-
over, the Japanese suffered some of the war's heaviest air and sea

bombardment.^'
As early as April 1943, Emperor Hirohito had understood that the
war was going badly and peace was advisable. The year before he had
appeared in uniform, riding a white horse, while reviewing the troops
as the —
supreme commander a picture Allied propagandists constantly
ran in newspapers and movie newsreels. Hirohito had even once openly
congratulated Hitler for German victories, a mistake the Emperor never
again made. But if he had deep reservations about continuing the war
in 1943, he believed he could not inten^ene effectively until Prime Min-
ister Tojo was removed. Tojo's dedication to fighting the war to victory,

or to a blazing Armageddon, was total. Even with his immense political

power (he held several cabinet posts, including army minister), how-
ever, Tojo could not bring order and efficiency out of the continual

fighting between the army and navy. (Tojo later claimed the navy did
not tell him about the dimensions of the Midway disaster until a month
after it occurred.) Of perhaps equal importance, Hirohito feared that
given the service rivalry, faltering war effort, and Tojo's growing respon-
sibilities, the general was an obvious target for assassination. If such
violence erupted, it could rapidly spread. Under intense pressure from
World War II: Trie Clash Over Two Visions 2 5 1

Prince Konoe and the shrewd, powerful Kido Koichi (of royal blood and
Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal since 1940), Hirohito reluctantly agreed
to replace Tojo with General Koiso Kuniaki. Koiso's appointment, the
advisers argued, would short-circuit the service rivalry and also possible
pro-Tojo revolts within the army^^
But Koiso's ineffectiveness accelerated Japan s military decline. Nor
could he damp down the army-navy infighting. On February 14, 1945,
Konoe handed his close friend, the Emperor, a memorial that urgently
requested approaching the Americans and British before the army tried
to make a deal with the Soviets that could bring Japan under Commu-
nist rule. Konoe warned that "What we need to fear, far more than
defeat, is the Communist revolution that will follow it." Chinese Com-
munists, he knew, were working with Japanese prisoners to form alli-

ances with other Japanese Communists in Moscow, Korea, and Taiwan.

Fearing that "the majority of young soldiers seem to believe that Com-
munism and Japan's Sacred National Polity are by no means incompati-
ble . . .
," Konoe added ingeniously that "I have heard there are even
members of the Imperial Family who are showing some interest in this
view," as were soldiers from especially the lower classes. The Emperor
was not yet ready to act on these warnings, but Konoe's fears were
not imaginary. Since the February 26, 1936, army revolt, the anti-Soviet
military factionhad been nearly destroyed, while the "control faction,"
once led by Tojo, had dominated policy with its plans to create an
empire to the south while cooperating with the Soviets in the north. ^^
Konoe's approach to the Americans and British, however, had a price:
retaining the Emperor as an institution. Konoe, resembling Kido and
the other elder statesmen, viewed the Emperor as a last bastion against
revolution, anarchy, and indeed the disintegration of what they saw as
a 2,600-year-old Japanese state. Konoe's appeal went nowhere in early

1945 because the military hierarchy was determined to use the

remaining 2.5 million soldiers and 4 million reservists to wage a fanatical
resistance until Truman would have to settle for a less than uncondi-
tional surrender. By late July, however, the military's determination was
being undermined. Admiral Suzuki Kantaro, prime minister since April,
had been told by Kido and other elders to keep the military in line while
peace talks were worked out.^^
This assignment proved to be difficult, even suicidal, for Suzuki and
his war Anami Korechika, who was to play a heroic,
minister. General
tragic role in the decisive August moments. Truman had rejected Stim-
son's plea that the Emperor be protected. The President instead went
along with Byrnes, who feared the political "crucifixion" of Truman if
 —
THE CLASH 2 5 2

he compromised unconditional surrender. Byrnes was forcefully joined

by former Secretary of State Hull, still nursing his fury over his 1941
talks with the Japanese. Hull contemptuously condemned Stimson's
suggestion as "appeasement of Japan." The absence of any mention of
the Japanese throne in the U.S. response split the Tokyo government:
the Foreign Office, led by Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, believed
the Potsdam Declaration opened possibilities for useful negotiations.
But the supreme command disdained any terms that did not directly
preserve the Emperor. The cabinet finally decided to compromise and
mokatsu the Declaration — that is, take no notice of it until the Soviets

were again approached for help. But in one of the war's great mistakes,
mokatsu appeared in newspapers and even in a Suzuki press conference
as meaning the Japanese intended to ignore the Potsdam announce-
ment. In Washington, "ignore" was quickly interpreted, even by Stim-
son, as reject.

The dropping of the atomic bombs and the onslaught of massive

Soviet armies followed. This "double shock," as a Japanese historian
later termed it, forced the Emperor to intervene on August 9-10 and
formulate a surrender offer. On August 10, the Suzuki government
offered to accept "the terms ... in the joint declaration" of Potsdam,
"with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise
any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sov-
ereign Ruler." As Robert J. C. Butow wrote in his classic analysis of
these August events, "If the Allies meant to wipe out, in one stroke, an
imperial institution tenaciously rooted in the mind and soul of every
true Japanese ... if they sought to deny to His Majesty's subjects the
very polityupon which they rested their claims to being Japanese," then
those favoring peace would join the military fanatics and there would
'^
be no peace.
The ball was now in Truman's court. Byrnes urged no compromise.
Stimson grew angry. The Secretary of War had probably suffered a small
heart attack on August 8, but he continued to push his argument
especially damning the "uninformed agitation against the Emperor in

this country mostly by people who know no more about Japan than has
been given them by Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Mikado.' " At a historic

White House meeting on August 10, Leahy and Forrestal supported

Stimson's demand that the Japanese offer should be immediately

accepted. Only the Emperor, he told Truman, could convince Japanese
fanatics to surrender and thus "save us from a score of Iwo Jimas and
Okinawas." The Secretary of War had earlier told his top aides he "felt
it was of great importance to get the homeland into our hands before
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 5 3

the Russians ' arrived to "help rule it." Byrnes meanwhile was trapped
by his own myopia: he agreed with Stimson about stopping the Rus-
sians, but was driven by fears that Truman would be "crucified" (per-
haps along with himself) if unconditional surrender were modified to
save the hated Emperor. A master domestic "fixer," the Secretary of
State had little talent for conceptuaHzing foreign policy. He could, how-
ever, convince an insecure president that he had the pulse of the Ameri-
can people. Forrestal suggested a compromise: Reiterate the Potsdam
principles but leave open the future of the Emperors position. Byrnes
added a phrase to protect Truman: the Emperor and the Japanese gov-
ernment would be "subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied
powers" occupying the home islands. Stimson agreed, and emphasized
that the word "Commander" was "singular in order to exclude any con-
dominium such as we have in Poland." The reply also included the
Potsdam Declaration's line that Japan's future government "shall ... be
"^^
estabhshed by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.
In Tokyo, hard-liners read this last phrase once again as an American
ploy to undercut imperial institutions. Between August ii and 14 a
vicious political struggle erupted between, on the one hand. Foreign
Minister Togo and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido, who wanted to
accept the U.S. response; and, on the other, General Anami and the
military, who feared that surrender would forever destroy kokutai, the
revered national polity. Togo and Kido barely prevented the military
from adding extraordinary new conditions to the peace terms: no occu-
pation or disarmament of Japan. The originator of the kamikaze attacks,
Vice Chief of the Naval General Staff Onishi, tried to convince his
superiors that "If we are prepared to sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives
in a special attack [kamikaze] effort, victory shall be ours!"^"^

Meanwhile, Allied planes and ships delivered some of the most dev-
astating attacks of the entire war. Stimson and Forrestal urged that the
attacks be stopped because they were unneeded, politically unwise, and
immoral. Truman did decide not to drop more atomic bombs, at least
for a while, because it was "too horrible," especially killing "all those
kids." But he refused to stop the massive conventional attacks. On
August 10, U.S. and British battleships stood offshore and lobbed huge
shells that destroyed much of the steel mill city of Kamaishi. On August

13, as Soviet troops moved through Sakhalin, 1,600 U.S. aircraft bombed
Tokyo, although the city was already so ruined that the planes, to use
Churchill's later phrase, mainly made the rubble bounce. On August
14, and other aircraft decimated six other
giant B-29S targets, killed
several thousand people, and laid on three of the raids after Japanese
THE CLASH 2 5 4

radio had accepted the surrender terms. The most important air strike,
however, occurred late on August 13 when leaflets were dropped on
Japan that revealed the Allied demands and the Tokyo governments
acceptance note of August 10. The military, whose power and fury
seemed to be intensifying in the secret discussions, was suddenly
undercut. But the supreme command's anger nevertheless remained
great enough that Kido worried the militar}^ might seize the govern-
ment.^^
Kido urgently asked his close friend since childhood, the Emperor,
to convene an Imperial Conference and end the war. On August 14,
Hirohito intervened. The military, which since the 1860s had vindi-
cated — usually with much hypocrisy — its actions by invoking the
Emperors name, now was trapped. Elements in the army invaded the
palace to try to find and destroy the Emperor's recording of the radio
broadcast accepting peace terms, but not before Kido thought it wise
to flush a number of important documents down the toilet. The invad-
ers were stopped by loyal troops. Other army officers, however, burned
down Prime Minister Suzuki's house. Kido received urgent reports that
units were marching on Tokyo to demand the war's continuation.^^
At this point. General Anami earned his place in history. An outspo-
ken opponent of peace, he could have spearheaded a military takeover.
He also could have exercised the military's post- 1870s power of paralyz-
ing the government by resigning his post, thus destroying Suzuki's cabi-
net and forcing the formation of a new government that the military
could dominate. Anami took neither course. He and the chief of Japan's
navy, Toyoda Soemu ("the admiral without a fleet, " as Butow later called

him), wanted to continue fighting but would not contradict the

Emperor. Threats of a military uprising continued end of until the
August. Nevertheless, obedience to the Emperor, as Stimson had fore-
seen, stopped them. Early on the morning of August 15, after drinking
much sake ("When you drink sake, you bleed more profusely," the gen-
eral had remarked), Anami sat on the floor of his home, faced the Impe-

rial Palace, and committed suicide by first splitting open his abdomen,

then slashing his neck.^^

Later that day, an astonished Japanese people heard the Emperor
announcing on the radio his Imperial Rescript on the End of the War.
He never used the word "surrender," nor did he mention the possibiUty
of an occupation. He recalled that they had gone to war "out of Our
sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization
of East Asia," not out of "territorial aggrandizement." To continue, how-
ever, "would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." He
World War II: TKe ClasK Over Two Visions 2 5 5

saluted Japan's military and offered "deepest . . . regret" to its Asian

allies, but offered not a syllable of regret to the tens of millions of other
Asians and non-Asians who had died in the flames of warfare since
1 93 1. Nor did he express regret for Japan's brutal treatment of Western
prisoners, three-quarters of whom died in inhumane captivity. The
effect of the speech on the Japanese was electric. As the
Nobel later

Prizewinner for Literature, Oe Kenzaburo, recalled of the August day

when he was not yet a teenager:

The and cried. The children gathered

adults sat around their radios
outside in the dusty road and whispered their bewilderment. We
were most confused and disappointed by the fact that the Emperor
had spoken in a human voice, no different from any adult's. How . . .

could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had

become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?^^

Japan was beaten, but it seemed the Japanese were not repentant.
Truman was of course delighted that Konoe's great objective of dealing
only with the Anglo-Saxon powers, while preventing any military-Com-
munist takeover, had been realized. General MacArthur alone presided
over the Japanese surrender signed by the diplomat Shigemitsu
Mamoru on board the USS Missouri on September 2. The U.S. flag

flying above the main mast was the same that flew above the capital on
December To make the message clear, Commodore Perry's flag
7, 1941.

of 1853, with its thirty-one stars, was draped over the Missouri's rear
turret. At the climactic point of the ceremony, Theodore White recalled

forty years later, as "MacArthur intoned These proceedings are now

closed,' we heard a drone and looked up. It is difficult to recall now,
after years of floundering and blunder, how very good we were in those
days, with what precision we ordered things. Four hundred B-29S had
taken off from Guam and Saipan hours before to arrive over the Mis-
souri at this precise moment of climax. They stretched across the rim
"^^
of the horizon.
On August 30, the first U.S. occupation forces had landed in Japan
without opposition. Several days later. New York Times reporter W H.
Lawrence reached Hiroshima. Although a correspondent with much
experience on European and Pacific battlefields, he reported that "I
have never looked upon such scenes of death and destruction." Law-
rence walked "through streets where the stench of death still pervades,"
where survivors, "wearing gauze patches over their mouths, still probe
among the ruins for bodies or possessions." Japanese doctors told him
THE CLASH 2 5 6

that "persons who had been only shghtly injured on the day of the blast
lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures
of 104 degree Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their
appetites, vomited blood and finally died" — at a continuing rate of about
one hundred each day.^^
Many informed analysts wondered whether the suffering and
later

the delay in ending the war had been a great, unnecessary error. John
Emmerson, a distinguished Foreign Service officer and among the most
respected of the Japan hands, concluded that some assurances regard-
ing the Emperor would have ended the war earlier, and certainly "the
dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki was senseless." Many schol-
ars who have closely studied the evidence agree that while the inexperi-
enced, insecure Truman was understandably between the poUtical
torn
fears of Byrnes and the strategic recommendations of Stimson, the
President's delay in accepting the retention of a carefully circumscribed
emperor, and the Japanese military's use of the unconditional surrender
ultimatum to demand war to the last soldier, caused needless suffering
and the "senseless" laying on of the second atomic bomb. (Not until
twenty-five years after the war ended did Washington officials allow a
film shot of Nagasaki after the bombing to be shown to American audi-
ences, so worried were these officials about charges of immorality and
needless brutality.) Truman's and his advisers' growing concern over
Stalin's advancing armies, and in Japan Hirohito's great risk taking,

finally led to an end of the bloodletting.^^

The United States had triumphed in the war in Asia. The Pacific,
acknowledged an envious British diplomat, was "an American lake."
Truman alone held the secret to history's most destructive weapon (this
"Frankenstein," as it was already known). But somehow, while standing
at the peak of an "American Century," the United States had lost its

historic foreign policy objective: an orderly Asia open to U.S. invest-

ment, trade, and principles. For China, as Truman knew, was veering
toward chaos and possibly communism. Southeast Asia seemed to be
condemned to outdated colonialism or explosive nationalism. Korea, by
agreement between U.S. and Soviet occupiers, was divided into North
and South. Only Japan remained, tenuously, open. And the future of
this devastated, confused, atomic-scarred country was, to say the least,

highly uncertain. Equally uncertain was whether U.S. officials could

now realize their vision for Asia: turning the Japanese from a rabidly
nationalist people who envisioned Asian empire into an outward-look-
ing, democratic people who would form the Asian hub of an open,
^^
global, multilateral system.
Xo Create a r\ew
Reiormin^, Rever^sfn^,
and NYarrin^
(1945-1951)

Give IVIe Bread or Give Me Bullets

The United States began the post-World War II era as the

superpower with sole possession of the atomic bomb's secrets;
as an economic powerhouse (controlling half the world's entire
industrial production) that intended to create an open, equitable
global market; and as a triumphant democracy that meant to
democratize and demilitarize Japan. Within just six years, this sup-
posed American Century was already transformed. Stalin's dicta-
torship exploded its own atomic bomb. The world's two largest
nations, the Soviet Union and China, forged a Communist alli-

ance aimed at destroying capitalism. And in Japan, embattled U.S.

pushed not democratization and demilitarization, but an
officials

economic and miHtary buildup for fighting a hot war in Asia, a

Cold War globally.
Certainly it had all seemed to start happily. With uncontested
sway over the earth's great oceans, Washington officials could
agree with the popular song, "To Be Specific, Our Pacific."
It's

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal told the Truman cabinet

in mid-1946 that "China is now our Eastern frontier." Not that

2 5 7
THE CLASH 2 5 8

all was perfect. A devastated Japan faced starvation. China was divid-
ing between Nationalists and Communists. Manchuria, long a prime
target of the open-door policy, fell under the Red Armys boots. The
great Asian empires of the British, French, and Dutch had been under-
mined by Japanese occupation and began toppHng to militant national-
ists. Wartime agreements that assumed a united Korea, and a Taiwan

linked with China, were simply washing away But the United States
seemed to have the power to make these things right, or at least accept-
^
able.
American dreams were
In the post-1945 years, as in the post-1918 era,
to be ruined by Russians and revolutionaries. During September 1945,

just two months after he bragged that he had "clinched" the open door
in Manchuria, President Harry Truman learned from U.S. intelligence
that the Red Army was ''carrying out a program of scientific looting" in
that region, while "indiscriminately killing Chinese and Japanese." Sta-
lin was ransacking the Far East (as well as Eastern Europe) for rapid

rebuilding of a war-devastated Russia. General George Marshall, the

U.S. manager of victory in World War II, warned that if Chiang Kai-
shek could not be rescued, "There would follow the tragic conse-
quences of a divided China and of a probable Russian resumption of
power in Manchuria, the combined effect resulting in the defeat or
. . .

loss of the major purpose of our war in the Pacific." Trying to avert this
catastrophe, Truman ordered 110,000 U.S. troops into China to help
Chiang obtain strategic areas as the Japanese departed. The President
then sent Marshall on a mission to reconcile Chiang with the Commu-
nists, while somehow keeping Chiang in the driver's seat. But nothing
worked, especially as rampant inflation and corruption wrecked the
Chinese economy^
The Yalta framework for the Far East lay in ruins. "I think . . . that the
main explanation for the American tendency to withdraw from China,"
British Foreign Office official J. C. Donnelly wrote acutely to his col-
leagues in November Americans now regard Japan
1945, "is that the
and the formerly Japanese bases which they held as their bulwark in
the Pacific. Thus, tragic and paradoxical as it may seem, it is likely
. . .

that the defeated Japanese will profit from American protection, while
the supposedly victorious Chinese will be left to the tender mercies of
the Communists whether native or Russian."^
Washington policymakers believed they faced stark, alarming alter-
natives. As U.S. trade expert Henry Grady warned, "The capitalistic
system is essentially an international system. If it cannot function inter-
nationally, it will break down completely." Such views intensified as
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 259

U.S. industrial production declined 30 percent in 1945-46. Unemploy-

ment shot upward, and public opinion polls revealed growing fear of
"^
another 1929 crash.
Truman and his advisers fully understood the need for rapid recon-
struction and a functioning international economy. The base of the
postwar system was to be the Bretton Woods framework established by
the United States and its Allies at the New Hampshire resort in 1944.
This system was not going to be Wilsonian — that is, it was not to follow
Woodrow Wilson and other Progressives' hopes that international eco-
nomic policy could be left to the private bankers (such as Thomas
Lamont and Kajiwara Nakaji of the 1920s). Those bankers had self-
destructed after 1929. Governments were now to play the central role,
not only by establishing principles and institutions but by providing
crucial funds. In 1945, those funds lay almost entirely in the United
States. Thus, if the British, French, or Japanese wanted to reconstruct

their societies, theyhad to accept U.S. principles laid out in the Bretton
Woods system. Those three nations did accept the rules, for the most
part. Stalin did not. Byrnes sorrowfully but accurately told Truman's

cabinet in early 1946 that "the only place where money has not influ-
"^
enced national policy is Russia.
Thus by had to work with a
1946, U.S. officials partially open world,
that is, with those areas not occupied by Soviet troops. In Asia, this
meant Truman faced the immense job of keeping Stalin's power at bay
while creating a functioning system before the new nationalist forces
swung their economies sharply to the left. The key to Asia was becom-
ing Japan. Yet the Japanese, as the U.S. paperon "Postsurrender Policy"
stated in 1945, were to be "completely disarmed and demilitarized."
Their society was to be reformed fundamentally as "feudal and authori-
tarian tendencies were modified. Their economy was to be stripped
'

down, the "large industrial and banking combinations dissolved. In late "

1945, U.S. authorities wrecked and dropped into the oceans cyclotrons
the Japanese had developed for creating atomic energy. American scien-
tists loudly condemned this destruction, but Secretary of War Robert
Patterson excused it by saying that for the Japanese to keep cyclotrons
"^
would be "like giving Al Capone a pistol.
In late 1945 the rebuilding job seemed foreboding, even highly dis-
tasteful. After all, in early 1945 Japanese had systematically executed
downed U.S. airmen. On August 12, 1945, eight airmen had been shot,
and on August 15 —even as the Emperor accepted surrender terms
eight more. In printing news of the surrender, Japan's leading newspa-
per, Asahi, reiterated the "superiority of our race, " a theme picked up
THE CLASH 2 6

by other publications. Obviously centuries of beliefs were not going to

be suddenly thrown into reverse/

Fortunately for the American occupiers, however, Japan's view of
them, at least,was changing. As the historian Homma Nagayo later
obsen^ed, the biggest change in this view had occurred between 1941
and 1945. Once seen as inferior enemies, the Americans had dealt Japan
its first military defeat in modern times with a power never imagined.

The victors then acted not as classic loot-and-pillage conquerors, but

as people with whom Japanese civilians could work. As a later foreign

minister, Fujiyama Aiichiro, remembered about 1945-46, "many indus-

trialists uncorked their champagne bottles and toasted the coming of a
new industrialist era." These Japanese well knew, moreover, that their
country was loathed throughout Asia; their only possible friend in the
world was the United States. The importance of American help rose as
3 million Japanese soldiers and civilians returned to live off a virtually

destroyed economy. A disastrous harv^est in 1945-46 produced only 60

percent of the war years' level. Stan ation loomed. During his first week
as head of the occupation, a stunned General iMacArthur told Washing-
ton, "Give me bread or give me bullets." On September 17, 1945, a
devastating t\]phoon struck. It especially ravaged Hiroshima, which
already lacked hospitals, medicine, policemen, firemen, and food. The
United States needed the Japanese to right the Asian world. The Japa-
nese needed the United States to survive.^
The two nations shared another overriding objective: keeping Japan
united and not, as in Germany, allowing a divided countr\^ to emerge.
After a trip to Japan, Patterson told the cabinet the Japanese were
"extremely apprehensive of Russian occupation. They greatly preferred "

American occupiers. U.S. Allies insisted on some role, so Byrnes agreed

to set up a Far Eastern Commission (FEC) of eleven nations, and an
Allied Council of the Big Three plus China. The Soviets complained,
accurately, that they were treated "like a piece of extra furniture. (Or '

like the Flying Dutchman: MacArthur amused himself by keeping the

Soviet representatives' plane circling for long periods above Tokyo

before allowing it to land.)The British later called the FEC, again accu-
rately, "a useless body." Truman turned a deaf ear.^
placed the occupation solely in MacArthur's hands. The Presi-
He
dent did not do so happily "Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star
MacArthur" was "worse than the Cabots and the Lodges," Truman
v^ote in June 1945, for "they at least talked with one another before
they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off." The new President
marveled that the United States could produce a Lee and an Eisen-
Xo Create a New Japan: Reiormin^, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 6 1

hower, "and at the same time produce Custers and Mac Arthurs." . . .

Truman sent along George Atcheson, a veteran diplomat and Far East
expert, to be political adviser. But MacArthur ignored, then largely
coopted, Atcheson before the diplomat died tragically in a 1947 airplane
10
crash.
In September MacArthur landed, virtually unprotected, at a
1945,
kamikaze training base outside Yokohama while stories circulated that
fanatics were gunning for him. In what Churchill called the bravest of
'all the amazing deeds in the war," the general rode in a car down streets
lined with thirty thousand Japanese troops. His car unfortunately broke
down, and the supreme commander had to wait on the road fifteen
minutes while Japanese civilians stared at the spectacle. MacArthur
nevertheless successfully set the tone. He publicly considered himself
an unparalleled expert on "the Asian mind" (although he admitted pri-

vately that "even after fifty years living among these people I still do not
understand them"). He did understand that under the right conditions
the Japanese would cooperate. He also understood and played to the
centuries-old Shogun tradition, even setting up his offices across from
the moat surrounding the Emperors palace while conducting himself
The distinguished scholar of Japan (and British diplomat)
imperially.
George Sansom wrote after a talk with the general that MacArthur
expressed his views so "they appear to have a kind of absolute validity,

an almost superhuman righteousness." He "is not always strictly truth-

ful." His "great trouble Sansom concluded. Japanese were

is vanity,"
not novices at dealing with foreigners with those characteristics. The
Japanese also heard (and Truman understandably was concerned about)
the rumors that MacArthur was well on his way to the 1948 Republican
^^
presidential nomination.
The general moved rapidly. He had 400,000 U.S. troops to maintain
order, but he helped the Japanese military save some face by asking it

to disarm its own troops. He even brought Japanese officers into the
occupations bureaucracy as the U.S. military took over hundreds of
acres to set up fruitful listening posts close to Soviet and Chinese bor-
ders. Of MacArthur quickly disposed of the
greatest significance,
Emperor question. On September 18, 1945, a powerful Georgia Demo-
crat, Richard Russell, introduced a Senate resolution demanding that

Hirohito be tried as a war criminal. Russell was in tune with most

Americans, but not with the Japan hands or MacArthur. The general
told Washington that "no specific and tangible evidence" linked the
Emperor to war crimes. Moreover, "His indictment will unquestionably
cause a tremendous convulsion" that could transform the "hope" of
THE CLASH 2 6 2

democracy into a regime "along communistic lines." MacArthur knew

how to hit the right buttons in Washington. Taking what he modestly
called the "greatest gamble in history," the general prevailed.

A breakthrough came on September 27 when the Emperor, dressed

in cutaway and top hat, was driven to the U.S. Embassy, where he met
MacArthur, dressed in khaki with an open neck. The Emperor ner-
vously accepted a cigarette offered by the general, although Hirohito
did not smoke. A quickly famous photo showed the tall general towering
over the Emperor as both stared at the camera. (Japanese officials,

finding the photo disrespectful to the Emperor, tried to stop its publica-
tion. They were overruled immediately by the Americans. A leading
Japanese literary figure, Takami Jun, concluded he could now wTite
anything: "Since I was born, this is my first experience with freedom.")
The meeting went well. MacArthur was moved "to the very marrow of
my bones." For the next six years, the two men would work together
with mutual admiration. Of course, by absoKing the Emperor of war
crimes, the general also helped make it possible for Japanese who
wished to escape their own past.^^
MacArthur meanwhile brought in an American Quaker, Elizabeth
Gray Vining, to teach Crown Prince (and after 1989, Emperor) Akihito.
The British, whom the general unceremoniously pushed out of this
particular school picture, were again left furious and frustrated. The
new relationship was neatly defined some years later when an irreverent
Senator WiUiam Fulbright (D: AR) quizzed diplomat John Foster Dulles
behind closed doors:

The Chairman [Tom Connolly, D: TX]: You say the Emperor calls on
MacArthur but MacArthur never calls on him?
Mr. Dulles: That is right. . . .

Senator Fidhright: Does that prove, you say, the Emperor is no longer
regarded as God?
Mr. Dulles: Yes.
Senator Fidhright: What does it prove about MacArthur?
13
Mr. Didles: ... I evoke my constitutional pri\ilege.

The First Occupation (l945-47)

The occupying Japan quickly discovered they were placing sec-

British
ond fiddle in a one-man band. But the band needed an audience. As
the audience, the Japanese at first overestimated their own influence.
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring ( 1945— 1951) 2 6 S

They were bitter when they learned of a two-part deal concocted by

Byrnes in December 1945. The Soviets supported a U.S. takeover of the
strategic, once Japanese-controlled Micronesian Islands. In return, the
Americans supported de facto Soviet control of the Kuriles and South
Sakhalin on Japan's northern doorstep. The Japanese had earlier been
stunned in September 1945 when MacArthur's office ordered their
media not to publish news on atomic bomb victims or damage. They
were further shocked when MacArthur publicly repudiated the cabinet
led by Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko (the Emperor's cousin), which
Konoe and his friends had carefully put together in August to maintain
order, work with MacArthur, and keep power in their own conservative
hands. MacArthur ignored the cabinet and ordered the restoration of
civil liberties. The government resigned. Shattered, about to be tried as

a war criminal, and convinced that communism would soon rule his
beloved nation, the fifty-four-year-old Konoe committed suicide by
swallowing potassium cyanide. A cabinet led by Shidehara followed;
it remained in power until May 1946. Not even his care in obtaining
MacArthur's approval at every step could protect this ghost from the
1920s. Shidehara's unfortunate public statement that Chinese treat-

ment of Japan in the early 1930s, not Japanese militarism, had triggered
^"^
the war, fit neither the historical record nor U.S. sensibilities.
Yoshida Shigeru became premier (and foreign minister) in May 1946.
This new leader of the Liberal Party was to be the central Japanese
figure in the occupation and beyond. Already sixty-eight years old when
he first grasped power in 1946, Yoshida had been the fifth son born to a
samurai and a woman who was probably a geisha. Graduation from
prestigious Tokyo University; diplomatic service in Washington, Lon-
don, and Tientsin, among other posts; and marriage to the daughter of
a powerful diplomat gave him the leverage needed to become vice min-
ister of foreign affairs under Tanaka in 1928, then ambassador to Great
Britain.As his link with Tanaka indicated, Yoshida strongly favored a
Japanese empire in North China, much as he supported annexing Korea
and intervening in Siberia. But he feared the militarist governments of
the 1930s as a terrible aberration in the nation's histor)^, and, in a neat
calculation of potential power, during that decade favored ties with the
Americans and British rather than the Germans. In 1944-45 he worked
closely with Konoe to stop the war (and was arrested for forty days as a
^^
result).

This background explained why Yoshida was available for the occupa-
tion's needs. Moreover, he envisioned restoring the historic, now shat-
tered kokutai (national polity) whose aura and significance went well
THE CLASH 2 6 4

beyond a national state. To realize this vision, he ran the Liberal Party
and later the nation with an iron fist.
Throughout the occupation, Yoshida shrewdly exploited splits among
U.S. policymakers. In Washington, State, Treasury, and military depart-
ments vigorously disagreed with one another over the pace and timing
of reforms. They even fought bitterly within their own departments. In
the State Department, for example, one group wanted Japan shunted
off to the United Nations' authority, another pleaded that the Japanese
be won over with an early end to the occupation, while some officials

wanted to stay indefinitely to ensure the Japanese remained peaceful

democrats. Such divisions, and Washington's preoccupations with Cold
War crises elsewhere, gave both MacArthur's headquarters and Japa-
nese politicians extensive freedom of action. Yet SCAP (Supreme Com-
mand of Allied Powers) itself was divided, most notably between two of
MacArthur's top Major General Courtney Whitney (of Govern-
officers.

ment Section) believed that Japan could only be saved by "a sharp swing
to the left." Major General Charles A. Willoughby (G-2 Intelligence)
saw "leftists and fellow travelers" everywhere. ^^
MacArthur initially leaned toward Whitney's view. Konoe and later
Yoshida might have feared an army-Communist takeover, but in Octo-
ber 1945, MacArthur made the small, six hundred-member Communist
Party legal for the first time since it had organized in 1922. Grass-roots
democracy was encouraged by massive decentralization of power, most
notably in the police forces. Tokyo officials had destroyed independent
labor unions in mid-1940, but three laws passed between December
1945 and March 1947 gave labor the right to organize, bargain collec-
tively, and enjoy such welfare measures as health insurance.
strike,

Union membership shot up from zero in August 1945 to 6.75 million

three years later. MacArthur backtracked, however, when threatened
with crippling strikes which, he concluded, were led by Communist-
controlled unions. In February 1947, he outlawed a planned general
strike. In 1948, he decreed that government employees could neither

strike nor bargain collectively. Yoshida and the Liberal Party had been
deeply suspicious of, if not outright hostile to, the early reforms, but
^^
they were delighted with MacArthur's later rulings.
On SCAP's October 1945 the government ordered
instructions, in
the release of nearly a million poHtical prisoners in jails and concentra-
tion camps. Some were quickly replaced by one thousand officials
whom MacArthur arrested and brought before a war crimes tribunal.
Seven were sentenced to death, including Tojo Hideki, two command-
ers of the Kwantung Army, and the military commanders in China and
To Create a New Japan: Reforming. Reversing, and ^'^arrin^ (1945—1951) 2 6 5

the Philippines. Eighteen (including Marquis Kido, Hirohito's closest

ad\iser) received lengthy jail terms. A storm of controversy arose. Many
Americans and Russians demanded that more Japanese be executed.
Some thought the trials a sham, the comictions prearranged, the pun-
ishment a dangerous precedent. \\ inston Churchill told Forrestal that
it was hang "prominent people when the Allies needed Jap-
"stupid" to
anese cooperation; "both Roosevelt and himself would have been exe-
cuted if the Allies had lost the war," the former British leader obser\'ed.
The acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken noted that Mac Arthur had exe-
cuted General Homma xMasaharu, "the man who beat him in a fair fight

on Bataan," who was, Mencken charged, tied to war crimes by flimsy

e\idence. Purges remo\ing icccoc Japanese from government, busi-
ness, and academia similarly generated controversy. Some critics
warned that this number was only half those purged in Germany. Oth-
ers believed the roundup destroyed both innocent lives and a bureau-
cracy needed to make the countr\' function.'^
Despised by Yoshida, the purge policy was soon reversed. But other
reforms proved more durable. In 194c, the still feudal rural system had
forced 70 percent of farmers to rent their land. Many Allied officials
believed that the rich, large landholders had formed the backbone of
the 1930s militarism. Yoshida, as a good consenative, disliked redistri-
bution of propert}' in principle. But — also as a good consenative — he
believed the feudal structures had to be dismantled if Japan were to

become competitive and potential revolution averted. The hotly

debated Owner-Farmer Establishment Law of 1946 bought some 4 mil-
lion acres and sold it cheaply to 2 million farmers. The rampant inflation
in 1947-5C then destroyed much of the debate 'and, of course, the
value of the compensation hoped for by the former landholders). The
historian Richard Barnet estimates that an acre cost about a carton of
black-market cigarettes (which became the common currency in both
postwar Japan and Germany). Tenantr\' dropped to 8 percent. The new
landholders became a bulwark of Yoshida s conser\ative coalition that
^^
dominated the political scene until the 1990s.
On paper, the reforms affecting women were just as dramatic. Before

1945, Japanese women had few rights; for example, they, but not men,
could be comicted of adulter}-. went far beyond the
Exploitation
absence of rights. When U.S. troops arrived in August 1945, Tok\-o
authorities sought to please the occupiers —
and protect women of the
—
upper classes by setting up groups of "special prostitutes' from lower
classes who personally pledged before the Imperial Palace to sacrifice
themselves for kokiitai. Determined to change the rigid family system
THE CLASH 2 6 6

that Americans blamed for much of Japan's militarism and fascism,

SCAP quickly gave women the right to vote, hold property, enjoy higher
education, enter the government, and even join the police. MacArthur
decriminalized adultery and outlawed contract marriage, which had vir-

tually enslaved wives. These and other reforms were notably pushed by
American women in SCAP, and by Japanese female reformers. When
in 1946 women ran for office for the first time in Japan's histor\; thirt}-

eight out of eighty female candidates won Diet seats, despite deter-
mined male opposition. The leading vote-getter was Kato Shizue,
known as "the Margaret Sanger of Japan. The changes proved
' real, but
most Japanese men (and the top British occupation official in Japan)
^"^
still fought the reforms.
Similar obstacles stalled many educational reforms. The attempt to

decentralize authority; while denationalizing and democratizing text-

books, proved to be a contradiction. Local, conservative authorities dug
in their heels against rethinking Japan's recent past. They fought a mere
five-day school week, or appointing women school principals. Even
"Shogun MacArthur's fiat only traveled so far in postwar Japan.
"

From the start, MacArthur focused on radically revising the Meiji

Constitution. On October 11, 1945, he publicly outlined his principles
for a new document. If implemented, these principles would have gone
far in creating a democratic, open-market Japan. First drafts borrowed

core ideas from the U.S. Constitution: the individual was paramount,
government was restricted, and the new document ordered that the
government "shall not" infringe on individual rights. The militarv' was
never again to enjoy a v eto over cabinet gov^ernment. All suppression of
freedom of thought, speech, and religion was to end. Women were to
be emancipated through the franchise, labor protected by unionization.
Schools had to be liberalized. The thought police and "secret inquisi-
tion"which had long held Japanese "in constant fear" were to end. And
"democratization of Japanese economic institutions" was to occur so
that "monopolistic industrial controls" could be revised, a wider distri-
bution of income "and ownership of the means of production and trade"
developed, and "full employment" enjoyed. The American "Shogun"
seemed to have discovered the vvTiting style of Karl Marx.-^^
MacArthur knew that any constitution lasting after American "bayo-
nets departed would hav^e to appear to be a Japanese-originated and
'

written document. Under the loose supervision of Whitney's Govern-

ment Section, a committee led by State Minister Matsumoto Joji
drafted a new constitution. Yoshida's influence permeated the docu-
ment. Whitnev warned MacArthur it fell far short of U.S. desires. It
Xo Create a New Japan: Reiortnin^, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 6 7

changed the Meiji Constitution too Httle, and, above all, scarcely
touched the Emperor's pre-1945 powers. MacArthur concluded exten-
sive tutoring was needed. He instructed Whitney to suggest a model
constitution to the Matsumoto-Yoshida group.
Whitney's outline stripped the Emperor of claims to divinity, while
the Constitution and the people's "basic will" limited his powers. Appar-
ently Colonel Charles Kades, a former New Deal lawyer now under
Whitney, made the pivotal change when he replaced MacArthur's word-
ing that the "Emperor is at the head of the state" to a mere "symbol of
the state." The draft further declared that "war as a sovereign right of
the nation is abolished" and "no Japanese Army, Navy, or Air Force will
ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will ever be conferred
upon any Japanese force." This central point perhaps suggested by —
—
the Emperor himself was the seed of the later, famous Article IX.
Whitney decreed that "the feudal system of Japan will cease." Whitney
handed his draft to Yoshida and Matsumoto with the advice that their
earlier language was "totally unacceptable." The two Japanese were
stunned. Their shock did not lessen when Whitney gave them some
fatherly advice: "It is better [as the recipients recorded his words] if the
Japanese conservatives moved far to the left."^^
Whitney stressed that he and MacArthur cared about the principles;
the Japanese could deal with the exact wording. Matsumoto quickly
warned that foreign principles transplanted in different societies resem-
bled "roses of the West, [which] when cultivated in Japan, lose their
fragrance totally." The power given "the masses" and the Diet's power
"
over the Emperor were 'revolutionary' in a way" Whitney refused to
bargain. Unless the cabinet accepted the principles in forty-eight hours,
MacArthur would "take the constitution to the people directly" and
make it a "live issue" in the forthcoming election. After more stalling
^^
and Matsumoto accepted the principles.
talks,

Within two days in early March 1946, his group, working with Whit-
ney's Japanese-speaking staff, wrote a fresh draft. After further rewriting
by the Privy Council, the Emperor —by his exclusive power under the
Meiji Constitution —sent it to the Diet for ratification. Again changes
were made that undermined U.S. wishes. The Diet, for example, struck
out a provision giving aliens equal protection rights. Yoshida and his
colleagues finally accepted the document with its extensive protection
of human rights only after those provisions were restricted, and, above
all, after the Emperor was not only explicitly retained but, by being
separated from formal authority, even more protected. The Emperor
became, in the historian John Dower's words, "more transcendent than
THE CLASH 2 6 8

Other changes occurred when, as Inoue Kyoko has argued, the

ever."
document was translated from EngHsh to Japanese. For example,
Americans thought they guaranteed women's rights with the phrase
"equality of the sexes." Many Japanese, however, interpreted the phrase
to mean equal in carrying out their respective, traditional roles within
the family. The document, issued in the Emperor's name, was made
public in November 1946 and became law on May 3, 1947.
The renunciation of war in Article IX especially triggered U.S. -Japa-
nese clashes over at least the next half century. The Japan hands' papers
had discussed demilitarization only in broad terms. Mac Arthur, Whit-
ney's staff, and perhaps the Emperor and Shidehara drew up the spe-
cific wording. Yoshida and soon-to-be Socialist Prime Minister
Katayama Tetsu approved the clause. Both men understood that all
fears of Japanese military resurrection had to be destroyed if Japan were
to obtain the help needed from the United States and Asian neighbors
with long memories. But a powerful member of the Diet, Ashida
Hitoshi, wrote Article IX so that it finally read:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and

order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right
of the nation and the threat of use of force as means of settling
international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land,
sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be main-
tained.

Ashida's final phrasing has produced wildly different interpretations.

Do these phrases, for example, allow Japan to create a defense force
that can not only protect the home islands but participate, say, in
United Nations' missions? Charles Kades, of Whitney's staff, worked
closely with Ashida and later claimed Japan could do both that is, —
create the force and send it abroad within a UN contingent. Over the
years, many, especially in Japan, disputed Kades's interpretation. Nota-
bly, at the time British officials paid Article IX scant attention because
^"^
they thought it was of little importance.
MacArthur's determination to decentralize political functions (in
good U.S. federal under the 1947 Local Autonomy Law, and
tradition)
to apply U.S. antitrust measures to strangle the zaihatsu, also excited
passions. Unhappily for the general, these struggles were rapidly set-
tled. By 1949, Yoshida's second government was ignoring the 1947 law
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (l 945— 1951) 269

and recentralizing powers. Why? Largely because the local areas never
received adequate power to tax and raise revenue.
The anti-zaihatsu measures suffered even quicker death. The 466
commercial banks of 1935 had merged into 186 by 1941 and only 53 in
1945. These financial giants had powered the industrial zaihatsu. SCAP's
antitrust analyst, Eleanor Hadley, believed that the Mitsui zaihatsu
alone was equivalent to U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil of
New York, Alcoa, Douglas Aircraft, DuPont, Allis Chalmers, Westing-
house, AT&T, RCA, IBM, Dole Pineapple, National City Bank, Wool-
worth Stores, and Statler Hotels —among others. A
few U.S. (and of
course, all wanted to
Soviet) officials solve the problem simply by dis-
mantling Japan's industrial plant and shipping it off to the victors as
reparations for Japanese warmaking. MacArthur and the Japan hands
in Washington decapitated such plans. These officials instead tried to

apply U.S. antitrust principles to decentralize and democratize the

economy Nearly everyone nevertheless agreed with one expert on Japan
who concluded, "Unless the business and financial structure in Japan
is radically transformed, all other changes will be rendered nugatory."
MacArthur ordered banks to stand alone, thus destroying the golden
links between finance and industry. SCAP closed or radically altered
the old institutions, such as the Yokohama Specie Bank, that had
financed the nation's colonialism. In early 1947, SCAP ordered the
breakup of the most powerful zaihatsu, including Mitsui and Mitsub-
ishi.25

Having attacked the old industrial-banking system, MacArthur now

found himself governing a people who had too little food, too much
inflation (prices shot up more than twelve times between early 1946
and 1949), and virtually no exports. Of immense importance, MacAr-
thur decided to exclude foreign investors from the country. He went to
great lengths to ensure that all contacts between the outside world and
the Japanese economy went only through his office. The general dis-
dained the Wilsonian theory of open-markets-openly-arrived-at. Yoshida
happily agreed; resembling the Meiji leaders after 1868, he and his col-
leagues intended to keep the economy wholly in Japanese hands. (Yos-
hida was married to the granddaughter of the great Meiji nationalist,
Okubo Toshimichi.) They looked to internal savings (equivalent in the
late 1940s to drawing water from a stone), and some borrowing from
^^
abroad, but in any case wanted no long-term foreign ownership.
By early 1947, such intense nationalism, SCAP's economic policies,
and the growing turn of U.S. resources to waging Cold War in Europe
had triggered a frightening crisis. Japan was on the brink of chaos. It
THE CLASH 2 7

looked into the abyss just as the Chinese Communists took the offen-
sive against the NationaHsts, —
and as Truman ever the good poker
player —prepared to fold his bet on Chiang Kai-shek, whom he now
termed "the wrong horse."
At this very moment (March 1947), MacArthur astonished Washing-
ton by declaring the occupation a rousing success. He urged that a
peace treaty be signed. Japan could then follow its own destiny and, of
course, American occupiers would go home. The general seemed to be
reacting not to what he saw in Japan, but what he thought he saw across
the Pacific — a demand that he return to enter the 1948 presidential
race. In Washington, Truman's advisers concluded the time had come
once again to make Japan aware of the outside world. They also
intended to deal with the American "Shogun."^^

Tne Second Occupation (1947 — 50):

The Americans
By early 1947, only eighteen months after the United States emerged
from the war as the strongest power in world history, Stalin's armies
controlled most of the nations in Eastern Europe. The Middle East,
under pressure from both Soviet demands and a growing Arab-Israeli
clash, was at flashpoint. Hull's dream of an open world was punctured
by fears of the "outlines of three worlds of trade," as the State Depart-
—
ment confidentially called it in September 1946 Russian, American,
and —with the
British there would be
possibility "
'little trade and less
peace.' "
despite MacArthur's cheerleading,
In Asia, the two hubs of
U.S. pohcy— China and Japan —were
^^
collapsing.
By default, Japan was becoming the pivotal redoubt for U.S. policy.
Washington officials had wished for considerable time to democratize
and rebuild Japan. By early 1947, time had run out. "Japan is facing
desperate economic conditions wherein lie grave dangers to the accom-
plishment of our objectives," George Atcheson told Truman from Tokyo
on January 3, 1947. "The Japanese economy is bankrupt. ." But this . .

bankruptcy was only one of a number of crises. A similar economic

crisis struck Western Europe, where Americans figured they would

have to spend at least $12 billion or confront the danger of the entire
region swinging sharply leftward and inward. Another crisis, the col-
lapse of China, could destroy U.S. interests in Asia. This crisis was
succinctly stated by State Department officials on March 12, 1947: a
new, "positive economic program" must quickly "create a viable Japa-
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring ( 1945— 1951) 271

nese economy," one "self-sustaining" by 1950. The program simultane-

ously had to deal with the regional crisis by permitting Japan to help
"the economic recovery of the Far East, which is desperately in need of
the products of the Japanese industry." Conveniently for the historian,
this document was written on the same day (March 12, 1947) that Tru-
man dramatically appeared before a joint session of Congress to

announce the Truman Doctrine: the world was now divided between
the free and enslaved peoples, the President proclaimed, and unless a
penny-pinching Republican Congress gave him $400 million immedi-
ately to help Greece and Turkey, the Middle East might join the
enslaved camp while the Mediterranean and Western Europe would lie
open to Communist pressures. Suddenly, half the globe stretching from
the Mediterranean east to the Pacific seemed to be sliding away from
Western capitalism. ^^
The crises were related. If the United States hoped to save the Japa-
nese, it could only do so by making them more self-sufficient (because
U.S. resources were headed toward more immediate threats in Europe).
Then a new, democratic Japan had to play its old role as the economic
center of the region, thus saving the remainder of Asia from the fate
fast enveloping China. On the surface, the ironies were rich. After the

Americans had supported Japan against Russia for decades, they had
switched in World War II to supporting the Soviets against Japan. Now
in 1947-48 they switched back to rebuild Japan —
so it could gain a kind
of economic interdependence with the Asians it had long sought and
the Americans had tried to prevent. One U.S. policy objective remained
consistent: keeping Asia open to American interests while integrating
the region within an open, global, capitalist framework. If that objective
required opposing Japan, so be it. If the objective required rebuilding
Japan and reintegrating it with Asia, so be it. Japanese culture was
interesting and was also viewed as malleable. It could be
strong, but it

put into the service of the American worldview. Japan was less an end
in itself than the means, in Washington's eyes, for achieving the larger
regional and global purposes of U.S. foreign policy.
Truman's new Secretary of State, the much-idolized George Mar-
shall, caught this relationship in part on January 29, 1947. He ordered

Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson to plan "a definite government

of South Korea and connect uf its economy with that of Japan." The
forty-year colonial bonds between Korea and Japan lay broken. Korea
itself lay loosely divided between Communist and capitaUst halves.

Marshall moved to restore the interdependence with economic rather

than political ties. Soon a $600 miUion grant-in-aid was being prepared
 —
THE CLASH 27 2

for South Korea. If the approach worked, if capitalism proved to be

more dynamic and integrative than communism, then a partially capi-
talist Asia could become an all-capitalist Asia —perhaps without war
^°
and with a new, U.S. -organized Japan at its center.

This breathtaking approach was spelled out in calm, undramatic

words by Acheson in his soon-to-be-famous speech at Cleveland, Mis-
sissippi, on May Because of the war's horrible destruction,
8, 1947.
Acheson began, many nations needed U.S. goods. But they were going
bankrupt pa\dng for them. If financing was not arranged, U.S. exports
now four times greater than before the war and representing one
month's work for American man and woman would drop. To
ever\^ —
solve the crisis, Germany and Japan, "those two great workshops . . .

upon which the ultimate recovery of the two continents so largely

depends, required quick rebuilding. Only in Achesons last paragraphs
"

did the Stalinist threat enter the picture. The immediate danger was
not a Soviet invasion but an economic catastrophe.^'
The Japanese "workshop " lay in shambles. Official food rations hov-
ered around the 1,000-calories-per-day level. Runaway inflation made
food impossibly expensive. U.S. officials now prepared to reverse the
anii-zaihatsu program and rapidly raise industrial production.
In September 1947, with U.S. Cold War poHcies accelerating in
Europe and Latin America, Undersecretary of the Army William H.
Draper returned from Japan to condemn SCAP's antitrust policies. In
March 1948, Draper (who had been a Wall Street investment banker,
then chief U.S. economic adviser in Germany) publicly envisioned only
three alternatives: "we can continue feeding the Japanese, we can with-
draw aid and let them starve, or we can help supply industrial raw
materials to pump-prime Japan's industry and put the nation on its own
feet. The implications were not small: "Japan needs raw materials from

the rest of Asia. . . . We foresee the revival of the old trade, not neces-
sarily anew trade. " Indeed, he told a congressional committee that
Japan was now to be the "focal point in the whole recovery^ of the East
from the effects of the war." Draper's boss. Secretary of the Army Ken-
neth C. Royall, underlined the central problem in a January 1948
speech. Japan had to be demiHtarized, but also economically self-sup-
porting: "With economic approach there has arisen an
this increasing

inevitable area of conflict," Royall worried, because those who ran

"Japan's war machine were often the ablest and most successful
. . .

"^^
business leaders.
In March 1948, George Kennan, head of the State Depart-
it fell to

ment's Policy Planning Staff, to beard the lion, MacArthur, in his den.
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 27?)

Kennan's ideas were shaping U.S. Cold War policies. His "Long Tele-
gram" of February 1946 from Moscow, where he had been Ambassador
Averell Harriman's chief adviser, had set out the historical and ideologi-
cal reasoning for containing Soviet power. Back in Washington, the
forty-three-year-old Wisconsin native was named by Marshall to head
the new Policy Planning Staff. Kennan, who deeply mistrusted mercu-
rial public and congressional opinion, also disliked the President's
hyperbole and militant call to action in the Truman Doctrine speech.
He preferred a focused, systematic, economic and political buildup of
Allies, a buildup especially of what he called "the two greatest industrial
complexes of East and West," Japan and West Germany, that would
immunize them and their regions against communism. ^^
Having been a prime architect for the rebuilding of Western Europe,
Kennan turned to deal with the other "complex." He understood in May
1947 that China's crisis "was to heighten greatly the importance of what
might now happen in Japan." Instead of leaving Japan, as MacArthur
wanted, Kennan believed the United States had to remain and build up
the country. "Our primary goal," Kennan said as he cut to the core of

U.S. policy, was to ensure that Americans would "never again be threat-
ened by the militarization against us of the complete industrial [Far
East] area as . . . [occurred] during the second world war."^"^
Kennan was not awe of MacArthur (he had, after all, dealt with
in
Stalin for many years in Moscow). What might Kennan have thought
when, in their first talks in Tokyo, MacArthur dropped such nuggets as
that the men who ran the zaihatsu were well gotten rid of because "they
were the counterparts of the most effete New York club men"; or that
a peace treaty demilitarizing Japan could include the Soviets because
"when the Russians put their signature to something clear and explicit,

they will remain faithful to their word"?^^

Kennan thought not. No peace treaty should now be sought, he
advised Marshall, because the United States must maintain full control
to transform occupation policy. Anyway, he "would not trust Russian
good faith" in any demilitarization treaty. An internal crackdown was
needed to stop Japanese Communists from "penetrating Japanese soci-
ety and seizing its key positions." Threats of extracting reparations from
Japan s industry to indemnify Asian war victims had virtually paralyzed
the nation s planning, so reparations had to be drastically cut if not —
completely stopped. The problems of fully reviving the economy "still
lie [in] the reluctance of other Far Eastern nations to accept Japanese
"^^
goods.
Kennan's recommendations became the core of NSC-13/2, an early
THE CLASH 27 4

paper of the newly created, powerful National Security Council (made

up of the secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, the Central Intel-
ligence Agency director, and presided over by the President). This
October 7, 1948, document marked the official turn of policy toward
Japan. There would be no peace treaty until Japan's security was
assured, partly by U.S. naval bases in huge facilities south of Tokyo and
on Okinawa, partly by an expanded, "centrally directed" Japanese
police. No new reforms for democratization or deconcentration were
planned. Purges were sharply reduced. Then a section of the paper
placed policy toward Japan in the mainstream of U.S. poHcies since the
1840S and 1890s: Japanese economic recovery, second in importance
"only to U.S. security interests," was to be realized by (i) cutting "away
existing obstacles to the revival of Japanese foreign trade," (2) accelerat-
ing "private enterprise," (3) warning the Japanese they must "raise pro-

duction and . . . maintain high export levels through hard work" (that
is, no more strikes), and (4) attacking inflation through balanced bud-
gets. A CIA research report of May 1948 was specific: Japan's recovery
required the trade of Northeast Asia. If the Chinese collapse made that

trade unreachable, commerce with Southeast Asia and the Philippines

had to be substituted.^'
No major announcement was made of this major turn. But MacAr-
thur was neither fooled nor pleased. Not wanting to carry out NSC-13/
2,he worked with other occupying powers to block it. He believed the
growing conflict was "between a system of free competitive enterprise
. . . and a socialism in private hands." The general told the British early
in 1948 that the new Washington policy was the brainchild of "the big
Wall Street combines," which wanted to control the rebuilt zaihatsu.

MacArthur "spoke most bitterly," as the top British official in Japan, Sir
Alvery Gascoigne, recorded it, about " 'tycoons' (Forrestal, Royall, Aver-
ell named) who were
Harriman, Draper were anti-purge and
all . . .

anti-economic centralization. They were against these measures

because they thought they would conflict with their own business inter-
ests." The general vowed to continue "trust-busting." But he was out-

gunned, especially after a devastating loss in the Wisconsin Republican

primary eliminated him from the presidential race. Of some 325 compa-
nies that he had hoped but 19 survived virtually intact.
to dismantle, all

Kades, fearing remilitarization, political polarization, and, as he phrased

it, the end of the "New Deal coalition" in Japan, quit MacArthur's staff
^^
and returned to Washington.
In mid-1948, the State Department's tracking of public opinion sur-
prisingly showed Americans strongly in favor of reconstructing Japan
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 7 5

economically (65 percent approved, 35 percent disapproved), despite

loud opposition from Asian nations and, especially, the Australians.
Some 81 percent of Americans polled agreed that U.S. occupation
troops should remain in Japan rather than be brought home, and 68
percent wanted to maintain troops in South Korea. Marshall used these
—
numbers to accelerate the new policies especially, as he told British
Ambassador Sir Oliver Franks in July 1948, since Truman, to whom he
was utterly devoted, would probably lose to the Republicans in the 1948
election and the winners would radically cut back overseas spending.
Also accelerating the new policy was the American Council on Japan,
or, as it became known, the "Japan Lobby." Led by old Japan hands

Joseph Grew, William Castle, Joseph W. Ballantine, and Eugene Doo-

man, as well as by Newsweek foreign editor Henry Kern (who organized
the Council), the outspokenly anti-Communist group pressured the
administration and Congress to allow a Japanese economic buildup
under Japanese control. The Council also urged smashing unions and
Communist organizations. Neither Kennan nor other U.S. officials
needed convincing. The Dooman-led group did not reverse the 1945—
46 policy (it was being reversed anyway), but after 1949 it did seal U.S.-
Japanese business links while taking in good profits in shipping, fishing,
^"^
insurance, pearls, coal, and other areas.

Tne Second Occupation (1947 — 50):

Japanese, Americans, and Cninese

"The original simple problem, 'How can we hold down Japan?' "
wrote
a fearful, perceptive Sunday Chronicle of London editor in August 1948,
"has been replaced by the complex proposition, 'How can we hold up
Japan?' ... It is as though the hero and villain of a Japanese kahuki play
had exchanged roles. This [new] role has naturally been accepted by
"^^
the Japanese leaders with eager hands.
With the appearance of those leaders, and his own surprising tri-
umph in the 1948 presidential election, Truman's policies rode a streak
of good fortune. A year earlier the Japanese and
conservatives had split,

for the only time between 1945 and 1993, a Socialist became prime
minister. That coalition fell apart and was replaced by a Democratic
Party-Socialist coalition led by the career diplomat —
and shaper of Arti-
cle IX —Ashida Hitoshi. The new premier was much friendlier to the
left and to anti-zaihatsii programs than, say, Yoshida. According to a

Japanese scholar of his diaries, Ashida believed that "capitalism" was

THE CLASH 216

the "bud" that would replace the old, pre-1945 system with the blooms
of the new. If Ashida had survived, the United States — after a century
of effort —mighty finally have made headway toward the historic goal of
an open Japan. Within months, however, Ashida's coalition was ripped
by scandal. In October 1948, Yoshida regained the premiership. The
next year Yoshida won a rousing electoral triumph that reunified the
Conservatives and set himself off on an uninterrupted five years of
41
power.
The seventy-year-old Yoshida largely agreed with the Kennan-Draper
policies of NSC-13/2. (Time would solve any disagreements. "Whatever
harm was done through the Occupation forces not listening to what I
had to say," the old man later wrote, "could be remedied after we had
regained our independence.") But Yoshida sharply broke with the
Americans in his determination to restore ties with China. He seemed
unconcerned whether Communists or NationaHsts sat in Beijing. To
his mind they all came out of a superior Chinese culture. His foreign
policies had long rested on three legs: China; disHke and mistrust of
the Soviets; and fervent pro-British principles, in part because he had
valued the Anglo-Japanese alliance that targeted Russia. The British,
he regretted, were collapsing as a world power. They were, however,
being replaced by their offspring, whom he had once seen as bumbhng
and naive. But the Americans at least had long mistrusted Russians.
Holding strong racial feelings, Yoshida disdained Asians other than Chi-
nese, and most everyone else save some British and a few post-1945
North Americans. ^^
One of those favored Americans, Detroit banker Joseph M. Dodge,
reached Tokyo in early 1949 as MacArthur's senior adviser to jump-start
the Kennan-Draper economic plan. Yoshida quickly fought Dodge's
insistence on removing government as rapidly as possible from the mar-
ketplace. Dodges demand for instant balanced budgets might slash
inflation, but also impose austerity —and, in Yoshida's eyes, probably
cause massive riots. A powerful Japanese planning board complained
that Dodge s demands resembled asking "a juggler to take out a rabbit
before the audience while furnishing him with a top-hat which has
room only for containing a rat." Yoshida, Dodge later claimed, "sabo-
taged" his plan for getting Japan on its feet by opening the country fully
'^^
to market forces.
That charge was not wholly true. Yoshida happily helped Dodge and
the SCAP conservatives kill the anti-zaihatsu program. The Japanese
leader, of course, was also delighted when Truman's new Secretary of
State, Dean Acheson, effectively halted Japan's payment of reparations
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 7 7

to nations victimized in World War II. Japan had already paid about $3
billion from its former colonial assets. Those resources were now to be
used for Japan's rebuilding, not, say, for the Soviet Union's or Australia's.
Yoshida helped set up a unitary foreign exchange rate —an undervalued
rate of 360 yen to the dollar — that gave Japanese exports a huge advan-
tage. The rate also made more predictable and ended the
export prices
"^^
interesting practice of pricing goods from Sears, Roebuck catalogues.
Yoshida took the Kennan-Draper policy to mean that he could allow
some convicted war criminals out of jail. (He would have appointed two
of them to his cabinet, but MacArthur stopped him.) Japanese officials
simultaneously began a "red purge of the liberal " left that soon claimed
about one thousand university and school faculty. For some Japanese,
the purgesmacked of prewar militarist purges that avowedly targeted
Communists, but usually hit Not only was the Communist
liberals.

Party attacked, but 5,500 unions with some 880,000 members were
squeezed out of existence. Surviving unions assumed characteristics
valued by the newly resurrected zaihatsu. As Igarashi Takeshi has
argued, Yoshida set out to win two Cold Wars: against the Soviets who
were a threat from abroad, and against groups he considered a threat at
home. The two wars were intimately related in his mind, as they were
in Kennan's, Drapers, and Acheson's."^^
One of Yoshida's striking accomplishments was putting in place a
highly trained bureaucracy that, as the historian Takemae Eiji aptly puts
it, rose out of the war's ashes like the mythical phoenix. The bureau-

cracy began to shape the economy as Yoshida's government, but not

always Dodge, wanted. This right arm of government thus embarked on
a long, successful life marked by bitter clashes with the United States.
But U.S. economic reforms ironically helped strengthen this bureau-
cracy. SCAP's sweeping economic directives, for example, depended on

Japanese officials for implementation. The 1949 Foreign Exchange and

Foreign Trade Control Law, proposed by SCAP and passed by the Diet,
allowed for export, import, and exchange controls to be operated by
the government. The 1950 Law Concerning Foreign Investment was
immediately used by the government. Four giant U.S. banks, for exam-
ple,had moved into Japan to serve military personnel, and American
Express began to handle travelers' needs. The Ministry of Finance then
called a halt. The "bamboo curtain " dropped. Exchange and trade con-
trols became sophisticated protectionism to shield nascent industries
from New York capital. Under MacArthur's beneficent gaze, economic
"^^
controls and the bureaucracy grew evermore effective.
In October-December 1949, Yoshida's two Cold Wars melded when
THE CLASH 2 1 '^

Truman accepted NSC-48/2, "The Position of the United States with

Respect to Asia." The document was drawn up amid crisis. In Septem-
ber, Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded an atomic

device. Americans no longer alone held the secret to ultimate destruc-

tive power. During early October, Mao's Communist forces claimed

control of all China. In Europe, the Marshall Plan was not doing its job.
Europeans could not revive their economies quickly enough to produce
dollars to buy vital American goods. Truman privately feared an eco-
nomic crisis of enormous proportions."^^
U.S. and Japanese economies were not immune. When their econ-
omy slumped in 1949, Americans feared they were entering their usual
postwar depression. Stalin's propagandists crowed to other 'proletariat"
that with China gone red, capitalism would soon be paralyzed, then
overwhelmed by revolution. In early 1950, U.S. production revived, but
Washington officials remained fearful. In closed-door testimony to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Acheson made
a remarkable admission. "Even if there were no Russia, even if there
were no communism," the Secretary of State declared, "we would have
very grave problems in trying to exist and strengthen those parts of
the free world which have been so badly shaken by the war and its
consequences. Japan faced special danger, Acheson publicly noted
"

that month: the Japanese had lost their historic markets and sources of
raw materials, and "other countries" did not want to help them
48
recover.
The danger, then, had less to do with the Soviet military than with
preventing the global breakdown of capitalism. In this poisoned atmo-
sphere, U.S. policymakers drafted and refined NSC-48/2. The historian
Bruce Cumings has noted that an unsigned August 1949 draft
early,

outlined the desired policy principles: that "economic life of the modern
world is geared to expansion"; that such exporting should occur in a
world of and that such policies must center
liberal trading poHcies;

around "reciprocal exchange and mutual advantage." John Hay and

Woodrow Wilson would have applauded. Yoshida and the new Japanese
finance ministry, however, had considerable reservation about the
"reciprocal exchange " phrase."*^
The final draft of NSC-48 revealed how these principles were to be
by encouraging the creation of "regional associations of non-
realized:
Communist states of the various Asian areas." Such associations could
help the United States ensure security. They could also accelerate eco-
nomic recovery by reviving trade and capital movement "along multilat-
eral, non-discriminatory lines." The General Agreement on Tariffs and
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 2 7 9

Trade, formed in 1947 to batter down tariff walls around the world, was
to be applied to Japan. At long last, the Japanese were to be integrated
into an open, global —and reciprocal — trade complex. Communist
China, of course, threatened to be a nightmare among these dreams.
Washington officials concluded, however, that as long as they held the
"off-shore islands" of Japan,Okinawa, and the Philippines, U.S. secu-
^^
rity was assured. Recognition of China could be delayed.

NSC-48/2 was a giant stride in the evolution of U.S. poHcy. The first
steps, democratizing and rebuilding Japan by solely U.S. means, had
proven insufficient. Hence the second step, taken by Kennan, Draper,
and Dodge, to push Japan toward self-sufficiency in other words, to —
work with Yoshida and the resurrected zaihatsu. But that step also fell
short. Western and Japanese economic crises combined with the spread
of revolution in Asia to form an explosive mixture. In late 1949, U.S.
officials diluted the mixture by creating regional associations revolving
around Japan and India. Such associations could institutionaHze multi-
lateralism and create a rising tide of security and development.
But the tide did not rise in early 1950. Japans all-important exports
grew sluggishly. The country meanwhile suffered a terrible trade imbal-
ance with the United States. America took only 12 percent of Japan's
exports in 1947, but sold it 92 percent of its imports. Before the war,
Asia, and especially the colonial empire of Korea, Formosa, and Man-
churia, had accounted for 53 percent of Japanese imports and 64 per-
cent of exports; regional trade in 1947, by contrast, amounted to only 6
percent of Japan's imports and an incredibly low 4.3 percent of its
exports. To top it off, Japan's birth rate exploded at twice the expected
numbers. ^^
Thus in 1949 and early 1950, U.S. officials swallowed hard, and, while
keeping a wary eye on Republicans determined to punish those 'who
lost China," quietly allowed Japan to open trade with the Chinese Com-

munists. The State Department overcame ardent opposition from the

Pentagon and the newly created Central Intelligence Agency. Both
warned that trade could build up China and open Japan to Communist
infection. The State Department countered that the trade would open
China to non-Russian influence, more likely make the Chinese depen-
—
dent on Japan than vice versa, and of special importance provide —
Japan a healthy profit to help take it off the U.S. dole. China, which
had lost millions of people during its long war with Japan, outspokenly
opposed the rapid American rebuilding of the nation. But the Beijing
government needed help, and its supposed new friend, the Soviet
Union, was providing precious little. Chinese officials moved to set up
THE CLASH 2 8

barter deals (their coal and salt for Japan's machinery and medicines).
Yoshida was ready to rush in: "I don't care whether China is red or
green. China is a natural market, and it has become necessary
Japan for
to think about markets." He received support from intellectuals, such
as Takeuchi Yoshimi, who feared the values and culture of American
occupiers, and insisted that the Japanese again use Chinese civilization
as their guide to a better society. Private Japanese business groups,
quickly organized to exploit China, were encouraged by SCAR From a
postwar low of $7.2 million in 1946, Sino-Japanese trade jumped to
nearly $80 million in 1950. Japan enjoyed a slightly favorable balance. ^^
It soon became clear that China would not deliver the jolt needed
by a dechning Japanese economy. In March 1950, Kennan spilled out
his anguish when he privately lamented that "we had made perhaps
unavoidably a great strategic mistake by letting the war end in the com-
plete destruction of German and Japanese strength." The Japanese,
Kennan believed, were "in as good a bargaining position as they were in
the 1920s and 1930s " to "do business with China, but we will have to
get off their necks first. " One other possibilit}^ for Japan's salvation
loomed that Kennan did not then discuss: linking the Japanese to the
markets and resources of Southeast Asia.^^
By early 1950, the United States was already enmeshed in Vietnam,
or French Indochina as it was know^n in the West. The dilemma began
in early 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt at first opposed, then finally

acquiesced in, a joint British-French colonial reoccupation of Indo-

china. The Europeans even used Japanese soldiers "to reconquer the
little people we promised to liberate,' MacArthur bitterly complained
at the time. "It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal" and it "makes
my blood boil. " Vietnamese nationalists, urged by the U.S. inteUigence
personnel, asked Truman for support. The President never answered.
When the Vietnamese responded in September with an uprising that
killed over one hundred Westerners, including a U.S. intelligence offi-
cer (the American \dctim of the thirty-year war), the revolution
first

commenced. By 1949—50, Acheson was committing the United States

to help the French because he needed France's cooperation in building
Western European defenses. But another, more comprehensive motive
also drove U.S. poHcy. By at least mid-1949, Kennan and Deputy Under-
secretary^ of State Dean Rusk (who had served as a militar\' officer in
Southeast Asia at the close of the war) had concluded that Japan's eco-
nomic survival depended on Southeast Asian trade. ^^
Acheson slowdy came around to accept the inevitable. He was
pushed by Rusk, who argued that the regions rice was necessar}' to
To Create a New Japan: Reforming. Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 281

feed Japan s population, and by Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup, who

visited Asia in early 1950 and became convinced that three prizes could
be collected in one move. Since the United States could not send
needed technicians to help Southeast Asia, Jessup reasoned, "J^pan
would be required to fill the gap. This would help to promote Japanese
trade and to placate any anti-Japanese sentiments which might still be
abroad." Privately, Acheson now saw "the American interest in the great
underbelly of Asia as depending on two pillars, India and Japan." On
March 29, 1950, Jessup and Acheson gave a remarkable summary of this
policy behind closed doors to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Jessup applauded the suddenly mushrooming Japan trade with South-
east Asia (rice for locomotives with Thailand, for example). Acheson
essentially admitted the United States was already trapped in the region

in an effort to contain Chinese influence. He had pushed the French

to be more enlightened in dealing with Asians, the Secretary of State
observed, but "we" must "not press the French to the point where they
say, 'All right, take over the damned country. We don't want it,' and put
their soldiers on ships and send them back to France." When a senator
worried that "we are very much who were
in the position of those
opposed to helping the American colonies" in 1776, Acheson made no
direct response. By late May 1950, a month before the Korean War
erupted, a forty-two-person U.S. aid mission set up shop in Saigon to
disperse $23.5 million in economic help to buttress the French posi-
^^
tion.

One Asian prime minister joked that the best approach to economic
development was to attack the them occupy your
Americans, then let

country. By early 1950, however, Acheson's policy was stumbling on the

realities of Vietnamese resistance and Japanese stagnation. A young

professor of Far East languages, Edwin O. Reischauer, had visited Japan

the year before and the State Department circulated his "penetrating
analysis. His report warned that the Japanese, once in awe of the occu-
pation, "see it today as a conglomeration of persons having conflicting
views and widely varying abiUties. . . Even General MacArthur has lost
.

his aura of sanctity." It was time to "get off their necks," as Kennan had
^^
phrased it, and sign a peace treaty.

Bureaucratic warfare erupted in Washington. Acheson later said that

four groups fought a peace treaty: theCommunists, the Pentagon, for-
mer Allies, and Japan. "Of these the Communists," he thought, "gave
the least trouble." The State Department wanted the treaty to undercut
anti-U.S. sentiment in Japan. Yoshida could then go off on his own,
within certain limits of course. But the Pentagon wanted nothing to
THE CLASH 2 8 2

threaten its network of bases in Japan and Okinawa that formed the
cornerstone of the entire U.S. security structure in Asia. The central
question thus became clear: Which U.S. controls and bases should
remain after a peace treaty went into effect? The State Department
rightly feared that such demands would rekindle the Japanese memory
^^
of the hated 1853 to 1899 treaties.
Yoshida did not make it easy for Acheson. In December 1949, his
government announced the 1945 Yalta agreements to be non-binding on
Japan. In other words, the Japanese reasserted their legal claims to the
Kuriles and South Sakhalin, and also to the Bonins, Okinawa, and Iwo
Jima, where U.S. officials intended to retain bases. Yoshida, moreover,
feared that many Japanese army officers favored communism (or, as the
phrase went, that they were **Red Fascists"). He consequently frowned
on U.S. requests for a Japanese military buildup that would ease the
burden of American taxpayers. In reality, since 1946 Japan had built a
thirty-five-ship force of minesweepers, and since 1947 a coastguard to
protect fishing rights. Yoshida wanted this navy to grow no further. By
early 1950, his reluctance to rearm led the Truman administration to
decide it must have long-term bases around Japan. After all, as a report
to Congress phrased Japan did act as the "West coast" of the United
it,

States. The view of Japan as the key to a far western frontier seemed
^^
branded on American minds.
In February 1950,Americans were shocked when the two great Com-
munist powers signed a Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance.
Article I specifically targeted Japan and the United States: the Soviets
and Chinese vowed "to adopt all necessary measures" to stop "the
resumption of aggression ... on the part of Japan or any other state
that may collaborate with Japan directly or indirectly in acts of aggres-
sion." If either signatory was attacked by Japan or any allied state, the
other signatory would immediately give "assistance by all means at its

disposal." Japanwas thus threatened with another atomic attack. The

United States thus faced a possible war with the Soviets if it went to
war with China.
A month earlier (January 1950), Acheson had anticipated such dan-
gers by announcing that Japan fell within the defense perimeter which
Americans would defend alone if necessary. The Secretary of State real-
ized, however, that the United States was overstretched: Truman,

obsessed with balancing the government's books, was forcing the mili-
tary to defend much
Europe and parts of Asia on a $13 billion budget.
of
In February to April 1950, Acheson and Paul Nitze (who had replaced
Kennan as head of Policy Planning) secretly drew up NSC-68, a blue-
print for fighting the post-1950 Cold War. The document aimed at noth-
 To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 283

ing less than destroying the Soviet Union. It planned to accomplish this

by quadrupling the military budget and creating global "situations of

strength," as Acheson liked to call them. One of those situations was to
^^
be Japan.
In April 1950, Truman appointed the chief Republican foreign policy
voice, John Foster Dulles, as Acheson's special adviser. Dulles was spe-
cifically charged with negotiating a Japanese peace treaty. In late April

1950, Yoshida sent a delegation led by his intimate adviser, Ikeda Hay-
ato, to Washington — ostensibly to discuss economic issues, in reality to
tell U.S. officials that Japan was ready to negotiate a bilateral treaty
allowing U.S. bases on Okinawa and the Bonins. Yoshida feared both
I the Sino-Soviet alliance and the sudden upsurge of Communist Party
strength in Japan. He also realized that a treaty was the price the Japa-
nese must pay Washington for their independence. When Dulles flew
to Tokyo in June to work out the details, however, the canny Yoshida
refused to be explicit about U.S. bases. The prime minister would not
play his high cards until the stakes were clearly on the table. Dulles
was "flabbergasted" and angered. He intensified the pressure. By June
22 (three days before the Korean War unexpectedly exploded), Dulles
was not only demanding bases but a limited rearming of Japan. The
^^
rearming was proposed over Mac Arthur's fervent objections.
Dulles's negotiations bogged down. U.S. officials, however, would
not retreat from their new, grand design of NSC-68 and Japan's pivotal
role in it. While Acheson awaited the proper moment to accelerate
the military budget and rearm Japan, the CIA helped Japanese trading
companies return to Southeast Asia. It also secretly dispatched Japa-
nese military officers to advise Chiang Kai-shek as he planned to over-
throw the Communists on the mainland. Assistant Secretary of State
Dean Rusk later observed, "Our general attitude in those days was that
it was important for the United States to have control of every wave in

the Pacific Ocean." On June 25, 1950, the Korean War suddenly broke
out. The conflict "prove [d] our thesis," Acheson later remarked, and
thus made possible the realization of NSC-68's vast plans to control
those and other ocean waves. Or, as he and his assistants concluded,
"Korea came along and saved us."^^

Korea: Tne W^ar lor Japan

"A Gift of the Gods"
The 1949 to 1953 years resembled a meat grinder: one Cold
historical
War went in and out came another, somewhat similar in ingredients.
THE CLASH 2 8 4

but quite changed in form. Faced with the Korean War, which was
quickly seen as a tremendous, if unexpected, opportunity, the United
States hurriedly built positions of strength that incorporated Japan, Tai-
wan, the southwest Pacific,and South Korea. Since 1853, the United
States had hoped to lock an open Japan into a vast, Hberalized trading
system while using the islands as a partner in protecting U.S. interests
in Asia. The war suddenly allowed an acceleration of these plans.
Even these historical earthquakes, however, were not enough to open
Japan's economic system as U.S. officials had long hoped. Japan's "col-
lectivist feeling, Dulles's top assistant (and later U.S. Ambassador to
"

Japan), John AUison, privately lamented to a Senate committee in 1951,

"isone of the problems you cannot get away from." Nor did the earth-
quakes close the long arguments between Washington and Tokyo over
China. To the contrary, as China became a focal point of American
hatred, it became a target economic ambitions. The
of Japanese
century-old themes that had shaped American-Japanese relations
changed and intensified rather than melted away.^^
The war climaxed five years of civil conflict between Communist
North Korea and the capitalist South. The two had been quickly and
artificially divided along the 38th parallel in 1945 for purposes of deline-
ating Sovietand U.S. occupation zones. Between 1947 and 1949, both
Soviet and U.S. troops began withdrawing from their respective zones.
By June 1950, the southern regime of the aged Syngman Rhee was cor-
rupt and stumbling. Deeply mistrustful of Rhee, Truman had reduced
U.S. troop presence but not the commitment to protect South Korea.
As Acheson had declared in a January speech, Americans would do so
with the aid of the United Nations.
The North's drive across the 38th parallel on June 25 was only one of
many crossings made by both Koreas during recent months. This partic-
ular invasion, however, was more massive and successful. As revealed
in Soviet archives opened after 1989, the attack had been planned by

North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung for a year and cleared in personal
conversations by Joseph Stalin. The Soviet ruler, however, wanted Kim
to get help from the Chinese Communists. He also emphasized that,
while Kim could employ Soviet equipment and advisers, if the invasion
went sour the Koreans were on their own. Stalin was not going to fight
World War III with the United States over South Korea. Nevertheless,
the Russians and Japanese had been enemies for centuries. The ancient
hatreds felt by Koreans for Japanese had been fueled to white heat by
a half century of Tokyo's rule. Now, as Dulles intensified his mission,
Japan was to be rebuilt and used as a long-term, well-anchored aircraft
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 8 5

and Kim agreed that the chance to neu-

carrier for U.S. forces. Stalin
trahze such dangers was worth the risks of invasion. The two Commu-
nist leaders did not foresee, however, that Truman would quickly

mobilize United Nations support and commit U.S. forces to fight the
invasion.
North Korean forces knifed through the peninsula, but they were
finally stopped in mid-July by MacArthur's United Nations forces

(which were actually more than 90 percent American). Washington

officials, led by Kennan, Dulles, and CIA analysts, had no doubt: an
ultimate Communist target was the U.S. position in Japan. Then and
later, Kennan believed the U.S. buildup in Japan was a central reason
Acheson that ''it is probable that one of the
for the invasion. Dulles told
purposes of the Korean attack was to break up United States planning
of a peace treaty for Japan," which, in Dulles's mind, made such plan-
ning even more urgent. In a nationwide CBS Radio speech, Dulles
declared that if the Soviets held Korea as well as Sakhalin, "Japan would
be between the upper and lower jaws of the Russian bear." Within hours
after the invasion, CIA analysts told U.S. officials that "Soviet military
domination of all Korea" could turn Japan away from "future alignment
with the U.S.," and lead to "neutralizing the usefulness of Japan as an
American base."^^
Acheson seized this golden opportunity to push ahead not only in
Japan but globally. Truman finally, reluctantly, agreed to set NSC-68
plans in motion and bust the budget limits on a massive military
buildup. The draft was reinstated so the army could quickly rise from
630,000 to over a million soldiers. U.S. policies toward defeated Nation-
alist Chinese on Taiwan were changing from withdrawal to commit-
ment even before the war; immediately after the invasion, Truman
stationed U.S. forces around Taiwan to protect Chiang's remnants and
began to view the island as a vital "free-world" outpost. Of special worry
to Stalin, Acheson planned
arm West Germany. In perspective, few
to
American decisions of these days were more significant than Acheson
ordering the first major U.S. military mission to French Indochina.
Truman made an equally important decision on September 11, 1950,
when, urged on by Acheson and Rusk, he ordered MacArthur to take
his successful counteroffensive north of the 38th and into North Korea
itself. Four days later, MacArthur pulled off a stunning, near-impossible
invasion back of Communist Only recently has it been
lines in Inchon.
learned — thanks to the work of Bruce Cumings and Jon Halliday that —
Japanese military units secretly played a vital role in the drive north-
ward. In October, Japanese minesweepers cleared Wonsan Harbor. This
THE CLASH 2^6

operation reintroduced Japan's military presence to other Asians just

five years after the end of World War 11. In the opinion of the admiral
who commanded the minesweepers, it also helped persuade U.S. offi-
cials to give Japan independence in 1951.^^
Because of open-ended instructions, and a belief in his own invinci-
bility,MacArthur drove toward the Yalu River separating Korea from
China. At first tentatively in October, then with human-wave attacks in
November, the Chinese intervened to inflict on the United States some
of the worst military defeats in its history. The Communists nearly drove
the U.S. -UN forces to the sea before bloody fighting in 1951 began to
produce a stalemate.
MacArthur, for all his disastrous decisions, provocatively summa-
rized the crisis when he remarked that "At one fell blow, everything that
had been so laboriously built up since the days of John Hay [in 1898-
1905] was lost." In late December, the frightened general secretly asked
Truman for permission to drop atomic bombs on twenty-six targets to
stop the Chinese advance. Truman turned down the request, although
a month earlier the President himself had publicly refused to rule out
the use of such weapons. In April 1951, Truman did order nine atomic
bombs to Okinawa for possible use against Chinese or Russians, but
after second thoughts, stopped the task force at Guam. The historian
Roger Dingman argues that while Truman did not come close to order-
ing nuclear weapons to be dropped, sending the bombs had a striking
political effect: it helped convince the miUtary Joint Chiefs that the
President was finally committed to fighting the war, and so made possi-
ble their support of Truman in April when he fired MacArthur and
recalled him home after the general publicly criticized administration
policies in Asia. The stakes in Asia had suddenly skyrocketed. As a joint
State-Defense team told Acheson during late 1950, "America without
Asia will have been reduced to the Western Hemisphere and a precari-
ous foothold on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent. Success
[in Korea] will vindicate [and] give added meaning to America and the
American way of life."^^
Yoshida and many other Japanese were, to understate, more relaxed
about the war. The premier declared in early 1951, "We do not have
slightest expectation that the Communist countries will invade Japan."
(Nor should the Japanese, given the U.S. militar\' commitment in the
region.) Since 1953, Japanese scholars have paid little attention to the
conflict relative to their work on other post- 1945 events. As Dingman
phrased it, for Japanese with any sense of history, "the Korean War
becomes simply another Korean War." Where Americans saw a historic
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring ( 1945— 1951) 287

crisis, Japanese saw an unfortunate but welcome opportunity

— "a gift

of the gods," as Yoshida later called the war.^^

Yoshida used the conflict not only to obtain Japan s political indepen-
dence and to ease its dependence on Americans. Since 1947 he had
secretly developed an intelligence organization, the Cabinet Research
Office (still in existence a half century later), that emphasized Soviet
affairs but did little at the outset in studying the United States. The
Tokyo government could thus obtain its own, usually calmer, views of
Soviet intentions instead of wholly relying on U.S. intelligence. The
CIA worked with the Japanese, notably when the agency served Yoshi-
da's purposes. During the Korean War, for example, Japan's conserva-
tives needed money and the United States needed tungsten, used to
harden steel. As the late Howard Schonberger revealed in his unpub-
lished history of the affair, the CIA and the Japan hands, led by Doo-
man, worked out a secret deal: for $10 million, the Pentagon bought
tungsten hoarded by former Japanese military officers. Much of the
money then went to the conservatives' political causes (after, that is,
the Dooman group apparently skimmed off more than $2 million in
profit). Using the well-known political fixer, Kodama Yoshio, as a broker,

the CIA began more than a decade-long funneling of money to conser-

^^
vative factions.
Yoshida's government and the Americans also enjoyed mutual bene-
fits when MacArthur demanded PoUce Reserve of 75,000 men be
that a
created, and that the Maritime Safety Force be expanded by 8,500.
These groups were to do internal policing once done by U.S. troops
now in Korea. Washington officials, as Allison said, wanted a central-
ized police force that could efficiently put down 'extremist elements"
who might ''take the law into their own hands," as they had in the "old
Japanese police state." Yoshida quieted critics who feared rearming by
appointing as head of the Police Reserve a person with no military expe-
rience. Over time it did develop into a capable military unit. In 1950-
54, however, his long-held fear of army officers who seemed to be sus-
ceptible to communism, and his determination not to waste resources
on a military while U.S. protection was in sight (and Communist invad-
ers were not), led him to build up the civilian economy, not military
^^
budgets.
Yoshida also used the Korean crisis to roundup of Com-
complete his
munist suspects and the restoring of rights to some seventy thousand
former military and wartime officials. Stalin inadvertently helped him
in early January 1951 by ordering Japanese Communists to shift tactics
and violently oppose U.S. defense policies. Yoshida could joke to a U.S.
THE CLASH 2 8 8

reporter, "YouAmericans are ver\" difficult. We had all the Communists

in jail when you occupied the countn" in 1945. Then vou told us to
release them. Now you ask us to find them and put them m jail again.
A cumbersome process. He was, however, most happy to cooper-
ver\'

ate. Japan seemed to be in step with Truman's Cold \\ ar poUcies. Holly-

wood began to reflect this perception. In 1951, just six vears after
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film Go for Broke portrayed the World
War II 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese-
exploits of the
American volunteers. Racism seemed in abeyance as \an Johnson, play-
ing the Anglo commanding officer, learned as much from his troops
^
about honor and courage as they did from him.
The moment seemed perfect for Dulles to write a peace treaty. He
and Acheson de\ised a shrewd strateg}'. They knew the So\iets opposed
any U.S. bases in Japan, the Pentagon demanded such bases, and Allies
(especially Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain) feared a resur-
gence of Japanese militarism. So Dulles and Acheson made separate
agreements to deal with these problems. They drafted a treat}' gi^ing
Japan its independence that most other parties, perhaps even the So\i-
ets, could sign. They then wrote a separate bilateral agreement betw een

Japan and the United States to guarantee the bases and assure the
Pentagon of long-term control of Okinawa and the Bonin Islands. Dul-
les meanwhile flew thousands of miles to pacif\' Australia and New

Zealand's fears of Japanese militarism. [He "practically invented shuttle

diplomacy, wTote Roger Buckley.) Dulles de\ised the axzus pact guar-
"

anteeing Australia and New Zealand's securit}'. Dulles privately told the
Senate that anv Russian attack on the Australians and New Zealanders
"seems . . . ver\' remote, but "they had the hot breath of Japan's aggres-
sion blowing right on them ' in the early 1940s, and fear remained. The
British bitterlv protested being excluded from a deal that released Japan
for a major export offensive on British markets m Asia. At one point,
Dulles departed London with the angr\- pronouncement that the Japa-
nese peace treatv was going to be signed, whether or not the British
^
decided to be one of the signers.
Charles Evans Hughes's work at the 1921-22 Washington Conference
was now being completed. Hughes had broken the backbone of British
power in the Far East by destroying the Anglo-Japanese alliance and
gi\ing Japan's fleet supremacy in the western Pacific. Dulles and
Acheson essentially announced that the British Empire was finished in
the region outside of a few remaining economic outposts such as Hong
i

Kong and Singapore). American power, working with London's former

xAsian partner, would take over.
To Create a New Japan: Reiormin^, Reversing, and Warring (1945—1951) 2 8 9

Dulles's real frustrations, however, were not with the British or the
Communist powers. They were with the Pentagon and Yoshida. The
Pentagon finally came around because of the bases' guarantee and, as
well, because the Secretary of Defense in 1950-51 was George Marshall,
former Secretary of State and a close ally of Acheson's. Marshall under-
stood the urgency of signing a peace treaty before a frustrated Japan
turned anti-American. Whenever a deadlock did appear, Truman invari-

ably came down on the State Department's side. Trusting Acheson

completely, the President had the interesting idea that foreign policy
should be decided in the place where was best understood.
it

Yoshida was tougher than even the Pentagon. He was determined to

create an "autonomous Japan," to use the historian Hirano Ken'ichiro's
phrase. Japan's security might remain dependent on U.S. forces, but
this same dependence was to be used to free up resources Japan needed

to become economically autonomous. Above all, Yoshida did not want

his country to be sucked into the Korean War, expensive rearming, or a
U.S. -controlled anti-Communist alliance system. He and his advisers
agreed that a security treaty had to be separate from a peace treaty, and
there was to be no rearming. Yoshida's famous nickname, "One Man,"
indicated his willingness to stand alone and act dictatorially, but it per-
haps also revealed his determination that Japan would stand alone as
^^
much as possible just six years after a crushing defeat.
On January 25, 1951, Dulles arrived in Tokyo for decisive talks. His
entourage included Allison, Pentagon and John D. Rockefeller
officials,

III, whose family had long been generous in developing Japanese medi-
cal and philanthropic cultural activities. Dulles wanted Rockefeller to
restart U.S. -Japan cultural exchanges.
In the on January 29 the chief stumbling blocks emerged
first talks

as Dulles and Yoshida maneuvered for advantage. First, the premier

asked for a restoration of laws promoting the "family system" — a code
phrase referring to prewar educational controls and the traditional role
of women. Dulles made no response. Second, Yoshida emphasized the
"long term necessity of trading with China." He argued that Japanese
businessmen were "the best fifth column" to break down communism.
Dulles warned that Japan could expect "restrictions" on any trade with
China. Third, Yoshida, to Dulles's displeasure, objected to quick
rearming — in part because "Japanese militarists who had now gone
"
'underground' might resurface to seize the government. Rearming
would also impose "a severe strain" just as "Japan was beginning to get
its feet on the ground financially"^^
In talks over the next week, a fourth problem appeared: the United
 THE CLASH 2 9

TKe Results of the 1945-1951

U.S. -Japan Peace Treaty Ne^otiat

Claims and titles renounced by Japan

(§) Ceded to Russia

Concurrence by Japan in any U.S.

proposal for a U.S. trusteeship
under the United Nations

© Claims and titles renounced by Japan:

Japanese acceptance of Unrted Nations
decision of April 1947 establishing a

U.S. trusteeship

.;.
(TAIWAN) ^-^^
Wake Is.
i.
Manana
: Islands
L(PHILiPPINE
<^olSLANDS Eniwetok
Guam* Bikini

/ Yap

Jruk Is.
\

"Marsfi3'
I.

,11
••Is-

^
/ . C, Kwajalein
^^OA
'^e /si'ands

States insisted on retaining bases in Okinawa and the Bonins, while a

disappointed Yoshida asked for the return of those islands. In the end,
Dulles both pleased the Pentagon and gave an important sop to Yoshida
bv holding the bases but recognizing Japans "residual sovereignt}' " in

the islands, a phrase finally incorporated in the 1951 treaty. A fifth prob-
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and W^arrin^ ( 1945— 1951) 291

lem, Japanese reparations to countries had invaded after 1931, was

it

settled when Dulles proposed a formula that committed Japan to pay,

but a limited amount and — in an especially imaginative stroke — tied to

Japanese exports so the funds would ultimately be spent in Japan itself.

Yoshida, needless to say, saw "no difficulties" with this arrangement.
He must hav^e appreciated how the reparations could now be used to
penetrate the very markets that Japan had failed to seize or hold mili-
^"^
tarily not long before.
The main obstacle was rearmament. In a decisive meeting of MacAr-
thur, Yoshida, and Dulles, the general came down hard against rearming
and suggested instead that Japan become the productive arsenal of mili-
tary goods and weapons for its allies in the region. Yoshida seconded
that view by observing that given Asians' memories of 1940 to 1945, any
Japanese threat to rearm would short-circuit the necessary economic
offensive. In the Diet he continued to ridicule any threat of a Commu-
nist invasion. And, as was revealed a quarter century later, Yoshida had
a fallback position: on February 3, 1951, he secretly agreed to creating
limited ground forces, but only after U.S. and Japanese negotiators
went through a highly complicated labyrinth of consultation procedures
'^^
that he had carefully devised.
Dulles surrendered. A compromise was reached. In a bilateral secu-
rity pact, the United States retained bases in Japan and Okinawa. The

Americans gave a vague promise to defend Japan (a signal they expected

the Japanese to rearm soon to defend themselves). After Truman's mas-
sive response in Korea, however, no sane person doubted how U.S.
forces would react if Japan were attacked. American forces were also
allowed, under the treaty, to put down riots and disturbances at the
request of the Tokyo government. Again, this provision was so loosely
drawn that for the rest of the 1950s the Japanese complained that the
United States could use force whenever it desired within Japan. Yoshida
successfully demanded that the rights of the U.S. troops in Japan be
handled separately, and quietly, in an executive agreement (that is, in a
form not requiring legislative debate), so Japanese opinion would not
be upset. Dulles thus obtained the peace treaty and bases, but only
with a blurred, complicated commitment from Yoshida to rearm. "The
Oriental mind," Dulles told a Chinese friend in 1951, "particularly that
of the Japanese, was always more devious than the Occidental mind."^^
In September 1951, fifty-four nations, not including mainland China
or India, met to discuss and sign the peace treaty. The British diplomat
R. H. Scott gave his friends in London a private, firsthand account of
how the conference illustrated American power and a new technologi-
cal revolution:
THE CLASH 2 9 2

It took place in the San Francisco Opera House, an enormous the-

atre, seating I suppose a couple thousand, with Acheson and Secre-
tariaton the platform. The orchestra pit was roofed over and what
the Americans call a "podium" was placed on it from which the
speakers addressed the conference. There were no desks or tables
and we all sat in the ordinary theatre seats. The delegates themselves
occupied (in alphabetical order) the first six rows of the orchestra
stalls and the whole of San Francisco and indeed most of California

queued up to occupy the other seats. There were also very strong
. . .

contingents of press men, radio men, radio commentators and televi-

sion operators. Acheson made one or two half-hearted attempts to
prevent the spectators from taking part but [anti-Communist orators]
found it very easy to draw rounds of cheers from the galleries. ... It
was by coincidence the first occasion on which the Americans had
coast to coast television, so the television audience was colossal. . . .

[Our] row was frequently raked by the cameras because they could
present to their audience in one line the U.S.A., the U.K. and the
U.S.S.R., and I believe that 45 million people had the pleasure of
seeing me pick my nose.^^

Acheson, suffering from ptomaine poisoning, dragged himself to the

podium to act as chair so he and his allies could enforce the rules of
procedure. The rules prevented any Soviet bloc amendments. When,
for example, the Soviet delegate proposed that Communist China be
invited, Acheson simply ruled him out of order. After the United States
and its allies from Latin America) rammed the treat)^
(especially those
through, it was signed by Japan, the United States, and forty-seven
other countries, but not by the Soviets, Poles, or Czechs. The treaty was
supplemented by the U.S. -Japan security treaty, and later by separate
Japanese peace treaties with the Republic of China (on Taiwan) in
1952.^8
The peace and security treaties now came before the U.S. Senate for
ratification. Dulles had earlier opened secret testimony to the Senate
by giving an almost exclusively economic explanation for the pacts. If
the United States did not move quickly, he warned, the Japanese could
join the Communist bloc because they needed both "vast raw material
resources" from Manchuria and their "natural market, that is the big
China Market." The Soviets, he added, sat on Japan's doorstep; they
occupied Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Dulles's was an honest but
not necessarily wise approach. Many senators, rabidly committed to
protecting Taiwan and overthrowing Communist China, noted that Yos-
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 2 9 3

hida — like Dulles —had emphasized Japan's possible links with China.
Before, and even for some months during the Korean War, Japanese-
Chinese trade grew. At the San Francisco Conference, Yoshida told

receptive British officials that "the future of Japan could not be sepa-
rated from the future of China." He wondered whether "Japan's role
would be to 'democratize' China" —words that echoed his remarks to

Dulles in late Januar)^.'^

Yoshida could balance his remarks with others, such as his condemn-
ing the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance as a gun aimed at Japan. But William
Knowland (R: CA), a leader of the Senate's so-called China Lobby, was
not reassured. He obtained the support of fifty-six senators to warn that
they might vote against the peace treaty unless the Japanese unequivo-
cally agreed to support the Republic of China on Taiwan and oppose
mainland China. Dulles, accompanied by two senators, dutifully flew
back to Tokyo in December 1951. They asked Yoshida to sign a state-
ment that would appease Knowland. The Americans carried a potent
threat: earlier in the year. Congress had passed the Battle Act that cut
off aid to nations trading with Communists. Japan's survival depended
on that aid. On December 24, the prime minister reluctantly signed a

so-called Yoshida letter. The letter's phrase that Japan had "no intention
to conclude a bilateral treaty with the Communist regime of China
gave the senators satisfaction. Great Britain, which had recognized
mainland China and desperately wanted to steer Japanese trade toward
China and away from British markets in Southeast Asia, blasted the
letter. Too bad, Dulles told the British through a letter to Acheson:

given Japan's dependence on Americans, "it is inconceivable that . . .

Japan should pursue foreign policies which cut across those of the
United States." In 1957, Yoshida recorded in his memoirs that such
dependence was unfortunate: the "British and Japanese" best under-
stood China, he wrote, while the Americans did not "truly" know the
Chinese and thus adopted policies that "have been almost a total fail-
ure." Not surprisingly, historians later discovered that the "Yoshida let-
^^
ter" was written by Dulles.

By 1951, the debate over the direction of Japan's trade was passionate,
all-consuming politically, and at the heart of the U.S. -Japanese relation-
ship. The Korean War's immense impact on Japan's economy intensified
the debate. Between 1950 and 1952, special U.S. military procurements
suddenly accounted for 70 percent of Japan's exports. A once war-devas-
tated economy that had survived on aid and narrow markets suddenly
became infused with capital. Four months after the war began, the
nation's industrial production reached postwar highs (actually 106 per-
THE CLASH 2 9 4

cent of the 1934 to 1936 base). Employment soared. The large annual
trade deficit began to be more than covered by U.S. military spending in
Japan. Later, Japanese and other experts downplayed the war's positive
effects because its shock distorted the economy and provided only a
little of Japan s overall capital investment between 1950 and 1953. But
such criticisms turned out to be much less important than, as a British
businessman Tokyo observed, the "unexpected windfall in hard cur-
in
rency" that enabled the Japanese "to re-equip and modernize their
plants, to expand in an amazing way"
^^
—
while keeping out foreign capital
and its influence.
The Korean War was Japan as the Marshall Plan
to the rebuilding of
was for rebuilding Western Europe. The long-term effects were terrific.
Two of them were to shape American, as well as Japanese, lives for the
rest of the century. First, Japan'smost powerful business association
(the keidanren, or Federation of Economic Organizations) and the gov-
ernment decided to work closely with the United States in importing
and developing dual-use technology. Such technology could be used for
U.S. and others' military needs while giving Japan an edge in exploiting
civilian markets. For example, a struggling Mitsui factory making spe-

cialized steel products suddenly generated vast amounts of capital by

becoming the nation's leading commercial arms producer. The seedbed
of the Japanese economic "miracle" of the 1960s and 1970s was being
^^
planted.
The second long-term effect of the wartime buildup was an acceler-
ated interest by Tokyo, and especially Washington, in Southeast Asia.
In 1945, John Emmerson had found that he was to help run the U.S.
occupation from an office in Tokyo occupied by a Mitsui executive. As
Emmerson moved into the office, the Japanese pointed to a map show-
ing his country's "Co-Prosperity Sphere " in East Asia. "We tried," the
Mitsui official observed. "See what you can do with it!" Emmerson later
noted that "at that moment the whole burden of American Foreign
Policy in Asia hit me in the stomach." This historic step of restoring
Japan's relationship with the region was not taken without impassioned
debate. At a private Council on Foreign Relations meeting in New York
City on October 23, 1950, Japan hand Eugene Dooman flatly told Dulles
that any attempt to keep Japan out of Communist China's market "will
be self-defeating." Perhaps, Dulles responded, but a Japanese-Chinese
relationship could harm vital U.S. relations with Tokyo. He believed
that "amicable relations" meant "finding new trade outlets for the Japa-
nese." And crucial outlets, as he had specified earlier in the meeting,

lay "in the underdeveloped areas of Southeast Asia." Dooman lost the
To Create a New Japan: Reforming, Reversing, and Warring (1945— 1951) 295

argument, at least in the short run, after Yoshida seemed to agree in

The idea that Japan depended on Chinese trade
public with Dulles.
was mere Communist propaganda, Yoshida told the Diet in October
1951; instead, ''Japan intended to cooperate in developing natural
"^-^
resources in the Southeast Asian countries.
There was, unfortunately, a problem. The Viet Minh revolt against
French colonialism continued to tear up parts of Southeast Asia. "The
biggest Viet Minh appeal," a State Department official observed, "is . . .

land, education, and a chance to shoot French. It is difficult to match

that platform." The attempt nevertheless had to be made. Among top
U.S. officials, the conventional wisdom developed that without South-
east Asia Japan could not be orderly and cooperative, and without that
kind of Japan there could be no effective U.S. policy in an inflamed Far
East. A leading Japanese scholar of the occupation later put a different
spin on it. The post-1947 policies, Takemae Fiji believed, created an
emphasis on materialism that was only a "mischievous reform" and
lacked an "ethos of democracy." This point seemed to be driven home
when Yoshida tried to pass an anti-subversive law that
in early 1952
reminded many Japanese of the McCarthyism then infecting American
politics. In the "Bloody May Day" riots that erupted, U.S. military vehi-
cles were attacked and fourteen hundred people, including several
Americans, injured.^"*

some trouble brewed, but Japan's

After six years of occupation, then,
economy, thanks to the Korean War, was reviving. No one, however, not
even MacArthur, could assume that Americans had created an open,
liberalized Japan. Indeed, no knowledgeable observer could conclude
that the primary U.S. aim had been to democratize Japan. The highest
objectives were, first, to use Japan as the hub of an open, multilateral
capitahsm in Asia; second, to contain communism; and third, to reas-

sure neighbors by keeping Japan orderly and controlled. American eco-

nomic policies and the containment of communism, as Acheson's close
adviser, Paul Nitze, later noted, "were viewed as being one and the same
thing." China and Vietnam, however, were about to challenge such
assumptions about U.S. -Japan relations. ^^
 Tke 1950s: ^^

1 ne Pivotal Deca

'Japan . . . Has a Unic|ue Capacity

lor Good or Evil

In THE United States, massive military spending characterized

the post-1950 years of the Korean War and implementation of
NSC-68. These expenditures replaced the spending on civilian
social needs that had driven the political economy between 1865
and 1939. In Japan, on the other hand, a rebuilding of industry-
for-export replaced the military demands of 1868 to 1945 as a driv-
ing force. Americans and Japanese seemed to have switched
places. These economic differences between the two nations led
to repeated clashes in the post-1950 years. Americans, for exam-
ple, defined China as a military danger. Japanese defined it as an
economic opportunity.
The root cause of the growing clash, however, was the U.S.
intention to keep Japan dependent, and Japan's determination to
be economically independent. In 1952, the country still had a long
way to go. As a British diplomat in Tokyo recalled, "many people
were still homeless, sleeping rough, under railway viaducts or in
the shells of buildings awaiting repair or demolition." With this as
background, Joseph Dodge bluntly told Japanese officials of the
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITl) that "Japan
can be independent politically but dependent economically." He
spoke to an increasingly powerful agency, which was setting out

2 9 6
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 2 9 7

precisely to destroy such dependence. John Foster Dulles was even

more direct. He remarked to British officials that the 1951 security
arrangements actually "amounted to a voluntary continuation of the
Occupation." Some U.S. officials did realize that such dependence
could eat away the entire relationship unless it was modified. Bitter
debates over the peace settlement, after all, had already splintered Japa-
nese politics. Some groups accepted the deal as a necessary evil, others
accepted the peace treaty but deplored any ties to unpredictable U.S.
military policies, and still others condemned it all. Many wanted the
freedom to resume Japan's historic destiny of Pan-Asianism. Japanese
thus grew nervous in 1952 when Republican presidential candidate
Dwight Eisenhower promised that in the future he would have Asian
soldiers (not Americans) fighting Asians for the sake of U.S. interests.^
In 1952, Senator Everett Dirksen (R: IL) stated the obvious but enve-
loped it in traditional racist terms: "Every ethnic argument is on my
side when I say they [the Japanese] are Asiatics and they will be Asiat-
John Allison, Dulles s top adviser on Japan and soon U.S. ambassa-
ics."

dor to Tokyo, warned the State Department in mid- 1952 that the
Japanese continued to believe their "distinctive culture" vastly superior
to the American. They "have generally been prone to regard Americans
as shallow, materialistic, and lacking in cultural values."

Allison then pinpointed three sources of past and future clashes:

specifically, Japanese intellectuals follow what they believe to be "a logi-

cally ordered, universalistic" philosophy "influenced by Hegelian and

neo-Hegelian" systems. They find little of interest in "the more eclectic
philosophical system of America." More generally, the Japanese
"emphasis upon socially-oriented values is in marked contrast with the
individually-oriented values" of Americans. Perhaps above all, the Japa-
nese are haunted by "a sense of vulnerability to external attack and a
continuing search for national security" They are "beset by confusion
and conflict," Allison emphasized, because they know they need U.S.
protection, but fear the resulting "impact on sovereignty." The future
ambassador warned, in other words, that each nation had yet to under-
stand the swift, often dangerous undercurrents that drove the other
nation s history.^

Dulles told MacArthur in March 1951 that "the United States and
Japan are the only significant source of power in the Pacific." But it was
also true, he informed a French audience in mid-1952, that Japan "has
a unique capacity for good or evil." After all, Dulles announced, "the
Japanese people have historically been susceptible to militarism." If

their "ability to produce modern types of precision weapons" should

THE CLASH 2 9 8

ever be used by "the Soviet Communist program of world conquest,"

"
then, as "Stalin has said . . . the Soviet Union would be 'invincible/
Americans and Japanese had often clashed during the previous century
because their relationship was so central to each nation's progress. Now,
as Dulles saw it, the relationship was also central to the "free world s"
very survival.^
A relationship could not be much more important than that, so when
Eisenhower and Dulles took power in Januar)^ i953. they quickly moved
to strengthen the links so Communist power could be further contained
in Asia. Their main thrusts came in the military and economic arenas.
As a military strategist, Eisenhower had no American peer, and he knew
it. The former general, however, was much less confident about the

American economy. He had run for the presidency in part by ham-

mering home to voters how the Democrats' spending threatened to
destroy the nation through inflation and then bankruptcy. The Texas-
born and Kansas-raised leader believed he had a sure intuition about
judging when and how much defense spending could be cut to save the
economy without jeopardizing U.S. He worried often about the
security.
republic's fate once a president took office who accepted the Pentagon's
argument for ever more defense spending. An economy dependent on
the military budget, Eisenhower flatly told his cabinet, "would either
drive us to —
war or into some form of dictatorial government. He set '

about cutting Truman's $52 billion military budget to $34 billion by the
mid-1950s. Eisenhower meanwhile increased the one thousand nuclear
weapons in 1953 by some eighteen times over the next eight years. Con-
tainment would be achieved cheaply through the threat of "massive
retaliation" —the ability to "retaliate, instantly, by means and at places
of our own choosing," as Dulles phrased it in 1954. It was implied,
moreover, that the awesome weapons would be used first, if necessary,
and not simply as a last resort."^
The Japanese had experienced such weapons firsthand. They were,
understandably, profoundly disturbed by the Eisenhower strategy. Tokyo
officials, led by Prime Minister Yoshida, were equally disturbed by

another result of the cost cutting. As fewer American troops came to

guard the ramparts of freedom, other nations' soldiers were expected to
step up to the ramparts. In a public speech of 1953, the new U.S. Vice
President, Richard M. Nixon, told seven hundred Japanese leaders that
Americans had "made a mistake in 1946" by placing Article IX in Japan's
Constitution. Washington wanted Japan to rearm. During the height of
the Korean War, Yoshida had increased the Police Reserve from 75,000
to 110,000, and rechristened it a "Self-Defense Force." The prime minis-
TKe 1950s: TKe Pivotal Decade 2 9 9

ter, however, was reluctant to go farther. He seemed obsessed by the

fear thatAmericans wanted Japanese troops to be used in Korea and
elsewhere. Yoshidas fears grew more intense after the Socialists (who
opposed any rearming) picked up surprising strength in elections of
1952 and 1953. His own conservative coalition meanwhile fragmented as
the Liberal Party came under the increasing influence of old, aggressive
nationalist leaders.^
For Yoshida, therefore, the Eisenhower-Nixon poHcies could hardly
have come at a worse moment. In May 1954, he tried to find a middle
ground through two laws that transformed the nation's defense policies
by setting up a functioning Defense Agency. This landmark legislation

was also shaped by Americans bearing gifts. In March 1954, the United
States had offered a mutual security agreement that provided $150 mil-
lion in military equipment, and another $100 million in agricultural
goods and U.S. purchases of Japanese products. In immediate need of
dollars to pay for food and raw material imports, Japan agreed to the
deal. U.S. miHtary payments between 1952 and 1956 were equivalent to
paying for a critical one-quarter of Japan's commodity imports. In
return, Yoshida bit his lip and built up the postwar Japanese military,
but in 1950, 1954, and 1956 (when another government was in power),
laws were carefully written to guarantee civilian control.^

The U.S. had another far-reaching effect: the money

military aid also
went through Japan's Ministry of Finance and thus bolstered its already
growing power. This ministry guided Japan's "economic miracle. Ironi- "

cally, it was U.S. policy after 1946 to work with the Ministry of Finance

(so Japan's economy could be accelerated), while largely ignoring the

Foreign Ministry (so Japan's foreign policies would be largely shaped in
Washington). British Ambassador to Japan Sir Esler Dening reported
home in 1955 that U.S. officials were making a "mistake " to favor the
finance ministry "in what may be called the Whitehall of Tokyo for use
as a PX [military post exchange, or supermarket], while the Japanese
Foreign Office still languishes squalidly in part of a commercial building
without amenities or security. ' Dening warned that Americans asked
too much from Japan, "and the parallel of Egypt comes to mind." The
Egyptian military had just ousted British rule after nearly a century of
London-directed colonialism.^
American attempts to reshape Japan did not stop at favoring the

Ministry of Finance over the foreign ministry. They also included U.S.
impacts on Japanese culture. The Korean War, for example, increased
the number of uniformed Americans in Japan some two and a half
times, to 250,000. They brought with them English-language radio and
 ^

THE CLASH 3

Other services that blanketed much of urban Japan. This was part of a
During 1950 to 1956, about three thousand
large U.S. cultural offensive.
Japanese students studied in the United States, the first wave of a flood
to follow. Many of these —
numbering about 250 per year belonged to —
the Fulbright Scholar program, which was extended to Japan in 1953.
The first major positions for the study of American history were estab-
lished. Inspired by the work of Charles Beard, and working especially
with Professor Merrill Jensen of the University of Wisconsin, Japanese
scholars —notably at the Kyoto Seminars —focused on Jensens spe-
cialty, the American Revolutionary era. The focus had a purpose: to
suggest that 1930s militarism had brought down Japan because the
nation had not gone through the bourgeois revolution and mass
democratization unleashed in eighteenth-century America. In Tokyo,
International Christian University was built to demonstrate U.S.
encouragement of Christianity. A new generation of Japanese students
studied democracy and social change in quite a new, and American,
context. Some Japanese scholars even argued that U.S. occupation poli-
cies had brought about the needed "bourgeois revolution," so Japan
could now peacefully and profitably adjust to the postwar world.
The Rockefeller Foundation, active in Japan long before the war,
returned to become a hub for the new exchanges. Its driving force was
Dr. Charles Burton Pahs, who had studied in Japan during the 1930s,
then helped spy on his former hosts between 1941 and 1945 as a member
of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA). After
joining the Rockefeller Foundation in 1946, he wrote a confidential
report emphasizing dismay at MacArthur and SCAP's attempts to
impose U.S. textbooks and educational principles on the Japanese an —
imposition Pahs believed was doomed to failure once the Americans
departed. He ad\ased that SCAP prohibition of travel be lifted, then
with Rockefeller money began in 1949 to send selected young Japanese
and Korean journalists and broadcasters to Columbia University for
training. SCAP officials selected the participants while constantly wor-
rying that the visitors would learn the bad manners of U.S. journalists
and return to be 'annoying to General MacArthur." Some did shape
Japan's media after 1952. When Dulles visited in early 1951, his fellow
traveler, John D. Rockefeller III, strengthened the Rockefeller Founda-

tion's work, and also helped create the highly influential International
House of Japan, where experts from around the globe were hosted at

conferences by Japanese over the next four decades.^

Popular culture soon reflected the new relationship. The best-selling
author James Michener (who knew Japan well and had married a Japa-
 Tke 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 1

nese woman) wrote The Bridges at Toko-ri (in which Japanese and
Americans learn about each other as persons rather than wartime ste-
reotypes) and Sayonara. When published in Life magazine during 1953,
Sayonara immediately reached an audience of 5 million. Perhaps most
popular of all were the Godzilla movies made in Japan, which became
smash hits in the United States, where audiences who watched mon-
sters attacking Japanese cities were usually ignorant that Godzilla was
replaying the U.S. bombings of those cities during the war.^^

I
Dernin^, Dulles, and tne Great Cnoice:
Cnina or Vietnam?

Then W. Edwards Deming. Born in 1900, trained in industrial

there was
management, Deming had worked in the U.S. government, before
teaching his new philosophy of business management at New York Uni-
versity and Columbia University. His theory viewed production not as
bit parts but as "a total system," in his phrase. This system required full

cooperation (not competition) among all persons in a firm to produce

the best (not necessarily the most) products. Deming demanded that a
company's policies begin not with the top management's views, but with
the customer's wants. He believed these wants to be, above all, prod-
ucts of dependable quality. Trained in statistical and mathematical the-
ory, Deming devised within his system statistically based quality
controls to secure customer satisfaction. The Union of Japanese Scien-
tists and Engineers that brought him Japan in 1950 understood the
to
importance of his work. His first eight-day seminar was attended by
over two hundred Japanese engineers, including top corporate officials.

Deming emphasized the need to find export markets, and stressed that
profitable, long-term markets required quality products. In 1951, Japan
began awarding the highly coveted Deming Prize to industries that pro-
^^
duced superior goods.
Deming's immense popularity among Japanese ironically worsened
U.S. -Japan clashes. He enjoyed little popularity in his own country until
after 1970, when the Japanese "economic miracle " forced embattled
U.S. firms to listen to him. Born in Iowa, raised in Wyoming, Deming
learned from his late-frontier experience the importance of cooperation
where everyone, as he liked to say, could be in a "win-win " situation.
U.S. companies, however, stressed competition. If one did not win, one
lost in a so-called zero-sum game. These companies were riding the
crest of world power because, they believed, of a tradition of vigorous
 —
THE CLASH 3 2

American competition. They seemed assured of an infinite market

driven by pent-up wartime demand and the rapid expansion of military
purchases. To meet the demand, American executives stressed mass
production that reUed on Frederick Taylor s time-and-motion studies of
the early 1900s, which ruthlessly broke down the production process to
emphasize and put pressure on the individual unit.
Deming condemned Taylorism. He believed it stressed quantity over
quality and also failed to see the individual as a key part of an entire
system. He damned the merit rating systems for pitting employee
against employee. Of special importance, Deming emphasized long-
term objectives ("What will we be doing a year from now, five years
from now, ten years from now?"), an approach the Japanese quickly
embraced. Most U.S. producers, conversely, were fixated on quarterly
or semi-annual profit reports. Americans did not bother with an equiva-
lent of the Deming Prize until the 1980s (the Malcolm Baldridge Prize),
when quahty Japanese goods were outseUing many U.S. products in the
global marketplace.
In one of history's neater coincidences, Demings theories arrived in
Japan just as the Korean War began. As the conflict's demands helped
Japan rebuild its industrial complex, Deming's procedures gave the
complex maximum efficiency. In both senses, the war, as Yoshida
termed it, was "a gift of the gods." On July 7, 1950 a dozen days after—
fighting erupted and as Deming's first seminars were starting in Japan
Dulles told Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the Japanese
remained "a confused and uncertain people." Dulles, echoing business
representatives he had consulted, was 'pessimistic about Japan's eco-
nomic prospects unless it could trade with the Asiatic continent" (read:
Communist China and Southeast Asia), because Japanese goods were
of such "poor quality" that even nearby South Korea preferred buying
^^
expensive U.S. rather than cheaper Japanese machines.
In an amazingly short time, one part of Dulles's fear evaporated. In
August 95 1, the
1 New York Times reported that Japan was already com-
peting less 'on the basis of cheap labor and unreliable products" than
with quality and precision work. The once-powerful textile industry, for

example, was reorganizing itself along these new lines. Of special note,
an optical lens producer, Nippon Kogaku K. was meticulously pro-
K.,

ducing extraordinary "Nikon" lenses. Regardless of the large demand,

the company and its fifteen hundred workers refused to make more
than hundred cameras per month. Reporters noted that through
five

the assistance of the U.S. government, Japanese firms were also work-
ing with Lowell O. Mellen, a management expert from Cleveland,
Tke 19508: Tke Pivotal Decade 3 3

Ohio, to put Deming's theories into practice by bringing foremen on

the factory floor into Thus the company saved
management decisions.
money with the suggestions and exempHfied what the Times termed the
new "pohtical democracy" in Japan. With such innovations as guaran-
teed hfetime employment, wage scales based on seniority and loyalty,
and integration of labor and management, productivity took off.^^
Fahs, Deming, and Mellen helped lay foundation stones for the later
"economic miracle." But the Japanese themselves never lost sight of
their true goal —
not to create the military force that Nixon and Dulles
begged for, but to create, in Hirano Ken'ichiro's phrase, an "autonomous
Japan." Above all, government worked to ensure that business had
access to Japanese capital. There was to be no begging from foreigners.
Repeatedly in the early 1950s, U.S. Ambassador John Allison bitterly
protested. Tokyo officials claimed to welcome foreign money, then
imposed "restrictions in screening investments." He could not see why
the Japanese were so difficult — especially given "Japan's foreign
exchange difficulties." In March 1954, Allison reported that three U.S.
corporations — Coca-Cola, Schaeffer Pen, and Studebaker automo-
biles —had been stopped from investing. He could not understand it.
The Japanese only "consider the proposals as subterfuges by the Ameri-
can companies to obtain a foothold in the economy. After the facade
and rationalizations are stripped away, the basic reason ... is clearly
exposed, fear of competition." MITI, moreover, feared Studebaker was
only the camel's nose inside the tent; the ministry would then not be
able to prevent other foreign auto firms from entering. Allison had trou-
ble accepting such "rationalizations," as he called them. The ambassa-
dor could, of course, have referred to Meiji Japan. This blossoming
U.S. -Japanese clash had deep, tough, historical roots. No amount of
free trade chemicals seemed to destroy it.^"^

The Japanese were determined to control their own society, which

meant controlling investment. The government-sponsored Develop-
ment Bank of 1951 provided funds (at low interest) for industry. Tax
reforms accelerated industrial productivity. The Ministry of Finance
shrewdly used subsidies, import quotas, controls over foreign capital
and other weapons more associated with nineteenth-century mercantil-
ism than post-1945 U.S. economic policy. The government set up an
Export-Import Bank, based on the U.S. model that dated from 1934, to
help finance overseas sales. Tokyo officials also allowed concentration
of resources; by 1955, both Mitsui and Mitsubishi, nearly broken up in
the late 1940s, were largely rebuilt. Unlike the old zaihatsu that had
generated its own capital, however, the new zaihatsu depended on a
THE CLASH 3 4

concentrated banking system that worked intimately with the finance

ministry or MITI. During the 1950s, about 80 percent of new capital
came not from within firms, nor from stock issues, but from banks
closely watched over by the government. The banks increasingly
obtained their capital from savings accounts. In 1947, the Japanese had
consumed 100 percent of their income to rebuild wartorn lives. By 1955,
they were saving at the prewar level of about 9 percent, and soon that
number doubled to reach nearly twice the prewar rate.^^
The bureaucracy-business teams also employed technology transfers
as alternatives to foreign investment. Austin automobile helped Nissan,
RCA cooperated with NEC, DuPont aided Toyo Rayon in chemicals.
Many U.S. companies sold their technology secrets because Japan's
market seemed too small to be worth developing. Other firms, as
Motorola, moved in because Eisenhower told the electronics giant that
ithad "to do business with Japan," even if Japanese goods were inferior,
because ''that country must become economically strong." Motorola
taught its Japanese counterparts very well indeed about electronics
(although forty years later Motorola continued to believe that its own
products remained unfairly shut out of Japan's domestic market). The
Tokyo bureaucracy also set out to break Japan's dependence on foreign
oil companies. By 1958, the nation's initial economic takeoff in steel
and synthetic fibers already made it the world's seventh-largest oil con-
sumer. MITI bought oil for these firms, used preferences and regula-
tions to favor new local refiners, and strongly backed Japanese
companies' movement into Iranian oil in 1953 and Soviet oil during the
detente years of 1955—56. Much of that oil was used for satisfying "a
technology lust, " as one Tokyo official put it. Americans were also hap-
pily helping to quench that lust by sharing their cutting-edge technology
in such fields as rocketry, machine tools, and nuclear reactors for peace-
ful use. Dulles's pessimism in 1950 about Japan's economic prospects
was beginning to appear ridiculous. ^^
Dulles's second concern, however —
the continuing Japanese need
for markets on the Asian continent —
was not ridiculous. Indeed, the
economic miracle elevated this concern to the center of the U.S. -Japa-
nese relationship. If Japan did not sell in Asia, it had to sell in the
Americas. Between 1953 and 1956, its exports to the United States dou-
bled to $5.5 million —
enough for some American producers to demand
that this Asian ally look elsewhere for markets. As Eisenhower and
Dulles took office in early 1953, the question could be sharply posed:
Should Japan seek its needed markets and raw materials in Communist
China or a revolutionary Southeast Asia? Without the adjectives before
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 5

the two regions, the question resembled the debate that tormented
U.S. -Japan relations down to December 7, 1941. But adjectives now
seemed to make the difference: with China in Communist hands, the
answer had to be Southeast Asia.
China remained a vast glowering ghost hovering over the U.S. -Japan
relationship. Washington officials seemed determined to keep Japanese
and Chinese divided. This determination was due in part to the Taiwan
Lobby in Congress. In part it was due to the containment policy. ('Tm
a little old-fashioned," the new, brash Secretary of Defense, Charles E.
Wilson, told Eisenhower. "I don't like selling firearms to the Indians.")
In part, the determination came from Joseph Dodge's belief that ''Japan
can be independent politically, but dependent economically." Access to
China could lessen such dependency considerably which was why —
Yoshida, and his successors, urged Japanese business leaders to move
into the bottomless mainland markets. Yoshida believed U.S. policy
toward China was doomed to failure; but, at least publicly, he had to
go along with it.^'^

In June 1952, Japanese business people signed a trade agreement

with China. They and the government explained was only a private
it

deal, thus not in violation of the 'Yoshida letter, which involved only
"

official relations. The Truman administration was not persuaded. In

July, U.S. officials requested that Japan join cocom (the Coordinating
Committee of the U.S. allies, sitting in Paris, that limited and closely
watched over trade with the and chincom (the equivalent
Soviets),
oversight of trade with the Chinese). Two months later, U.S. officials
forced Yoshida to accept a secret agreement imposing even harsher
restraints on Japan in its China trade than other chincom members
had accepted. Being unfairly singled out, the Japanese "national obses-
sion with [China] trade," as the historian Sayuri Shimizu has called it,
only intensified. Three more private Sino-Japanese trade agreements
followed in 1952-53. From a tiny base, their mutual trade jumped 120
percent in 1953 and another 75 percent in 1954. In a late 1953 deal
between the suave Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai)
and a Japanese delegation, both cultural and economic exchanges were
^^
promised.
Japan's ignoring the spirit of chincom's restrictions pleased some of
its alhes, especially the British, who also saw China as a potential eco-
nomic saviour and who wanted Japanese diverted from Britain's Asian
markets. But it triggered vigorous discussion in the Eisenhower admin-
istration. Dulles and Dodge (who headed the Council on Foreign Eco-

nomic Policy) wanted to sever Sino-Japanese ties. Dulles argued that

THE CLASH 3> 6

China could be split apart from the So\iets, but only if "maximum pres-
sure" was applied, not by enticing the Chinese with Japanese or West-
ern goods. Eisenhower, with a broader view, strongly disagreed. "If we
don't assist Japan, gentlemen, Japan is going Communist," he told con-
gressional leaders in June 1954. "Then instead of the Pacific being an
American lake, belie\ e me it is going to be a Communist lake. If we do
not let them trade with Red China, with Southeast Asia, then we are
going to be in for trouble." Indirect support came from his deeply con-
George Humphrey. This former steel
servative Secretar}' of the Treasury,
executive urged that "Japanese business ... be spread throughout the
world and not concentrated only in American markets," for "American
industry' could not compete with the intricate, delicate hand labor of

Japan," and the imports "would cause great unemployment here."

As Nikita Khrushchev (Stalin's successor) unleashed a detente policy
during 1954 to 1956 to win Asian hearts with aid and cooperation, Eisen-
hower's fear about losing "the great industrial potential of Japan inten- "

sified. The struggle in Asia was, he believed, "an economic one." This
\\e\\ deepened his comiction that, within limits, Japanese-Chinese
trade had to be tolerated; otherwise, "where was Japan to get the iron
and coal which it formerly got from Manchuria and North China?"
Eisenhower could w^ax so eloquent about Japan's trading needs that
Humphrey once quipped that perhaps Americans had defeated "the
two wrong nations in the last war. "You don't mean that, Eisenhower
"

quickly interjected, "you mean we licked these two nations too thor-
oughly. Special presidential assistant Robert Cutler picked up that clue
"

to ask the National Security Council whether it wished to "look to the

restoration of Japan's colonial empire." No, Eisenhower responded.

That seemed to be going too far.^^
In 1954, the President quietly loosened some U.S. -imposed bonds on
Sino-Japanese trade. But not even Eisenhower meant to open up the
torrent of trade Japan needed \\ ith the Chinese to right its unfavorable
trade balance (especially with Americans). Such unwillingness left
Southeast Asia as the remaining hope."^
As early as 1951, U.S. policy to integrate the Japanese and Southeast
Asian economies had moved so rapidly that it produced an astonishing
and prophetic document. The author was George Glutton, a British
diplomat who reported from the embassy in Tokyo to the Foreign Office
in a long memorandum of October 2, 1951. Glutton's analysis first bril-
liantly constructed a historical context:

It would . . . probably not be wrong to say that from the time of

Commodore Perr\'s landing, Japan's national ambition has been to
TKe 1950s: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 7

achieve for herself the position, not of a great Asiatic power, but of
a great maritime world power, and to be treated as an equal with the
"Western" and world powers, specifically the United States, Britain
and France. ... It is even possible that, had other things been equal,
Japan's history in the Meiji era might have been gradually to dissoci-

ate herself more and more from Asia. Unfortunately other things
were not equal. Japan's ambition to become a world power made it
impossible (and this was the real paradox and Japan's dilemma), for
her to ignore Asia. . . .

Glutton destroyed the popular idea that Japan (with its seapower,
imperial ambitions, and home islands) was the "Great Britain of the
Pacific. ' At the same time, he put his finger on the needs and depen-
dence that historically propelled Japanese policies:

Unlike her fellow islanders in the Great Britain of the 19th cen-
tury, she did not have the capital, the resources or the national
strength to dispense with the continent to which she was adjacent.
. . . Thus in her pre-war pretensions to leadership in Asia, Japan
exploited her geographical position not because of common ties . . .

but because in order to achieve her aspirations and justify her inclu-
sion among the Great Powers, she required the political and eco-
nomic support of the Asian land-mass. . . .

Japan, Glutton noted with delicious irony, had lost a horrible war but
gained its great objective of the 1930s: to eliminate most Western power
from Asia. In 1951, however, that achievement forced the new Asian
nations to beg for help from the Gommunist bloc — or from Japan, sup-
ported by the Americans. The ironies, and the demands of postwar
capitahsm, were stunning:

. . . come from at least some of the Asiatic

requests have already
countries for Japanese technicians. What Japan once attempted to
make these countries accept by force, is now being asked as a favour.
. [A]s time goes by and the memory of the Japanese Occupation
. .

dims, we must certainly be prepared to see Japan exploit the real, if

indirect contribution she made to their liberation. . . .

Such exploitation would, again with nice irony, now be made possible
by the conqueror's capital. Japan failed in the 1930s because it lacked
capital, so had to resort to force. Such use of force "is no longer neces-
sary." The Americans and other Westerners were supplying capital
THE CLASH 3 8

through a variety of government programs — Point Four technology, eco-

nomic and mihtary aid —and also by creating "a. framework of interna-
tional cooperation into which Japan can ... fit herself and into
. . .

which, it seems clear it is United States policy to fit her." Glutton con-
tinued:

Though [the] Co-Prosperity [approach of the 1930s] may change its

name, and probably some of its more detestable features, it still

remains from Japan's point of view a sound conception, one prerequi-
site of which, the elimination of paramount Western influence in

Asia, has been established. The old, Co-Prosperity Sphere is

. . .

open under favourable conditions to Japanese economic penetration

and Japan's security is now guaranteed by the greatest military and
^*
naval power in the world.

Japan would find its natural source of markets and raw materials in
Asia. Or, in other words, Clutton's analysis implied that a war over
Vietnam for the sake of Japan's recovery was unneeded and irrelevant.
He clearly saw that Asia's future would not be determined by U.S.
working through Japan.
military force, but by the force of capitalism
Asia's only alternative was developmental help from the Communist
bloc,and while such help was possible, Clutton understood it could
be overpowered by the peaceful, steady sweep of Japanese commerce
southward.
Unfortunately, Eisenhower and Dulles did not share Clutton's con-
clusions. They believed that only military victory in Southeast Asia
could save the region for Japan and Western-style capitalism. A series
of Japanese governments, beginning with Yoshida's, pointedly disagreed.
Oddly, a British Foreign Office analyst and Japanese governments
placed greater confidence in the power of capitalism than did the
Americans who shaped much of that capitalism.
The fervent belief that massive military expenditures were necessary
had been built into NSC-68. U.S. officials quickly played Southeast
Asian variations on the NSC-68 themes. The NSC-124 series of policy

papers in 1952 was the Truman-Acheson legacy to Eisenhower that jus-

tified U.S. commitments in Indochina. French colonial forces were

headed off the cliff, NSC-124 feared. They somehow had to be stopped,
for if "any of the countries of Southeast Asia" were lost 'as a conse-
quence of overt Chinese Communist aggression, it would
or covert "

bring down "the rest of Southeast Asia and India," and, "in the longer
term the Middle East." Obviously, Japan would be a faHing domino:
. . .
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 9

"The loss of these rice exporting areas would impose a two-fold pressure
on Japan by removing simultaneously a source of food and a potential
field for Japanese export development." Either all Southeast Asia

remained open for Japanese exploitation, or it was "dubious that Japan

could refrain from reaching an accommodation with the Communist
bloc." Truman and Acheson were consequently ready to "continue and
increase [U.S.] military and economic assistance programs for Indo-
chma.
Eisenhower and Dulles intensified this commitment as the French
stumbled toward their decisive defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh's
forces at Dienbienphu in mid-1954. "Indochina is the key to Southeast
Asia, upon the resources of which Japan is largely dependent," Dulles
told the French in 1952. He was not in any mood to await the working
out of capitalist development in the region. The Secretary of State
instead anticipated using "massive retaliation," that is, the possible use
of nuclear weapons. As Eisenhower emphasized, he had no intention
of fighting a conventional war against major Communist aggression.
There were to be no more frustrating, expensive Koreas. ^^
U.S. policy had thus moved in just six short years after 1948 from the
need to rebuild Japan, to the belief that Southeast Asia was essential
for that rebuilding, to public hints that nuclear strikes might be neces-
sary. As Eisenhower explained in a soon-to-be-famous press conference
of April 7, 1954, the highest stakes were on the table:

You have arow of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and
what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very
rapidly . . .

It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of

the Philippines. . . .

It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must
have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place to
go — that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.
So the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to
^"^
the free world.

Over the next month, Eisenhower approached, then backed away

from, the use of U.S. forces, even nuclear weapons, to save the French
at Dienbienphu. He knew he lacked the support of Congress, of the
British, and, especially, of "local Asiatic peoples" to intervene. France
made peace with Ho Chi Minh's forces, agreeing in the process to
divide — temporarily—Vietnam north and south until nationwide elec-
THE CLASH 3 10

tions could be held, presumably in 1955. Eisenhower refused to go along

with any elections (which would have resulted, as the President later
noted, in Ho's certain victory). The United States replaced the French
South and constructed a Southeast Asian Treaty Organization
in the
(SEATO) that was to prop back up any falling "dominoes. "^^
The Japanese watched all this with wonder and dismay Wanting (to

understate considerably) no military role in SEATO, Tokyo never

joined. Yoshida could feel vindicated in keeping the Japanese military
too small to be of use for Americans. 'The test of strength in fighting
communism lies as much, if not more, in the poHtical and economic
fields as in the military,' a Japanese position paper concluded in later

1954. As the United States moved to militarize the region, Japan signed
agreements with Burma, and reaffirmed deals with Indonesia, in which
Tokyo paid over $1 billion in "reparations." This money was then used
to finance Japanese investments and exports to these nations, while
they in turn sold food and raw materials to Japan. The Japanese steel,
shipbuilding, automobile, and electrical businesses handsomely
profited. Japan began lucrative long-term relationships with Southeast
Asia even as U.S. officials worried how to keep the "dominoes erect ' in
the capitahst camp.^^

A New Cold War

The Southeast Asian crises of 1954 symbolized, in hindsight, a major

transition in the Cold War. A prophetic article in BusinessWeek of Octo-
ber 16, 1954, observed that "Asia [not Europe] is the front now —and
the West is shaping new ways to counter a new partnership between
Russia and Red China." Between 1954 and 1958, moreover, the Soviets
successfully launched rockets that demonstrated they were not only
ahead of the United States in this technology but had the capacity to
hit — —
Western Europe or Japan with nuclear-tipped missiles. Neither
of the two superpowers, however, could stop an ominous splintering of
its own bloc. In 1956, the Soviets had to send in tanks to maintain their

hold on Poland and Hungary. But they could do nothing to repair the
damage caused by arguments with China over military and nuclear
weapons poHcies. By 1957-58, the vaunted Sino-Soviet bloc was split-
ting apart. In 1959, Cuba's Fidel Castro successfully imposed an anti-
U.S. revolution ninety miles from Florida. The rise of the smaller pow-
ers (Dulles and Eisenhower called it "the tyranny of the weak") was
^^
tormenting both blocs.
For the United States and Japan, the new era began tragically on
TKe 19508: The Pivotal Decade 3 1 1

March i, 1954, when a Japanese fishing boat, ironically named Lucky

Dragon, unwittingly sailed close to the Marshall Islands' test site of a

U.S. atomic bomb explosion. Captain Tsutsui Isao later reported that
"about 90 minutes after the blast snow-white ashes began falling all

around the ship. The ashes continued showering the ship for two
hours." Three days later, blisters appeared on the crew members' skins.
Tsutsui headed home, where the news created fear that the Japanese
had long been eating fish that was radioactive. Street demonstrations
erupted along with anti-American rhetoric. As crew members began to
die from the blast's aftereffects, U.S. officials (who at first actually

believed that Communists had deliberately sailed the boat into the blast
area to embarrass the United States) issued an apology. After bitter
exchanges and countercharges, Eisenhower offered, and Japan
accepted, a $2 million indemnity.
The "conclusions drawn from" the tragedy "are unpleasant, some
even ominous," Ambassador John Allison told Washington. The Japa-
nese government had nearly broken down in handling the episode.
Unable to get its story straight, Yoshida's government suffered a political
revolt from within and stinging anti-U.S. criticism from without. Allison
warned that the position of "neutralists, pacifists, feminists and profes-
sional anti-Americans had been strengthened." The "government
. . .

and the people cracked," the ambassador wrote. Allison and his readers
in Washington (which included Eisenhower) thus turned a Japanese
^^
tragedy into a tragedy as well for U.S. plans for Japan.
Allison was bitter. The best U.S. efforts had too little dulled the
historic clash between the two countries. Japanese always took but
never gave, the ambassador complained. They neither put their own
political house in order nor opened their economic house to the self-
invited American visitors. "Japan does not consider itself an ally or part-
ner with the United States, he wrote in 1954, 'but rather a nation
"

which for the time being is being forced by circumstances to cooperate

with the United States and which intends ... to wring out of this rela-
tionship every possible advantage at minimum cost." That view, of
course, did not match Japan's. The Japanese felt "the U.S. had no real
benevolence toward Japan," Allison recorded powerful Finance Minis-
ter Ikeda Hayato declaring in 1954 —
otherwise how could Americans
have made such mistakes impose school reforms and politi-
as trying to
cal-economic decentralization policies on Japan after 1945?
Eisenhower and Dulles recognized the growing strain. They tried to
help by ushering Japan into the membership of two all-important. West-
ern-dominated organizations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and
—
Trade (GATT) in 1955, and after four vetoes from the Soviets the —
 ^

THE CLASH 3 1 2

United Nations in 1956. Eisenhower also looked the other wav as Japa-
nese signed private trade agreements with Communist China. These
deals ostensibly did not involve the Tokyo government, but. in fact,
during 1955 they led to the exchange of trade representatives who to
American eyes uncomfortably resembled diplomatic corps. ^^
This aggressive China policy was pushed by Premier Hatoyama
Ichiro, a conser\^ative who had ended Yoshida's six-year reign. Yoshida
had fallen in December 1954 amid ringing scandals invoking his govern-
ment, shipping companies, and investment firms. Hatoyama united
enough of the Progressive Part}' and Liberal Part}' \^^th his new Demo-
cratic Party to form a government, but only with votes as well from
Socialists who opposed any alliance with the Americans. An early 1955
national election led to a united, impressive Socialist Part}'. Frightened
conservative businessmen and political leaders finally forced the Liber-
alsand Democrats to merge in a consen^ative coalition in late 1955. The
resulting Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) formed a consenati\'e part}'
of bitterly di\ided factions, but its powerbrokers would periodically
piece the factions together to rule Japan imperiously for the next thirt}-
eight years.The "1955 setup," as Japanese political analysts later termed
it, was made up of shrewd politicians, talented bureaucrats, and rich

business groups (led by the heidanren, or Federation of Economic Orga-

nizations, which regularly swamped the LDP with money to keep it in
power). It created the semblance of a stable two-party political system,
albeit one of powerhouse right. ^^
a smaller left versus a
As the new premier, Hatoyama seemed a transitional figure, a sev-
enty-two-year-old partially paralyzed from a stroke of three years earlier.
His two years in power nevertheless became pivotal for Japanese rela-
tions with the Communist bloc. Hatoyama named as his foreign minis-
ter Shigemitsu Mamoru, already sixty-five, and ha\dng lost a leg in 1932
when a Korean nationahst tossed a bomb. Shigemitsu had signed the
surrender documents for Japan in 1945, then ser\'ed time in jail as a
Class A war criminal. Unlike Hatoyama, Shigemitsu was neither popu-
lar nor a good politician. He seemed "ruthless, cold, and unapproacha-

ble," in a British diplomat's phrase. The two new leaders agreed on the
need to widen trade with China and open political relations with the
Soviet Union. They accomplished the former in 1955, the latter in 1956.
Shigemitsu, who when young had been a consul in Portland, Oregon,
before sening in China and the Soviet Union, knew English well mis-
trusted Americans greatly, supported rearming enthusiastically, and
feared dependence on the United States totally. His views and the time
seemed well matched.^
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 1 3

The Japanese economy meanwhile picked up speed in 1956 when it

equaled its highest prewar level of production. As Allison and other

U.S. officials worried about Japan's economic policies, the real gross
national product shot up an average of 7 percent yearly between 1953
and 1958. One reason: its industrialists learned how to substitute home-
made goods (such and wood pulp) for imports (such as cotton
as rayon
and foreign-grown wood). Meanwhile, the U.S. industrial machine sud-
denly sputtered through a series of recessions. Its gross national product
rose at less than half the rate of Japan s, or the Soviets'. By 1957, the
U.S. Treasury's gold supply (which undergirded the dollar as the inter-
national economy's cornerstone) began to be sucked out of the country
by overseas military commitments, U.S. investors moving billions of
dollars into a unifying Europe, and a declining merchandise trade bal-
ance. No group worried more about this growing dilemma than Eisen-
hower's cabinet. One member warned in 1958 about "pricing ourselves
out of world markets." Dulles privately told Senate leaders that this
dilemma loomed just as the newly emerging nations threatened to go
^^
to the Communists for help if the West could not provide enough.
As Japan's economy accelerated, its politics grew more complex and
independent of U.S. pressure. Dulles and Shigemitsu neither known —
as "Mr. Warmth" —
clashed repeatedly over the U.S. determination to
move, unannounced, nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships into
Japanese bases. When Shigemitsu told a greatly annoyed Dulles in 1955
that the 1952 security treaty should be renegotiated, the Secretary of
State shot back, yes, when the Japanese were willing to pay for their
own mihtary to defend the home islands and to help the United States
^^
abroad.
At the April 1955 Bandung, Indonesia, Conference of mostly non-
aligned nations, Japan gently separated itself from U.S. policies in
Southeast Asia. Dulles, who once labeled neutralism as "immoral," was
not pleased. Nor was the highly influential, hawkish journalist Joseph
Alsop. Visiting Tokyo in 1955, Alsop announced that the United States
had blown its great opportunity in 1954 by not saving the French and
destroying Vietnam's Communist forces. For, he emphasized, "Every
Japanese businessman, without exception [,] regards Southeast Asia as
Japan's most promising future trading area." Now they had lost trust
in Washington: "Anti-Americanism here can be expected to become
uncontrollable" as Japan turns neutral. "Asia is a seamless web," Alsop
preached. "If the web is too badly torn anywhere, it will unravel every-
where. And it is tearing now."^^
U.S. -Japan cooperation on Chinese questions certainly seemed to be
 —
THE CLASH 3 1 4

unraveling. As Americans vigorously dueled with China to protect Tai-

wan, the Japanese worked to increase trade with both China and Tai-
wan. An analysis forwarded by Dulles to the President bluntly warned
that many Japanese believed " 'Communist China' is almost a contra-
diction in terms; that Chinese can never be 'Communist.' " Dulles obvi-
ously thought this view weird. He considered equally weird the
"professional" Japanese diplomats, who, the report noted, "believe that
Peiping can be split from Moscow by peaceful means." The Eisenhower
administration decided, in Dulless phrase, to let Japan "go it alone."
Perhaps Clarence Randall, the new chair of the Council of Foreign
Economic Policy after July 1956, was right. A rabid believer in open
markets, Randall convinced the sympathetic President that letting
Japan trade in roughly half the goods listed on the embargo statutes
would improve U.S. -Japanese relations and perhaps wean China away
from Communist bloc products. Randall won compromise \dctory this

over angry opposition from the Defense Department and the passion-
ately pro-Taiwan assistant secretary of state, Walter Robertson, who
^^
feared anv contact with China.
The Soviets were now warmly courting Japan and the new Asian
nations. In June 1955, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev proposed talks
to make (finally) a peace treaty with Japan. It was not lost on U.S.
officials that Khrushchev took this initiative after his scientists success-

fully tested a 1,500-mile missile that could be targeted on the Japanese.

The initiative collapsed when Japan demanded that the Soviets surren-
der their hold on the Kurile Islands north of Hokkaido. With their con-
tinued control of the Kuriles and Sakhahn, the So\dets had a strategic
grip on the region and its on w^hich many Japanese
rich fishing grounds
depended. Ambassador Allison feared that "Japan is on the verge of
slowly slipping away from us.' A secret report to Eisenhower's National
Security Council agreed: "Japan's tendency to drift away is due to
decreasing economic, military, and diplomatic dependence on the
United States and to the growth of national pride and spirit of indepen-
dence." One conclusion starkly stood out: "The major U.S. objective
a firm alliance in the Pacific — is not being achieved.
"^^

Tne Explosion Over tne Security Pact

(1957-60)

U.S. officials feared the worst, and their fears soon seemed to be justi-
fied. In December 1956, Hatoyama retired, only to be replaced by Ishi-
TKe 1950.S: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 1 5

bashi Tanzan, a bon vivant, seventy-two-year-old economist keen to lead

the rush into China's market. When he lasted as prime minister for only

two months, Washington breathed more easily especially since he was —

replaced by his foreign minister, the smooth, powerful political broker,
Kishi Nobusuke. Kishi was more pro-American, yet during his reign
Japan and the United States endured their worst crisis since 1945.
The crisis revolved around the renewal of the 1952 security treaty.
According to the pact's provisions, it had to be renewed by i960. Kishi
seemed nicely positioned to do this job. Born in 1896 of a well-con-
nected Choshu sake brewer, he had been raised by the powerful Sato
family of Choshu, and thus moved easily in the clan that shaped Meiji
Japan. An and ardent admirer of German literature and philoso-
early
phy, Kishi read Hegel and Nietzsche in the original. A graduate of pres-
tigious Tokyo University, where he was influenced by ardent
nationalists, he concluded that Russian communism and Western capi-
talism were twin evils threatening the heart of Japan. These views
developed while he rose rapidly through the bureaucracy. In 1941, he
became Tojo's minister of commerce and industry. Kishi helped over-
throw Tojo in 1944 after a series of Japanese military defeats, but contin-
ued to be a pivotal economic planner for the doomed war effort.

MacArthur's officials labeled Kishi awar criminal. He spent

Class A
three and a half years in prison before being depurged in 1952.^^
Entering politics with gusto, and running a major steel trading com-
pany with efficiency, Kishi worked to overthrow the occupation reforms
that limited the zaihatsu, liberalized education, and restricted rearma-
ment. The head of Japan's million-member labor unions condemned
3
Kishi as a "guardian of the monopolists." The new premier's economic
views, his hatred of the Soviets, and (unlike Yoshida and Hatoyama) his
fear of getting too close to China —
not to mention his love of golf
made him welcome in Eisenhower's Washington. U.S. officials liked

Kishi's idea that since Asian communism had ended Japan's manifest
destiny on the mainland, the Japanese had to turn toward non-Commu-
nist Southeast Asia. These officials seemed blind to the determination
of the Kishi faction to use tight, powerful governmental controls to
guide and accelerate the Japanese economic machine. Kishi, it became
clear, was moving toundermine many of the occupation's democratic
reforms so that Japan could be more efficient, economically competi-
tive —and independent of the United States. He even floated the idea
of restoring the Emperor as "Head of State, " although without the for-

mer claims to divinity. For the Eisenhower administration and many

other Cold War warriors, however, such reactionary politics were of less
THE CLASH 3 1 6

interest than was Kishi's anti-communism and his willingness to ram a

renewed security treaty through the Diet.^^
Just two months after obtaining power, Kishi handed Ambassador
Douglas MacArthur II (the general's nephew) a tough paper. It criti-
cized Japan's subordination to the United States under the 1952 pact,
expressed disappointment over U.S. policies to restrict trade with
China, and indicated Okinawa should now return to Japanese control.
He implied that Japan dissented from any American attempt to use
military force to overthrow communism. Kishi indeed wanted a new
understanding on the entire issue of security. Clearly, his supposed pro-
American attitudes were well under control. His offensive received sup-
port when a U.S. soldier, Sergeant William S. Girard of Ottawa-LaSalle,
Illinois, shot a forty-six-year-old Japanese woman as she was picking up
casings of exploded shells so she could sell them. U.S. officials asked
that Girard be tried by Americans. Tokyo officials, claiming they had
allowed Americans to dictate the penalties for 97 percent of the 14,000
"off-duty" crimes committed by U.S. soldiers between 1953 and 1957,
demanded that Girard face a Japanese court. Americans' anti-Japanese
feeling now shot upward. But Eisenhower and Dulles sided with the
Japanese: the President privately "said that Girard would receive an
easier trial in Japanese court than in a [U.S.] court martial, [and] said
that he could not understand a public that makes a hero out of a 'man
"
who shoots a woman in the back at 25 yards as she is running away'
As Eisenhower expected, the Japanese court released Girard on a sus-
pended three-year sentence. ^^
Kishi's demands and the uproar over the Girard case only partly
explained the growing tensions. Japanese officials worried when Eisen-
hower, as part of his cheaper, nuclear-centered New Look defense pol-
icy, reduced U.S. troops Japan from 210,000 in 1953 to 77,000 in 1957
in
(and 48,000 by i960). More than half the remaining personnel were in
the Air Force. This ratio signaled to the Japanese that in any new con-
flict, the United States intended to fight a nuclear war from local bases.
They thus felt even more threatened by possible annihilation without
consultation. U.S. officers were meanwhile working so assiduously to
develop Japanese air and naval forces that English, not Japanese, was
the Japanese air force's operational language. Yet how could this air

force and navy be used? and lack of confidence in

Such lack of clarity,
future U.S. intentions, led elder statesman Yoshida to favor an indepen-
dent Japanese deterrent. Kishi then told a cabinet committee that
"there would be nothing against using nuclear weapons if they were
within the limits of self-defense" (as, presumably Article IX of the Con-
TKe 1950s: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 1 7

stitution allowed). Withremark as background, Kishi visited the

this

United States in June 1957 to tell Eisenhower directly: since U.S. forces
in Japan were "subject to the unilateral determination of the United

States, we would like to have this subject to consultation with the Japa-
nese side.'"^^

Many U.S. officials, preoccupied with a global, complex Cold War,

were no hurry to renegotiate the treaty with a subordinate Japan. If
in
the Japanese were worried, they were to stop grumbling and spend
more on their own military. Moreover, the first whiffs of Japanese
exploitation of U.S. markets hung in the air. By 1956-58 American tex-
tile interests demanded protection against cheap Japanese imports.

State Department officials thought the demands absurd, given the

Americans' domination of both their domestic and international mar-
kets. But influential southern congressmen, and complaints from Amer-
ican producers and fishermen, drowned out State Department views.
Eisenhower sharply disUked and feared using protectionist measures
against an ally such as Japan. He pressed Kishi to act. The Japanese
reluctantly (and in violation of the GATT principles to which they had
agreed in 1955) reduced their exports of textiles, tuna, and electrical
goods to the United States. Then Europeans demanded and received
similar concessions."^^
Kishi had Ambassador MacArthur phrased it,
Httle choice. Japan, as

had to "trade to live." The long-hoped-for China market was disap-

pearing amid the political and economic chaos of the "Great Leap For-
—
ward" of 1956-58 Maos disastrous attempt to infuse renewed
revolutionary vigor into Chinas sagging production. In 1958, U.S. -Chi-
nese forces almost clashed over the small Taiwan-controlled islands off
the mainland. The climactic event occurred at a Nagasaki trade fair that
same year. Two young Japanese nationalists tore down the Communist
Chinese flag. The resulting crisis led Beijing to cancel trade with Japan.
Noting that the security pact was being discussed, China accused Japan
of being a shield for U.S. militarism asAmericans pitted "Asians against
Asians." After all, Beijing pointed out, Kishi had been intimately
involved in warring against Asians in 1941. The Chinese further accused
the premier of being the frontman for capitalist imperialism in South-
east Asia. Perhaps worst of all, in the Communists' eyes, during 1957
Kishi had moved to reinforce rapidly growing Japanese interests by vis-
iting Taiwan —
that most sensitive of all Chinese concerns.
"^^

Kishi's room for maneuver was rapidly shrinking by late 1958. The

shrinking continued that year because of extraordinary political skul-

duggery that accompanied a national election. In the supposedly messy
THE CLASH 3 1 8

U.S. political system, Eisenhower kept a firm hand on foreign policy,

while in the supposedly orderly Japanese system, the prime minister
found himself cobbling together policies to try to stay a step ahead of
his party's fractious leaders. The Communists and the Socialist left

wing lost ground in the 1958 vote, largely because they were discredited
by their fondness now-stumbUng, hostile China. These losses
for a
allowed LDP leaders the freedom to neglect the left and go after each
other. Kishi temporarily quieted his major rival, Ikeda Hayato, with a
cabinet appointment. But the prime minister believed he could only
save his government with a new, improved security treaty. He needed
toremove long-held Japanese complaints about American domination.
Then he could happily climax his long, checkered, and not always
^^
exalted career among Japanese voters.
U.S. officials soon learned about Kishi s insecurity —and about the
'mother's milk" of Japanese as well as American poUtics. His younger
brother, Sato Eisaku, secretly met in a Tokyo hotel room on July 25,
1958, with S. S. Carpenter, first secretary of the American Embassy.
The Soviets and Chinese were funding Japanese leftists, Sato lamented.
The nation's business community had nearly emptied its pockets to
ensure the recent LDP electoral win. Could Washington "supply
financial funds to aid the Conservative forces in this constant struggle
against Communism?" Usually this turned on the money spigots:
Americans gave generously to anti-Communist causes. But the embassy
had seen this request coming. For a year Sato had been suggesting
such gifts. U.S. officials in the embassy saw httle reason to risk being
discovered dropping secret funds into the maelstrom of Japan's personal
politics. The CIA, however, suffered no such compunction. "We

financed them," was the flat statement years later of Alfred C. Ulmer,
Jr., the CIA's Far East operations officer. The financing was probably
unnecessary, given communities donations,
the Japanese business
although the information obtained by CIA moles in the LDP and
"^"^
Socialist Party did prove useful.
Kishi was running scared, and the United States seized the advan-
tage. In October 1958, it gave him a new draft treaty little changed from
the 1952 pact. The draft did expHcitly promise the U.S. defense of Japan
(which few thinking persons doubted would occur in any event). In
return, Americans were to be able to use bases in Japan to defend the
Pacific region. At no time did polls indicate that a majority of Japanese
wanted U.S. military bases on the home islands, and in 1958 only 7
percent wanted the all-important bases in Okinawa to remain. A Tokyo
District Court actually declared the 1952 treaty unconstitutional. The
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 1 9

Supreme Court overturned that ruling, but notably refused to say

whether or not the nation s "Self-Defense Forces" were legal under the
1947 Constitution. As Kishi was buffeted at home, Dulles whom the —
prime minister called "the man who best understood Japan" died of —
cancer in May 1959.'^^

As the new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, and the Japanese

pushed ahead on the treaty talks, opposition solidified in Japan. A core
group was Zengakiiren, or the Federation of Students Self-Government
Associations, whose 222,000 members in 1948 (about 70 percent of the
nation's college students) had begun planning strikes for educational
reform. In the mid-1950s, Zengakuren was turning toward international,
especially anti-American, causes. British experts on Japan ascribed this
turn to a rebellion against U.S. teachers and influences in the schools.
The analysts also believed that Japanese students, who felt "lost" after

the humiliation of the 1945 surrender, sought refuge in "pleasure," or

"Christianity," or,more commonly, leftist politics. Zengakuren, ironi-
cally, was influenced by American left liberals, most notably C. Wright

Mills, whose "power eHte" theory helped critics explain the pro-Cold
War characteristics of both the U.S. and Japanese elites. By 1958, Zen-
gakuren members had joined large labor organizations to conduct street
protests against Kishis poHcies."^^
In January i960, the embattled Kishi flew to Washington to sign the
new treaty. He assured Eisenhower that the LDP control of the Diet
meant cooperation with the Americans and "left-wing opposition" could
be discounted. But Kishis own foreign minister, Fujiyama Aiichiro, had
learned that the prime minister was not, as he thought, going to retire
and give him the premiership, but pass it on to Fujiyama's rival, Ikeda
Hayato. The foreign minister then set about undercutting his prime
minister by telling Americans that Kishi's days in power were num-
bered. Despite such backbiting, on January 19, Kishi and Herter signed
the new White House East Room the same room where
treaty in the —
one hundred years before. President James Buchanan had welcomed
Japan's first diplomatic mission to the United States. It had been a more
eventful century than Buchanan or the Japanese visitors could have
"^^
imagined.
The i960 treaty, unlike the old, explicitly committed the United
States to defend Japan,and to consult with the Japanese before putting
forces into action under the pact's provisions. Also unlike the 1952
arrangement, the treaty had a definite ten-year duration. Either party
could then give notice to end the agreement. Article VI granted Japa-
nese bases to U.S. forces. Kishi, it turned out, had not obtained many
THE CLASH 3 2

concessions. For example, the United States no longer had the explicit
right to intervene to put down upheavals inside Japan, but U.S. forces
could actually do so under the disguise of protecting what both Articles
IV and VI called "the security of Japan . . . and security in the Far East."

Japanese critics quickly zeroed in on "the Far East" phrase: did it

mean they were obligated to help the Americans fight a war against
China over Taiwan? In the Diet on February 26, i960, Kishi gave in to
U.S. views by defining the "Far East" provision as including "primarily
the region north of the Philippines inclusive, as well as Japan and its

surrounding area, including the Republic of Korea [South Korea], and

the area under the control of the Republic of China [Taiwan]." But that
was not all. on Japan (and former Ambassador to
In 1981, U.S. expert
Tokyo) Edwin Reischauer revealed that a secret verbal agreement in
i960 had given the United States the right to move nuclear weapons
freely in and out of Japan. If that understanding had leaked in i960,
"^^
Kishi could have quickly been forced to give up power.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Graham Parsons privately bragged
to the British that the treaty gave Washington everything it wanted. The
Soviets publicly warned that the pact could pull the Japanese directly
into the line of fire in a nuclear war, adding that Moscow had no inten-
tion of returning the northern islands until "all foreign armies" left
Japan. Kishi, embattled on all sides, determined to push ahead. In Feb-
ruary i960, he ordered debate to begin in the Diet. Socialists, the largest
minority, tried unsuccessfully to stall or kill debate. Opponents of the
treaty then brutally equated Kishi's action with his signing of the war
declaration in December 1941 that had nearly destroyed Japan. On May
7, in the middle of this uproar, the Soviets shot down a U.S. U-2 spy
plane that had been photographing Russian facilities. Eisenhower lied

that was a weather plane, only to have a gleeful Khrushchev produce

it

the pilot and evidence of the plane's spy mission. Not only had the
United States been caught flagrantly spying and lying, but it became
'^'^
known that some U-2 planes were stationed in Japan.
The United States stood humiliated just as Kishi moved to force
the treaty through the Diet on May 19-20. Yoshida and a few other
conservatives, who disliked the treaty for bending too far to U.S. wishes,

boycotted these sessions. When Socialists with other opposition mem-

bers tried to stop voting by sitting in the aisles, Kishi ordered five hun-
dred policemen to remove them. Rioters, led by students in Zengakuren,
attacked Kishi's home; they also prevented him from leaving the Diet
building. Violent protests in the streets replaced parliamentary debates.
Some 6 million people went out on strike. U.S. and Japanese officials
TKe 19508: TKe Pivotal Decade 3 2 1

Eisenhower was scheduled to fly into Tokyo

realized to their horror that
on June 20 to help Kishi celebrate ratification. As late as June 8, Fuji-
yama answered worried queries from Washington by emphasizing that
the had to go forward or Kishi would be humiliated. ^^
visit

But two days later, Eisenhower's press secretary, James Hagerty,

arrived in Tokyo to survey the situation. His car was surrounded and
nearly toppled by thousands of protesters. After eighty minutes of terror,
he escaped to advise Eisenhower to cancel the visit. On June 15, pro-
testers led by labor and Zengakuren invaded the Diet grounds to fight
police. A student was trampled to death as 482 students and 536 police
were injured. British observers noted "the unusual violence on both
sides. ' On June 19, the upper house, the House of Councilors, automat-
was automatic because the Constitution pro-
ically ratified the treaty. It

vided that a treaty passed by the lower house became law if the
Councilors did not act, and Socialist protesters prevented the upper
house from convening. On June 22, the largest mass protest in the
nation's history erupted as 6.2 million went on strike. Their concern
was no longer merely the treaty, but the growing fear that Kishi who —
had systematically tried to slash the rights of workers and civil servants
since 1947 —
might try to use the mihtary and police to impose a des-
potic regime.
Fujiyama and Ambassador MacArthur finally exchanged ratifications
at the foreign minister's residence in a secret meeting, but only after
Fujiyama arranged an alternative flight plan with neighbors: if protest-
ers stormed the house, MacArthur was to escape by climbing over
fences and across adjacent gardens. In the historian John Welfield's
phrase, "Japan showed every indication of emerging as America's Hun-
gary" — a reference to the other superpower's use of military force during
1956 to keep a rebellious people in the Soviet bloc. The ratification did
not stop the violence. On July 14, was stabbed in his residence by
Kishi
a right-wing fanatic. The prime minister escaped with minor injuries.
In October, a young nationaUst killed the SociaUst Party leader, Asa-
numa Inejiro (who had helped organize the mass protests), and did so
in full view of television cameras. ^^
New York Times columnist James Reston concluded that the pact
had been put into force, but "at best the United States had lost face, at
worst it had lost Japan." Such losses, however, did not occur. Japan
instead seemed to forget about the treaty. Explaining why Reston mis-
judged explains as well why a different Japan emerged after i960. The
explanation begins with the July 11, i960, announcement by Fujiyama
that the U-2 planes, the "Black Jets" hated by many Japanese, were
THE CLASH ill

lea\ing the countn because their "weather obsenation mission has

been completed. On July lo. Ikeda Havato replaced the wounded, dis-

graced Kishi as head of the LDP and thus as prime minister.^"

Ikeda made a historic contribution: he helped change the mind-set
of Japanese politics b\ taking Cold War and placing it on
it otf the

economic grow th. This sLxty-vear-old son of a rice brewer in Hiroshima

had been educated at Kvoto L ni\ ersitv and law school, then rose rapidlv
in the finance bureaucracy. As Japan militarized in the ig:;cs. he came

down with a rare skin disease whose care both forced him into seclusion
and killed his wife who exhausted herself caring for him. Finallv search-
ing for cures at Buddhist temples, he met a distant relati\"e. Mitsue.
was miraculously cured, married Mitsue. and named their Hrst child
after his first wife. With little in\oKement m ig:;cs Japanese politics.
Ikeda therefore escaped the postwar purges. As a protege of Yoshida,
he resumed his climb to the pow erful post of finance minister. He w as,
as .\ruga Tadashi has obser\ed. the first of the new political generation
whose members rose to power after ig4^. Ikeda demonstrated some
new thinking by appointing the first woman to a Japanese cabinet. Wel-
fare Minister Xakayama Masa. Certainly Beijing officials considered
Ikeda to be a fresh breeze. The Chinese applauded the "Japanese peo-
ple" for being \ictorious over Kishi and ""Imperialist America." "The
days when Japan accepts U.S. policies peacefullv." China announced,
"are o\er."^^
L.S. otficials agreed with neither Restons nor the Chinese assess-
ment of the situation in late igbc. Washington did not fundamentally
reformulate Asian policy in part because it believed its policies had
triumphed in igbc. Refusing to take seriously the So\iet attempt to
thaw the Cold War. growing more obsessive about China, and refusing
to restructure militan budgets to give reliet to a slipping economy the
new Kennedy administration instead honed old policies, especially by
spending more mone\ on them. Eisenhower had shown some under-
standing that rethinking w as necessar\. He privately related how he had
refiected on President William McKinleys 19C1 speech, ""delivered the
day before he was shot, which urged "freer trade and warned that "

"isolation is no longer possible or desirable. Eisenhowers reading of

McKinlevs speech suggests why he. along with a few others such as
Clarence Randall, w ere capable of rethinking and so tolerated increas-
ing Sino-Japanese trade. As enlightened capitalists, they believed in
the interdependence and demonstration of capitalism's power that such
trade produced.^"*
The post-igsi era m L.S. -Japan relations had begun with Joseph

I
Tlie 1950s: Tlie Pivotal Decade 3 2 3

Dodge declaring that "Japan can be independent politically but depen-

dent economically." Dulles meanwhile claimed that the security rela-

tionshipwas the continuation of the occupation by other means. The

1950s ended with massive protests against that security relationship
and with Ikeda's determination to end economic dependence. The
decade also ended with continued friction between the all-out U.S.
support of Chiang on Taiwan and by the LDP powerbrokers, who
yearned to try again to profit from mainland China. The Tokyo govern-
ment of the 1950s thus formed links in a long line of Japanese ruling
parties w^ho tried to lessen their nation's insecurity, strengthen its differ-

ent capitalism, and, as the astute British diplomat George Clutton

wrote in 1951, redefine its necessary' role in Asia.
On the American side, no one had better anticipated the stark alter-
natives facing U.S. officials than did John Allison in a memorandum to

the Secretary of State in early Januar}^ I952-- After summarizing exten-

sive CIA analyses of the situation, Allison concluded:

China is the heart of the whole U.S. policy toward Asia and what we
do or don't do with respect to China will vitally affect our policy
toward Japan and Southeast Asia. There is considerable agitation in
Japan to resume its relations, particularly economic, with the main-
land of China .[and] over a long-term period it will be almost
. .

impossible to prevent Japan having once again the close relationship

with China that has been true throughout its history. Through United
States economic and military assistance and through United States
help in increasing Japan's economic opportunities in Southeast Asia,
dependence on the mainland of China may be kept at a minimum
for a short time. However, it is not believed that this can go on for
much more than five years at the maximum. Sooner or later Japan
will have to deal with the mainland of China and it is to be the

interest of the United States to see to it that within the approximately

five-year period available conditions in China are so changed that
Japan may resume its close relationship with that area without it

being a security threat to this country.

The importance of China to Southeast Asia is obvious. ... In view
of the alarming reports recently received from Southeast Asia con-
cerning the possibility of Chinese Communist intenention in Indo-
^^
china, the urgency of action is apparent.

But neither U.S. direct pressure nor an attempt to drive a "wedge"

between the Soviets and Chinese —nor even the threat of possible
THE CLASH S 2 4

nuclear war over the offshore islands —had "so changed" China by i960
that itwas safe for Japan to "resume its close relationship." If salvation
for Japan were not to be found in a converted China, then, Glutton and
Allison predicted, salvation for Japan —and, indeed, for historic U.S.
interests in Asia —had to be found in a resurrected Southeast Asia. U.S.
officials set about arranging the resurrection.
A "Miracle Appea
Cnina Reappears
(1960-1973)

Tne "Miracle" oi —
Ikeda and Other
"Mercnants oi Transistors

Ikeda Hayato and Dwight Eisenhower — so different in back-

ground and politics —shared one notable characteristic: both were
known for using words Seen in the 1950s by many as con-
badly.
fused, preferring golf over work, and a master of bad syntax, Eisen-
hower fully controlled his government and sometimes deliberately
used the bad syntax to confuse or dull the message for his own
advantage. Ikeda had a nickname: hogen koji, or ''one whose
tongue slips." He won the nickname in the early 1950s when, as a
finance official, Ikeda told the Diet that the new concentration of
Japanese industry might extract a price: "It cannot be helped if

five or ten medium and small entrepreneurs go into bankruptcies

and hang themselves" (as, indeed, several had already done).^
Critics similarly thought Ikeda's tongue slipped in i960 when
he astonishingly committed Japan to doubling its income within a
single decade. Again, Ikeda only spoke from conviction. He under-
stood from his experience as head of MITI in 1959—60 that such a
goal — —
was achievable and of special importance necessary. After
the bloodshed and seemingly constant rioting of early i960, the-

3 2 5
 —
THE CLASH 3> 2 6

nation needed to focus on more constructive pursuits. Rapidly rising

income could, and did, take the wind from the political sails of the

Japanese left wing. Such a program, moreover, could give the nation
the kind of leverage in world affairs had not enjoyed since the 1930s
it

only this time the leverage would be economic, not military, and this
time others (especially Americans and Asians) would be dependent on
Japanese, not vice versa. Ikeda even had the imagination to view Japan
as one of the "three pillars" of the 'Tree world," along with the United
States and Western Europe. But as this "three-pillar" statement indi-
cated, the premiers emphasis on economics misled: his program to
quiet the country, decimate the left, and diminish Japan's dependence
required working closely with the United States politically. Japan
needed military protection to free up resources for industry rather than
for an armed forces' budget. It would also avoid bitter internal debates
over militarization. And American markets for Japan's industrial goods
were most welcome.^
Ikeda's economic scheme succeeded astoundingly, but, at the same
time, slowly ate away at the ties between Japan and the United States.
The two nations clashed over China, then over China and Vietnam, and
finally, climactically, over the "Nixon shocks" that marked the terminus

of the post-1945 U.S. -Japan relationship. Waves of production from the

Japanese economic "miracle" finally washed away most of the founda-
tions of both the post-1945 relationship and Japan s political structure.
By 1964, Japanese gross national product had risen to sixth place glob-
ally; in another three years it flew past France, Great Britain, and Ger-

many to settle into third place just back of the two superpowers.
With the LDP's success, the left splintered. China played a pivotal
role in causing the splintering: its alienation from the Soviets created
ruptures between pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions in Japan's Social-
ist and Communist parties. The CIA poured in more money just to

ensure the left's demise. One CIA official later said that paying off LDP
leaders "is the heart of darkness and I'm not comfortable talking about
it, because it worked." Others, however, did talk. The U.S. ambassador
to Japan between 1966 and 1969 (and longtime Japanese hand), U.
Alexis Johnson, recalled that "the principle [of funneling money secretly
to the LDP] was certainly acceptable to me. We were financing a party
on our side." But given local resources, the LDP did not need the CIA
funds, and the Agency obtained greater cost efficiency by infiltrating
the Socialist Party, youth groups, and labor organizations throughout
the 1960s. The CIA-State Department covert activities were a waste of
^
money.
A "Miracle" Appears: CKina Reappears (1960-1973) 3 2 7

For Ikeda had things in hand. The power rose along

conservatives'
w^ith hisincome-doubhng plan. He successfully pushed to recentralize
control over education, and to fill the youth with traditional nationalist

values and ethics —

instead of the 'wishy-washy social science course

instituted by the Americans," as a British observer condescendingly

called it. When he returned from a European trip in 1962, the premier
went first to bow to the Emperor, then paid homage at the Yasukuni
Shrine to the war dead that was linked to the nation's pre-1945 military
deeds. His visit to the shrine angered Americans, and other Asians,
while gratifying Japanese nationalists. Ikeda was forced by cancer to
give up his post in 1964, but by then he had shredded the left (and
much The political vacuum began to be filled by
of the center).
Komeito, or "Clean Government Party." Komeito was spawned by Bud-
dhists whose goals included neutralism, more help to small businesses,
and more aid to those dispossessed by the "miracle. In its first election
"

of 1967, it won twenty-five Diet seats, and within a decade it became

Japan's third-largest party. But the LDP rolled on."^
The irony lay here: as the CIA-helped LDP increased its power, it

not only grew more corrupt but increasingly clashed with the United
States. This clash revolved as usual around China. It also centered on
the never-ending question of how to deal with an aggressive Japanese
capitalism that refused to play by American ground rules. Certainly

Japan's own ground rules seemed productive; its growth rate averaged
nearly 10 percent annually over a fifteen-year era that spanned the
1960s —the highest real growth rate ever recorded over such a span by
a leading economic power. Japan won membership in such crucial
full

international groups as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development in 1964. (OECD had been formed to expedite free trade,
but Japan was able to negotiate a series of reservations that allowed it
to maintain trade barriers.) The auto industry, producing a half-million
vehicles in i960, quadrupled to 2.2 million in 1966, then increased 50
percent again to replace Germany number-two maker by
as the world's
the 1970s. The globe's largest shipbuilding industry had order books
double the size of its three closest rivals. By 1966, the United States
had sold Japan $2.4 billion worth of goods during the year and bought
$2.9 billion. An unfavorable trade balance had set in for Americans.^
In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle denigrated the Japanese
prime minister as a mere "merchant of transistors." Uncharacteristically,
de Gaulle missed the point. The Japanese government indeed saw its

role as selling shiploads of better transistors, among other products,

because such sales realized the larger goal Japan had long sought: eco-
THE CLASH 3> 2 S

nomic security that would produce autonomy that would lead

political

to domestic order (or wa, as the Meiji generation had phrased it). De
Gaulle sought glory for France by building a nuclear force, playing bal-
ance-of-power politics and checking U.S. global power.
to the hilt,

Ikeda and his successors realized not mere glory but security for Japan
by escaping the endless costs of a nuclear force, playing their economic
cards to the hilt, and reluctantly cooperating with (or often politely and
quietly sidestepping) U.S. Cold War poHcies. De Gaulle lost power in
1969. Ikeda's LDP successors held power for nearly another quarter
century.
The "merchants had
labor-management relationship
of transistors" a
in the 1960s that looked oddly different from the American. Japanese
stressed — especially in the largest exporting firms — lifetime employ-
ment that ensured stability, company unions that ensured predictability,
wages based on seniority that ensured an end to ruinous worker compe-
tition, and (as W. Edwards Deming's techniques demanded) a maxi-

mum of cooperation. An end-of-the-year bonus system secured the

workers' interest in the company profit and spread risk to workers as
well as owners. The ''transistor salesmen" also kept governmental
expenditures low, especially for welfare and the military.^
The Japanese government instead created neo-mercantiHstic policies
(taxes, industrial regulations, control over imports) that favored new
industries (electronics, steel, autos, and synthetics), and deemphasized
old (as coal). It encouraged successful firms, such as Nissan, Toyota,
Hitachi, New Japan Steel, to merge with others in their sector to form
world-competitive enterprises. A great "science
was planned north city"

of Tokyo where a collective of 52,000 scientists and engineers could

turn out, and adapt, the latest technology. These developments were
overseen by a highly trained, elite bureaucracy. Insulated against politi-

cal firestorms, it nevertheless produced the prime ministers (such as

Ikeda, from both the Ministry of Finance and MITI) who presided over
Japan for twenty of the years between 1955 and 1980. The bureaucracy,
then and later, excelled in information collection, especially from such
leading competitors as the United States.'
Nowhere, however, was the government more successful, and more
un-American, than in controlling capital, the "miracle s" lifeblood. After

1945,Japanese businesses depended utterly on bank loans. That depen-

dence enabled Tokyo bureaucrats to shape industrialization by turning
on the banks' money supply for certain companies and denying others.
The government did this by employing several wrenches. Its Recon-
struction Finance Bank was the prime source of capital from 1945 into
A "Miracle" Appears: China Reappears (1960—1973) 3 2 9

the 1950s, especially after New York City capital was largely excluded.
Then the government created the Japan Development Bank to favor
cutting-edge export industries. The Bank of Japan became both an
investor and a referee in the economy. The United States embraced
the private marketplace, or slow-moving governmental fiscal and taxing
policies, to develop competitive businesses. Japan used ruthless, effi-

cient, and unusually well-informed bureaucratic decision making to

implement its decisions effectively: by creating low-interest loans for
Japanese businesses through control of the capital supply.
Thus American firms depended on the stock markets for capital, and
were often held hostage by their short-term profit objectives. Japanese
companies took the long-term view encouraged by MITI and the
finance ministry. By the mid-1960s, the state provided nearly 30 percent
of gross domestic capital formation (or about twice the percentage
found on the American Above all, the government accumulated
side).

capital at home through a variety of weapons to accelerate the Japanese

people s already strong habits of saving. MITI and the finance ministry
sought Japan's salvation through exporting technology, not, as in the
United States, through a society (or global military force) based on
increasing consumption.^
By 1966, a surprised U.S.News & World Report observed that Japan,
lying in ruins just twenty years before, had become one of the few
nations exporting more capital than it imported. Most of this invest-
ment went to secureraw materials and mineral resources. Japan tar-
geted Brazil, where masses of Japanese had emigrated, and Canada.
This historic power occurred as the John F. Kennedy
shift in the yen's

and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations worked feverishly to shore up

U.S. credit. Dollars flowed out for war in Southeast Asia, global military
commitments, private investments in a unifying Europe and a grow- —
ing unfavorable trade balance with Japan. U.S. officials demanded that
Japanese open their markets, including capital markets. By 1970, of the
tw^o hundred largest American corporations, seventy-eight were
operating in Japan. But to exist they largely had to work closely with
Japanese firms —an arrangement that helped channel U.S. technology
and Japan under tight Japanese control. After intense U.S.
capital into
pressure was applied, Tokyo announced in 1967 that seventeen types of
business would finally be opened to 100 percent American ownership.
The announcement meant little because the businesses included steel,
shipbuilding, and motorcycles, where Japanese dominance was over-
whelming. Earlier, the authorities had made the mistake of allowing in

several U.S. food companies; the Americans soon held 80 percent of the
 a

THE CLASH 3 3

instant coffee market. Tokyo bureaucrats would not repeat that error. As
one Japanese official declared: "Most Japanese businessmen don't want
to make the same mistake European businessmen did turning
that —
over most of their businesses to American business."^
Americans might have better tolerated Japan's economic success had
it not had two glaring characteristics: sudden triumph just as the United

States headed into the nightmare of the Vietnam War, and a focus on
selling to Chinese (and even Vietnamese) whom Americans opposed in
that war. A rapid buildup of U.S. troops in Vietnam occurred during
1965. That year was also a watershed for the U.S. -Japan trade relation-
ship: before then, the Americans enjoyed a favorable balance. After-
wards, Japan's favorable balance grew to $1.5 billion in 1969 (out of $9
billion two-way trade), then $3.2 billion in 1971. Honda and Yamaha
first sold motorcycles in the United States during i960; by 1966, they

accounted for 85 percent of all motorcycles bought by Americans. The

story was quickly, if less dramatically, repeated in autos and electronics.
North American markets were taking 36 percent of Japan's exports —
figure like that of the 1920s when Japanese prosperity rested on those
markets. By 1972, a top Japanese diplomat warned that "a trade imbal-
ance of this magnitude cannot simply continue without creating serious
difficulties in the bilateral economic relationship" —
and, he might have
added, also in the political. Japan's exports remained low-priced too,
^°
while American prices suffered from Vietnam War— stoked inflation.
The American trade wound was deepened by the Japanese determi-
nation to sell to Communists and other Asians alike. Trilateral trade
among Japan, the Asian continent, and the United States (with Japan
the pivot for most of the trade) grew so fast that experts predicted a
"Pacific trading bloc." It would include Australia (which now had Japan
as its largest trading partner), and even Peru and Chile. U.S. officials
feared the bloc might also include the Soviet Union, for Japan signed
consular and air-traffic agreements with Moscow while planning to
increase trade and joint ventures for opening Siberia's mind-boggling
mineral resources. Clearly, a powerful LDP faction led by Mild Takeo
was urging the development of Soviet and Asian trade as an alternative
to dependence on the U.S. market. Thus in Burma, Japan's goods were
becoming so prominent that people ran to catch the "hino rather than
"

the "bus." Japan was Taiwan's leading trade partner (the United States
was second), and although the balance was overwhelmingly in Tokyo's
favor, U.S. officials showed little concern.'^

They were more exercised, however, with the so-called L-T deals
(named after the negotiators' initials) that supposedly private Japanese
A "Miracle" Appears: Cnina Reappears (l 960— 1973) 3 3 1

signed with China in 1962. In these arrangements, the parties agreed

that "politics and economies are inseparable." The U.S. "imperialists'
open intervention" was condemned. In
into Sino-Japanese relations
January 1963, Ikeda told a press conference that Japan was ready to act
"independently from beginning to end" on China trade, although he
emphasized the 1962 deals were agreed to by non-governmental groups.
Bilateral Sino-Japanese trade then jumped from $136 million in 1963 to

$560 million in 1969. In a break with the past, Tokyo officials supplied
credit arrangements for some of that trade. Japan, becoming China's
number-one trading partner, was "looking 10 or 20 years ahead," The
Times of London declared, "when the Chinese economy should have
changed radically."'^
Americans meanwhile died in Asia, supposedly to contain China's
expansionism. Anti-war and civil rights protests created chaos on col-
lege campuses and in major urban areas. The U.S. economy overheated,
was wracked by inflation, and became less competitive. Between 1971
and 1973, the U.S. -devised international economic system put into
place after World War II came to an end.
This apocalyptic climax gradually hove into view throughout the
1960s. The American economy boomed along toward a gross national
product that moved from $23 billion in 1947 to $900 billion in 1969
(Japan's was barely 10 percent of that, or $91.1 billion in 1968). But
overall increases in agricultural productivity hid a frightening decline in
annual industrial productivity from a 3.6 percent increase early in the
1960s to only 1.5 percent by 1966—70. This decline was doubly ominous,
for imports (notably from Japan) increased their share of the American
market during the 1960s by a whopping 50 percent. Dollars flowed out
to pay for these imports just as the Vietnam War's budgets rose dramati-
cally. The head of Mitsui believed in 1967 that Japanese profited from
between $500 million and $4 billion every year for producing items to
be used in fighting that war.^^

U.S. officials moved to stanch the financial bleeding by trying to

regulate (that is, tax) investment capital moving overseas. That
approach was doomed to failure, not least because American officials
and investors soon discovered that if they could not invest abroad, oth-
ers, including Japanese, happily stepped in. Washington officials also

moved to retilt the international marketplace toward their interest by

initiating the so-called Kennedy Round of tariff cuts that by 1969 did,
indeed, reduce tariffs by as much as 60 percent in some parts of the
world. But quotas and "voluntary restraints" replaced tariffs as barriers
to increased world trade. President Kennedy had personally worked out
THE CLASH i 3, 2

an arrangement with Tokyo that limited U.S. imports of some Japanese

textiles.

In May 1969, the CIA reported that Japan was pro\iding too little

help for the embattled American economy: "informal administrative

means," as the Agency nicely termed Tokyo's bureaucracy effectively
barred most U.S. capital and goods. Meanwhile, the CIA warned, the
Japanese effectively exploited ties with U.S. firms —even computer
giant IBM — to obtain cutting-edge technology and then "effectively
shut out" those firms from the Japanese market. Undersecretar\^ of
State U. Alexis Johnson could proudly announce in 1963 that because
of astounding successes since 1945 in U.S. -Japan trade, the Japanese
had become a "model" and "source of modern technology" for other
Asians. "The Far East," Johnson declared, "from our vantage point is
"

more correctly called the Tar West,' " or, even better, the " 'Near West.'
Other Americans, however, began to wonder whether, in the racial ste-
reotaxes of their western movies, the Japanese were going to play the
friendlies or the hostiles in this "Near West."^'*

Kennedy, Ikeda. and the Illusion ol

"Ecjual Partnersnip

The new administration Washington had no doubt about who was to

in

play the cavalr}. As the British journalist Louis Heren recalled, "When
I arrived in Washington just before the inauguration of John Kennedy,

the mood of the city could only be described as euphoria." A new gener-
ation, Kennedy announced in his inaugural, was taking leadership to
fight the Cold W^ar more effectively, and reform society more dramati-

cally. The new President, a veteran of the Pacific War, had been decor-

ated "involuntarily," as he phrased it. The Japanese destroyed his

torpedo boat and forced him bravely to rescue his crew. U.S. -Japan
relations, however, seemed to be recovering well from the memories of
the early 1940s and the riots of early i960. In September i960. Prince
Akihito, heir to the throne, and Princess Machiko took the political risk
of visiting Hawaii to help celebrate the centennial of the i860 Japanese
mission. They dropped on the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl
a lei
Harbor. A British diplomat, maneling at the visit's success, privately
admitted, "I can't see ourselves permitting such a \isit under similar
"^^
circumstances.
In late 1961, the first meeting of the U.S. -Japan Joint Committee on
A "Miracle" Appears: China Reappears (i960— 1973) 3 3 3

Scientific Cooperation took place. So did the initial convening of the

U.S. -Japan Cultural and Educational Cooperation committee. Harvard
expert-on-Japan Edwin Reischauer and others preached that as Japan
finally modernized, it would become more like the United States. The
British evaluation of the relationship, however, was not kind: "It must
... be comforting for the Americans to have a country and a people
"^^
with whom they can indulge in mutual admiration.
The two cultures might have appeared to be converging, but foreign
policies do not always follow culture. In their first meeting in 1961,

Kennedy pressed Ikeda to play a larger international role. The prime

minister lamented that Japan firstneeded better command of the
English language. U.S. officials then proposed sending one hundred
Peace Corps volunteers to help Japanese learn English. Japan's Ministry
of Education quickly objected that the new Peace Corps was for under-
developed nations; its appearance in the home islands would be taken
as an insult. Instead, the Japanese began to demand what they called
"equal partnership, by which they seemed to mean more economic
"

access while America bore the responsibility for maintaining Asian

^'^
security.
Kennedy appointed Reischauer as U.S. ambassador to Tokyo.
Reischauer, in a widely noted i960 essay, had criticized the "broken
dialogue" between the two nations, especially between Americans and
the Japanese left. He and his Japanese-born wife, Haru, did much to
repair that break over the next six years —not least after he was seriously
wounded when stabbed by an unbalanced young Japanese in 1964.
Reischauer was intent on using modernization theory (essentially that
Japan was following U.S. development) as a weapon against Marxist
theories of development that were popular in important Japanese intel-
lectual circles. The ambassador, however, grew frustrated that few top
U.S. officials wished to visit Japan. Attorney General Robert Kennedy
was an exception. The President's brother scored a triumph during a
1962 trip when he effectively debated Japanese protesters.
The young President meanwhile fretted over declining U.S. competi-
tiveness in the world marketplace. His reading of history concluded
that great empires of the past had been destroyed by enemies who
nibbled away at the empire's most exposed frontier. In the case of nei-
ther the economic nor security problems, Kennedy privately com-
plained, could he pull fresh, effective ideas from a stagnating American
liberalism. Louis Heren later caught the moment: the 1930s New Deal
"initiatives had run their course by the sixties. . . . The United States
had also turned its back on the examples of social reform prevalent in
THE CLASH 3 3 4

northern Europe, and the intellectual isolationism was to say the least
stultihino;."^^
Kennedys "New Frontier" threatened to become little more than the
old frontier studded with HoUwood glitter. Confronting U.S. trade
imbalances and edg\' Asian security, the President and his advisers
came up with variations of policies from the late 1940s and 1950s:
preaching open markets and practicing containment. On the pivotal
trade problem, a secret State Department analysis of March 1962
defined the dilemma. Its logic, to a point, was impeccable: "We see

Japan as our principal ally in East Asia, our second largest world trading
partner, the host for important forward U.S. militar}^ facilities, and a
source of technical skill and capital contributing to the economic devel-
opment of South and South East Asia." But Japans cooperation with
Washington, and its "continued control by moderate elements," as well
as its abilit}^ to be helpful in Asia, depended "primarily on the mainte-
nance of a high level of economic activity w^hich, in turn, depends to

an unusual extent upon access to world markets." These tough-minded

officials quickly saw the opportunity: "This dependence on trade . . .

provides the United States with ver\' considerable leverage in Japan."

That assumption, of course, had been shared by Thomas Lamont,
also
Charles Evans Hughes, Cordell Hull, and Stanley Hornbeck. Their pol-
^^
icies toward Japan now formed a thin layer in the ashheap of history.

The New Frontiersmen found themselves trapped between two tec-

tonic plates of the post-1945 era: on one side the traditional U.S. trade
surplus, which had paid bills for expensive, far-flung military^ contain-
ment, was shifting into deficits; on the other side, the Japanese econ-
omy whose devastation and slow recovery had given Americans a
powerful leverage o\er Tok\^os policies, was beginning to accelerate.
Between 1958 and 1971, the United States became a more normal eco-
nomic power while Japan became a more-than-normal economic power.
Caught in these historic transitions, and light on new ideas, the State
Department echoed the 1930s by asking Japan to help in the "alleviation
of the United States balance of payments problem" through "trade liber-
alization." Americans w^ould in turn further open their own markets to

—
Japanese goods unless, of course, U.S. restraints on Japanese imports
were "absolutely essential." Japan was meanwhile urged to find outlets
in Asia (although not China) and Western Europe. In 1962, Undersecre-
tary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick demanded that the Japanese were
now in a position to help by paying more of the costs of U.S. bases in
the home islands and Okinawa. In realit\; Gilpatrick realized that Japan
could not pay those costs without an eviscerating public debate in
A "Miracle" Appears; China Reappears (1960-1973) 3 3 5

which the left could blast pro-American conservatives. Gilpatrick

touched upon, then quickly backed away from, the idea that money
could be saved by reducing or restructuring the U.S. base complex in
Japan. For Reischauer, the very thought that Gilpatrick could float such
an idea was abhorrent. As the ambassador lectured W. Averell Harriman
(the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs) in late 1962: "The
primary role of our bases in Japan, I feel, is to help insure that this
country [Japan] does not fall or gravitate into Communist hands or into
a neutralist position." But the Pentagon "seems to be judging them
solely on their secondary value as bases for the defense of other areas
in the Far East."^^
The American military personnel, 54,600
169 U.S. bases had 45,000
dependents, 3,300 American civilians, and nearly 70,000 Japanese
employees. That such force might be in Japan primarily to shape inter-
nal Japanese politics rather than provide for Asian security had, of
course, also crossed many Japanese minds. Such ideas helped trigger
the i960 riots. Moreover, the secret State Department analysis noted in
1962, "The Japanese are haunted by the fear of involvement in another
nuclear war." If the "conservatives" tried to "flout these fears," the price
would be high for both the LDP and U.S. poHcy.^^
Supporting U.S. policy, LDP politicians understood, could be poHti-
cally equivalent to eating the great delicacy of blowfish: perhaps
rewarding, but one mistake could be fatal. Mishandling the issue of
U.S. bases could be the one mistake. Another could be handling the
growing U.S. pressure from domestic manufacturers (especially tex-

tiles) to force Japanese export reduction "voluntarily." These pressures

built as Kennedy preached the need for more liberal trade and adher-
ence to the "Kennedy Round" of tariff talks. The secret State Depart-
ment policy statement of March 1962 was blunt. Essential to U.S.
policy was "the continuation in power of a moderate. Western-oriented
conservative government."
Such laudable objectives excused the CIAs covert funding of the
LDP in 1955. In February 1961, a CIA official and a representative of the
Agency briefed Kennedy s national security
top-secret National Security
adviser, McGeorge Bundy; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; and Rusk's
adviser on Asia, Roger Hilsman. The CIA operation had begun under
Eisenhower, the two briefers explained, because Communist nations
were helping the left wing. The assistance simply paralleled CIA activi-

ties in Italy, France, and Greece to block the left. Hilsman suggested
the operation might now be stopped. The CIA agent replied that per-
haps it should never have started, but if it were suddenly stopped now,
THE CLASH 3 3 6

the LDP would be furious. U.S. -Japan relations would suffer. The
briefer suggested the money-passing be stopped gradually, and "after 30
years nobody will notice this." (Thirty-three years later the revelation of

the operation become a much-discussed page-one story in the New York

Times.) Money continued to flow through the 1960s, apparently $2 mil-
lion to $10 million per year. It was usually passed in Hawaii, where LDP
couriers flew "to do you know what" ireino mono), as one future prime
minister, Ohira Masayoshi, called it. While pa}ing off the right, the
CIA and other U.S. officials also infiltrated the Japanese left, especially
the giant trade union Sohyo. The
was to split and weaken these
goal
groups, or win them over to the fen^ent anti-Communist policies of the
American labor movement. These operations w^ere overseen by a Spe-
cial Group (SO, chaired by the President's national security ad\iser. It

met in Room 40 of the Old Executive Office Building next to the W hite
House, and thus was known as "the 40 Committee." The SG guided
the most important U.S. covert operations in Japan and elsewhere into
^^
the Nixon-Kissinger era of the 1970s.
Above all, Kennedy demanded help from Japanese (as well as from
highly reluctant Europeans) to contain, if not drive back, China's power.
After the world approached nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis
of October 1962, Kennedy concluded that the Soviet leaders had
learned their lesson about the dangers of challenging the United States.
But, he also concluded, China had not learned those hard lessons. Dur-
ing a joint U.S. -Japan economic meeting in Washington two months
after the missile crisis, the President took the highly unusual step of
lecturing the Japanese in pubfic. "The rise of the Communist power in

China combined with an expansionist, Stalinist philosophy," Kennedy

began, had led to the need for containing China. Japan must help con-
tain this menace, "w^hich is in its essence today a beliexer not only in
class struggle but also in the international class struggle of a Third
World War. ' Foreign Minister Ohira's response notably emphasized
^^
instead the need to develop trade.
Japan clearly wanted trade, not confrontation. The 1962 L-T
agreement, increasing private trade between China and Japan, antici-
pated the future. In Februar\^ 1963, Ikeda was reminded by a Diet mem-
ber about Kennedy's condemnation of China and the prime minister's
own earlier declaration that he would "not allow any foreign inter\'en-

tion in Sino-Japanese relations. Is he still of the same mind? " Ikeda

replied, "Japan will cooperate in checking the expansion of commu-
nism, but Sino-Japanese trade is, I believe, another question. Then "

came announcements that China would receive credits to pay for pur-
A "Miracle" Appears; Cnina Reappears (1960—1973) ^ ^ 1

chases from Japan. Assistant Secretary of State Harriman warned that

the United States could not approve such arrangements. By April 1963,
nevertheless, reports circulated that Mitsubishi and several other huge
Japanese firms had set up dummy companies to open business with
China. The dummies were especially useful, the report noted, in
allowing their U.S. branches to profess that the firms were not directly
involved in the China market. In October of that year, the largest Japa-
^^
nese trade fair in China's history occurred in Beijing.
In truth, Kennedy's policies were sinking. U.S. officials knew that
Japan's trade with China was domestically popular and increasingly
necessary for Japan's long-term prosperity (especially if Americans con-
tinued to insist on the Japanese "voluntarily cutting back exports to the
"

—
United States). Moreover, U.S. policies by Washington officials' own
—
admission depended utterly on close links with Ikeda and LDP lead-
ers who wanted to move into China. In July 1962, Ikeda had to restruc-
ture his cabinet after an internal party crisis brought pro-Chinese
factions, led by Mild Takeo, to power. The pro-U.S. group, headed by
Kishi Nobusuke, Sato Eisaku, and Fukuda Takeo, received a temporary
setback. Americans wanted to embrace the LDP, but the object of their
affections suffered from a deeply split personality. Washington's alterna-
tive pressure point was to work through the foreign ministry, but it

lacked the clout of the finance ministry or MITI. The CIA therefore
penetrated the latter bureaucracies while the foreign ministry remained
a willing but weak ally.^^

The Kennedyites, then, wanted Japan to become fully involved in

South and Southeast Asia, as well as in Taiwan, but not in nearby
China. The Times of London underlined the paradox: "With distant
Asian countries, alien to her own
Japan can thus deal with
civilization,

ease and freedom. With those neighbors with whom she shares much
in culture and outlook relations are more complex. U.S. pressures only
'

accelerated Japan's "strong desire for neutralism." Or, as the British

ambassador in Tokyo told "The Japanese can nei-
his superiors in 1963,
ther love the Americans nor endure being loved by them because "

Americans could not bring themselves to see that Japan was now a
^^
sovereign nation.
No U.S. was more determined to use Japan (and any other
official

available nation) to contain China than Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Rabidly anti-Communist, Rusk harbored bitter memories of how the
Chinese invasion of Korea in late 1950 had threatened and humiliated
the U.S. position in Asia when he was a top State Department official.
He fed Kennedy's fixation on China. In December 1962, Rusk told For-
THE CLASH 3 3 8

eign Minister Ohira that the Sino-Soviet spHt meant not an easing of
pressure, but perhaps "serious consequences in South East Asia."
China could be more aggressive once freed of Moscow's restraint.
When Ohira tried to respond that the problem in the region was "pov-
erty combined with nationalist sentiment," Rusk would have none of it:
he "saw little evidence that trade with the Communist countries led to
"^"^
the promotion of peace. Thus grew a quiet but ominous clash
between Japan and the United States. Determined to contain and disci-
pline China, Kennedy increased U.S. military personnel in South Viet-
nam from 600 to 16,000. Two months before his own assassination in
November 1963, he secretly agreed to the Vietnamese military's over-
—
throw of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime the act by "the young president,
in his zeal," General William Westmoreland later observed, that "mor-
ally locked us in Vietnam." The Japanese meanwhile opened wider trade

and cultural exchanges with Beijing. In South Vietnam, they contrib-

uted handsomely to U.S. development projects and created highly
profitable trade links, but they wanted nothing to do with Kennedy's
Tokyo even cultivated trade with Communist North
military escalation.
Vietnam through "private" trade associations. As U.S. attacks on the
North intensified in 1964—65, Japanese agents and Vietnamese Commu-
nists worked out complex channels through third-country carriers to
continue a trade that was vital for the North. Given the extent of U.S.
power and the diverging interests of Japan, as the historian Kono Yasuko
later observed, chances were evaporating of realizing a truly "equal part-
^^
nership" between Tokyo and Washington.

Johnson, Sato, and Vietnam

In one 1964 spectacular, the Japanese tried to demonstrate that they

were worthy of being equal partners and had come to terms with their
crushing defeat of 1945. This sports-crazy people hosted the Olympic
Games with a dedication bordering on frenzy. Even the sixty-three-year-
old Emperor Hirohito stood stiffly at attention for several hours as
ninety-four national teams paraded by. Hirohito stunned many critics

by giving the Order of the Rising Sun, the highest honor a

First Class
foreigner can receive from Japan, to General Curtis LeMay the archi- —
tect of the firebombing that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Japa-
nese, and the highest U.S. Air Force officer involved in the field
operation that dropped the two atomic bombs in 1945. LeMay was hon-
A "Miracle* Appears: Clilna Reappears (1960-1973) 3 3 9

ored —on December 7, 1964, no less — for developing Japan's postwar

defense system. Protests erupted over the award. The Japanese govern-
ment ignored them.^'^
Any hope that such spectaculars would lead to a more equal partner-
ship with the United States, however, disappeared as the new Presi-
dent,Lyndon B. Johnson, escalated the war in Vietnam. The Japanese
wanted to avoid a war that made little sense, and even uncomfortably
reminded them of their own earlier quagmire on the Asian mainland.
Of greater importance, they fundamentally disagreed with the U.S.
determination to teach China a lesson by warring on Vietnam. In 1965,
China became Japan's fourth-largest trading partner (after the Ameri-
-^^
cans, Australians, and Canadians).
As the war accelerated, so did three disagreements between Ameri-
cans and Japanese: the return of Okinawa; trade with China; and the
removal of U.S. discriminations against imports from Japan while Japa-
nese discriminations against U.S. exports (and capital) remained in
place. The vitality of these disagreements is stunning, especially since
they surged during the premiership of Sato Eisaku, probably the most
pro-American of all postwar Japanese prime ministers.^
Sato held power longer than any of those leaders —from November
9, Lyndon Johnson celebrated his landslide election victory,
1964, just as
to July 7, 1972, as Richard Nixon prepared to celebrate a similar tri-
umph. Born March 27, 1901, in southern Honshu, he was upper-class
bred and educated. Becoming a power in the railway ministry, he
strongly supported the war effort, but endured terrifying personal expe-
riences when his wife and children barely escaped the firebombing of
Tokyo, only to be bombed again in Osaka. His nephew died at Hiro-
shima on August 6, 1945. war criminal,
Although suspected of being a
he was never tried, due to lack of evidence. Sato accrued power rapidly
during the occupation as Yoshida's cabinet secretary. Other than Yos-
hida, Sato's chief sponsor was his brother, Kishi Nobusuke, ruined in
i960 by his handling of the U.S. security treaty. The brothers had differ-
ent names because each had been adopted by their wives' families, as
is frequently done in Japan when a woman has no brother to pass down

the family name.

''Ruggedly handsome and large for a Japanese," according to U.S.
Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson, Sato "had a master politician's easy,
friendly manner." He also had a master politician's ability to scheme
and find common ground. As head of the powerful Ministry of Finance
under his brother's premiership, and also as close adviser to his intimate
friend Ikeda, Sato took a tough line against the left and headed one of
THE CLASH 3 4

the most pro-American factions of the LDP. His intimacy with Ikeda
did not prevent him from unsuccessfully trying to dethrone the prime
minister in 1963. "Friendship should not be permitted to interfere with
a person's decision when it has any bearing on his course of action in
public life, " Sato declared in a sentence that deserved close study in
Washington. In 1964, when Ikeda developed throat cancer, Sato finally
climbed to the top rung. Of special note, Sato was extraordinarily well
connected through marriage to both powerful political factions and rich
corporations. He epitomized keihatsu, whose characters mean "clique-
out-of-bedroom." Resembling other Japanese leaders, he combined an
intense devotion to both technology and tradition: he loved and criti-

cally studied cinema, for example, while he was also renowned as an

expert on the ancient, highly ritualistic tea ceremony.^^
Lyndon Johnson was too restless to sit through many films, and
certainly knew nothing of tea ceremonies. (The tall Texan once told
friends that he only enjoyed 'whiskey, sunshine, and sex.") But he har-
bored hopes for a profitable relationship with Japan because he appreci-
ated Sato's pro-U.S. beliefs. In personal meetings he got along well
with the prime minister. As Sato observed, however, personal friend-
ship did not necessarily resolve the deeply rooted, substantive differ-
ences.^^
"The key issue on LBJ was told in early 1965, "is Com-
Sato's mind,"
munist China." But there was no meeting of minds about China. Rusk
had lectured Japanese cabinet members in 1964 on the evils of trade
with China (and was even harsher in questioning Japan's recent deal to
buy sugar from Castro's Cuba). Foreign Minister Ohira played down
the trade, but pointedly reminded Rusk that "it is still fresh in our
memory" that China not long ago took 20 percent of Japan's exports.
The threat magnified on October 16, 1964, when the Chinese exploded
an atomic device equal to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. By
mid-1966, they exploded a bomb ten times larger than the first. The
next year they triggered their first hydrogen bomb. In the short term,
China's new arsenal made U.S. protection more important to Japan. In
the long run, however, Sato believed Japan needed the capability for
similar weapons. He refused to sign a non-proliferation agreement,
despite intense U.S. pressure. Professor Robert Scalapino of the Uni-
versity of California-Berkeley accurately predicted in 1967 that Japan
would develop space and peaceful nuclear power technologies that
could be easily converted to military use "on the quickest, easiest and
cheapest basis, should the necessity arise." In December 1967, Sato
issued his soon-to-be-famous "Three Nonnuclear Principles": Japan
ABOVE. Hiroshima,
August i()4^, at ground
zero. (UN/DPI Photos)

RIGHT. General Douglas

MacArthur and Emyeror
Hirohito, September
i()4$.For a number of
reasons, this photo sym-

bolized a transformation
in Japan, as well as in

]apanese-U.S. relations.
(AP/Wide World Photos)

k
I
ABOVE. President Lyndon B. Johnson, with Ladybird Johnson, greets Prime Minister
Sato Eisaku in January ig6^ to begin difficult talks on Vietnam and trade. (LBJ Library
Collection)

BELOW. President Lyndon B. Johnson and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer.
Johnson came to mistrust Reischauer because of the ambassador's long commitment to

bringing Americans and Japanese closer together. (LBJ Library Collection)

Prime Minister Sato Eisaku's dour look, not the smiles of the President, Mrs. Sato, and
Mrs. Nixon, reveals the tough give-and-take on Okinawa and textiles that m.arked the
November ig6g watershed negotiations. (Nixon Library Collection)

Pomp and circumstance in Alaska, September igji, as President Richard Nixon wel-
comes Emperor Hirohito. But not even the seventy-year-old Emperor's first visit out of
Japan could reverse the downward spiral of U.S. -Japan relations. (Nixon Library
Collection)
ABOVE. Prune Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro flaunts Japan's technology as he pre-
sents a miniature television set to President and Nancy Reagan, April i(^8g.

(Reagan Library Collection)

BELOW. At their tough 1995 talks, U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor and
Japan's trade minister {and future prime minister) Hashimoto Ryutaro playfully
parried with a Japanese fencing sword — a sport in which Hashimoto notably
excelled. {AFP Photos)
A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears (l 960-1 973) 3 4 i

would not possess, manufacture, or allow nuclear weapons to enter the

country. The development of peaceful nuclear power, along the lines
Scalapino foresaw, nevertheless accelerated.^^
How to respond to China's nuclear program generated heated dis-

agreement between Tokyo and Washington. So did the question of how

to respond to China's role in the Vietnam War. Throughout 1964, U.S.
officialsassumed the Chinese were back of the Vietnamese revolution-
ary forces led by Ho Chi Minh. If the Viet Minh prevailed, the entire
region would fall under Communist control like collapsing dominoes.
In July 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked Japan's top
defense official, Fukuda Takeo, to estimate the effect on the Japanese
"if the U.S. lost South Vietnam."Fukuda coolly replied that the "left"
would probably strengthen and protest more vigorously against Ameri-
can bases, while "Japan would lose trading opportunities in [Southeast
Asia]." Fukuda was having no part of the U.S. fear about China pushing
over the dominoes: he believed that the Chinese cared more about their
"domestic build-up" than "improving their military forces. To make his "

dissent from U.S. policies clear, Fukuda added that "it was difficult to
maintain control of such an area [as Vietnam] solely through military
"35
means.
Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara, however, put much of their faith in
military means. After replacing the slain Kennedy in November 1963,
Johnson came under constant pressure from the late President's closest

advisers —
especially McGeorge Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara — to

escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam rapidly lest the divided,

corrupt Saigon governments collapse. McNamara, former "whiz kid"

president of Ford Motor Company, beHeved his Pentagon could manage
the war and kill enough of the enemy with legendary American effi-
—
ciency all the while building a new nation in South Vietnam. In 1964,
Johnson beat back these pressures except for one fateful moment. As
LBJ began his election campaign against Republican hard-liner Senator
Barry Goldwater of Arizona, McNamara urgently reported during the
first week of August 1964 that U.S. ships off the Vietnamese coast had
twice been the victim of unprovoked attacks. It later emerged that
American vessels were actually engaged in a covert operation against
North Vietnam. The circumstances of the first attack were muddy. The
second attack probably did not occur. But Johnson seized on the oppor-
tunity to show his toughness. He bombed the North and obtained from
Congress the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that, as he interpreted it, gave
him a blank check in responding to North Vietnam. ^^
In Tokyo, the foreign ministr}^ carefully declared that Johnson's
THE CLASH 3 4 2

response was justified under the right to self-defense, then even more
carefully added, "There is no way to ascertain for sure" exactly what
had occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. When Socialists asked whether the
presence of U.S. bases might draw Japan into the war, the govern-
—
ment then and forever after anesthetized most Japanese by—
responding that Americans were responsibly acting under the terms of
the duly ratified i960 treaty. The response did not, however, anesthetize
protesters who greeted the U.S. nuclear submarine. Sea Dragon, when
it visited Sasebo in late 1964.^^

Between February and July Johnson crossed his own

1965, a reluctant
Rubicon. He launched a systematic bombing campaign and dispatched
some 120,000 troops in an escalation that by 1968 had reached 550,000
soldiers. He took these historic steps for many
As South Viet- reasons.
nam's governments grew weaker, and northern infiltration and influence
grew, he believed he had to honor the commitment to Southeast Asia.
Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara, among others, pressured him to do so.
He also truly wanted to help the Vietnamese develop, much as his
cherished New Deal of the 1930s had helped his native Texas develop.
An earlier British Foreign Office analysis of Johnson concluded that he
was "relatively inexperienced' in foreign affairs, but "has firm ideas
about the pre-excellence of the American Way of Life, and tends to
regard it as the only possible form of democracy. This paper also accu-
"

rately predicted he would want "to devote most of his time and effort
to domestic affairs." LBJ's beloved Great Society program to help
minorities, children, poor, and theBut Johnson
elderly came first.

believed he could not push controversial domestic legislation through

Congress if he "lost " Vietnam —much as Harry Truman, to his great
political cost, had "lost' China. Johnson realized, moreover, his incredi-
ble power: with a telephone call to McNamara he could send hundreds
of thousands of personnel halfway around the globe via the world's most
^^
powerful navy and air force.

Above all —and always — there was China. Only now China played a
slightly different role. had worried that
Before the 1960s, U.S. officials

the Japanese would grow dependent on the China market if Southeast

Asia (and North American) markets were not open to them. Now those
officials became obsessed with the fear that failure in Vietnam would

be viewed as a Chinese triumph. Japan, along with much of Asia, would

then move leftward. As White House aide Michael Forrestal noted, the
1965 escalation by Johnson was necessary to "delay China swallowing
Southeast Asia until (a) she develops better table manners and (b) the
"^^
food is somewhat more indigestible.
A "Miracle" Appears: CKina Reappears (i960— 1973) 3 4 3

U.S. officials seemed beside themselves that Japan ignored such

danger. At their January 1965 summit, the President expressed his
"grave concern that Communist China's militant policies and expan-
sionist pressures against its neighbors endanger the peace of Asia." Sato
commented only that Japan intended "to continue to promote private
contact" with China. Later, at a press conference, Sato dealt with Viet-
nam by remarking that Asian problems could often be solved not by the
West's "rational approach but required the patience and understanding
"

of the "Asian mind. " Relations were not helped when LBJ began his
bombing campaign and escalation of troop strength without briefing
Sato. The President had informed others, including New Zealand.
Japan made gestures. It sent 11,645 radios to the South Vietnamese so
they could hear their government's decrees (and programs from Japan),
and also gave medical supplies. Tokyo secretly dispatched twenty-eight
landing craft, and Stripes and manned by Japanese
flying the Stars
wearing U.S. uniforms, to help move supplies along the Vietnamese
"^^
coast. These crews suffered dead and wounded.
But Johnson wanted far more from Japan. Rusk blamed Ambassador
Reischauer for being too pro-Japanese, for not educating Japan about
the great danger, for assuming that the two nations were converging in
their interests while, in reality, the Japanese were going off on their
own. As Reischauer lay in serious condition after he was stabbed in

Johnson nor Rusk sent him a personal note. In mid-1966,

1964, neither
Reischauer was finally replaced by the hawkish U. Alexis Johnson.
Tokyo, however, only now differed with two Johnsons instead of one
over China and Vietnam.
The President was trapped. He meant to escalate U.S. power until
the North Vietnamese broke and allowed the Souths to exist. But to
his surprise, the northerners sacrificed themselves in large numbers
while moving south in even larger numbers. The other claw of the trap
then snapped: if his escalation —
went too far if, as he put it, he turned
to "rape rather than seduction —
Chinese reaction might be instant
. . .

and total." Johnson's strategy in Vietnam was neither cowardly nor con-
fused, but quite rational; it was gradual and restrained because he
rightly feared any repeat of the Korean War tragedy when the Chinese
massively entered. Extensive bombing of the North's ports, moreover,
might not only threaten sensitive Chinese interests. With only one-third
of North Vietnam's shipping arriving from Communist countries, the
other two-thirds came chiefly from British, Japanese, Norwegian, and
Greek ships — that is, from American allies. When a New York Times
correspondent asked Johnson in late 1965 whether he was trying to save
THE CLASH 3 4 4

face in Vietnam, the President replied, "I'm not trying to save my face.
"^^
I'm trying to save my ass.

Americans and Japanese did agree on some issues between 1965 and
1968. One was that Japan was profiting handsomely from the war. Only
the amounts were in dispute. In a thorough analysis of its effect on
Japan, Thomas Havens estimated that, in all, the war brought at least
an extra $1 Japanese firms between 1966 and 1976. A
billion per year to

U.S. Treasury^ estimate of late 1967 reached the same figure. Bank of
Japan figures were lower because they left out hard-to-calculate monies
spent by U.S. soldiers resting in Japan. Only 7 to 8 percent of Japan's
annual exports, this war-generated trade was nevertheless a godsend
for small companies. U.S. soldiers used Japanese-made tents, watches,

cameras, generators. Jeeps, and toilet paper. They "drank Kirin beer,
chewed Lotte gum," Havens observed, while "some of the injured
as
received transfusions of Japanese blood, and those who died were sent
home in polyethylene body bags made in Japan." The Sato government
used some profits to buy militarv^ goods, especially high-technolog\^
weapons and aircraft from Americans. Meanwhile, Japan's trade with
both North and South Vietnam grew. By 1970, war-devastated South
Vietnam overflowed with Japanese radios, tele\isions, trucks, and
motorcycles. Newsweek quoted a iMITI official in 1966: "Japan is nicely
involved in the Vietnam War, no matter how you look at it. We are
''^"
enjo\ing our own escalation.
and Washington officials also agreed about war protesters. In
Tok\^o
the United States, protests focused on civil rights as well. Urban riots
ripped through the United States during 1964-65; by late 1965, thirty-
four had died during an uprising in the southern California ghetto of
W^atts. Protesters were joined by anti-war groups in a number of cities,
including W^ashington, D.C. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., winner
of the Nobel Prize for Peace, began to argue that his plea for non-
violent, fundamental change in race relations was impossible until
Americans quit warring on Asians. By 1967-68, riots had spread to many
cities, including Detroit, where fortv^-three died. FBI director J. Edgar

Hoover lamented that in 1967 alone, thirty thousand xAmericans had

illegally avoided the militar}^ draft.

Japan's powerful mass-circulation newspapers reported all this. They

featured U.S. brutalities in Vietnam. But Japanese society was not
immune. Led by the widely read novelists Oda Makoto and Oe Kenza-
buro (the latter the 1994 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature), a
massive anti-\\ ar movement, Beheiren, or Citizens' Federation for Peace
in Vietnam, spread. It targeted the Japanese bureaucracy and the Amer-
A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears ( 1960-1 973) 3 4 5

ican policies. An anti-Marxist who had Hved in Europe and the United
States, Oda made Beheiren part of a worldwide protest network. Among
other activities,helped U.S. military personnel in Japan disappear so
it

they would not have to go to Vietnam. The Japanese protests were usu-
ally more and respectful of lives and property than were the
polite
American, but their effect was powerful: when Johnson hinted he
would like to visit Japan, Tokyo officials quickly replied that it was
"inconceivable."'^''^

Johnson and Sato also largely agreed on policy in a surprising but

pivotal region: Indonesia. With its on 3,000 islands
132 million people
spread over 580,000 square miles, Indonesia had long been a huge, rich
(notably in oil), and strategic nation. Its durable president, Sukarno,
was known internationally for his political skills and womanizing. When
power in late September 1965, they were destroyed
leftists tried to seize

by the army's commander, Suharto. The military then killed at least

250,000 actual and suspected Communists. The CIA and U.S. Embassy
allegedly helped Suharto pick out the victims. Johnson was convinced
that a dangerous shift toward a pro-China position had been stopped
just in time. The Japanese, who quietly had become the largest source
of aid for Sukarno's regime, were much less convinced. But as Washing-
ton pressed them to help Suharto, Tokyo officials pumped in $30 mil-
lion of credits. Japan indeed became so active that in 1966 the State
Department concluded that "Japanese interests" aimed to push out
'"^"^
"American interests with regard to oil concessions in Indonesia.
As the Indonesian episode revealed, Sato was determined to increase
Japan's presence in Southeast Asia as the United States demanded, but
in his own way. Thus in 1966, his government joined the Asian and
Pacific Council (ASPAC), an anti-Communist alliance designed to
expedite economic exchanges. Sato soon mistrusted ASPAC for being
too anti-Chinese, too militant. ASPAC became defunct in the 1970s.
More congenial for the Japanese was the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), established in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia,
the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Its purpose was twofold — to
accelerate economic interchange, but to keep uninvited great powers
(including China and the United States) out of Southeast Asian affairs.
ASEAN was helped by the new Asian Development Bank (ADB). Japan
gave the ADB $200 million of its first $1 billion in capital.
Absorbed in Vietnam, U.S. officials missed the importance of
ASPAC and especially ASEAN. For the first time. Southeast Asian
nations were creating institutions to develop their region cooperatively
while excluding unwanted outside involvement. Japan was at the center
THE CLASH 3 4 6

of these movements. The Acheson-Dulles policy of integrating the

Southeast Asian-Japanese economies was succeeding. But such suc-
cess no longer enraptured American observers. Their soldiers were
dying as Japanese and Southeast Asians stood apart and profited. In
1967, U.S. News & World Report raised bad memories by declaring that
'"^^
Japan was developing a "New idea for [a] 'Co-Prosperity Sphere.'.
By late 1967, Sato's attempted goodwill trip to South Vietnam, and
his friendship with Johnson, merely disguised what James Reston had
earlier identified in the New York Times as Japan's "slowly diverging

path away from American policy. One step in the path involved the
"

Ryukyus (Okinawa especially) and the Bonin Islands. Sato probably

went as far as he did with Johnson on Vietnam, Indonesia, and trade
issues in the hope that Japan would in turn regain the Ryukyus and
Bonins. But the President, more specifically his top military advisers,
had little interest in helping the prime minister. Okinawa bases were
indispensable for warring on North Vietnam; U.S. license plates on the
island called Okinawa the "Keystone of the Pacific." Sato joined Social-
ists in condemning the island's use by huge B-52 aircraft that carpet-
bombed parts of Vietnam. A secret U.S. government analysis in late

1967 concluded that returning Okinawa to Japan's control would, sur-

prisingly, have little effect on waging conventional war, as long as the
air bases could be used. Those conclusions naturally ran into intense
opposition from the military. The President tried to make the best of it

by signing an executive order in 1968 that returned the Bonins to Japan.

The Okinawa issue was left to fester.^^

That was minor compared with the crisis that

festering, however,
blindsided U.S. -Japan relations after the North Vietnamese launched
their surprise Tet (New Year) Offensive in late January 1968. The Com-
munists suffered devastating losses (probably thirty thousand killed),

but, astonishingly, penetrated Saigon, even the grounds of the U.S.

Embassy. The shock of Tet turned important media figures (such as
Walter Cronkite of CBS News) against the war. Powerful informal
advisers to Johnson reversed themselves to warn him that, in Dean
Acheson's words, we "can no longer do [the] job we set out to do.'"^'
The Tet catastrophe began the year from hell. The largest Japanese
newspapers, led by Asahi Shimhun, had for months headlined stories
about American ignorance of Asia and U.S. soldiers committing brutal
crimes against Vietnamese, especially women. Then the huge U.S.
nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise docked at Sasebo naval base. Massive
up the area around Sasebo and Nagasaki. The U.S. nuclear
protests tied
submarine Sivordfish was next, and questionably, charged with leaking
A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears (1960-1973) 3 4 7

radioactive materials into Japanese waters. As tensions rose, a U.S.

fighter plane taking off from its air base crashed into a building of
Kyushu from a Japanese nuclear research labora-
University, only yards
tory. Miraculously, no one was injured —
except Sato and his pro-Ameri-
can political reputation. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered
in Memphis. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in

Los Angeles. But perhaps most shocking for Sato was Johnson's
announcement of March 31 that he would not run for reelection in
1968. Done without informing the prime minister, the President's dra-
matic broadcast put Sato, as Ambassador Johnson phrased it, "under
heavy attack in both press and Diet for having too closely tied [Japan]
'"^^
to a highly unpredictable [United States].
Sato realized he had lost the second battle of Okinawa. He now
declared that he had always doubted U.S. policies in Vietnam. Naka-
sone Yasuhiro and Miki predicted the end of American hegemony and
the consequent welcome rise of Chinese cooperation. Washington
retaliated in kind. Ambassador Johnson used blunt language when For-
eign Minister Miki invited him to a hidden hotel room for talks always —
a sign that the Japanese had serious business in mind. Johnson wasted
no time on politeness. 'The biggest threat to Japanese-U.S. relations,"
the ambassador began, 'was feeling on part of US that after sacrificing
thousands of lives and billions of dollars in defense of areas of East
Asia, an area which is at least of equal interest to Japan, we not only
did not get any understanding from Japan but received criticism and
harassment on essentially minor matters." It was time for Japan to bear
"a responsibility commensurate with its growing power rather than con-
tinuing to seek to be treated by the US [as] aminor and weak country."
Johnson became specific: Tokyo had to cooperate more with the Ameri-
can military while dismantling "protectionist measures" that produced
a "large and growing trade gap" in Japan's favor. Miki "took this in good
spirit," Johnson reported. Sato, however, showed more interest in keep-

ing his fractious coalition together so he could win the election —which
he did, despite a 38 percent increase in his opposition's vote over the

1966 ballotting."^^
Thus the year from ended with Sato's guarded win and Richard
hell
Nixon's narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey in the U.S. presidential
campaign. Nixon celebrated his triumph on election night by returning
to his New York apartment, cooking bacon and eggs, and listening to
his favorite record: Richard Rodgers's Victory at Sea, which celebrated
the U.S. defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II. The year from
^^
hell was about to turn into a decade from hell for U.S. -Japan relations.
THE CLASH 3 4 8

Nixon and Sato — or " 1 radin^ witn

tne Enemy
Sato moved to start his relationship with Nixon on the right foot by
firing Foreign Minister Mild and appointing Aichi Kiichi. Miki's cool-
ness toward U.S. policies and warmth Chinese were not appropriate
for
for the pohtical weather in Washington. (More to the point, Mild
unwisely ran against Sato inside the LDP for the top job and lost by a
two to one margin.) But Aichi did nothing to dam up the growing anti-
American feelings. By 1969, only 12 percent of Japanese polled felt bet-
terbecause of the U.S. "nuclear umbrella," while 67 percent feared the
relationship could drag them into a war. Two-thirds of those asked
favored improved or normal diplomatic relations with China. Washing-
ton's return of thirty-two base sites did little to reassure the Japanese,
perhaps because ninety-eight U.S. installations remained in Japan. In
October 1969, Beheiren got out nearly a half-million anti-establishment
protesters. Violence erupted during more than 2,400 street battles with
police, although not one fatality occurred. The next month, Sato, amid
more demonstrations, flew off for his first meeting with President
Nixon.'^^
The Japanese saw Nixon as a loose cannon. As early as 1953, he had
declared that Article IX was a mistake and Japan should rearm. A trip

through Asia produced a widely noted 1967 essay that argued the
United States must avoid the traps of future Vietnams by allowing
Asians to defend themselves. He believed the great danger was China,
at least "until China changes." "We have now to reach out westward
[sic] to the East, and to fashion the sinews of a Pacific community."

Japan, Nixon added, would play a pivotal role in fashioning those "sin-
ews" when it began limited rearmament. These comments frightened
many Japanese, as did his emphasis on the need to "Vietnamize" the
—
war a view Asians took to mean that they were to fight other Asians
^^
for U.S. objectives.
To and other foreign policy visions, the new President
realize these
appointed Henry Kissinger of Harvard University as NSC adviser and
his closest foreign policy confidant. Kissinger shared Nixon's ideas as
well as his obsession for secrecy and control. The former professor later
admitted, "When I first came was no major country I
into office, there
understood less than Japan." Kissinger, whose ego was as great as Nix-
on's was insecure, noted that "The hardest thing for us to grasp was
that the extraordinary Japanese decisions were produced by leaders who
A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears (1960-1973) 3 4 9

prided themselves on their anonymous style. . . . A Japanese leader does

not announce a decision; he evokes it. "Kissinger soon belittled Japan's
fixationon mere internal economic development ("little Sony sales-
men, he privately called Japanese). American destiny, he believed, was
'

instead shaped by the vast landed "frontier that had become trans- "

formed into an "emotional commitment" for Americans to care for the

"well-being of all mankind." Kissinger's formulation of the two diverse
manifest destinies demonstrated once again how top officials could
view Japan's historic "frontiers" in Asian markets clashing with Ameri-
cans' conceptions of their global "frontiers." If misunderstanding
existed, however, it seemed to go in both directions. The German-born
NSC adviser (whose immediate family had barely escaped the Holo-
caust) privately complained that "Every time the Japanese Ambassador
"^^
has me to lunch he serves me Weiner Schnitzel.
Sato and the Nixon-Kissinger team nevertheless shared several
important beliefs. They agreed, for example, that "The greatest need of
the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order," as
Kissinger phrased (He even professed to beUeve that for a statesman,
it.

"justice and disorder" was less preferable than "injustice and order.") In

1969-70, such order had to start at home. Several Japanese cities were
tied up by protests. Anti-war demonstrations grew so large in American
cities, especially Washington, that Nixon secretly ordered three hun-

dred troops to hide in the White House and the neighboring Executive
^"^
Office Building in case he needed protection.
The President moved to restore order in mid-1969 by announcing his
—
"Nixon Doctrine, and later with more effect deciding to end the
" —
military draft. The Nixon Doctrine, issued at Guam and later elabo-
rated, declared that the United States would maintain its treaty com-
mitments and continue to provide a "shield" if friends were threatened
by "nuclear power. In other cases it would furnish military and eco-
"

nomic aid while letting the threatened nation defend itself. To Japa-
nese, the doctrine confirmed fears that the U.S. President wanted
Asians to fight Asians, and that he expected Japan to move to the front
of the fight. These fears heightened as rumors spread that Nixon and
Kissinger were privately encouraging the development of Japanese
nuclear weapons. Both Kissinger and the Pentagon publicly denied
such remarks, but close aides later testified, as one phrased it, that
"Henry believed was good to spread nuclear weapons around the
it

world. He and Nixon apparently thought that particularly Japan and

"

Israel would benefit the world order if they helped hold up the nuclear

umbrella. The two Americans hinted as much to Sato, who came away
THE CLASH 3 5

quite confused about U.S. policy. In reality, the Nixon Doctrine indi-
cated not a U.S. retreat from Asia but a plan for containing Asian Com-
munists on the cheap. U.S. treaty commitments and nuclear umbrellas
were to remain in place, but under the doctrine Japan was to be a leader
in assuming the burden."'^

Nixon believed he held a fine carrot to entice Japanese cooperation:

Okinawa. Foreign Minister Aichi had declared 1969 to be the "year of
Okinawa." Sato's political fortunes were becoming so enmeshed with
the island's future that the new U.S. ambassador to Japan, Armin H.
Meyer, told the State Department, "As Okinawa goes, so goes Japan."
An NSC analysis informed Nixon that a winding down of the U.S.
effort in Vietnam, the advent of intercontinental missiles, and the new
Polaris submarines carrying nuclear weapons made control of Okinawa
less important. The President was prepared hand Okinawa back if
to
U.S. base rights were protected and Japan would assume "an increas-
ingly large role in Asia."^^
As more anti-war protests erupted in Washington, the first Sato-
Nixon summit in November 1969 struck a deal. Okinawa would return
to Japanese control in 1972. As compensation, the United States

received use of the bases in language so loose that Nixon retained the
power to use them for launching nuclear attacks. Sato also agreed to
renewal of the i960 security treaty. (His agreement averted another cri-
sis in the relationship, but also brought out 750,000 protesters in Japan
during June 1970). The prime minister went along with a statement that
Japan considered both South Korea and Taiwan vital to its security.

Critics in Tokyo quickly blasted Sato for letting Nixon commit Japan to
wars it did not want —
especially any war triggered by the unpredictable,
heartily disliked South Koreans. Finally, Sato agreed to send more aid
to Southeast Asia (which Japanese observers viewed as a wedge to open
markets for their goods), and to cut back textile exports to U.S. mar-
^^
kets.
The 1969 summit results seemed to be a major achievement for both
sides — if all the provisions were carried out. Sato enthusiastically lec-
tured the National Press Club in Washington about the "new Pacific
Age" that was by Japan and the United States." An official
to "be created
government White Paper released in Tokyo a month later noted that
Japan's economic aid to Asia, especially Southeast Asia, had tripled
since 1965 and was to double again by 1975. (Much of this money, it
turned out, was to develop Asian raw materials while integrating the
region within a large Asian bloc under Japanese, and some U.S., capi-
tal.) In February 1970, Asians and most Americans were pleased when
A "Miracle" Appears; China Reappears ( 1960-1 973) 3 5 i

Sato's government signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The

prime minister won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1974 for his ardent
anti-nuclear stand. This was somewhat ironic, since later in 1970 Naka-
sone Yasuhiro s Defense Agency announced that military spending was
todouble by 1975. The nation s defense budgets would then approach, if
not surpass, those of West Germany, France, and Great Britain. Japan,
moreover, was ready to develop an air force and a fleet capable of
^^
defending other Asian nations, not just the home islands.
But was not resolved. Japan continued to trade with the North
all

Vietnamese and promised more help once the conflict ended. The
major clash —indeed, a confrontation that rocked U.S. -Japan rela-

tions —emerged from Sato's promise to cut back textile exports to the

United States. The issue was of immense importance to Nixon for polit-
ical, not economic, reasons: in the 1968 campaign he had pledged to
southern textile-making areas, especially South CaroHna, that he would
protect them from cheap imports. Sato then promised to help in return
for Okinawa's reversion. Okinawa reverted, but Sato never delivered on
his end of the bargain. His problem was not, as claimed at the time,
that something was lost in the translation when the two leaders cut the
deal. Sato's problem was that Japanese textile makers and, especially,
their supporters in the government bureaucracy flatly refused to go
along. The prime minister could not whip them into line. The Japanese,
moreover, then condemned Nixon for asking them to break the free
trade rules that Washington had itself written since 1945. Nixon was
beside himself with anger. His fury intensified when a powerful Demo-
cratic congressman, Wilbur Mills of Ohio, took matters into his own
hands and worked out an agreement with the Japanese. Nixon coldly
rejected the deal.^^
A State Department Foreign Service officer said privately in 1971 that
the White House now considered Japan an "enemy." The term probably
referred to Nixon's threat that unless Japan met his demands, he would
impose quotas on Japanese imports under the 1917 wartime Trading
with the Enemy Act. As U.S. -Japan relations plummeted to a post-1945
low. Ambassador David Kennedy finally hammered out an agreement
in October 1971. His weapon: a threat to import cheaper textiles from
other Asian producers if the Japanese did not restrict their own exports.
After all the agony, acrimony, and "stupidity" on both sides, as Assistant
Secretary of State Philip Trezise later noted, Japan never filled most of
the quotas set by Kennedy's deal.^°
Nixon saw Japan as an "enemy." Tokyo and some Japanese
officials

industrialists believed that U.S. demands represented a "second coming

THE CLASH 3 5 2

of Commodore Perry's black ships." Internal politics and economics

were replacing the old Cold War security issues as the combustible
materials that could blow apart the post-1945 U.S. -Japan relationship.^^

The Nixon Snocks

During the last four years of Nixon's presidency, a new
emerged era
in world affairs. Between 1971 and 1974, the once-imperial American
presidency weakened, although not before Nixon reconfigured the Cold
War by embarking upon detente with the Soviets and, more surprisingly,
opening ties with China. During these years as well, the U.S. economy
labored under war expenses, inflation, and a growing inability to com-
pete internationally. Nixon responded by declaring economic war on
some of his closest allies, including Japan.
Publicly, Japan-admiring seemed to be the order of the day. In 1971
several widely noted books applauded the Japanese 'miracle," while
warning about its future. Herman Kahn's The Emerging Jafunese Super-
state predicted that Japan's investment rate (twice America's), and its

workers' real income (doubling about every six years), would enable it

to rule the globe economically by the year 2000. Some critics damned
Kahn's methodology and complained that Americans now wrote about
the "miracle " with the same unthinking euphoria that "they used to
write about achieving satori [Buddhist spiritual enlightenment] on the
Hollywood freeway." Few, however, disputed Kahn's conclusions.
Lauded as Prime Minister Sato's favorite "futurologist, he nevertheless
"

feared the Japanese lacked the worldly sophistication necessary to han-

dle onrushing political responsibilities.^^
In early 1972, Zbigniew Brzezinski'sThe Fragile Blossom also received
attention, in part because the author, a Columbia University professor,
had some State Department experience and ties to the Rockefeller fam-
ily Brzezinski admired Japan's talent in adapting to technological

change, but worried whether the society was too fragile to suffer the
inevitable social and political consequences. Notably, leading Japanese
intellectuals were not returning such admiration. Kawabata Yasunari,
awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, had broken with Ameri-
— —
can and European influenced writers forty years earlier. He now
reasserted that Japan's salvation lay in its own tradition and uniqueness,
not in the traditions of overseas allies. His best-known disciple, the
brilliant, flamboyant Mishima Yukio, publicly committed suicide
A "Miracle" Appears; China Reappears ( 1960-1 973) 3 5 3

because he professed to fear that westernization was eating away at

Japanese greatness.
Richard Nixon's tolerance for intellectuals was not unlimited unless
they constantly admired and flattered him. The President understood
the Kahn-Brzezinski arguments, but arrived at quite different conclu-
sions. For two years, Nixon had tried to strengthen the U.S. -Japanese

alliance so Sato w^ould move his country more fully into world affairs

and cooperate in Vietnam and on trade issues. Nixon believed Japans

uniqueness was less important than its cooperation. By 1971 he had
—
decided as the U.S. trade deficit with the Japanese skyrocketed from
$1.2 billion in 1970 to $3.2 billion —
that Sato would not cooperate. Nix-
on's interest in the alliance, not to mention in Japan's supposed unique-
ness, began plummet.
to
Consequently, at Kansas City in mid-1971, the President proclaimed
the emergence of "five great economic superpowers" (the United States,
Soviet Union, Japan, Western Europe, China). Americans, he warned,
faced a severe challenge since "economic power will be the key to other
kinds of power ... in the last third of this century." Two parts of his
formulation had direct consequences for U.S. -Japan relations: first, the
Chinese were no longer seen as outcasts but joined the Japanese as an
Asian power to contend with; second, since Japan's "miracle made it "

the great potential economic competitor, it would be dealt with as less

an ally than a rival. The month before Nixon spoke, twenty-seven U.S.
business leaders had told his administration that Japan was systemati-
Americans as inhabitants of an underdeveloped region.
cally treating
The Japanese bought only raw materials and sold profitable finished
—
goods meanwhile keeping their own market closed to U.S. finished
goods. The Japanese already controlled "the forest products industry in
Alaska," one businessman announced. Japan, another bitterly noted, "is

like the golfer who is shooting in the 80s with the same 25 handicap he
used when he was shooting in the loos."^^
These business leaders begged for "a coordinated U.S. foreign trade
policy." The sense when Time quoted a cabinet
of crisis heightened
member, thought to be Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans: "The
Japanese are still fighting the war, only now instead of a shooting war it
is an economic war. Their immediate intention is to try to dominate the
and then perhaps the world." During the summer of 1971, Nixon
Pacific
opened his own counterattack by breaking the dollar from gold. He left
the dollar to float (within limits), a process that aimed at lowering its

value while raising the yen's. Thus U.S. exports became cheaper and
Japan's more expensive. The President did not stop there. Realizing that
THE CLASH i 5 4

inflation endangered both the economy and his 1972 reelection

chances, he imposed temporan' controls on prices and wages —then
stuck a ic percent surcharge on imports. That was a shot across Japans
bow. The surcharge especially hit Japanese (and Canadian) exporters.
In Nixon happily followed the ad\ice of Secretan- of the
all this,

Treasun" John Connally a former Texas go\"ernor. who \iewed the inter-
national marketplace as an extension of the old Texas frontier: "[T]his
cowboy knows that you can ride a good horse to death," White House
aide Patrick Buchanan recorded Connally regaling a delighted Xixon,
"and the world has been riding the U.S., a good horse, to death in the
post-war years, and this has got to stop, -\mericans were hit with 3c
percent of Japans ex-ports, Connally complained, but Europe only 5
percent, "because Europe keeps these goods out, while we take them."
(\\uh reason, Japanese soon nicknamed Connally 'T^-phoon,' after the
summer hurricanes that devastated their islands.) The President volun-
teered why .Americans had been suckered for so long: 'The goddam
StateDepartment hasnt done its job. Were changing the rules of the
game. Notably, Nixon announced his new, tough policies on V-J (1945
Victor}- over Japan Day, i9~i.^"^^

His toughness had less \isible effect on the Japanese than the Presi-
dent had hoped. In September 1971, the CIA warned Nixon that Japans
powerful industrial and agricultural groups were working with MITI to

stop any reforms. The two nations moved toward "a complete break-
down in discussions, as a Japanese official termed it. Tok\o finally

agreed to revalue the yen, thus making Japanese ex-ports more ex-pen-
sive. The cobbled-together agreement, however, did not save Nixon
from ha\ing to devalue the floundering dollar again m i9~3. Nor did it

turn around Japan's growing trade surpluses. The "miracle" was mo\-ing
too fast for such a turnaround. It was not the old Texas frontier after
all, but more like a classic Japanese painting: "We are like a mountain
climbing part}' at the foot of a \eiy steep mountain whose summit is still

shrouded in clouds," warned Nixon's special representative for trade,

William D. Eberle.^^
Amid this disorder came a second, greater shock. In July 1971,
Nixon —an arch anti-Communist who had damned the Democrats for

"losing" China 1949— amazed the world by announcing

in Kissinger that
had secretly flown to Beijing to arrange a \-isit by Nixon himself in

Februar\- 1972. With one stone, the President hit three targets. Demo-
crats, prepping for the 19-2 reelections, were stunned. The So\iets,
belie\ing thev could corner Nixon in bilateral talks, suddenly were
trumped by his "China card." Russian-Chinese relations had
A "Miracle" Appears; China Reappears (1960-1973) 3 5 5

approached flashpoint: heavy casualties resulted when their troops

fought along their lengthy, inflammable border. Now Nixon was going
to profit from their problems. Finally, Japan reeled from this Nixon
shock. Since the late 1960s, its business community had quietly acceler-
ated its movement into the China market. Sato meanwhile angled to

please Nixon by keeping Tokyo-Beijing political relations cool. Japanese

observers compared Sato's poHcy with a duck: it seemed to be placid
above the water, but underneath it was paddling furiously toward
China. Nixon now took aim for the duck.^^
As recently as the month before (June 1971), Nixon and Secretary of
State William Rogers had promised Sato to collaborate with him on
China questions. No collaboration had occurred. Undersecretary of
State U. Alexis Johnson believed that Nixon's announcement of his trip
to China instantly dissipated much of the trust built with Tokyo since

1945. Kissinger's later excuse for not informing Sato was revealing: "Jap-
anese policy was not undercut by ours, but only deprived of its desired
opportunity to stay ahead of us on a road [to China] it had started
traveling long before we did." In Tokyo, officials agreed they had to
jump back ahead of the Americans at all costs. One high cost was paid
—
by Sato in July 1972 he had to hand over the prime ministership to
the longtime leader of the LDP's pro-Chinese, cool-toward America,
faction, Tanaka Kakuei. Sato had been victimized by Nixon's shocks and
his own inability to control MITI and finance ministry bureaucrats.^^
The century-old competition between Americans and Japanese over
China fully reopened. In contrast to the pre-1941 years, of course, they
now dealt with a China that controlled nuclear weapons and mostly —
healed from the Cultural Revolution's chaos —an effective government.
Nixon agreed with China's aging leader, Mao Zedong, and the shrewd
premier, Zhou must be reduced. They also
Enlai, that Soviet influence
agreed, after many exchanges, on recognizing Taiwan as part of China
(although Taiwan itself remained fiercely independent), while allowing
the Beijing government to take Taiwan's seat in the United Nations.
Japan proved to be a thorny topic in the Nixon-Chinese talks. Chou,
one American visitor recorded in mid-1971, was Very agitated indeed
about Japan." The Japanese had finally signed the nuclear non-prolifera-
tion treaty, but the Diet would not ratify the pact (nor did it until June

1976). The Chinese worried that Japan's growing number of nuclear

facilities could turn out material for weapons. Mao and Zhou had

doubtless heard stories that Nixon and Kissinger did not care if the
Japanese military went nuclear. "Japan's feathers have grown on its
wings and it is about to take off," Zhou told Nixon. He then changed
THE CLASH 3 5 6

the metaphor: "Can [the] U.S. control the wild horse' of Japan?" Nixon
neatly turned the argument (and metaphor) around: "The United States
can get out of Japanese waters, but others will still fish there. If we
were to leave Japan naked and defenseless, they [sic] would have to
turn to others for help or build the capability to defend themselves."
Mao and Zhou came around to the President's view, not least because
they understood the "others" meant the Soviets. For good measure,
Nixon assured the Chinese that as the United States gradually pulled
out of Taiwan, he would work to ensure the Japanese did not move in.^^
Here was a remarkable turnabout. After twenty- three years of work-
ing to contain China, Nixon was promising China that he would contain
Japan, his own closest Asian ally. Of course, the President actually had
it every way: with Mao and Zhou's consent, he maintained the i960
U.S. -Japan security which if necessary could be used to contain
treaty,

China. And he could depend on both the Chinese and the Japanese to
help him contain the Soviets. As Nixon counted his winnings, the Sovi-
ets and Japanese counted their losses. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev
quickly recovered enough to invite Nixon to Moscow for a summit con-
ference in the spring of 1972. The visit paid high diplomatic and political
dividends for the President. The Japanese took longer to recover, as
Sato's political demise in mid-1972 indicated.
The new prime Tanaka Kakuei, was a quite different type
minister,
from Sato and his predecessors. Born in 1918 of a poor, failed farmer in
an isolated region two hundred miles north of Tokyo, Tanaka had no
university education. Self-made, he earned a fortune in the construc-
tion and real estate business during and after the war. He meanwhile
married his landlady's daughter (without bothering with the usual Japa-
nese custom of an arranged marriage by third parties). Open, convivial,
outgoing, the tycoon moved and rose rapidly to the head of
into politics
mighty MITI, where he often thwarted Sato. With access to piles of
money, Tanaka became a lordly LDP powerbroker. The Chinese, under-
standing Tanaka's love of trade and his growing skepticism about Ameri-
can dependability, clearly favored him. His first summit, however, was
with the triumphant Nixon at Honolulu in late August 1972. In an infor-

mal toast, the ebullient President declared that Tanaka, a new "pitcher"
with the old reliable team, "has all the pitches. He has a 'fast ball,' a
"
'curve,' a 'slider,' a 'knuckler,' but no 'spitball.' Nixon's toast, the record
read, "was received with friendly laughter and appreciation."^^
If so, the Japanese had outdone even themselves in politeness. Nix-
on'sChina shock rubbed raw the relationship inside the LDP between
the pro-Taiwan faction (headed by former Prime Minister Kishi) and
A "Miracle" Appears; CKina Reappears (1960-1973) 3 5 7

Tanakas pro-PRC faction. As this infighting grew fiercer, Tanaka had

to hsten to Nixon lecture him at Honolulu about the unacceptable $3.5
biUion trade deficit. Apparently it was then that the President success-
fully twisted Tanaka s arm so All-Nippon Airlines and the Japanese air

force would help cut the trade deficit by buying planes from Lockheed
Corporation. (In 1970, Nixon and Congress had barely saved Lockheed
from bankruptcy by giving federal guarantees for loans from private
banks.) The new purchases led to a scandal when evidence surfaced in
the mid-1970s of bribery payments made by Lockheed to Tokyo politi-
^^
cians, including Tanaka.
If thiswere not humiliating enough, Tanaka had to travel to Beijing
in September 1972. The business and poUtical communities in Tokyo
demanded that he regain the initiative toward China. He was fair game
for Zhou Enlai. Tanaka first had to offer public regret for Japanese treat-
ment of China before 1945. He then had to have Foreign Minister Ohira
announce that Japan's treaty with Taiwan was null and void. In return,
Zhou agreed to surrender China's claims to war reparations from Japan.
Finally, apparently without fully realizing its meaning, Tanaka agreed to

a statement that implied a joint Sino-Japanese condemnation of "hege-

mony" (a Chinese euphemism for the Soviets) would be included in a
peace treaty between China and Japan. Nixon had accepted a similar
statement because it served his purpose of checking the Soviets, but
the Japanese wanted little to do with such big-power power politics.

Tanaka, unlike Nixon, had failed to play off the two Communist powers
for his own nation's benefit.^
Tanaka had no stomach for such games. Japan's future lay neither in
the Soviet market nor in mimicking Nixon and Kissinger's obsession
with balance-of-power poHtics. It lay in securing some independence,
and order in Japanese society by exploiting the markets of Asia.
security,
And this was being done. Americans were moving into Asia "at a snail's
pace" compared with Japan, wrote correspondent James Sterba in the
New York Times. "Japanese now do more business with Asian countries
than the countries do among themselves, including China. . . . [Japan]
replaced the United States as Asia's leading trading partner in 1969."
Former World Bank president Eugene Black noted that "the Japanese
are already invading [Southeast Asia] again, this time with busi-
"72
nessmen.
Americans had grown tired of acting as a shield for the Japanese.
The Vietnam War and the Nixon shocks had shaken the relationship.
Even the old, ill Mao Zedong lectured Kissinger to pay attention to the
Japanese. In February 1973, Mao first uttered pleasantries ("I don't look
THE CLASH 3 5 8

bad, but God has sent me an invitation") and personal complaints (the
United States should take in lo million Chinese women because they
"will create disasters" by having more babies in China). He then told
Kissinger: "When you pass through Japan, you should perhaps talk a bit
more with them. You only talked with them for one day [on the last
trip] and that isn't good for their face." The chastened American agreed.

But Kissinger took the offensive by declaring that Nixon "put the high-
est value on relations with Japan," and warning that "any attempt [by
Americans and Chinese] to compete for Tokyo's allegiance could end
up encouraging resurgent Japanese nationalism."^^
For all the rhetoric, Japan no longer held pride of place in U.S. plans.
China, once again, intervened. "We are now in the extraordinary situa-
tion that, with the exception of the United Kingdom," Kissinger told
Nixon, "the PRC [People's RepubHc of China] might well be closest to
us in its global perceptions." Americans again were thinking globally,
while, as in the 1930s, Japan thought primarily in terms of Asia and the
United States. And then there was Vietnam, a devastated ghost that
haunted Americans and U.S. -Japan relations. Democratic Governor
George Wallace of Alabama, planning for the 1972 presidential race,
expressed the view of many Americans: "The war Vietnam would
in
have been over a long time ago if Japanese troops had joined us." In
December 1972, Nixon tried to force a settlement with a brutal carpet-
bombing of North Vietnam. Japanese condemned the bombing; the
chief editorialist of the giant Asahi newspaper privately described Nix-
on's tactics as "almost identical to Nazis' atrocities at Auschwitz." When
a deal was signed with North Vietnam during January 1973 that
finally

allowed U.S. forces to withdraw after a quarter century of warfare,

Nixon invited China and the Soviets to the signing. He excluded
^"^
Japan.
The distinguished historian Aruga Tadashi believes that these 1972-
73 events were more important for East Asia than the fall of the Berlin
Wall That assessment seems accurate. Americans and Japa-
in 1989.
nese, however, never agreed on the reasons for this transformation that
marked the early 1970s. Because they interpreted history differently,
^^
their differences were about to be dangerously magnified.
Tne End oi a'^.Era
(Since 1973)

The W^atershed oi the Cold W^ar E ra

In 1971 HiROHiTO became the first Emperor in more than two

thousand years to leave the home islands. On September 27, the
seventy-year-old Emperor and Empress Nagako flew to Anchor-
age, Alaska, where Richard and Patricia Nixon greeted them. The
meeting was full of happy symbols. Noting this was the first time
a Japanese emperor and an American president had met, Nixon
praised the statesmanship 'which spans the space between our
two countries." He gave no hint of his deep anger over the space
between the two because of textile and other trade and security
issues. The Emperor thanked Americans for their "unstinted assis-
tance, materially and morally," since These words were
1945.
exchanged in a huge, lavishly decorated airplane hangar where
five thousand people (mostly from the Anchorage Elks, Lions, and

American Legion clubs) loudly applauded.^

That same year. Time magazine was less poHte: "If Japan does
not follow the gentlemanly rules [on trade], it is not because of
simple greed but because it does not adhere to Western principles
on much of anything." As Time implied, the two nations were
headed toward a series of clashes that marked the 1971—74 era as
a turning point in the partnership, and as the turning point in the
Cold War era. Nixon's and Mao's transformation of the U.S.-

3 5 9
THE CLASH 3 6

Chinese relationship changed American and Japanese poHtical, eco-

nomic, and diplomatic priorities.^
No one had foreseen the hammer blows that rocked U.S. power and
global relationships in 1973-74. First came the Vietnam peace treaty,
that is, the American pullout that others interpreted as a massive U.S.
defeat after a quarter-century effort and fift\^-eight thousand American
dead. Then Congress passed the War Powers Act of 1973 over Nixon's
veto. For the first time in history, Congress systematically attempted to
limit the President s power to commit troops to an actual or threatened
conflict."King Richard of the 1972 presidential triumph was becoming
"

"Little Richard. Worse was to come. In mid-1973. Congress opened

"

hearings to discover whether Nixon had committed a crime by trying to

cover up the burglarizing of Democratic Party offices in Washington's
Watergate apartment complex by a small group of highly incompetent
W^hite House agents
June 1972. By August 1974, as damning e\idence
in
piled up, Nixon decided he could avoid possible impeachment only by
becoming the first U.S. chief executive to resign his office.^
As the ghost of Vietnam hovered, the economy stumbled, and Nix-
on's power disintegrated, came another potentially crushing blow. On
October 6, 1973, a surprisingly effective Egyptian attack posed the
Israeli state's most dangerous challenge since its creation in 1948. Israeli

forces finally turned the tide of battle, but when Nixon, and newly
appointed Secretar}^ of State Henr\' Kissinger, supported Israel, six Arab
nations retaliated by deming their oil to the United States and its allies,

including Japan.
The Japanese imported almost 80 percent of their oil from the Mid-
dle East. The incredibly profligate Americans bought more than half
their petroleum supplies overseas. The embargo could have been a
catastrophe. Both Americans and Japanese, however, imposed controls
to cut demand, while secretly buying off other producers (such as the
Shah of Iran), who willingly sold oil quietly and at great profit. As gaso-
hne prices quadrupled in the United States, inflation began to under-
mine the Western and the Japanese economies. In early 1974, Kissinger
worked out a truce between Eg\^t and Israel that reduced tensions and
reopened the oil tap, but economic pain lingered. So did the belief
among U.S. allies, not least the Japanese, that the war exposed the
limits and vulnerability of American power.
As if all this were not enough, Nixon's carefully crafted detente with
the Soviets came undone. The U.S. Congress refused to extend pivotal
economic help to Moscow. In 1974-75, the superpowers wTCStled each
other for influence in the so-called Third World, especially in Angola,
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 6 1

the newly decolonized West African nation. It seemed the worst of

times. When Nixon's sudden successor, former Vice President Gerald
Ford, gave a State of the Union message in January 1975, the New York
Times termed it "the gloomiest delivered by a President since the
Depression [of] the nineteen-thirties. " Ford described "millions of
Americans out of work," with others' incomes being eaten away by
"recession and inflation," while both the national budget deficit and
trade deficit shot upward."^
These traumas sharpened the American-Japanese conflict. Kissinger
lamented to Nixon the need somehow to create "a coherent overall
political approach rather than getting bogged down in economic arm-

wrestling" with Japan. But no such approach could be devised. Neither

nation, moreover, could tame inflation. Prime Minister Tanaka poured
gasoline on an already red-hot economy by giving money to a host of
companies threatened by the Nixon shocks and textile deal. Pressure
thus intensified on Japan s exporters to find even more markets abroad,
especially in the United States and China. A U.S. -Japan relationship
that was souring in 1971 grew even more bitter.^
The responses to these crises provide case studies of the differences
between the two capitalisms (and governmental systems) by the 1970s.
The American response came in three steps. First, in late 1973, Nixon
announced a "Project Independence based on great hope and little
"

analysis. It tried to accelerate development of oil supply rather than

reducing demand (for example, by requiring users to become energy-
efficient). Second, Kissinger formed an International Energy Agency of
consumer nations, including Japan, that pledged to build oil stockpiles
for 60-90-day supplies in case of another emergency. Finally, Nixon and
a badly divided Congress agreed on the Emergency Petroleum Alloca-
tion Act (EPAA), which extended Nixonian controls over petroleum
prices and production. The emphasis was on ensuring equity of distri-
bution, not slashing demand, except through market forces of higher
prices. (Over the years, the ever cheaper dollar used to purchase over-
seas oil even took the force out of these market devices.) The only
other major restraints were a 55-mile-an-hour speed limit on national
highways (removed by the mid-1990s and little observed before), and a
ruling that auto producers were to build cars averaging 27.5 miles-per-
gallon by 1985.^
Oil company profits rocketed upward. Many Americans came to see
the "crisis" as manufactured by petroleum firms for immense profits. In
this political hothouse, governmental controls were badly managed.
One analyst, a government official in the 1970s, later drew the conclu-
 ^

THE CLASH 3 6 2

sion that the oil crisis revealed 'a large and fragmented government,
responsive to claims . . . from interests of many kinds, [that is] passive
or immobilized with respect to the definition of broad national objec-
tives,and suffering from eroding legitimacy."^
Japan's response was quite different. The crisis actually pumped life
into a MITI that had been losing its grip. The "miracle" had been mak-
ing the ministry's intervention less necessary —
and less welcome. One
instance: in 1969 Mitsubishi revolted against MITI's favoritism to Toy-
ota and Nissan autos to sign a shocking deal to make cars with Chrysler.
The oil crisis was like oxygen to MITI.
Tanaka's first response was a massive conservation program, aimed
especially at export-oriented heavy industry that depended on imported
energy. A second response was a trip by MITI's top man, Nakasone
Yasuhiro, to cut bilateral deals with Middle East producers and thus
break free from U.S. policies in the region. Simultaneously, MITI devel-
oped alternative sources by encouraging nuclear and natural gas suppli-
ers. The crisis forced Japan to become more active in world affairs — to

undergo a "shedding of the skin," in Inada Juichi's phrase. Certainly,

the Japan-China ties took new forms. Japanese imports of 80,000 tons
of refined oil from China in 1973 suddenly soared to i million tons of
crude 1974 and 8 million tons in 1975. Japanese-Arab relations
oil in

also took a new form. Despite a hurried trip by Kissinger to Tokyo to

keep Tanaka Japan took an anti-Israeli stance and put an
in Hne, —
exclamation point on the new approach by suspending jet-fuel supplies
to U.S. bases in Japan.
One Japanese response was forced by rising prices and the sudden
scarcity of goods (even toilet paper)dependent on petroleum. MITI
received the power to set prices for some goods and to crack heads
among suppliers who violated the national interest. A final, more com-
prehensive response was especially important. The bureaucracy
employed subsidies, outright cash grants, new regulations, and other
government powers to force efficiencies on producers and for the —
longer term —
transform energy-consuming heavy industry (steel, tex-
tiles) into services and knowledge-based industries (electronics). Thus

between 1973 and 1986 Japan's energy consumption grew only 7 per-
cent, while gross national product roared ahead by 50 percent. The
government meanwhile provided help to coal, textiles, and other heavy
manufacturing to cushion the social and political shocks of this shift.

Some Japanese efforts were misguided. An emphasis on nuclear

power proved and denied Japan benefits from lower oil prices in
costly
the 1980s. Overall, the policies seemed quite out of step with some
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 6 3

Western views
— "a mix of modern industry with feudal ideas," as a Brit-
ish analysis sniffed. But the "mix" produced a continuing "miracle" with
domestic order. Since 1853, that combination had often not worked
together.^
For U.S. -Japan relations, MITI's policies seemed too successful.
Japan's more efficient export industries raised a $1.7 billion favorable
trade balance with Americans in 1974 sixfold, to $10.4 biUion by 1980.
In the
— late 1970s, Washington demanded —and Tokyo grudgingly
accepted "voluntary" reduction of color television exports to the
United States. When Tokyo refused to do the same for autos, President
Jimmy Carter imposed a 25 percent tariff on Japanese light trucks that
pushed many out of the U.S. market. Japan meanwhile continued to
reject demands that more American agricultural products be allowed
in, even as Japanese paid five times the world price for their heavily
protected staple, rice. On the Cold War front, while U.S. -Soviet politi-
cal relations soured, Soviet-Japanese economic ties sweetened. Steel
and machinery moved from Japan to the Soviets, while cotton and forest
products came back from Russia. ^^
Tanaka's economic success was not enough to save him from some-
thing approaching Nixon's fate. In December 1974, personal financial
scandals forced the prime minister to resign. Allegations arose that.
Lockheed had handed him millions to ensure profitable aircraft con-
tracts. "Mr. Clean," Mild Takeo, took charge. He lasted two years until
December 1976, when President Ford, just defeated by Carter, and Mild
both had to leave Only MITI's power, a worsening Cold War,
office.

and intensifying U.S. -Japan clashes seemed predictable.^^

Needed: American Bodies, Not American

—
Banks Or, Japan as Number One

Senator Mike Mansfield — Senate majority Asian

leader, and expert,
later U.S. ambassador to Japan — began the 1970s
in emphasize to that
"the U.S. -Japanese relationship is the most important bilateral relation-
ship in the world, bar none." Many travel agents agreed. By this time,
about I million Japanese tourists arrived annually in the United States.
They clung together in large groups (a Japanese travel custom dating
back a thousand years when all classes traveled together to hear Bud-
dhist teachings in various temples). Because of the language barrier and
group traveling, few new bridges resulted to link the two cultures. Only
 a

THE CLASH 3 6 4

about one-third as many Americans journeyed to Japan. Few more

seemed driven understand a culture that had built the world's second
to

most powerful economy.^"

Two Americans were trying to understand. The new President,
Jimmy Carter, and his top foreign policy adviser, national security
adviser Zbigniew^ Brzezinski, had grown deeply interested in Japan. In
1972, Brzezinski had written The Fragile Blossom. Then, with banker
David Rockefeller, he helped found the Trilateral Commission —
group of business people and governmental leaders from the United
States, Japan, and Western Europe who tried to coordinate policies for
problems bedeviling these industrial nations. Carter, then a little-known
governor of Georgia, became an early member. By the time of his elec-
tion, however, Carter, as well Brzezinski, was shifting gears. The Trilat-
eral Commission seemed to produce httle but interesting discussions.
The Cold War, moreover, was picking up speed, and Brzezinski — from
an anti-Soviet Polish family —began to focus on the traditional enemy.
Carter found himself caught between Brzezinski's ardent anti-Sovietism
and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's belief that cooperation with the
Russians was necessary to resolve such life-and-death issues as arms
control.
Carter's confusion quickly afflicted U.S. -Japan relations. In February

1977, the one-month-old administration told Tokyo that some U.S.

troops were to be pulled out of South Korea, an area of extraordinary
Japan for a thousand years. Carter believed he had to cut
sensiti\aty to
expenditures and reorient foreign commitments. This proved to be the
wrong approach, especially given the recent U.S. withdrawal from Viet-
— —
nam. Asians above all, Japanese were closely watching how Ameri-
cans would respond to the loss. President Ford had responded in 1975
with a "doctrine": "The center of political power in the United States
has shifted westward. Our Pacific interests and concerns have
increased. He added that a "first premise is that American strength is
"

basic to any stable balance of power in the Pacific. Ford emphasized "

the commitment by becoming the first U.S. President to visit Japan.

With such assurances, Japanese business poured into South Korea,
where it already enjoyed 64 percent of all foreign investment. (Ameri-
cans, with 17 percent, were a distant second.) Now Carter seemed to
be reversing Ford's policies. An uproar in Tokyo, Seoul, and the U.S.
^^
Congress forced Carter to retreat. The troops remained.
But doubts had been sown. Japan saw U.S. military commitments as
crucial. They provided Ford's "balance of power, behind which Japa-
"

nese overseas investment could march. Tokyo's defense budgets could

TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 6 5

meanwhile remain low. Japan, in other words, wanted American bodies

but not American banks.
Japanese banks and their keiretsu (networks) in big industry were
mounting an all-out assault on Southeast Asian and Chinese markets
as well. "J^P^n Inc." —
the team of efficient businesses, aggressive gov-
ernment bureaucracy, and cooperative labor unions appeared unstop- —
pable. When Japan seemed to be falling behind in the semiconductor
industry, pivotal in the onrushing computerization of the globe, the gov-
ernment ensured tax breaks and subsidies for a Research Association
(including Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, NEC, and Toshiba). The association
pooled research efforts between 1976 and 1979 to develop patents that
brought Japan up with the U.S. computer industry. Americans were
meanwhile left knocking on Japans door, their technology either
coopted or excluded.
A major exception was the considerably low-tech baseball players
hired by the sports-crazy Japanese. Even this hiring, however, was reluc-
tant. "If you ask a Japanese manager what he considers the most
important ingredient of a winning team," a U.S. correspondent wrote,
"he would most likely answer 'wa' " or harmony. "If you ask him how to
"
knock a team's wa away, he'd probably say, 'Hire an American.'
Another U.S. success, McDonald's, was finally allowed in after bitter
struggle and below-the-table resistance from Japan's food chains. The
native Japanese executive who headed the nation's McDonald's enter-
prise nevertheless won out —
in part by lightly arguing, "If we eat ham-
burgers for a thousand years, we will become blond, and when we
—
become blond we can conquer the world.
"^"^

The nation's economy soared as its need for lawyers sank. All of
Japan had fewer lawyers than Los Angeles alone. The crime rate actu-
ally dechned from the already low levels of the 1950s. In 1977, 20.8

murders struck every 100,000 people in New York City; in Tokyo, the
rate was 1.7. New York's rate for robberies per 100,000 was 994; Tokyo's

3.1. In 1979, Professor Ezra F. Vogel's Japaw as Number One explained

these phenomena to become a best-seller in the United States and
Japan. Vogel noted MITI's success in combining competition with gov-
ernment help to "create the strongest possible companies with the
greatest competitive potential. " He rated such traits superior to U.S.
beliefs in free markets, the automatic evil of bureaucracies, and the
supposed efficiencies of antitrust acts. Japanese bureaucrats made
major errors (for example, in not believing initially that Sony's transis-
tors had But they had learned. Japan did pay a price, Vogel
a future).
warned: "strong pressure toward conformity and consensus [is] some-
 "

THE CLASH ?> 6 6

times at the expense of the deviant, the opposition, the httle man, the
outsider." On the other hand, Americans "do not have the confidence
to carry out the will of the majority against the egoistic deviant. . . .

America needs all the help it can get in moving toward group coopera-
4.- "15
tion.

President Carter agreed. A deeply religious man who cared about the
needy community, the Georgian harked back to
as well as the larger
the 1930s when Democrats helped both giant corporations and society's
downtrodden. In mid-1980. Carter trumpeted a three-year plan to save
Detroit's auto industry against the Japanese invasion. Imports were to
be reduced, environmental regulations eased for U.S. producers, and
aid given to cities hurt by Japan's success. Carter's top domestic aide
declared, "We consider this the first part of a national industrial policy.
Chrysler's head, Lee A. lacocca, was more explicit: "We have taken a
page from Japans book." But the next pages were not torn from that
book. Chrysler nearly went bankrupt several years later until Washing-
ton saved it with a massive bailout. The entire U.S. auto industry stum-
bled through the 1980s while Japanese models controlled 30 percent of
the American market. The United States lacked the tradition, homoge-
neity, and bureaucracy for an effective "national industrial policy."
Indeed, six months after Carter announced his grand plan, he lost the
presidency to Ronald Reagan. The triumphant former Republican Cali-
fornia governor launched an attack on industrial policy and promised to
"^^
get the government "off our backs.
Meanwhile, the Japanese moved to control the burgeoning Southeast
Asian and Chinese markets. In 1971, the United States held 36.4 per-
cent of foreign investments in Southeast Asia, the Japanese 15.4 per-
cent. Five years later, the U.S. share had sunk to 26 percent; the
Japanese more than doubled, to 36.4 percent. Tokyo officials tellingly
resurrected a 1930s metaphor, the "flying geese" model. In this model,
the smaller geese followed the head goose, Japan, in employing technol-
ogy and new processes. Thus, as Japan moved into cutting-edge, profit-
able electronics at home, it passed down auto and steel production to
lower-waged geese, such as Taiwan and South Korea. It also targeted a
new goose, Vietnam, even as the United States had tried to kill, then
cage, it. The morning Nixon had agreed to retreat from Vietnam
after
in early 1973, the LDP headquarters in Tokyo hung a large banner:
CONGRATULATIONS VIETNAM CEASE-FIRE. NEXT LETS COOPERATE IN
RECONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT. An initial $10 million in foreign
aid opened the way for $216 million in trade with both North and South
Vietnam by the time the Communists unified the country in 1975.
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3> 6 1 '

Another $i6 million of aid to the victors led to a 1978 agreement that
locked Vietnam into Japan's economic orbit. By now, some 60 percent
of Japanese foreign aid targeted Southeast Asia — nearly all, of course,
requiring purchase of Japanese goods. The Acheson-Dulles hope of
using the region to ensure Japanese prosperity was being realized — at a

level neither man could have foreseen.'^

Not all was smooth sailing. Riots erupted against Japan s growing
presence in Thailand, Indonesia, and China. In August 1977, Prime
Minister Fukuda Takeo decisively moved to undercut the protests. The
newly elected leader was one of the most powerful post-1945 political

powerbrokers. Scion of a silk- farming family, a Tokyo University Law

School graduate, protege of Kishi Nobusuke, twice head of the all-pow-
erful finance ministry, the sophisticated Fukuda led a well-financed fac-
tion of the LDP. His faction also proved to be corrupted by such
finances. As early as 1952, a bribery scandal forced him to resign from
the ministry. His salvation seemed to lie in the even greater corruption
charges afflicting his chief LDP rival, Tanaka.
Fukuda's triumph over Tanaka's cleaner successor. Mild, in 1976,
however, went beyond personal politics. Fukuda's faction was deeply
interested in Southeast Asia, notably Taiwan. Its financial backers had
grave doubts about normalizing relations with China if it meant signing
blatant anti-Soviet provisions, as Beijing demanded. Tanaka and his fac-
tion, on the other hand, wanted to profit from Southeast Asia, but

—
emphasized as well ties with China especially knotting those ties
before the Americans. The LDP thus divided along foreign policy, as
^^
well as personal, fault lines.
In August Fukuda stroked suspicious Southeast Asians by
1977,
announcing at Manila a Fukuda Doctrine. It embraced three principles:
the guarantee that Japan would never again become a military power;
"heart-to-heart" understandings with Southeast Asians; and full part-
nership with the new ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
group. ASEAN's appearance announced this part of the globe's arrival
on the world's political stage. Part of the Fukuda's Doctrine was, as The
Economist of London called it, "a con." In 1978, for example, Fukuda
publicly reserved the right to build "any type of weapon" if necessary
"for self-defense purposes, even if this means nuclear or bacteriological
weapons." But Japanese aid to ASEAN nations doubled during Fuku-
da's watch. U.S. auto executives vowed not to lose Southeast Asian

markets — the fastest-growing car markets in the world. The race, how-
was actually over by 1980. And Japan had won.'^
ever,

The next race would be for the China market. That race had enor-
 —
THE CLASH 3, 6 ^

mous military as well aseconomic implications. Carter and Brzezinski

wanted to move quickly toward China. The President was again
restrained by Secretary of State Vance, who placed greater value on
relations with the more powerful Soviets. Brzezinski, however, outma-
neuvered Vance by constantly 'pestering" (Brzezinski's word) the Presi-
dent to send Vance to Moscow while he, the NSC adviser, worked
things out in Beijing. Carter surrendered. The result was full diplomatic
relations, effective January i, 1979. The two giants furthermore pledged
to cooperate against Russian imperialism and to continue cutting the
links between the United States and Taiwan, which China considered
part of its own country. Brzezinski was so taken with the Chinese that
Carter recorded, "I told him he had been seduced." But "seduced" was
hardly the word when Carter sent Brzezinski halfway around the world
to propose.
So the race for the China market was on — again. The Japanese had
a head start of a thousand years or so, but also a bad recent track record
of atrocities inflicted on tens of miUions of Chinese in the 1930s and
1940s. Carter thought he could draw on a century of goodwill because
of the open-door approach that aimed to keep foreign imperialists from
carving up China. When, however, Carter told a group of Americans
that "the people of our country had a deep and natural affection for the
people of China," he was embarrassed when "most of the group
laughed." The President mislearned the nature of U.S. -China relations
by accepting the mistaken version of history offered by U.S. missionar-
ies and churches. Between 1949 and 1972, moreover, U.S. presidents
—
epitomized by John F. Kennedy had been the sworn enemy of Beijing.
All in all, Americans and Japanese seemed roughly equal as they set to
race for Chinese concessions.^^
The concentrated firepower of the keidenren's banking-industrial
complex made Japan (to use Orwell's phrase) more than equal. Even as
Brzezinski and the top Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, raised their
glasses in Beijing to damn the Russians, Japanese Foreign Minister
Sonoda Sunao had been secretly courting the Chinese for full diplo-

matic relations for nearly a year. These talks, along with U.S. interest,
accelerated as Deng announced China would rapidly mod-
in 1978 that
ernize with a selected infusion of capitalism —
under tight Communist
Party control, of course. By 1978, trade between China and Japan had
exploded to $5 billion, nearly five times the 1972 figure. Chinese oil
^^
exports became of special importance to Tokyo.
The rise of Ohira Masayoshi to power in late 1978 accelerated this

rush to Beijing. Tanaka, always the powerbroker, had pushed Ohira to

TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) i 6 9

challenge and defeat a surprised Fukuda. Determined to release the

Lockheed scandal's brake on his power, the aggressive sixty-year-old
Tanaka collected so much money from businesses that his faction was
twice the size of Fukuda's. And these businesses had strong interest in
China. The victorious Ohira threw out all of Fukuda's cabinet —except
Foreign Minister Sonoda, who had performed so well in Beijing. As the
United States and China discussed normalizing Japan actu- relations,

ally did so by signing a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the Chinese
in late 1978. Deng's state visit to Tokyo in early 1979 was accompanied
by the first major Japanese loan —some $2 billion — from the Export-
Import Bank, tied entirely to Japan's exports and services. By late 1979,

the Chinese had to back away from some of Japan's generous loan
arrangements because they were unable to deal with the tide of money.
Within the next five years, the relationship flourished until China
became Japan's number-two trading partner just behind the United
^^
—
States.
Ohira began to discuss a "Pacific rim" strategy to integrate China and
Southeast Asia's raw materials and markets into Japanese capital and
technology. The idea was sometimes extended to a "Pacific Basin" that
took in Canada and the United States. North Americans, however, were
to provide raw materials for Japan's machines. California officials began
to think that "The Japanese see California as part of their 'Pacific copro-
sperity sphere,' " as one phrased it. Japan's firms had invested $25 billion
in the United States, one-third of it in the West where they exploited
forests and fisheries for exports back to Japan. They also moved deci-
which California's "Silicon Valley" firms
sively into electronics, a field
were shaping. The "question is whether we want to become a banana
republic . . .
," a CaHfornia electronics manufacturer declared in 1978.
"If we think we are trying to balance our trade imbalance with the
Japanese by seUing them beef and grapefruit, we'll end up killing our
industrial base. " Anti-Japanese feelings rose among workers in lumber,
fisheries, and electronics.^"^
These inroads, and American complaining, confirmed Japanese
beliefs that the United States was in a state of decline. Japan did not
openly gloat; it was too dependent on Americans for that. But it began
to rethink its military as well as economic priorities. A second oil shock
of 1979-80, arising from revolutionaries overthrowing Washington's
close friend, the Shah of Iran, brought ineffective responses from Car-
ter. Inflation battered American savings and investments. In late 1979

the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The month before, Ohira declared

that the "military balance" had changed; the Soviets had "caught up
THE CLASH 3 7

some ways." He asserted during a trip to Washington

... in that "U.S.
hegemony has been relatively declining." Japan used to "just . . . follow
the U.S. lead," but "Japan today is different." In a 1978 defense report,
Tokyo expressed doubts that the U.S. Navy could protect Japans sea-
lanes and oil supplies. Ohira's government responded with a defense
budget that jumped from $1.6 billion in 1970 to more than $10 billion
in 1978, although the increase was also due to the yens surging value
and a high inflation rate.^^
A major turnhad begun in both military establishments. After equiv-
ocating between Vance's and Brzezinski's conflicting advice. Carter, in
just six months of 1980, jacked up the projected five-year U.S. militar\^
budget from an awesome $800 billion to an incredible $1.25 trillion.
Vance finally resigned when Carter and Brzezinski insisted on using
force in April 1980 to try to free fifty-three American hostages held
by the Iranian revolutionaries. The attempt failed disastrously, costing
American lives but not liberating the hostages. "What can the United
States be thinking of?" Ohira wondered aloud. The prime minister
responded with a new military policy, "Comprehensive National Secu-
rity," that included more cooperation with Western militaries, to raise

Japan's miHtary profile. A July 1980 Defense Agency report noted the
"termination of clear American supremacy in both military and eco-
nomic spheres." The report urged building up Japan's defenses, espe-
^^
cially to secure oil supplies.
Ohira died suddenly in mid- 1980. He was replaced by a weaker fig-

ure, Suzuki Zenko. But Ohira, Fukuda, and Tanaka had accompUshed
much since 1974: they buffered the miracle against Middle East crises,
moved into Southeast Asia, renewed the historic tie with China, and
began transforming the nation's military strategy.
Carter also surrendered power in 1980, the victim of indecisiveness
and Ronald Reagan's promises to cut taxes while reinvigorating the mili-
tary effort to fight theCold War. Often confused by Carter's policies,
the Japanese were not at all prepared for Ronald Reagan and George
Bush's willingness to use force, or to distort the economy so more force
would be available. Thus the scene was set for the clashes of the 1980s
and the final stages of the Cold War.

Tne 1980s: From "Ron-Yasu . . .

The 1980s opened and closed with crises in U.S. -Japan relations. The
stakes were becoming ever higher. In 1980, U.S. -Asian trade surpassed
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 7 1

U.S. -European trade for the first time in history. The American econ-
omy, however, was devastated by a deadly inflation and i8 percent inter-
est rates, even as its trade deficit with Japan soared toward $50 billion
in 1985. The respected political analyst Walter Dean Burnham noted
the growing, dangerous disillusionment with the American state: "a gen-
eralized crisis of legitimacy develops while the [economic] surplus
declines." 'Tlease Japan," a New York Times guest editorial pleaded in
March 1981, "Return the Favor: Occupy Us."
The editorial reflected the malaise that continued under Reagan in

1981-82. Japan's concern grew as the Cold War intensified. In August

1983, Soviet jets shot down a South Korean civilian airliner flying off

course and over some of Russia's most sensitive military bases in the
Far East. The was 269 dead. A U. S. Marine Corps general called
result
limited war between Americans and Russians "an almost inevitable
probability" within a generation. Such a war would probably be fought
in part from U.S. bases in Japan —
bases long programmed into the
sights of Soviet nuclear missiles. Suzuki could not stem anti-American
protests, especially after a U.S. nuclear submarine collided with and
sank a Japanese merchant ship in 1981. Two Japanese lives were lost;
the sub left the scene without trying to save the thirteen survivors.
Reagan's handling of foreign policy did not inspire confidence in Japan.
The assassination attempt on his life in March 1981 reaffirmed Japanese
views that violence and disorder dangerously corrupted American
^^
society.

In late 1982, the relationship showed signs of improving. Not only

was the U.S. economy snapping back, but a different kind of leader
took power in Tokyo. Nakasone Yasuhiro had been a powerful player in
the LDP since election to the Diet in 1947 when this son of a lumber
dealer was twenty-nine years old. He was such a central member of the
well-oiled, Lockheed scandal— tainted Tanaka faction that critics called
Nakasone's administration "Tanakasone." "Nakasone is the jockey,"
Tanaka immodestly explained. "I own the horse." The new prime minis-
ter, however, ran his own race —
especially after 1984, when Tanaka was
finally convicted for taking $1.6 million in bribes.
Between 1972 and 1974, Nakasone had led MITI, where he took the
nation's first tentative steps toward trade liberalization. Unlike other
top leaders, however, he had also run the Defense Agency. Nakasone
criticized Sato's three "nonnuclear principles" of the 1970s, but finally
opposed building nuclear arms. He also opposed further dependence
on U.S. forces. Nakasone wanted a new security treaty allowing Japan
to defend itself with a "truly autonomous defense." He harbored a
THE CLASH 1> 1 2

healthy respect for U.S. power: as a World War II sailor, he had watched
from a distance the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima. But the sixty-

four-year-old leader believed Japan's political and military maturity now

had to equal its economic powerhouse. He also learned (by watching
John Kennedy) about using the new medium to shape "television
democracy." Nakasone learned so well that in 1986 he won a landslide
reelection that slashed the Socialists to all-time post-1955 lows. (The
desperate SociaHsts then became Japan's first party to choose a woman,
Doi Takako, to lead it.)^^
Nakasone moved so decisively to upgrade Japan's mihtary that a fas-
cinating argument erupted in Washington. The main combatants were
Secretary of State George Shultz (who took office in June 1982) and
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. In 1982-83, Weinberger and
his military advisers wanted Nakasone to rearm quickly so Japan
could — as an NSC paper phrased it in late 1982
— "as soon as possible
within this decade . . . assume defense of its own territory, its sur-
rounding seas, skies, and its sea-lanes to a distance of 1,000 miles. " For
Japan was "the centerpiece" of U.S. policy in
his part, Shultz believed
Asia. But the blunt Secretary of State "exploded" (his word) when he
discovered the Pentagon's plan. Shultz only wanted Japan to pay more
for U.S. protection. "But the last thing America should want," this
World War II Marine told Weinberger, "is the re-creation of a massive
Japanese military machine." (Shultz vividly recalled the "savagery" in
the Palau campaign, "when the Japanese snipers were finally talked into
coming out with their hands up," only to be "hit by [American] fire from
all over the beach.") While visiting the Philippines, Shultz learned that
if the thousand-mile arena for the Japanese Fleet was to include their
islands, "One thing was clear: the Filipinos didn't want to be
"^^
included.
Shultz lost the argument. During a January 1983 visit to Washington,
Nakasone quickly moved to a "Ron-Yasu" relationship with Reagan. As
with Nixon, baseball bridged the cultures. "You be the pitcher, I'll be
the catcher," the prime minister told the President. "But once in awhile,
the pitcher must Usten to the catcher's good advice. " Reagan accepted
"Yasu's" advice that Japan should be "an unsinkable aircraft carrier put-
"^°
ting up a tremendous bulwark of defense.
Japan's miUtary budget remained within the sacred i percent of gross
national product. But the GNP
grew so fast that the budget ranked
eighth in the world in the late 1970s, and third just behind the two —
—
superpowers a decade later. Nakasone, moreover, breached the i per-
cent limit in 1987. Most of the money went into new technology, the air
The End of an Era (Since 1973) 1> 1 1>

force, and the navy. Authorized ground forces remained at the 1953
level — 180,000 —although they carried advanced weapons. With
Reagan's approval, Japan for the time since 1945 began to export
first

mihtary goods. With its fixation on the Soviets, China accepted the
buildup and even exchanged views with senior Japanese military advis-
ers. Some Japanese, however, bitterly condemned Nakasone. Professor
Kan Hideki of Kita Kyushu University, for example, implied that the
buildup smelled of the 1930s, warned that it distorted the economy, and
demanded that Japan learn to say no to Washington. But Kan admitted
that "the majority of Japanese are not seriously concerned about these
"31
issues.
Several U.S. demands were not warmly received. One was in the
as
secret 1982 NSC Decision Directive on Japan. It declared the Ameri-
cans should "press for . . . access to the Japanese economy for U.S. high
technology firms," and "full opportunity for U.S. firms to invest in Japan
in high-technology ventures." Technology, however, mostly moved one-
way: westward. Another, related (and bewhiskered) demand came from
Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific
affairs: "Japan s movement toward greater liberalization of its domestic
capital markets and a broader international role for the yen."^^

. . . to Two Competing Capitalisms . . .

The two economic systems were moving toward not cooperation but
full-throated competition. Nakasone told Americans that "Japan Inc.
does not exist." But he personally had honed the machine as head of
MITI. He also, in a tone far from "Ron-Yasu," had written in 1978 about
a "new civilization" that would integrate less developed countries under
Japans guidance. During 1983, he told an audience in Hiroshima that
"the Japanese have done well for 2000 years because there are no
. . .

foreign races" in the country. The remark untrue brought down criti- — —
cism on Nakasone. He nevertheless stuck with a poHcy that excluded
nearly all Asian refugees, especially those from Vietnam, even as other
nations, such as the United States and Canada, took in hundreds of
thousands. The Japanese had also repeatedly promised to be more
cooperative on economic issues. By the mid-1980s, however, widely
noted work of Ezra Vogel and Chalmers Johnson persuasively argued
that the problem was not quantitative trade figures, but qualitative poli-
tics: the keiretsu and bureaucracy had created a very different system

from the American. Nakasone and Reagan were both extroverts and
THE CLASH 3 7 4

politically ingenious, but the former remained the heir of the Meiji
and Yoshida, the latter the descendant of Woodrow Wilson and Cordell
Hull.^^
Not that the two economies were all one thing or all another. Naka-
sone rightly noted that a smaller share of Japan's economy was owned
by the government than was true of any other major industrial econ-
—
omy including the United States. In 1986, only 19.4 percent of Japa-
nese and development expenditures came from the
research
government; in the United States, it was 48.2 percent. The real differ-
ence lay in research goals. Most of the U.S. research went into the
military (50.8 percent compared with 4.9 percent in Japan). The Japa-
nese put 60 percent into industry, agriculture, energy, and infrastruc-
ture; Americans invested about 17 percent in these sectors. Nakasone
also correctly observed that Japan prospered because the "bond
between the large companies and their subcontractors is different
[from] in the United States." And again: Japanese managers, he empha-
sized, planned "over a period of 20 to 30 years. . . . This is a different
approach from American business." He did not add that the long view
was possible in part because Japan rigidly controlled the sources of, and
access to, its capital. In any case, the plan to build export powerhouses

worked so well that Japanese automakers sold 29 percent of their cars

^"^
at home, 71 percent abroad.
Americans meanwhile publicly worshipped at the shrine of freer
trade. But they also pressured Japan to slash its exports, "voluntarily,"
to the United States in cotton textiles (1956), steel (1968 and 1974),
televisions (1977), semiconductors (1986), and
automobiles (1981),
machine tools (1987), among other products. During the Reagan years
especially, Americans preached Adam Smith but practiced Lord
Keynes. Thus when Republican budget cutters targeted governmental
agencies, such as the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation that provided cheap financing for U.S. exports
and investments, the agencies were saved by massive corporate lob-
bying. "Corporate leaders," one analyst wrote, "have no particular inter-
away of the state; they simply seek a relationship
est in the withering
with the Federal Government that will enhance corporate profits."
When Reagan seemed not to understand this, corporate leaders "have
come into conflict with him."^^
Most of the time no conflict occurred. The government bailed
Chrysler out of bankruptcy. It hastened the disintegration of the labor
movement by breaking the Air Traffic Controllers Union. It bought
political peace with huge budget deficits that maintained social pro-
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 7 5

grams which Americans hoped to be accustomed. It poured

at a level at

money into research and development through contracts paid for by the
highest peacetime defense budgets in history. The money was specifi-
cally targeted. When, for example, the machine tool industry faced
cheaper and better Japanese products, a decision was made at the top
—
by the National Security Council to declare U.S. machine tools as "a
small yet vital component of the U.S. defense base." The industry was
to be integrated ''more fully into the defense procurement process."
. . .

"During the supposedly lean Reagan years," one disillusioned Republi-

can leader later wrote, ''overall [government] spending jumped from
$746 billion in the 1982 fiscal year to $1.1 trillion in the 1989 fiscal

year— a 65 percent increase.

"^^

The was thus deeply involved in both economic systems. In

state

Japan, however, involvement was usually less formal (except in handling

capital); overseen by politically insulated, highly educated, and informa-

tion-saturated bureaucrats; focused on specific civilian production or

dual-use functions; and, by the later 1980s, so consensual that bankers
and real estate developers began to resemble economic buccaneers
whose swords were happily honed by MITI and finance ministry
employees. In the United States, government involvement was more
formal and legislated; worked through special private interest groups
rather than as part of a more comprehensive policy; depended on a
bureaucracy less respected and systematized; and — of overriding impor-
tance —was geared far more to winning the Cold War than to domi-
nating international markets in selected goods.
In 1984, Reagan's personal popularity climaxed in a landslide reelec-
tion victory. In 1985,Americans not only became debtors to the world
for the first time since World War I, but were piling up more debt
during the Reagan years than under all the other presidents since 1789.
High interest rates (needed to kill inflation) attracted vast amounts of
foreign capital. Nakasone observed that the dollar became so strong
that it sucked in foreign investment and trade "like a black hole
absorbing As the "black hole" absorbed massive imports, the
stars."

strong dollar drove up the prices of U.S. exports, thus creating a historic
trade deficit to accompany the historic budget deficit. By 1986, Japan
was shipping $80 billion of goods and taking only $30 billion of products
in its U.S. trade. Or, as one observer figured, every two days the Japa-

nese were selling to the United States the equivalent of their entire
bilateral trade in 1955.^^
Americans had entrapped themselves. They nevertheless blamed the
Japanese. Senator Robert Dole (R: KA) condemned Japanese "selfish-
THE CLASH 3 7 6

ness and myopia" for not opening their markets to American goods.
Senator John Danforth (R: MO) As pro-
called the Japanese ''leeches."
tectionism and anger grew, the Reagan administration voiced the hope
in a secret NSC paper that "the severe problem" could be solved by
convincing Nakasone to open markets. Japan did open its capital mar-
kets a crack after the 1984 Yen-Dollar Agreement allowed foreign banks
to begin trust-banking operations and participate in its bond markets.
In 1985, foreign security firms could trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
for the first time. But the Japanese were surrendering little and would
go no further. They were not about to change thirty-five years of highly
^^
successful policies just to please Americans.
Tokyo and Washington officials searched for a quickremedy fix to

the growing trade crisis. Led by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury James
Baker III, finance ministers of the globe's five leading economic powers
met during September 1985 in the White and Gold Room of New York
City's Plaza Hotel. They agreed to concert policies to lower the dollar
and raise the value of other currencies, especially the yen. Japan finally
agreed to reverse policy and revalue the yen only after Nakasone medi-
ated several bitter internal arguments. The Plaza accord turned out to
be the most significant financial agreement since Nixon destroyed the
dollar-for-gold part of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. The yen soared
almost 100 percent against the dollar, from about 250 yen in the mid-
1980s to 130 yen in early 1989.^^
Economic theory dictates that with the dollars value sinking like a
stone, U.S. goods will be cheaper to buy abroad. Thus, as their goods
move overseas, Americans' trade balance will turn favorable. But
accepted economic theory seemed irrelevant to the realities of Japanese
trade poUcies. In 1986-87, the U.S. global trade deficit skyrocketed to
over $160 billion; $59 biUion flowed from the trade with Japan. Despite
the Plaza agreement, U.S. exports to Japanese markets rose only 5.5
percent in 1986, but Japan's exports to Americans jumped 21 percent.
Japanese producers, it turned out, willingly absorbed the yen's massive
reevaluation in order to keep market share abroad. It also turned out

that the finance ministry and MITI strongly supported the producers,
especially with easy money, so market share could be retained. It fur-
ther turned out that only about one-third of Japanese exports (and a
mere 3 percent of imports) were accounted for in yen; the rest was
"^^
largely in the declining dollar.
Reagan and Baker had been blindsided by Japan. No one around
Baker either knew enough about the Japanese practices or was able to
convince the Treasury Secretary that the finance ministry would use
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 'ill

every ounce of its considerable power to exploit the Plaza accord fully.

The Japanese found themselves in a happy win-win situation: not only

did the agreement increase their favorable trade balance, it performed
As the yen ballooned in value, Japanese
miracles for their investments.
investors gobbled up prize manufacturing and real estate assets at
seemingly bargain-basement prices. Southeast Asia, China, and the
United States were special targets. The "miracle's" version of a co-pros-
perity sphere took shape. In 1980, American firms had about $5 billion
invested directly in Southeast Asia, Japanese about $7 billion. By 1989,
the Americans had doubled their holdings to $10 billion, but the Japa-
nese more than tripled theirs to $23 billion. By 1989
Japan had as well,
replaced the United States as the leading donor of foreign aid to South-
east Asia. The aid, of course, was closely tied to the region's acceptance
of Japan's goods and capital."^

In 1989, Austraha recognized the urgency for dealing with such star-
tling developments. It took the lead in creating the Asia-Pacific Eco-
nomic Cooperation (APEC) forum. "APEC was born out of fear,"
Funabashi Yoichi notes, 'Tear of a unilateralist or isolationist America,
fear of the balkanization of the world into competing economic blocs."
Fearing, for their part, that they were being ganged up on, Tokyo offi-
cials disliked APEC until it became clear that the United States would

be allowed to join. Americans entered over bitter Southeast Asian pro-

tests and after Washington and Tokyo applied pressure. APEC became

a focus for many players: Southeast Asians interested in protecting

themselves against rich outsiders; Japanese investors intent on keeping
the region open to the powerful yen; and Washington officials deter-
mined not to allow the world market to be divided into protectionist,
anti-U.S. regions. APEC thus became a battlefield for forces that set
"^^
about to reshape the world of the 1990s after the Cold War ended.
The muscular yen also affected China. Japan had become
By 1985,
China's leading trading partner, as exports soared 40 percent alone in
1984 to reach $8.6 billion, against imports of only $5.3 billion. (Compa-
rable Chinese figures with the United States were $3.8 billion and $2.3
billion.) Trade and yen investment climbed despite Chinese student

protests against Japanese goods. The protests notably erupted after

Nakasone marked the World War II's end by
fortieth anniversary of
visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to pay homage to Japan's war dead, includ-
ing convicted war criminals. The lure of Chinese oil fields, the power
of Japanese banks and keiretsu, and a 1988 agreement for protecting
investments nevertheless helped Japan provide more than half of all
development loans made to China in the late 1980s. "^^
 —
THE CLASH 3> 7 S

The hyperactive yen also swarmed eastward. Through 1986, the

United States received more Japanese investment ($25.3 billion) than
any other nation. Indonesia ranked second, with $8.4 billion. Between
1985 and 1990, Japanese invested an incredible $650 billion abroad, with
nearly half going to the United States. Tokyo investors bought such
jewels as the major share of Rockefeller Center in New York City, lead-
ing Hollyw^ood studios, and Pebble Beach, perhaps the nation's most
beautiful golf course. Some observers warned of a Japanese invasion.
Others, however, viewed the yen as a jumpstart for the sagging U.S.
economy, especially as Japanese built Honda, Toyota, and Nissan plants
to revive so-called Rust Belt, deserted midwestern manufacturing
plants. A distinctly non-Rust Belt state. North Carolina, alone had sixty

Japanese companies by 1989, thirty-eight of them manufacturers.'^'^

A most awesome display of Japan's power occurred in October 1987.
Japanese had been fueling the New York City stock market and, espe-
cially, financing the huge U.S. budget deficit by purchasing as much as

30 percent of the American government's bonds issued to cover the

deficit. Then, in October, these investors grew concerned over poor
U.S. trade performances and worldwide interest-rate hikes. The Japa-
nese began pulling money from the New York Stock Exchange. The
result was Black Monday: the exchange more than 500 points on
lost

the Dow-Jones Index, the largest absolute decUne in its history. Other
exchanges, including Tokyo's, quickly began shding. The Ministry of
Finance rapidly pressured Tokyo's leading security houses to prop up
both their own and the New York exchanges. The crisis passed. Several
studies concluded, in the words of one, that "the crash started and
. . .

stopped in Tokyo." Such power was less surprising when it became

apparent that of the world's ten largest banks, nine —perhaps ten
were Japanese."*^
Debates erupted over how Americans could respond to such power.
U.S. elites sharply divided. A number (such as Senators Dole and Dan-
forth) wanted to retaliate. Others (such as experts-on-Japan Chalmers
Johnson, Karl van Wolferen, and Clyde Prestowitz) warned that Ameri-
cans must adapt their own system to compete against a fundamentally
different Japanese capitalism. Many (such as U.S. multinationals who
worked hard to establish beachheads in Japan, the Rockefeller inter-
ests, and Hollyw^ood moguls who sold properties at inflated prices) were

glad to take Japanese money.

American laborers and white-collar workers similarly divided. Those
who worked in competitive export industries (such as autos) agreed
with Senator Dole. Those who worried about the new Asian immigra-
T\ie End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 7 9

tion into the United States, as well as about the new competition,
sought (like Johnson and Prestowitz) comprehensive political change.
The tens of thousands who gained employment in Japanese-owned
plants in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, and New Jersey took
Japanese money with few complaints.
Given these divisions, a fragmented U.S. political system could not
pull itself together to work out a coordinated response. At most, flank-
ing attacks were launched — as when Washington officials and twenty
leading semiconductor firms banded together in 1987 to establish Sema-
tech, in Austin, Texas. Sematech did basic research that within a
decade gave U.S. companies a lead over Japan in this cornerstone
industry. More commonly, however, Americans hoped to readjust the
balance of economic power by trusting to the magic of the international
—
marketplace a marketplace that MITI and the keiretsu had long
worked to fix. MITI, for instance, had set up the Japanese version of
Sematech sixteen years earlier. "It used to be that we could say America
should be moving into the future," Clyde Prestowitz declared in 1987.
'"^^
"Now we are finding out that we don't have a future.

. . . to "Relations Have Not Been So

Low Since I960"

For the first time in their history, and despite the Plaza agreement,
Americans in 1986 suffered a trade deficit in high-technology goods.
Forbes showed a one-dollar which George Washington's face was
bill in

replaced by Mount Fuji. Kanemitsu Hideo, an economics professor at

Tokyo's Sophia University, recalled that in 1955 his nation resembled a
starfish trying to survive in a huge global pool dominated by Americans.

In 1970, the starfish had become "a squid" stretching its long legs. In

1986, was "a giant octopus crawling out from the pool.'"^^
it

Many Americans seemed to think of the Japanese economy as a

—
shark carnivorous, primitive, never giving up even after having to
retreat temporarily. Secretary of State Shultz spent a year in what he
described as "a painful, tooth-pulling effort" to open sectors of Japan's
markets. These MOSS (m»arket-oriented, sector-selective) deals
seemed promising when signed in 1986. In the widely noted Maekawa
Report of that year, moreover, a distinguished Japanese panel told Prime
Minister Nakasone that the nation's economy was not open; to compete
internationally in the future, "we must totally change our economic
policies and way of life." But little changed. A 1987 U.S. Treasury study
THE CLASH 3 8

complained that American investing services, probably the world s best,

were "effectively frozen out" of Japan's bond market. U.S. construction
firms, also among the globe's most efficient, were denied contracts for
building a new airport in Osaka Bay because Japanese officials claimed
only local builders understood the soil conditions. (When the airport
began sinking into the sea, hurried reevaluations of the soil and struc-
)'^^
tures drove its cost up 50 percent, to $15 billion.
Secretary of State Shultz, a professional economist, avoided a con-
frontation. The U.S. -Japan security arrangements were too important to
weaken with trade disputes. Besides, Shultz concluded, if the Japanese
wanted to pay "astronomical prices for goods that are cheaper else-
where, that is more their problem than ours." He believed Americans
should concentrate on producing superior goods, and ——instead of
depending on Japanese to finance the U.S. government debt "increase
our own savings to finance our own investment. In other words ... if

we wanted to see our real problem we should look in the mirror. " Shultz
followed his own advice by negotiating with Japan a Structural Impedi-
ments Initiative in 1988 —each nation agreed to reform weaknesses the
other nation identified. For Japan, this meant opening up; for Ameri-
cans, meant saving-for-investment and closing budget deficits, rather
it
^^
than more credit-card spending.
Changes resulted, but neither nation was ready to go cold turkey.
Seventy-four percent of Japanese polled called their nation's economic
system unfair. MITI and the finance ministry nevertheless held a steady
course. LDP governments resembled conservative governments in

Washington and London: they jacked up consumption taxes while

reducing taxes on those with high incomes. When Socialists won stun-
ning victories in the 1989 parliamentary elections for the upper house,
it was a warning shot. But the "octopus did not change course.
"

Stronger reactions erupted in the United States. Books appeared

with titles that identified Japan's "Threat to America," and at times even
identified that threat as "war." In 1988, the U.S. Congress prepared for
a trade war. It passed the Omnibus Trade measure bristUng with retalia-
tory weapons, notably the so-called Super 301 provision that gave the
President extended power to retaliate against those he considered
unfair traders. The bill, in Shultz's phrase, "had Japan in its sights."

When the two nations tried to cooperate in technology transfers (as

cooperating in building the advanced FSX fighter plane), each attacked
the other for holding back information. In 1987, Foreign Minister Abe
Shintaro lamented that the U.S. -Japan trade relationship "is at its worst
since the war."^^
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 8 1

On both sides, racism further corrupted the relationship. An extreme

form struck Rhode Island. In 1946, Victory Over Japan Day of August
14 became a legal holiday in many states. By 1975, however, every state
had abolished the holiday except Rhode Island. When a state represen-
tative tried in 1985 to rename it World Peace Day, she lost overwhelm-

ingly; her co-sponsors were called "traitor" and "Communist." In 1989,

observers at legislative hearings wore American Legion and Veteran-of-

Foreign-Wars paraphernalia as they swore at "J^ps" and waved photos
of Pearl Harbor. A woman at Brown University was attacked when she
identified herself as Japanese. Another repeal attempt in 1992 suffered

defeat by an even larger margin than in 1985.^^

Clashes broke out as well over policies toward volatile regions of the
globe. In 1986, the U.S. Congress condemned South Africa's apartheid

policies by imposing tough economic sanctions. Washington officials

warned others not to fill the void left by departing U.S. business. Tokyo
signaled cooperation by cutting off imports of South African iron and
steel. Japanese goods and business people nevertheless continued to

move South Africa; they even secretly sold a $50 million steel plant
into
to a Pretoria company. Japan's firms were widely criticized for selling
computers and Land Rovers to South African police and military. By
January 1988, Japan had become the largest economic partner of the
condemned South African regime. ^^

"Tne Cold War Is Over, tne Japanese W^on"

Differences over South Africa demonstrated larger differences between

American and Japanese priorities (and values) in the post-Cold War
world after 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev's post-1985 reforms laid bare the
weaknesses within the Communist bloc. Germany stunningly reunited
in 1989-90. The Soviet Union itself finally imploded and disappeared
on December 25, 1991. Americans and Japanese found their world, and
their relationship, under new strains. The U.S. economy stagnated.
Millions of Americans discovered their jobs endangered by reduced
defense budgets —and rising tides of Japanese products. In mid-1989,
polls revealed that 68 percent of Americans believed Japan's economic
threat was greater than the Soviet military danger. ^^
At this historic moment, Japan's political leadership began to
unravel — slowly at first, then with a speed nearly as surprising as the
decline of the Cold War. Nakasone's LDP had won three hundred lower
house seats in the 1986 election. But his resignation in late 1987, a
THE CLASH 3 8 2

highly unpopular tax reform enacted by his successor, Takeshita

Noboru, and stories of LDP corruption led to a surprising setback in
1989. For the first time, the LDP lost its majority in the upper House
of Councilors.
Takeshita, son of a sake brewer, had risen through LDP ranks as part
of Waseda University's old-boy network. He had been schooled by his
powerful father-in-law, Kanemaru Shin, a top-rank LDP powerbroker.
In May 1989, Kanemaru and Takeshita touched wealthy friends to raise
$14.5 million in just two hours for the sake of the son-in-laws career.
Observers nodded when Takeshita's cabinet filled with LDP old boys.
Then news began. The prime minister admitted that he, along
the bad
with Nakasone and other political fixers, had received large amounts of
money from Recruit Corporation (a services firm that placed temporary
workers). Recruit bought politicians and some bureaucrats in the free
marketplace that was elite Japanese politics. Takeshita's successor, Uno
Sosuke (another son of a sake brewer), held power for all of two months
before a forty-year-old former geisha testified that Uno had paid her for
sex during an affair four years earlier. That women's groups played a
role in forcing Uno to resign was notable in a nation where politicians
had dismissed the small feminist movement.^'*
As the LDP staggered, the terminus of the Cold War tore at the
party's leaders much as it tore at Republicans in the United States:

anti-communism could no longer be used to hold together groups that

differed on sensitive domestic issues. In 1989, Emperor Hirohito's death
and the end of the sixty-three-year-long Showa era further disoriented
the country's poUtics.
Uno's successors, Kaifu Toshiki and Miyazawa Kiichi, were strug-
gling with this new world when, in 1990—91, Japan suddenly faced U.S.
demands war against Iraq.
to join a Kaifu, another link in the Waseda
University old-boy chain, had years before gotten into trouble by loudly
opposing U.S. occupation policies. He had, however, found a useful
patron, Mild Takeo ("Mr. Clean"), who swept Kaifu to the top. Once
there, Kaifu s limited political experience and lack of any foreign policy
background fatally weakened him. As noted below, his mishandling of
the Iraqi War further soured relations with Washington. In November
1991, seventy-two-year-old Miyazawa Kiichi took over. Miyazawa, as
finance minister in 1985, had negotiated the highly profitable Plaza
accord. But he had also been stained by the Recruit scandal, by associ-
ating withKanemaru, and by a questionable visit to a hotel room where
he barely escaped being killed by an attacker. In late 1992, corruption
brought down the top LDP powerbroker: Kanemaru was charged with
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 8 3

receiving as much as $50 million from contributors linked to organized

^"^
crime.
More a financial cesspool than a political party, the LDP split. Under
the lead of Ozawa Ichiro, the Japanese Renewal Party claimed to
demand real reform, including bringing the bureaucracy under control
and conducting a more aggressive foreign policy. Japan had to become
as Ozawa phrased it in his best-selling Blueprint
'*
a normal nation,' "

for a New Japan. Ozawa w^as a younger version of Kanemaru; but, faster
on his feet, Ozawa escaped many of the corruption charges. In Septem-
ber 1993 elections, the truncated LDP lost power in the important lower
house for the first time since the "1955 system" went into place. A coali-
tion of new parties, Socialists, and Komeito (Clean Government Party)
formed. The left and the coalition rejoined what remained of the LDP
to insert a new prime minister. Indeed, four prime ministers moved
into —and out — of months. Japan, the historian Homma
office in eleven
Nagayo had accurately predicted in 1991, would endure a "borderless
"^^
economy and leaderless politics.
That "borderless economy" bent under new strains in the post-Cold
War era, as did the "leaderless politics." While prime ministers passed
through political revolving doors, bureaucrats quietly made policy with
even fewer domestic restraints. The head of Japan's largest supermarket
chain complained that regulations had become such that "You even
need approval to sell condoms in a vending machine." But the bureau-
cracy proved startlingly inept in handling the worst economic crisis
since World War II —and, indeed, was largely responsible for it.^'

As the yen's value soared after the 1985 Plaza agreement, the finance
ministry tried to cure the pain of Japan's exporters by easing monetary
restraints. Borrowing rapidly increased. Much of it bought up real
estate. The value of the property, moreover, was set less by the market
than by price indexes compiled by several bureaucratic agencies which
established land prices to suit their own interests. The result was chaos
and illusion, boom and then Economist David Asher described
crash.
the climax: "a speculative bubble of a magnitude greater than previously
experienced anywhere in the world." This was not hyperbole. "By 1988,"
Asher noted, "the paper value of all Japanese property had risen to four
times that of all land in the United States — a nation 25 times its size."

In theory, the Imperial Palace grounds in the middle of Tokyo equaled

in value all of California. (No one could test that theory because the
Imperial Palace grounds were not for sale.) These lands were then used
as security to purchase stocks. So the stock market soared in a trajectory
reminiscent of the New York Stock Exchange in 1928. Many small firms,
 —
THE CLASH 3 8 4

however, proved uncompetitive. As loans became worthless, the bubble

in real estate popped,
be followed in 1990-91 by the pricking of the
to

stock market bubble. That market plummeted 20 percent before the

government began ineffectively shoring it up.^^
Part of Japan's problem paralleled a similar adjustment forced upon
the United States and areas of Western Europe in the 1980s moving —
the economy from manufacturing to services and new technologies. In
one sense, Japan managed this shift better than its competitors, for
unemployment reached only a little over 3 percent by the early 1990s
according to official figures —while the United States suffered twice
that figure. In parts of Europe, it was 12 percent. Meanwhile, Japan's
trade surpluses —and American tempers — rose as the bureaucrats
allowed the keiretsu to coordinate suppliers, producers, and bankers
behind closed doors. ^^
U.S. officials shouted and threatened, but other than ineffectively
reducing the discount rate to an unbelievable 0.5 percent, supposedly
to stir up domestic demand, Tokyo's unelected administrators stayed
true to course. And why not? The bureaucrats who actually drafted the
nation's laws came from the cream of university graduates, rose through
a cutthroat competitive system, and had presided over the "miracle"
that uplifted their nation from bombed rubble to the globe's second-
richest economy. On a per capita basis, it was probably the richest.

Their accomplishment, however, was bitterly debated in the United

States. The debate revolved not only around the "miracle but the value '

of "free, " less regulated markets. The economist Robert J. Samuelson,

for example, argued that Japan's more controlled post-1991 economy
was growing at one-tenth the speed of America's open-market system.
The "
'control freaks' '

of Tokyo's bureaucracy "have met the 'market'

and lost," Samuelson concluded. Close observers of Japan, such as
Chalmers Johnson and Clyde Prestowitz, considered such comments
myopic because they confused several years of adjustment with forty
years of success. Such criticism as Samuelson's also missed the admin-
istrators' long-term policies that seemed to be putting Japan into an

excellent position for competition in the twenty-first century.^*^

As the Hammer
and Sickle was lowered for the last time at the
Kremlin, Chalmers Johnson observed: "The Cold War is over, the Japa-
nese won." President George Bush disagreed. "By the grace of God,"
Bush told the nation in early 1992, "America won the Cold War" and
was "the undisputed leader of the age." In truth, both Tokyo and Wash-
ington officials had been slow to comprehend the Cold War's termina-
tion and its meaning. Bush never shared a central belief of some Tokyo
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 8 5

officials that the new world would be To the contrary, and

less violent.

to the Kaifu government's shock, the President had invaded Panama in

late 1989 with 27,000 troops to remove an obnoxious dictator. (In the

bargain, he challenged the media that had labeled him "a wimp.") Both
Americans and Japanese thus believed what their own strengths led
them to believe. The United States, with an unrivaled military and
beleaguered economy, foresaw a world of spreading chaos unless U.S.
force could be made credible. Japan, with its "miracle and limited mili- '

tary, foresaw new, intensified economic competition. Then came the

war with Iraq.^^

The Gull War: A Case Study 01 tne Clash

The war broke out on August i, 1990, when Iraqi armies invaded neigh-
boring Kuwait over disputes that included territorial boundaries and
petroleum pricing. Both Japan and the United States had quietly
befriended Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. The Japa-
nese were either the dominant or second-largest trading partner of Iraq
during the decade (as, indeed, they had become of nearly every Middle
East nation since the 1973-74 oil embargo trauma). The United States
supported Saddam Hussein in his bloody, nearly decade-long war
against revolutionary Iran, the nation most despised by Americans. The
Reagan and Bush administrations even pumped in several billion dollars
of agricultural credits so the Iraquis could purchase U.S. products,
especially rice, and sent an impressive array of non-nuclear weapons to
the dictator. Iraq's aggression thus caught both Tokyo and Washington

officials by surprise. ^^
Those officials had talked with each other too little about these (and
other) emerging problems. Between 1989 and 1993, Secretary of State
James Baker visited Tokyo the same number of times he visited the
capital of Kazakhstan. Bush's National Security Council was notably
strong on arms control issues and notably weak in the number of offi-
cials attending to Asian developments. None of this escaped the Japa-
nese.
The Iraqi War erupted, moreover, in the context of an especially
notable American-Japanese clash. The occasion for this clash was, as
usual,Chinese developments. China's post-1978 opening to capitalism
had spawned an energetic movement supporting political rights and
condemning Communist Party corruption. In May 1989, over a million
people gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding reform. On
THE CLASH 3^6

June 5, 1989, party hard-liners used tanks to end the demonstrations. A

massacre followed. The number of killed ran above seven hundred, but
exact casualties remain unknown.
Bush soon condemned the crackdown, gave sanctuary to prominent
Chinese dissidents, cut off military sales, canceled high-level U.S.-
China meetings, and declared he opposed loans to China from interna-
tional agencies. As American business deals in China were put on hold,
Washington pressured Tokyo to follow suit and, above all, not try to fill
the vacuum left by the United States. The new Uno government, in
power only two days before the massacre, responded sluggishly. Two
weeks after the slaughter, it finally announced a "delay" in its aid pro-
gram. Japanese firms continued to do business in China, even as the
government wrung its hands and asked for self-restraint so Japan would
not be seen "as the kind of country that takes advantage of other peo-
ple's troubles." U.S. condemnation of Tokyo's equivocation was
severe.
The condemnation, however, contained a dose of hypocrisy. In 1990,
Americans learned that after the Tiananmen massacre. Bush sent top-
level officials to discuss with Chinese leaders how to restore normal
relations. Arguing that China's growing military and economic power
could not be ignored, the President refused to cancel the most-favored-
nation (MFN) China access to U.S. markets. He did
status that gave
so even though Congress had mandated that MFN should be extended
only to nations with improving human rights records. When Congress
moved to retaliate against China, Bush vetoed the attempt. The Japa-
nese began to feel they were watching a lower-voltage repeat of the 1971
"Nixon shocks. They moved quickly to take the lead (and gain credit
"

in Beijing) in easing international sanctions by releasing $6 billion of

governmental credit for China. Plans for the new Emperor's trip to

Beijing in 1991 remained on course. By 1993, a fresh wave of Japanese

money had flooded into cheap labor Asian countries, but this time more
^"^
went into China than into any Southeast Asia nation.
In this context, on August i, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Bush initially hesitated. He found it difficult suddenly to throw into
reverse a decade of pro-Iraqi policies. But pushed especially by Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain (whose banks heavily
depended on Kuwaiti biUions), Bush imposed economic sanctions. He
also began a military buildup in Saudi Arabia. Having finally taken the
plunge, Bush demanded that Kaifu throw him a life jacket: the Presi-
dent personally called the prime minister to ask for money. The request
hit a stone wall. The finance ministry was determined to keep govern-
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 8 7

mental expenditures low. Japanese recalled, moreover, other ventures

when both they and Americans had gone thousands of miles to impose
their military might, only to retreat in disgrace. A large number of Japa-
nese also believed U.S. society was so decadent that it could not effec-
tively wage war. The 1986 Challenger tragedy in space, for example,
seemed to exemplify American technological decline. Just before Iraq's
invasion, a Tokyo foreign ministry official publicly warned that in an
anarchic post-Cold War world, the United States —
given its enormous
—
budget deficits could not prop up international order on its own.
Other observers pointed out that, after all, it was not in Japan's interest
to anger Saddam: about 12 percent of its oil came from Iraq. Iraq also
owed Japan nearly $2.5 billion in loan repayments. MITI wanted this
money, but wanted no part of any U.S. effort that hurt exports, raised
oil prices, and damaged trade. Finally, within weeks of the invasion,

Iraq seized 141 Japanese, stranded by the crisis, as virtual hostages.

(About 103 Americans were also held.)^^
Kaifu, if he hoped to cooperate with Bush, faced a steep mountain
to climb — a mountain loaded with traps set by his own bureaucracy.
He was, moreover, a weak member of a bitterly factionalized and cor-
rupt party who was elevated to the top because he was relatively honest
and presentable. But he also presided over the worlds second-largest
—
economy and the globe's third-largest military budget. Bush expected
help from such a well-endowed partner, especially since thousands of
American soldiers had provided security in Japan since 1951. Now, the
President implied, it was payback time.
Kaifu promised money and materiel, but by mid-September 1990
only 800 vehicles had left Japan to help 200,000 troops Bush had rushed
into the Middle East. The U.S. House of Representatives condemned
such cheapness. By an overwhelming vote, it demanded that Tokyo pay
the entire $4.5 billion cost of maintaining American troops in Japan,
rather than the 50 percent currently being paid. Kaifu tried to respond
with a historic bill that would, for the first time since 1945, send Japa-
nese troops abroad, albeit unarmed and used only for logistics and med-
ical care. Even this proposal ran into a storm of opposition led by

Socialist leader Doi Takako. She warned that armed soldiers would fol-
low the unarmed "as surely as night follows day." Asian capitals agreed.
Kaifu 's support from the pro-American foreign ministry was no match
for MITI and finance ministry opposition. Outspoken opponents
echoed the views of Morita Akio and Ishihara Shintaro. Their best-
selling The Japan That Can Say "No" argued it was time to teach Ameri-
cans who had the power. U.S. missiles, after all, depended on Japanese-
THE CLASH 3 8 8

made semiconductors and guidance systems. If "Japan sold chips to the

Soviet Union and stopped selling them to the U.S., this would upset
the entire military balance." The moment had arrived to use Japan's
technology triumphs to discipline the Americans. ^^
November, the Japanese struck a deal with Saddam Hussein
In early
to release many of their hostages. Americans damned the deal for
breaking the anti-Iraqi front that Bush had so painstakingly built. Kaifu
insisted that no concessions were given Iraq. Later that month, how-
ever, he gave up his plan to send unarmed soldiers into the war zone.

More criticism cascaded down Capitol Hill. Summarizing his view of

Kaifus policies, Senator John McCain
AR) labeled them "con-
(R:
temptible tokenism." Senator Alphonse D'Amato (R: NY) claimed
Tokyo's policy was again 'guided by greed and avarice." Many Japanese
agreed. The debate that erupted throughout Japan during the autumn
of 1990 was profound. Critics of Kaifu s policies declared, in the words
of one, that "The Government is behaving like a rich man whose
neighbour's house is on fire. Its attitude is astonishing; here's some
money, but please don't ask for any water. "^^
At Bush's insistence, Kaifu finally pried
$4 billion out of the legisla-
ture. When U.S. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney refused to exclude
using nuclear weapons, however, Japan's criticism of American plans
again swelled. Then, to the surprise of many Japanese (and Americans),
the U.S. -led coaHtion softened Iraqi troops with a month of bombings
before launching a massive ground assault in February 1991 that liber-
ated Kuwait. The war ended in one hundred hours. During the bomb-
ing, Washington asked Japan to pay more of the expenses for stationing
U.S. soldiers in Okinawa and the home islands (the Japanese agreed),
and for another $10 billion to support the war. Kaifu squeezed $9 billion
—
from the Diet, but only on March 6 weeks after the spectacular U.S.-
led victory. Even then, the prime minister suffered for cooperating with
Bush. Kaifu was said to have a "Bush-button phone." He lasted until
November 1991. Before departing, he did send four minesweepers to
join eight other nations in clearing operations. Japanese business lead-
^^
ers urged this step to sweeten U.S. relations.
The American triumph led some Japanese to reassess both their view
of U.S. dechne and the role of force. But the victory created fears as

well: in mid-1991, for the first time since 1945, more Japanese viewed
Americans rather than Russians as the greatest threat to Japan's secu-
rity. As for the Americans, polls indicated that nearly one-third of those

asked had lost respect for Japan. Some irony existed. U.S. officials,
including Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell, had harbored
 TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 8 9

doubts during the war. Could the nation use force effectively in the

aftermath of the Vietnam tragedy? But in the end, Americans and their
partners committed sons and daughters to the battlefield while Japa-
nese politicians and bureaucrats argued over money. Bush pointedly did
not invite Japan to Washington for the victory celebration. Nor did the
Kuwaiti government mention the Japanese when it issued a public let-
^^
ter of thanks for being liberated.
These 1989-92 events —the end of the Cold War, the LDP's disinte-
gration, the bursting of the speculative bubble, the bitter arguments
over the action in Tiananmen Square, the fallout from the Iraqi war
marked a major turn in Japan's postwar history and U.S. -Japan relations.
Kaifu was not the only political casualty. The anti-war Socialist Party
endured major losses in spring 1991 elections. Ms. Doi had to step down
as leader. The victorious LDP, however, also suffered as it split in 1993.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi War generated pressure that breached post-1945
defense policies. In June 1992, the Diet passed an International Peace
Cooperation law that for the first time permitted Japan to participate in
United Nations peacekeeping operations. (The Japanese already ranked
second only to the United States in financial contributions to the
United Nations.) Japanese troops moved into peacekeeping and
humanitarian operations in Cambodia (where Japan's firms were aggres-
sively exploring for oil), Mozambique, and Rwanda. It was a victory for
the long-beleaguered foreign ministry. It also led to Tokyo's requests
for a permanent seat (and the power of the veto) on the UN Security
Council.^^
Japan's coming to terms with its new international role did not mean
it was coming to terms with the United States. The clash with the

Americans instead intensified as a new president. Bill CHnton, took

power early in 1993.

jt Tne 1990s: American Policy in Asia

Begins with Japan"

The on the competition that raged between "free-

conflict centered
market capitalism" (the United States) and 'non-capitalist market econ-
omies" (the phrase used by Sakakibara Eisuke of the finance ministry to
describe Japan's —
and, he believed, the larger evolving Asian system). —
Each system had its advocates, but both sides agreed that Asian mar-
kets held the key to a prosperous future. By 1993, Americans' two-way
trade across the Pacific reached $369 billion, over 50 percent more than
THE CLASH i 9

their transatlantic trade. Exports to Asia pro\ided more than 2 million

U.S. jobs in the embattled manufacturing sector. East Asian economies
making up 4 percent of the world's gross national product in i960 soared
to 25 percent in 1991 and headed for 3c percent by the year 2000. The

contest focused on the 6cc million Southeast Asians and Chinas 1.5
billion potential customers. The diplomatic implications of the contest
became clear to Clinton early in his presidency: L .S. business success-
fully insisted that he establish diplomatic relations with \'ietnam's
Communist government, largely so .Americans could have some chance
of competing with Japanese who had been working in \ietnams mar-
^
kets since the 196CS and 197CS.
Japan's movement into Southeast Asia w as unrelenting. Betw een the
mid-1980s and 1992, the percentage of its exports going to the United
States dropped from 40 to 28 percent, while those to Southeast Asia
rose by half, 20 to 31 percent. Simultaneously, the Japanese moved car
and computer factories into the region. Japans ex^ports to China dou-
bled during 1991—92 in dollar terms. Asahi Shimhiin correspondent
Funabashi Yoichi accurately described these trends as demonstrating
^
"The Asianization of Asia. "

For its part. U.S. trade and investment also continued to flow into
China, despite Beijing's miserable human rights record. CUnton ignored
his own 1992 campaign pledges by granting China most-favored-nation
status in U.S. markets. The competition for China, now the world's
third-largest economy and perhaps its largest by 2020. left little alterna-

tive. As Chnton's special trade representative. Mickey Kantor, obsened

in 1995. "I have one job: to protect .American workers and create mar-
kets for U.S. products and exports. I cannot control what Chinas lead-
ership does. That is none of my business. But the United States
"

seemed to have little choice since, in the World Bank's words. Japan
was "quietly replacing the L .S. as the key partner in the development of
East Asia." Such quiet replacement led to this outburst from Assistant
Secretary' of State \\ inston Lord in 1996: "One of our biggest problems
in China is that our friends in Europe and Japan hold our coats while
we take on the Chinese [on such issues as human rights and nuclear
arms proliferation], and they gobble up the contracts."^
Secretary- of State Warren Christopher's statement in 1995 that
*'.-\merican policy in Asia begins with Japan thus seemed to have sev-

eral meanings. For one, the U.S. -Japan securit}" and economic relation-
ships were the axis for W ashington's overall approach to Asia. A second
meaning seemed to be that by 1994—95, .Americans learning from the —
Japanese —believed that sacrificing market share for the sake of
"^
human
rights was quixotic, not to mention bad business.
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 9 1

Christopher's observation also meant that the 47,000 U.S. troops in

Japan formed the Hnchpin of Washington's poHcies in Asia. U.S.
Department of Defense officials viewed the troops as a guarantee of
Asian stabiHty. Other officials saw them as one of the few remaining
levers the United States could effectively exert in the vast region's

affairs. Asians, including the Chinese, hoped they would be a check on

possible Japanese militarism. For their part, Japanese willingly paid
about $5 to $7 billion annually for the U.S. contingent because it saved
them billions more in military expenditures while reassuring those
Asians Japan wanted as customers.
In all, Washington and Tokyo officials viewed the security arrange-
ment as sacrosanct. They agreed that it had to be shielded against the
vitriol emitted by the trade disputes. Growing animosity over trade was

therefore not only a danger arising from the clash of two capitalist sys-
tems but a danger to the U.S. -Japan security relationship. Thus among
the paradoxes that characterized American policy toward Japan was this
one: U.S. military men and women were stationed in Japan to keep in
place a system with which many American business men and women
found it increasingly difficult to compete.
Since 1945, U.S. poHcymakers had not planned it this way. They
fought wars in Asia for the sake of an open Asia. Non-tariff administra-
tive obstacles and the keiretsu networks nevertheless kept Japan's mar-
ket heavily protected. In 1992, President Bush led a delegation of
powerful U.S. auto executives to Tokyo to demand better cooperation
in trade. It did not help when Bush suddenly became ill at dinner and
vomited on the Japanese prime minister. The President nevertheless
succeeded in forcing Japan to pledge to buy more U.S. auto parts. The
purchases, such as they were, did little to shrink the ballooning U.S.
^^
trade deficit.
Initially, the Clinton administration seemed to be more realistic. The
President himself read books and learned from the past. He also
appointed Wall Street veterans whose firms knew Japanese techniques
firsthand. Clinton undertook a three-front offensive. On one front he
supported new Asian regional organizations, especially APEC, to
ensure Americans would not be excluded from such important forums.
(Bush had mistrusted APEC, in which the United States was
initially

in a white minority, and instead stressed the need for open, bilateral
trade arrangements.)
Clinton's second front was notable: he began to develop a series of
government-private-sector relationships avowedly aimed at competing
with Japan's (and some Europeans') profitable government-private-sec-
tor linkages. In truth, of course, the United States had long followed
 ' —
THE CLASH 3 9 2

such an industrial policy. The Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private

Investment Corporation (that provided insurance for overseas transac-
tions), massive subsidies to farmers and corporations that sold abroad,

and especially the mammoth military budget — all were government

contributions to U.S. entrepreneurs. Economist John Kenneth Gal-
braith's observation that the American version of socialism appeared
when the corporate jets descended on Washington was interesting in
this context.

Clinton moved to expand this relationship. He announced a program

to commit $150 miUion to help match Japanese and European export
subsidies. Some $3 billion of loan guarantees were extended to U.S.
shipbuilders.With fanfare, the President initiated a ten-year partner-
ship between Washington and Detroit to build a "super car" that could
dominate global markets. (Foreign automakers, who made 25 percent
of all U.S. cars and employed 34,000 Americans, were omitted from
these plans.) "Not since the days when the American Navy was sent to
open up trading ports Japan and China.
in Da\id E. Sanger wTote
. .
,"

in the New York Times, "has the United States made such a concerted
"'^
effort to win deals for American companies.
But Clinton also stumbled. Beset by political pressures and concern
about the stock and bond markets, his administration feared any break-
down of trade talks with Japan — a fear Japanese bureaucrats fully
exploited. His offensive on the third front was a mere replay of the old
tried-and-failed tactic of talking the dollar down, and the yen up, so
U.S. exports would be more competitive. That tactic had seldom
reduced the trade gap for any length of time. A finance ministry
researcher was quoted as saying, 'The Clinton Administration was full

of suckers waiting to be manipulated from the word go."'

The and the Republicans' land-

failure of this monetar\^ approach,
slide victory in the 1994 congressional elections, forced and allowed —
Clinton to change tactics. He directly assaulted Japan's regulated mar-
kets. Its political party system in chaos, its "bubble economy" punc-

tured, Japan seemed As Karl van Wolferen phrased it, the

\ailnerable.
Japanese had entered an "age of uncertainty" that produced "a disorien-
tation without precedent in postwar Japan. The Japanese who had "

bought up valuable American properties during the 1980s (especially in

Hollywood) found their investments bleeding money and themselves
veering toward bankruptcy Between 1989 and 1993, Japan's investments
in the United States sank 50 percent, to less than $15 billion. At home,

Japan became the first industrial country since the 1930s to suffer gen-
eral price deflation. Clinton and Kantor therefore maneuvered into this
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 9 3

battleground confident they could force Japan to open its market for

autos and car parts. The 1986 deal on semiconductors, which had speci-
fied —and ended with success
numerical targets for U.S. firms entering

the Japanese market — provided model. a

But the Japanese government, led by former Finance Minister Has-
himoto Ryutaro, refused to retreat. Tokyo's bureaucracy would not toler-

ate a repeat of the semiconductor experience. The nation's economic

problems signaled that a ''severe change" was overtaking it, ''the kind of
transformation that takes place once every half century," as the manag-
ing director of Japan's Industrial Bank phrased it. The trauma only made
protecting the mercantilistic system that had produced the miracle
more important. was worth noting that even amid the bursting of the
It

"bubble," Osaka's economy alone was larger than Canada's. It was also
worth noting that even at the depths of the depression in late 1994,

Japan continued to pour money into basic research that was, in terms
of percentage of the gross national product, several times higher than
U.S. research monies. The Japanese were using the economic down-
turn to position themselves to dominate technology markets in the
twenty-first century.^^
Hashimoto refused to bend very far to Clinton's demands. The Presi-
dent threatened prohibitive tariffson Japanese luxury cars sold in the
United States. (After all, R. Taggart Murphy observed, Lexus dealers
probably voted RepubHcan anyway.) A deal resulted, although not solely
because of this threat. Many U.S. and Japanese experts feared that
managing trade by setting numerical targets could reverse fifty years of
open trade and even undermine U.S. liberal trading principles. Japa-
nese business wanted no damage done to long-term relations. U.S.
exporters, such as Boeing and agribusinesses, had begun to penetrate
Japan and feared retaliation. Both sides exerted pressure for a deal. So
did intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Tokyo's foreign
ministry — all of whom worried that the acid seeping from the economic

relationship might eat away security ties.^^

Hashimoto succeeded in getting an agreement in which Japan gave
little away. He used his achievement to propel himself into the leader-

ship of a revamped LDP coalition. Hashimoto became the first prime

minister since the 1940s who made his reputation by repeatedly and
publicly bashing, rather than cooperating with, Americans. As for Clin-
ton's mini-industrial policy, its results could only be assessed much
later. Unlike the policies that shaped the miracle, the U.S. approach
had no comprehensive long-term goals or sense of priorities; lacked a
politically insulated and elite bureaucracy to carry out such a plan; and
THE CLASH 3 9 4

was constantly vulnerable to powerful interest groups of political and

corporate leaders whose patience for payoffs was usually short. Japan,
moreover, had created one of the most powerful, well-financed lobbies
in Washington to ensure that any changes would not unduly harm its
interests. A similar pro-American lobby had no chance of operating
successfully in Tokyo, if for no other reason than that it could not effec-
tively penetrate bureaucratic decision making.
Despite all the attempts to protect the security arrangements from
the trade talks' bitterness, those arrangements too came under pressure.
A test case arose in North and South Korea. Both had
memories vivid
of forty years of Japanese colonialism after 1905. Since Japan had nor-
malized relations with the capitalist South Koreans in 1965, it had
worked to preserve the peninsula's status quo. Japanese influence in
the Communist North grew from curious roots: the $1 to $2 bilhon that
300,000 Koreans working in Japan sent annually to their relatives in the
impoverished region. Much of the cash came from profits of Korean-
owned Pachinko gambling parlors which, as it happened, also provided
major support for Japan's Socialist Party. In 1993-94, the United States
condemned North Korea's plans to build nuclear weapons plants, and
for barring international inspectors from the sites. Clinton moved to
impose tough economic sanctions, perhaps a blockade. Talk of military
action swirled. But Clinton encountered Pachinko diplomacy. Tokyo
officials feared that cutting off the flow of gambling profits might create
dangerous unrest in both North Korea and Japan. The nation's largest
hberal newspaper, Asahi Shimhun, also worried that cooperation in
imposing tough sanctions would renew memories of Japanese milita-
on
rism.
The crisis eased when North Korea admitted international inspectors
in return for massive economic help. The episode revealed how two
demands whipsawed the U.S. -Japan security arrangements. Washing-
ton wanted Japan to become more involved abroad, to become, in Oza-
wa's phrase, a "normal country." The other demand emanated from
Asian capitals and many Japanese, but also, paradoxically, from Ameri-
cans too. They demanded that Japan's military be kept under tight
restraints. Its advanced nuclear power and missile programs had to be
minutely watched and rigidly controlled. In 1994, Prime Minister Hata
Tsutomu had not eased those when he
declared that ''J^P^^
anxieties
has the capability to possess nuclear weapons, but has not made them."
The resulting uproar forced Hata to deny that Japan had any such
^
"capability."^
In 1995, the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three U.S. servicemen
TKe End of an Era (Since 1973) 3 9 5

on Okinawa further strained the security arrangements. Investigations

revealed a string of such crimes in Okinav\/a and Japan. In Japanese
society, rape ruined marriage prospects and brought special stigma to
the woman's family and school, even when she was an innocent victim.
Japanese took to the streets and legislative podiums to demand the
reduction, if not removal, of U.S. bases. Washington officials feared,
however, that such a retreat could unsettle other parts of Asia, while
forcing themselves to rethink their entire security policy. "Security is a
lot like oxygen," one Pentagon official declared in 1995. "You tend not
to notice it until you begin to lose it, but once that occurs there's noth-
"^^
ing else you'll think about.
Larger questions remained. Did the post-1945 U.S. -Japan relation-
ship already exist on a life-support system? At the end of an era, was a
quite different relationship waiting to be born?
 Conclusio n

Ine Clasn: Tne Present

in Retrospect

Any helpful answer to those two questions —whether the

post-1945 U.S. -Japan relationship was finally passing from the
scene, and whether in the post-Cold War world a quite different
relationship would replace it —required first understanding the
relationship's history.
In 1852, President Millard Fillmore instructed Commodore
Matthew C. Perry to deliver an unusual letter to the Japanese
Emperor. ''We know that the ancient laws of your imperial majes-
ty's government do not allow of foreign trade, except with the Chi-
nese and the Dutch, " the note observed. But Fillmore implored
the Emperor between" Japan and the United
to allow "a free trade
States. In 1989, as Secretary of State James Baker III recalled, the
Bush administration took power with the "goal" of turning "Japan
from an inward-looking, mercantilist economic giant to an out-
ward-looking economic and political power with strong ties to the
United States." If only these two documents formed the record of
U.S. -Japan relations, observers would conclude that little changed
^
between Americans and Japanese during 136 years.
In reality, few relationships have been as eventful. Yet Fillmore's
and Baker's words reveal fundamental themes that have shaped
the relationship: the United States was determined to push for an
open Japan and, beyond that, an open Asia. The Japanese were
determined to break free of Western constraints and exert maxi-

3 9 6
Tne Clasn: Tne Present in Retrospect 3 9 7

mum control over their foreign relations (and hence their domestic
order) by closing the door to foreign goods and capital. At historic turn-

ing points (1910-15, 1918-22, 1931—45, the 1970s), the conflict between
the two approaches centered on China.
In the 1990s, U.S. officials insisted on policies that, with rare excep-
tions, their predecessors had been thumping for over 140 years: a fair-

field-and-no-favor (in John Hay's words) for developing the bottomless

markets of Asia; and a political approach in which a Western power
(before World War I Great Britain; afterwards, the United States) was
to be the Japan the junior, partner. The heyday of that dual
senior,
policy occurred in the 1920s. But the relationship broke apart when its
central link, the dollar, disintegrated after 1929. The Japanese vowed
never to be so dependent again, and — ironically with General Douglas
MacArthur's help in the late 1940s — they rigidly controlled their own
capital flows. A 1947 internal Ministry of Finance analysis concluded
that since Japanese ownership of "basic industries "was ''essential for
the independence of the Japanese economy ... we must be vigilant
in order to prevent foreign capital from gaining control of company
management.'^
The post-1951 clashes should not have surprised. By the 1960s, Japan
had recovered spectacularly from the war. Japanese, like Americans,
were shaped by their history as they vigorously pursued independence.
An elite bureaucracy, which a century earlier applied the ethic of the
samurai to the Meiji era, was reconstituted in the late 1940s with the
U.S. occupation officials' blessing to rebuild the economy and generate
exports. These administrators dominated economic and foreign policy.
The economy was shaped by the keiretsu, the corporate families that
informally linked powerful banks and industries. The keiretsus control
over capital allowed the Japanese both to plan longer-term and go far in
realizing their long-sought goal of economic autonomy. Japan's policies
focused on Asia before World War II; on the United States after that
war; and, again, increasingly on a very different Asia in the post-1973
era.

The United States weaker central state whose

meanwhile created a
bureaucracy was more maligned than systematically empowered. In the
late nineteenth century, Americans had enacted a series of protection-

ist, mercantilist measures (including steep tariffs and huge if selective

subsidies). These policies produced the highest savings rate in recent

U.S. history and an economic miracle that made Americans the globe's
premier economic power by the early twentieth century. Because they
had such power to compete, Americans were determined to open up
THE CLASH ' ?, 9 ^

international trade and capital flows. They believed that liberal eco-
nomic policies best allowed the world marketplace to generate and dis-
tribute wealth. At home, competition was to be the rule; not keiretsu
informal family and corporate networks but antitrust laws were to be
the guideposts. depended on swirHng markets rather than
If capital

steady savings, this was all right: quarterly reports were a welcome regu-
lar check on producers —
and, as well, encouraged Americans to switch
swiftly to stay on the cutting edge of ever-changing technology.
U.S. officials thought globally. Japan, like the rest of Asia, was to
be integrated into worldwide policies. When Tokyo tried to close off
neighboring regions, as in 1904-15 or in the 1930s, conflict with the
United States accelerated. After 1989, a central question became
whether Asian regional groups (such as ASEAN and APEC) presaged
a fresh conflict. The new East Asian Economic Caucus was described
by The Economist as "an Asian-only version of APEC invented to
exclude America." Japan meanwhile wondered during the 1990s
whether NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement, com-
prised of the United States, Canada, and Mexico) was a Washington-
directed attempt to exclude Japanese exporters from the richest western
hemisphere markets. Americans rephed that NAFTA had been in the
works for at least eighty years, and that their market remained the
world s most open. The United States viewed Japan's complaints about
NAFTA or U.S. attempts to protect domestic producers as the height
of hypocrisy. For their part, Japanese saw NAFTA and massive U.S.
help to industry as examples of American practices not following Ameri-
can preaching.^
As James Baker's plaintive hopes of 1989 intimated, the United
States had been trying, it seemed forever, to turn Japan outward. When
Japan obliged — as in 1905, 1915—20, or 1931—45 — it did so for its own
reasons. The results were not happy After 1945, nevertheless, Ameri-
cans gave it another try —not least because, as a top U.S. Japan hand
observed, the Far East had long since become the American 'Tar West,"
or, more "Near West." Tokyo was the hub of U.S. plans to
accurately,
integrate that Near West into a larger world trading system. By 1993, the
hub functioned so well that Japanese trade and investment dominated
Southeast Asia and flowed into China. The Japanese enjoyed a per
capita income of $31,450, compared with $24,135 in the United States.
Of the 500 largest firms around the globe, 151 were American, 149 Japa-
nese.'^

As book has argued, the causes of the U.S. -Japan clashes have
this

deep historical roots. The roots might be controlled. They will not be
Tne Clasn: Tne Present in Retrospect 3 9 9

eradicated. The two different kinds of capitalism create clashes on the

cultural level as well. An increasingly powerful finance ministry official,
Sakakibara Eisuke, declared in the 1990s that Japan was a non-capital-
ist, market-based economy, while the United States was a capitalist,

market-based economy. He added and some of his new national-

that he
ist colleagues intended to make the differences between the two sys-
tems even greater.^
When the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, "it was as if the curtain fell

on the 1980s," as one foreign ministry official, Kuriyama Takakazu,

wrote in 1990. But the curtain did not on the fundamental causes
fall

of the post-1951 clashes between Americans and Japanese. As Kuriyama

himself prophesied, 'particularistic nationalisms" contained by the
Cold War burst out after 1989 to destabilize world affairs. Because of
the relative decline of their power, Americans could no longer "sustain
the international order alone." Kuriyama (who would serve as a pop-
. . .

ular ambassador to the United States between 1992 and 1995) hoped
for a reprise of the 1922 Washington Conference-type cooperation
this time with a happy ending. But he worried that because of the deep-

seated differences between the two capitalisms, strains would neverthe-

less intensify. Widely noted American experts on Japan, including Chal-

mers Johnson, James Fallows, Clyde Prestowitz, and R. Taggart

Murphy, largely agreed with Kuriyama s conclusions.^
That much of the conflict is due to centuries-old cultural differences
is apparent. Other causes, however, are too often lost. There is little

culturally based about U.S. free trade, "one-world" policies after 1945.
Until the early twentieth century, U.S. economic poHcies were shaped
more by mercantilist tariffs and heavy governmental involvement than
by any belief in free trade. In Japan, post-1945 industrial and social
cooperation contrasted sharply with the explosive struggles that pock-
—
marked pre-1945 years struggles that at times ended in violence and
assassinations. The lauded lifetime employment of the "miracle" did
not exist before World War II because, in part, factory employees were
often young women who worked briefly (and very cheaply) before mar-
riage, while labor organizations were smashed.

In the United States, freer trade and related economic poHcies after
World War II thus arose from a determination not to repeat the errors
of the 1930s. (Or as President Harry Truman phrased it in 1947, "We
can't go through the thirties again.") They also resulted from Americans'

once-in-a-millennia opportunity of uncontested hegemony in the capi-

talist world to benefit from open-market policies. Japanese officials sim-
ilarly learned from and adapted to their history. They concluded that
THE CLASH 4

the quest for order and independence that had ended so horribly in
1945 could be better achieved by suppressing the military and emphasiz-
ing the nation's talent for industrial organization. Yoshida's approach
replaced Yamagata's. Keiretsu replaced colonialism. By the 1980s, Japa-
nese governmental leadership bent to U.S. demands for fewer restric-

tions, but successful policies died slowly. As the historian Carol Gluck
has observed, opening Japan's heavily protected rice market, for exam-
ple, proceeded "kernel by kernel."^
Indeed, after fifty years of peace and frequent cooperation, Ameri-
cans and Japanese too often bashed each other with a fervor unknown,
say, in U.S. -German relations. The Japanese perspective on Americans,
concluded the Washington Posts correspondent in Tokyo, T R. Reid,
seemed to be that

You can kill your parents while they're eating ice cream in front of
the TV. You can ravage your wife. You can maim your husband. You
can pull out a gun big enough to kill a grizzly bear and blow the life

out of an innocent 16-year-old foreign exchange student who rings

your door on Halloween. You can do any of those things and then
find an American jur}^ that will let you get away with it.

All of these actual events had been featured on U.S. and Japanese
television. By 1995, Sakakibara Eisuke, head of the finance ministry's
international bureau, publicly claimed that any American attempt to
"reform Japanese capitahsm, given the violent nature of U.S. society,
"

"is nothing but an act of barbarism against our own cultural values."^
To help protect their cultural values, Japanese resurrected heroes
from their past. Saigo Takamori, who had led a samurai rebellion against
Western modernization in the 1870s, was glorified in a series of books
that sold 8.4 million copies. Even Lafcadio Hearn's work enjoyed a
revival because his love for traditional Japan made him, in the w^ords of

one Japanese author, "the most eloquent and truthful interpreter of the
"^
Japanese mind.
Thus the culture of the past was refurbished to defend the miracle
of the present against American-style modernization of the future. But,
of course, both sides manipulated the past. In 1995, as nations com-
memorated the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, several
episodes revealed the power of that past.
In the United States, an unwiUingness to confront the past occurred
at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the
world's most heavilv attended museum. The Smithsonian Institution
Tne Clasn: Tne Present in Retrospect 4 1

planned an exhibit on the dropping of the two atomic bombs in 1945

and how they shaped the war's conclusion. Leading scholars painstak-
ingly wrote multiple drafts of a 400-plus-page analysis to provide a con-
text for the exhibit. The text, however, included Japanese perspectives.
The exhibit further displayed such horrors as artifacts of those killed in
the Hiroshima blast. The texts posed sharp questions about whether
dropping the bombs was necessary —questions based on wide-ranging
scholarship and new documentation.
These historical accounts ignited a firestorm of criticism from veter-
ans' groups and their friends in Congress. They refused to accept the
new scholarship, rejected the Japanese perspective, attacked "revision-
ism," and threatened to slash the Smithsonian's budget. The chastened
museum disavowed the scholarship; the Air and Space Museum's direc-
tor resigned. The fiftieth anniversary was marked by an exhibit of the
bare fuselage of the Enola Gay, without any accompanying text. A
widely respected historian of the Pacific War, Ronald Spector, recalled
that when he was director of Naval History and was pressured to give
the official U.S. Navy slant to past events, he replied, "We don't have
government approved history in this country. If you want government
approved history you ought to move to Russia." After the Smithsonian
episode, Spector concluded that "it appears they can just stay in Wash-
ington." Obviously, he added, many Americans had decided that some
^^
events were "too significant to be left to the historians."
The Smithsonian Institution's solution to the controversy, wrote a
U.S. journahst who knew Japan was "a classically Japanese solu-
well,
tion." Japan, highly adept at avoiding its World War II record, placed

interesting military rehcs in museums, but with little explanation as to

why they had been deployed in the 1930s and 1940s. At a particularly
trashy level, fantasy novels refought the war and sometimes ended with
Japanese troops liberating California, or General Douglas MacArthur
being prosecuted for war crimes. These best-sellers (sometimes in num-
bers above 100,000 copies) found an audience among young people who
had no memory of war, but knew it largely through school texts carefully
cleansed of stories about Japanese atrocities. (By the 1990s, some of
these texts had finally been made more truthful.) Several museums and
television networks did present honest history. NHK network's docu-
mentary graphically recounted the suffering of Korean women forced
to act as "comfort women," or sex slaves, to the Japanese army in the
1940s. Such perspectives were unfortunately not reflected at the top
political level. Several Japanese cabinet members justified the nation's
war record. A minister of justice denied the 1937 slaughter of more than
 —
THE CLASH 4 2

150,000 Chinese in Nanking by his nations troops. These officials were

finally forced to resign by the resulting outcry in Japan and abroad. ^^
American admirers of the legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa
sounded a similar outcry in 1991. Since the 1950s, Kurosawa had rede-
fined filmmaking with, among other pictures, Rashomon, Seven Samu-
rai, and Ikirii (which brilliantly attacked Japan's bureaucrats). Rha^psody

in August, however, commemorated the Pearl Harbor attack's fiftieth

anniversary by having actor Richard Gere — in the unlikely role of a

Japanese American —go to Nagasaki and tearfully apologize for the

atomic bomb of August While blaming Americans for Japanese
9, 1945.
suffering, the film never mentioned Japan's rape of China, treatment of
U.S. prisoners, or the Pearl Harbor attack itself. The two bombs seemed
to have been dropped on Japan only out of American brutality. Kuro-

sawa was surprised and shocked when Westerners blasted the film.^^
Angry with such manipulation of the past, Americans wanted the
Japanese government to explore why one of every twenty-five U.S. pris-
oners of war in German camps died, but one of every three perished
in Japanese prisons — often horribly (as by decapitation). Ian Buruma's
widely noted The Wages of Guilt detailed how Germany tried to recon-
cile with its past while Japan had not, and how that difference helped

explain why their neighbors had come to trust the Germans more than
the Japanese. In mid-1995, when members of the Diet proposed passing
a resolution of apology for wartime aggression and atrocities, 70 percent
of the LDP members
banded together with other opponents to kill the
measure. (The acrimony, one American journalist noted, resembled
what might happen if "Democrats and RepubHcans in the U.S. House
of Representatives" tried "to write a joint declaration about the U.S.
role in the V^ietnam War.") After considerable hand-wTinging, in August
1995 Japan's first Socialist prime minister in nearly forty years, Muray-
ama Tomiichi, cut through the bitter debate. He offered, for the first
time by any top Japanese official, an "apology" for the suffering and
devastation Japan had inflicted during the war. He especially offered a
"heartfelt apolog}^" to other Asians. His contrition was probably also a
Socialistwarning against Japanese involvement in any future conflict
resembling the Gulf War. Even so, Murayama's cabinet unanimously
approved his apology. Then many made a pilgrimage to
of the ministers
the Yasukuni Shrine to honor the Japanese soldiers who died in battle
including some six thousand kamikaze pilots who in their "tragic brav-
ery (as a plaque at the shrine reads) "struck terror into their [American]
'

foes."^^
Notably, in the 1990s neither Japanese nor Americans found it neces-
Tne Clasn: Tne Present in Retrospect 4 3

sary to mark Chinas and suffering, in the war. Chinese officials

role,

were absent from the commemorations. The century-long struggle

—
between the two nations over China was ignored just as that struggle
'"^
quickened in the 1990s within a quite different China.
"For the last 100 years, our focus in foreign affairs has been on
America," a top Japanese official observed in 1996. "From now on, it
will have to be China." By the year 2010 or 2020, China could be the

world's largest economy. Some 55 million overseas Chinese supply

much of the capital and expertise for this phenomenon, but U.S. and
Japanese investors also battle for the vast market. Matsushita, the giant
electronics firm, employed 18,000 in 32 Chinese operations, part of a
massive Japanese move into Asia to exploit cheap labor and vast mar-
kets. World-leading U.S. computer and service industries, such as
Microsoft, IBM, and American Express, meanwhile expanded in China.
Three characteristics of the Japanese approach set it off from the Amer-
ican. First, the Japanese understood the need to cooperate with Chi-
nese family networks to obtain preference in the market. Such kinship
undergirded the pre-1945 zaihatsu and postwar keiretsu that shaped
Japan's unique economy. Second, as the 1989 Tiananmen Square trag-

edy revealed, Japan joined its Asian neighbors, not Americans, in view-
ing human rights abuses as internal matters that should not be allowed
to interrupt trade and investment. Democracy and accountability, many
Asian nations believed, were not necessary prerequisites to capitalist
development, but could get in its way. Nor were West Europeans about
to challenge such beliefs in China. U.S. automakers thought in 1995
they had the inside track to build new plants in China, only to see the
rich contracts go to a German firm whose government protested little
about Chinese human rights abuses. Finally, Japan, unlike the United
States, expanded foreign aid and tied it closely to purchases of Japanese
goods. Foreign aid became a flying wedge for Japan's entry into China
and Southeast Asia, while the U.S. Congress ruthlessly cut aid until
the nation ranked last among industrial nations on a per capita basis.
Americans saw foreign aid as security protection, so in the post-Cold
War slashed it. Japanese saw the aid as economic, so after 1989 consis-
tently expanded it.^^
The potential fissure in Sino-Japanese relations was China's major
military buildup and territorial claims in the 1990s. Other Asians,
including Japanese, approached flashpoint with Beijing over China's
claims to rich oil fields in the East China Sea and South China Sea.
Tokyo officials also grew concerned as Russia profitably sold technology
to China as part of an apparently developing long-term military relation-
THE CLASH 4 4

ship. Trapped between a fear of China and a fear of building up its own
mihtary, Japan reluctantly solidified security ties with the United States
in 1995—96. While slightly reducing its own forces, Tokyo pledged to
continue paying 70 percent of U.S. mihtary costs in Japan. It also qui-
etly reinterpreted the treaty so U.S. forces could use Japanese bases for
operations as distant as the Persian Gulf —and Japan would, for the first
time, supply weapons parts and logistical support.

No one knew, however, how the Japanese would react if shooting

erupted between Americans and Chinese. A senior U.S. official noted
in 1996 that containment worked against the Soviets because 'we had
a large number of good allies." Against China, though, "we'd have not a
single ally in Asia to help us carry it out. You'd cause great strains with
Japan, Korea, and all of Southeast Asia, let alone AustraHa." Nishihara
Masashi, a leading Japanese defense analyst, concurred. Japan alone
could not handle the Chinese or protect vital sealanes, Nishihara
believed, so needed the United States; "but the problem is, the Japa-
it

nese Government does not want to talk about the C-word [China] or
^^
the K-word [Korea]."
Crises will continue to test whether Americans and Japanese have
learned from their history. The historian Yamamoto Mitsuru notes that
"A basic and deep process of adjustment" was forced on the relationship
after the Cold War's end; but both nations continue "to use old words
for new problems. For Americans, the test will be whether they can
"

accept an Asia for and by Asians in which the United States will have a
relatively declining role both economically and, despite strong Pentagon
objections, militarily. The probable answer is that Americans will not

accept such a situation. Two hundred years of history and especially

the sense of being the post-1989 global superpower make such an
acceptance most unlikely. Asian markets offer too many profits; a grow-
ing defense budget for an already all-powerful U.S. military is too
tempting. For the Japanese, one test will be whether they have learned,
finally, to view other Asians differently than they have historically, and
whether they can maintain institutional safeguards on their own mili-
tary. Another test will be how Japan can maintain its social and poHtical

order against the typhoon of new technologies and foreign financial

power that threatens to engulf that centuries-old order. In neither the
American nor Japanese case, then, does the historical record promise
an easy new relationship to replace the old. "One should realize J' Asahi
Shimhun editorialized in 1993, "that the Japan-U.S. relationship has
entered an era of genuine competition in which any attempt at equivo-
cation simply will not do."^'^
Tne Clasn: The Present in Retrospect 4 5

History therefore promises continued clashes. But learning from that

past can offer better understanding between these two peoples, and
if they are lucky —can lead to the understanding that the clashes must
be accepted, managed, limited. Certainly their causes, so deeply
anchored in history, cannot be safely extinguished. For the primary
cause of those earlier clashes —the century-old rivalry to decide which
system was to lead in developing Asian and especially Chinese mar-
kets — will continue to shape both United States and Japanese domestic
and foreign policies in the twenty-first century.
Notes

The following abbreviations have been used for archival, manu-

script, and selected periodical materials

Acheson Papers Papers of Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman Library,

Independence, Missouri

Adams Papers Papers of Henry Adams, Houghton Library, Harvard

University

AHR Am.erican Historical Review

Baker Papers Papers of Newton D. Baker, Herbert Hoover Library,

West Branch, Iowa

Barker Papers Papers of Wharton Barker, Library of Congress

Bartlett, Record Ruhl J. Bartlett, ed.. The Record of American Diplo-

macy. Documents and Readings in the History of Ameri-
can Foreign Relations, 4th edition enlarged (New York,
1964)

Beasley, Documents W G. Beasley, ed.. Select Documents on Ja'panese For-

eign Policy, 18^^-1868 (London, 1955)

Bourne, Documents Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt, British Docu-

ments on Foreign Affairs —Reports and Papers from the
Foreign Office Confidential Print. Series E. Asia (Fred-
erick, MD, 1989)

Butler, Documents Rohan Butler, ed.. Documents on British Foreign Policy,

/9J9-/939. ist Series (London, 1946- )

Castle Diaries Diaries of William Castle, Houghton Library, Harvard

University

4 7
Notes 4 8

Castle Papers Papers of William Castle, Herbert Hoover Library, West

Branch, Iowa

CIA Reports CIA Research Reports: Japan, Korea, and the Security of Asia,
1946— 7976 (Frederick, MD, 1976)

Cabot Papers Papers of John Moors Cabot, Fletcher School, Tufts Univer-
sit}'

cj Contemporary Japan (Tokyo, 1932-70)

Cortelyou Papers Papers of George B. Cortelyou, Library^ of Congress

CFR Council on Foreign Relations, New York City

Daniels, Cabinet Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephiis Daniels,

1913-1921, ed. E. Da\id Cronon (Lincoln, NE, 1963)

Da\is Papers Papers of Norman Da\is, Librarv' of Congress

DDQ Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue (Washington,

DC, 1975- )

DH Diplomatic History

Dickman Papers Papers of Major-General John T Dickman, Notre Dame

Universit}'

Dulles Papers Papers of John Foster Dulles, Princeton University

Eisenhower Library Dwight D. Eisenhower Libran.', Abilene, Kansas

FRUS U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United

States (Washington, DC, 1861- ), followed by year and, if

necessary, volume

FRUS: Jafan U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United

States: Japan, 1931-794/, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1943)

FRUS: Lansing U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United

States: The Lansing Papers, 7974-7920. 2 vols. (Washington,
DC, 1940)

FRUS: Paris U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United

States: Paris Peace Conference, igig, 13 vols. (Washington,
DC, 1942-47)

Gage Papers Papers of LvTnan Gage, Librarv' of Congress

Gaimusho, Komiira Gaimusho [Japanese Foreign Ministry], Komura Gaikoshi

[The Diplomacy of Komura] (Tokyo, 1953)

Gaimusho, Nipfon Gaimusho Qapanese Foreign Ministry], Nippon Gaiko Nen-

pyo Narabimi Shuyo Bunsho Qapanese Foreign Relations
Chronicle and Documents], Vol. I (Tokyo, 1965)

Goldberg, Documents Harold J. Goldberg, ed.. Documents of Soviet-American

Relations (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1993- )

Grew Papers Papers of Joseph C. Grew, Houghton Library, Harvard Uni-

versity
Notes 4 9

Hara Takashi Hara Takashi Nikki [Diaries of Hara Takashi], Vol. 8 (Tokyo,

1950)

Harriman Papers Papers of W. Averell Harriman, Library of Congress

Hay Papers Papers of John Hay, Library of Congress

Henderson Papers Papers of Loy Henderson, Library of Congress

Hoover Library Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa

Hoover Papers Papers of Herbert Hoover, Herbert Hoover Library, West

Branch, Iowa

Hopkins Papers Papers of Harry Hopkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library,

Hyde Park, New York
Hosoya, "Documents' Chihiro Hosoya, ed., "Japanese Documents on the Siberian
Intervention, 1917-1922. Part i, November, 1917-January,
1919," Hitotsuhashi Journal of Law and Politics, i (April
i960): 30-53.

House Papers Papers of Edward Mandel House, Yale University

IHR International History Review

JACS Journal of American and Canadian Studies (Tokyo, 1988- )

JAEAR Journal of American-East Asian Relations (Chicago, 1992)

JAH Journal of American History (Bloomington, IN, 1964- )

]AS Journal of Asian Studies (Ann Arbor, MI, 1941- )

JJAS Japanese Journal of American Studies (Tokyo, 1981- )

J]S Journal of Japanese Studies (Seattle, WA, 1974- )

]M]S Journal of Modem Japanese Studies (Tokyo, 1977- ) — in Jap-

anese

Kennedy Library John F. Kennedy Library, Columbia Point, Boston

Kimball, Corresp. Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Com-
plete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1984)

Lansing Diaries Robert Lansing Diaries, Library of Congress

LBJ Library Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas

Leahy Diaries Admiral William E. Leahy Diaries, Harry S. Truman Library,

Independence, Missouri

Link, Council Arthur S. Link, ed. and translator. The Deliberations of the
Council of Four (March 24-June 28, 1919J. Notes of the Offi-
cial Interpreter Paul Mantoux, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1992)

Link, Wilson Papers Arthur S. Link, ed.. The Papers ofWoodrow Wilson, 68 vols.

(Princeton, 1966-93)

Maki, Documents John M. Maki, ed., Conflict atid Tension in the Far East,
Key Documents, 18^4-1^60 (Seattle, WA, i960)
Notes 4 1

McKinley Papers Papers of William McKinley, Libran,- of Congress

Moore Papers Papers of R. Walton Moore, Franklin D. Roosevelt Librar);

Hyde Park, New York
Moore. J. B., Papers Papers of John Bassett Moore, Librarv" of Congress

Morgenthau Diaries Henr\- Morgenthau, Jr., Presidential Diaries, Franklin D.

Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York
NA, RG 59 National Archives, Washington. DC. Record Group 59

MT-GCl New York Times, Great Contem'porar) Issues. Japan (New

York. 1974)

Olney Papers Papers of Richard Olney, Library of Congress

PHR Pacific Historical Revieu^ (Berkeley, 1932- )

Princeton Seminars Princeton Seminars, Papers of Dean Acheson, Harr}' S. Tru-

man Librar}'. Independence, Missouri

POQ Public Ofinion Quarterly (New York, 1937- )

PRO Public Record Office, Kew, United Kingdom

PSQ Political Science Quarterly

Rockhill Papers Papers of William W. Rockhill. Houghton Library-, Hanard

Universit}'

Roosexelt Librar\- Franklin D. Roosevelt Libran,". H\de Park. Neu York

Roosevelt, Letters Theodore Roosevelt, Letters, selected and edited by Elting

E. Morison, 8 vols. iCambridge. MA. 1951-54^

Roosevelt Papers Papers of Theodore Roosevelt. Libran,- of Congress

Root Papers Papers of Elihu Root. Libran,' of Congress

Saionji Memoirs Harada Kumuo, TJie Saionji-Harada Memoirs (1^^1-1^40)

U.S. .Army, Ci\il Intelligence Section Special Report
(Tok\o. 1946—47)

Senate FRC, Executive United States Congress, Senate, Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, E.xecutix'B Sessions of the Setiate Foreign Relations
Committee {Historical Series) (Washington, DC, 1976— )

Seward Papers Papers of WilHam Seward. Unixersit) of Rochester

Signals Intelligence Great Britain, Public Record Office. "Signals Intelligence

Passed to the Prime Minister. Messages and Correspon-
dences (enigm.a Messages)," HW i. Kew. United Kingdom

Stettinius Papers Papers of Edward R. Stettinius, University of \'irginia

Stimson Diary Henn,- Stimson Dian,-, Yale University"

Straight Papers Papers of Willard Straight, Cornell Universit)'

Taft Papers Papers of WilHam Howard Taft, Librar\' of Congress (micro-

film)
Notes 4 1 1

Truman Library Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri

Webster, Papers Daniel Webster, The Papers of Daniel Webster. Series 3, ed.

Kenneth E. Shewmaker (Hanover, MA, 1974-89)

Preface

1. Records of Groups, 97 (1964/1965), Dec. 7, 1964, CFR.

2. E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence as a Modem State: Political and Economic Problems
of the Meiji Period (New York, 1940).

3. Quoted in Michael H. Armacost, Friends or Rivals? The Insider's Account of U.S. -Japan
Relations (New York, 1996), p. 27.

4. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power; Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York, 1983),

p. 382.

5. A provocative analysis of the three-cornered U.S. -Japan-China relationship by the mid-

1990s, and the important role of Southeast Asia as a fourth player, is Chalmers Johnson,
"Nationalism and the Market: China as a Superpower," JPR/ Working Paper no. 22 (July
1996), esp. pp. 5-13. A useful overview is Richard Halloran, 'The Rising East," Foreign
Policy, 102 (Spring 1996): 3-21.

6. Armacost, Friends or Rivals?, pp. 65-67, 80.

7. Faulkner is quoted and analyzed in Michael Kammen, Salvages and Biases (Ithaca, NY,

1990), p. 175.

Chapter I

I.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1948), II, 292-295. As
noted earlier, "Americans' is used as a synonym for U.S. citizens, for purposes of suc-
cinctness and variation.
2. Ibid., 421-424.
3. William Neumann, "Determinism, Destiny, and Myth in the American Image of China,"
in Issues and Conflicts, ed. George L. Anderson (Lawrence, KA, 1959), pp. 1-22; Samuel
Eliot Morison, The Maritime Histor}' of Massachusetts, iy8^-i86o (Boston, 1941), pp. 328-
329; William Neumann, "Religion, Morality, and Freedom: The Ideological Background
of the Perry Expedition," PHR, 23 (August 1954): 247-258.
4. This paragraph is especially indebted to John Emmerson and Harrison M. Holland, Eagle
and the Rising Sun (Reading, MA, 1988), pp. 5, 19, 22-23, 3^~?>?>-

5. Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 243; Walt Whitman, The Gathering of the Forces, 2 vols. (New
York, 1920), I, 32-33.
6. A helpful analysis is Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (New York, 1991), esp. pp.

3-102 and 364-395 on the "market's cultural conquest"; see also Marvin Meyers, The
Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford, 1957), which outlines the acquisition-for-ascent theme,
and Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955), which made the
classic (and much-debated) case that without feudal restraints Americans were born free.

7. See esp. Emmerson and Holland, Eagle, p. 30.

8.T. J. Pempel, Policy and Politics in Japan (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 3-7; Emmerson and
Holland, Eagle, p. 33.

9. Emmerson and Holland, Eagle, pp. 34-35-

10. Beasley, Documents, p. 3; William H. Lockwood, Japanese Economic Development, 1868-
1938 (Princeton, 1954), p. 4 note; W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894-194^ (New
Notes 4 ] 2

York, 1991); Ronald P. Toby, "Contesting the Centre: International Sources of Japanese
National Identity," IHR, 7 (August 1985): 347-363.
11. Paul Akamatsu, Meiji 1868 (New York, 1972), pp. 35-36, 441.
12. Beasley, Documents, p. 4; W. G. Beasley, "The Foreign Threat and the Opening of the
Ports," in Marius B. Jansen, ed., The Cambridge History of japan. Vol. 5. The Nineteenth
Century (New York, 1989), p. 262; Beas\ey, Japanese Imperialism, p. 22.

13. Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise (New York, 1993), pp. 270-275. Neu-
mann, "Religion," p. 251; Emmerson and Holland, Eagle, p. 41; Julius W. Pratt, "The
Ideology of American Expansion," in Essays in Honor of William E. Dodd, ed. Avery Cra-
ven (Chicago, 1935), pp. 342-343.
14. Ohashi Kenzaburo, Melville and Melville Studies in Japan (Westport, CT, 1993), esp. pp.
221-243; Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (San Francisco, 1947).
15. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 22: Beasley, "The Foreign Threat," p. 268; "whole Orien-
tal trade" quote in Merle Curti, The Grau^th of American Thought (New York, 1942), p.
663.
16. Webster, Papers, II, 244; Kenneth E. Shewmaker, "Daniel Webster and the Politics of

Foreign Policy," JAH, 63 (September 1976): 314.

17. Webster, Papers, II, 253-254, 289-293.
18. Ibid., 289-291.
19. Ibid., 256—258, 290.
20. Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. 92—93; U.S. Congress, Senate Executive Document j^i, 33d Cong.,
2nd Sess. (Washington, D.C., 1854?), pp. 53-55; Ian Buruma, "Japan: In The Spirit
World," New York Review of Books, June 6, 1996, pp. 31—35.
21. Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. 88-89, 94-ioo-
22. Wallace Gagne, "Technology and PoUtical Interdependence: Canada, Japan, and the

United States, "JACS, 9 (Spring 1992): 48-49; Bartlett, Record, pp. lyi-iy^.

2^. New York Times, July 11, 1854, in NITT-GCI, p. 2; Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. loo-ioi.
24. New York Times, July 11, 1854, in NYT-GCI, p. 2; Emily Hahn, "A Yankee Barbarian at

the Shogun's Court, Americaw Heritage,

'
15 (June 1964): 62—63.
25. Aruga Tadashi, "Editor's Introduction: Japanese Interpretations of the American Revolu-
tion, "JJAS, 2 (1985): 5-7, 8-9; Professor Aruga to author, February 5, 1996: John Whitney
Hall, "East, Southeast, and South Asia," in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us
(Ithaca, NY, 1980), p. 170; Marius Jansen, Introduction to Jansen, ed., The Nineteenth
Century, pp. 14, 16; Neumann, "ReHgion," p. 252.

26. Victor Koschmann, The Mito Ideology (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 56—64; Beasley, Japanese Impe-
rialism,, p. 29.

27. Koschmann, Mito, pp. 30—32; Hall, "East," pp. 166—167; Lockwood, Economic Develop-
ment, pp. 5-8; Emmerson and Holland, Eagle, pp. 36—37.
28. W G. Beasley, in his Japanese Imperialism, notes the need for a study of the effect of the
West's trade and diplomacy on Japanese administrative structure at this time.
29. Michael A. Barnhart, Japan and the World Since 1868 (London, 1995), p. 7; Aruga, "Edi-
tor's Introduction, "
pp. 9-1 1.
30. Hahn, "Yankee," pp. 63, 89-90.
31. This and the previous paragraph are drawn from Townsend Harris, The Complete Journal
ofToFwnsend Harris, ed. Mario E. Consenza, 2nd rev. ed. (Garden City, NY, 1959), pp- 9,

206, 209-210, 227, 252; Hahn, "Yankee, " p. 90.

32. Hahn, 'Tankee," pp. 90-93.

33. Harris, Complete Journal, p. 330.

34. Ibid., pp. 325, 347, 351-352; Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. 105-106; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism,
pp. 28-29; Hahn, "Yankee," p. 94.

35. Harris, Complete Journal, pp. 436-437; Hahn, 'Yankee, pp. 94-95- "
Notes 4 1 3

36. Harris, Complete Journal, pp. 475, 485-487, 550; Robert J. Smith, Ja'panese Society (Cam-
bridge, UK, 1983), p. 57.

37. Text is in Beasley, Documents, pp. 183-189, esp. p. 185; Payson J. Treat, Diplomatic Rela-
tions Between the United States and Jayan, i8^^-i8g^, 2 vols. (Stanford, 1932), I, 48-63,

85; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 24.

38. "Imperial Court to Hotta Masayoshi, 3 May, 1858," in Beasley, Documents, pp. 180-181;
Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. 110-112; Koschmann, Mito, pp. 141-143, 149-151.
39. "Imperial Court to Manabe Akikatsu, 2 February 1859," in Beasley, Documents, pp. 41-
52, 193-194; Beasley, "Foreign Threat," pp. 282-283; Koschmann, Mito, pp. 150-151.

40. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them (Berkeley, i960), pp. 3, 13, 21-33; ^^^ York Times,
June 18, i860, June 27, i860, Nov. 18, 1858, all in NYT-GCI, pp. 3-4.
41. New York Times, June 27, i860, p. 2; a brief context is in Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman
(New York, 1980), pp. 256-257; Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, pp. 66-75.
42. Hallie M. McPherson, "The Interest of William McKendree Gwin in the Purchase of
PHR, 3 (no. i, 1934): 29-38; Lloyd C. Gardner, Walter F. LaFeber, and
Alaska, 1854-1861,"
Thomas J. McCormick, The Creation of the American Empire (Chicago, 1976), chapter 11.
43. Fukuzawa Yukichi, soon to be Japan's leading intellectual, recalled that in the 1860s, "any
person who showed any favor towards admitting foreigners into Japan indeed, any
. . . —
—
person who had any interest in foreign affairs was liable to be set upon by the unrelent-
ing ronin." Yukichi Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, revised and trans-

lated by Eiichi Kiyooka (New York, 1966), p. 122; Akamatsu, Meiji, pp. 143-144; Treat,

Diplomatic, I, 105-106; Hahn, "Yankee," p. 96.

44. Beasley, "Foreign Threat," pp. 286-287.

45. Treat, Diplomatic, I, 171-182, has a good overview.

46. Ibid., 185-200.

47. William H. Seward, The Works of William H. Seward, ed. George E. Baker, 5 vols. (Bos-
ton, 1884), III, 618; ibid., V, 246; Frederick H. Stutz, "William Henry Seward, Expansion-
ist," Unpublished master's thesis, Cornell University, 1937, p. 26; Ernest N. Paolino, The
Foundations of the American Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1973), pp. 170-173.
48. Seward to Burhngame, March 6, 1862, Instructions, China, NA, RG 59; Paolino, Founda-
tions, pp. 172-174.

49. FRUS, 1864, III, 594; Paolino, Foundations, pp. 172-173. The argument is spelled out in
detail, with specific reference to Seward, by Walter LaFeber, The American Search for
Opportunity, 1865-1913, in Warren Cohen, ed.. The Cambridge History of American For-
eign Relations (New York, 1993), chapters 1-2.

50. Paolino, Foundations, pp. 174-175, 184-186; Treat, Diplomatic, I, 201-237; Beasley, Japa-
nese Imperialism, p. 20.
51. New York Times, Nov. 27, 1864, in NYT-GCI, p. 5; PaoHno, Foundations, pp. 186-187;
Seward W Livermore, "American Naval-Base Policy in the Far East, 1 850-1914," PHR, 13

(June 1944): 114; Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-igio (Philadelphia,
i960), p. 107.

52. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 24-25.

53. Koschmann, Mito, pp. 1-2, 170-171; Ian Hill Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 1869-/942
(London, 1977), p. 10; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, UK,
1979), p. 169.

54. Smith, Japanese Society, pp. 15, 17, 31-32.

55. Ibid., pp. 18-21; New York Times, July 5, 1868, in NYT-GCI, p. 6; John Whitney Hall,
"Reflections on a Centennial," JAS, 27 (August 1968): 713.
56. Quoted in Smith, Japanese Society, pp. 134-135; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 14;

Byron K. Marshall, "The Late Meiji Debate Over Social Policy, " in Harry Wray and Hilary
Conroy, eds., Japan Examined (Honolulu, 1983), pp. 160-162.
Notes 4 1 4

Chapter II

1. Robert Smith, Jafanese Society (Cambridge, UK, 1983), pp. 4, 108.

2. The argument here is that industrial development and the resulting disorder in both
societies led Japan and the United States to follow an imperialist path in the 1890s and
after. A consensus exists on the belief that both were imperialistic, especially during the
post-1882 era. The Japanese side is succinctly stated by Bonnie B. Oh in Harry Wray and
Hilary Conroy, eds., Ja'pan Examined (Honolulu, 1983), pp. 122-123, where the author
writes that "imperialism [is] being defined here as extension of control over alien peoples
and territories either by conquest or by economic and cultural penetration." The process
is well described on the U.S. side in Thomas Schoonover, Dollars Over Dominion (Baton
Rouge, LA, 1978), pp. xiii-xiv.

3. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., with the assistance of Takashi Hikino, Scale and Scope (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1990), esp. pp. 62-63; Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1990),
pp. 337-349, although the handling of foreign policy is highly questionable. Gresham and
other officials are discussed in this context, and with further citations in Walter LaFeber,
The New Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1963), pp. 136-149, 197-283, 376-406; "Olney on the Labor
Revolution," June 20, 1894, Olney Papers; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years, 2 vols. (Lon-

don, 1925), II, 3.

4. C. R Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New York, 1950), p. 317. An important
overview of the policies and their consequences is Michael A. Barnhart, Japan and the
World Since 1868 (London, 1995), pp. 9-10.

5. Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky, "A Century of Japanese Economic Growth," in

William W Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton, 1969),

pp. 53-64; Michael A. Barnhart, Japaw Prepares for Total War (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 22.

6. Aruga Tadashi, "Editor's Introduction: Japanese Interpretations of the American Revolu-

tion," JJAS, 2 (1985): 16-17; Smith, Japanese Society, p. 114; Akira Iriye, "Japan's Drive to
Great Power Status," in Marius B. Jansen, ed.. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 5.

The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1989), pp. 729, 731.

7. W G. Beasley, "Foreign Threats," in Jansen, ed.. The Nineteenth Century, p. 300; Smith,
Japanese Society, p. 108;

8. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi's An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, translated

by David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst (Tokyo, 1973), esp. pp. 20-22 on Sino-
Japanese cultural differences, and pp. 42-43 on early America and Japan; Yukichi Fuku-
zawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, revised and translated by Eiichi Kiyooka
(New York, 1966), pp. 214-216; Aruga, "Editor's Introduction," pp. 11-13; Shumpei Oka-
moto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 1970), p. 47; a

revisionist critique of Fukuzawa is Earl H. Kinmonth, "Fukuzawa Reconsidered: Gaku-

mon no susume and Audience," JAS, 37 (August 1978): esp. 677-684, 695-696.
Its

9. New York Times, Oct. 17, 1871, in NYT-GCI, p. 7; New York Times, Dec. 15, 1871, in ibid.,

p. 8; Sansom, Western World and Japan, pp. 385-386.

10. Marlene J. Mayo, "Western
Education of Kume Kunitake, 1871-76," Monumenta Nippon-
ica. Studies in Japanese Culture, 28 (Spring 1973): 3-67 is important on the mission; Ian
Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, /869-1942 (London, 1977), pp. 10-12, 18, 20.

ii."Tomomi Iwakura . . . Introduction by George Akita," in U.S. Capitol Historical Society,

Foreign Visitors to Congress: Speeches and History', 2 vols. (Milwood, NY, 1989), I, 15, 17.

12. Mayo, "Western Education of Kume," pp. 19-23.

13. Ibid., pp. 27-28; Aruga, "Editor's Introduction," pp. 19-20.
14. Mayo, "Western Education of Kume," pp. 41-61.
15. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 21; Chitoshi Yanaga, "The First Japanese Embassy to the
United States," PHR, 9 (June 1940): 138.
Notes 4 1 5

i6. Smith, Japanese Society, pp. 24-25; T. J. Pempel, Policy and Politics in Japan (Philadelphia,
1982), p. 33; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 28-29.

17. Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia (New York, 1922), pp. 512-520; Nish, Japanese

Foreign Policy, pp. 30-31.

18. Smith, Japanese Society, pp. 30-31.
19. Brainerd Dyer, The Public Career of William M. Evarts (Berkeley, 1933), pp. 235-236.
20. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York, 1982), p. 19; Robert W.
Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago, 1985), pp. 29-30.
21. Hilar)' Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea: 1868-igio (Philadelphia, i960), pp. 28-36,
47-48; Iriye, "Japan's Drive," pp. 739-740, 745.
22. Conroy, Japanese Seizure, pp. 18-19, 5^-

23. Ibid., pp. 36-38, 55-58; Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modem China (New York, 1990),
p. 220.

24. Iriye, "Japan's Drive, Conwy, Japanese Seizure,

" p. 746; pp. 52-53.
25. C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-Kyo Kim, Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, i8y6-igio
(Berkeley, 1967), pp. 21-29; Fred Harvey Harrington, "An American View of Korean-
American Relations, 1882-1905," in Yur-Bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds.. One Hundred
Years of Korean-American Relations (University, AL, 1986), pp. 48-49. Frederick C. Drake,
The Empire of the Seas (Honolulu, 1984), is the standard biography of Shufeldt and
emphasizes his passion for Asian and other foreign markets.
26. Payson J. Treat, Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Japan, 1853— 1895, 2

vols. (Stanford, 1932), II, esp. 155-159.

27. Ohkawa and Rosovsky, "A Century," pp. 65-66.

28. Ibid., p. 55; Peter Duus, Economic Aspects of Meiji Imperialism (Berlin, 1980), pp. 10—12;

William W. Lockwood, The Economic Developm£nt of Japan (Princeton, 1954), pp. 14, 27;

W B. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan (New York, 1990), p. no.

29.Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge, UK, 1979), pp. 103-104.
30. Oka Yoshitake, Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan, translated by Andrew Eraser and
Patricia Murray (Tokyo, 1986), pp. 3-6.
31. Ibid., pp. 6-9, 21, 23, 36-37, 39.
32. Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Security (Ithaca, NY, 1993),
pp. 11-12, 16—17; ^- G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 18^4-1^4^ (New York, 1991), pp.

34-37; Roger E. Hackett, Yam.agata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan, 1838-7922 (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1971), chapters 1-3.

33. Harrington, "An American View," pp. 46-67.

34. Yur-Bok Lee, "Korean-American Diplomatic Relations, 1882— 1905," in Lee and Patterson,
eds.. One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, pp. 12-45; Harrington, "An Amer-
ican View," pp. 60—61; Ered Harvey Harrington, God, Mammon and the Japanese (Madi-
son, WI, 1944), pp. 1-17, 52-53, 134-135; Iriye, "Japan's Drive," p. 751; Nish, Japanese
Foreign Policy, p. 34; Charles C. Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thom.as F. Bayard, 188^-

i8gy (New York, 1940), pp. 417-449.

35. Barnhart, Japan and the World, pp. 13-14, esp. for legal and educational implications;
Charles W Calhoun, Gilded Age Cato (Lexington, KY, 1988), pp. 180-181; Nish, Japanese
Foreign Policy, pp. 26-27.
36. Conroy, Japanese Seizure, pp. 208-212, 218-222; Marius Jansen, "Japanese Imperialism:
Late Meiji Perspectives, " in Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, eds.. The Japanese Colonial
Empire (Princeton, 1984), pp. 61-79; Jeffrey M. Dorwart, The Pigtail War (Amherst, MA,
i975)> P- 23-

37. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 34-37; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 31-32; Dorw-
art, Pigtail War, p. 32.

38. Dorwart, Pigtail War, pp. 11-12, 20-21; Pauncefote to McKinley, July 10, 1894, Confiden-
Notes 4 1 6

tial, FO 5/2234, PRO; Lee, "Korean-American," p. 43; Jack Hammersmith, "The Sino-
Japanese War, 1894-95: American Predictions Reassessed," Asian Forum, 4 (January-
March 1972): 48-54.

39. Rydell, All the World's a Fair, pp. 48-49, 50-51; Dorwart, Pigtail War, pp. 96, 108-110;
Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Aug. 18, 1894, 256-257; Thomas McCormick,
China Market (Chicago, 1967), pp. 49-50; Calhoun, Gilded Age Cato, pp. 173-175; Akira
From Nationalism to Internationalism (London, 1977), p. 125.
Iriye,

40. Dun to Gresham, March 4, 1895, Dispatches, Japan, NA, RG 59; Beasley, Ja-panese Impe-
rialism, pp. 61—62.

41. Dun to Gresham, May 2, 1895, Dispatches, Japan, NA, RG 59; Hugh Seton-Watson, The
Russian Empire, 1801-igiy (Oxford, 1967), pp. 582-583.
42. Harrington, "An American View," pp. 66-67; Harrington, God, Mammon, chapter 9.

43. Dun to Olney, Nov. 23, 1895, Dispatches, Japan, NA, RG 59; Alfred Vagts, Deiitschland
und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), II, 960—961; Duus,

"Economic Aspects," pp. 5-6; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 51-52, 59—60, 74; Nish,
Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 41-42.
44. Edw^ard I-Te Chen, "Japan's Decision to Annex Taiwan: A Study of Ito-Mutsu Diplomacy,
1894-95, "JAS, 37 (November 1977): 61-72.
45. Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 1970),
pp. 49—50; Philadelphia Press, Dec. 12, 1905, p. 6; Lockwood, Economic Development, p.

19; Dorwart, Pigtail War, p. 113. See also William Elroy Curtis, The Yankees of the East:
Sketches of Modem Japan, 2 vols. (New York, 1896).

^6. Public Opinion, Nov. 14, 1895, pp. 627-628; Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost: The Odys-
sey of Lafcadio Heam (New York, 1991), pp. xiii-xiv.
47.Winiam A. Russ, Jr., The Hawaiian Revolution (18^^-18^4) (Selinsgrove, PA, 1959), pp.
30—32; Tansill, Thomas F. Bayard, p. 361.
48. Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires (Philadelphia, 1991); pp. 25-57; Cleveland quoted in LaFeber,
New Empire, p. 54.

49. Okihiro, Cane Fires, esp. p. 42; Wiltse to Tracy, Jan. 18, 1893, Naval Records, Area 9 file,

box 19, National Archives.

50. Homer E. Socolofsky and Allen B. Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison (Law-
rence, KA, 1987), pp. 200-206; Okihiro, Cane Fires, p. 57; the New York World quote is
in Public Opinion, Feb. 11, 1893, pp. 439-441, Feb. 4, 1893, pp. 415—417.
51. Russ, Hawaiian Rei^olution, pp. 34—35; Belknap to Herbert, March 17, 1893, Naval
Records, Area 9 file, box 9, National Archives; Hilary Conroy, Japanese Expansion into
Hawaii, 1868-1898 (San Francisco, 1973), pp. 140, 146.
52. Conroy, Japanese Expansion into Hawaii, pp. 179—180; Sylvester K. Stevens, American
Expansion in Hawaii, 1842-1898 (Harrisburg, PA, 1945), pp. 282-284; LaFeber, New
Empire, pp. 329-332.
53. Theodore Roosevelt, Letters of Theodore Roosei^elt, ed. Elting E. Morison, 6 vols. (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1951), I, 601; Dun to Sherman, June 21, 1897, Dispatches, Japan, NA, RG
59; Long to Commanding Officer, USS Oregon, Naval Records, Confidential Correspon-
dence, vol. 2, National Archives; State Department to Sewall, July 10, 1897, Naval
Records, Area 9 file, box 30, July 1-15 folder. National Archives; McNair to Long, Aug. 3,

1897, Naval Records, Area 10 file, box 15, August folder, for the attack on U.S. sailors,

National Archives.
54. Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, A Life (New York, 1992), pp. 257-259.

55. Mahan to Roosevelt, May i, 1897, Roosevelt to Goodrich, May 28, 1897, Roosevelt Papers;
Roosevelt, Letters, I, 695; Alfred T Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston,
1897), p. 162.
56. Diary-Memoranda, May 1894, Moore Papers; J. M. Devine to Wharton Barker, Dec. 16,
Notes 4 1 7

1895, box 14, Barker Papers, on Japanese invasion of America; Statement of Phoenix Silk
Manufacturing Company in U.S. Congress, House, House Report 2263, 54th Cong., ist

Sess. (Washington, DC, 1896), p. 368.

57. This account of 1896-98 is told in more detail, with note references, in Walter LaFeber,
The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-/913, in Warren Cohen, ed. The Cambridge
History of American Foreign Relations (New York, 1993), pp. 126-145.

58. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 51-52; Charles S. Campbell, Jr., Anglo-American
Understanding, 1898-/903 (Baltimore, 1957), pp. 17-18.
^g. Chattanooga Tradesman, Dec. 15, 1897, p. 59; McCormick, China Market, pp. 75-76;
Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-/900 (Arlington Heights, IL,
1986), p. 84; Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of i8g8 (Baltimore, 1936), p. 281 has missionary

quote; Dennett, Americans, pp. 580—581; William Neumann, "Determinism, Destiny, and
Myth in the American Image of China," in George L. Anderson, ed., Issues and Conflicts
(Lawrence, KA, 1959), p. 10 for trade statistics.
60. McCormick, China Market, pp. 153-154; New York Tribune, March 18, 1898, p. 6;
Pauncefote to Salisbury, March 17, 1898, FO 5/2361, PRO.
61. Roosevelt to Dewey, Feb. 25, 1898, Naval Records, Ciphers Sent, no. i, 1888-98, National
Archives; Joseph Fry, "Imperialism, American Style, 1890— 1916," in Gordon Martel, ed.,

American Foreign Relations Reconsidered (London, 1994), p. 60; Ernest Samuels, Henry
Adams (New York, 1989), p. 323; McCormick, China Market, pp. 164-165.
62. Cortelyou diary, June 8, 1898, container 59, Cortelyou Papers; Pratt, Expansionists of i8g8,

PP- 323-325-
63. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading, p. 43; Campbell, Anglo-American, p. 162; Mahan to Col.

John Sterling, Dec. 23, 1898, Mahan Papers; McCormick, China Market, pp. 186—187.
64. On Mahan and others on sea versus land powers, especially useful are Alfred Thayer
Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (Boston, 1890), pp. 324, 416;
Mahan, Interest of America, pp. 220—222; Vagts, Deutschland, II, 608-615, 961-968.
65. William Elliot Griffis in New York Times, July 30, 1905, p. 8; Gaimushu, Komura, esp.
chapters 4-5.
66. Adee to McKinley, Sept. 28, 1898, with enclosure, container 57, Cortelyou Papers; James
K. Eyre, Jr., "Japan and the American Acquisition of the Philippines," PHR, 11 (March
1942): 55-71.
67. Barbara Schaaf, ed., Finley Peter Dunne: Mr. Doole}', Wise and Funny (New York, 1988),
p. 217.

6S. The China and Japan Sporting Register (Shanghai, 1877); Allen Guttmann, Games and
Empires (New York, 1994), pp. 75-77-
69. Public Opinion, Aug. 20, 1896, p. 245; Sept. 24, 1896, pp. 405-406.

CKapter III

1. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (New York, 1989), p. 326.

2. For this and the previous paragraph, see Thomas McCormick, China Market (Chicago,
1967), pp. 34-37, 131; Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 123;
Warren Cohen, America's Response to China (New York, 1980), pp. 81-82; Julius Pratt,
Expansionists of i8g8 (Baltimore, 1936), p. 287 on missionaries; Alfred Vagts, Deutschland
und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), II, 1046; Emily
Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York, 1982), pp. 16—17, i^- Charles S.
Campbell, The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865-/900 (New York,

1976), pp. 327-32.

3. McCormick, China Market, pp. 231-232; David Healy, U.S. Expansionism (Madison, WI,
Notes 4 1 8

1970), p. 166; Brooks Adams, "The Spanish War and the Equihbrium of the World,"
Forum, 25 (August 1898): 641-651.

4. Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 1869-/942 (London, 1977), p. 48.

5. Sugihara Kaoru, "Japan as an Engine of the Asian International Economy, c. 1880-1936,"
Japan Forum, II Duus, The Abacus and the Sword (Berkeley,
(April 1990): 129-131; Peter

1995), pp. 245-247, 434-435; Peter Duus, Economic Aspects of Meiji Imperialism (Berlin,
1980), pp. 7-8; W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 18^4-1^4^ (New York, 1991), pp. 127-
128; Baron Albert d'Anethan, The dAnethan Dispatches from Japan, 18^4-1^10, selected,

translated, and edited by George Alexander Lensen (Tokyo, 1967), p. 107; Nish, Japanese
Foreign Policy, pp. 54-56.
6. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modem China (New York, 1990), pp. 231-233.
7. McCormick, China Market, pp. 233-237; Theodore Roosevelt, Letters of Theodore Roose-
velt, ed. Elting E. Morison, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1952), II, 934; Walter LaFeber, "John
Hay," in Encyclopedia of American Biography, ed. John A. Garraty (New York, 1974).
8. Ueda Toshio, "The Latter Half of the Meiji Era," in Japan-American Relations in the
Meiji-Taisho Era, ed. Kamikawa Hikomatsu, translated by Kimura Michiko (Tokyo, 1958),
pp. 178-188.
9. Conger to Secretary of State, May 29, 1900, McKinley Papers.
10. Michael A. Barnhart, Japan and the World Since i868 (London, 1995), pp. 29-31 for a
succinct analysis of the Japanese debates and number of troops sent; Nish, Japanese
Foreign Policy, pp. 52-53; Roosevelt, Letters, II, 1423; III, 6.

11. H. C. Lodge to Rockhill, July 16, 1900, Rockhill Papers; McCormick, China Market, pp.
156-164; A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford, 1971), pp. 391-392.
12. Democratic Party, Democratic Campaign Book, Presidential Election igoo (Chicago, 1900),
pp. 324-325, italics in the original; Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley: Now and Forever, ed.
Louis Filler (Stanford, 1954), p. 137.

13. Pierce to Secretary of State, Aug. 30, 1900, McKinley Papers; Hay to Adee, Sept. 14, 1900,

McKinley Papers; McCormick, China Market, pp. 161— 175.

14. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism p. 135.

15. d'Anethan, dAnethan Dispatches, pp. 146—157; Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon teihoki shugi no kesei
[The Formation of Japanese Imperialism] (Tokyo, 1968), p. 318 for Japan's relative eco-
nomic weakness in 1900.
16. d'Anethan, dAnethan Dispatches, p. 126.

17. Oka Yoshitake, Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan, translated by Andrew Eraser and
Patricia Murray (Tokyo, 1986), pp. 29-30; Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and
the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 1970), pp. 19-20; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp.
62-63.
18. Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 22-23; Peter Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed., Cambridge Mod-
ern History. Vol. S.Japan in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988), pp. 39-40.
19. Okamoto, Oligarchy pp. 25-26, 32; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 60.

20. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 82-83; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 82.

21. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 65-66; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 76—77; the
Komura interview is in New York Times, Feb. 28, 1904, p. 7; the point on the lack of
economic motives before 1904 is made by one of Japan's best-known and controversial
historians, Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon teikoku shugi no kesei, which sees the war as the turning

point leading to Japan's later economic-driven imperialism.

22. Gaimusho, Komura, especially early sections of chapter 8 on Komura's British and U.S.
policies; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 68, on background of British alliance; Hugh
Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801-igij (Oxford, 1967), pp. 580-588.
23. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 79; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 70-71; Paul Varg,
The Making of a Myth (East Lansing, MI, 1968), pp. 51-55.
24. This and the previous paragraph are based on Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 43, 91-93, 97;
Notes 4 1 9

Marius Jansen, "Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives," in Ramon H. Myers and
Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Ja-panese Colonial Empire, 1895-/905 (Princeton, 1984), pp.
65-66. I am indebted to Professor Robert Smith's translation of parts of Kiyozawa Man-
shi, Bukkyo to shinharon [Buddhism and Evolutionary Theory], reprinted in Kiyozawa
Manshi Zenshu [The Collected Works of Kiyozawa Manshi] (Kyoto, 1953), pp. 101-118 for
some of the material on evolutionary theory in Japan. Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the

Global Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 26; Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of
Korea (Philadelphia, i960), pp. 328-329.
25. Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 38-39, 96; d'Anethan, d'Anethan Dispatches, pp. 176-177; Gai-
musho, Komura, chapter 8 for the Komura-Hay relationship; Duus, Abacus and the
Sword, pp. 188-189, 427-428.
26. Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 101-102; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago,
1985), pp. 180-181, 200; Eleanor Tupper and George E. McReynolds, Japan in American
Public Opinion (New York, 1937), pp. 4-5.

27. George Queen, "The United States and the Material Advance in Russia, 1881-1906,"
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1942, pp. 169-170, 226; J. H. Wil-
son to Rockhill, June 30, 1904, Rockhill Papers; Akira From Nationalism to
Iriye, Interna-
tionalism (London, 1977), p. 289; Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, Jan. 10, 1904, in
Henry Adams, Henry Adams (1892-1918), ed. Worthington C. Ford (Boston,
Letters of

1938), pp. 409—410; Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 436—437.
28. Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 832-833; John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1954), pp. 26-29; Brooks Adams to Rockhill, May 28, 1903, Rockhill Papers;

Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Cecil Spring-Rice, 2 vols. (London,

1929), I, 231; Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1992), p. 443; Thomas G.
Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA, 1980), is standard and
especially important regarding Lamarckianism.

29. Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 700-701; ibid., 829-832.

30. Ibid., 701; Okamoto, Oligarchy, p. 105; Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow (New York,
1983), p. 268.
3i.Grosvenor Jones to Hoover, Aug. 7, 1926, Commerce, Office Files, box 130, Hoover
Library; Gary Dean Best, "Financing a Foreign War: Jacob H. Schiff and Japan, 1904-05,"
American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 61 (June 1972): 313-324, esp. pp. 313-315, 322.

32. Gaimusho, Komura, chapter 8, part 5, on Komura and Roosevelt; Okamoto, Oligarchy,
pp. 108-109; Walter A. McDougall, Let The Sea Make a Noise (New York, 1993), pp. 448-
456.

33. Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 1201-1203; Okamoto, Oligarchy, p. 119; Lincoln, In War's Dark
Shadow, p. 268.

34. Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 1230-1231, 1233-1234.

35. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 83-84; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 72-73; Oka-
moto, Oligarchy, pp. 117-118, 121-122, 148.

36. Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 144, 150; Miller, Roosevelt, p. 446.

37. Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 117-118; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 75.
38. Jansen, "Japanese ImperiaHsm," p. 74; Okamoto, Oligarchy, pp. 167, 184, 218-221;
d'Anethan, dAnethan Dispatches, pp. 211-212.
39. Gaimusho, Komura, chapter 5, parts 6-8; Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 1079-1080; Tupper and
McReynolds, Japan, p. 14.
40. C. I. Eugene Kim and Han-kyo Kim, Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, i8y6-igio
(Berkeley, 1967), pp. 114-118; Michael H. Hunt, Frontier Defense and the Open Door
(New Haven, 1973), pp. 144-145; Fred H. Harrington, "An American View of Korean-
American Relations, 1881-1905," in Yur-bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds.. One Hundred
Years of Korean-American Relations (University, AL, 1986), p. 62; John Gilbert Reid, ed.,
"Taft's Telegram to Root, July 29, 1905," PHR, 9 (March 1940): 66-70; Walter LaFeber,
Notes 4 2

"Mission to Tokyo," Constitution, 6 (Fall 1994), for an overview; John Edward Wilz, "Did
the United States Betray Korea in 1905?" PHR, 54 (August 1985): 243-270; Taft to H. H.
Taft, July 31, 1905, Taft Papers.

4i.Gaimusho, Komura, chapter 8, parts 8-9; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 91-94; Vis-
count Kaneko, "Japan's Monroe Doctrine," Peiping Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1932, p. 6, and
Sept. 8, 1932, p. 6, where Kaneko tells how Komura supposedly stopped Harriman.
42. For this and the previous paragraph, see Jansen, "Japanese Imperialism," p. 68 on Ito's

background; Gaimusho, Nippon gaiho nenpyo narahini shuyo hunsho [Japanese Foreign
Relations Chronicle and Major Documents], Vol. I (Tokyo, 1965), 261-269; Oka, Five
Political Leaders, p. 30; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 97—98; Duus, Economic
Aspects, pp. 1-5.

43. Oka, Five Political Leaders, p. 41.

44. Dunne, Mr. Dooley, pp. 290, 297-298.

45.Teruko Kachi, The Treaty 0/7911 (New York, 1988); Tupper and M c Reynolds, Japaw, pp.
21, 18-19; Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), II, 16-17.
46. Kachi, igii, pp. 162-164;Tupper and McReynolds, JapaM, p. 24; Miller, Roosevelt, p. 479;
Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice (Boulder, CO, 1988), p. 57.

47. John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 111-112;
Roosevelt, Letters, IV, 1205; Kimura Masato, "The Opening of the Panama Canal and
Japanese-American Relations" (in Japanese), JMJS, 16 (1989): 39-44.

48. Cooper, Warrior, p. 112; James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable (New York,
1988), pp. 138-140.

49. d'Anethan, dAnethan Dispatches, pp. 234-235; Tupper and McReynolds, Japan, p. 40;

James Miller, War Plan Orange (Annapolis, MD, 1995), pp. 89—90.
50. Peter Duus, "The Takeoff Point of Japanese Imperialism," in Harr)' Wray and Hilary
Conroy, eds., Japan Examined (Honolulu, 1983), pp. 156-157; Sandra Caruthers Thomson
(Taylor), "Meiji Japan Through Missionary Eyes; The American Protestant Experience,"
Journal of Religious History, 7 (June 1973): esp. 253-259; Warren F. Kuehl, Seeking World
Order (Nashville, TN, 1969), p. 106; G. B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan (New
York, 1950), p. 391 on link between treaty revision and missionaries.

51. The scholar quoted is Peter Duus, "Takeoff Point of Japanese Imperialism," pp. 156—157;
Gaimusho, Komura, chapter 10; Jansen, "Japanese Imperialism," p. 69.

52. Kamikawa Hikomatsu, ed., Japan- American Diplomatic Relations in the Meiji-Taisho Era,
translated by Kimura Michiko (Tokyo, 1958), pp. 270-272; Jessup, Root, II, 24-43.

53. Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1931), p. 382.

54. Maj. Gen. John T Dickman to his brother, Jan. 30, 1910, Dickman Papers; Chace and
Carr, America Invulnerable, p. 141.

55. This argument is outlined, with further citations, in Walter LaFeber, The American Search
for Opportunity, 1865-/913, in Warren I. Cohen, ed.. The Cambridge History of American
Foreign Relations (New York, 1993), pp. 206-208, 228-229.
56. Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 388 for Taft quote on support;
Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 2 vols. (New York, 1939),
II, 678-683.
57. William H. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan (Princeton, 1954), pp. 22-23;
Duus, "Takeoff Point," p. 155; Shinobu Seizaburo, Nichiro Sensoshi no Kenkyu [A Study
of the Historiography of the Russo-Japanese War], revised ed. (Tokyo, 1972), esp. p. xix
on the Japanese dilemma of capital exports, and throughout for the 1907 turn; Sansom,
Western World, pp. 503-504.
58. Inoue, Nihon teikoku shugi no keisei, esp. p. 158, 322, 341 on the turning point.
59. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 6-7; Lockwood, Economic Development, pp. 35-36;
Duus, "Takeoff Point," pp. 155-156.
Notes 4 2 1

60. Gaimusho, Nippon gaiho nenpyo narahini shuyo hunsho, pp. 305-308 for the 1908 docu-
ment on the cabinet debate.
61. Ibid., esp. p. 309; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 98-99.
62.Tupper and M c Reynolds, yapaM, pp. 13, 17, 82-83, ^^'' I^ye, From Nationalism, p. 224.

63. A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (New York, 1938), pp.

144-145, esp. for Knox's views.

G^.FRUS, 1910, pp. 237-238, 243-245.
65.M. W. Lampson, "The Manchurian Question," in Bourne, Documents, Part I, series E,
pp. 285-288; Kimura, "The Opening of the Panama Canal" (in Japanese), pp. 50, 60-
61; Wilham L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan (Baltimore, 1963), p. 131 quoting

Griswold.
66. Lampson, "The Manchurian Question," pp. 287-288; Walter V. and Marie V. Scholes,
The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration (Columbia, MO, 1970), pp. 121-122; Wil-
ham D. Puleston, Mahan (New Haven, 1939), pp. 193-194, 201; Asada Sadao, Ryodai
Senhan no Nichi-hei kankei: Kaigun to Seisaku kettei katei [Japanese-American Relations
Between the Wars: Naval Policy and the Decision-Making Process] (Tokyo, 1993), pp.
26-36 for Japanese officers' views.

67. Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 240-241; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 49-50;

Kachi, igii, pp. 154-155; Miller, War Plan Orange, pp. 24-25.
68. Bryce to Foreign Office, Dec. 4, 1912, FO 371, 45/53529/ 12, PRO.
69. Sansom, Western World, pp. 307-308.

CKapter IV

I.William W. Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan (Princeton, 1954), pp. 31, 33;

Peter Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed.. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twen-
tieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1988), p. 26; Sherman Cochran, "Japan's Capture of Chi-

na's Market for Imported Cotton Textiles Before World War I, " Institute of Economics,
The Second Conference of Modern Chinese Economic History, January 5—7, 1989 (Taipei,
1989), pp. 809-838.
2. Kimura Masato, "The Opening of the Panama Canal and Japanese-American Relations"
(in Japanese), Jourwa/ of Modem Japanese Studies, 11 (1989), esp. 45-46, 50—55; Asada
Sadao, Ryodai Senhan no Nichi-Bei kankei [Japanese-American Relations Between the
Wars] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 2,8-36; Lockwood, Economic Developm.ent, pp. 36-37; Roger
Dingman, Power in the Pacific (Chicago, 1976), pp. 14-16; E.Sydney Crawcour, "Industri-
alization and Technological Change, 1885-1920," in Duus, ed.. The Twentieth Century,
pp. 444-445.
3. Ikuhiko Hata, "Continental Expansion, 1905-1941," in Duus, ed.. The Twentieth Century,
pp. 278-279; Roger F. Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo (Cambridge, MA, 1971), esp. pp. 249-
264.
4. Nobuya Bamba, Japanese Diplomacy in a Dilemma (Kyoto, 1972), pp. 49-50; Hackett,
Yamagata, pp. 270-275, has the quote; Marius Jansen, Japan and China (Chicago, 1975),
pp. 199-202.
5. This view of Wilson draws heavily from Martin J. Sklar's The Corporate Reconstruction of
American Capitalism, 1890-19/6 (New York, 1988), esp. pp. 36—37, 390-411; Wilson's view
of revolution is in "Democracy," Dec. 5, 1891, Link, Wilson Papers, VII, 350.
6. The quote is in Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist (Baltimore, 1957), p. 7.
7. William Diamond, The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, 1943), pp. 132—
133-
Notes 4 2 2

8. Roland N. Stromberg, Collective Seciirit}' and American Foreign Policy (New York, 1963),
p. 66; Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door (Pittsburgh, 1971), p. loi.

9. Straight to Harry P. Davison, Oct. 28, 1911, Straight Papers; Daniel M. Crane and Thomas
A. Breslin, An Ordinary Relationship (Miami, 1986), p. 49.

10. Daniels, Cabinet, pp. 7-8; Israel, Progressivism, p. 108.

11. Arthur S. Link, Wilson. The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), pp. 285-288; Secretary of
State Memorandum of Aug. 20, 1913, State Department Records Relating to the Internal
Affairs of China, 1910-1929 (microcopy 329, roll 148), 893.51 / 1361-1500, NA, RG 59.
12. Kimura, "The Opening of the Panama Canal" (in Japanese), p. 53; Caddis Smith, The
Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1^4^-1^^^ (New York, 1994), pp. 26-28; William C.
Widenor, Henry Cahot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley,
1980), pp. 135-136.
13. For this and the pre\dous paragraph, see Teruko Kachi, The Treaty of 7917 (New York,

1978), pp. 255-256; Link, Wilson. Neu' Freedom, pp. 289-290; Link, Wilson Papers, XXIV,

351-353. 382-383-
14. Link, Wilson Papers, XXVII, 365; Kendrick A. Clements, The Presidency ofWoodrcnv Wil-
son (Lawrence, KA, 1992), pp. 107-108; Eleanor Tupper and George E. McReynolds.
Japan in American Public Opinion (New York, 1937), p. 59.
15. Daniels, Cabinet, pp. 52—68; Link, Wilson. New Freedom., pp. 293-297.
16. Link, Wilson Papers, XXVII, 451-452.
17. Duus, Introduction, p. 7; Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge,
MA, 1992), pp. 33-34.
18. Chronicle Reprints. Two Japanese Statesmen. Marquis Okuma and Prince Yamagata (Kobe,
1922), pp. 1-16; Junji Banno, "External and Internal Problems After the War," in Harrv^

Wray and Hilar\' Conroy, eds., Japan Examined (Honolulu, 1983), pp. 167-168.
19. Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 7869-7942 (London, 1977), pp. 83-85.
20. Richard Storry, Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia, 18^4— ig4^ (New York, 1979),
pp. 108-111; Dingman, Power, pp. 49-53.
21. Sir C. Eliot to Curzon, Aug. 17, 1922, FO 371 F2942 72942 723, PRO; Jon Halliday, A
Political Histor) of Japanese Capitalism (New York, 1975), p. 94; Nish, Japanese Foreign
Policy, pp. 93-95; W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, i8g4-ig4^ (New York, 1991), p.
116.

22. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 106—107; Clements, Wilson, p. 108; Link, Wilson. The
Struggle for Neutrality, igi4-igi^ (Princeton, i960), pp. 267-270.
23. Storry, Japan, pp. 102-103; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 104—7.
24. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 98—99; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 112-113; Link,
Wilson. Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 269-270.
25. Link, Wilson. Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 272-278.
26. Link, Wilson Papers, XXXIII, 140-141; Clements, Presidency, pp. 109-110; Link, Wilson.
Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 269-285, 300—308.
27. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 99—100; Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New-
York, 1984), pp. 80-83; William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan (Baltimore,

1963), p. 145.
28. Link, Wilson Papers, XXXIII, 121-122.
29. The Japanese loan offensive is outlined in Hirano Ken'ichiro, "Nishihara shakhan kara
shinshikoku shakkanda e" [From the Nishihara Loan to the Four- Power Consortium],
in Hosoya Chihiro and Saito Makoto, eds., Washinton taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei [The
Washington Treaty System and Japanese-U.S. Relations] (Tokyo, 1978), pp. 291-294;
FRL'S, 7977, pp. 135-136; FRUS, igiS, pp. 170-175; Foreign Office Memorandum, Nov.
23, 1920, FO 371 F2753/2/10, PRO; N. Gordon Le\in, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World
Politics (New York, 1968), p. 21.
 Notes 4 2 3

30. Link, Wilson. Progressivism and Peace, 79/6-/9/7 (Princeton, 1965), chapter 9.
31. Lansing Diaries, Feb. 4, 1917, box 2, microfilm, reel #1; Edward H. Buehrig, Woodrow
Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington, IN, 1955), pp. 137-144.
32. Dean Acheson, "The Eclipse of the State Department," Foreign Affairs, 40 (July 1971):

598, has Wilson's "associates" quote; Link, Wilson. Progressivism, pp. 265-275.

33. Viscount Kikujiro Ishii, Diplomatic Commentaries, translated and edited by William R.
Langdon (Baltimore, 1936), pp. v, 112; New York Times Magazine, June 24, 1917, has
interview and quotes.

34. Ishii, Diplomatic Commentaries, pp. 116-120; Gardner, Safe, pp. 217-219; Takashi Mat-
suda, "Woodrow Wilson's Dollar Diplomacy in the Far East," Unpublished Ph.D. disserta-
I tion. University ofWisconsin-Madison, 1979, pp. 174-175, 182.
35. FRUS: Lansing, II, 432-451, esp. p. 436 on "special interest" and pp. 450-451 on exchange
of notes; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 115-117.
36. Straight to Frederick Moore, Nov. 10, 1917, Straight Papers; Robert Lansing, War Memoirs
of Robert Lansing (IndianapoHs, IN, 1935), pp. 303-304; FRUS: Lansing, II, 451-453;
Gardner, Safe, pp. 222-224; MacMurray to Long, Sept. 20, 1918, 893.51/2013, NA, RG
59-

37. Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, and Thomas J. McCormick, The Creation of the Ameri-
can Empire (Chicago, 1976), pp. 336—337 for further citations.
38. Goldberg, Documents, I, 35-39; Gardner, et al., Creation, pp. 335-336.

39. Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 38-39; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 160-161; Nish,
Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 112-113.
40. Hosoya Chihiro, "Origins of the Siberian Intervention, 1917-1918," Arzwa/s of Hitotsuhashi
Academy, 9 (October 1958): 96-102; Hosoya, Documents, p. 36; Dingman, Power, pp. 57-
59; Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 40 for back-
ground of the military's need for raw materials.
41. Lansing Diaries, March 18, 1918, box #2, microfilm, reel #1; Arthur Link, Woodrow Wil-
son: Revolution, War, and Peace (New York, 1979), p. 85; Bullitt to House, June 24, 1918,
folder 45, House Papers.
42. Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars (New York, 1992), pp. 155-156; Gardner, Safe, pp.
186—191; Hosoya, "Origins," pp. 105-108.

43. Hosoya, Documents, pp. 45-48; Hosoya, "Origins," pp. 103-105; Bamba, Japanese Diplo-
macy, pp. 38-39, for "mystic" quote; FRUS: Paris, II, 466, for railroad situation.
44. Hosoya, Documents, pp. 52-53; Bullitt to House, Jan. 30, 1919, folder 45, House Papers;
Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 117; David S. Foglesong, America's Secret War Against
Bolshevism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), pp. 147-149.
45. Link, Wilson Papers, XLI, 438-484; New York Times, Aug. i, 1915, in NYT-GCI, p. 57.
46. Foreign Office Memorandum, Nov. 23, 1920, FO 371 F2753 /2 / '°' PRO; Iriye, China and
Japan, pp. 22—24.
47. Dingman, Power, pp. 55-56 for favorable account of Haras background; Chalmers John-
son, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, 1982), p. 91 for rice riots and causes.

48. Hara Takashi, pp. 317, 346, 449; FRUS: Paris, I, 490; Yoshitaka Oka, Five Political Leaders
of Modern Japan, translated by Andrew Eraser and Patricia Murray (Tokyo, 1986), pp.
177-179, 192-193, 194; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 119.
49. FRUS: Paris, I, 489, 519; Link, Council, I, xxii.

50. Arthur Link, Wilson. Confusions and Crises (Princeton, 1964), p. 33; Charles E. Neu, The
Troubled Encounter (New York, 1975), pp. 90-91, 150-151; William Reynolds Braisted,
The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-/922 (Austin, TX, 1971), pp. 418-426.
51. Levin, Wilson, pp. 113-114; Link, Wilson. New Freedom, p. 69; Neu, Troubled, p. 92 for
House quote.
52. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations (Boston, 1921), pp. 98-99; Ronald Steel, Walter
Notes 4 2 4

Lippmann and the American Century (New York, 1980), pp. 149-150; FRUS: Paris, II,

520-525; ibid., XI, 21.

53. Shimazu Naoko, "The Japanese Attempt to Secure Racial Equality in igig" Japan Forum,
I (April 1989): 93-94; Link, Wilson Papers, LVII, 259-261; Paul Gordon Lauren, Power
and Prejudice (Boulder, CO, 1988), pp. 82-90; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 121.

54. Link, Wilson Papers, LVII, 261-265; Lauren, Power, pp. 78-79, 83, 93.

55. Link, Council, FRUS: Paris, V, 129-130; Lansing, Peace Negotiations, p.

I, 320-321, 326;
262; Herbert C. Hoover, The Ordeal ofWoodrow Wilson (New York, 1958), pp. 208-211.

56. Link, Council, I, 399-408; Knock, To End All Wars, pp. 249-250; Harold Nicolson,

Peacemaking, 1919 (London, 1933), p. 146.

57. Hoover, Ordeal, pp. 223-228; New York Times, Jan. 21, 1920, in NYT-GCI, p. 40.

58. Neumann, America, Wayne Patterson and Hilary Conroy, "Duality and Domi-
p. 156;

nance," in Yur-bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds.. One Hundred Years of Korean-Ameri-
can Relations (University, AL, 1986), p. 6.

59. Widenor, Lodge, pp. 327-328; Root to Lodge, June 19, 1919, Root Papers.
60. Bullitt to Lansing, May 17, 1919, Lansing Papers; Daniel M. Smith, "Lansing and the
Wilson Interregnum," The Historian, 21 (February 1959): 152-153.
61. Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplom.acy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967), pp. 876—877; Gard-
ner, Safe, p. 295.

62. Bourne is quoted in David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p.

83-

Cnapter V

1. Bourne, Documents, Part II, series E, III, 113.

2. Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 186^—1^42 (London, 1977), p. 4; Herbert C. Hoover, The
Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1958); Herbert Hoover, American Individualism
(Washington, DC, 1922).
3. "Address Before American Bankers' Association, Chicago, Dec. 10, 1910," Addresses, Let-
ters . . . AG I, vol. 5, Hoover Papers.
4. Hoover to Hughes, April 29, 1922, Secretary's Files, Hoover Papers; Robert Freeman
Smith, "Thomas W Lamont," in Thomas C. McCormick and Walter LaFeber, eds..
Behind the Throne (essays in honor of Fred Harvey Harrington) (Madison, WI, 1993), pp.
101-102.

5. Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy (New York, 1984), p. 296; Sir C. Addis to Mr.
Bentinck, July 29, 1920, FO 371 F1651 /2/10, PRO; Sir A. Geddes to Earl Curzon, Sept.
9, 1920, FO 371 F2180 / 2 / 10, PRO.
6. FRUS, 498-499; "Thomas
igio, I, W
Lamont's Visit to the Far East," March 29, 1920, in
B. Alston to Earl Curzon, March 29, 1920, FO 371 F784/2/10, PRO; Hirano Ken'ichiro,

"Nishihara shakhan kara shinshikoku shakhanda e" [From the Nishihara Loan to the
Four-Power Consortium], in Hosoya Chihiro and Saito Makoto, eds., Washinton taisei to

Nichi-Bei kankei [The Washington Treaty System and Japanese-U.S. Relations] (Tokyo,
1978), pp. 306-312.
7. Sir C. Addis to Bentinck, April 20, 1920, FO 371 F588/2/10, PRO; B. Alston to Earl

Curzon, March 29, 1920, FO 371 F784/2/10, PRO.

8. FRUS, 1920, I, 537, 556; Japan Advertiser, May 13, 1920, pp. i, 10, for joint statements;
Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire (Pittsburgh, 1969), pp. 201-202.

9. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York, 1990), pp. 231-235; Warren Cohen, "Con-
Alexander DeConde, ed.. Encyclopedia of American Foreign Relations, 3 vols.
sortia," in
Notes 4 2 5

(New York, 1978), I, 172-173; G. C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan. 4th
ed. (New York, 1981), pp. 100-106.
10. Nobuya Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy in a Dilemma (Kyoto, 1972), pp. 42-57, 50-51; Peter
Duus, Introduction to Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century, Duus,
ed. (New York, 1988), p. 35; Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific (Chicago, 1976), pp.

131-132.
11. Bsimha, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 42-51; Eguchi Kiichi, Futatsu no taisen [Between the
Two Great Wars] (Tokyo, 1989), pp. 11 5-120 for theater and hairstyles; Dingman, Power,

P- 131-
12. Dingman, Power, pp. 124-125; Tadashi Aruga, "Editor's Introduction," /JAS (2, 1985): 23-
26; Duus, Introduction, p. 8.

13. Dingman, Power, pp. 132-133, 183; Goldberg, Documents, I, 169-/73 on exchange over
Siberia; F. O. Minute, Oct. 4, 1920, on Eliot to Foreign Office, Sept. 3, 1920, FO 371
F2281 / 2281 723, PRO; Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Secu-
rity (Ithaca, NY, 1993), p. 16.

14. Congressional Record- Senate, Dec. 14, 1920, 66th Cong., 3d Sess., vol. 60, part i, p. 310;

Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (New York, 1937), II, 446; Dingman, Power, p. 143;
Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (New York, 1951), II, 453.
15. Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise (New York, 1993), pp. 524-527. Dingman,
Power, pp. 147-148; Sir C. Eliot to Foreign Office, July 29, 1922, FO 371 F2493 72493 ^^S-
PRO; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (New York, 1984),
p. 362; Pusey, Hughes, p. 459.

16. "Memorandum," Neville to Hughes, June 15, 1921, in MacMurray to Hughes, June 27,
1921, 790.94 7 5, box 7112, NA, RG 59.

17. Sir C. Eliot to Foreign Office, June 29, 1922, FO 371 F249372493723, PRO; Ira Klein,

"Whitehall, Washington, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1919-1921, " PHR, 46 (no. 2,

1968):468-469, 477; Pusey, Hughes, II, 442; Gardner, Safe, p. 308, has elephant story;

Dingman, Power, pp. 97-98, 155-156; Jessup, Root, II, 449-450.

18. Pusey, Hughes, pp. 468-473.
19. Hiroyuka Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, translated by
John Bester (New York, 1979), pp. 27-28; Dingman, Power, pp. 257, 192, 218.
20. Kato and the anti-Washington naval faction are noted in Hosoya Chihiro, "Washinton
taisei no tokushitsu to henyo" [Characteristics of Changes of the Washington System] in

Hosoya and Saito, eds., Washinton taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei, pp. 3-5; New York Times,
Sept. 9, 1919, p. 47; ibid., March 11, 1951, p. 92; Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 156-158;
Castle Diaries, May 4, 1930; Morris to Lansing, Nov. 27, 1918, FRUS: Paris, I, 491 on
Shibusawa.
21. This and the next paragraph are drawn especially from Herbert O. Yardley, The American
Black Chamber (London, James Bamford's Introduction in Herbert O.
1931), pp. 194—222;
Yardley, The Chinese Black Chamber (New York, 1983); and James Bamford, The Puzzle
Palace (Boston, 1982), pp. 8, 16.

22. Japanese economic dependence on Americans at this time is stressed in Nakamura Taka-
fusa, "Sekai keizai no naka no Nichi-Bei, " Qapanese-U.S. Economic Relations in the

World Economy], in Hosoya and Makoto, eds., Washington taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei, pp.
476-482; Pusey, Hughes, pp. 476-477; Agawa, Yamamoto, pp. 28-29; Akira Iriye, Across
the Pacific (New York, 1967), p. 144.

23. W G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 18^4-1^4^ (New York, 1991), pp. 266-267; Pusey,
Hughes, pp. 481, 499; Klein, "Whitehall," p. 482.
24. Hughes to Hoover, Sept. 27, 1921, Commerce, Official File, box 55, Hoover Papers; Jessup
Root, II, 452, 458-459; Bartlett, Record, pp. 486-490.
25. Sadao Asada, "Japan's Special Interests' and the Washington Conference, 1921-22," AH/?,
Notes 4 2 6

67 (October 1961): 63-70; James B. Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy (Princeton,
1966), p. 29; Russell H. Fifield, "Secretary Hughes and the Shantung Question," PHR, 24
(no. 4, 1954): 375-385-

26. FO Minute, Oct. 18, 1920, on Geddes to FO, Oct. 14, 1920, FO F2446 72343 723,
371
PRO; "C-in-C Asiatic," to "Opnav-Washington," Feb. 14, 1921, 790.9473 (1910-29), box
71 12, NA, RG 59, on Japan's view of its "special interests."

27. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 167; Iriye, After Imperialism, pp. 19-20; Hirano, "Nishi-
hara shakhan kara shinshikoku shakkanda e," p. 314, for how loans helped divide U.S.
and Japan.
28. Sir C. Eliot to FO, May 25, 1922, FO 371 F210972109723, PRO; Akira Iriye, "Japan's

Policies Toward the United James William Morley, ed., Japan's Foreign Policy,
States, " in

1868-1^41 (New York, 1974), pp. 243-244; Manfred Jonas, "Isolationism," in Alexander
DeConde, ed.. Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 3 vols. (New York, 1978), II, 496.
29. For this and the previous paragraph, see FRUS, igii, I, 773-774; Crowley, Japan's Quest,
p. 29; Yardley, Chinese, p. xvii, has White quote; Herbert O. Yardley, The Education of a
Poker Player, Including Where and How One Learns to Win (New York, 1957).
30. Charles Evans Hughes, The Pathway of Peace (New York, 1925), p. 259; Roger Daniels,
Coming to America (New York, 1990), pp. 282-283.
31. Roger Daniels and Harry H. L. Kitano, American Racism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970),
pp. 54-55; Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest (Armonk,
NY, 1992), pp. 4-5.
32. Asada Sadao, Ryodai Senkan no Nichi-Bei hanhei [Japanese-American Relations Between
the Wars] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 338-339 for "yellow peril" image at this time; Aruga Tadashi,
"Hainichi mondai to Nichi-Bei kankei: Hanihara shokan o chusin ni" [The Japanese
Exclusionary Policy and Japanese-U.S. Relations: The Hanihara Letter], in Iriye Akira

and Aruga Tadashi, eds., Senkanki no Nippon gaiko [Japanese Foreign Policy During the
Interwar Period] (Tokyo, 1984), pp. 65-96; Pusey, Hughes, pp. 512-516.
33. Izumi Hirobe, "American Attitudes Toward the Japanese Immigration Question, 1924-
1931," JAEAR, 2 (Fall 1993): 275-280; Sandra C. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding (Kent,
OH, 1984), is the standard biography of Gulick, especially for his work in Japan.

34. Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 157, 158, 214, 119.

35. Ibid., pp. 196-198; Asada, Ryodai Senkan no Nichi-Bei kankei, p. 300 for Japanese
attempts to understand the act; Akira Iriye, "The Failure of Economic Expansionism,
1918-1931," in Bernard Silberman and Harry Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis

(Princeton, 1974), pp. 259-260; Viscount Kikujiro Ishii, Diplomatic Commentaries, trans-
lated and edited by William R. Langdon (Baltimore, 1936), pp. 306-307.

36. Iriye, "Failure," pp. 254-255, 259-260; Bamba, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 297-298; Mac-
Veagh to Kellogg, Aug. 2, 1926, 790.94713, box 7112, NA, RG 59 on Pan-Asian fiasco;
Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria (Berkeley, 1964), p. 39.

37. Gardner, Safe, pp. 322-323; C. F. Remer, Foreign Investments in China (New York, 1933),
p. 274; Grosvenor Jones to Hoover, Aug. 7, 1926, Commerce, Official Files, box 230,
Hoover Papers, for Rockefeller involvement.

38. Asada, Ryodai Senkan no Nichi-Bei kankei, pp. 343-344 on Japan-U.S. banking coopera-
tion; FO Minute, Ashley Clarke, May 27, 1944, and enclosed memorandum by Sir J.

Pratt, FO 371 F25927 17877 10, PRO; Iriye, "Japan's Policies," pp. 436-437.
39. Asada, "Japan's 'Special Interests,' " p. 62 on "Shidehara period"; Iriye, "Failure," pp. 245-
247; Duus, Introduction, pp. 36-37; Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy, p. 52.

40. Iriye, China and Japan, pp. 55-56; Ogata, Defiance, p. 8; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy,
p. 155, for Shidehara quote; background on this economic perspective is in Hirano, "Nis-

hihara jakkan kara shinshikoku jakkandan 3," pp. 309-314.

41. Hosoya, "Washinton taisei no tokushitsu to henyo," pp. 4, 6; Pauline Tompkins, American-
Notes 4 2 7

Russian Relations in the Far East (New York, 1949), chapter 9, and especially p. 212;

Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 171; Iriye, "Japan's Policies," p. 438.

42. Memorandum for Hoover from Batchelder, Nov. 22, 1921, Commerce, Official File, box
170, Hoover Papers; Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 234-236.
43. Hoover to Hughes, April 29, 1922, Secretary's Files, Hoover Papers; Parrini, Heir, pp.

194-195, 202-203; Taichiro Mitani, "Manchuria: American Capital and Japanese Special
Interests in the 1920s," in Ian Nish, ed.. Some Foreign Attitudes to Republican China
(London, 1980), pp. 1-3, 6-12.

44. Gardner, Safe, pp. 315-317; Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 236-237, 338.
45. Warren I. Cohen, Empire Without Tears (New York, 1987), pp. 80-81; Ogata, Defiance,
pp. 7-8.
46. Bamha, Japanese Diplomacy, pp. 15, 25-26, 40; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 152-153;
Ogata, Defiance, pp. lo-ii.
47. Mitani, "Manchuria," pp. 12-24.
48. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 51; Ogata, Defiance, pp. 10—13; Iriye, China and Japan, p. 51.

49. Ogata, Defiance, pp. 16-17; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 187-188.
50. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 164.

51. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington,
DC, 1961), p. 564.

52. "The Future of Our Foreign Trade," March 16, 1926, Secretary of Commerce Official File,
Foreign Trade, 1926, Hoover Papers; Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion (Ithaca, NY,
1985), chapter i; "Business Depression and Policies of Government, June '
15, 1931, Public
Statements, AGi, vol. 52, no. 1587, Hoover Papers; Castle Diaries, June 29 and Dec. 31,

1930-

53. Castle Diaries, May 3, 1931; "Business Depression," Hoover Papers.

54. Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, 1973), p. 59; Sato
Kazuo, "Nichi-Bei boeki to Nihon keizai no fukinkan seicho" [Japan-U.S. Trade and the
Imbalance of Growth in the Japanese Economy], in Hosoya and Makoto, eds., Washinton
taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei, pp. 502-506 for silk and cotton goods and rice; Barnhart, Japan
Prepares, p. 65; Allen, Economic History, pp. 106-115 on Japanese consolidation; Beasley,
Japanese Imperialism, pp. 236-237 on comparison of trade; Oct. 11, 1931, Saionji Memoirs
for ties between New York and Japan's gold reserve crisis.

55. Kindleberger, World, p. 144; Allen, Economic History, pp. 108-109; Bamba, Japanese
Diplomacy, p. 47; Duus, Introduction, p. 22, has Chamber of Commerce quote; ibid.,

pp. 23-24 on labor; Tatsunosuke Ueda, "Some Aspects of Industrial Japan," The World
Tomorrow, 13 (November 1930): 459-460 on "warm-feeling principle."
56. Sato, "Nichi-Bei boeki to Nihon keizai no fukinkan seicho," pp. 502-510 for economic
causes of rural breakdown; Duus, Introduction, p. 20, on lack of government control
Monthly Labor Review, 33 (August 1931): 396-399; Current History, 33 (December 1930)
479 has note on suicides; James T. Shotwell, "The Fateful Dilemma of Young Japan,'
New York Times Magazine, March 2, 1930, pp. 4ff; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp.
175-176.
57. Chernow, House of Morgan, pp. 342-343; Castle Diaries, March 2, April 26, 1930.
58. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 165-166, 173-174; Iriye, "Japan's Policies," p. 440; Beas-
ley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 173.

59. Asada, Ryodai senkan no Nichi-Bei kankei, p. 179 for Japanese divisions over 1930 talks;

Millett and Maslowsky, Common Defense, p. 373; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 166-
170; Castle Diaries, May 31, 1930, Feb. 15, 1930 (for Shidehara quote).
60. Castle Diaries, Jan. 31, 1930, on Japanese fear of U.S. war over China; Castle to Stimson,
Jan. 31, 1930, Foreign Affairs-China, 1930, box i-G/847, Hoover Papers; Iriye, "Japan's

Policies," p. 441 has Ishiwara quote; Ogata, Defiance, pp. 28-29; ^^^ York Times, June
 —
Notes 4 2 8

6, 1930, p. 6 has Inoue quote; Current History, 33 (December 1930): 480 for Hamaguchi
quote.
61. Ogata, Defiance, p. 29; Castle Diaries, March 4, 1931; New York Times, Dec. 11, 1930, p.
7; ibid., March 13, 1931, p. 1.

Ckapter VI

I.John G. Roberts, Mitsui. Three Centuries of Japanese Business, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989),

p. 259; Justus D. Doenecke, The Diplomacy of Frustration: The Manchurian Crisis of ig^i—
1933 as Revealed in the Papers of Stanley K. Hornheck (Stanford, 1981), p. 7; Michael A.
Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War (Ithaca, NY, 1987), pp. 28—29; ^- G. Beasley,
Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945 (New York, 1991), pp. 188-190.
2. Peter Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Security (Ithaca, NY, 1993), p.

19; Chalmers Johnson, MITl and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford, 1981), pp. 93-94, 98-
104, 112-115.

3. Richard J. Samuels, "Rich Nation, Strong Army"; National Security and the Technological
Transformation of Japan (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 93-99; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp.
24-25.
4. Katzenstein and Okawara, Japan s National Security, pp. 13-15; Robert J. Smith. Japanese
Society (Cambridge, UK, 1983), pp. 129-130; Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 1869-1942
(London, 1977), p. 255.

5. Peter Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed., Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, UK, 1988), pp. 15-16, has the 1930 quote; Akira Iriye, "The Failure
of Economic Expansionism," in Bernard Silberman and Harry Harootunian, eds., Japan
in Crisis (Princeton, 1974), p- 265; Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria (Berkeley,

1964), pp. 35-36 has Matsuoka quote.

6. Hirovoiki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, translated by
John Bester (Tokyo, 1979), p. 4; Ogata, Defiance, pp. 44-45; July 13, 1931, Saionji Mem-
oirs, esp. pp. 5-10; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 182; Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustra-
tion, pp. 9—10; Barnhart, Japan Prepares for War, p. 29.
7. Ogata, Defiance, pp. 17-19, 42-43; July 13. 1931, Saionji Memoirs; "Imperial Japanese
Army in Manchuria, 1894-1945, " in U.S. Army, Japan, War in Asia and the Pacific (New
Doenecke, Diplomacy' of Frustration, p. 9.
York, 1980), pp. 66—67;
S.Ogata, Defiance, pp. 45-49; Sept. 23, 1931, Saionji Memoirs; Beasley Japanese Imperial-
ism, pp. 192-193.

9. Sept. 23, 1931, Saionji Memoirs, esp. p. 74; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 32-33; Ogata,
Defiance, pp. 42, 63-67, 76.
10. Castle Diaries, Aug. 24 and Sept. 9, 1931; Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, pp. 3-4;
Ogata, Defiance, p. 72.

11. New York Times, Oct. 14, 1963, p. A29; Castle Diaries, June 29, 1930; ibid., Jan. 12, March
8, 1931, and Jan. 24, 1930, on discussion with Nelson Johnson; ibid., Sept. 29, 1931, wish-
ing it had not happened, Oct. 6, 1931. Castle to Johnson, Oct. 13, 1930, Castle Papers
China, Hoover Papers.
12. Doenecke, Diplomacy' of Frustration, pp. 10—16.
13. Washington Post, Oct. 14, 1962, p. B2 for Castle's obituar\-; Castle Diaries, Sept. 7, 1929,
Dec. 31, 1931; Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, p. 11; Henry L. Stimson and
McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1947), p. 192.
14. Eking E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: The Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Bos-
ton, i960), pp. 373-374; Sept. 22, 1931, and Jan. 8, 1932, Stimson Diary; Doenecke, Diplo-
macy of Frustration, p. 15; Castle Diaries, Dec. 27, 1930, for Stimson on "White races";
"Memorandum of Transatlantic Telephone Conversation Between Secretary Stimson,
Notes 4 2 9

Norman Davis, and Hugh Wilson," Sept. 23, 1931, Presidential Papers, Foreign Affairs,
Far East (Japanese Incident), Hoover Papers.
15. Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, pp. 13-14; Walter Lippmann, Interpretations, 193/-

7932 (New York, 1932), pp. 187-189.

16. Ogata, Defiance, p. 87; Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, pp. 16-17; Castle Diaries,
Oct. 10, 1931; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York, 1990), pp. 339-340.

17. Lippmann, Interpretations, pp. 191-192; "Transatlantic Telephone Conversation between

Secretary Stimson and General Dawes, Paris, Nov. 19, 1931, 11:00," in Presidential Papers,
Foreign Affairs, Far East (Japanese Incident), Hoover Papers; Doenecke, Diplomacy of
Frustration, pp. 20-23; Castle Diaries, Dec. 7, 1931, on blockade.
18. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 65; Castle Diaries, Dec. 23, 1931, on cable to Tokyo; Oct. 2,

1931, Saionji Memoirs; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 180; Ogata, Defiance, p. 138;

Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, pp. 24-25.

19. Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, p. 26; Lippmann, Interpretations, p. 200; Hornbeck
to Stimson, Feb. 7, 1933, on Feb. 6 memorandum in Lot File 244, General Records of the
. . . Far Eastern Division, 1932-1941, box 2, NA, RG 59.
20. Armin Rappaport, Henry L. Stimson and Japan, i9y-i<)^l (Chicago, 1963), pp. 148-149
on business support; Doenecke, Diplomacy of Frustration, pp. 28-30; Chernow, House of
Morgan, p. 343; "Memorandum of Transatlantic Telephone Conversation," between Stim-
son and Simon, Feb. 13, 1932, Presidential Papers, Foreign Affairs, Far East (Japanese
Incident), Hoover Papers, on Japan fearing both; Lippmann, Interpretations, pp. 224-225;

Stimson, Active Service, pp. 243-244, has Hoover quote; Hornbeck's view of British prob-
lem is in "Manchuria Situation. . .
." Feb. 17, 1921, folder January-February 1932, box 453,
Hornbeck Papers, Hoover Institution Stanford, California. I am indebted to Anne Foster
Hornbeck document.
for this

21. Stimson, Active Service, pp. 246-256.

22. Ogata, Defiance, pp. 145-146, 152-154; Hugh Byas, Government hy Assassination (New
York 1942), pp. 24-30.
23. Ogata, Defiance, pp. 156-161; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 175-176; Attachment in
Hamilton to Castle, June 13, 1932, F/HS 790.94/29 box 4396, NA, RG 59, has Uchida
quote; see also Akira Iriye, "The Failure of Military Expansionism," in James Morley, ed..
Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton, 1971), p. 445.

24. Ogata, Defiance, pp. 159-161, 173—174; Nish, "The Showa Emperor and the End of the
Manchurian Crisis," Japan Forum, i (October 1989): 266-268.
25. Henry L. Stimson, "Bases of American Foreign Policy During the Past Four Years," For-
eign Affairs, 11 (April 1933): 383; Stimson to Root, Dec 14, 1931, Presidential Papers,
Foreign Affairs, Far East (Japanese Incident), Hoover Papers; Stimson to Lippmann, May
26, 1932, Baker Papers; Castle Diaries, Dec. 14, 1931; Grew to Stimson, Sept. 23, 1932, F/
HS 790.94/31, box 4396, NA, RG 59; Ogata, Defiance, p. 132 on Kwantung Army; Grew
to Hull, May 11, 1933, enclosed in Hull to the President, May 27, 1933, PSF: Japan,
Roosevelt Library.
26. Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 68—69.
27. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-/939 (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 166-

167; Duus, Introduction, pp. 41-42 on the "new bureaucrats"; Barnhart, Japan Prepares
for War, p. 67; John W
Masland, "Commercial Influence Upon American Far Eastern
Policy, 1937-1941, " PHR, II (September 1942): 282.
28. Jan. 9, 1933, Stimson Diary.

29. Matsuoka speech at Council on Foreign Relations, March 27, 1933, Record of Meetings,
vol. V (7/33-6/35), CFR.
30. "China-Economic Matters," May 2, 1933, Lot File 244, General Records of the Far East-
ern Division, 1932-1941, box i, NA, RG 59; News-Week, April 28, 1934, pp. 7-8; New York
Times, April 21, 1934, p. 8.
Notes 4 3

31. Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 197, 210 on Hirota; Iriye, China and Japan, p. 77;

Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, p. 197; Herbert Feis, 1933: Characters in Crisis (Boston,

1966), pp. 299-300; New York Times, April 29, 1934, section
8, p. New Republic, May i;

2, 1934, p. 323 esp; ibid., May 16, 1934, p. 14; News-Week, April 28, 1934, pp. 7-8; an
alternative view of the Amau statement is Inoue Toshikazu, Kiki no naka no kyocho gaiho:
Nitchu senso ni itaru taigai seisaku no hesei to tenkai [A Conciliatory Foreign Policy in the
Midst of Crisis: The Formation and Development of Japanese Foreign Policy Until the
Sino-Japanese War] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 118— 129.
32. The Peiping Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1932, p. 6, has Kaneko's article; Hornbeck to Hull, Jan.

27, 1934, with attachment, 790 94/65 box 4396, NA, RG 59; George H. Blakeslee, "The
Japanese Monroe Doctrine," Foreign Ajfairs, 11 (July 1933): 680.

33. "Summary of the Morning Newspapers . . . Nov. 7, 1933, box 18, Russian file, Moore
Papers; Pauline Tompkins, American-Russian Relations in the Far East (New York, 1949),
chapter 12 for discussion of the "nutcracker"; Hornbeck to Hull, Oct. 28, 1933, and Horn-
beck to Phillips, Oct. 31, 1933, 711.6.7333, NA, RG 59, on reassuring Japan; Feis, 7933, pp.

329—330; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 195.

34. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York, 1969), pp. 9-10.

35. Chernow, House of Morgan, p. 345, on Lamont; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski,
For the Common Defense (New York, 1984), p. 377; Warren Cohen, America's Response to

China (New York, 1980), pp. 139-140; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 41-42, 66, 116, esp.
good on silver purchases.
36. Agawa, Yamamoto, pp. 33-35; Inoue, Kiki no naka no kyocho gaiko, pp. 172—176; Barnhart,

Japan Prepares, pp. 61-62, 116-117; Cohen, America's Response, p. 136; Masland, "Com-
mercial," p. 234 for the National Foreign Trade Council quote.

37. New York Times, Feb. 26, 1936, in NYT-GCI, pp. 206-207; Duus, Introduction, p. 37;
Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 221-222; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 180— 181,
204-205.
38. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 201-203.
39. Inoue, Kiki no naka no kyocho gaiko, pp. 269, 273-274; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp.

214-215, 228-229.
40. Duus, Introduction, China and Japan, p. 68.
p. 16; Iriye,

4i.Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro, translated by Shumpei Okamoto and Patricia Murray
(Tokyo, 1983), pp. 3—9, 16-19, 2.9-38; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 218-219, has good
sketch; John K. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread (New York, 1978), pp. 104-105.

42. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 28-83, 84-89, 91, 118.

43. David Green, Shaping Political Consciousness (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 144. Wayne Cole,
Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945 (Lincoln, NE, 1983), pp. 242-243; Barnhart,
Japan Prepares, pp. 119— 120.
44. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 121; Cole, Roosevelt, p. 244.

45. Bartlett, Record, pp. 577-580; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 243-244; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p.

125.

46. "4th Meeting, Brussels Conf." box 5, Meetings, Nov. 1937, Davis Papers; Barnhart, Japan
Prepares, p. 124; Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison,
WI, 1963), pp. 95-96; Richard J. Barnet, The Rockets' Red Glare (New York, 1990), has
FDR-Welles quote, p. 218.

Chapter VII

I. Irvine H. Anderson, Jr., The Standard-Vacuum Oil Company and United States East Asian
Policy, 19^^-1941 (Princeton, 1975), pp. 107-109; New York Times, Dec. 13, 1937, and Dec.
Notes 4 3 1

19, 1937, in NYT-GCI, pp. 109-110; New York Times, May 13, 1994, for recent figures;
Richard J. Barnet, The Rockets' Red Glare (New York, 1990), p. 201, on Townsend; Wayne
S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, /932-1945 (Lincoln, NE, 1983), p. 252.
2. Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War (New York, 1988), pp. 8-9 for the 1938 shift; Ander-
son, Standard-Vacuum, pp. iio-iii; Quincy Wright and Carl J. Nelson, "American Atti-
tudes Toward Japan and China, 1937-38," POQ, 3 (January 1939): 47-49; Conversation,
Jan. 16, 1938, Presidential Diaries, book#i, Morgenthau Diaries; ibid., April i, 1938, book
#1, on FDR panicking: Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense
(New York: 1984), pp. 387-388, 394.

3. Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 248-249; John W. Masland, "Commercial Influence Upon American
Far Eastern Policy, 1937-1941," PHR, 11 (September 1942): 290; Akira Iriye, China and
Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 162-163; Mira Wilkins, "The Role
of U.S. Business," in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History

(New York, 1973), pp. 348-349.

4. Kaoru Sugihara, "Japan as an Engine of the Asian International Economy, 1880-1936,"

Japan Forum, 2 (April 1990): 140.

5. Richard J. Barnet, The Alliance (New York, 1983), p. 84 on Mitsui; Michael A. Barnhart,
Japan Prepares for Total War (Ithaca, NY, 1987), pp. loi, 112-113, has octopus quote;
Memorandum by Hornbeck, Sept. 28, 1938, 790.94/85, box 4396, NA, RC 59, has a more
sanguine view of Japan's position in China.
6. Maid, Documents, pp. 78-79; Barnhart, Japaw Prepares, pp. 109-113, 131-132.
7. C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain and Appeasement, ig^S-iq^g (New York,

1981), pp. X, 148—150; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 133-134; Conversation, June 19, 1939,

book#i, Morgenthau Diaries.

8. Hosoya Chihiro, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiko, 1^14-1^4^ [Japanese Foreign Policy in the
Period Between the Two World Wars] (Tokyo, 1988), pp. 283-284 for Japan's view of
commercial treaty revocation; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 347-352.
9. Aruga Tadashi, "Japanese Scholarship in the History of U.S. -East Asian Relations,"
Manuscript in author's possession (1993), pp. 21-22.

10. Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiko, pp. 195-198; Yohitake Oka, Five Political Leaders
of Modern Japan, translated by Andrew Eraser and Patricia Murray (Tokyo, 1986), p. 219;
Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 186^-1^42 (London, 1977), pp. 231-232, for USSR
clashes.
11. Ronald P. Toby, "Contesting the Centre," IHR, 7 (August 1985): 354-356 for seventeenth-
century background; W G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, i8g4-ig4^ (New York, 1991),

pp. 223-225, 233, 244; Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers. Vol. I. At the Admiralty
(New York, 1993), p. 401.
12. Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiko, pp. 283—286.
13. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (New York, 1984), pp.

395-397; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 186-188; July 9, 1940, Stimson Diary.
14. Anderson, Standard-Vacuum, frontispiece, has Grew "sword of Damocles" quote; Oka
Yoshitake, Konoe Fumimaro (Tokyo, 1983), pp. 97-98; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp.
235-236-
15. New York Times, Aug. 2, 1940, in NYT-GCI, p. 113; New York Times, June 30, 1940, in
ibid., p. 32, for Fish quotes; Takemae Eiji, Senryo sengoshi [Occupation and Postwar
Policy] (Tokyo, 1980), pp. 322-325 for cultural expansion; Beasley, Japanese Imperialism,

pp. 226-227.
16. Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism (New York, 1994), chapter 1; Masland,
"Commercial," pp. 292-294.
17. New York Times, Sept. 28, 1940, in NYT-GCI, pp. 114-115.
18. Grew to Franklin Mott Gunther, Feb. 24, 1941, Letters, vol. 111-112, Grew Papers; New
Notes 4 3 2

York Times, Oct. 12, 1940, p. 6 for "catastrophe'" quote; Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nikon
gaiko, pp. 291-292 for Matsuoka-Konoe \ie\vs of U.S.; Masland, "Commercial, pp. 288- "

289, 298.
19. Cole, Roosei'elt, p. 355; Warren I. China (New York, 1980),
Cohen, America's Res'ponse to

p. 150 on the White Committee; Robert A. Divine, Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential
Elections, 1^40—1^48 (New York, 1974), pp. 82-83.
20. Oka, Konoe, pp. 94—105.
21. Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiko, pp. 204-206; Barnhart, japan Prepares, pp. 198-
200.
22. Maid, Documents, p. 95; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 241-242.
23. James McGregor Burns, Roosei'elt, Soldier of Freedom (New York, 1970), p. 83.
24. Eden to Halifax, May 21, 1941, in Grew to Hornbeck, May 26, 1941, Letters, vol. 111-112,
Grew Papers; Kimball, Corresp., I, 136; Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians
(LawTence, KA, 1993), p. 126 on sending bombers.
25. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 222-224; R- J- C. Butow, "Marching Off to War on the
Wrong Foot," PHR (Februan,' 1994): 67.
26. Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War (Stanford, 1961), pp. 212-219; Barnh-
art, Japan Prepares, p. 238 on economic situation; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, pp. 239-
245. 249-
27. "After Cabinet," July 18, 1941, book #4, Morgenthau Diaries.
28. Heinrichs, Threshold, pp. 20—21; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 227-228, 232, 239—240;
Dean Acheson. Present at the Creation (New York, 1969), pp. 25-27; Hosoya Chihiro,

"Japan's Decision for War in 1941, Hitotsuhashi Journal of Law and Politics, 5 (April 1967):
28-29 on middle-level officers' response; Harold Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
3 vols. (New York, 1953), III, 591-592.
29. Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiko, pp. 290, 292-294; Acheson, Present at the Cre-
Richard
ation, p. 27; W
Steele, Propagayida in an Open Society (Westport, CT, 1985), p.

124 on FDR reticence; Justus D. Doenecke and John E. Wilz, From Isolation to War,
ig^i-ig4i, 2nd ed. (ArUngton Heights, IL, 1991), pp. 122-123 ^^r Rocky Mountain quote;
Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 490-491, 493.
30. Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 298-299; for baseball, Allen Guttmann,
Games and Empires (New York, 1994), pp. 78-79.

31. Kimball, Corresp., I, 229; Cole, Roosevelt, p. 490; Japanese Ambassador, Washington to

Foreign Ministry-, Tokvo. Sept. 19, 1941, in "C" to Prime Minister, Sept. 19, 1941, Signals
Intelligence.

32. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 170; Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stan-
ford, 1982), pp. 153-154; Grew to Castle, May 8, 1941, Letters, vol. 111-112, Grew Papers;
Akira Iriye, Power and Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 29, 32.

33. Grew to Dr. James A. B. Scherer, July 24, 1941, Letters, vol. 111-112, Grew Papers; Grew
to FDR, Sept. 22, 1941, ibid.; Robert A. Fearey, "My Year with Ambassador Joseph C.
Grew, 1941-1942, "JAEAR, i (Spring 1992): 99-105; Oka, Konoe, pp. 143-145.

34. Mitani Taichiro, "Senzen senchuki Nichi-Bei kankei ni okeru sin-Nichiha gaikakan no
yakuwari; J. Barantain to E. Douman ni tsuite [The Role of the Pro-Japanese American
Diplomats in U.S. -Japan Relations, Before and During the Pacific War: Joseph Ballantine
and Eugene Dooman], Gaiko Forum, 36-39 (September-December 1991): 83-86 for

background.
35. James Fetzer, "Stanley K. Hornbeck and Japanese Aggression, 1941, SHAFR Newsletter,
24 (March 1993): 34-38; Memorandum of Conversation, Sept. 29, 1941, and enclosures.
Lot File 244. General Records of the . . . Far Eastern Division, 1932-1941, box 2, NA, RG
59; Memorandum by Ballantine, Sept. 25, 1941, with comments by Hornbeck, ibid.;

Schmidt of Far Eastern Division to Hull, Oct. 21, 1941, ibid.; State Department draft to

Hirohito, Oct. 16, 1941. ibid., with last document containing the Chiang reference.
Notes 4 3 3

7,6. FRVS: Japan, II, 637-640.

37. Ibid., 645-661.
38. Ibid., 688; Memorandum of Conversation, Oct. 13, 1941, Lot File 244, General Records
of the . . . Far Eastern Division, box 3, NA, RG 59; also in FRUS: Japan, II, 685 for
Hamlet reference.

39. Oka, Konoe, pp. 155-159; Asada Sadao, Ryodai Senkan no Nichi-Bei kankei: Kaigun to
Seisaku kettei katei [Japanese-American Relations Between the Wars: Naval Policy and
the Decision-Making Process] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 249-256, esp. p. 248 for "group think."
40. Butow, Tojo, pp. 6-1 1, 22-27, 2.80, 295-296; Doenecke and Wilz, Isolation, p. 129; "Memo-
randum for the President," drafted by Far Eastern Division, Oct. 17, 1941, Lot File, 244,

box3, NA, RG 59, has the "moderate" reference for Tojo.

41. FRUS: Japan, II, 690.

42. Ibid., 701-704.

43. Ibid., 753-756; Jonathan Utley, "The United States Enters World War II," in Modern
American Diplomacy, ed. John M. Carroll and George C. Herring (Wilmington, DE,
1986), pp. 102-103; Schmidt to Ballantine, Nov. 4, 1941, Lot File 244, box 3, NA, RG 59,
on Kurusu.
^4. FRUS: Japan, II, 764-770; FRUS, 1941, IV, 685; Nov. 27, 1941, Stimson Diary; Usui Kat-
sumi, "Nichi-Bei kaisen to Chugoku" [The Pacific War in China] in Hosoya Chihiro, et

al., eds., Taiheiyo Senso [The Pacific War] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 51-67; Barnhart, Japan
Prepares, p. 23.

45. Hosoya, "Japan's Decision," pp. 11-12, 15-16; Marquis Kido, The Diary of Marquis Kido,
J937-1945 (Tokyo, 1983), pp. 310, 320-321; Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, p. 246; Foreign
Minister, Tokyo to Japanese Consul-General, Hong Kong, in circular letter, Nov. 21, 1941,

in "C" to Prime Minister, Nov. 21, 1941, Signals Intelligence; Peter Duus, Introduction to
Duus, ed.. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
UK, 1988), p. 27 on Japan's dilemma.

46. Barnhart, Japan Prepares, pp. 270—271.

47. Conversation of May 17, 1941, book #4, Morgenthau Diaries; Steele, Propaganda, pp. 122-
124; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York, 1990), p. 466; Ickes, Secret Diary,
in. 387-
48. Justus D. Doenecke, "American Isolationism, 1939-1941," Jowma/ of Libertarian Studies,
6 (Summer-Fall 1982): 211; Stephen C. Craft, "Deterring Aggression," SHAFR Newsletter,
24 (March 1993): 27-28; Doenecke and Wilz, Isolationism, p. 145 for FDR to Grew; British
War Cabinet Minutes, Aug. 19, 1941, CAB 65, 84 (41), PRO; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 12-13,
488-489.
49. Doenecke and Wilz, Isolationism, pp. 1 51-152 on FDR and Southeast Asia; Nov. 25, 1941,
Stimson Diary; Japanese Foreign Minister to Japanese Ambassador, Berlin, Dec. 2, 1941,
in "C" to Prime Minister, Dec. 2, 1941, Signals Intelligence; an excellent discussion is R.

J. C. Butow's review of Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept in JJS, 9 (Summer 1983):

413-416.
5o.Agawa, Yamamoto, pp. 1-2, 6-9, 21-24, 70~75' ^2,7; Asada, Ryodai Senkan no Nichi-Bei
kankei, pp. 247-248 on Yamamoto and army-navy differences; Gordon Prange, At W
Dawn We Slept (New York, 1982), pp. 9-15.
51. David Kahn, "U.S. Views of Germany and Japan in 1941," in Ernest R. May, ed., Knowing
One's Enemies (Princeton, 1984), pp. 496-501 on intelligence foul-up; Butow, "Marching,"
pp. 76-78, for the lack of villains or conspiracies; Prange, At Dawn, pp. ix-x, 712-723,
727-736; Henry Clausen and Bruce Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgment (New York, 1992),
an extended argument on the chronology of the intercepts.
52. Harry S. Truman Library, "World War II Continued at the Library," Whistlestop, 21 (no.

2, 1993): 7; Millett and Maslowski, Common Defence, p. 401; FRUS: Japan, II, 787.
53. Dec. 7, 1941, Stimson Diary; Kimball, Corresp., I, 281, for Churchill.
Notes 4 3 4

54. FRUS: ]apan, II, 793-795.

55. Maki, Documents, pp. 104-105; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 272, a good statement of
these readings.

56. John Whitney Hall, "Japanese History in World Perspective," in Charles F. Delzell, ed..
The Future of History (Nashville, TN, 1977), p. 185; a slightly different view that places
some emphasis on irrationality is Hosoya, Ryo taisenkan no Nihon gaiho, pp. 293-294.
57. Oka, Konoe, p. 161; Marquis Kido, Diary, pp. 320-321; Dec. 8, 1941, Stimson Diary.

Ckapter VIII

I.Walter McConaughy to Japan-American Society, Oct. 2, 1961, "State Department Press

Release," FO 371 FJ103145/ 13, PRO.
2. Miwa Kimitada, Japanese Policies and Concepts for a Regional Order in Asia, 7938-7940,
Sophia University, Institute of International Studies, 1983, pp. 1-23; Akira Iriye, Power
and Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 64-66, 70; Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares
for Total War (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 9.

3. Jonathan G. Utley, "The United States Enters World War II," in John M. Carroll and
George C. Herring, eds., Modern American Diplomacy (Wilmington, DE, 1986), p. 99 for
Clayton; Henry Luce, The American Century (New York, 1941), pp. 16-19.

4. Hudson to Ashley Clarke, Feb. 10, 1943, FO 371 F877 / 877 / 61 , PRO; Wendell L. Willkie,

One World (New York, 1943).

5. Sept. 20, 1942, Leahy Diaries; Oct. 2, 1942, ibid.; Akira Iriye, Power and Culture (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1981), pp. 72-73; Hoover to R. L. Jones, Feb. 18, 1942, Post-Presidential
Individual: Lloyd-Jones, Hoover Papers.
6. John W Dower, War Without Mercy (New York, 1986), pp. 203-247, esp. pp. 204, 217,
221, 225, 227, 229.

7. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (New York, 1984), p. 408;
Robert Goralski, World War 11 Almanac: ig^i-1^4'^ (New York, 1981), pp. 424-429 tables.

8. Richard J. Barnet, The Rochets' Red Glare (New York, 1990), p. 224; Kimball, Corresp., I,

390-
9. Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 78 has Pyle"s quote; Iriye, Power and Culture, p. 37; Roger
Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial (New York, 1993), pp. 16, 78-80.
10. Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, pp. 17-18, 28; Daizaburo Yui, "From Exclusion to Inte-

gration," Hitotswi^as/rijowrwa/ of Social Studies, 24 (December 1992): 56-57; Gary Y. Okih-

iro. Margins and Mainstreams WA, 1994), p. 169 has the "viper" quote.
(Seattle,

11. Richard Polenberg, ed., America at War (New York, 1968), pp. 98-102, 103-107.

12. Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible (New York, 1980), pp. 78-81, 84; Daniels, Prison-
ers Without Trial, pp. 40-41, 47-48; Okihiro, Margins, p. 137; Ronald Takaki, A Different
Mirror (Boston, 1993), pp. 378-380.
13. Paul Gorden Lauren, Power and Prejudice (Boulder, CO, 1988), pp. 132-133 has Dewitt
and immigration official quotes; Sandra Taylor, Jewel of the Desert (Berkeley, 1993) is a

major case study of internment.

14. Geoffrey S. Smith, "Doing Justice,"" Public Historian, VI (Summer 1984): 83-97; Daniels,
Prisoners Without Trial, p. 64; Takaki, Different Mirror, pp. 376-377; New York Times,
July 20, 1994, p. Bi.
15. Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, pp. 3-4, 88; Takaki, Different Mirror, pp. 400-402; Bar-
net, Rochets' Red Glare, pp. 230-231; Yui, "From Exclusion to Integration,'" pp. 55-68.
16. New York Times, July 20, 1994, p. Bi; Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood
Goes to War (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 60, 250-253; Polenberg, One Nation, pp. 51-52; Boston
Globe, Aug. I, 1993, pp. B21, B25, a fascinating analysis by Jon Haber and John Galligan.
Notes 4 3 5

17. Koppes and Black, Hollywood, p. 248; Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, pp. 69-70; Iriye,

Power and Culture, p. 76; Lauren, Power and Prejudice, pp. 13, 201 for Lippmann quote.
18. Theodore Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy (Princeton, 1988), p. 279; Millett and Maslowsld,
Common Defense, pp. 401-402; Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, i8yo-ig4^ (Lon-
don, 1983), pp. 184-185.
19. Stanley L. Falk, "Douglas MacArthur and the War Against Japan," in William M. Leary,

ed.. We Shall Return! (Lexington, KY, 1988), pp. 2, 4, 58; Washington Post, Dec. 5, 1993,

pp. C1-C5.
20. Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, p. 401; Conrad C. Crane, Bombs, Cities and
Civilians (Lawrence, KA, 1993), p. 122; Barnet, Rochets' Red Glare, p. 219 on 1942 elec-
tions; "Memorandum for General Marshall. . .
." from "Commander in Chief," July 15,

1942, PSF, container 3, Hopkins Papers.

21. Lt. Gen. H. H. Arnold to Roosevelt, May 3, 1942, PSF, Japan, FDR Library; Millett and
Maslowski, Common Defense, p. 420; Koppes and Black, Hollywood, pp. 266-267.
22. Kennedy, Strategy, pp. 186-188; James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Boston, 1982), pp.

43-44 on COMINT.
23. Kimball, Corresp., I, 507; Kennedy, Strategy, pp. 187-188.
24. The best, and critical, account on the two-track strategy, and how service rivalry shaped
it, is Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun (New York, 1985); Goralski, World War II

Almanac, p. 263; Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 407, 422.
25. For this and the previous paragraph, see John Welfield, Empire in Eclipse (London, 1988),
p. 31 for Konoye group; Kimball, Corresp., I, 305; David Halberstam, The Next Century
(New York, 1991), pp. 58-59; Goralski, World War
Almanac, pp. 382, 421 has spending
II

figures and ice cream story; Thomas Havens review of Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and
Culture in Wartime Japan, in JJS, 9 (Winter 1983): 185-186; Kennedy, Strategy, pp. 181-
182 on Japan's decision making, and pp. 183-192; Barnhart, Japan Prepares, p. 197 on raw
materials; Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy, 186^-1^42 (London, 1977), p. 247 on Axis
cooperation.
26. Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 231; James J. Weingartner, "Trophies of War," Pacific
Historical Review, 61 (February 1992): 56-65.

27. Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, pp. 59-61, 281; W G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 18^4-1^4^
(New York, 1991), p. 245; Thomas R. Havens, Fire Across the Sea (Princeton, 1986), p. 15
on starvation in northern Vietnam.
28. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, pp. 240-243, 248-249; Iriye, Power and Culture, p. 119, on
Atlantic Charter comparison; Friend, Blue-Eyed Enemy, pp. loo-ioi, 260.
29. "President's Conversation at Luncheon," Nov. 13,1942, PSF: United Nations, box 102,

FDR Library; "Memorandum — Hopkins, Eden Visit," March 27, 1943, box 138, Hopkins
Papers; Strang Foreign Office Minute, March 29, 1943, FO 371 F1878/25/10, PRO,
especially for Butler comments on China; also Butler Minute on Clauson to Ashley
Clarke, Oct. 25, 1943, FO 371 F5611/74/10, PRO.
30. "Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan," May 8, 1943, JCS 287/1,
FDR Library; Report of talk from Dominions Office to Canada, etc., Jan. 12, 1944, FO
371 F118/66/61, PRO; Iriye, Power and Culture, pp. 44-45 for Japanese approach to

China, also pp. 98-100, 109.

31. May 2, 1943, Leahy Diaries; E. J. Kahn, Jr., profile on Stilwell in New Yorker, April 8,

1972, p. 64; Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, p. 434; Washington Post, Dec. 8,

1993, on dangers of flying the "Hump"; FDR to Admiral Brown, enclosure, Dec. 4, 1944,
Map Room, Naval Aide, China, FDR Library.

32. Stettinius to Grew, May 24, 1944, Division of Far Eastern Affairs, box 217, Stettinius
Papers; FDR to Chiang, Aug. 21, 1944, enclosed in Marshall to FDR, Aug. 18, 1944, Map
Room, FDR Library; Jonathan Spence, To Change China (New York, 1980), pp. 263-264
Notes 4 3 6

has Stilwell quote; FDR to Admiral Brown, enclosure, Dec. 4, 1944, Map Room, Naval
Aide, China, FDR Library.

33. Life, May i, 1944, pp. 101-103, has White quote; "Special Information for the President,"
from Stettinius, Nov. 27, 1944, PSF: State Department, FDR Library; Gore-Booth to Far
Eastern Department, Sept. 18, 1944, FO 371 F4552/357/ 10, PRO, for Pearl Buck allu-

sion; FO Research Department, Oct. 9, 1944, FO 371 AN334/20/45, PRO, has survey
of U.S. business reaction; Seymour to Sterndale Bennett, May 17, 1945, FO 371 F3172/
127 /G61, PRO, for Hurley story.

34. Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 442-444; Falk, "MacArthur," p. 15; Ken-
nedy, Strategy, pp. 189-190.

35. William Branigan wrote a superb retrospective on Saipan in the Washington Post, June
15, 1994, pp. A27-A28; Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 443-444.
36. Falk, "MacArthur," p. 10; John Ray Skates, The (Columbia, SC, 1994), p.
Inx^asion of Japan

135; Kimball, Corresp., Ill, 191-193 for MacArthur's alleged threat; Millett and Maslowski,
Common Defense, pp. 444-445; Paolo E. Coletta re\dew of Edward J. Drea's MacArthur's
Ultra Codehreaking in Pacific Historical Reinew, 63 (February 1994): 118-119; Goralski,
World War 11 Almanac, pp. 353-354.
37. Washington Post, Oct. 27, 1994, p. A34; Falk, "MacArthur," p. 19; Millett and Maslowski,
Common Defense, p. 461; Spector, Eagle Against the Sun, pp. 416—417 compares Manila
and Warsaw.
38. Kimball, Corresp., Ill, 448-449.
39. Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 457-462, is the major source for this and
the preceding paragraph; Crane, Bombs, p. 132.
40. Akira Iriye, "Continuities in U.S. -Japan Relations, 1941-49," in Akira Iriye and Yonosuke
Nagai, eds.. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1977), pp. 380—382; Halifax
to Foreign Office, Feb. 22, 1943, FO 371 F1317/1317/61, PRO.
41. Robert E. Ward, "Presurrender Planning," in Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu,
eds.. Democratizing Japan (Honolulu, 1987), pp. 36—37; Mitani Taichiro, "Senzen sen-
chuki Nichi-Bei kankei ni okeru sin-Nichiha gaikakan no yakuwari: J. Barantain to E.
Douman ni tsuite" [The Role of the Pro-Japanese American Diplomats in U.S. -Japanese
Relations, Before and During the Pacific War: Joseph Ballantine and Eugene Dooman],
Gaiko Forum, 36-39 (September-December 1991): 67-69.
42. Hugh Borton, American Presurrender Planning for Postwar Japan (New York, 1967), pp.
12-13.

43. Mitani, "Senzen senchuki Nichi-Bei," pp. 69-71; Ward, "Presurrender," pp. 3-4, 9, 19-20.
44. Borton, Planning, pp. 15-17; Iriye, "Continuities," p. 386; Gabriel Koiko, The Politics of

War (New York, on Grew group; Ward, "Presurrender," pp. 7, 23-24.

1968), p. 544

45. Iriye, Power and Culture, pp. 126—127; Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 544-545.

46. Harriman to Hopkins, Sept. 10, 1944, Harriman file, Hopkins Papers; Borton, Planning,
pp. 13, 30; Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York, 1970), p. 245 for FDR; The Econo-
mist, Aug. 26, 1944, pp. 267-268, received special Foreign Office attention.

47. Kimball, Corresp., Ill, 524, on FDR and China; Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of
New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, WI, 1964), p. 310 quotes FDR; "Memorandum for the
Secretary's Files," Quebec, Sept. 15, 1944, Morgenthau Diaries, book #6; Oct. 24, 1944,
Leahy Diaries; J. C. Sterndale Bennett to War Cabinet Chiefs of Staff Committee,
March 3, 1945, C.O.S. (45) 143 (O) CAB80.92, PRO, has summary of Indochina events;
FPUS, 194s, Berlin, I, 939.
48. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Armed Services, United States-Vietnam Relations,
/945-1947, 12 vols. (Washington, DC, 1971), I, A19-A20; "Record," vol. VI, April 8-14,

1945, Stettinius Papers for FDR's last words; Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign
Policy in the Second World War (London, 1962), pp. 534-535-
Notes 4 3 7

49. Millett and Maslowski, Common Defense, pp. 463-464; Goralski, World War II Almanac,
PP- 392-394. 396. 400. 409-
50. Crane, Bombs, pp. 118-119 for Lovett quote, p. 120, pp. 133-136 for Stimson; Millett and
Maslowski, Common Defense, p. 456; Grew to Frederic W. H. Stott, March 31, 1945,
Letters, Grew Papers.

51. Harry S. Truman, Where the Buck Stops, ed. Margaret Truman (New York, 1989), pp.

205-206 for 1965 speech; Louis Morton, "Analysis of Decision," in Kent Roberts Green-
field, ed.. Command Decisions (Washington, DC, i960), pp. 394-396; Skates, Invasion,

pp. 96-97, on gas warfare, pp. 237-238, p. 243 on Marshall; Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-
war Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 42 (June-July 1986):
38-40; Barton J. Bernstein, "The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered," Foreign Affairs, 74
(January-February 1995): 149.
52. Private calendar notes, March 13, 1945, box 224, Stettinius Papers; Konstantin Pleshakov,
"Taiheiyo Stalin no ketsudan" [The Pacific War: Stalin's Choices] in Hosoya Chihiro, et
al., eds., Taiheiyo senso [The Pacific War] (Tokyo, 1993), pp. 184-190.
53. Iriye, "Continuities," p. 392; Morton, "Decision," p. 396; FRUS, 194s, VII, 864-878.

54. Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), pp. 16-23, 51-70, 79-
80; Borton, Planning, p. 24; Bernstein, "Atomic Bombings Reconsidered," pp. 142-146.
55. For this and the previous paragraph, see Memo from Hoover-Truman meeting, May 24,

1945, Post-Presidential Individual: Truman, Hoover Papers; Mitani, "Senzen senchuki

Nichi-Bei," pp. 71-80 on Japan hands; Borton, Planning, pp. 21, 29; Kolko, Politics of
War, p. 457; Skates, Invasion, p. 239 on Marshall; Grew to Randall Gould, April 14, 1945,

Grew Papers; Grew to Rosenman, June 16, 1945, Grew Papers.

Judge Samuel I.

56. For this and the previous paragraph, see Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (Princeton,
1988), pp. 13-14; lokibe Makoto, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon [U.S. -Japan War and
Postwar Japan] (Osaka, 1989), pp. 1 12-120 on Stimson and Kyoto; Martin Sherwin, A
World Destroyed (New York, 1987), pp. 202-203, 229-231; July 24, 1945, Stimson Diary.
57. Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot (New York, 1992), pp. 208-209,

212.

58. June 6, 1945, Stimson Diary.

59. New York Times, Dec. 12, Herken, Winning Weapon, pp. 17-19; Messer,
1983, p. 18E;
End of an Alliance, pp. 102-103; Pleshakov, "Taiheiyo Stalin no ketsudan," pp. 191-193.
60. Harry Truman, Off the Record, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York, 1980), p. 53; Melvyn

Leffler, A Preponderance of Power (Stanford, 1992), p. 83.

61. July Stimson Diary; Pleshakov, "Taiheiyo Stalin no ketsudan," pp. 195-198; Lef-
17, 1945,

fler, Preponderance of Power, pp. 83-89; Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 103-104.
62. July 24, 1945, Stimson Diary; Barton J.
Bernstein, "Research Note," DH, 16 (Winter 1992):
163-173 discusses alternatives and Truman's inaccurate recollection; Borton, Planning, p.

26.

63. OSS to State, "Source Unknown to JA," July 31, 1945, Lot Files 56D 225, 56D256, Records
of the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, 1945-1953, NA, RG 59; Committee for the Compila-
tion of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York, 1981), pp. 11-21, 87-92; Sherwin, World Destroyed,
p. Donna R. Casella, "Rebirth and Reassessment, "Joitrna/ of Amer-
232 on U.S. prisoners;
ican and Canadian Studies, 4 (Autumn 1989): 133-138; Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel
(New York, 1990), pp. 337-338.
64. New York Times, Aug. 7, 1945 in NYT-GCI, pp. 133-135; Kai Bird, The Chairman (New
York, 1992), p. 259; Barnet, Rockets' Red Glare, p. 265.

65. Committee for Compilation of Materials, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pp. 27, 55-56, 115;
Weingartner, "Trophies," has Truman on "a beast."

66. Herken, Winning Weapon, p. 21; Aug. 8, 1945, Leahy Diaries; Kolko, Politics of War, pp.
Notes 4 3 8

598-599, on Stalin and Japan; Sergei N. Goncharov, et al., Uncertain Partners (Stanford,
1993), pp. 3, 9-10 for Stalin's policy; "Memorandum for the President," Aug. 11, 1945, Lot
File 53D 444, NA, RG 59.

67. Letter to Editor from Robert Cowley, New York Times, Feb. 2, 1995, p. 16, on new Soviet
documents.
68. Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shou^a Japan (London, 1992), pp. 117— 119.
69.Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro (Tokyo, 1983), pp. 171-174, which paraphrases the
memorial; Iriye, Power and Culture, pp. 220-222; Welfield, Empire, pp. 32-35; Kolko,
Politics of War, pp. 550-551.
70. James W. Morley, "The First Seven Weeks," Japan Interpreter, 6 (no. 2, 1970): 152-154 is

important on Konoe; Kennedy, Strategy, pp. 193-194.

71. Robert J. C. Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender (Stanford, 1954), pp. 140—149, and 243-
244 for Potsdam Declaration text.

72. Butow, Japan's Decision, pp. 141, 243; Hata Ikuhiko, Nihon saigunhi [The Historical
Record: Japan's Rearmament] (Tokyo, 1976), p. 17 has "double shock."
73. Hodgson, The Colonel, p. 338; Aug. 10, 1945, Stimson Diary; James Forrestal, The Forres-
tal Diaries, ed. Walter Millis (New York, 1951), p. 83; Barton J. Bernstein, "The Perils and
Politics of Surrender," PHR, 46 (February 1977): 6-7; the U.S. reply is in Butow, Japan's
Decision, p. 245; also David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F.
Byrnes (New York,
1994), pp. 434-437.
74. Butow, Japan's Decision, pp. 192-205; lokibe, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon, pp. 11 5-124.

75. Bernstein, "Perils and Politics," pp. 9-17; Goralski, World War 11 Almanac, pp. 416-417.
76. Marquis Kido Koichi, The Diary of Marquis Kido, 1937-/945 (Frederick, MD, 1984), pp.
448-450.
77. Butow, Japan's Decision, pp. 206-209, 218-220; Large, Emperor Hirohito, pp. 124-129.
78. lokibe, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon, p. 125; rescript in Maki, Documents, pp. 123-124;
a good review essay on prisoner treatment is Stanley L. Falk, "Prisoners of Japan, "JAEAfi,

4 (Fall 1995), esp. pp. 279-281; Oe Kenzaburo, A Personal Matter (New York, 1968), pp.
vii—viii.

79. Theodore White, "The Danger from Japan," New York Times Magazine, July 28, 1985, pp.
19—21.
80. New York Times, Sept. 5, 1945, in NYT-GCI, pp. 142-143; Robertson, Sly and Able, pp.
434-437-
81. John Emmerson, The Japanese Thread (New York, 1978), p. 240; Bernstein, "Atomic
K.
Bombings Reconsidered," pp. 135-152; Sherwin, World Destroj'ed, chapters 8—9; Gar Alp-
erovitz. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1995), esp. pp. 610—612 on the

Nagasaki and pp. 629-670; important essays from

film, DH collected in Hiroshima in
History and Memory, ed. Michael L. Hogan (New York, 1996); and Ian Buruma's "The
War Over the Bomb," New York Review of Books, Sept. 21, 1995, esp. p. 34 on Nagasaki.
82. Balfour to Foreign Office, Aug. 25, 1945, FO
371 AN2597 74/45, PRO; Barnet, Rockets'
Red Glare, p. 264; William H. McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia (New York, 1953), p.
640 for a good overview of the Asian situation in late 1945.

Chapter IX

I. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind (New York, 1978), pp. 688-690 for succinct over-

view; John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York, 1993), p. 163; "Cabinet Meeting,
Friday, Aug. 2, 1946," in Notes on Cabinet Meetings, 1945-1946, by Matthew Connelly,
HST Library, for Forrestal; Peter Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed.. The Cambridge His-
tor)' of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1988), p. 11.
Notes 4 3 9

2. Donovan, "Memorandum for the President," Sept. 17, 1945, OSS Memoranda for the

President, Donovan Chronological File, box 15, HST Library; FRUS, 7945, II, 60, for
mistrust of Soviets; Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China, /94/-/950, 2 vols. (Garden
City, NY, 1955-56), II, 81; Sakamoto Yoshikazu, "The International Context of the Occupa-

tion of Japan," in Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds.. Democratizing Japan
(Honolulu, 1987), pp. 56-57.
3. Akira Iriye, "Continuities in U.S. -Japanese Relations, 1941-49," in Akira Iriye and Yono-
suke Nagai, eds.. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1977), p. 399; J. C.
Donnelly Minute on Halifax to Foreign Office, Nov. 10, 1945, FO 371 AN3447 74/45,
PRO.
4. Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New
Deal Diplomacy (Madison, WI, 1964), pp. 308,
344; Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Chicago, 1970), is important for the early fears
of depression.

5. Thome, Allies of a Kind, p. 675; "Cabinet Meeting, Friday, April 19, 1946," in Notes on
Cabinet Meetings, 1945-1946, by Matthew Connelly, HST Library.

6. Maki, Documents, pp. 125-132 for initial U.S. post-surrender policy; "Cabinet Meeting,
Friday, Oct. 26, 1945," in Notes on Cabinet Meetings, 1945-1946, by Matthew Connelly,

HST Library.

7. John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York, 1986), pp. 300-301.
8. Homma Nagayo, Utsuriyuku Amerika [The Changing America] (Tokyo, 1991), pp. 243-
244; Jacques Hersh, The USA and the Rise of East Asia Since 1^4^ (London, 1993), for
Aiichiro quote; Ronald McGlothlen, Controlling the Waves (New York, 1993), pp. 25, 56,

on food crisis; Richard Barnet, The Alliance (New York, 1983), p. 64 for MacArthur quote,
p. 67 for repatriation; G. C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan (London,
1981), pp. 187-188.

9. Watanabe Akio, Preface to Watanabe, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku [Postwar Japa-
nese Foreign Policy] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 2-3; "Cabinet Meeting, Friday, Feb. i, 1946," in

Notes on Cabinet Meetings, 1945-1946, by Matthew Connelly, HST Library; Barnet,

Alliance, p. 63; Minute by Johnston, June i, 1951, FO 371 FJ1027 / i, PRO, on "use-
FO
less body"; James Forrestal, The Forrestal Diaries, ed. Walter Millis (New York, 1951), p.
104; Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power (Stanford, 1992), pp. 90—91.
10. Harr)'Truman, Off the Record, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York, 1980), p. 47; Leahy to

MacArthur, Oct. 2, 1945, RG 10, VIP Correspondence, Douglas MacArthur Library, Nor-
folk, VA.
11. lokibe Makoto, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon [Japanese-American Relations in Postwar
Japan] (Osaka, 1989), pp. 141-150 for a comparison of MacArthur and Perry; John K.
Fairbank, "Digging Out Doug," New York Review of Boohs, Oct. 12, 1978, p. 16; Barnet,
Alliance, pp. 62-64; Mitani Taichiro, "Senzen senchuki Nichi-Bei kankei ni okeru sin-
Nichiha gaikokan no yakuwari: J. Barantain to E. Douman ni tsuite" [The Role of Pro-
Japanese American Diplomats in Japanese-U.S. Relations, Before and During the Pacific
War: Joseph Ballantine and Eugene Dooman], Gaiko Forum, 36-39 (September 1991-
December 1991), esp. pp. 85-91 on Shogun allusion; New York Times, Sept. 8, 1945, in
NYT-GCI, p. 148 on the breakdown; Sansom is quoted in Sir A. Gascoigne to Scott, Jan.

22, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019/3, PRO; Sir A. Gascoigne to Foreign Office, Feb. 6, 1951, FO
371,FJ1019/5 recalling Harriman saying MacArthur was a front-runner for 1948.
12. This and the previous paragraph are based on Robert E. Ward, "Presurrender Planning,"
in Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds.. Democratizing Japan (Honolulu, 1987),
Robert E.
pp. 11-16; Hugh Borton, American Presurrender Planning for Postwar Japan (New York,
1967), p. 27; Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 166-167 on Japanese military; Akira
Iriye, The Cold War in Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974), pp. 124-126; Igarashi Takashi,

"Senso to senryo, (1941-1951)" [War and Occupation], in Hosoya Chihiro, ed., Nichi-Bei
Notes 4 4

kankei tsushi [Japan-U.S. Relations] (Tokyo, 1995), pp. 164-175 for photo story and Takami
Jun quote; Stephen S. Large, Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan (London, 1992), pp.
134-144, esp. on Hirohito as war criminal; Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 307.
13. Sir A. Gascoigne to Be\an, Feb. 6, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019/5, PRO, for Vining; U.S. Con-
gress, Senate, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical
Series), vol. Ill, part i (Washington, DC, 1976), p. 290.
14. Kimitada Miwa, "Japan's Northern Territories," Joitrna/ of American and Canadian Stud-
6 (Autumn 1990): 6-7 on Byrnes deal; Committee for the Compilation of Materials
ies,

on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (New York, 1981), p. 12 on censorship; James W. Morley, "The First Seven
Weeks," Japan 2, 1970): 151-164; Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro
Interpreter, 6 (no.
(Tokv'o, 1983), pp. 182-198; Kyoko Inoue, MacArthur's Japanese Constitution (Chicago,
1991), p. 7; New York Times, Oct. 5, 1945, p. Ai; ibid., Oct. 10, 1945, p. A4 on Shidehara.
15. This and the following paragraph are especially drawn from Dower, Japan in War and
Peace, pp. 211-212; Barnet, Alliance, pp. 76-78.
16. Major General Courtney Whitney MacArthur (New York, 1956), pp. 263-311; Major Gen-
eral Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur, 1947-1951 (New York,

1954), p. 323; Barnet, Alliance, p. 69.

17. Dower, Japan in War and Peace, p. 166; Allen, Short Economic History, p. 219; Barnet,
Alliance, pp. 67, 80-81; Justin Williams, Sr., "A Forum," and John Dower and Howard
Schonberger, "A Rejoinder," PHR, 57 (May 1988): 188-189.
18. Eto Jun, Mo hitotsu no sengoshi [Another Postwar History] (Tokyo, 1978), pp. 474—476;
Forrestal, Forrestal Diaries, p. 524; Barnet, Alliance, pp. 65, 70-71; New York Times, Nov.
12, 1948, in NYT-GCI, pp. 168-169.
19. Gascoigne to Be\in, Feb. 6, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019/5, PRO; Allen, Short Economic History,

p. 222; Barnet, Alliance, pp. 74—75-

20. Susan J. Pharr, The PoHtics of Women s Rights, in Ward and Sakamoto, eds.. Democra-

tizing Japan, pp. 222-224, 240—248; Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 308; Barnet, Alliance,
p. 72; New York Times, April 13, 1946, in NYT-GCI, p. 159 on Kato Shizue; Gascoigne to

Be\in, Feb. 6, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019/5, PRO; Carol Cluck, "Entangling Illusions," in War-
ren I. Cohen, ed., New Frontiers in American-East-Asian Relations (New York, 1983), pp.
192-193; Robert J. Smith, "The Sources and Proponents of Tradition' and 'Modernity' in
Japanese Law,' Journal of Legal Pluralism and LSnofficial Law, 33 (1993): 231—237.
21. Inoue, MacArthur's Japanese Constitution, pp. 75-77, 266—270; a good summarv' by a cen-
tral participant is Charles L. Kades, "The American Role in Revising Japan's Imperial
Constitution," PSQ^, 104 (Summer 1989): 217-220.
22. Kades, "American Role," pp. 225—230; Kyodo News Service, Japan Economic Newswire,
May 2, 1992, p. 2 for Kades's use of "symbol." am indebted to Professor Robert Smith
I

for the Kyodo document.

23. This and the following paragraphs are based on Kades, "American Role," pp. 232-236;
Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 219, 228-229; Inoue, MacArthur's Japanese Constitu-
tion, pp. 230-262, 269-270 for the remarkable debate.
24. Kades, "American Role, pp. 236-238; Ward, ""Presurrender, pp. 33-34; C.
" " P. Scott Min-
ute, April 16, 1951, on Gascoigne to Bevin, Feb. 6, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019, PRO.
25. W Miles Fletcher, ""Taiheiyo senso. . .
.

" [Economic Impact of the Pacific War on Japan],

in Hosoya Chihiro, et al., eds., Taiheiyo senso [The Pacific War] (Tok\'o, 1993), pp. 381-
383; Barnet, Alliance, p. 83 quotes Hadley, also p. 84; Geoffrey Gorer, "The Special Case
of Japan, " POQ, 7 (Winter 1943): 574; Allen, Short Economic History, p. 204; Yutaka Kosai,

""Postwar Japanese Economy, 1945-1973," in Duus, ed.. The Twentieth Century, pp. 496-
497-
26. Allen, Short Economic History, p. 189; Leon Hollerman, ""International Economic Con-
Notes 4 4 1

trols in Occupied Japan," JAS, 38 (no. 4, 1979): 710; Wallace Gagne, "Technology and
Political Interdependence: Canada, Japan, and the United States, "JACS, 9 (Spring 1992):
50.

27. Igarashi Takashi, "MacArthur's Proposal for an Early Peace with Japan and the Redirec-
tion of the Occupation," in Aruga Tadashi, ed.. United States Policy Toward East Asia,
/945-1950, a volume of JJAS, I (1981), pp. 67-83, 86; New York Times, May 25, 1947, p.

A25; ibid., June 2, 1947, p. A3.

28. U.S. Department of State, Fortnightly Survey of American Opinion on International
Affairs, Sept. 4, 1946, pp. 2-3 on trade blocs; "Cabinet Meeting, Friday, Aug. 2, 1946," in

Notes on Cabinet Meetings, 1945-1946, by Matthew Connelly, HST Library; Forrestal,

Forrestal Diaries, pp. 179, 190; Daily Staff Summary, Feb. 5, 1947, Lot Files, NA, RG 59;

Robert Divine, Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections, 1940-/948 (New York,

1974), pp. 223, 245, 270.

29. FRUS, 1947, VI, 159, 184; Osborn to Clayton, with copy to Harriman, July 11, 1947, "Pub-
lic Service, Secretary of Commerce Japan," Harriman Papers. . . .

30. Bruce Cumings, "Japan's Position in the World System," in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar
Japan as History (Berkeley, 1993), p. 39 for Marshall quote in which italics are Marshall's

emphasis; Minute by E. Dening, March 26, 1947, FO 371, UN2001 / 1754/78, PRO; Yos-

hikazu, "International Context," pp. 58-60.

31. Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York, 1955), has the Cleveland speech text;

Fortune (February 1950): 67.

7,2. Nippon Times, March 28, 1948, in "Political . . . Tokyo," March 31, 1948, FO 371 F5396/
662/23, PRO, for Draper; Hersh, USA and Rise of East Asia, p. 19; Vidya Prakash Dutt,

ed.. East Asia . . .

1947-/950 (London, 1958), pp. 631-637 for Royall speech text.

33. Kennan's view is in his Memoirs, /925-1950 (Boston, 1967), pp. 271-368; an important and
different view is Lloyd Gardner's analysis of Kennan in Architects of Illusion (Chicago,
1970), pp. 270-300.

34. Kennan, Memoirs, pp. 368-382; Leffler, Preponderance, p. 253.

35. Leffler, Preponderance, pp. 382, 389; FRUS, 1948, VI, 697, 712.

36. FRUS, 1948, VI, 712-794.

37. Ibid., 858-862; "CIA Research Reports: Japan-Korea, Security of Asia, 1946-1976," reel
2, Fletcher School Library, Tufts University.
38. Yoshikazu, "International Context," p. 63 on MacArthur opposition; Hersh, USA and Rise

of East Asia, p. 16 on MacArthur and socialism; Williams, et al., "Forum," pp. 212-213 for
Schonberger analysis; Gascoigne to Dening, Jan. 10, 1948, FO 371 F1287/661 /23, PRO;
Gascoigne to Foreign Office, April 7, 1948, FO 371 F5237/662/23, PRO; Barnet, Alli-

ance, p. 86; Hata Ikuhiko, Shiroku: Nihon saigunhi [The Historical Record: Japan's Rear-
mament] (Tokyo, 1976), p. 106 for Kades.

39. U.S. Department of State, Monthly Survey of American Opinion (July 1948): 9; Franks to
Foreign Office, July 15, 1948, FO 371 F9870 / 662 / 23, PRO; Howard B. Schonberger,

Aftermath of War (Kent, OH, 1989), esp. pp. 143-151; Williams, et al, "Forum," p. 216 for
Schonberger on Dooman.
40. Sunday Chronicle (London) clipping by Hughes in Tokyo, Aug. 15, 1948, in "Extract,"
Aug. 15, 1948, FO 371 F11450/662/23, PRO.
4i.Shindo Eiichi, "Ashida Hitoshi and Postwar Reform" (in Japanese), International Rela-
tions, 85 (May 1987), esp. p. 62; New York Times, Oct. 7, 1948, p. A17; Oct. 15, 1948, p.
Aio.
42. John W Dower, Empire and Aftermath (Cambridge, MA, 1988), pp. 36-38, 136-170, 400-
401; John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse (London, 1988), pp. 38-39; Barnet, Alliance, p.

79-

43. Dower, Empire and Aftermath, pp. 274, 422-423.

Notes 4 4 2

44. FRL/S, 1949, VII, 640-642, 716-720 for Acheson and reparations; Hollerman, "Interna-
tional Economic Controls," p. 718 for Sears, Roebuck reference.

45. Williams, et al., "Forum," p. 205 for Dower overview, also pp. 217-218 on purges; New York
Times, Oct. 14, 1949, in NYT-GCI, p. 179; ibid., Oct. 22, 1949, p. 173; Barnet, Alliance, p.
81; Yoshikazu, "International Context," on purge and intellectuals; Igarashi Takeshi, "Rei-
sen to kowa" [Cold War and Peace], in Watanabe, Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku, pp.

48-60.
46.Takemae Eiji, Senryo sengoshi [Occupation and Postwar Japanese History] (Tokyo, 1980),
pp. 56-57; Duus, Introduction, pp. 42-43; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New
York, 1990), p. 551 on banks; Hollerman, "International Economic Controls," pp. 716—719.

47. The 1949-50 crisis, especially as viewed by Truman and his advisers, is discussed, with
citations, in Walter LaFeber, "NATO and the Korean War: A Context," in Lawrence S.

Kaplan, ed., American Historians and the Atlantic Alliance (Kent, OH, 1991), pp. 33-51-

48. Minute by P. A. Wilkinson, Jan. 10, 1950, on Kelly to Bevin, Dec. 12, 1949, FO 371
N10789/ 1024 738, PRO, for overview of U.S. troubles; Frederick C. Barghoorn, The
Soviet Image of the United States (Port Washington, NY, 1969), pp. 133-135; U.S. Con-
gress, Senate, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Com,mittee (Historical

Series), ig4g-ig^o, I, 108; Dean Acheson, Crisis in Asia (Washington, DC, 1950), p. 117.

49. Barnet, Alliance, p. 94; Cumings, "Japan's Position in the World System," pp. 43-44.
•yO.FRUS, 1949, VIII, 1210-1220.
51. McGlothlen, Controlling the Waves, pp. 24, 75-76, 134; Akira Iriye, China and Japan in
the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 94-95.

52. An important account is Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, "American Policy Toward Sino-Japa-
nese Trade in the Postwar Years," DH, 8 (Summer 1984): 183-208; Welfield, Empire, p.
41; Iriye, China and Japan, pp. 98—99.
53. "Regional Conference of U.S. Chiefs of Mission. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil," March 8, 1950,
Records of Inter- and Intra-Departmental Committees: Inter-American Economic Affairs
Committee, 1945-1950, NA, RG 353, esp. pp. 44, 88, 90.
54. Chester Cooper, The Lost Crusade (New York, 1970), pp. 49-50; McGlothlen, Controlling
the Waves, pp. 189-191; Gascoigne to Foreign Office, Jan. 18, 1950, FO 371 FJ1022 / j,

PRO.
55. U.S. Congress, Executive Sessions, 1949-/950, I, 267-269, 278; UK Consulate General to
Foreign Office, June i, 1950, FO 371 / F11345 / 3, PRO, on U.S. aid mission.
56. lokibe Makoto, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon [U.S. -Japan War and Postwar Japan]
(Osaka, 1989), p. 2-6; FRUS, 1949, VII, 663.

57. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York, 1969), pp. 428-429, 434-435; "Prema-
ture" and other Pentagon objections are in "Memorandum of Conversation" of State and
Defense officials, April 24, 1950, Acheson Papers; Sept. 22, 1948, Leahy Diaries; Welfield,

Empire, p. 30; Roger Buckley, U.S. -Japan Alliance Diplomacy, 7945-1990 (Cambridge,
UK, 1992), pp. 36-37.
58.Neu; York Times, Dec. 23, 1949, in NYT-GCI, p. 180, on Yalta; Welfield, Empire, pp. 69-
70; Dower, Japan in War and Peace, p. 182.

59. Sergei N. Goncharov, et al, Uncertain Partners (Stanford, 1993), p. 260 for Communist
pact; FRUS 1950, I, 234-272 for NSC-68 and background; Princeton Seminars, Oct. 10-
II, 1953, Acheson Papers.
60. Sato, Ohira, pp. 133-134; Ronald W Pruessen, John Foster Dulles(New York, 1982), pp.
448-452; Welfield, Empire, pp. 29, 46; Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 174-175;
Chihiro Hosoya, "Japan's Response to U.S. Policy on the Japanese Peace Treaty," Hitotsu-
hashi Journal of Law and Politics, 10 (December 1981), esp. p. 18.

61. Dower, Japan in War and Peace, p. 185; McGlothlen, Controlling the Waves, p. 21 for

Rusk; Princeton Seminars, July 8-9, 1953, Acheson Papers; ibid., Oct. lo-ii, 1953, for
"Korea . . . saved us."
Notes 4 4 3

62. U.S. Congress, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical
Series), ig^i, Vol. Ill, Part i (Washington, DC, 1976), 290.

63. A classic account, with an emphasis on the long civil war, is Bruce Cumings, The Origins
of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1981, 1990), especially first two chapters of vol. II;

the new documents are analyzed in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times of
July 21, 1994, and I am indebted to Milton Leitenberg for calling them to my attention;

John W. Carver, "Polemics, Paradigms," JAEAR, 3 (Spring 1994): 27-28; Roger Dingman,
"Korea at Forty-plus," JAEAR, i (Spring 1992): 139.
64. Buckley, U.S.-]a-pan Alliance, p. 37; McClothlen, Controlling the Waves, p. 80; U.S.

Department of State, Korea (Preliminary Version). An Intelligence Estimate . . . June 25,

7950, OACST-"P File," State Department, Office of Intelligence Research Intelligence

Estimate #7, NA, RG 319, p. 5; I am indebted to David Langbart for calHng this document
to my attention.

65. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall, 4 vols. (New York, 1963-87), IV, 452; Clenn D.
Paige,The Korean Decision (New York, 1968), pp. 132-133, 164; U.S. Department of State,
Monthly Survey of American Opinion (September 1950): 3-4; Caddis Smith, Dean
Acheson (New York, 1972), p. 172; Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea (New York,

1988), pp. 115, 165.

66. Thomas J. Christensen, "Threats, Assurances, and the Last Chance for Peace," Interna-
tional Security, 17 (Summer 1992): 128-131, footnote; Thome, Allies of a Kind, pp. 691-
692 for Hay reference; Nov. 30, 1950, Diary entry, box 17, Papers of Eban A. Ayers, HST
Library; Richard J. Barnet, The Rockets' Red Glare (New York, 1990), p. 314; Roger Ding-
man, "Atomic Diplomacy. . .
," International Security, 13 (Winter 1988-89): 72-75, 89;
Lloyd Cardner, Approaching Vietnam (New York, 1988), chapter 3 for quote and its con-
text.

67. Roger Dingman, "The Dagger and the Cift: The Impact of the Korean War Upon Japan,"
JAEAR, 2 (Spring 1993): 30-31; Dower, Empire and Aftermath, pp. 389-391.
68.Welfield, Empire, pp. 70-71; the CIA operation is outlined by Tim Weiner, Stephen
Engelberg, and James Sterngold in the New York Times, Oct. 9, 1994, p. A14.
69. Welfield, Empire, pp. 72, 76-77; Dingman, "Dagger," p. 37; Chancery Tokyo to Far East-
ern Department, July 26, 1950, FO 371 FJ1193, PRO; New York Times, July 8, 1950, in
NYT-GCI, p. 183; Allison to Rusk, July 10, 1950, in "Special Assistant Subject File . . .

Japanese Treaty June 1950," Harriman Papers.

70. Goncharov, et al.. Uncertain Partners, p. 89; Frank Cibney, "The First Three Months of

War,"JAEAR, 2 (Spring 1993): 106 for Yoshida quote; New York Times, June 20, 1951, in
NYT-GCI, p. 184, Boston Globe, Aug. i, 1993, pp. B21, B25 on the film.
71. "Notes for letter to General MacArthur," undated, probably late November 1950, Confer-
ence Dossiers, UN-Formosa, Dulles Papers; Pruessen, Didles, pp. 468-477; the U.S.
approach is also outlined in Acheson, Present at the Creation, pp. 432-435, 544-545; Buck-
ley, U.S. -Japan Alliance, p. 35; Dulles's quote is in U.S. Congress, Senate, 82nd Cong.,
ist Sess., Executive Sessions . . . (Historical Series), 1952, Vol. Ill, part i, 292-293; FRUS,
195/, VI, 831 has British fears of Japanese exports; Marks, Power and Peace, p. 136 for
Dulles warning the British.
72. Hosoya, "Japan's Response," pp. 16-17; Hirano Ken'ichiro, "Sengo Nihon gaiko ni okeru
(Bunka)" [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy in Relation to "Culture"] in Watanabe, ed.,

Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku; Welfield, Empire, p. 48; Hosoya, "Japan's Response, "
pp.
18-19; Dower, Japan in War and Peace, p. 208.

73. Hosoya, "Japan's Response," pp. 20-21; FRUS, 195/, VI, 827-829; Ishii Osamu, "Nichi-
Bei . . . 1952-1969" [The Japan-U.S. Partnership, 1952-1969], in Hosoya, ed., Nichi-Bei
kankei tsushi, p. 223 on Rockefeller.
74. Hosoya, "Japan's Response," pp. 26-27; Carol Cluck, "Entangling Illusions," in Cohen,
ed., New Frontiers, pp. 169-236; "Notes on Conversations . . . Feb. 7, 1951," by Dulles,
 "

Notes 4 4 4

Lot File 56D225, 56D256, Records of the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, 194 5-1953, box i,

NA, RG 59.

75. Hosoya, "Japan's Response," pp. 21-25; Barnet, Alliance, p. 91; Dower, Jwpan in War and
Peace, p. 190; Dower, "Peace and Democracy," p. 23; Igarashi Takeshi, "Peace-Making
and Party PoHtics," JJS, 11 (no. 2, 1985): 323-356 for analysis of how parties and treaty
negotiations intersected.
76. Hosoya, "Japan's Response," pp. 23, 26; Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 310 has the Dulles
quote; Maki, Documents, pp. 132-147 for peace treat); esp. p. 135 on bases.
77. F.O. Minute by R. H. Scott, Sept. 26, 1951, FO 371 FJ1027 / 5, PRO.
78. Acheson, Present at the Creation, pp. 545-47.

79. U.S. Congress. Senate, Executive Sessions . . . (Historical Series) 1951, Vol. III. Part i: 260-
261; Yashuhara Yoko. "Japan, Communist China, and Export Control in Asia, 1948-1952,

DH, 10 (Winter 1986): 75-89; F.O. Minute by R. H. Scott, Sept. 26. 1951. FO 371 FJ1027 /
5, PRO.

80. FRUS, 1951, VI, 1464-1470; Dower. Japan in War and Peace, p. 234; Dower. Empire and

Aftermath, pp. 400—414.

81. New York Times, Jan. 3. 1951, in NYT-GCI, p. 183; Kotaro Suzumura and Mashahiro
Okuno-Fujiwara, Industrial Policy in Japan (Canberra, 1987), pp. lo-ii; Yamamoto, "Cold
War," pp. 412-413; Richard J. Samuels, "Rich Nation, Strong Army" (Ithaca, N^', 1994),

pp. 133-134; W E. Smith to R. H. Scott, March 22, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019 / 6, PRO, for
British view; I am indebted to Milton Leitenberg for statistics and other material in this

paragraph.
82. Samuels, "Rich Nation," pp. 136-143.
83. Pruessen, Dulles, p. 478; Council on Foreign Relations Study Group Reports, Oct. 23,

1950, meeting. Conference Dossiers, draft of Japanese Peace Treaty, Dulles Papers; Yos-
hida is paraphrased by Dening in Sir E. Dening to Foreign Office. Oct. 19, 1951, FO 371
FJ1027 / 9, PRO; John K. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread (New York, 1978), p. 256.

84. Frank Costigliola, France and the United States (New York, 1992), chapter 3 has the State
Department official's quote and an excellent discussion; Sir A. Gascoigne to Scott, Jan.

22, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019 / 3, PRO; Takemae Fiji, Senryo sengoshi, pp. 53-54.
85. Igarashi, "Peace-Making and Part}' PoUtics, "
pp. 354-355; McGlothlen, Controlling the
Waves, p. 203 for Nitze quote.

Cnapter X

I.John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse (London, 1988), pp. 54-55; Roger Buckley, L^.S.-

Japan Alliance Diplomacy, 2945-/990 (Cambridge, UK, 1992), p. 78; FRUS, i9S5-^957>
XXIII, 86-87.
2. Sydney Giffard, Jflpaw Amxmg the Powers, 1890-1990 (New Haven, 1994), p. 147 on inter-
John Dower, War Without Mercy
nal conditions; Buckley, U.S. -Japan Alliance, p. 74;
(New York, 1986), p. 310 has Dirksen quote; Allison to J. E. MacDonald, Exec. Sec. Panel
"D" — ^Japan, Psychological Strategy Board, May 27, 1952, p. 14 in Lot File 56D225,
56D256, Records of Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, 1945-1953, NA, RG 49.
3. 'Tar Eastern Problems. Address by John Foster Dulles Before French National PoHtical
Science Institute, Paris. May 5, 1952, ' Primary Correspondence. 1916-1952, box 33, Eisen-
hower Library.

4. The themes are well explored in Lloyd Gardner, A Covenant with Power (New York, 1984),
esp. pp. 50—52; Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York, 1981), esp. pp.

33-39; and David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill. . .

," International Security, 7

(Spring 1983): 27.

Notes 4 4 5

5. New York Times, Nov. 19, 1953, in NYT-GCI, p. 214 for Nixon quote; Douglas H. Mendel,
Jr., "Japanese Views of the American Alliance," PSQ, 23 (Fall 1959): 9; Welfield, Em-pire,

pp. 79, 84, 103.

6. W. G. Beasley, The Rise of Modem Japan (New York, 1990), p. 226; Welfield, Empire, pp.
61, 82; George C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modem Japan (London, 1981), p.
190.

7. Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Security (Ithaca, NY, 1993),

pp. 7-8; Dening to Macmillan, Oct. 3, 1955, FO 371 FJ10345 / 33, PRO.
8. Ishii Osamu, "Nichi-Bei paatonashippu e no dotei, 1952-1969" [The Road to Japan-U.S.
Partnership, 1952-1969], in Hosoya Chihiro, ed., Nichi-Bei kankei tsushi [Japan-U.S.
Relations] (Tokyo, 1995), pp. 221-223; ^^ argument that 1945-51 was a "bourgeois revolu-
tion" is in Oishi's essay in Tokyo Daigaku, Shakai Kagaku Kenkyujo (Tokyo University,
Social Science Institute), Sengo kaikaku [Postwar Reform], 8 vols. (Tokyo, 1974), I, 92-
97; Roger Dingman, "The Dagger and the Gift: The Impact of the Korean War on Japan,"
JAEAR, 2 (Spring 1993): 50—52; Aruga Tadashi, "Editor's Introduction," JJAS, 2 (1985):

26-29.
9. Dingman, "Dagger," pp. 51-52; Reiko Maekawa, "The Rockefeller Foundation and Cul-
tural Politics in Postwar Japan," Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center
(Spring 1993): 10-12.
10. Boston Globe, Aug. i, 1993, pp. B21, B25; Dingman, "Dagger," p. 52 on Michener; Michael
Schaller, "Altered States," in Diane B. Kunz, ed.. The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade
(New York, 1994), p. 254 for the Godzilla interpretation.
11. Washington Post, Dec.23, 1993, p. A23; John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York,

1993), p. 206; "W Edwards Deming: The Prophet of Quality," CC-M Productions, PubHc
Broadcasting System, Nov. 30, 1994; Rafael Aguayo, Dr. Deming (New York, 1991).
12. Dulles "summary report" of July 7, 1950, P. C. Jessup files. Lot File 53D211, box i, NA,
RG 59, for which I am indebted to Professor Frank Costigliola; Dower, Japaw in War and
Peace, p. 193.

13. New York Times, Aug. 26, 1951, in NYT-GCI, p. 185; ibid., Sept. 23, 1951, p. 185; Peter
Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed.. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, UK, 1988), p. 24.

14. Fi^US, 1952-1954, XIV, 1623-1627; ibid., 1682-1684.

15. Hirano Ken'ichiro, "Sengo Nihon gaiko ni okeru (Bunka)" [Postwar Japanese Foreign Pol-
icy in Relation to "Culture"], in Watanabe Akio, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku [Post-

war Japanese Foreign Policy] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 343-348; Allen, Short Economic History,

pp. 204-205; Beasley, Rise, pp. 245-246; Yutaka Kosai, "The Postwar Japanese Economy,
1945-1973," in Duus, ed.. The Twentieth Century, pp. 507-508, 513-515.
16. Kosai, "Postwar Japanese Economy," pp. 520-521; Welfield, Empire, pp. 96-97; Richard J.

Samuels, "Rich Nation, Strong Army" (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 142-153 for dual-use technol-
ogy; Washington Post, July 18, 1993, p. Hi for Eisenhower and Motorola.

17. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power (New York, 1963), p. 76; John Dower, "Peace
and Democracy in Two Systems," in Andrew Gordon, ed.. Postwar Japan as History

(Berkeley, 1993), p. 12.

18. FRUS, 1952-/954, I, 885, 918-919 for cocoM deal; Sayuri Shimizu, "A Bothersome Trian-
gle . . . 1952-1958" (1992), Manuscript in author's possession; Akira Iriye, China and Japan
in the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 103-104; Nancy Bernkopf Tucker,
"American Policy . . .
," DH, 8 (Summer 1982): 208 notes trade figures; Ishii Ahira, "Or
Taiwan or Pekin," in Watanabe, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku, pp. 80-84 ^^ i953~54
meetings.
19. The quotations in these two paragraphs can be found in FRUS, 7952-/954, XII, 1011-1012,
esp. p. 396, for Eisenhower; also in FRUS, 1952-/954, V, 1808-1810; James C. Hagerty,
Notes 4 4 6

The Diary of James C. Hagerty, Robert H. Ferrell ed. (Bloomington, IN, 1983), pp. 70,
III, 141, 167; Dower, "Peace and Democracy in Two Systems," p. 51 on restoring Japan's

empire.
20. FRUS, 2952-1954, I, 1250-1252 on CHINCOM loosening; MM139 (28), April 16, 1953, Min-
utes of Meetings of National Security Council, supplement III (microfilm) (Bethesda,
MD, 1995).
21. George Glutton to Foreign Office, Oct. 2, 1951, FO 371 FJ1027/6, PRO.
22. FRUS, 1952-1954, XIII, 82-89.
23. Press conference in New Delhi, May 22, 1953, Dulles Papers; Douglas Kinnard, The
Secretary of Defense (Lexington, KY, 1980), p. 69 for use of nuclear weapons; The Pentagon
Papers, Senator Gravel Edition, 4 vols. (Boston, 1971), I, 83-84 for NSG-124 / 2.

24. U.S. Government, Public Papers of the Presidents Eisenhower, ig^4 (Washington, DG,
. . .

1958), pp. 382-383; "Far Eastern Problems. Address by Dulles." . . .

25. Eisenhower to Gen. Alfred M. Gruenther, April 26, 1954, Diary Series, box 5, Eisenhower
Library; Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam (New York, 1988), esp. ch. 6 analyzes
debates shaping SEATO; George G. Herring and Richard H. Immerman, "Eisenhower,
Dulles, and Dienbienphu, " JAH, 71 (September 1984): 352-353, 356-357. Divine, Eisen-
hower and Cold War, esp. p. 51.

26. Alhson to J. E. MacDonald, Exec. Secretary, Panel "D"-Japan, Psychological Strategy

Board, May 27, 1952, Lot Files 56 D225, 56 D256, Record of Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs,
box I, NA, RG 59; John Dower, Empire and Aftermath (Gambridge, MA, 1988), pp. 472-
473 for position paper; Welfield, Empire, p. 95.

27. BusinessWeek, Oct. 16, 1954, pp. 25-26; "Memorandum of Luncheon Conversation with
the President," March 15, 1954, White House Memoranda Series, box i. Papers of John
Foster Dulles, Eisenhower Library; Yamakage Susumu, "Ajia Taiheiyo to Nihon" [Asia,

Japan, and the Pacific], in Watanabe, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku, pp. 1 51-153 for
analysis of 1950s sphntering.
28. Hagerty, Diary, p. 40 for Communist allegations; New York Times, March 16, 1954, in
NYT-GCI, p. 213; FRUS, 1952-1954, XIV, 1643-1648 for AlHson's May 20, 1954, report.

29. For this and the previous paragraph, see the good analysis by Stuart Auerbach, "How the
U.S. Built Japan Inc.," Washington Post National Weekly Edition, July 26-Aug. i, 1993, p.
21; Shimizu, "Bothersome Triangle," pp. 9-1 1.

30. Dening to Eden, Jan. 19, 1955, FO 371 FJioii/i, PRO; Beasley, Rise, p. 230; Karel van
Wolferen, "Japan's Non-Revolution," Foreign Affairs, 7 (September-October 1993): 55.

31. "Biographic Report" by Department of State, Aug. 22, 1955, in FO 371 FJ1012/3 PRO;
New York Times, Dec. 10, 1954, p. Ai.
32. Allen, Short Economic History, pp. 191-192, 231; Walt W Rostow, The Diffusion of Power
(New York, 1972), pp. 60-61; "Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, April 20, 1956," pp. 1-2,
Cabinet Meetings of President Eisenhower, Eisenhower Library; U.S. Congress, Senate,
Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series) (Washing-
ton, DC, 1980), Vol. X, pp. 2-3.
33. FRUS, i9S5-i957> XIII, 128-129; FRUS, 1955-1957, IX, 30-31 on defense purchases; R. H.
Scott to Macmillan, Sept. 3, 1955, FO 371 FJ10345/23, PRO, for Dulles's annoyance;

Scott to Foreign Office, Sept. 9, 1955, FO 371 FJ10345/25, PRO.

34. Welfield, Empire, p. 94; clipping from the Washington Post, May 4, 1955, in FO 371

FJ 10345 / 17, PRO, on Alsop in Tokyo.

35. Burton Kaufman, "Eisenhower's Foreign Economic Policy with Respect to Asia," in War-
ren Cohen and Akira Iriye, eds., The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953-1960 (New York,
1990), pp. no— 112; Qing Simei, "The Eisenhower Administration ," in ibid.,
pp. 121- . . .

124; Iriye, China and japan, p. 107; Shimizu, "Bothersome Triangle," pp. 6-9; Buckley,

U.S. -Japan Alliance, pp. 70, 196; McHugh to John Keswick, July 30, 1955, Papers of Gol.

James McHugh, Cornell University.

Notes 4 4 7

36. Momose Hiroshi, "Futatsu no taisei no aida de" [Interaction Between Two Systems], in

Watanabe, ed., Sengo Nikon no taigai seisaku, pp. 91-96; FRUS, i9SS-i957> XIX, 154-157
on missile's effects; Sato Seizaburo, et al., Postwar Politician: The Life of . . . Ohira (Tokyo,
1990), p. 315; Buckley, U.S. -japan Alliance, p. 75 for Allison quote, and p. 76 for Dulles;
"Progress Report on U.S. Policy Toward Japan," NSC-5516, by Operations Coordinating
Board, Feb. 6, 1957, Documents of the NSC, 6th supplement (microfilm), reel (Bethesda,
MD).
37. This and the following paragraph on Kishi are drawn especially from U.S. Department of
State Biographical Report, Aug. 22, 1955, FO 371 FJ1012/3, PRO; and Welfield, Empire,
pp. 116-122.
38. Ishikawa Tadao, Nakajima Mineo, and Ikei Masaru, eds., Sengo shiryo Nit-Chu kankei
[Postwar Documents in Japanese-Chinese Relations] (Tokyo, 1970), p. viii on Kishi and
China; New York Times, Feb. 25, 1957, p. A7 for labor unions quote; March 9, 1957, p.

A6 on the Emperor; FRUS, 1955-^957, XXIII, 518-520, and also note references in #37
above.

39. Pre-press conference briefing, July 17, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 13 (microfilm),
frame 00590, original in Eisenhower Library; Frederick W. Marks III, Power and Peace
(Westport, CT, 1993), p. 225.
40. Welfield, Empire, pp. iio-iii, 152, 257; "Memorandum of Conversation, June 19, 1957,"

Kishi Call on President, Declassified Documents, 003463 (microfiche).

41. Welfield, Empire, p. 90; Buckley, U.S. -Japan Alliance, pp. 83-84.
42. Ishikawa, et al., Sengo shiryo, esp. pp. ix-x, 105-106 on the Chinese reaction; Operations
Coordinating Board, "Progress Report on Japan (NSC-5516 /i, approved April 9, 1955),"

Sept. 25, 1957, esp. p. 4, copy in author's possession; Hiwatari Yunu, "U.S. -Japanese
Relations in the Late 1950s: Kishi's Southeast Asian Policy" (in Japanese), JMJS, 11 (1989):
211-212.

43. Lascelles to Foreign Office, May 29, 1958, FO 371 FJ1017/8, PRO, for election analysis;
Buckley, U.S. -japan Alliance, pp. 80-89.

44. "Memorandum of Conversation," July 25, 1958, of Sato and S. S. Carpenter, in Douglas
MacArthur II to "Jeff" and J. Craham Parsons, RM / R Files, 794.00/7-2958, NA, RG
59. I am greatly indebted to David Langbart for noting this document. New York Times,
Oct. 9, 1994, p. 14 analysis by Tim Weiner.
45. Mendel, "Japanese Views of the American Alliance," p. 341; Marks, Power and Peace, p.
128 for the Kishi quote.

46. Chancery, Tokyo to Foreign office, July 23, 1951, FO 371 FJ1019 / 19, PRO; Asahi journal,
"Zengakuren's Thought and Action," Dec. 20, 1959, Summaries of Selected Japanese
Magazines, Jan. 18, i960, issued by translation services branch, American Embassy,
Tokyo, copy in author's possession.

47. "Memorandum of Conversation: Japanese Domestic Pohtical Situation," Eisenhower and

Kishi, Jan. 19, i960, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 24 (microfilm), frame 00452, Eisenhower
Library; de la Mare 371 FJ10345/ 18, PRO.
to Peter Dalton, Feb.
5, i960, FO
48. Maki, Documents, pp. 220-225 for treaty and accompanying documents; Morland to For-
eign Office, Jan. 29, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/13, PRO; Chancery Tokyo to Far Eastern
Department, Feb. 29, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/24, PRO, for Kishi statement analysis; Wel-
field, Empire, p. 143-145.

49. Parsons to Caccia quoted in Caccia to Foreign Office, Jan. 13, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/6,
PRO; Reilly to Foreign Office, Jan. 28, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/12, PRO; Buckley U.S.-
Japan Alliance, pp. 92-94.
50. MacArthur to Secretary of State, May 26, i960, Declassified Documents, 00869 (micro-
fiche); Welfield, Empire, p. 138.

51. This and the previous paragraph on the Japanese reaction are based on New York Times,
July 14, May 27, June 16, and June 17, i960, and also June 19, 1962, all in NYT-GCI, pp.
Notes 4 4 8

271-281; Morland to Foreign Office, June 17, i960, FO 371 FJ101345/60, PRO, on June

15 riots; Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea (Princeton, 1987), p. 10; Welfield,
Empire, p. 138.

52. Caccia to Foreign Office, June 18, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/57, PRO, quotes Reston; Chan-
cery Tokyo to Foreign Office, July 15, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/69, PRO; Welfield, Empire,
p. 140, on right-wing assassination attempts.
53. New York Times, July 19, i960, p. A14; Aruga, "Japanese Scholarship," p. 40; Ishikawa, et
al., Sengo shiryo, entry for July 2, i960, is Chinese commentary on Kishi's retirement.

54. Eisenhower to Swede Hazlett, Aug. 3, 1956, Ann Whitman File — Hazlett, Eisenhower
Library.

55. Mr. AlHson to the Secretary, Jan. 3, 1952, p. 3, copy in author's possession; 1 am indebted
to David Langbart for pointing out this document, which was declassified on Sept. 12,

1995-

Chapter XI

1. New York Times, July 19, i960, p. A14.

2. Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea (Princeton, 1987), p. 20; John Welfield, An
Empire in Eclipse (London, 1988), pp. 170-171; Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global
Setting (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 118.
3. Tim Weiner story in New York Times, Oct. 9, 1994, p. 14; and Kazumoto Ono, "Shin
CIA tai nichi himitsu kosaku no zenbunsho" [New Testimony: Documents on
shogen:
CIA Operations in Japan], Bungei Shunju (December 1994): 144-156.
Covert
4. Sir O. Morland to Far Eastern Department, Jan. 23, 1963, FO 371 FJ2041 / 1, PRO; Sir O.

Morland to Foreign Office, Jan. 7, 1963, FO 371 FJioii / 1, PRO; W. G. Beasley, The Rise
of Modem Japan (New York, 1990), pp. 234-235.
5. BusinessWeek, Aug. 19, 1967, p. 94; William R. Nester, Japan and the Third World (New

York, 1992), pp. 13-14 on OECD reservations; G. C. Allen, A Short Economic History of
Modem Japan (London, 1981), p. 212; New Scientist Japanese Supplement, Nov. 16, 1967,

pp. 8-9; William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance (Madison, WI, 1984), pp. ix, 3-17, 37-
41, 218-222; New York Times, July 6, 1967, in NYT-GCI, p. 308.
6. Kosai Yutaka, "The Postwar Japanese Economy, 1945-1973," in Peter Duus, ed., The Cam-
bridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1988), p. 530;
Allen, Short Economic History, p. 225; Jacques Hersh, The USA and the Rise of East Asia
Since 1^4^ (London, 1993), p. 32.
7. Wall Street Journal, Nov. 11, 1966, p. 22; Suzumara Kitaro and Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara,
Industrial Policy in Japan (Canberra, 1987), pp. 11-12, 15-16; Beasley, Rise, pp. 230-232;
New Scientist Japanese Supplement, Nov. 16, 1967, p. for the "science city." i

8. Kitaro and Okuno-Fujiwara, Industrial Policy in Japan, pp. 14-15; Allen, Short Economic
History, pp. 226-227.

9. U.S. News &• World Report, July 24, 1967, p. 90; Peter Duus, Introduction to Duus, ed.,

The Twentieth Century, pp. 29-30 on raw material investment; Yatuka, "Postwar Japanese
Economy," p. 528; New York Times, Jan. 19, 1968, p. 56; Far Eastern Economic Review,
May 21, 1970, p. 74; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York, 1990), pp. 552-554;
BusinessWeek, Sept. 6, 1969, pp. 124-125, for the Japanese official's quote; ibid., Aug. 19,
1967, p. 106.
10. New York Times, June 10, 1968, p. 71; Michael Schaller, "Altered States: U.S. and Japan
. . .
," in The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade (New York, 1994), pp.
Diane Kunz, ed..

259-260; Seymour Broadbridge and Martin Collick, "Japan's International Policies," Inter-
Notes 4 4 9

national Affairs, 44 (April 1968): 249; Kunio Moraoka, Japanese Security and the United
States. Adelphi Papers (London, 1973), p. 9.

11. Broadbridge and Collick, "Japan's International Policies," pp. 240-253 on the Pacific Basin
Economic Community; Peter Drysdale, Economic Integra-
"Japan, Australia, and Pacific
tion," Australia's Neighbors, 4th series, nos. 50-51 (November-December 1967), pp. 6-9;
Mike Mansfield, The Rim of Asia (Washington, DC, 1967), p. 5; BusinessWeek, Aug. 19,
1967, p. 93 New York Times, Jan. 19, 1968, p. 65 on Taiwan; Garvey to Foreign
on "hino";
Office, Jan. FO 371 FJ113110 / PRO.
i, 1963, 1,

12. Hsinhua press report, Jan. 19, 1963, in FO 371 FJ113110/2, PRO, for Ikeda quote; Garvey

to Foreign Office, Oct. 8, 1963, FO 371 FJ113110/21, PRO, on credit deals; Iriye, China

and Japan, pp. 116-117; The Times "Press Cutting," FO 371 FJ113110/8, PRO.
13. New York Times, Jan. 11, 1981, p. 18; Lewis Beman, "How to Tell Where the U.S. Is

Competitive," Fortune, 86 (July 1972): 54-55; New York Times, July 6, 1967, in NYT-GCI,
p. 308.

14. CIA, Intelligence Memorandum. Japan: The Effectiveness of Informal Import and Invest-
ment Controls (Washington, DC, 1969), National Security Archive, no. 73714; New York
Times, Nov. 26, 1967, p. F14; Philip H. Trezise to Editor, Foreign Affairs, 72 (September-
October, 1993): 188; Ledward to Far Eastern Department, April 3, 1963, FO 371 FJi 13145/
2, PRO, for Johnson speech.
15. Louis Heren, No Hail, No (New
Farewell York, 1970), p. 118; Hindle to Earl of Home,
Sept. 26, i960, FO 371 FJ10345/77, PRO.
16. Laura E. Hein, "Free-Floating Anxieties on the Pacific: Japan and the West Revisited,"
DH, 20 (Summer 1996): 414-419; Ledward to de la Mare, Oct. 11, 1961, FO 371 FJ103145/
15, PRO.

17. Trench to de la Mare, Nov. 17, 1961, FO 371 FJ103145/18, PRO; Kono Yasuko, "
'Sengo
no owati,' " [The End of the Postwar Era], in Watanabe Akio, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai

seisaku [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 187-190 for the "equal part-
nership" theme; Schaller, "Altered States," pp. 261-262.
18. Sir H. Garcia to FO, July i, 1961, FO 371 FJ1031458/8, PRO; Heren, No Hail, pp. 118-

119.

19. U.S. Department of State, "Japan. Department of State Guidelines for Policy and Opera-
tions . . . March 1962," pp. i, 9, National Security Archives, no. 74095 (hereafter cited as
Department of State, "Japan, March 1962").

20. "Memorandum for the President" from Roswell Gilpatrick, Feb. 7, 8, 1963, National
Security Archive, no. 71594; Reischauer to Harriman, Oct. 22, 1962, FE 5790/102.20/8-
22-62, NA, RG 59.
21. For this and the following paragraph, see Wall Street Journal, Sept. 13, 1962; Denson to

Foreign Office, Sept. 13, 1962, FO 371 FJ103145/15, PRO, for U.S. bases; Department of
March
State, "Japan, 1962," p. 4; British Embassy in Tokyo to London, April 19, 1963, FO
37iFJi3i45/3,PRO.
22. This paragraph is based especially on the reporting of Kazumoto Ono, "Shin shogen."
Professor Michael Schaller to author, Feb. 2, 1995, has specific annual amounts.
23. Greenhill to Foreign Office, Dec. 20, 1962, FO 371 FJ113145/16, PRO, has Kennedy's
speech and describes the meeting.
24. Tokyo Embassy to Foreign Office, Feb. 5, 1963, FO 371 FJ113110/4, PRO, on Ikeda and
China; C. G. Harris to Foreign Office, March 9, 1963, FO 371 FJ113110/6, PRO.
25.Welfield, Empire, pp. 174-178, 182; Kazumoto, "Shin shogen," pp. 153-156, alluding to
CIA penetration of ministries.
26. Editorial page of The Times (London), Oct. 21, 1961; Morland to Foreign Office, Jan. 7,

1963, FO371 FJioii/i, PRO.

27. Report in Ledward to de la Mare, Feb. i, 1963, FO 371 FJ103145/2, PRO.
Notes 4 5

28. Lam- Berman. "From Intervention to Disengagement, in Ariel Le\ite. Bruce jentleson.
and Lam Berman. eds.. Foreign Militan Intenention 'New York. 1992). pp. 30-31 for
"
Westmoreland quote; Havens. Fire, pp. 18—19; Kono. "
Sengo no owati. pp. 194-195.
29. Xeir York Times, Oct. 11. 1964. in -MT-GCJ. p. 325; Seiv York Times. Dec. -. 1964. p. 5
for Lemay; I am indebted to Kathr\Ti Comerford for finding this episode.

30. Schaller. ".\ltered States, p. 2-2.

31. For U.S. bitterness over Japan's capital control, an XSC briefing book for Johnson is

instructive: "Aisit of Prime Minister Sato. January" 11-14. 1965. Background Paper. Japa-
nese Restrictions on Direct Foreign Investment. National Security .-Vrchive. no. 73330.
32. Nexv York Times, Nov. 9. 1964. p. Ai; John K. Emmerson. Tlie Japanese Tljread '
New York.
1978), pp. 384-385 on Sato; Welfield. Empire, p. 129; U. .-Mexis Johnson. TJie Right Hand
of Power (Englewood Cliffs. NJ. 1984'. pp. 463-464.
33. George E. Reedy, Lyndon Johnson, A Memoir (New York, 1982), p. 36; Memorandum for

Mr. Bundy. Jan. ~. 1965. National Securit)' .\rchive. no. "3346.

34. "Memorandum for Mr. Bundy, Jan. -. 196-. National Security .Archive, no. "3346;
Record of Third meeting of Joint U.S. -Japan Committee on Trade and Economic .Affairs.

Tokyo. Januar\^ 27. 1964. I\ . . .

," National Security Archive, no. "3309; Jonathan Spence.
To CJuinge China (New York, 1980^ pp. 286-28"; Reischauer to Office of the Secretary
of State, telegram. Feb. 24, 1966. National Security- .Archive, no. 734C6, for non-prolifera-
tion treat) ; Scalapino is quoted in Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 1967.

35. FfiLS. i<)64—ig68, I, 486—487, 916-918; "Memorandum of Conversation, Subject; \isit

of Mr. Fukuda. July 11. 1964. National Security- .Archive, no. -3228; "Memorandum of
Conversation. Subject: United States-Japan Relations and Policy Problems in .Asia, Jan.
13. 1965, National Security Archive, no. 73217.
36. George Kahin, Interventiov. New York, 1986), emphasizes the pressures on Johnson from
his ad\isers.

37. Havens. Fire, pp. 21-23.

38- Berman. 'Trom Intenention, pp. 32-33: FO .Minute by J L. N O Laughlin. Dec. 2.

1963, FO 3-1 -AU1012/5, PRO; Johnsons motives and the conte.xt are anah-zed in Lloyd
C. Gardner. Pa\ Am Price » Chicago. 1995'. which stresses the New Deal background.
39. Forrestal quote is in William Chafe. Tlie Unfinished Journey •
New York. 1986'. p. 2S1.
4c. For this and the following paragraph, see Sexv York Times, Jan. 14. 1965. in .\YT-GC/.
pp. 327—328; Havens, Fire, pp. 25—28, 89—90 on Japans response; Tlie Economisr. Oct.
22. 1966, p. 359; Schaller, ".Altered States, pp. 262-263.
41..Allen S. Whiting. The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence i.Arm .Arbor. .MI. 19-5 .
pp. i-c—
172, 182; Dean Rusk Oral Historv. LB] Library, on the Chinese; Kahin. bttervention, p.

338 for Japan-North \ietnam; James Reston. Deadline (New York. i99i>. p- 321 for LBJ
quote.
42. Havens, Fire. pp. 87, 94—97, 103—104; Johnson. Right Hand. p. 451; Economic Benefits

to Japan Traceable to the \'ietnam Conflict." Nov. 9, 196-, Sneider to Jorden. National
Security- .Archive, no. 73575; Neusxveek, Aug. 15. 1966. pp. 68—69.

43. N^eir York Times. Dec. 31, 1967. p. 3 for Japans nationalism; Havens. Fire. pp. 32-35. 56—
60. 71, 114; Welfield, Empire, pp. 228—229.

44. The important analysis of Indonesia at this time is George and .Audrey Kahin, Suhi'ersion
as Foreign Policy 1 New York, 1995^ .NVir York Tintes. July 12, 199c, p. .A13 for U.S. involve-
ment; The Economist. .April 2. 1966. p. -6; Rusk to U.S. .Ambassador, "Eyes Only ....
May 12, 1966. National Security .Archive, no. 73415: U.S. Embassy. Japan, to Department
of State, Dec. -, 1966. "Secretary -Sato Conversation: Indonesia. .National Security

.Archive, no. "3431: Johnson, Right Hand, p. 482.

45. Richard Halloran, Japan; Images and Realities 'New York, 1969). pp. 192-193; Havens.
Fire, p. 114; U.S. News & World Report, July 24. 1967, pp. 90-93.
 Notes 4 5 1

46. New York Times, Jan. 15, 1965, p. 42; Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "Continuity Through
Change . . .
," JAEAR, 3 (Spring 1994): 37, 46; Havens, Fire, pp. 87-88, 124; Welfield,
Empire, pp. 226-227; "Memorandum for Mr. Walt W. Rostow," from Benjamin H. Read,
Oct. 13, 1967, National Security Archive, no. 73517-

47. "Memo for Mr. Rostow," from Dick Moose, Feb. 8, 1968, NSC file. Subject file. Press
Appointments, LBJ Library, for media response; Harry McPherson Oral History, tape #5,

pp. 5-6,LBJ Library, on White House view of Tet; Acheson's words, in LBJ's handwriting,

are shown in Walter LaFeber, The American Age (New York, 1994), p. 619.

48. U.S. Department of State, "Growing Severity of Japanese Press on U.S. -Related Issues,"
Nov. 9, 1967, National Security Archive, no. 73576; Welfield, Empire, p. 234; Johnson,
Right Hand, p. 491 on riots; Johnson to Bundy, April 4, 1968, National Security Archive,
no. 73623, for Japanese surprise and Sato's dilemma; Havens, Fire, pp. 144-145, 175.

49. Welfield, Empire, pp. 236-239; Johnson, Right Hand, 444; Johnson to Secretary of
I State, Aug. 21, 1968, National Security Archive, no. 73671, for
p.

Johnson-Mild conversation.
50. Richard Nixon, RN (New York, 1978), p. 335.
51. Johnson, Right Hand, p. 509 on Sato-Mild; Havens, Fire, pp. 163, 189-191 on cutbacks
and riots.

52. Richard M. Nixon, "Asia after Viet Nam," Foreign Affairs, 46 (October 1967): 111-125.
53. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), p. 735; Henry Kissinger, White House
Years (Boston, 1979), p. 324; John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York, 1993), p.

323 on "little Sony salesmen"; Henry Kissinger, Am.erican Foreign Policy. Expanded Edi-
tion (New York, 1974), pp. 182-183; Johnson, Right Hand, p. 521.

54. Kissinger, American Foreign Policy, p. 57; John Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger (New York,
1976), pp. 12-14.

55. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 224-225; Seymour Hersh, TPie Price of Power (New
York, 1983), pp. 148, 281; Hersh, USA, pp. 40-41; Leslie H. Brown, American Security
Policy in Asia. Adelphi Papers (London, 1977), pp. 6, 8.

56. "National Security Decision Memorandum 13," May 28, 1969, signed by Kissinger, out-
lines U.S. negotiating position on Okinawa, copy in author's possession; Sarantakes,

"Continuity Through Change," pp. 46-47; Welfield, Empire, pp. 243-244; Takemae Eiji,

Senryo sengoshi [Occupation and Postwar Japanese History] (Tokyo, 1980), pp. 53-55 for

k 57.
Okinawa's internal conditions.
Text of agreement is joint communique, Nov. 21, 1969, U.S. Foreign Policy, ig6g-igyo
(Washington, DC, 1971), pp. 503-505; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 334-335; Havens,
Fire, pp. 192-193.

58. Havens, Fire, pp. 91-92, 151-152, 199; Gabriel Kolko, "Oiling the Escalator," The New
Republic, March 13, 1971, on Southeast Asia link; Christian Science Monitor, Dec. i, 1969,
p. 21 on White Paper; Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 1970, p. 7 on air force; Meyer
to Department of State, March 15, 1971, National Security Archive, no. 73994, on nuclear
weapons.
59. Johnson, Right Hand, pp. 549-550 on context; Havens, Fire, p. 222 on Communist trade;
Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 24, 1969, p. 11; Sato, Ohira, pp. 254-255; "Memorandum
for the President's Files," March 11, 1971, National Security Archive, no. 71710, for Mills;
L M. Destler, Haruhiro Fukui, and Hideo Sato, The Textile Wrangle (Ithaca, NY, 1979),
esp. p. 320.
60. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 340, 359; Destler, et al., Textile Wrangle, p. 320.
61. Sato, Ohira, p. 250 for Perry reference.
62. Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970); criticial
reviews are in The Economist, June 26, 1971, p. 59; and by Henry Rosovsky in Science,
Feb. 5, 1971, p. 467.
6^. Public Papers of the Presidents . . . Nixon . . . igyi (Washington, DC, 1972), pp. 806-812;
Notes 4 5 2

"Summary of Discussion . . . Eighth Japan-U.S. Businessmen's Conference," June i8,

1971, National Security Archive, no. 74108 has the business leaders' quotes; Robert E.
Osgood, et al., Retreat from Empire? (Baltimore, 1973), p. 229 for trade.
64. This and the previous paragraph are based on "Summaiy of Discussion, Government-
Business Debriefing Session"; "Opening Remarks of William R Rogers at 8th Meeting of
Joint U.S. -Japan Committee on Trade and Economic Affairs," Sept. 9, 1971, National

Security Archive, no. 741 17; "Memorandum for the President's File," Nov. 16, 1971,
National Security Archive, no. 71698, for Connally-Nixon exchange; Destler, etal., Textile

Wrangle, p. 27 has the Stans quote from Time; Bruce Cumings, "Japan's Position in the
World System," in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japanese History (Berkeley, 1993), p. 55.

65. CIA, "Intelligence Memorandum. Japan's Eight-Point Economic Program: Progress and
Prospects," September 1971, National Security Archive, no. 73718; "Memorandum for the
Secretary," by Harold B. Scott, Dec. 14, 1971, National Security Archive, no. 741 18;
Tadashi Kawata, "The Rise and Fall of Economic Hegemony and Policy Change, "Jowrna/
of American and Canadian Studies, 5 (Spring 1990): 24: New York Times, April 24, 1972,
p. 53 for Eberle quote.
66. Tanaka Akihito, "Bei, Chu, So no aida de" [Inside the United States, China, and the
Soviet Union], in Watanabe Akio, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai sesaku [Postwar Japanese
Foreign Policy] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 228-231 for the duck analogy; "Memo for the Presi-

dent's File," April 8, 1971, National Security Archive, no. 71701; Ogata Sadako, Normaliza-
tion with China (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 18-21 on Sino-Soviet clash.

67. Ogata, Normalization, p. 37 on Nixon-Rogers promise; Johnson, Right Hand, pp. 501,

553-554; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 761-762; Havens, Fire, pp. 227-228 for Sato's
unpopularity.
68. Hersh, Price of Power, p. 382 on Zhou's fears; Nixon's handwritten personal notes, "China
Visit," Feb. 15, 1972, National Security Archive, no. 74177; Welfield, Empire, pp. 252-253;
Nixon, RN, p. 567 on "others . . . defend themselves "; Ogata, Normalization, pp. 33-35-
69. New York Times, July 6, 1972, p. Ai on Tanaka; Ogata, Normalization, pp. 46-47; "Memo-
randum for the President's File, " Aug. 31, 1972, by Ron Ziegler, National Security Archive,
no. 71666, for toast.

70. New York Times, March 22, 1970, p. 4 on LDP split; Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace

(New York, 1978), pp. 616-617 on Lockheed.

71. Iriye, China and Japan, pp. 124-125; Beasley, Rise, pp. 241-242; Ogata, Normalization, pp.
54-55 on Tanaka; Havens, Fire, p. 228.
72. Sterba story in New York Times, Aug. 28, 1972, p. 14; Japan Times, March i, 1970, p. 3
has Eugene Black quote.
73. "Memorandum of Conversation," by Kissinger, Feb. 17, 1973, National Security Archive,
no. 71723; "Memorandum for: The President," from Kissinger, March 2, 1973, National
Security Archive, no. 71717.
74. "Memorandum for: The President," from Kissinger, Feb. 27, 1973, National Security
Archive, no. 71724; Havens, Fire, pp. 92, 226, 232; George Herring, America's Longest War
(New York, 1986), esp. pp. 250-256.

75. Aruga Tadashi, "Japanese Scholarship in the History of U.S. -East Asian Relations" (1993),
pp. 42-43, in author's possession.

Chapter XII

1. New York Times, Sept. 28, 1971, in NYT-GCI, p. 395; Robert J. Smith, Japanese Society
(Cambridge, UK, 1983), p. 21.
2. Yamamoto Mitsuru, Fumo no gensetsu: Kokkai tohen no naka no Nichi-Bei kankei [The
Notes 4 5 3

Barren Discourse: The Diet's Response to the Japan-U.S. Relationship] (Tokyo, 1992),
esp. pp. 15—20 on the 1970s as a major break; I. M. Destler, Harukiro Fukui, and Hideo
Sato, The Textile Wrangle (Ithaca, NY, 1979), p. 27 has quote.

3. These 1972-74 events and their importance as a watershed, with leading scholarly analy-
ses of them, are discussed in Walter LaFeber, "From Detente to the Gulf, " in Gordon
Martel, ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, /890-1993 (London, 1994), pp. 147-
151.

4. New York Times, Jan. 16, 1975, p. i.

5. Destler, et al., Textile Wrangle, pp. 313-315, 320; "Memorandum," Kissinger to Nixon,
Feb. 27, 1973, National Security Archive, no. 73724: Chalmers Johnson, MTTl and the

Japanese Miracle (Stanford, 1982), pp. 292-296.

6. Franklin Tugwell, The Energy Crisis and the American Political Economy (Stanford, 1988),

pp. 98-112.
7. Ibid., pp. 113, 212-213.
8. This and the previous paragraph on the Japanese response are based on John Welfield,
Empire in Eclipse(London, 1988), pp. 344-346; Johnson, MITI, pp. 286-288, 297-300;
F. C. Perkins, "A Dynamic Analysis of Japanese Energy Policies," Energy Policy, 22 (July
1994): 595-597, 606; and Inada Juichi, "Hattentojokoku to Nihon" [Developing Countries
and Japan], in Watanabe Akio, ed., Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku [Postwar Japanese
Foreign Policy] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 313-314.
9. The Economist, July 9, 1994, p. 17.
10. George C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan (London, 1981), pp. 223—224;
Welfield, Empire, pp. 330-331, 338.
11. Ono Kazumoto, "Shiu shogen: CIA tai nichi himitsu kosaku no zenbunsho" [New Testi-
mony: Documents on Covert CIA Operations in Japan], Bungei Shunju (January 1995):
5-

12. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 183-185; Ezra F. Vogel, "Japanese-
American Relations After the Cold War," in Aspen Strategy Group, Harness the Rising
Sun (Lanham, MD, 1993), p. 165.
13. Background and detailed citations on Carter are provided in Walter LaFeber, "From Con-
fusion to Cold War: The Memoirs of the Carter Administration," DH, 8 (Winter 1984):
1-12; Ford "doctrine" speech is in New York Times, Dec. 8, 1975, p. C14; Thomas R. H.
Havens, Fire Across the Sea (Princeton, 1987), pp. 241-244; Welfield, Empire, p. 339; New
York Times, Jan. 13, 1976, p. A4 on Mild views.
14. Suzumara Kitaro and Mashahiro Okuno-Fujiwara, Industrial Policy in Japan (Canberra,
1987), p. 21 on Research Association; Smith, Japanese Society, p. 50 for baseball; Miyoshi,

As We Saw Them, p. 95 for the hamburger reference.

15. Smith, Japanese Society, pp. 124-125; Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One (New York,

1979, 1980), esp. pp. 70-73, 90-91, 232-245.

16. The Economist, July 15, 1995, p. 87; Sadako Ogata, Normxilization with China (Berkeley,
1988), pp. 89-99; Washington Post, July 10, 1980, p. Bi for lacocca quote; William Nester,
Japan and the Third World (New York, 1992), pp. 18, 106, 114.

17. Welfield, Empire, p. 346; Havens, Fire Across the Sea, pp. 245, 248; Jacques Hersh, USA
and the Rise of East Asia (London, 1993), pp. 53-56; Sydney Giffard, Japan Among the
Powers, /890-7990 (New Haven, 1994), pp. 179-180; New York Times, Aug. 6, 1978, p. i.

18. The Economist, July 15, 1995, p. 88.

19. Richard P. Cronin, Japan, the United States and Prospects for the Asia-Pacific Century
(New York, 1992), p. 59; Hersh, L^SA, pp. 62-63.
20. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (New York, 1982), pp. 190, 206, 214-215; Jimmy
Carter, Keeping the Faith (New York, 1982), pp. 193-196.
21. Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 48.
Notes 4 5 4

22. Welfield, Empire, p. 334; New York Times, Nov. 9, 1976, p. A61, and July 23, 1978, p. A9.
23. Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 1978, p. Ii, and Dec. 8, 1978, p. I4; Nester, Japan and Third
World, pp. 152-153; Giffard, Japan Among the Powers (New Haven, 1994), pp. 179-180.
24. W. G. Beasley, The Rise of Modem Japan (New York, 1990), pp. 268-269; Washington
Post, July 31, 1978, p. Ai.

25. Takashi Inoguchi, /apaw's Foreign Policy in an Era of Global Change (New York, 1993), p.
20; Ohira's interview is in New
York Times, Nov. 23, 1979, p. A27, and also see Aug. 6,
1978, p. I. Akira Iriye estimates that in yen, the defense budget rose from 593 billion in
1970 to 1,881 billion in 1978. During these years, the dollar dropped from 360 yen to 195
yen, and the price index spiraled upward from 577 to 1227 (1934-36 = i); Professor Iriye
to author, Feb. 17, 1996.
26. Washington Post, June 26, 1980, p. A31 on Carter's military budget; Seizaburo Sato, Koy-
ama Ken-ichi, and Kumon Shumpei, Postwar Politician, The Life of Former Minister
Masayoshi Ohira, translated by William R. Carter (Tokyo, 1990), p. 534; Yamamato, Fumo
no genetsu, pp. 61-67 on Carter, pp. 74-75, 99-100 on Ohira; Giffard, Japan Among the
Powers, pp. 185—186; Cronin, Japan, the United States, pp. 60—61 on Defense Agency;
Bruce Cumings, "Japan's Position in the World System," in Andrew Gordon, ed.. Postwar
Japan as History (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 55-56.

27. The background and quotes in this and the previous paragraph are from Inoguchi
Takashi, Kokiisai kankei no seiji keizaigaku: Nihon no yakuwari to sentaku [Economics
and Politics in International Relations: Japan's Role and Choices] (Tokyo, 1985), pp. 124-
130; New York Times, May 21, 1981, p. A6 on U.S. sub and protests: Hersh, USA, pp.
loo-ioi; Walter Dean Burnham, "American Pohtics in the 1980s," Dissent, 27 (Spring

1980); Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 515; Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1980, pp. I14—
16 on Suzuki; Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, Democratizing Japan (Honolulu,
1987), pp. x-xi for "Occupy Us."
28. Giffard, Japan Among the Powers, pp. 177-178; Kent E. Calder, Grisis and Compensation
(Princeton, 1988), pp. 114-116; New York Tim£s, Nov. 27, 1982, p. Ai; Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 25, 1982, p. Ii for Tanaka versus Fukuda; Richard J. Samuels, "Rich Nation, Strong
Army" NY, 1994), pp. 171-175; "Yasuhiro Nakasone
(Ithaca, . . .
," interviewed by Alan M.
Webber, Harvard Business Review, 67 (March-April 1989): 93 for "television democracy."
29. "National Security Decision Directive Number 62. National Security Decision Directive
on United States-Japan Relations," Oct. 25, 1982, National Security Archive, no. 73855;
George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (New York, 1993), pp. 173-178, 193.
30. "Yashuhiro Nakasone," pp. 84-85 for baseball metaphor; Cumings, "Japan's Position in

the World System," pp. 57-58.

31. Havens, Fire, p. 244; Calder, Grisis, pp. 416-417 on defense levels; John Dower, "Peace
and Democracy in Two System," in Gordon, Postwar Japan as History, p. 30 on exports;
Hideki Kan, "The Reagan Administration and the Expansion of the Military-Industrial
Complex, "JoMrwa/ of American and Canadian Studies, 3 (Spring 1989): 68—71.

32. "National Security Decision Directive Number 62," p. 2; Paul D. Wolfowitz, "Taking

Stock of U.S. -Japan Relations," June 1984, Current Policy, no. 593, p. 4.
12,

33. "Yasuhiro Nakasone," p. 89 for "Japan Inc. John Dower, War Without Mercy
";
(New York,
1986), p. 315; Havens, Fire, pp. 249-251 on Nakasone's and Japanese racial views.
34. "Yashuhiro Nakasone, "
pp. 89-90; Nester, Japan and Third World, pp. 40-41 has the
percentages; Andrew Boltho, "Was Japan's Industrial Policy Successful?" Cambridge Jour-
nal of Economics, 9 (1985): 191-192; Inoguchi, Japaw's Foreign Policy, p. 32.

35. Calder, Crisis, p. 119 has "voluntary" figures; Sidney Blumenthal, "Whose Side Is Business
On, Anyway?" New York Times Magazine, Oct. 25, 1981, esp. p. 95 on quoted corporate
view.

36. "National Security Decision Directive Number 226. Machine Tools and National Secu-
Notes 4 5 5

rity," May 21, 1986, National Security Archive, no. 73862, for machine tool decision; John
R. Kasich, "Get Rid of Corporate Welfare," New York Times, July 9, 1995, p. E15.

37. "Yasuhiro Nakasone," p. 88; Hersh, USA, pp. 86-87; Hideo Kanemitsu, "Trends in U.S.-

Japan Economic Relations from 1955 to ig86." Journal of American and Canadian Studies,
2 (Autumn 1988): 94 for 1955 comparison.

38. Yoichi Funabashi, Managing the Dollar (Washington, DC, 1989), p. 4; Ellen L. Frost, For
Richer, For Poorer (New York, 1987), p. 165 for Dole and Danforth; "National Security
Decision Directive Number 154, U.S. -Japan Trade Policy Relations," National Security
Archive, no. 73860; Mike M. Mochizuki, "Japan and the Strategic Quadrangle," in
Michael Mandelbaum, ed., The Strategic Quadrangle (New York, 1995), p. 117 on capital

markets.

39. Frost, For Richer, p. 13 for post-Plaza; N ester, Japan and Third World, p. 35; Funabashi,
Managing the Dollar, is important throughout for internal Japanese debates.
40. Cronin, Japan, pp. 9-10; Calder, Crisis, p. 120 has figures; Nester, Japaw and Third World,
p. 35 on yen transactions.
41. R. Taggart Murphy, The Weight of the Yen (New York, 1995), esp. pp. 164-177; Stephen
W Bosworth, "The United States and Asia," Foreign Affairs, 71 (no. i, 1991-92): 119;
N ester, Japan and Third World, p. 19 on aid division; New York Times, Aug. 21, 1985, p.

D2 for China figures; Beasley, Rise, pp. 252, 267; Giffard, Japaw, pp. 180-182 on Japan in
China.
42. Yoichi Funabashi, Asia Pacific Fusion (Washington, DC, 1995), pp. 105, 187-189; Cronin,
Japan, pp. 73-74.
43. Nester, Japan and Third World, p. 160.

44. Ibid., p. 65; David Gelsanliter, Jump Start: Japan Comes to the Heartland (New York,
1990), is excellent on the effects overall; John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York,
1994). PP- 303-304-
45. New York Times, April 16, 1995, p. E5, and also March 10, 1989, p. D2 on 1987 crash.
46. These points are covered elsewhere in this chapter, and there is good discussion and
overview in Mark Mason, Am.erican Multinationals and Japan (Cambridge, MA, 1992),
esp. pp. 202-242, with case studies; Jean-Claude Derian, America's Struggle for Leader-
ship in Technology, translated by Severen Schaeffer (New York, 1990), pp. 8, 172-173 for
Sematech; Dower, Japan in War and Peace, pp. 303-304 has Prestowitz quote; Akio Mor-
ita and Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say "No" (Washington, DC, 1989), pp.
7-1 1.

47. Derian, America's Struggle, pp. 2-5; Kanemitsu, "Trends," pp. 103-105; Dower, Japan in
War and Peace, p. 308 for cartoon.
48. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p. 190; Hersh, USA, p. 144 for Maekawa Report and after;

U.S. Department of the Treasury, "The Yen / Dollar Talks: Progress to Date and Current
Issues," March 1987, National Security Archive, no. 71587; Washington Post, Aug. 22,

1994, p. A12 for the airport; Allen Wallis, "The U.S. and Japan," April 19, 1988, Current
Policy, no. 1072.

49. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp. 189-190; C. Fred Bergsten and Paula Stern, "A New
Vision for United States-Japan Economic Relations," in Aspen Strategy Group, Harness
the Rising Sun, pp. 101-102.

50. Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point (New York, 1993), pp. 37-40; Dower, Japan in War and
Peace, p. 304 for Abe quote, also pp. 312-314 for books; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p.

195; Derian, America's Struggle, p. 270; Kan, "Reagan Administration," pp. 69-71.
"
51. Steve Rabson, 'V-J Day' in Rhode Island," Jowma/ of American and Canadian Studies, 9
(Spring 1992): 1-18.
52. Nester, Japan and Third World, pp. 233-234, 250-251.

53. Cronin, Japan, p. 5.

Notes 4 5 6

54. Homma Nagayo, Utsuriyuku Amerika [Changing America] (Tokyo, 1991), pp. 282-303 for
quote and discussion; Los Angeles Times, Aug. 9, 1989, p. Ii; Oct. 12, 1991, p. Ai; Oct. 21,
1987, p. 18; and June 30, 1989, p. 16; New York Times, May 26, 1989, p. Ai; Kato Tetsuro,
"Japanese Perception of the 1989 Eastern European Revolution," Hitotsuhashi Journal of
Social Studies, 23 (August 1991): 12 on 1989 election.

55. Courtney Purrington, "Tokyo's PoUcy Responses During the Gulf Crisis," Asian Survey,
31 (April 1991): 179-180.

56. Ichiro Ozawa, Blueprint for a New ]a'pan, translated by Louisa Rubinfien (Tokyo, 1994),
esp. pp. 91-99; Homma, Utsuriyuku Amerika, p. 304.

57. Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1993, p. A6.

58. Taggart, Weight of the Yen, pp. 200-202 discusses price setting; James K. Classman,
"Down and Out in Japan," Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1995, p. A19 quotes and analyzes
Asher; Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1994, p. C3; The Economist, July 9, 1994, p. 14 of "Survey
of Japan" section.

59. Milton Ezrati, "Who Controls the Yen? Just Japan." New York Times, July 24, 1994, p. F9;
The Economist, Sept. 10, 1994, p. 34.

60. Robert J. Samuelson, "They Have Met the Market — and Lost," Washington Post, March
29, 1995, p. A23; Chalmers Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? (Nev^ York, 1995), esp. pp. 7-
18, 21-37, 1
1
5-140, 296-323; Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1995, p. D12.
61. David Halberstam, The Next Century (New York, 1991), has Johnson quote; New York
Times, Jan. 29, 1992, p. A16 for Bush speech; Inoguchi, Japan's Foreign Policy, pp. 103-
104.
62. For the U.S. side, note especially Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These (New York,
1994), on the Reagan-Bush pre-August 1991 policies; Theodore Draper, "The Culf War
Reconsidered," New York Review of Books, Jan. 16, 1992, pp. 46-53; Cilbert Rozman,
Ja-pan's Response to the Gorbachev Era (Princeton, 1992), p. 277.
63. Inoguchi, Japan's Foreign Policy, p. loi; Kato, "Japanese Perception," pp. 5-6; Rozman,
Japan's Response, p. 308; Larry Berman and Bruce W. Jentleson, "Bush and the Post-
Cold-War World," in Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman, eds.. The Bush Presidency;
First Appraisals (Chatham, NJ, 1991); Cronin, Japan, p. 35; Nestor, Japan and Third
World, pp. 163-164.
64. William H. Gleysteen, Jr., "Japan and Korea in U.S. -China Policy during the 1990s," in
Barber B. Conable, et al., eds., United States and China Relations at a Crossroads (Lan-

ham, MD, 1995), p. 247; Cronin, Japan, p. 35; The Economist, May 7, 1994, pp. 75-76.
65. Inoguchi, Japan's Foreign Policy, p. in; Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf
Conflict, 1990-/99; (Princeton, 1993), pp. 81-82, 122-123, ^5^^ Washington Post, July 3,
1988, p. A29; Kuriyama Takakazu, "Geikido no kyujunen dai to Nihon gaiko no shin
tenkai" [Tremors in the 1990's and New Developments in Japanese Foreign Policy], Gaiko
Forum, 12 (May 1990): 12-21 is the foreign ministry official.

66. Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, pp. 124-125; Nester, Japan and Third World, pp.
227—228; Morita and Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say "No," esp. pp. 3-5.
67. Nester, Japan and Third World, pp. 227-231; Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, p.

122 has Japanese quote.

68. Purrington, "Tokyo's Policy Responses," pp. 167-172; Washington Post, March 7, 1991, p.

A18; Toshiki Come, "American Public Opinion During the 'Persian Gulf Conflict' and Its

Image of Japan" (in Japanese), Jowrwa/ of American and Canadian Studies, 8 (Spring 1992):
33-52-
69. Peter Katzenstein and Nabuo Oka wara, Japan's National Security (Ithaca, NY, 1993), pp.
1-2 for Japanese opinion; Purrington, "Tokyo's Policy Responses," pp. 169-171.
70. The Economist, Sept. 17, 1994, p. 364; Steven R. Weisman, "Land of the Setting Sun?",
New York Times Book Review, Sept. 11, 1994, p. 22; Ozawa, Blueprint, pp. 91-99; an
Notes 4 5 7

important view of the UN question is Sato Kinya's column "From a Tokyo Window,"
Asahi Evening News, May 26, 1994. Especially useful is Cronin, Japan, pp. 70, 89-96.
71. Sato Kinya, "From a Tokyo Window," Asahi Evening News, Feb. lo-ii, 1994; Chalmers
Johnson and E. B. Keehn, "The Pentagon's Ossified Strategy," Foreign Affairs, 72 (July-
August 1995): 112 has Sakakibara quote; Robert A. Manning and Paula Stern, "The Myth
of the Pacific Community," Foreign Affairs, 73 (November-December 1994): 81-82.

72. The Economist, Jan. 30, 1993, p. 59; Yoichi Funabashi, "The Asianization of Asia," Foreign
Affairs, 72 (November-December 1993): 75-85.

73. New York Times, Feb. 5, 1995, p. 12 has Kantor's quote; Washington Post, May 5, 1994, p.
A38; The Economist, Feb. 20, 1993, p. 17 has World Bank quote; New York Times, June
12, 1996, p. A7 for Lord.

74. Warren Christopher, "America's Strategy for a Peaceful and Prosperous Asia-Pacific," July

28, 1995, in author's possession; Robert S. Ross, "The United States and China and the
Stability of Southeast Asia," in Conable, et al., eds.. United States and China Relations,
pp. 256-257.
75. Washington Post, May 11, 1995, p. A18 is a useful survey.

76. Far Eastern Economic Review, April 15, 1993, pp. lo-ii; New York Times, April 5, 1995, p.
A25; Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1995, p. A20; Washington Post, Oct. 7, 1993, p. D23;
New York Times, Feb. 19, 1995, p. Fi has Sanger quote.

77. Murphy, Weight of the Yen, pp. 268-282.

78. Washington Post, Feb. 22, 1994, p. A17; Karl van Wolferen, "Japan's Non-Revolution,
Foreign Affairs, 72 (September-October 1993): 54; New York Times, Oct. 16, 1994, p. E5
on Japan's investment; Washington Post, Sept. 30, 1995, p. H2 for "once every half cen-
tury" quote; Newsweek, Jan. 30, 1995, p. 30; The Economist, Oct. 21, 1995, p. 77 for defla-
tion.

79. Murphy, Weight of the Yen, p. 281; Washington Post, June 29, 1995, p. A32; New York
Times, June 30, 1995, p. D5; Jim Hoagland column in Washington Post, July 5, 1995, p.
A33-
80. Izumi Hajime, "Chikakute poi rinjin" [A Near Far Neighbor], in Watanabe Akio, ed.,
Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku: Kokusai kankei no hen ijo to Nihon no yakuwari [Postwar
Japanese Foreign Policy: The Changes in International Relations and Japan's Role]
(Tokyo, 1985), pp. 179-182; New York Times, April 24, 1994, p. 3; Washington Post, Jan. 9,

1994, p. H6. A leading Asahi columnist, Sato Kinya, interestingly dissented from Japan's
and his newspaper's position in his column, "From a Tokyo Window," Asahi Evening
News, March 24, 1994.
81. New York Times, June 22, 1994, p. Aio; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p. 193.

82. Washington Post, Sept. 20, 1995, p. A15; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "The Case for Deep Engage-
ment," Foreign Affairs, 74 (July-August 1995): 91 for oxygen reference.

Conclusion

1. Edward M. Barrows, The Great Commodore (Indianapolis, IN, 1935), pp. 284-285; James
III, The Politics of Diplomacy (New York, 1995), p. 44.
A. Baker
2. R. Taggart Murphy, The Weight of the Yen (New York, 1995), p. 87.

3. The Economist, Jan. 14, 1995, p. 13.

4. "Far West" quotes are discussed in Chapter XI above; Washington Post, Aug. 15, 1995, p.
A14.
5. Clyde Prestowitz, "Japan and the United States: Twins or Opposites?" in Aspen Strategy
Group, Harness the Rising Sun (Lanham, MD, 1993), p. 79.
6. Kuriyama Takakazu, "Geikido no kyujyunen dai to Nihon gaiko no shin tenkai" [Tremors
Notes 4 5 8

in the 1990s and New Developments in Japanese Foreign Policy], Gaiko Forum, 12 (May
1990): 12, 15, 20-21; Miyazato Seigen, "Posuto haken jidai no Nichi-Bei kankei" [Japan-
U.S. Relations in the Post-Hegemony Period, 1985-1993], in Hosoya Chihiro, ed., Nichi-
Bei kankei [Japan-U.S. Relations] (Tokyo, 1995), pp. 264-293; James Fallows, "What Is an
Economy For?" Atlantic Monthly (January 1994): 76-92; Chalmers Johnson, Ja'pan: Who
Governs? (New York, 1995), esp. chapters 3-5, 11, 15; Thomas K. McCraw and Patricia A.
O'Brien, "Production and Distribution: Competition Policy and Industry Structures, " in
Thomas K. McCraw, ed., America versus Japan (Boston, 1986), pp. 79-80; Paul Krugman,
"The Myth of Asia's Miracle," Foreign Affairs, 73 (November-December 1994): 77-78 is

an opposing view.
7. Truman's reference to the 1930s is in U.S. Government, Public Papers of the Presidents
. . . Truman, ig^j (Washington, DC, 1963), pp. 167-172; Robert B. Reich, "Playing Tag
with Japan," New York Review of Books, June 24, 1982, pp. 37-39; Carol Cluck, "Patterns
of Change," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, XLVIII (March 1995):
48-51; Ezra F. Vogel, "Japan-American Relations After the Cold War," in Aspen Strategy
Croup, Harness the Rising Sun, p. 179; Warren Christopher, "The U.S. -Japan Relation-
Department of State Dispatch, March 11, 1994, p. 3.
ship,"

8. Washington Post, Feb. 6, 1994, p. Ci; New York Times, Sept. 16, 1995, p. 31.

9. The Economist, Oct. i, 1994, pp. 42-44; Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of
Lafcadio Hearn (New York, 1991), pp. xvi-xvii.
10. David E. Sanger, "Coloring History," New York Times Magazine, July 2, 1995, pp. 30-31;
John W Dower, "How a Genuine Democracy Should Celebrate Its Past," Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 10, 1995, pp. B1-B2; Ronald H. Spector, "Reflections on the Enola
Cay Debacle," GW Magazine (Fall 1995): 35; I am indebted to Michael Kammen for the

Spector reference.
11. For background and quote, see especially Sanger, "Coloring History," p. 30; Sato Kinya,
"From a Tokyo Window" column, Asahi Evening News, May 12, 1994, on officials' resigna-
tions; New York Times, March 4, 1995, p. 5 on pulp fiction; and an important series of
articles, "Hiroshima in History and Memory: A Symposium," DH, 19 (Spring 1995): 197-
365; as well as Sadao Asada, "The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches," in author's

possession.
12. A good overview is given by T R. Reid in the Washington Post, Dec. 28, 1993, p. C2.
13. Washington Post, March 16, 1995, p. Di Buruma, The Wages of
for prisoner statistics; Ian

Guilt (New York, 1994), important for comparison of Japan and Germany; New York
Times, Aug. 16, 1995, p. A3 for Japanese "apology"; T R. Reid's overview of Japanese
coverage of the war commemoration in Washington Post, Aug. 14, 1995, p. A13; Nicholas
Kristof 's story on Yasukuni Shrine in New York Times, July 30, 1995, pp. 8XX-9XX in Travel
Section.
i4.Yoichi Funabashi, "Clinton Missed Chance," Asa/ii Shimhun, Sept. 5, 1995, pp. 2-3, on
China not being involved in commemorations; Kevin B. Phillips, Boiling Point (New York,
1993), p. 237; Ian Buruma, "Ghosts of Pearl Harbor," New York Review of Books, Dec. 19,

i99i,p. 13.

15. Especially important are Thomas L. Friedman's columns in the New York Times, Feb. 28,
1996, p. A17, and March 3, 1996, p. E15; also Nicholas Kristof 's report of June 16, 1996,

p. E3 in the New York Times, and Sandra Sugawara, Washington Post, June 6, 1996, p.

D9.
16. New York Times, Feb. 25, 1996, p. E5 quotes U.S. official; New York Times, Feb. 28, 1996,
p. A17 has Nishihara quote; The Economist, Feb. 20, 1993, pp. 19-22 has background;
Washington Post, April 17, 1996, p. A29, and April 19, 1996, p. A29, and New York Times,
May 28, 1996, p. A8 on new security arrangements.
i7.Yamamoto Mitsuru, Fumo no gensetsu: Kokkai tohen no naka no Nichi-Bei kankei [The
Notes 4 5 9

Barren Discourse: The Diet's Response to the Japan-U.S. Relationship] (Tokyo, 1992),
pp. 232-236; Peter Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawar a, Japan's National Security (Ithaca,
J.

NY, 1993), pp. 6-7; New York Times, April 20, 1993, p. D2 quotes Asahi Shimhun; The

Economist, Oct. 7, 1995, pp. 35-36 for succinct historical perspective on Japan's role in

Asia.
Biblio^rapny

This bibliography has been chosen to supplement and elaborate

the book's endnotes. Items have been selected on the basis of
whether they are referred to more than once in the notes, and /or
whether they have been important sources for the book's overall
argument.
Manuscript and archival sources, as well as some collections of
pubhshed documents, are not listed in the BibHography Rather,
for easy reference, they are listed at the beginning of the Notes
section.

Acheson, Dean G. Crisis in Asia. An Examination of U.S. Policy. Washington, DC,

1950.
. Present at the Creation. My Years in the State Department. New York, 1969.
Agawa Hiroyuki. The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy. Translated
by John Bester. Tokyo, 1979.
Aichi Kiichi. "Japan s Legacy and Destiny of Change." Foreign Affairs, 48 (October
1969).
Akamatsu, Paul. Meiji 1868. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Japan. New York,

1973-
Allen, G. C. A Short Economic History of Modem Japan. New York, 1981.
Allison, John M. Ambassador from the Prairie; or, Allison Wonderland. Boston, 1973.
Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an
American Myth. New York, 1995.
Anderson, Irvine H., Jr. The Standard-Vacuum Oil Company and United States East
Asian Policy, 1933-/94/. Princeton, 1975.
Anethan, Albert d'Baron. The dAnethan Dispatches from Japan, /894-/9/0. Selected,
translated, and edited, with a historical Introduction by George Alexander
Lensen. Tokyo, 1967.

4 6 i
Biblio^rapny 4 6 2

Armacost, Michael H. Friends or Rivals? The Insider's Account of U.S. Japan Relations. New
York, 1996.
Aruga Tadashi. "Editor's Introduction: Japanese Interpretations of the American Revolution."
Japanese Journal of American Studies, 2 (1985).
.
Japanese Scholarship in the History of U.S. -East Asian Relations. MS in possession
of author. 1993.
.
"Japanese Views of the Pacific War."7A/fi International Newsletter (October 1992).
Asada Sadao. "Japan's 'Special Interests' and the Washington Conference, 1921-22." Ameri-
can Historical Review (October 1961).
. "The Japanese Navy and the United States." In Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Oka-
moto, eds. Pearl Harhor as History: Japanese- American Relations, 1^^1-1^41. New York,
1973-
. Ryodai senkan no Nichi-Bei kankei: kaigun to seisaku kettei katei [Japanese-American
Relations Between the Wars: Naval Policy and the Decision-Making Process]. Tokyo,
1993-
, ed. Japan and the World, 7853-1952; A Bibliographic Guide to Japanese Scholarship
in Foreign Relations. New York, 1989.
Asahi Shimbun. The Pacific Rivals: A Japanese View of Japanese- American Relations. New

York, 1972.
Aspen Strategy Group. Harness the Rising Sun: An American Strategy for Managing Japan's
Rise as a Global Power. Lanham, MD, 1993.
Baker, James A. Ill, with Thomas M. DeFrank. Politics of Diplomacy. Revolution, War, and
Peace, 1989-1992. New York, 1995.
Bamba Nobuya. Japanese Diplomacy in a Dilemma: New Light on Japan's China Policy, 1924-
igzg. Kyoto, 1972.

Barnet, Richard J. The Alliance. New York, 1983.

. The Rockets' Red Glare: When America Goes to War, the Presidents and the People.
New York, 1990.
Barnhart, Michael A. "Hornbeck Was Right: The Realist Approach to American Policy
Toward Japan." In Hilary Conroy and Harry Wray, eds. Pearl Harbor Reexamined:
Prologue to the Pacific War. Honolulu, 1989.
.
Japan and the World Since 1868. London, 1995.
.Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security. Ithaca, NY, 1987.
Beasley, WiUiam G. Japanese Imperialism, 1894-194^. New York, 1991.
. The Rise of Modern Japan. New York, 1990.
, ed. Modem Japan. Berkeley, 1975.
, translator and editor. Select Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy, 18^^-1868. Lon-
don, 1955.
Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900. 2nd edition. Arlington

Heights, IL, 1986.

Bergsten, C. Fred, and Paula Stern. "A New Vision for United States-Japan Economic Rela-
tions." In Aspen Strategy Group. Harness the Rising Sun. Lanham, MD, 1993.
Berman, Larry. "From Intervention to Disengagement." In Ariel Levite, Bruce Jentlesen and
Larry Berman, eds. Foreign Military Interventionism: The Dynamics of Protracted Con-
flict. New York, 1992.
, and Bruce W Jentlesen. "Bush and the Post-Cold War World." In Colin Campbell
and Bert A. Rockman, eds. The Bush Presidency: First Appraisals.Chatham, NJ, 1996.
Bernstein, Barton J. "An Analysis of Two Cultures': Writing About the Making and the
Using of the Atomic Bombs." Public Historian, 12 (Spring 1990).
.
"The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered." Foreign Affairs, 74 (January-February 1995).
.
"The Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the
Third Atomic Bomb." Pacific Historical Review, 46 (February 1977).
Bibliograpny 4 6 3

. "A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 42
(June-July 1986).
. "Writing, Righting, or Wronging the Historical Record; President Truman's Letter
on His Atomic-Bomb Decision. Diplomatic " History, 16 (Winter 1992).

Best, Gary Dean. "Financing a Foreign War: Jacob H. Schiff and Japan, 1904-05." American
Jewish Historical Quarterly, 61 (June 1972).
Bird, Kai. The Chairman, John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment.
New York, 1992.
Bix, Herbert P. "The Showa Emperor's 'Monologue' and the Problem of War Responsibility."
Journal of Japanese Studies, 18 (Summer 1992).
Boltho, Andres. "Was Japan's Industrial Policy Successful?" Cambridge Journal of Economics,
9 (1985)-
Borden, William S. The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese
Trade Recovery, ig4j-ig^^. Madison, WI, 1984.
Borg, Dorothy. The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 19^^-19^8. Cambridge, MA,
1964:
, and Shumpei Okamoto, eds. Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations,
193Z-/941. New York, 1973.
Borton, Hugh. American Presurrender Planning for Postwar Japan. New York, 1967.
Braisted, William Reynolds. The United States Navy in the Pacific, 1909-/922. Austin, TX,
1971.
Briggs, Vernon M., Jr. Mass Immigration and the National Interest. Armonk, NY, 1992.
Broadbridge, Seymour, and Martin Collick. "Japan's International Policies." International

44 (April 1968).
Affairs,

Brown, Leslie H. Adelphi Papers, 132. American Security Policy in Asia. London, 1977.
Bruchey, Stuart. Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People. Cambridge, MA,
1989.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan. New York, 1971.
. Power and Principle. New York, 1982.
Buckley, Roger. U.S. -Japan Alliance Diplomacy, /945-/990. New York, 1992.
Burton, David H. Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist. Philadelphia, 1968.
Buruma, Ian. "Ghosts of Pearl Harbor." New York Review of Books, Dec. 19, 1991.

. The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York, 1994.
Butow, Robert. Japan's Decision to Surrender. Stanford, 1954.
.
"Marching Off to War on the Wrong Foot: The Final Note Tokyo Did Not Send to
Washington." Pacific Historical Review, 63 (February 1994).
.
Tojo and the Coming of the War. Stanford, 1961.
Byas, Hugh. Government by Assassination. New York, 1942.
Calder, Kent E. Crisis and Compensation. Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan, 1949-
1986. Princeton, 1988.
Calleo, David. "The Political Economy of Allied Relations: The Limits of Interdependence."
In Robert E. Osgood, et al. Retreat from Europe? The First Nixon Administration.
Baltimore, 1973.
Caiman, Donald. The Nature and Origins of Japanese Imperialism: A Reinterpretation of the
Great Crisis of i8j^. London, 1992.
Campbell, Charles S. Jr. The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 186^-1900. New
York, 1976.
Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York, 1982.
Central Intelligence Agency. CIA Research Reports: Japan, Korea, and the Security of Asia,

1946-19J6 (microfilm). Frederick, MD, 1983.

.Intelligence Memorandum. Japan: The Effectiveness of Informal Import and Invest-
ment Controls. Washington, DC, May i960.
Bibliography 4 6 4

Chace, James, and Caleb Carr. America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from
iSii to Star Wars. New York, 1988.
Chandler, Alfred D., with the assistance of Takashi Hikino. Scale and Scape: The Dynamics
of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA, 1990.
Chen, Edward I-Te. "Japan's Decision to Annex Taiwan: A Study of Ito-Matsu Diplomacy,
(November 1977).
1894-95." Jowrna/ of Asian Studies, 27
Chernow, Ron. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modem
Finance. New York, 1990.
China and Japan Sporting Register, The. Shanghai, 1877.

Christensen, Thomas J. "Threats, Assurances and the Last Chance for Peace: The Lessons
of Mao's Korean War Telegrams." International Security, 17 (Summer 1992).
Clausen, Henry, and Bruce Lee. Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement. New York, 1992.
Clemens, Diane Shaver. Yalta. New York, 1970.
Clements, Kendrick A. The Presidency ofWoodrow Wilson. Lawrence, KA, 1992.
Cochran, Sherman. "Japan's Capture of China's Market for Imported Cotton Textiles Before
World War I: The Role of the Mitsui Trading Company." The Second Conference on
Modern Chinese Economic History. Taipei, 1989.

Cohen, Warren 1. "America's New Order for East Asia: The Four Power Financial Consor-
tium and China, 1919-1946." East Asia Occasional Papers. Michigan State University,
1982.
. America's Response to China; An Interpretive History of Sino-American Relations.
New York, 1980.
. The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky
and American-East Asian Relations. New York, 1978.
. "Consortia." Ed. Alexander DeConde. Encyclopedia of American Foreign Relations.

3 vols. New York, 1978.

. Empire Without Tears. America's Foreign Relations, 1921-/922. New York, 1987.
, ed. New Frontiers in American East Asian Relations. Essays Presented to Dorothy
Borg. New York, 1983.
, and Akira Iriye, eds. The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953-/960. New York, 1990.
Cole, Wayne S. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, ig^2-ig4^. Lincoln, NE, 1983.
"
Coletta, Paolo E. 'The Most Thankless Task': Bryan and the California Alien Land Legisla-
(May 1967).
tion." Pacific Historical Review, 36
The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence, KA, 1973.
.

Committee for the Completion of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima and Nakaski: The Physical, Medical and Social
Ejfects of the Atomic Bombings. New York, 1981.

Conroy, Hilary. The Japanese Expansion into Hawaii, i868-i8g8. San Francisco, 1973-
. The Japanese Seizure of Korea: /868-/9/0. Philadelphia, i960.
, and Harry Wray, eds. Pearl Harbor Reexamined: Prologue to the Pacific War. Hono-
lulu, 1990.

Cooling, B. Franklin. Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy: The Formative Years of America's
Military-Industrial Complex, 1881-igiy. Hamden, CT, 1979.
Cooper, Chester. The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. New York, 1970.
Costigliola, Frank. France and the United States. The Cold Alliance Since World War II. New
York, 1992.
Cott, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Heam. New York, 1991.
Cowhey, Peter F. "Domestic Institutions and the Credibility of International Commitments:
Japan and the U.S." International Organization, 47 (Spring 1993).
Craft, Stephen G. "Deterring Aggression Abroad or at Home? A Rejoinder to 'FDR's Day of
Infamy' " SHAFR Newsletter, 24 (March 1993).
Biblio^rapny 4 6 5

Crane, Conrad C. Bombs, Cities, and Civilians. Lawrence, KA, 1993.

Cronin, Richard P. Japan, The United States and Prospects for the Asia-Pacific Century. New
York, 1993.
Crowley, James B. Japan's Quest for Autonomy. National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930-
19^8. Princeton, 1966.
, ed. Modem East Asia: Essays in Interpretation. New York, 1970.
Cumings, Bruce. "Japan's Position in the World System." In Andrew Gordon, ed. Postwar

Japan as History. Berkeley, 1993.

.
"The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial
Sectors, Produce Cycles, and Political Consequences." International Oraganization,
38 (Winter 1984).
. The Origins of the Korean War. 2 vols. Princeton, 1981-90.
Curtis, Gerald L., ed. Japan's Foreign Policy After the Cold War: Coping with Change. Arm-
onk, NY, 1992.
Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seattle,
WA, 1988.
. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York, 1993.
Dawson, Heam
and the Vision of Japan. Baltimore, 1992.
Carl. Lafcadio
DeConde, Alexander. Ethnicity, Race, and Foreign Policy. A History. Boston, 1992.
Derian, Jean-Claude. America's Struggle for Leadership in Technology. Translated by Severen
Schaeffer. Cambridge, MA, 1990.
Dietrich, William S. In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The Political Roots of American Eco-
nomic Decline. University Park, PA, 1991.
Destler, I. M., Haruhiro Fukui, and Hideo Sato. The Textile Wrangle: Conflict in Japanese-
American Relations, 1969-797/. Ithaca, NY, 1979.
Dingman, Roger. "Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War." International Security, 13
(Winter 1988-89).
. "The Dagger and the Gift: The Impact of the Korean War on Japan." Journal of
American-East Asian Relations, 2 (Spring 1993).
. "Korea at Forty-plus: The Origins of the Korean War Reconsidered." Journal of
American- East Asian Relations, i (Spring 1992).
.
Power The Origins of Naval Limitation, 1974-7922. Chicago, 1976.
in the Pacific:
. "The U.S. Navy and the Cold War: The Japan Case." In Craig L. Symonds, ed. New
Aspects of Naval History. Annapolis, MD, 1981.
Divine, Robert A. Eisenhower and the Cold War. New York, 1981.
. Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections, 7940—7948. New York, 1974.
Doenecke, Justus. "American Isolationism, 1939-1941." Journal of Libertarian Studies, 6
(Summer-Fall 1982).
. The Diplomacy of Frustration: The Manchurian Crisis of i^^i-i^^^ as Revealed in the

Papers of Stanley K. Hornbeck. Stanford, 1981.

, ed. In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-Interventionist Movement of 7940-7947 as
Revealed in Papers of the American First Committee. Stanford, 1990.
, and John E. Wilz. From Isolation to War, 7937-7947. 2nd edition. Arlington Heights,
IL, 1991.
Dore, Ronald. Taking Japan Seriously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Econom.ic Issues.

Stanford, 1987.
Dorwart, Jeffrey M. The Pigtail War: Am.erican Involvement in the Sino-Japanese War of
7894-7895. Amherst, MA, 1975.
Dower, John. Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 7878-7954.
Cambridge, MA, 1979.
.Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays. New York, 1993.
Bibliograpny 4 6 6

. "Peace and Democracy in Two Systems. " In i\ndre\v Gordon, ed. Postwar japan as
Histon. Berkeley 1993.
. War Without Mercy. Race and Power in tlie Pacific War. New York, 1986.
Drake, Frederick C. The Empire of the Seas: A Biography of Rear Admiral Robert Wilson
USN. Honolulu, 1984.
Shufeldt,
Draper, Theodore. "The Gulf War Reconsidered." Neu' York RexHew of Books, Jan. 16, 1992.
Drea, Edward J. MacArthiir's ultra Codehreaking and tlie War Against Japan, 1942-7945.
LawTence, KA, 1991.
Dudden, .Arthur Power. The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present. New
York, 1992.
Dutt, \'. P. East Asia: Chitia, Korea, Japan, 7947-/950. New York, 1958.
Duus, Peter. The Abacus and the Sword. The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 2895-2910. Berke-
ley 1995.
.
Economic Aspects of Meij Imperialism. Berlin, 1980.
.Economic Dimensions of Meiji Imperialism: The Case of Korea, 1895-1910." In
Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, eds. The Japanese Colonial Empire. Princeton, 1984.
. "The Takeoff Point of Japanese Imperialism." In Hany WYay and Hilan" Conroy
eds. Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese Histon. Honolulu, 1983.
, ed. The Cambridge Histon of Japan. Vol. 6. Tlie Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK,
1988.
, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds. Tlxe Japanese Informal Empire in China,
i8g^-ig^j. Princeton, 1989.
Eguchi Keiichi. Fatatsu no taisen [Ber\veen the Two Great Wars]. Tok\o, 1989.
Eisenhower, Dwight D. The W^ite House Years: Mandate for Change, 2953-2956. Garden
Cit\-, NT, 1963.
Emmerson, John K. Tlie Japa-nese Tliread: A Lifetime in tJie U.S. Foreign Sennce. New York,
1978.
, and Harrison M. Holland. Eagle and the Rising Sun: American and Japan in the

Twentieth Century. Reading, MA, 1988.

Emmott, B\\\. Japayiophobia: The Myth of tlie hivincible Japanese. New York, 1993.
Encarnation, Dennis. Rivals Beyond Trade: America versus Japan in Global Competitioti. Ith-
aca. NY, 1992.
Esthus, Ra\Tnond A. Double Eagle and the Rising Sun: Tire Russians and Japanese at Ports-
mouth in 2905. Durham, NC, 1988.
Eto Jun. Mo hitotsu no sengoshi [.Another Postwar History']. Tok\'0. 1978.

Falk, Stanley L. "Douglas Mac.Arthur and the War Against Japan." In William M. Lear\',

ed. We SJmll Return: MacArthurs Comynanders and the Defeat oj Japan, ig42-ig4y
Lexington, K\', 1988.
Fallows, James M. Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the Near East Asian Economic and Political
System. New York, 1994.
Fearey Robert A. "My Year with Ambassador Joseph C. Grew, 1941-1942: A Personal
Account." Jowma/ of A^nerican-East Asian Relations, i (Spring 1992).
Ferrell, Robert H. American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoox^er-Stimson Foreign
Policy, 2929—2933. New Haven. 1957.
Fetzer, James. "Stanley K. Hombeck and Japanese Aggression, 1941." SHAFR \ewsletter, 24
(March 1993).
Fifield, Russell H. "Secretary- Hughes and the Shantung Question." Pacific Historical Rei'iew,
23 (November 1954).
Fingleton, Eamonn. "Japan's Imisible Le\iathan." Foreign Affairs, 74 (March-April 1995).
Finn, Richard B. Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan. Berkeley, 1992.
Fletcher, W. Miles. "Taiheiyo senso: No nihou keizai e no eik\o" [The Economic Impact of
BiDlio^raphy 4 6 7

the Pacific War on Japan]. In Hosoya Chihiro, et al. Taiheiyo senso [The Pacific War].
Tokyo, 1993.
Foglesong, David S. America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Rus-
sian Civil War, igiy-igzo. Chapel Hill, NC, 1995.
Foot, Rosemary. The Wrong War. American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict,

1950-J953. Ithaca, NY, 1985.

The Forrestal Diaries. Ed. Walter Millis. New York, 1951.
Forrestal, James.

Freedman, Lawrence, and Efraim Karsh. The Gulf Conflict iggo-iggi: Diplomacy and War
in the New World Order. Princeton, 1993.
Friend, Theodore. The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan Against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942-
/945. Princeton, 1988.
Frost, Ellen L. For Richer, For Poorer: The New U.S. -Japan Relationship. New York, 1987.

Fry, Joseph. "ImperiaUsm, American Style, 1890-1916." In Gordon Martel, ed. American For-
eign Relations Reconsidered. London, 1994.
.
"In Search of an Orderly World: U.S. Imperialism, 1898-1912." In John M. Carroll
and George C. Herring, eds. Modern American Diplomacy. Wilmington, DE, 1995.

Fukuyama, Francis. "Virtue The National Interest, 40 (Summer 1995).

and Prosperity."

Fukuzawa Yukichi. The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. Revised translation by Eiichi

Kiyocka. New York, 1966.

.Fukuzawa Yukichi's An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. Translated by David A.
Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst. Tokyo, 1973.
Funabashi Yoichi. Asia Pacific Fusion. Japan's Role in APEC. Washington, DC, 1995.
.
"Japan and the New World Order." Foreign Affairs, 70 (Winter 1991-92).
. Managing the Dollar: From the Plaza to the Louvre. Washington, DC, 1989.
Gallichio, Marc. "Recovery Through Dependency: American-Japanese Relations, 1945-
1970." In Warren I. Cohen, ed. Pacific Passage: A Study of American-East Asian Rela-

tions on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century. New York, 1996.

Gardner, Lloyd. Approaching Vietnam. New York, 1988.
. Architects of Illusion. Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, /941-1949. Chicago,
1970.
. A Covenant with Power. American and World Order from Wilson to Reagan. New
York, 1984.
. Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy. Madison, WI, 1964.
.
Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1973-/923. New
York, 1984.
Gelsanliter, David. Jump Start: Japan Comes to the Heartland. New York, 1990.
Gibney, Frank. "The First Three Months of the Wai." Journal of American-East Asia Rela-
tions, 2 (Spring 1993).
.Japan: The Fragile Superpower. Tokyo, 1975.
Giffard, Sydney. Japan Among the Powers, /890-1990. New Haven, 1994.
Gleysteen, William H., Jr. "Japan and Korea in U.S. -China Policy During the 1990's." In

Barber B. Conable, Jr., et al., eds. United States and China Relations at a Crossroads.

Lanham, MD, 1995.

Cluck, Carol. "Entangling Illusions —^Japanese and American Views of the Occupation." In
Warren I. Cohen, New Frontiers in
ed. American-East Asian Relations. Essays Pre-
sented to Dorothy Borg. New York, 1983.
. Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton, 1985.
-. "Patterns of Change: A 'Grand Unified Theory' of Japanese History." Bulletin of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 48 (March 1995).
and Stephen R. Graubard, eds. Showa: The Japan of Hirohito. New York,
-, 1992.
Gomi, Toshiki. "American Public Opinion During The Persian Gulf Conflict' and Its Image
Bibliography 4 6 8

of Japan" (In Japanese). Journal of American and Canadian Studies, 8 (Spring 1992).
Goncharov, Sergei N., John W. Lewis, and Yue Litai. Uneven Partners: Stalin, Mao and the
Korean War. Stanford, 1993.
Goralski, Robert. World War U Almanac, i^^i-ig4^. New York, 1981.
Gordon, Andrew, ed. Postwar Ja-pan as History. Berkeley, 1993.
Griswold, A. Whitney. The Far Eastern Policy of the United States. New York, 1938.
Guttmann, Allen. Games and Empires: Modem Sports and Cultural Imperialism. New York.
1994.
Hackett, Roger F. Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modem Japan, 7838-1922. Cambridge,
MA, 1971.
Hagert}', James C. The Diary of James C. Hagerty: Eisenhower in Mid-Course, ig^4-i()^^. Ed.
Robert H. Ferrell. Bloomington, IN, 1983.
Hahn, Emily. "A Yankee Barbarian at the Shogun's Court.' American Heritage, 15 (June 1964).
Halberstam, Da\id. The Next Century. New York, 1991.
Hall, Francis. Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and
YokoJiayna, i8^g-i866. Ed. F. G. Notehelfer. Princeton, 1992.
Hall, John Whitney. "Japanese History in World Perspective." In Charles F. Delyell, ed. The
Future of Histor)\ Nashville, TN, 1977.
. "East, Southeast, and South Asia." In Michael Kammen, ed. The Past Before Us:
Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca, NY, 1980.
. "Reflections on a Centennial." Jowma/ of Asian Studies, 27 (August 1968).
Halliday, Jon. A Political History of Japanese Capitalism. New York, 1975.
, and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknoum War. New York, 1988.
Halloran, Richard. Japan: Images and Realities. New York, 1969.
Hammersmith, Jack. "The Sino-Japanese War, 1894—95: American Predictions Reassured."
Asian Forum, 4 (no i, 1972).
Harrington, Fred Han'ey. "An American View of Korean-.'\merican Relations, 1882-1905."
In Yur-Bok Lee and Wayne Patterson, eds. One Hundred Years of Korean-American
Relations, 1882-1^82. University, AL, 1986.
.
God, Mammon, and the Japanese; Dr. Horace N. Allen and Korean-American Rela-
tions, /884-1905. Madison, WI, 1944.
Hart, Jeffrey A. Rival Capitalists: International Competitiveness in the United States, Japan,
and Western Europe. Ithaca, NY, 1992.
Hata Ikuhiko. Shiroku: Nihon saigunhi [The Historical Record: Japans Rearmament]. Tokyo,
1976.
Hattori Akira. "Is Japanese-Style Capitalism Counterproductive?" International Economic
Insights, 4 (September-October 1993).
Havens, Thomas R. H. Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, ig6^-igy^.
Princeton, 1987.
. Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two. New York, 1978.
Hein, Laura E. "Free-Floating Anxieties on the Pacific: Japan and the West Revisited." Diplo-
matic History, 20 (Summer 1996).
Heinrichs, Waldo. Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World
War II. New York, 1988.
Heren, Louis. No Hail, No Farewell. New York, 1970.
Herken, Gregg. Tlie Winning Weapon. The Atomic Bomh in the Cold War, ig4^-ig^o.
Princeton, 1988.
Herring, George. America's Longest War. The United States in Vietnam, 1950-1975. 2nd edi-
tion. New York, 1986.
Hersh, Jacques. The USA and the Rise of East Asia Since 194^' Dilemmas of the Postu^ar
International Political Economy. London, 1993.
Biblio^rapKy 4 6 9

Hersh, Seymour. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York, 1983.
Hideki Kan. "The Reagan Administration and the Expansion of the Military-Industrial Com-
plex." /oMrwa/ of American and Canadian Studies, 3 (Spring 1989).

Hideo Tanaka. "The Conflict Between Two Legal Traditions in Making the Constitution of
Japan." In Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds. Democaratizing ]ayan: The
Allied Occupation. Honolulu, 1987.
Hideo Kanemitsu. "Trends in U.S. -Japan Economic Relations from 1955 to i()S6." Journal of
American and Canadian Studies, 2 (Autumn 1988).
Hirano Ken'ichiro. "Nishihara shakhan hara Shinshikoku shakkanda e" [From the Nishihara
Loan to the Four- Power Consortium]. In Hosoya Chihiro and Saito Makoto, eds.
Washinton taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei [The Washington Treaty System and Japanese-
U.S. Relations]. Tokyo, 1988.
.
"Sengo Nihon gaiko ni okeru (Bunkat)" [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy in Relation

to "Culture"]. In Watanabe Akio. Sengo Nihon no taigai sesaku: Kokusai kankei no

hen yo Nihon no yakuwari [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy]. Tokyo, 1985.
to

Hirano Kyoko. Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo; Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation,
i^4^-ig^2. Washington, DC, 1992.
Hirobe Izumi. "American Attitudes Toward the Japanese Immigration Question, 1924-1931."
Journal of American- East Asian Relations, 2 (Fall 1993).

Hiwatari Yume. "U.S. -Japanese Relations in the Late 1950's: Kishi's Southeast Asian Policy"
{in ]apanese). Journal of Modern Japanese Studies, 11 (1989).
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empires. New York, 1987.
Eric.

Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel. The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950. New York,
1990.
Hogan, Michael L., ed. Hiroshima in History and Memory. New York, 1996.
Homma Nagayo. "The Peril of Revisionism." Japan Review of International Affairs, 2 (Spring-
Summer 1990).
. Utsuriyuku Amerika: Gendai Nichi-Bei kankei ko [Changing America: A Modernist
Overview of Japan-U.S. Relationships]. Tokyo, 1991.
Hoopes, Townsend, and Douglas Brinkley. Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forres-

tal. New York, 1992.

Hoover, Herbert. The Ordeal ofWoodrow Wilson. New York, 1958.
Hosoya Chihiro. "Japan's Decision for War in 1941." Hitotsuhashi Journal of Law and Politics,

5 (April 1967).
. Ryotaisenkan no Nihon gaiko, /9J4-1945 [Japanese Foreign Policy in the Period
Between the Two World Wars]. Tokyo, 1988.
, ed. Nichi-Bei kankei tsushi [Japan-U.S. Relations]. Tokyo, 1995.
, and Saito Makoto, eds. Washington taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei [The Washington
Treaty System and Japanese-U.S. Relations]. Tokyo. 1978.
, Homma Nagayo, Iriye Akira, and Hitano Sumio, eds. Taiheiyo Senso [The Pacific

War]. Tokyo, 1993.

Hoyt, Edwin Palmer. Warlord: Top Against the World. Lanham, MD, 1993.
Hunt, Michael H. Frontier Defense and the Open Door: Manchuria in Chinese- American
Relations, i8g^-igii. New Haven, 1973.
.
Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, 1987.
Ibe Hideo. Japan Thrice-Opened: An Analysis of Relations Between Japan and the United
States. New York, 1992.
lenaga Sahuro. Japan's Lost War: World War II and the Japanese, 1(^^1-194^. New York, 1979.
Igarashi Takashi. "MacArthur's Proposal for an Early Peace with Japan and the Redirection
of the Occupation." In Aruga Tadashi, ed. Japanese Journal of American Studies, i

(1981)-
Bibliography 4 7

. "Peace-Making and Party Politics: The Formation of the Domestic Foreign-Policy

System in Postwar Japan." Jowrwa/ of Japanese Studies, ii (no. 2, 1985).
. "Reisen to Kowa" [Cold War and Peace]. In Watanabe Akiro. Sengo Nihon no taigai

seisaki [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy]. Tokyo, 1985.

. "Senso to senyo, 1941-1951" [War and Occupation]. In Hosoya Chihuro, ed. Nichi-
Bei kankei tsushi [Japan and the United States]. Tokyo, 1995.
Inada, Juichi. "Hottentojoku to Nihon" [Developing Countries and Japan]. In Watanabe
Akio, ed. Sengo Nihon no taisai seisaku [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy]. Tokyo,
1985.
Inoguchi Takashi. Japan's Foreign Policy in an Era of Global Change. New York, 1993.
. Kokusai kankei no seiji heizaigaku: Nihon no yakuwari to sentaku [Economics and
Politics in International Relations: Japan's Role and Choices]. Tokyo, 1985.
Inoue, Kiyoshi. Nihon teikoku shugi no kesei [The Formation of Japanese Imperialism].
Tokyo, 1968.
Inoue, Kyoko. MacArthur's Japanese Constitution. A Linguistic and Cultural Study of Its Mak-
ing. Chicago, 1991.
Inoue, Toshikazu. Kiki no naka no kyocho gaiko: Nitchu Senso ni itaru taigai seisaku no keisei
to tenkai [A Conciliatory Foreign Policy in the Midst of Crisis: The Formation and
Development of Japanese Foreign Policy Until the Sino-Japanese War]. Tokyo, 1994.
lokibe Makoto. Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon [The Japan-U.S. War and Postwar Japan].
Osaka, 1989.
Iriye Akira. After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 192/-/931. Cam-
bridge, MA, 1965.
. China and Japan in the Global Setting. Cambridge, MA, 1992.
. The Cold War in Asia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974.
-. "The Failure of Economic Expansionism: 1918-1931." In Bernard Silberman and
Harry Harootunian, eds. Japan in Crisis. Princeton, 1974.
. "The Failure of Military Expansionism." In James Morley, ed. Dilemmas of Growth
in Prewar Japan. Princeton, 1971.
. From Nationalism to Internationalism: U.S. Foreign Policy to 19/4. London, 1977.
.
"Japan's Drive to Great-Power Status. " In Marius Jansen, ed. The Cambridge History
of Japan. Vol. 5. The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK, 1989.
.
Japan's Policies Toward the United States." In James William Morley, ed. Japan's

Foreign Policy, 1868— 1941. A Research Guide. New York, 1974.

. The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. London, 1987.
.
Power and Culture: The Japanese- American War, 1^41-1^4^. Cambridge, MA, 1981.
, ed. Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations. Cambridge, MA, 1975.
, and Warren I. Cohen, eds. The United States and Japan in the Postwar World.
Lexington, KY, 1989.
Irokawa Daikichi. The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modem Japan. Translated by Mikiso
Hane and John K. Urta. New York, 1995.
. The Culture of the Meiji Period. Translated and edited by Marius B. Jansen.

Princeton, 1985.
Ishii Osamu. "Nichi-Bei paatonashippu e no dotei, 1952-1969" [The Road to Japan-U.S.
"Partnership" 1952-1969]. In Hosoya Chihiro. Nichi-Bei kankei tsushi [Japan-U.S.
Relations]. Tokyo, 1995.
Ishii, Viscount Kikujiro. Diplomatic Commentaries. Translated and edited by William R. Lan-
gdon, Baltimore, 1936.
Ishikawa Tadao, Nakajima Mineo, and Ikei Masaru, eds. Sengo shir}'o: Nit-chu kankei [Post-
war Documents in Sino-Japanese Relations]. Tokyo, 1970.
James, D. Clayton. The Years of Mac Arthur. 3 vols. Boston, 1975-85.
 Biblio^rapKy 4 7 i

Jansen, Marius. Japan and China: From War to Peace, i8g4-igy2. Chicago, 1975.
.
"Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives." In Ramon Myers and Mark Peat-

tie, eds. The Japanese Colonial Empire. Princeton, 1984.

Jentlesen. Bruce W. With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, /982-1990. New
York, 1994.

Jessup, Philip C. Elihu Root. 2 vols. New York, 1938.

Johnson, Chalmers. Japaw: Who Governs? New York, 1995.
. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. Stanford,

1982.
, and E. B. Keehn. "The Pentagon's Ossified Strategy." Foreign Ajfairs; 74 (July-
August 1995).
Johnson, Sheila, The Japanese Through American Eyes. Stanford, 1988.
Johnson, U. Alexis, with Jel Olivarious McAllister. The Right Hand of Power. Englewood
Chffs, NJ, 1984.
Kachi, Teruko. The Treaty of igii and the Immigration and Alien Land Law Issue Between the
United States and Japan, 29/1-7973. New York, 1978.

Kades, Charles L. "The American Role in Revising Japan's Imperial Constitution." Political
Science Quarterly, 104 (Summer 1989).
Kahin, George McT Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam. New York,

1986.
, and Audrey Kahin. Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles
Debacle in Indonesia. New York, 1995.
Kahn, David. "U.S. Views of Germany and Japan in 1941. " In Ernest R. May, ed. Knowing
One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars. Princeton, 1984.

Kahn, Herman. The Emerging Japanese Superstate. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970.
Kajima,M. The Diplomacy of Japan, iSg^-igzi. 3 vols. Tokyo, 1976-80.
I Kamikowa Hikomatsu, ed. Japan- American Diplomatic Relations in the Meiji-Taisho Era.
Translated by Kimuro Michiko. Tokyo, 1958.
Kan Hideki. "The Reagan Administration and the Expansion of the Military-Industrial Com-
plex." Jottrwa/ of American and Canadian Studies, 3 (Spring 1989).

Kanemitsu Hideo. "Trends in U.S. -Japan Economic Relations from 1955 to ig86." Journal of
American and Canadian Studies, 2 (Autumn 1988).
Kaoru Sugihara. "Japan as an Engine of the Asian International Economy, c. 1880-1936."
Japan Forum, 2 (April 1990).
J., and
Katzenstein, Peter Nobuo Okawara. Japaw's National Security; Structures, Norms, and
Policy Responses in a Changing World. Ithaca, NY, 1993.
Warren
I Kaufman, Burton. "Eisenhower's Foreign Economic Policy with Respect
Cohen and Akira Iriye, eds. The Great Powers
to Asia.

in East Asia, /953-/960.

" In
New York,

1990.
Kazumoto Ono. "Shin shogen: CIA tai nichi himitsu kosaku no zenbunsho" [New Testimony:
Documents on Covert CIA Operations in Japan]. Bungei Shunju. (December 1994).
Kennan, George. Memoirs, /925-/950. Boston, 1967.
Kennedy, Paul M. The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German- American Relations, i8y8-
/900. New York, 1974.
.
and Diplomacy, 1870—1945: Eight Studies. London, 1983.
Strategy
Kido Koichi. The Diary of Marquis Kido, 1931-/945: Selected Translation into English. Freder-
ick, MD, 1984.
Kim, C. I. Eugene, and Han-kyo Kim. Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, i8y6-igio. Berke-
ley, 1967.
Kimura Masato. "The Opening of the Panama Canal and Japanese-American Relations" (in

Japanese). Journal of Modem Japanese Studies, 11 (1989).

Bibliography 4 7 2

Kinmouth, Earl H. "Fukuzavva Reconsidered: Gakumon no susume and Its Audience." Jowr-
nal of Asian Studies, 37 (August 1978).
Kjssinger, Henry. American Foreign Policy. Expanded edition. New York, 1974.
. White House Years. Boston, 1979.
. Years of Upheaval. Boston, 1982.
Kitaro Suyumara and Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara. Industrial Policy in Japan: Overview and
Evaluation. Canberra, 1987.
Klein, Ira. "Whitehall, Washington, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1919-1921." Pacific His-
torical Review, 46 (no 2, 1968).
Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order.
New York, 1992.
Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1^4^-1^^^. New
York, 1968.
"
Kono Yasuko. 'Sengo no owati' " [The End of the Postwar Era]. In Watanabe Akio, ed.
Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy]. Tokyo, 1985.
Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and
Propaganda Shaped World War 11 Movies. Berkeley, 1990.
Koschmann, J. Victor. The Mito Ideology. Discourse, Reform, and Insurrection in Late Toku-
gawa Japan, iygo—1864. Berkeley, 1987.
Kosai Yutaka. "The Postwar Japanese Economy, 1945-1973." Translated by Andrew Gable. In
Peter Duus, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, UK, 1988.
Krasner, Stephen D. "Japan and the United States: Prospects for Stability." In Takashi Ino-
guchi and Daniel I. Okimoto, eds. The Political Economy of Japan. Vol. 2. Stanford,

1988.
Krugman, Paul. "The Myth of Asia's Miracle." Foreign Affairs, 73 (November-December
1994)-
Kublin, Hyman. "The Evolution of Japanese Colonialism. ' Comparative Studies in Society
and History, II (1959).
Kuriyama Takakazu. "Geikido no kyujunen dai to Nihon gaiko no shin tenkai" [Tremors in
the 1990s and New Developments in Japanese Foreign Policy]. Gaiko Forum, 12 (May
1990).
Kurosawa Fumitaku. "A Prelude to Disaster: The Japanese Imperial Army's Total War Plan
Before World War II." In Sophia University Institute of American and Canadian
Studies. Beginnings of the Soviet-German and the U.S. -Japanese Wars and Fifty Years

After. Tokyo, 1993.

Large, Stephen. Emperor Hirohito and Shou^a Japan: A Political Biography. New York, 1992.
Lauren, Paul Gorden. Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimina-
tion. Boulder, CO, 1988.
, and Raymond F. Wyle, eds. Destinies Shared: U.S. -Japanese Relations. Boulder, CO,
1989.
Leary, William M., ed. We Shall Return! MacArthur's Commanders and the Defeat of Japan,

1942-Z945. Lexington, KY, 1988.

Lee, Yur-Bok. Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Korea, /866-1887. New
York, 1970.
, and Wayne Patterson, eds. One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882—
1982. University, AL, 1986.
Leffler, Melvyn P. A
Preponderance of Power. National Security, the Truman Administration,
and the Cold War. Stanford, 1992.
Levin, N. Gordon, Jr. Woodrow Wilson World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolu-
tion. New York, 1968.
BibliograpKy 4 7 3

Lockwood, William W. The Economic Development ofJapan. Growth and Structural Change,
1868-1938. Princeton, 1954.
. The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan. Princeton, 1985.

Mandel, Richard. "The Struggle for East Asia's Rimlands: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Far East Policy, 1921-1945." Unpublished doctoral disserta-

tion, Cornell University, 1990.

Mandelbaum, Michael, ed. The Strategic Quadrangle: Russia, China, Japan and the United
States in East Asia. New York, 1995.
Manning, Robert A., and Paula Stern. "The Myth of the Pacific Community." Foreign Affairs,

73 (November-December 1994).
Marks, Frederick W. III. Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles. Westport,
CT, 1993.
.
Velvet The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Lincoln, NE, 1979.
on Iron:

Marshall, Jonathan. To Have and to Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins
of the Pacific War. Berkeley, 1995.
Martel, Gordon, ed. American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993. London, 1994.
Maruyama Masao. Thought and Behavior in Modem Japanese Politics. Ed. Ivan Morris. Lon-
don, 1963.
Masland, John W. "Commercial Influence Upon American Far Eastern PoHcy, 1937-1941."
Pacific Historical Review, 11 (September 1942).
Mason, Mark. American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital
Controls, 1899-/980. Cambridge, MA, 1992.
Matsuda Takeshi. "Woodrow Wilson's Dollar Diplomacy in the Far East: The New Chinese
Consortium, 1917-1921." Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Wisconsin-
Madison, 1979.
May, Ernest R. ed. Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before Two World Wars.
Princeton, 1984.
Mayer, Arno J. Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution
at Versailles, 1918-1919. New York, 1967.
Mayo, Marlene. "The Western Education of Kume Kunitake, 1871-76." Monumenta Nippon-
ica, 28 (1973).
McCormick, Thomas. America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War.
2nd edition. Baltimore, 1995.
. China Market. Chicago, 1967.
McCraw, Thomas K., ed. America versus Japan. Boston, 1986.
McDougall, Walter A. Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan
to MacArthur. New York, 1993.
McGlothlen, Ronald. Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia.

New York, 1993.

McMahon, Robert J. "The Cold War in Asia: Toward a New Synthesis?" Diplomatic History,
12 (Summer 1988).

McNeil, Frank. Japanese Politics: Decay or Reform? New York, 1993.

McNelly, Theodore H. "
'Induced Revolution': The Policy and Process of Constitutional
Reform in Occupied Japan." In Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds.
Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Honolulu, 1987.
.
"The Renunciation of War in the Japanese Constitution. " Political Science Quar-
terly, 77 (September 1962).
Mendel, Douglas H., Jr. "Japan Reviews Her American Alliance." Public Opinion Quarterly,
30 (Spring 1966).
.
"Japanese Views of the American Alliance.' Public Opinion Qiuirterly, 23 (Fall

1959)-
Biblio^rapky 4 7 4

Messer, Robert L. The End of an Alliance. James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the
Origins of the Cold War. Chapel Hill, NC, 1982.
Miller, Edward S. War Plan orange The U.S. Strategy to Defeat japan, i8gj-ig4^. Annapolis,
MD, 1991.
Miller, Nathan. Theodore Roosevelt: A Life.New York, 1992.
Millett, Allan R., and Peter Maslowski. For the Common Defense: A Military History of the
United States of America. New York, 1984.
Mitani Taichiro. "Manchuria; American Capital and Japanese Special Interests in the
1920 s." In Ian Nish, ed. Some Foreign Attitudes to Republican China. London, 1980.
. "Senzen senchuki Nichi-Bei kankei ni okeru sin-Nichiha gaikokan no yakuwari: J.

Barantain to E. Douman ni tsuite" [The Role of the Pro-Japanese American Diplo-

mats in U.S. -Japanese Relations, Before and During the Pacific War: Joseph Ballan-
and Eugene Dooman]. In Gaiho Forum, 36-39 (September-December 1991).
tine
Miwa Kimitada. Japanese Policies and Concepts for a Regional Order in Asia, 1938-1940.
Sophia University, Institute of International Relations for Advanced Studies on Peace
and Development in Asia, 1983.

Miyazoto Seigen. "Posuto haken jidai no Nichi-Bei kankei" ["Japan-U.S. Relations in the

Post-Hegemony Period"]. In Hosoya Chihiro, ed. Nichi-Bei kankei [Japan-U.S. Rela-

tions]. Tokyo, 1995.
Miyoshi Masao. As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (i860).
Berkeley, 1979.
Mochizuki, Mike M. "Japan and the Strategic Quadrangle." In Michael Mandelbaum, ed.
The Strategic Quadrangle: Russia, China, Japan and the United States in East Asia.

New York, 1995.

. "Review Essay: The Past in Japan's Future." Foreign Affairs, 73 (September-October
1994)-
Morita Akio and Ishihara Shintaro. The Japan That Can Say "No": The New U.S. -Japan
Relations Card. Washington, DC, 1989.
Morley, James W, ed.Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan. Princeton, 1976.
. "The First Seven Weeks." Japaw Interpreter, 6 (no. 2, 1970).
Munro-Leighton, Judith. "A Post-Revisionist Scrutiny of American's Role in the Cold War
in Asia, 1945-1950. Jowrwa/ of American-East
" Asian Relations, i (Spring 1992).
Murphy, R. Taggart. The Weight of the Yen. How Denial Imperils America's Future and Ruins
an Alliance. New York, 1995.
Nagai Yonosuke and Akira The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. New York, 1977.
Irye, eds.

Nakamura Takafusa. "Seikai keigai no naka no Nichi-Bei" ["Japanese-U.S. Economic Prob-

lems in the World Economy"]. In Hosoya Chihiro and Saito Makoto, eds. Washinton
tasei to Nichi-Bei kankei [The Washington Treaty System and Japanese-U.S. Rela-
tions]. Tokyo, 1978.
Nester, William R. Japan and the Third World: Patterns, Power, Prospects. New York, 1992.
Neu, Charles. "Higashi Ajia ni okeru Amerika gaikokan" [American Diplomats in East Asia].

In Hosoya Chihiro and Saito Makoto, eds. Washinton taisei to Nichi-Bei kankei [The
Washington Treaty System and Japanese-U.S. Relations]. Tokyo, 1978.
.
The Troubled Encounter: The United States and Japan. New York, 1975.
Neumann, William L. America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur. Baltimore, 1963.
.
"Religion, Morality and Freedom: The Ideological Background of the Perry Expedi-
tion." Pacific Historical Review, 23 (August 1954).
Ninkovich, Frank A. Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth

Century. Chicago, 1994.

Nish, Ian. Alliance in Decline. A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations 1908-1928. London,
1972.
BiWio^rapKy 4 7 5

. Britain and Japan, /600-1975. 2 vols. London, 1977.

.
Japanese Foreign Policy, i86g-ig42. Kasumigaski to Miyahezaka. London, 1977.
.
The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War. London, 1985.
.
"The Showa Emperor and the End of the Manchurian Crisis." Japan Forum, i

(October 1989).
Nixon, Richard M. "Asia After Vietnam." Foreign Affairs, 46 (October 1967).
. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York, 1978.
[Notter, Harley]. U.S. Department of State. Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939-1945.

Washington, DC, 1949.

Nye, Joseph S., Jr. "The Case for Deep Engagement." Foreign 74 (July-August 1995).
Affairs,

O'Connor, Raymond G. Force Diplomacy: Essays, Military and Diplomatic. Coral Gables, FL,
1972.
Ogata Sadako N. Defiance in Manchuria. The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, /931-1932.

Berkeley, 1964.
. Normalization with China: A Comparative Study of the U.S. and Japanese Processes.
Berkeley, 1988.
Ohkawa Kazushi, and Henry Rosovsky. Japanese Economic Growth. Stanford, 1973.
Ohmae Kinichi. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New
York, 1990.
Oishi Kaichiro. Nihon teihoku shugishi [Japan's Imperialistic History]. Tokyo, 1985.
Oka Yoshitake. Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan. Ito Hirohumi, Okuma Shigenohu,
Hara Takashi, Inukai Tsuyoshi, and Saionji Kimmochi. Translated by Andrew Eraser
and Patricia Murray. Tokyo, 1986.
. Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography. Translated by Shumpei Okamoto and Patri-

cia Murray. Tokyo, 1983.

Okamoto Shumpei. The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War. New York, 1970.
Okihiro, Gary. Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865— 7945. Philadelphia,
1991.
. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle, WA,
1994.
.
Whispered Silences. Japanese-Americans and World War 11. Essay by Gary Y Okihiro.
Photographs by Joan Myers. Seattle, WA, 1996.
Osgood, Robert, et al, Retreat from Empire? The First Nixon Administration. Baltimore,
1973-
Ozawa Ichiro. Blueprint for a New Japan. Introduction by John Rockefeller. Translated by
Louisa Rubinfen. Edited by Eric Cower. Tokyo and New York, 1994.
Packard, George R. III. "Living with the Real Japan." Foreign Affairs, 46 (October 1967).
. Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of ig6o. Princeton, 1966.

Paige, Glenn D. The Korean Decision, June 24-^0, igso. New York, 1968.
Paolino, Ernest N. The Foundations of American Empire; William Henry Seward and U.S.
Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY, 1973.
Peattie, Mark R. Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the West. Princeton, 1975.

Pelz, Stephen E. Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference
and the Onset of World War II. Cambridge, MA, 1974.
Pempel, T J. Policy and Politics in Japan. Creative Conservatism. Philadelphia, 1982.
. "The Tar Baby Target: 'Reform' of the Japanese Bureaucracy. " In Robert E. Ward
and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds. Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Hono-
lulu, 1987.

Perkins, F. C. "A Dynamic Analysis of Japanese Energy Policies." Energy Policy, 22 (July
1994)-
Perry, John Curtis. Facing West: Americans and the Opening of the Pacific. New York. 1994.
Biblio^rapny 4 7 6

Perry, Commodore Matthew C. The Ja'pan Expedition 1852-1854; The Personal Journal of
Commodore Matthew C. Perry'. Ed. Roger Pineau. Washington, DC, 1968.

Petillo, Carol Morris. "The Cold War in Asia." In John M. Carroll and George C. Herring,
eds. Modem American Diplomacy. Wilmington, DE, 1986.
Pharr, Susan J. "The Politics of Women's Rights." In Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshi-
kazu, Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Honolulu, 1987.
Phillips, Kevin P. Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle-Class
Prosperity. New York. 1993.
Pleshakov, Constantine V. "Taiheiyo senso: Stalin no ketsudan" [The Pacific War: Stalin's
Choices]. In Hosoya Chihiro, et al, eds. Taiheiyo senso [The Pacific War]. Tokyo,

1993-
Pogue, Forrest C. George C. Marshall. 4 vols. New York, 1963-87.
Polenberg, Richard. One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States
Since 1938. New York, 1980.
, ed. America at War: The Home Front, 1941-1945. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968.
Prange, Gordon W, in collaboration with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. At
Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. New York, 1982.
Prestowitz, Clyde. "Japan and the United States: Twins or Opposites?" In Aspen Strategy
Group. Harness the Rising Sun. Lanham, MD, 1993.
.
Trading Places: Hcru' We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead. New York, 1988.
Rozman, Gilbert. Japan's Response to the Gorbachev Era, igS^-iggi: A Rising Superpower
versus a Declining One. Princeton, 1992.
Rydell, Robert W All the Worlds a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exposi-
tions, 2876—1926. Chicago, 1985.
Sakaiya Taichi. What Is Japan? Contradictions and Transformations. New York, 1993.
Samuels, Richard J. "Rich Nation, Strong Army": National Security and the Technological
Transformation of Japan. Ithaca, NY, 1994.
Sanger, David E. "Coloring History." New York Times Magazine, July 2, 1995.
Sansom, George B.Japan: A Short Cidtural History. London, 1931.
. The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic
Cultures. New York, 1950.
Sarantakes, Nicholas Evan. "Continuity Through Change: The Return of Okinawa and Iwo
Jima, 1967-1972." Jownza/ of American-East Asian Relations, 3 (Spring 1994).
Sato Kinya, "From a Tokyo Window." Asahi Evening News. Februar)' 10— 11, March 24, May
12, and May 26, 1994.

Sato Seizaburo, Ken'ichi Koyama, and Shumpei Kumon. Postwar Politician: The Life of
Masayoshi Ohira. Translated by William R. Carter. New York, 1990.
Scalapino, Robert A., ed. The Foreign Policy of Modern Japan. Berkeley, 1977.
Schaller, Michael, "Altered States: The United States and Japan During the 1960s." In Diane
B. Kunz, ed. The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations Dur-
ing the igSos. New York, 1994.
.
The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. New York,
1985.
.
Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General. New York, 1989.
.
"MacArthur's Japan: The View from Washington." Diplomatic History, 10 (Winter
1986).
Scheiber, Harry N., and Akio Watanabe. "Occupation Policy and Postwar Planning in Post-
war Japan.' In E. Aerts and A. S. Milward, eds. Economic Planning in the Post-ig4^
Period. Leuven, Belgium, 1990.

Scholes, Walter and Marie. The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration. Columbia, MO,
1970.
Bibliography 4 7 7

Schonberger, Howard B. Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, /945-1952.
Kent, OH, 1989.
Sherwin, Martin J. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race. New
York, 1987.
Shillony, Ben-Ami. Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan. New York, 1981.

Shimazu Naoko. "The Japanese Attempt to Secure Racial Equality in igig." Japan Forum, i

(April 1989).

Shimizu Sayuri. "A Bothersome Triangle: The United States, Japan, and the Problem of
Trade with Communist China, 1952-1958," 1992. Manuscript in author's possession.

. "Clarence Randall and the Control of Sino-Japanese Trade." Journal of American

and Canadian Studies, 7 (Spring 1991).

Shindo Eiichi, "Ashida Hitoshi and Postwar Reform: Between Liberalism and Conservatism
(in Japanese). International Relations, 85 (May 1987).
Shinobu Seizaburo and Nakayama Jiichi. Nichi-ro senso-shi no kenkyu [A Study of the His-
tory of the Russo-Japanese War]. Tokyo, 1972.
Shiraishi Masaya. Japanese Relations with Vietnam: 1951-1987. Ithaca, NY, 1990.
Shiraishi Takashi. Japan's Trade Policies, ig4^ to the Present Day. London, 1989.
Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph. My Years as Secretary of State. New York, 1993.
Skates, John Ray. The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb. Columbia, SC, 1994.
Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-19/ 6. The Mar-
ket, the Law, and Politics. New York, 1988.

Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and
China. Cambridge, UK, 1979.
Smith, Caddis. Dean Acheson. New York, 1972.
The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 7945-/993. New York, 1994.
.

Smith, Geoffrey S. "Doing Justice: Relocation and Equity in Public Policy." The Public Histo-
rian, 6 (Summer 1984).
.
To Save a Nation: American Countersubversives, the New Deal, and the Coming of
World War IL With a New Epilogue. Chicago, 1992.
Smith, Robert Freeman. "Thomas W. Lamont. International Banker as Diplomat." In
Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber, eds. Behind the Throne: Servants of
Power to Imperial Presidents, 7898-/ 968 [Essays in Honor of Fred H. Harrington].
Madison, WI, 1993.
Smith, Robert J. Japanese Society: Tradition, Self, and the Social Order. Cambridge, UK,
1983-
. "The Sources and Proponents of 'Tradition' and 'Modernity' in Japanese Law." Jour-
nal of Legal Pluralism, 33 (1993).
Socolofsky, Homer E., and Allan B. Spetter. The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison. Lawrence,
KS, 1987.
Somura Yasunobu. Peri wa naze Nihon ni kita ha [WTiy Perry Came to Japan]. Tokyo, 1987.

Spector, Ronald. Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. New York, 1985.
. "Reflections on the Enola Gay Debacle." Magazine (Fall 1995). GW
Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modem China. New York, 1990.
. To Change China. New York, 1980.
Steele, Richard W Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration and the
Media, ig^^-ig4i. Westport, CT, 1985.
Stevens, Sylvester R. American Expansion in Hawaii, 1842-18^8. Harrisburg, PA, 1945.
Stimson, Henry L., and McGeorge Bundy On Active Service in Peace and War. New York,

1949.
Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia, 18^4— ig4^. New York, 1979.
Storry, Richard.

Suzamura Kotaro and Okuno-Fujiwara Masahiro. Industrial Policy in Japan: Overview and
Biblio^rapny 4 7 8

Evaluation. Australia-Japan Research Centre. Pacific Economic Paper no. 146, April
1987.
Suzuki, Gengo. "The Impact of the Korean War on Japan: An Overview." In William Nimmo,
ed. The Occupation ofja-pan: The Impact of the Korean War. Norfolk, VA, 1990.
Szulc, Tad. The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon-Kissinger Years. New York, 1978.
Tadashi Kawata. "The Rise and Fall of Economic Hegemony and Policy Change." Journal of
American and Canadian Studies, 5 (Spring 1990).
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston, 1993.
Takemae Eiji. Senryo sengoshi [Occupation and Postwar Japanese History]. Tokyo, 1980.
Tanaka Hideo. "The Conflict Between Two Legal Traditions Making the Constitution of
in

Japan." In Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds. Democratizing Japan: The
Allied Occupation. Honolulu, 1987.
Tansill, Charles Callan. The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 1885-1897. New York, 1940.
Taylor, Sandra. Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan.
Kent, OH, 1984.
Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz. Berkeley, 1993.
.

Thayer, Nathaniel B. "Japanese Foreign Policy in the Nakasone Years." In Gerald L. Curtis,
ed. Japan's Foreign Policy. Armonk, NY, 1993.
Thomson (Taylor), Sandra C. "Meiji Japan Through Missionary Eyes: The American Protes-
tant Experience." Jowrmi/ of Religious History, 7 (June 1973).
Thome, Christopher. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Great Britain and the War Against
Japan, ig^i-ig^^. New York, 1978.
Toby, Ronald P. "Contesting the Centre: International Sources of Japanese National Iden-
tity." International History Review, 7 (August 1985).
Tokyo Daigaku. Sengo kaikaku [Postwar Reform]. Shakai Kagaku Kenkyujo [Tokyo University
Social Science Institute]. Vol. i of 8 vols. Tokyo, 1974.
Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. 2 vols. Garden Cit)', NY, 1955-56.
.
Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman. Ed. Robert H. Ferrell. New
York, 1980.
. Where the Buck Stops. The Personal and Private Writings of Harr)' S. Truman. Ed.
Margaret Truman. New York, 1989.
Tsuru, Shigeto. Japan's Capitalism: Creative Defeat and Beyond. Cambridge, MA. 1993.
Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "American Policy Toward Sino-Japanese Trade in the Postwar
Years." Diplomatic History, 8 (Summer 1994).
Tugwell, Franklin. The Energy Crisis and the American Political Economy: Politics and Mar-
kets in the Management of Natural Resources. Stanford, 1988.
Tupper, Eleanor, and George E. McReynolds. Japan in American Public Opinion. New York,
1937-
United States Capitol Historical Society. Foreign Visitors to Congress. Speeches and History.

Ed. Mary Lee Kerr. 2 vols. Millwood, NY, 1989.

United States Congress, House. Committee on Armed Services. United States-Vietnam Rela-
tions, J945-1967; Study Prepared h}' the Department of Defense [The Pentagon Papers].
12 vols. Washington, DC, 1971.
United States Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs. United States-Japan Rela-
tions. Washington, DC, 1982.
United States Department of State. Korea (Preliminar)' Version). An Intelligence Estimate

Prepared by the Estimates Group, Office of Intelligence Research. June 25, 1950.
OACST-"P File. Record Group 319. National Archives. Washington, DC.
Unterberger, Betty Miller. The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslo-
vakia. Chapel Hill, NC, 1989.
Usuri Katsumi. "Nichi-Bei kaisen to chugoku" [Japan-U.S. and the War in China]. In Hosoya
Chihiro, et al., eds., Takeiyo senso [The Pacific War]. Tokyo, 1993.
Bibliography 4 7 9

Utley, Jonathan G. "Cordell Hull and the Diplomacy of Inflexibility. " In Hilary Conroy and
Harry Wray, eds. Pearl Harbor Reexamined: Prologue to the Pacific War. Honolulu,
1989.
. Going to War with Japan, 7937-/94/. Knoxville, TN, 1985.
. "The United States Enters World War II.
"
In John M. Carroll and George C. Her-
ring, eds. Modern American Diplomacy. Wilmington, DE, 1986.
Vogel, Ezra F. Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. New York, 1979, 1980.
.
"Japanese-American Relations After the Cold War." In Aspen Strategy Group. Har-
ness the Rising Sun. Lanham, MD, 1993.
Walker, J. Samuel. "The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update." Dip/owatic
History, 14 (Winter 1990).

Ward, Robert E. "Presurrender Planning: Treatment of the Emperor and Constitutional

Changes." In Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds. Democratizing Japan:
The Allied Occupation. Honolulu, 1987.
Watanabe Akio, ed. Sengo Nihon no taigai sesaku: kokusai kankei no hen'yo to Nihon no
yakuxvari [Postwar Japanese Foreign Policy: The Changes in International Relations
and Japan's Role]. Tokyo, 1985.
Weingartner, James J. "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War
Dead, 1941-1945." Pacific Historical Review, 61 (February 1992).
Weinstein, Martin E. The Human Face of Japan's Leadership: Twelve Portraits. New York,

1989.
Welfield, John. An Empire in Eclipse; Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System: A
Study in the Interaction of Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy. London, 1988.
White, John Albert. Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War. Princeton, 1964.
White, Theodore H. "The Danger from Japan." New York Times Magazine, July 28, 1985.
Whiting, Allen S. The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina. Ann Arbor, MI,
1975-
Whiting, Robert. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style. New York, 1977.
Whitney, Major General Courtney. MacArthur. His Rendezvous with History. New York,

1956.
Widenor, William C. Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy.

Berkeley, 1980.
Wiley, Peter Booth, with Korigi Ichiro. Yankees in theLand of the Gods. New York, 1990.
Wilkins, Myra. "The Role of U.S. Business." In Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds.
Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese- American Relations, 1^^1-1^41. New York, 1973.
Williams, Justin, Sr., John W. Dower, and Howard Schonberger. "A Forum: American
Democratization Policy for Occupied Japan." Pacific Historical Review, 57 (May
1988).
Willoughby, Major General Charles, and John Chamberlain. MacArthur, ig4i-ig^i. New
York, 1954.
Wiltz, John Edward. "Did the United States Betray Korea in 1905?" Pacific Historical Review,
54 (August 1985).
Wolf, Charles, Jr. Perspectives on Economic and Foreign Policies. Santa Monica, CA, 1995.
Wolferen, Karl van. The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation.
New York, 1990.
.
"Japan's Non-Revolution." Foreign Affairs, 72 (September-October 1993).
Woodward, Sir Ernest Llewellyn. British Foreign Policy in the Second World War. London,
1962.
Wray, Harry, and Hilary Conroy, eds. Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modem Japanese His-
tory. Honolulu, 1983.
Wright, Quincy, and Carl J. Nelson. "American Attitudes Toward Japan and China, 1937-
1938. " Public Opinion Quarterly, 3 (January 1939).
Bltlio^rapKy 4 8

Yamamoto Mitsuru. Fumo no gensetsu: Kokkai tohen no naka no Nichi-Bei hanhei [The Bar-
ren Discourse: The Diet's Response to the Japan-U.S. Relationship]. Tokyo, 1992.
Yardley, Herbert O. The Chinese Black Chamber. An Adventure in Espionage. Introduction
by James Bamford. Boston, 1983.
Yasuba Yasukichi. "Anatomy of the Debate on Japanese CapitaHsm." JoMrwa/ of ]apanese
(Autumn 1975).
Studies, 2
Yasuhara Yoko. "Japan, Communist China, and Export Controls in Asia, 1948-1952. " Diplo-

matic History, 10 (Winter 1986).

'Yasuhiro Nakasone: The Statesman as CEO. " Interviewed by Alan M. Webber. Harvard
Business Review, 67 (March-April 1989).
Yoshida Shigeru. The Yoshida Memoirs; The Stor)' of Japan in Crisis. Westport, CT, 1973.
Yoshikazu Sakamoto. "The International Context of the Occupation of Japan." In Robert E.
Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds. Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation.
Honolulu, 1987.
Yoshino, M. Y. Japan's Multinational Enterprises. Cambridge, MA, 1976.
Yoshitsu, Michael M. Japan and the San Francisco Peace Settlem.ent. New York, 1983.
Yui Daizaburo. "From Exclusion to Integration: Asian Americans' Experiences in World War
II." Hitotsuhashi Journal of Social Studies, 24 (December 1992).
Yutaka Kosai. "The Postwar Japanese Economy, 1945-1973." Translated by Andrew Coble. In
Peter Duus, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, UK, 1988.
Ackno\vle dements

As THIS PROJECT, planned to be completed in two and a half

years, stretched to five, the debts also multiplied. It is a cliche for
a tardy author to thank the long-suffering editor, but in this case
the cliche has force. Ed Barber, Vice President of W. W. Norton,
has been not only patient and supportive, but a trusted friend.
His red pen robbed the world of many noble phrases, but he was
invariably right, especially when he suggested cuts for a runaway
manuscript. As the copy editor for a rather complex work, Ann
Adelman was extraordinary. I am greatly indebted to her. Gerry
McCauley placed the manuscript, and has also been a most sup-
portive and valued friend.
Akira Iriye and Michael Barnhart read the entire manuscript.
Their knowledge of Japan, as well as of U.S. foreign relations,
saved me from many errors. In addition, Akira's friendship has
long been valued, as have his many contributions to the writing of
history. Frank Costigliola also read a large portion of the manu-
script and over twenty-five years has provided good advice and
close friendship. Gabriela Lopez, Mark Anderson, and Lu Yan
were indispensable, for they translated most of the Japanese-lan-
guage sources used in the book. Lu Yan, despite a pressing dead-
line for her doctoral dissertation, also was most kind in going over

the final manuscript to check for usage. Professor Sayuri Shimizu

was a new Ph.D. at Cornell when she translated sources and intro-
duced me to many important Japanese materials, including her

4 8 1
Acknowledgments 4 8 2

own work on the 1950s. I value her, Danny's, and her parents' friendship.
A number of other friends and former students helped with material
and insights. Da\id Langbart of the National Archives once again was
unsurpassed in his knowledge of the documents and in his determina-
tion to make them legitimately available for researchers. Barr\' Eisler of
California and Tokyo read parts of the manuscript and provided per-
sonal insights. Da\id Maisel, Evan Stewart, Eric Edelman, Mark Lytle,
Robert Hannigan, Doug Little, Cather\Ti Obern, Arthur Kaminsky,
Carol Kuntz, and Hirschel and Elaine Abelson have been counsellors,
on academic as well as other matters, and friends. Milton Leitenberg,
Michael Schaller, Ronald McGlothlen, and Tom Schoonover, as well as
Ambassador Frank McNeill, sent materials and demonstrated an
enthusiasm for U.S. diplomatic histor\' that was catching. I am grateful
to Robert \\\ Barnett and James Morley for permission to quote them.
Stephen Weiss not only made certain research for this book possible,
but over the years has helped make Cornell a stimulating place for
teaching and scholarship. So has Marie Underbill Noll, a longtime
teacher-of-histor\^ and personal friend. This book is dedicated to four
persons who, since the 1960s, led in the building of the present Cornell.
Among other accomplishments, they helped make it possible to have
such colleagues as Robert Smith —whose distinguished work on Japan
as well as thirts'-sLx years of friendship helped shape book—this ^Joel

Silbey, Dick Polenberg, Michael Kammen, Takashi Sharaishi, Tom

Christensen, Peter Katzenstein, Tim Borstelmann, Glenn .Altschuler,
Mary Beth Norton, Larr\^ Moore, Sherman Cochran, Ted Lowi, Da\id
Wyatt, and Vic Koschmann. Some of the best ideas in this book were
stolen from Lloyd Gardner, Tom McCormick, and Marty Sklar, but that
has long been the case.
Carmen Blankinship, Caroline Spicer, Janie Harris, and Mar\^
Wesche of the Cornell Libraries, as well as their directors, Alain Seznec
and David Corson, especially helped make this book better. LizAnn
Rogovoy, Rebecca Gaslow, Kathr\n Comerford, and Karen Tanis used
the libraries in providing vital research help. That three of them are on
their way to successful careers in law reveals their talent as well as the
length of time it has taken to finish this work. Dennis Hilger of the
Truman Branch of the Reagan Library; E. Philip Scott of
Library; Steve
the Johnson Library; and David Humphrey, formerly of the Johnson
Library and now with the State Department Historical Office, were
most kind in expediting the availability of documents and photos. Bob
Wampler, head of the post-1960 U.S. -Japan project at the National
Security Archive, has provided hundreds of pages of invaluable docu-
Acknowledgments 4 8 3

ments would have been held back from researchers

that otherwise
—
and needlessly so for years to come. A number of Japanese friends
are valued for their friendship and thanked for their interest and help:
Sato Kinya and Funabashi Yoichi of Asahi Shimhun, Aruga Tadashi,
Homma Nagayo, Hosoya Chihiro, Nagata Akifumi, Asada Sadao, Kubo
Fumiaki, Takahara Takao, Kurosawa Fumitaka, Ishii Osamu, Inoue Tos-
hikazu, Abe Hitoshi, Matsuda Takeshi —
all distinguished contributors

to U.S. -Japan studies —

Maruyama Isamu of the International House of
Japan; and two Cornellians, Professor Okada Yasuo and Matsunobu
Yohei.
Once Tom, and Matthew Kahl, Bill
again, Scott LaFeber, Suzanne,
— —
and Hilde Kahl, Peg and Hurley Gould, and above all Sandy have
made it all worthwhile as well as possible.

—Walter LaFeber,
July igg6
 InJ ex

Abe Masahiro, 13-14, 17 Amau Eiji, 177

Abe Shintaro, 380 "Amau statement," 177
Acheson, Dean, 179, 200-201, 237, 271, America First Committee, 200-201, 209
276-77, 278, 284, 302, 308-9, 346, American Asiatic Association, 94
367 American Bankers Association, 130
Cleveland speech of, 272 "American Century," 216-17, 257
freeze order and, 200 American Committee for Non-Participation in

NSC-68 and, 282-83 Japanese Aggression, 188

Southeast Asia policy and, 280—81 American Council on Japan (Japan Lobby),
U.S. Indochina mission and, 285 275
U.S. -Japanese peace treaty and, 288-89 American Express, 277, 403
Adams, Brooks, 67, 79 American Federation of Labor, 34
Adams, Henry, 59, 66, 67, 79 American Group, 113, 131
Adams, John Quincy, 67 "American Individualism" (Hoover), 129
Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Pol- American Medical Association, 52
icy, 236 Anami Korechika, 251, 253-54
Afghanistan, 76, 369 Angola, 360-61
Aichi Kiichi, 348, 350 Anti-Comintern Pact (1936), 181
Aizawa Seishisai, 16 ANZUS pact, 288
Akihito, Emperor of Japan, 262, 386 Araki Sadao, 1 70
Hawaii visit of, 332 Arizona, USS, 332
Alcock, Rutherford, 28, 29 Armacost, Michael, xv, xxii

Aleutian Islands, 223, 225, 229 Aruga Tadashi, 322, 358

Allen, Horace, 47-48, 51, 78, 85 Asahi Shimhun, 194, 259, 346, 358, 394
Allied Council of the Big Three plus China, Asanuma Inejiro, 321
260 Asher, David, 383
Allison, John, 284, 287, 297, 303, 313, 314. Ashida Hitoshi, 268, 275-76
323 Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC), 345
U.S. -Japanese relationship assessed by, Asian Development Bank (ADB), 345
311 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC),
Alsop, Joseph, 313 377, 391, 398
Alston. B.. 131 Associated Press, 192

4 8 5
 1

Index 4 8 6

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Bonin Islands, 283, 288, 289-90, 346
(ASEAN), 345, 367, 398 Borah, "V^^illiam E., 126, 135, 137, 172
Atcheson, George, 261, 270 Borneo, 193
Atlantic Charter, 216, 230, 238 Borton, Hugh, 237-38
Atlantic Conference (1941), 201-2 Boston, USS, 54
Atlantic Monthly, 52 Bourne, Randolph, 127
atomic bomb, 244, 250, 255-56, 263 Boxer Protocol (1901), 72
in attack on Japan, 247—48 Boxer uprising, 68, 69-70, 72-73
Smithsonian controversy and, 400—401 Brazil, 146, 329
targeting debate and, 245—46 Brest-Litovsk peace agreement (1918), 118
Attu, 229 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 259, 376
Aulick, John H., 11, 12 Brezhnev, Leonid, 356
Australia, 124, 135, 193, 223, 225, 231, 275, Bridges at Toko-ri, The (Michener), 301
288, 330, 404 Bridgman, Elijah C, 38
APEC and, 377 Brief Account of the United States, A (Bridg-

Austria, 11, 122 man), 38

Axis alliance, 193-94 Brussels Conference (1937), 185
Anti-Comintern Pact and, 181-82 Bryan, William Jennings, 70, 72, 104, 105,
107, 108, 112, 138
Baker, James, III, 376, 397, 398 Twenty-one Demands crisis and, 1 1

hakufu, 18,20, 22,25-26,29 Bryce, James, 97

Balfour, Arthur, 138 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 352-53, 364, 368, 370
Ballantine, Joseph W, 203, 204, 237, 275 Buchanan, James, 22, 319
Ba Maw, 230 Buchanan, Patrick, 354
Bamba Nobuya, 133 Buck, Pearl, 206, 222, 233
"bamboo curtain," 277 Buckley Roger, 288
Bandung Conference (1955), 313 Buddhism, 5, 136
Bankof Japan, 45, 329,344 Bullitt, William Christian, 118, 119, 123, 125,
Barbarian and the Geisha, The (film), 20 127
Barnet, Richard, 265 Bundy McGeorge, 335, 341-42
Barnett, Robert W., xvii, xviii Burma, 193, 223, 224, 231-32, 310, 330
Baseball, 63, 201, 356, 365, 372 Burnham, Walter Dean, 371
Bataan Death March, 224 Buruma, Ian, 13, 402
Beard, Charles, 300 Bush, George, xxi, 370, 384-85, 386, 388,
Beheiren (Citizens' Federation for Peace in 391
Vietnam), 344-45, 348 Bush administration, 385, 397
Belgium, 141 Business Week, 3 1

Belknap, George, 55 Butow, Robert J. C, 252, 254

Bell, Edward Price, 143 Byas, Hugh, 172
Beveridge, Albert J.,
78-79 Byrnes, James F., 243-44, 246, 247, 250,
Biddle, Francis, 220 252-53, 256, 259, 260, 263
Biddle, James, 10, 13 Bywater, Hector C, 179
Bingham, John A., 42
Black Chamber, 140, 143 Cabinet Research Office, Japanese, 287
Black Dragon Society, 136 Cabinet Resources Bureau, 162
Blakeslee, George, 237 Cairo Conference (1943), 237
"Bloody May Day" riots, 295 California, 87-89, 104-6, 107, 143

Blueprint for a New Japan (Ozawa), 383 forced relocation of Japanese Americans in,

"Bock's Car," 248 218-20

Boer War, 66 Japanese immigration to, 88—89
Bolsheviks, 1 16, 1 18, 129, 134 racism of, 88-89, 104-6, 107
Inde 4 8 7

segregation order of, 89 Formosa and, 43-44

Cambodia, 232, 389 Great Britain trade and, 4, 9, 1 1-12, 20, 21

Canada, 88, 89, 135, 329, 373, 393, 398 and Japanese annexation of Taiwan, 52
forced relocation of Japanese Canadians in, Japanese trade with, see Sino-Japanese trade
221 Korea and, 44-45
capitalism, xviii, 100, 160, 173, 206-7, 275- Manchuria issue and, 87, 92, 94-95
76 open-door policy and, 65—66, 69-70, 72
conflicting systems of, 373-79 Shufeldt treaty and, 44-45
Grady's views on, 258—59 U.S. missionaries in, 66
Japanese practice of, xix, 86, 93, 156-160, U.S. perception of, 5

294, 303-4, 312, 319-21, 328-29, U.S. trade treaty of 1844 and, 1

365-68, 384, 397-98, 400-403 U.S. troops in, 69-70, 72

Capra, Frank, 222 warof 1894-95 and, 48-51
Carnegie, Andrew, 34, 72 as world market, 66-68

Caroline Islands, 108, 126, 143, 240 China, Nationalist, 132, 174, 208, 212, 256
Carpenter, S. S., 318 Communist conflict with, 150, 257, 258,

Carter, Jimmy, 363, 364, 366, 368, 369 269-70, 278

Castle, William, 154-55, 157, 158, 159, 166- Hurley mission to, 233
68, 170, 173-74, 190 Kuomindong movement in, 147, 150, 152,

Castro, Fidel, 310, 340 164

CBS, 285, 346 Lansing-Ishii agreement and, 115-16, 131,

Cecil, Robert, 124 142, 203

Centennial Exposition (1876), 42 Nine-Power Treaty and, 141-42

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 274, 279, revolution of 1911 and, 31, 147-50
281,283,285,332, 345, 354 Shantung settlement and, 122, 123, 125
LDP financed by, 318, 326-28, 335-36, Soviet Union and, 148-49
337 united front in, 182
tungsten deal and, 287 U.S. aid to, 176-77
Challenger tragedy, 387 U.S. banking consortium and, 147, 149-50
Chamberlain, Neville, 187 in U.S. postwar planning, 231-33
Chang Hsueh-liang (Zhang Xueliang), 152 Washington Conference and, 141-43
Changsha intervention, 157 World War II and, 231-33, 236-37, 239
Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuohn), 152 see also Chiang Kai-shek; Sino-Japanese
Charter Oath, 30 War (1937); Taiwan
Cheney Richard, 388 China, People's Republic of, xvii—xx, xxii, 160,

Chiang Kai-shek, 147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 257, 258, 291, 292, 293, 322, 323-24,
164, 166, 167, 177, 182, 189, 196, 348, 358, 367, 373
203, 204, 206, 207-8, 250, 258, 270, Clinton's policies on, 390-91
283,285, 323 "Great Leap Forward" of, 317
Anti-Comintern Pact rejected by, 181 Gulf War and, 385-86, 389
at Cairo Conference, 237 human rights issue and, 390-91
Sino-Japanese War and, 183 Japanese trade with, see Sino-Japanese trade
U.S. postwar planning and, 231-33, 237, Japan's Peace and Friendship Treaty with,
239 369
Chile, 330 Korean intervention and, 286, 343
China, Imperial, 8, 17, 36,41,42,63, 74, 115 L-T deals and, 330-31, 336
Anglo-Japanese alliance and, 76-77 MEN status and, 386, 390
Boxer uprising in, 68, 69-70, 72-73 modernization of, 368
declining Manchu dynasty of, 67-69, 99- Nixon and, xxi, 352, 355-56, 359-60
100 nuclear program of, 340-41
European imperialism and, 58-59 Russia and, 403-4
 1

Indt 4 8 8

China, People's Republic of (continued) COMINT (Communications Intelligence),

Soviet Union's 1950 Friendship Treaty with, 225

282, 293 Committee to Defend America by Aiding the
Soviet Union's relationship with, 282, 293, Allies, 194
310,326,338,354-55 Communist Party, Chinese, 147, 367, 385
Tanaka's visit to, 357 Communist Party, Japanese, 264, 277, 283,
territorial claims of, 403 326
Tiananmen Square massacre and, xxi, 385- "Comprehensive National Security" policy.

86, 403 370

Vietnam War role of, 337-38, 339, 340, Compromise of 1850, 1

341, 342-43 Conger, Edwin, 69

CHINCOM, 305 Congress, U.S., 11,20,44, 59, 81,88. 114,
Chinda, Count, 111, 121, 124 137-38, 140, 158, 189, 240, 243, 275,
Chinese Eastern Railway, 119, 161, 239 342, 356, 380, 381. 386, 401, 403
Chinese Peace Society, 107 China Lobby of, 305
Christian Missionary Alliance, 66 conscription enacted by, 191-92
Christopher, Warren, 390-91 FDR's war message to, 212
Chrysler, 362, 366, 374 Truman Doctrine and, 271
Churchill, Winston, 191, 196, 216, 228, 231, see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Sen-
240, 242, 253,261,265 ate, U.S.; s-pecific acts

at Atlantic Conference, 201 Connally. John, 354

at Cairo Conference, 237 Connally, Tom, 262
Citizens' Federation for Peace in Vietnam Constitution (1889), Japanese, 39-40, 41. 46,
(Beheiren), 344-45, 348 47
Civil War, U.S., 32-33 Constitution (1948), Japanese, 266-68, 298,
Clayton, Will, 215-16 316-17, 319, 321
Clean Government Party (Komeito), Japanese, Constitution, U.S., 39, 40, 54, 55, 107, 266
327, 383 proposed Ludlow Amendment to, 186—87
Clemenceau, Georges, 125 containment policy, 273, 298, 305, 404
Cleveland, Grover, 34, 49, 54, 66 Convention of 1866, 29
Chnton, Bill, xxi. 389, 390-94 Coolidge, Calvin, 144, 147
Asia policy initiatives of, 391-93 Coral Sea, Battle of the, 225
Clinton administration, 391-92 Council on Foreign Economic Policy, 305, 314
Glutton, George. 306-8, 323, 324 Cronkite, Walter, 346
Cochran, Sherman, 100 Cuba, 54, 56, 57-58, 59, 61, 62, 310, 340
COCOM, 305 Cuban missile crisis, 336
Cold War, xviii, 332, 363, 364, 370, 371, 375, Cumings, Bruce, 278, 285
399 Cutler, Robert. 306
containment policy in, 273, 298, 305, 404
detente in, 306, 352, 360 daimyo, 7. 14, 17, 23, 34

end of, 389 D'Amato, Alphonse, 388

Kennan's ideas on, 272-73 Danforth. John. 376, 378
Korean War and, 283 Daniels, Josephus, 106
"massive retaliation" in, 298 Daniels, Roger, 220
missile gap in, 310 DanTakuma, 157, 163, 172, 175
NSC-68 and, 282-83 "Declaration for an Open-Door Policy with

post-World War II era and, 257, 264, 269- Respect to Trade with China" (Hay),
73 69
"power elite" theory and, 319 Defense Agency, Japanese. 299, 351, 370, 371
U.S. -Japanese relationship in, 297-98 Defense Department, U.S., 274, 279, 281-82,
see also Soviet Union 288, 289, 290, 292, 298, 314, 391
Incl( 4 8 9

de Gaulle, Charles, 327-28 East Asian Economic Caucus, 398

Deming, W. Edwards, 301-3, 328 Eberle, William D., 354

Democratic Party, Japanese, 312 "economic miracle," xvii-xviii, 299, 352, 353,
Democratic Party, U.S., 9, 70, 72, 102-3, 212, 354, 384, 399
224, 298, 360 Asia market and, 304
see also elections, U. S. banks and, 328-29
Deng Xiaoping, 368, 369 bureaucracy and, 328-30, 332
Dening, Esler, 299 control of capital supply and, 329
Denison, Henry Willard, 39 Deming's theories and, 301, 303
Dennett, Tyler, 86 dual-use technology and, 296
Depression, Great, 154-55, 158, 163, 166, L-T deals and, 330-31
173-74 MITI and, 362
Destination Tokyo (film), 222 neo-mercantile practices and, 328, 329
detente policy, 306, 352, 360 Soviet-Japanese trade and, 330-31
Dewey, George, 59-60, 62 Vietnam War and, 331-32
DeWitt, John L., 220, 222 Economist, 367, 398
Dienbienphu, Battle of, 309 Eden, Anthony, 196
Diet, Japanese, 40, 146, 162, 237, 266, 267, Edict of Toleration (1873), Japanese, 91
291, 295, 320, 325, 371, 389,402 Education Ministry, Japanese, 218, 333
Dingley Tariff (1897), 57 Education of a Poker Player, Including Where
Dingman, Roger, 286 and How One Learns to Win, The
Dirksen, Everett, 297 (Yardley), 143
"Dr. Win the War," 224 Egypt, 299, 360
Dodge, Joseph M., 276, 277, 279, 296, 305, Eisenhower, Dwight D., 297, 298, 304, 314,
322-23 317-18, 319, 321, 322, 325, 335
Doi Takako, 387, 389 Girard case and, 316
Dole, Robert, 375-76, 378 Indochina involvement and, 308-10
"dollar diplomacy," 93 Lucky Dragon incident and, 31
Dominican Republic, 169 Sino-Japanese trade and, 306, 312
domino theory, 170, 308-9, 310 Eisenhower administration, 305, 314, 315-16
Donnelly, J. C., 258 elections, U.S.:

Doolittle, James H., 177,228 of 1900, 70, 72,90

Tokyo raid of, 224-25 of 1912, 97, 103, 05

Dooman, Eugene, 202, 203, 204, 237, 275, of 1916, 112, 115, 127

287, 294-95 of 1932, 155, 171

Dower, John, 267-68 of 1940, 191, 194, 216
Draper, William H., 272. 274, 277, 279 of 1942, 224
DuBois, W E. B., 124 of 1944, 221, 235, 243
Dulles, John Foster, xx, 262, 284, 285, 300, of 1948, 261, 270, 274, 275
302, 303, 304, 310, 311,316, 323, of 1952, 297, 298
346, 367 of 1964, 338, 341
ANZUS pact and, 288 of 1968, 347, 351
death of, 319 of 1972, 354, 358, 360
domino theory and, 308-9 of 1974, 363
on Japanese militarism, 297-98 of 1980, 370
nuclear issue and, 313 of 1984, 375
peace treaty negotiations and, 283, 288-93 of 1992, xxi. 390
Sino-Japanese trade and, 305—6 of 1994, 392
"Yoshida letter" and, 293 Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act (EPAA)
Yoshida's talks with, 289-92, 293 (1973), i6\
Dunne, Finley Peter, 63, 72, 88 Emerging ] apanese Sviferstate. The (Kahn), 352
 1

Indt 4 9

Emmerson. John K.. wii. wiii. 256, 294 442nd Regimental Combat Team. L.S.. 221.
Enok Go), 24". 401 288
Enterprise. USS. 346 Fragile Blossom, The iBrzezinsld). 352. 364
"Errand -Bearers. The (Wliitman). 24 France. 16. 21, 38, 39. 40. 41. 58. 61. 66. 76.
Evarts, William M.. 42. 44 80, 87-88, 92, 93. 107. 1 12. 1 13. 122.

Exclusion Act (1882). 221 131. 139. 141. 191.232.258. 313.

Exclusion Act (National Origins Act' (1924), 326,335.351
144-46, 158.219 Bretton Woods framework and. 259
Executive Order 9066. 220 de Gaulle go\emment of, 328
Export-lmpon Bank 1~9. 303, 369. 3~4. 392 Indochina reoccupation and. 280-8 1 309— .

10
Factor)- Law (1911), Japanese, 97 open-door poUcy and. 69
Pahs. Charles Burton. 300. 303 Triple Inter\ ention and. 5

Fallows. James. 399 Franklin. Benjamin. 36

Far Eastern Commission * FEC 260

=. Franks. Oliver. 2~5
Faulkner. \\ illiam. xxii Freedom and Peoples Rights Movement" 35
Fearey. Robert, 238-39 Friend. Theodore. 229
Federal Resene Act (1913-. 122 Friendship and Mutual .Assistance Treat)
Federation of Economic Organizations. 294. (1950). 282
312 Fuji)ama .Aiichiro. 260. 319. 322
Federation of Students Self-Govemment .Asso- Fukuda Doctrine. 367
ciations. 319 Fukuda Takeo. 337. 341. 367. 369. 370
Fillmore. Millard. 11. 12. 13. 396 Fukuzawa Yukichi. 36-37. 38. 48

Finance MinistT\. Japanese, xxi. 299, 303, Fulbright. William. 262

328. 329. 341-t2, 376-77. 378, 380. Funabashi Yoichi. 377, 390
383. 386-8". 39" "Fundamentals of National Policy." 181

Fish, Hamilton. 192-93

Fiske. Bradley A.. 105-6 Galbraith. John Kenneth. 392
Five-Power Treat). 141-42. 1"2. 176, 180 Gascoigne. .Alver). 2~4
Florida Times-Union, 84 General .Agreement on Tarifts and Trade
"fl\ing geese model. 366 (GATT.278-"9. 311.317
FKing Tigers, 196.201 General Electric. 157
Forbes, 379 "Genius of Japanese Ci\ilization. The
Ford. Gerald. 361.363, 364 (Heamt. 52-53
Ford. Wbrthington C 6" genw, 74. 83. 101. 108. 1 1 1. 1 12. 121

Foreign Affairs Ad%isor\ Council. Japanese. decline of. 133

11" Gendemens Agreement ' 1900'. 88

Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Gentlemen s .Agreement 190" ^

i. 145
Law (1 949 K
2"" Gere. Richard. 402
Foreign Office. British. 96. 97, 216, 308, 342 Germany. Federal Republic of (West). 285,
Foreign Office. Japanese. 208. 252. 299. 306 326. 351.381.402
Formosa, 43-44, 50, 52. 62. "2. 162. 1"4. Germany Imperial. 38. 40. 41. 58. 59. 61. 63.

230, 237. 279 65-66. 80, 87-88. 89. 93. 95. 106,
see also Taiwan 108. 113. 116. 122. 134. 162

Forrestal. James. 243. 245. 252. 253. 25~-5S. Asia Policy of. 50-5 1 62
.

265. 2"4 Brest-Litovsk Peace .Agreement and. 1 18

Forrestal. Michael. 342 open-door policy and. 69
40 Committee. 336 Triple Inten ention and. 5

"four policemen" concept. 231. 233. 239-40 Germany Nazi. xx. 193. 201, 208. 22S. 237,

Four- Power Treat), 139. 141 238

Fourteen Points, 117 Japans .Anti-Comintem pact with, 181-82
InJe 4 9 i

Poland invaded by, 190 "Great Leap Forward, " 3 1

Soviet Union invaded by, 197 Great Pacific War, The (Bywater), 179
surrender of, 244 Great Society program, 342
war declared on U.S. by, 212 Greece, 271,335
Germany, Weimar, 150, 153 Greene, Conyngham, 128
Gilbert Islands, 233 Gresham, Walter Quintin, 34, 42, 48, 49, 50,

Gilpatrick, Roswell, 334-35 54

Girard, William S., 316 Grew, Alice, 174
Gluck, Carol, 400 Grew, Joseph, 174, 184, 192, 194, 204, 206-
Glynn, James, 11-12 7, 237, 238, 242, 243, 244, 275
Godzilla (film), 301 "Dear Frank" letter of, 202-3
Go/orBrofee (film), 288 Grey, Edward, 108, 111, 112

gold standard, 174, 386 Griscom, Lloyd, 77

Goldwater, Barry, 341 Groves, Leslie, 244-45
Gompers, Samuel, 34 Guadalcanal, Battle of, 228, 229
Good Earth, The (film), 206 Guam, 90, 187, 212, 223, 234, 286
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 381 Gulf War, xxi, 382, 385-89, 402
Grady, Henry, 258 onset of, 385
Grant, Gary, 222 U.S.-China relations and, 385-86, 389
Grant, Ulysses S., 38, 44 Gulick, Sidney L., 145
Great Britain, 3, 15, 16, 38, 39, 41, 49, 51,

58, 59, 61, 63, 66, 68, 72, 84, 85, 87- Hadley, Eleanor, 269
88,89,93,95,96,99, 111, 113, 131, Hagerty, James, 321
132, 148, 150, 154, 155, 162, 182, Haiti, 111, 169
191, 194,208, 209,212,240, 258, Halifax, Lord, 236
262, 270, 274, 280, 288, 326, 351 Hall, John Whitney, 212-13
Anglo-Japanese alliance and, 76, 94, 1 12, Halliday, Jon, 285
122, 128-29, 276 Halsey, William F "Bull," 228, 235
Atlantic Charter and, 216 Hamaguchi Osachi, 157, 158-59
Bolshevik revolution and, 1 17 Hammond, John Hays, 94
Bretton Woods framework and, 259 Hanihara Masanao, 145
China trade and, 4, 9, 1 1-12, 20, 21 HaraTakashi (Hara Kei), 121, 122, 123-24,
Five-Powers Treaty and, 141 133, 134, 140, 163
four policemen idea and, 231 assassination of, 139
Germany's Pacific possessions seized by, Washington Conference and, 135-36
108-9 Harding, Warren G., 129, 138, 144
gold standard dropped by, 166 Harding administration, 135
Gulf War and, 386 Harriman, Edward H., 86, 87, 95
Japanese trade and, 22 Harriman, W Averell, 239, 243, 249, 273,

London Naval Conference and, 157-58 274, 335, 337

Manchuria crisis and, 171-72 Harris, Townsend, 18-22, 25, 26, 29, 36, 44,
mandate system and, 176 90
open-door policy and, 65, 69 Shogun's meeting with, 21
Sino-Japanese trade and, 305 treaty negotiated by, 21-22
Sino-Japanese War and, 184, 187, 189 Harrison, Benjamin, 54
Soviet-Japanese neutrality treaty and, 196 Hashimoto Ryutaro, 393
Washington Conference and, 137-38, 139 Hata Tsutomu, 394
"Yoshida letter" and, 293 Hatoyama Ichiro, 312, 314, 315
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 191, Havens, Thomas, 344
192,215, 229, 308 Hawaii, 11,65,84,89,90,92,96. 105, 140.
and Japan's postwar recovery, 294 143
 1 2

InJc 4 9 2

Hawaii (continued) personal philosophy of, 129-30

Akihito's visit to, 332 Hoover, J. Edgar, 344
Japanese emigration to, 53-54 Hoover administration, 166, 171
U.S. annexation of, 53-57, 60-61, 107 Hornbeck, Stanley K., 132, 150, 152, 153,

U.S. racism and, 55 167-68, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 10 179, 180, 184, 203, 204, 206, 208,

Hay, John, 61, 66, 72, 75, 77, 92, 93, 1 16, 236, 334
136, 141,206, 278, 286, 397 Hosoya Chihiro, 119, 191. 195
China trade and, 68-69 Hotta Masayoshi, 18, 20, 21-23
open-door notes of, 69—70 House, Edward H., 50
Hearn, Lafcadio, 52-53. 64, 400 House, Edward M., 112, 118, 125, 126, 183
Hearst, William Randolph, 104, 105, 112, 120 as Wilson's advisor, 121, 122—23
Henry, Patrick, 35, 36 House of Commons, Japanese, 40
Heren, Louis, 332, 333 House of Councilors, Japanese, 321, 382

Herter, Christian, 319 House of Representatives, U.S., 38, 61, 135,

Heusken, Henry C. J., 19,21 387

murder of, 25 Exclusion Act passed by, 145
Higashikuni Naruhiko, 263 Ludlow Amendment defeated by, 187
Hill, James J.. 66, 88 war resolution passed by, 2 1

Hilsman, Roger, 335 "How to Tell Your Friends from Japs," 222
Hirano Ken'ichiro, 289, 303 Hughes, Charles Evans, 127, 130, 135-37.
Hiranuma Kiichiro, 190 139, 140, 146-47, 149-50, 288, 334
Hiroaki Hiroshi, 63 Exclusion Act opposed by, 144—45
Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 150—51, 152, Washington Conference and, 141—42, 143
166, 170, 180, 182, 192, 195,208, Hull, Cordell, 178, 184, 185, 188-90, 193,

213, 228,229, 265, 267 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206-7, 209,

death of, 382 236, 238, 252, 270, 334, 374

Japanese surrender and, 250—51, 252, 254- Pearl Harbor attack and, 21 1-12
55 views and philosophy of, 1 79—80
MacArthur's meeting with, 262 Humphrey, George, 306
Nixon's meeting with, 359 Humphrey. Hubert, 347
at Olympic Games of 1964, 338 Hungary, 310, 321
Tojo ousted by, 250—51 Hunt's Merchant Magazine, 1

war crimes charges and, 261—62 Hurley Patrick J., 217, 233
war declaration of, 215 Hussein, Saddam, 385, 386, 387-88
Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 247-48, 255-
56 lacocca, Lee A., 366
HirotaKoki, 177, 181 IBM, 332, 403
Hitler, Adolf, xx, 178, 190, 195, 196, 208, Ickes. Harold. 200. 209
212,215,228,229, 238,250 lemochi (Shogun), 36
HoChiMinh, 309, 310, 341 lesada (Shogun), 17-18
Hollywood, 222, 288 Igarashi Takeshi, 277
Holt, Hamilton, 91 liNaosuke, 18. 22-23,25
Homma Masaharu, 265 Ikeda Hayato, 283, 31 1, 318. 319. 322, 323,

Homma Nagayo, 260, 383 325,331, 333,337,339, 340

Hong Kong, 99, 212, 223, 231-32, 288 Japan's economic prosperit}' and, 326, 327—
Hoover, Herbert, 125, 126, 132, 149-50, 153, 28
159, 170, 171, 172, 173,243 "three-pillar" statement of, 326
background of, 129 Ikiru (film), 402
Great Depression and, 154-55, 158 Imperial Conference, Japanese, 77-78, 197,

Japanese victories as seen by, 217 208, 254

Indc 4 9 3

imperialism, 40-41, 65, 72 Ludlow Amendment and, 186-87

social Darwinism and, 79-80 Sino-Japanese War and, 184-85
Imperial Military Reserve Association, 163 Israel, 349, 360, 362
Imperial Rescript on the End of the War, 254- Issekt-kai, 164
55 Itagaki Seishiro, 152-53, 163, 164
Inada Juichi, 362 Italy, 40, 69, 72, 141, 150, 190, 193, 335
India, 9, 66, 76, 107, 193, 223, 231-32, 279, Ito Hirobumi, 37, 46-49, 50, 51, 58, 67, 68,
281,291 73, 74, 75-76, 77, 82, 83, 87, 88
Indochina, 191, 192, 193, 197, 200, 201, 203, Iwakura Tomomi, 37-40, 42, 43, 46-47
204, 208, 230, 232, 240 Iwasaki company, 93
Anglo-French reoccupation of, 280 Iwasaki family, 132
NSC- 124 and, 308 Iwasaki Yataro, 139
U.S. involvement in, 280-81 Iwo Jima, 236, 282
see also Vietnam
Indonesia, 191, 192, 209, 223, 310, 345, 346, Jackson, Andrew, 1

367, 378 Jamestown, 28

Inoue Junnosuke, 155, 157, 158-59, 163, Japan:
166, 169, 170, 171 Anti-Comintern Pact signed by, 181-82
Inoue Kyoko, 268 antiwar movement in, 344-45
Interim Committee, 244 Axis alliance and, 193-95
International Christian University, 300 "Bloody May Day" riots in, 295
International Council of Women, 124 bureaucracy of, 75, 362, 384, 397
International Energy Agency, 361 business-government relationship and, xix,

International House of Japan, 300 93, 134, 162, 368

International Peace Cooperation law (1992), closed country policy of, 8
389 coast guard and navy of, 282
International Settlement, 171 Communist roundup in, 287-88
interwar period: defense budget of, 370
Atlantic Conference and, 201-2 democracy movement of, 133-34, 148,
Axis Pact and, 193-95, 204 153
co-prosperity sphere and, 191-93 emergence of middle class in, 133

end of 191 1 U.S. -Japan trade treaty and, Emperor institution in, 7, 22-23, 30, 215,
189-90 218,267-68
FDR's freeze order and, 200-201 in first encounter with West, 7-9
Crew's "Dear Frank" letter and, 202-3 "flying geese" model and, 366
Japan's Southeast Asia interests and, 191 foreigners debate in, 25-26
Konoe's "new order" declaration and, 189 GNPof, 313, 326, 362, 372
Konoe's summit proposal and, 203-5 gold standard and, 155, 174
Nazi-Soviet Pact and, 190 imperialism and, 41, 46, 48, 91, 99, 128.
Pawa}' incident and, 186-87, 188 174-75
Soviet-Japanese neutrality treaty and, 195- intelligence organization of, 287
96 Ito-Komura rivalry and, 75-76
see also Pearl Harbor attack kokutai concept of, 151, 195, 253, 263-64,
Inukai Tsuyoshi, 170, 172 265
Iran, 369, 370 language of, 5

Iraq, 382, 385, 387 mandate system and, 126

Ishibashi Tanzan, 314-15 Maritime Safety Force of, 287
Ishihara Shintaro, 387 military upgraded in, 371-73
Ishii Kikujiro, 1 14-16, 117, 1 19, 145 Momotaro "Peach Boy" fable of, 236-39
Ishiwara Kanji, 153, 163-64, 183 1923 earthquake disaster in, 133, 149, 155
isolationism, 76, 112-13, 143 1929 stock market crash and, 153-56
 1 1

Indt 4 9 4

Japan (continued) Kades, Charles, 267, 268, 274

1964 OlvTnpic Games and, 338 Kahn. Herman, 352—53
nuclear non-proliferation treaty signed by, Kaifu Toshiki, 382, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389
350-51, 355 Kajiwara Nakaji, 132, 259
oil crisis and, 360. 361-62 kamikaze, 235, 236, 240-41, 253
paternalistic labor policy of, 97-98 Kanagawa, treaty of (1854), 14-15
peacekeeping operations and, 389 Kaneko Kentaro, 78, 80, 177-78, 192

per capita income of, 398 Kanemaru Shin, 382-83

Policy Reserve of, 287 Kanemitsu Hideo, 379
political prisoners in, 156, 264—65 Kan Hideki, 373
post-Cold War era and, 382-83 Kantor, Mickey, 390, 392-93
post-World War recession in, 132-34
I Katayama Tetsu, 268
religion and, 5, 7, 91 Kato Kanji, 1 58
rice riots of 1918 in, 133 KatoKomei, 107-8, 112, 114
Root-Takahira agreement and, 92 Twenty-one Demands and, 109—1
"Shidehara" era of, 138-39 Kato Shizue, 266
South Africa trade and, 381 KatoTakashi, 145
U.S. banking consortium and, 151-52 Kato Tomosaburo, 138, 139, 140-41
vertical integration style of, 100 KatsuraTaro. 74, 75-77, 81, 101, 192
Vichy Frances pact with, 193 Taft's agreement with, 85-86
see also capitalism; "economic miracle;" Kawabata Yasunari, 352
Meiji era; militan,; Japanese; United heihatsii, 340
States-Japan relationship heidanren (business association), 294, 312,
Japan as Numher One (Vogel), 365-66 368
Japan Development Bank, 303, 329 keiretsu (networks), 365, 373, 379. 384, 391,

Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, 88 397. 398. 400, 403

Japan Lobby (American Council on Japan), Kellogg, Frank, 1 5

275 Kellogg-Briand Peace Treaty (1928), 151, 169

Japan Sea, Battle of, 82 Kennan, George F., x\a, 275, 277, 279. 281,
Japan Society; 91, 145 282, 285
Japan That Can Say "No," The (Morita and Cold War as seen by, 272-73
Ishihara), 387-88 "Long Telegram" of, 273
Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 178 on Sino-Japanese trade, 280
Jensen, Merrill, 300 Kennedy, David, 351
Jessup, Philip, 281 Kennedy. John F., 331-32, 335, 338, 368,
Jews, 80-81, 144 371
Jimmu Tenno, 5, 7, 30, 218 New Frontier of, 334

Johnson, Albert, 144-45 Sino-Japanese trade and, 336—37

Johnson, Chalmers, 373, 379, 384, 399 Kennedy, Robert F., 333, 347
Johnson, Lyndon B., 344. 345 Kennedy administration. 322. 329

Sato and, 340, 343, 345, 346 Kenseikai Party. Japanese. 134
Vietnam War escalation and, 339, 341—42, Kern. Henn; 275
343 Keynes, John Maynard, 174
Johnson, U. Alexis, 326, 332, 339, 347, 355 Khrushchev, Nikita S.. 306, 314, 320
Johnson administration, 329 Kido Koichi, 251, 253, 254. 264
Joint Board of the Army and Navy, 106 Kim Il-sung, 284-85
Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S., xxi, 241, 242, 244, King, Ernest J., 242
286 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 344, 347

J. P. Morgan company. 95, 113, 130, 132, 149. Kishinev Massacre (1903), 81
151 Kishi Nobusuke, 162, 315-21, 322, 335, 337,
Justice Department. U.S., 209 356, 367
Inde 4 9 5

Kissinger, Henry A., xxi, 354, 355, 357-58, Japanese military units in, 285-86
360, 361, 362 Japanese view of, 286-88, 302
on U.S. -Japanese relationship, 348-49 MacArthur and, 285-86
Kita Ikki, 164 outbreak of, 283, 285
KMT (Nationalist) Party, Chinese, 233 Sino-Japanese trade and, 284
Knowland, William, 293 Stalin and, 284-85
Know Your Enemy—Japan (film), 222 UN and, 284-85
Knox, Philander C, 92-93, 95-96, 98, 126 U.S. counteroffensive in, 285-86
Kodama Yoshio, 287 U.S. -Japanese cultural exchanges and, 299-
Koiso Kuniaki, 251 300
Kojong, King of Korea, 47-48, 49, 51, 85 Yoshida's views of, 286-88, 302

hokutai (National Polity), 151, 195, 253, 263- Kuboura Hirota, 248
64, 265 Kuhn, Loeb company, 81, 95
Komei, Emperor of Japan, 12, 13, 18 Ku Klux Klan, 144

Komeito (Clean Government Party), Japanese, Kume Kunitake, 38, 39

327, 383 Kuomindong movement, 147, 150, 152, 164

Komura Jutaro, 61-62, 68, 75-77, 81, 82-83, Kurile Islands, 9, 43, 126, 239, 263, 282, 292,

84,91,92,94,95, 114 314

Harriman proposal and, 86-87 Kuriyama Takakazu, 399
Konoe Fumimaro, 182-83, 184, 190, 192, Kurosawa Akira, 402
194, 195, 206, 213, 228,255,264 Kurusu Saburo, 207, 21 1-12
"new order" declaration of, 1 89 Kuwait, 385, 386
suicide of, 263 Kwajalein, 233

summit proposal of, 203-5 Kwantung Army, Japanese, 152, 160, 161,

Tojo's ouster and, 250-51 162, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176, 180,

Kono Yasuko, 338 248, 264

Koo, Wellington, 124 ideology of, 163-64
Korea, 35, 37, 47-48, 50-52, 65, 67, 68, 81, Mukden incident and, 164—66

83, 84,92, 106, 107, 122, 126, 162, Kwantung Leased Territory, 99
174,237,258,263,279
Anglo-Japanese alliance and, 76
China and, 44-45 Lamont. Thomas, XV, 130-32, 134, 140, 143,
Japan's annexation of, 87, 96 145, 151, 153, 157, 169, 171, 173,

Japan's preoccupation with, 43-45 179, 189,239,259, 334

Meiji regime and, 43-45 Kajiwara's agreement with, 132, 142, 144,
partition of, 256, 271-72, 284 160
Russo-Japanese War and, 78 Lansing, Robert, 109, 111, 112-13, 114. 117,
Shufeldt treaty and, 44-45, 49 118, 121, 123, 125, 126-27, 130
Taft-Katsura agreement and, 85-86 Ishii's agreement with, 115-16, 131, 142,
Tokugawa Shogunate and, 43 203
Tonghak uprising in, 48-49 Laos, 232
Triple Intervention and, 51 Lattimore, Owen, 196
U.S. attempt to open, 44-45 Law Concerning Foreign Investment (1950),
Korea, Democratic People's Republic of 277
(North), 284-85, 394 Lawrence, W H., 255-56
Korea, Republic of (South), 271-72, 275, 284, Lea, Homer, 94
302, 320, 350, 364, 366, 394 League of Nations, 121-22, 135, 152
Korean War, 281,296, 298 Brussels Conference and, 185
Chinese intervention in, 286, 343 Japan's departure from, 173, 192
CIA's tungsten deal and, 287 Manchuria Crisis and, 166, 169, 170, 173

Japanese economy and, 293-94, 295 mandate system and, 126

 1

Ind< 4 9 6

League of Nations (continued) Emperor question and, 261-62

race equality clause and, 123-24 Hirohito's meeting with, 262
U.S. Senate's rejection of, 127 in Japanese surrender, 255
Leahy, William D., 216-17, 252 Japan's Constitution and, 266-68
LeGendre, Charles W., 44 Korean War and, 285-86
LeMay Curtis E., 235-36 NSC-13/2 opposed by 274
honored by Japan, 338-39 Occupation reforms of, 263, 264-69
lend-lease, 201, 240 315
Lenin, V. I., 116, 118, 119, 133 peace treaty negotiations and, 291
Leyte Gulf, Battle of, 235 in return to Philippines, 234-35
Liaison Conference, Japanese, 208 Truman on personality of, 260-61
Liaotung Peninsula, 161, 163 MacArthur, Douglas, II, 316, 317, 321
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japanese, McCain, John, 388
330, 340. 366, 371, 380, 381,402 McCarthyism, 295
CIA covert financing of, 318, 326-28, 335- McCloyJohn, 220, 221
36, 337 McConaughy Walter, 214-15
corruption in, xxi, 382-83 McCook, JohnJ., 78
Nixon's "China shock" and, 356—57 MacDonald, Ramsay 158
rifts within, 318, 367, 383, 389 McDonald's, 365
Liberal Party Japanese, 263, 299, 312 Machiko, Princess of Japan, 332
Life, 206, 216, 229, 233, 301 McKinley William, 55-56, 57, 62, 78, 322
Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, 54 assassination of, 73
Lincoln, Abraham, 25, 61, 90 Boxer uprising and, 69, 72
Lippmann, Walter, 123, 126, 169-72, 222 open-door policy and, 70, 72
Literary Digest, 177 Spanish-American War and, 58-61
Litvinov, Maxim, 178 McKinley administration, 68-69
Lloyd George, David, 121, 125 McNamara, Robert, 341, 342
Local Autonomy Law (1947), 268 Maekawa Report, 379
Locke, John, 133 MAGIC intercepts, 197. 200, 208, 209, 211-
Lockheed Corporation, 357, 363, 369, 371 12
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 70, 82, 89, 104-5, 126, Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 56, 61, 79, 96
135, 140, 145 Maine, USS, 58
London Naval Conference (1930), 157-59, Makino, Baron, 124, 125
167 Malaya, 191, 193. 212, 223
"Long Telegram, 273 " Malaysia, 345
Lord, Winston, 390 Manchu dynasty, 67-69, 99-100
Los Angeles Times, 88, 219 Manchukuo, 166, 176, 178-79, 183, 196,
Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), 78 204, 205, 208
Lovett, Robert, 241 Manchuria, 17, 50, 51, 58, 61, 65, 70, 74,

L-T deals, 330-31. 336 75-77, 81, 83,84,89,91-92, 101,

Luce, Henry, 206, 222 106, 107. 108, 112, 117, 122, 131-32.
"American Century" of, 216, 257 134, 147, 148, 149, 151, 188, 237,
Lucky Dragon, 3 1 239, 243, 246, 258, 279, 292
Ludlow Amendment, 186-87 FDR and. 175-79
Lytton, A. G. R., 173 geography of. 161
Lytton Report, 173 Great Britain and. 171-72
Harriman proposal and, 86—87
MacArthur, Douglas, 201. 231. 233, 270. 272, Imperial China and. 87, 92, 94-95
273, 276, 277, 280, 281, 295, 297, Japanese invasion of, 160, 166-70, 171,

300, 397, 401 175-76

background of, 223 Japan's dependence on, 161-62
In<l« 4 9 7

Lansing-Ishii agreement and, 1 15-16 economic reforms of, 45-46

League of Nations and, 166, 169, 170, 173 Fukuzawa and, 36-37
Lytton Report and, 173 imperialism and, 40—41, 46
Mukden incident and, 164-66, 169 innovations of, 34-35
Nine-Power Treaty and, 142, 143 "knowledge seeking" expedition and, 23-25,
non-recognition doctrine and, 171, 176 37-39, 42, 46
open-door policy and, 95-96, 171-73 Korea debate and, 43-45
puppet government of, 173 military and, 35-36, 45, 47
Russo-Japanese fisheries agreement of 1907 political reforms of, 46
and, 93-94 Sansom's observation of, 97
Soviet Union's postwar designs on, 249- Satsuma Rebellion and, 35-36, 40, 41
50 Shintoism as state religion and, 41-42
Stimsonand, 168-72, 173 unequal treaties and, 29, 42, 48, 96-97
Taft-Komura neutralization agreement and, Mellon, Lowell O., 302-3
95-96 Melville, Herman, 10
Tanaka's policy and, 152-53 Mencken, H. L., 265
truce in, 176 Mexico, 3, 89, 111, 115, 398
Twenty-one Demands crisis and, 111 Japan and, 104
Manchuria Youth Congress, 146 Meyer, Armin H., 350
Manhattan Project, 244-45, 246 Michener, James, 300-301
manifest destiny, 9—1 1, 17, 45 Micronesian Islands, 263
Manila Bay, Battle of, 59-60 Midway, Battle of, 225, 250
Mansfield, Mike, 363 Midway Island, 212, 223
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), 231, 232, 242, Miki Takeo, 330, 337, 347, 348, 363, 367,
278, 317,358 382
Nixon's talks with, 355-56, 359-60 mihtary, Japanese, xix, 117, 151

Marco Polo Bridge incident, 183 economic control by, 162—63

Marianna Islands, 108, 126, 143, 234, 240 Inukai assassinated by, 172
Marine Corps, U.S., 89, 171, 231, 236 London agreement opposed by, 1 58-59
Maritime Safety Force, Japanese, 287 Taisho era and, 101
Marshall, George, C, 196, 242, 244, 258, "total mobilization" idea of, 162
273, 289 Yamagata's strengthening of, 74-75
Asia policy and, 271, 275 see also Kwantung army, Russo-Japanese
Pearl Harbor attack warning of, 211 War, Sino-Japanese War, World War I,

Marshall Islands, 108, 143, 233-34, 240 World War II

Marshall Plan, 278, 294 Mills, C. Wright, 319

Massachusetts Agricultural College, 42 Mills, Wilbur, 351
"massive retaliation, " 298 Min, Queen of Korea, 51
Matsu, 140 Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI),
Matsukata Masayoshi, 45, 46, 54 Japanese, 162
Matsumoto Joji, 266, 267 Ministry of International Trade and Industry
Matsuoka Yosuke, 163, 176. 191-92 (MITI), xxi, 296-97, 303, 304, 325,
Axis alliance as seen by, 194-95 328-29, 337, 354, 355, 356, 363, 365,
Soviet neutrality treaty and, 195-96 371, 375, 376,379,380,387
Mayo, Marlene, 39 oil crisis and, 362
Meiji, Emperor of Japan, 30, 35, 37, 40, 47, Mishima Yukio, 352-53
48, 74, 97 Mississippi, USS, 13
Meiji era, xix, 98, 153, 397 Missouri, USS, 255
Constitution of 1889 and, 39-40, 41, 46, Mitchell, Billy, 137
47 Mitsubishi zaifcafsM, 86, 97, 107, 132, 175,
and copying of West, 36-37, 39, 46, 52 188,269, 303, 337, 362, 365
 5

Indc 4 9 8

Mitsui zaihatsu, 51, 86, 93, 97, 109, 132, 149, secret Decision Directive of 1982 of, 373
155, 157, 162, 175, 188,269,294, Naval Act (1938), 187
303 Navy, U.S., 89, 96, 135, 172, 176, 231, 241,
Miwa Shigeyoshi, 234 370
Miyazawa Kiichi, 382 Navy Department, U.S., 59, 179
Mohy-Dick (Melville), 10 NawaToichi, 188
Mohammed, Elijah, 222 Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 190
Molotov, Vyacheslav, 248, 249 Netherlands, 9, 15-16, 22, 141, 191, 258
Momotaro ("Peach Boy") fable, 229-30 Netherlands East Indies, 193, 200, 209, 223
Mongolia, 131-32, 161, 173 Neville, E. L., 136

Inner, 109, 115, 142 New Deal, 184, 187, 216, 224, 333, 342
Monroe, James, 104, 114 New Frontier, 334
Monroe Doctrine: New Proposals (Shinron) (Aizawa), 16
Japan's adaptation of, 114-15, 177-78, 179 New Re-public, 77 1

Lodge Corollary, 40, 104 Newsweek, 177, 275, 344

Morgenthau, Henry, 184, 187, 208, 245 New York Commercial, 94
Morison, Samuel Eliot, 222 New York Council on Foreign Relations, xvii,

Morita Akio, 387 176, 193, 294

Morley, James, xvii New York Evening Post, 90
Morris, Roland, 121 NewYorkTimes, 7, 15, 23-24, 29, 115, 126,
Morrison, 10 169, 172, 177, 187, 193, 255, 302,
Motono Ichiro, 1 1 321, 336, 343, 346, 357, 361, 371,
Mott,JohnR.,91 392
Mozambique, 389 Neu^ York Times Magazine, 1 56
Mukden, Battle of, 80 New York Tribune, 59
Mukden incident, 164—66 Neu^ York World, 55, 105
Murayama Tomiichi, 402 New Zealand, 135, 193, 223, 228, 288, 343
Murphy, R. Taggart, 393, 399 Ngo Dinh Diem, 338
Mutsu Munemitsu, 48, 49, 50-51 Nicaragua, 111, 169
Nichiren (Buddhist priest), 163-64
Nagako, Empress of Japan, 359 Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, 82, 1 16
Nagasaki, atomic bombing of, 248, 256 Nicolson, Harold, 125
Nakaoka Shintaro, 18 Nimitz, Chester, 225, 233-34, 237, 241
Nakasone Yasuhiro, 347, 351, 362, 374, 375, Nine-Power Treaty, 141-43, 170, 171-72,

376, 377, 379 176,207

resignation of, 381-82 Nish, Ian, 41, 182-83, 197
upgrading of military and, 371-73 Nishihara Masashi, 404
Nakayama Masa, 322 Nissan company, 175, 304, 328, 362, 378
Natabe Inazo, 133 Nitze, Paul, 282, 295
National City Bank, 113, 152 Nixon, Patricia, 359
National Defense Action Act (1940), 192 Nixon, Richard M., xxi, 298, 303, 339, 347,
National Defense Women's Association, 163 358,372
National Foreign Trade Council, 180 detente and, 352
National Origins Act, see Exclusion Act Hirohito's meeting with, 359
National Security Agency, 335 Japanese view of, 348
National Security Council (NSC), 306, 314, Mao's talks with, 355-56, 359-60
348, 350, 372, 375, 376 Nixon Doctrine announced by, 349-50
NSC- 13/2 of, 273-74, 276 Sato and, 348-50
NSC-48/2 of, 277-79 Soviet Union visited by, 356
NSC-68 of, 282-83, 285, 296, 308 Tanaka and, 356-57
NSC- 124 of, 308 U.S. dollar manipulation and, 353-54
Indc 4 9 9

Watergate scandal and, 360 Orwell, George, 368

Nixon Doctrine, 349-50 Outer Mongolia, 93, 239
Nomonhan, Battle of, 190 Overseas Private Investment Corporation,
Nomura Kichisaburo, 196-97, 201-4, 207. 374, 392
211-12 Owner-Farmer Establishment Law of 1946,
non-recognition doctrine, 171, 176 265
Norman, E. H., xix Ozawa Ichiro, 383, 394
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), 398
Pacific Fleet. U.S., 56, 59, 191, 21 1

Oda Makoto, 344-45 Palau Campaign, 372

Oe Kenzaburo, 255, 344 Pan-African Congress, 124
Office of Strategic Services, 300 Panama, 169, 385
Office of War Information (OWI), 222 Panama Canal, 89-90, 100
Ohira Masayoshi, 336, 337-38, 357, 368-70 Panay, 186-87, 188

oil, 134, 194, 200, 360, 361-62 panic of 1927, 162

Okamoto Shumpei, 78 Paris peace conference, 120-27
Okichi (geisha), 20 German colonies and, 125-26
Okinawa, 44, 240-41, 279, 282, 283, 286, Japan and, 1 20-26
288, 289-90, 316, 318, 334, 339, 346, League of Nations and, 121-26
347, 350, 351, 388,394-95 mandate system and, 126
see also Ryukyu Islands racial equality clause and, 123-24
Okubo Toshimichi, 43, 269 Shantung Settlement issue and. 122. 123.
Okuma Shigenobu, 107-8, 109 125. 126
OLYMPIC, Operation, 241 Wilson at, 119-20, 121, 122-26, 127, 130-
Olympic Games (1964), 338-39 31
Omnibus Trade measure (1988), 380 Parsons, Graham, 320
One WorW( Willkie), 216 Patria (film), 120
Onishi Takijiro, 253 Patterson, Robert, 259, 260
open-door policy, 84. 90, 92, 93, 103, 108, Peace and Friendship Treaty (1978), 369
115, 125, 136, 142, 167, 170, 178, Peace Commission. U.S., 61
180, 186, 196, 204, 206, 207, 368 Peace Corps, 333
Castle-Hornbeck dichotomy and, 267-68 Pearl Harbor attack, xvii, 218, 228, 402
France and, 69 casualties in, 211
Great Britain and, 65, 69 MAGIC intercepts and, 197, 200. 208.

Hay's notes on, 69-70 209,211-12

Imperial China and, 65-66, 69-70, 72 Marshall's warning and, 2 1

Imperial Germany and, 69 U.S. war resolution and, 212

Imperial Russia and, 69, 70 Yamamotoand, 209-11. 213
as international law, 141, 143 see also interwar period

Knox-Taft neutralization plan and, 95-96 Pembroke, 26

Konoe's "new order" declaration and. 189 "Perhaps They Are Human," 229
McKinley and, 70, 72 Perry, Matthew C, xviii, 10, 12-13, 14, 15,
Manchuria and, 95-96, 171-73 16, 17, 18, 23-24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 36.
War II era and, 258
post- World 54,62,63,90, 138. 160, 174,255,
Twenty-one Demands crisis and, 1 1 394
World War II and, 243, 246 Perry, Oliver Hazard, 12-13

Opium War, 9 Persian Gulf War, see Gulf War

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Peru, 330
Development (OECD), 327 Phelan, James D., 105
Oriental Development Company. 1 52 Philadelphia Press, 52
 9 —

Index 5

Philippines. 59. 63. 65. ~6. 81. 84. 89. 90. 92. NSC-68 and. 285
105. 143. 158. 191. 201. 204. 212. open-door poHcy and. 258
225. 264-65. 274. 2~9. 320. 345. 3"2 peace treat)- issue and. 2-0. 2-3--4. 281-
battle for Manila in. 235 82. 283. 288-93. 297
Japanese invasion of. 223-24 purge policy and. 265
Mac.\rthurs return to. 234—35 racism and. 259-60. 29-
Taft-Katsura agreement and, 85—86 "red purges" and. 2
U.S. annexation issue and. 60—62 regional associations idea and. 2-8— -9
U.S. recapture of. 230-31 reparations issue and. 269. 273. 2-6— ~,
Philippine Sea. Battle of the. 234 291
Philipps. William. 94-95 Sakhalin-Kuriles problem and. 263. 282.
Pierce. Franklin. 19 292
Pittman. Key. 180 second occupation in. 2-0-83
Plaza accord. 3"^~~. 382. 383 Sino-Japanese trade and. 2-6. 278-80. 284.
Ph^uouth. USS. 13 289. 293-95. 302. 305
Poland. 190.292. 310 Southeast Asia trade and. 280-81. 283.
Police Reserve. Japanese. 287. 298 294. 302
Port -Arthur. Battle of. 80 Truman Doctrine and. 2-]. 2-3
Portland Exposition '
1905 i.
~8 U.S. open Asia pohcy and. 2-1--2
Portsmouth peace conference 1905 i. 82—84. war crimes issue and. 261. 264—65
86.89 womens rights and. 265—66, 268, 289
Portugal. 141 Yalta agreements and. 258, 282
"Position of the United States with Respect to Yoshida and. see Yoshida Shigeru
Asia. The" ^^€-48'. 27---8 zaibatsu and, 268-69. 2-2. 2-3. 2"4. 2-6.

Postsurrender Policy." 259 277. 279

Postvvar Programs Committee. 238 Potsdam Conference (1945), 243, 244-46
post-World War II era. 258. 260. 262. 291. Potsdam Declaration. 246 \~. 252
294 Powell. Cohn. 388-89
Ashida coalition and. 2~5-~6 "power elite" theon. 3 1

Asia at outset of, 257-58 Prestou-itz. Clyde. 3-8. 379, 384

bases issue and. 288. 289-91 Pn\y Council. Japanese. -4. 26"
Bretton Woods framework and. 259 Progressive Part}". Japanese. 312
B\Tnes-So\iet deal and, 263 "Project Independence." 361
Cold War and, 257. 264, 269-73 Pru\-n. Robert H.. 26. 2--29
Constitution of 1948 and. 266-68. 298. Pueno Rico. 61
316-1". 319. 321 Putiatin. E\-fimii. 9. 14. 15

cultural exchanges and. 289 Pu-\i. Henr\. 1-3

economic recover\ in, 259-60, 2 — ~9 P>le. Ernie. 219. 241

education reforms in. 266
Emperor question and. 261—62 "quarantine" speech. 184—85. 188
exclusion of foreign investors in. 269 Quarino. \ ick\. 235
first occupation in, 262-70
GATT and, 2-8-79 race, racism. 65. "3. 91. 112. 209
international economy and. 258-59 in California. 88-89. 104-6, 107
Japan Uobby and. 2-5 Exclusion Act and. 1 44—^6
Kennan-Draper economic plan and. 2"6 forced relocation of Japanese .Americans
Kennans influence on. 2-2—74 and. 218-20
Korean W ar and. see Korean War in Hawaii. 55
Mac.Arthurs reforms and. 263. 264—69. 315 immigration debate and. 128, 135—36
NSC-13''2 and, 273-74 Japanese. 21 --18. 259-60. 2-6. 297. 3-3
NSC-48 2 and. 277-79 League of Nations debate and. 123—24
Index 5 1

Paris peace conference and, 123-24 death of, 240

in post-World War 11 era, 259-60, 297 Executive Order 9066 signed by, 220
social Darwinism and, 77, 79—80 and fall of Philippines, 223-24
ofTR, 79-80, 84-85 forced relocation of Japanese Americans
Victory over Japan Day controversy and, 381 and, 220-21
Washington Conference and, 142 "four policemen" concept of, 231, 233,
on Wilson, 101-3, 113-14 239-40
Wilson's decision for war and, 1 13-14 freeze order of, 200-201
World War II and, 217-23, 229, 230 Crew's "Dear Frank" letter to, 202-3
Yoshida's attitude on, 276 Konoe's summit proposal and, 203-5
Randall, Clarence, 314, 322 Ludlow Amendment and, 187-88
Rankin, Jeannette, 212 MAGIC intercepts and, 197, 200
Rashomon (film), 402 Manchuria crisis and, 175-79
Reader's Digest, 229 non-recognition doctrine and, 176
Reagan, Ronald, 366, 370, 371, 372, 373-74, postwar planning and, 231, 232-33, 234,
376 236
Reagan administration, 374-75. 376, 385 prelude to war and, 191-92, 193, 194, 208-
Reciprocity Act (1890), 54 9, 211
Reciprocal Trade Act (RTA) (1934), 179 "quarantine" speech of, 184-85, 188
Reconstruction Finance Bank, 328-29 Sino-Japanese War and, 183, 187-88
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 177 Soviet Union recognized by, 178
Recruit Corporation, 382 at Yalta Conference, 239
Reid, T. R., 400 Roosevelt, Theodore, 55-56, 59, 67, 69, 70,
Reinsch, Paul, 1 10-1 1, 1 16, 123, 167 90, 92, 95, 96, 103, 105, 167, 177-78
Reischauer, Edwin O., 281, 320, 333-35, 343 California's anti-Asianism and, 89
Reischauer, Haru, 333 Nobel Prize won by 83-84
Renewal Party, Japanese, 383 racism of, 79-80, 84-85
Renouvin, Pierre, xvi Russo-Japanese War and, 77, 78, 79-80,
Republican Party U.S., 72, 78, 236, 275, 279, 81, 82
382, 392 Taft-Katsura deal approved by, 85-86
see also elections, U. S. Root, Elihu, 89, 91, 96, 126, 167, 173
Rescript on Morals (1890), 91 Nine-Power Treaty and, 141-42
Reston, James, 321-22, 346 Takahira's agreement with, 92, 94
Rha-psody in August (film), 402 Rothschild, Lord, 81
Rhee, Syngman, 284 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 133
Roberts, Edmund, 10 Royall, Kenneth C, 272, 274
Robertson, Walter, 314 Rusk, Dean, 280-81, 283, 285, 335, 337-38,
Rockefeller, David, 364 340, 341-42, 343
Rockefeller, John D., Ill, 289, 300 Russell, Lindsay, 91
Rockefeller Foundation, 147, 300 Russell, Richard, 261

Rockhill, WiHiam W, 70, 76-77 Russia, 403-4

Rodgers, John, 25 Russia, Imperial, xix, 9, 15, 22, 38, 41, 47, 48,
Rogers, William, 355 50, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65-66, 68, 72,
Ronin, 25, 26, 28 74,92,95, 107, 114
Roosevelt, Alice, 85, 86 Alaska territory and, 25
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 194 Bloody Sunday outbreak in, 82
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 171, 174, 196, 206, Bolshevik revolution in, 116, 118
217, 218-19,228, 246,280 Brest-Litovsk peace agreement and, 1 18
Atlantic Charter and, 216 Japan's fisheries agreement of 1907 with,
at Atlantic Conference, 201 93-94
at Cairo Conference, 237 Japan's Manchuria agreement with, 96
 1 1 1

Inde 5 2

Russia, Imperial (continued) Schiff, Jacob, 81

open-door policy and, 69, 70 Schonberger, Howard, 287

Sakhalin possession and, 43—44 Scott, R. H., 291

Siberia intervention and, 117-18 Sea Dragon, USS, 342

Triple Intervention and, 5 second industrial revolution, 33-34, 63, 93
see also Russo-Japanese War Secret Service, Japanese, 50
Russo-Japanese War, 75-84 Seiyukai Party, Japanese, 67, 74, 121, 133,
Japan's economic difficulties and, 80-81 134, 151, 170, 172
peace terms of, 83-84 Self-Defense Force, Japanese, 287, 298, 319
Portsmouth Conference and, 82-83 Sematech, 379
prelude to, 75-77 semiconductor industry, 365, 379
TRand, 77, 78, 79-80,81, 82 Senate, U.S., 56, 60-61, 86, 92, 93, 124, 284,
U.S. and, 77, 78-80 313
Rwanda, 389 China Lobby of, 293
Ryukyu Islands, 43-44, 240, 346 Exclusion Act passed by, 145
see also Okinawa Foreign Relations Committee of, 126-27,
135, 172, 180,278
Saigo Takamori, 35-36, 43, 400 League of Nations rejected by, 127
Saionji Kimmochi, 87, 101, 117, 121, 122, Stimson confirmed by, 192
133, 163, 164, 166, 170, 183, 184, U.S. -Japan peace treaty and, 292-93
190, 195 war resolution passed by, 212
Saipan, 234 Seven Samurai (film), 402
Saito Makoto, 172, 173 Seventh Fleet, U.S., 235
Sakakibara Eisuke, 389, 399, 400 Seward, William H., 25, 42, 90
Sakhalin Island, 9, 43-44, 83, 149, 239, 253, Asia policy of, 26-29
263, 283, 292, 314 Shanghai, 171, 172
Samuelson, Robert J., 384 Shantung, 121, 135, 142, 143, 152
samurai, 7, 8, 16-17, 30, 34 Paris peace conference and, 122, 123, 125,
San Francisco Chronicle, 88 126
San Francisco Conference (1945), 293 Sherman, John, 57
San Francisco Conference (1951), 290—92 Shibusawa, Baron, 139, 143
Sanger, David E., 392 Shidehara Kijuro, 138-39, 145-47, 149, 150-
Sanjo Sanetomi, 43 51, 153, 157-58, 163, 164, 166, 168,

Sansom, George, 97, 261 170, 239,263

Santo Domingo, 1 1 Shigemitsu Mamoru, 255, 312, 313
Saratoga, USS, 13, 15 Shimazu Naoko, 123
Sato Eisaku, 318, 337, 344, 347, 353, 355, Shimizu, Sayuri, 305
356 Shimonoseki, Treaty of (1895), 51
background of, 339—40 Shintoism, 41-42, 91, 156
LBJ and, 340, 343, 345, 346 Shogun, 7,8, 18,21,22,26, 29
Nixon and, 348-50 Emperor-institution's replacement of, 33
textiles deal and, 351 opening of Japan and, 13-17
"Three Nonnuclear Principles' of, 340-41, Shotoku, Prince, 6
371 Shotwell, James T, 156-57
Sato Naotake, 248 Showa era, 151, 382
Satsuma Rebellion, 35-36 Showa Kenkyukai Association, 181

Saudi Arabia, 386 Shufeldt, Robert N., 44-45, 47

Sayonara (Michener), 301 Shultz, George, 372, 379-80
Scalapino, Robert, 340-4 Siam, 19
SCAP (Supreme Command of Allied Powers), Siberia, xix, 116-20, 121, 122, 135, 142, 143,
264, 272, 276, 277, 280, 300 151,263
Inclc 5 3

Bolshevik Revolution and, 1 16-18 South Manchurian Railway 86, 87, 93, 109,
Czech troops in, 118-19 110, 139, 151, 161, 164, 192
Nikolaevsk massacre in, 134 Soviet Union, 137, 147, 1 51, 161, 164, 173,

silk, 45, 155, 200 258,278, 279, 288, 312, 314, 330,
Silver Purchase Act (1934), 179-80 363
Simon, John, 171-72, 173 Afghanistan invaded by, 369
Singapore, 191, 223, 240, 288, 345 Angola and, 360-61
Sino-Japanese trade: Anti-Comintern Pact and, 181-82
Dulles and, 305-6 Bretton Woods framework and, 259
Eisenhower and, 306, 312 Brussels Conference and, 185
Great Britain and, 305 China's 1950 Friendship Treaty with, 282,
Imperial China and, 99-100 293
JFK and, 336-37 collapse of, xxi, 381, 384
Kennan and, 280 containment policy and, 273, 398, 305,
Korean War and, 284 404
post-World War II era and, 276, 278-80, detente and, 352, 353, 360
284, 289, 293-95, 302, 305 "four policemen" idea and, 231
State Department and, 279, 281 German invasion of, 197
Vietnam War and, 330-31 Hungarian intervention and, 310, 321
Yoshida and, 280, 305 Japan's neutrality treaty and, 195-96, 197
Sino-Japanese treaty (1885), 48 Japan's World War II relations with, 228-
Sino-Japanese treaty (1915), 125 29, 239, 242-45, 246, 247-50, 252
Sino-Japanese treaty (1918), 125 Korean jet shoot-down and, 371
Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), 112 Manchukuo and, 178
Sino-Japanese War (1937): Nationalist China and, 148-49
Chiang and, 183 Nazi-Soviet Pact and, 190
FDR and, 183, 187-88 Nixon's "China shock" and, 354-56, 358
Flying Tigers and, 196, 201 in NSC-68, 282-83
Japan's Southeast Asia interests and, 191 postwar era and, 257, 260, 270, 271, 273,
Konoe's "new order" declaration and, 189 277
Konoe's proposed summit and, 203—5 Red China's relationship with. 282, 293,
Marco Polo Bridge incident and, 183 310,324, 326, 338, 354-55
Pflwa}/ incident and, 186-87, 188 Sino-Japanese War and, 183, 188, 190, 195
"quarantine" speech and, 184-85 U.S. -Japanese relations and, 148-49
Soviet-Japanese neutrality treaty and, 195- U.S. -Japan peace treaty and, 292
96, 197 U.S. recognition of, 178
Soviet Union and, 183, 188, 190, 195 U-2 incident and, 320
U.S. isolationists and, 184-85 Spain, 58, 59-61,65
Smith, Erasmus Peshine, 39 Spanish-American War, 58-61, 65, 102
Smith, Robert, 30 Special Group (SG), 336
Smithsonian Institution, 400-401 Spector, Ronald, 401
Smoot-HawleyTariff Act (1930), 154 Sporting News, 20
social Darwinism, 77, 79-80 Spring Rice, Cecil, 80, 82
Socialist Party Japanese, 312, 318, 321, 326, Stalin, Joseph, 164, 178, 190, 206, 228-29,
380, 383, 394 237, 244, 249, 256, 257, 258, 273,
Sohyo (trade union), 336 287, 298
Solomon Islands, 223, 228 Korean War and, 284-85
Sonoda Sunao, 368, 369 on postwar Asia, 250
South Africa, 57,66, 381 at Potsdam Conference, 245, 246
Southeast Asian Treaty Organization Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Treaty and, 195-
(SEATO), 310 96
Inclt 5 4

Stalin, Joseph (continued) State Department reorganized by, 93

Truman and, 243, 246 Taisho, Emperor of Japan, 150
at Yalta Conference, 239, 242 Taishoera, 101, 148
Stalingrad, Battle of, 229 Taiwan (Formosa), 25, 52, 58, 106, 122, 126,

Stans, Maurice, 353 258, 284, 285, 292, 293, 314, 317,
State Department, U.S., 45, 51, 52, 57, 104, 320, 323, 330, 337, 366, 367, 368
108-9, 116, 117, 131, 140, 149, 150, Nixon-China talks and, 355, 356
151-52, 157, 167, 168, 176-77, 188, Taiwan Lobby, 305
193, 205, 219, 233, 239, 243, 246, Takahashi Akihiro, 248
274-75, 289, 297, 317, 326, 334, 335, Takahashi Korekiyo, 147-48, 162, 174-75,
345, 350, 351, 393 180
Japanese Occupation and, 264 Takahira Kogoro, 92, 94
Japan's economic policies and, 270-71 Takami Jun, 262
Sino-Japanese trade and, 279, 281 Takemae Eiji, 277, 295
Taft's reorganization of, 93 Takeshita Noboru, 382
Sterba, James, 357 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 280
Stettinius, Edward, 242, 243 Tanaka Giichi, 151-53, 157, 170, 263
Stevens, Durham White, 39-40 Tanaka Kakuei, 355, 356-57, 361, 362, 367,
Stevens, John, 54 368, 370
Stilwell, Joseph "Vinegar Joe," 224, 232, 233 Lockheed scandal and, 363, 369, 371
Stimson, Henry L., 166, 174, 201, 209, 241 Tanaka Memorial, 153
forced relocation of Japanese Americans Tarawa, 233
and, 220-21 Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, 164
Manchuria crisis and, 168-71, 173 Taylor, Frederick, 302
non-recognition doctrine of, 171, 176 Tenno, see Hirohito, Emperor of Japan
Pearl Harbor attack and, 212, 213 Terauchi Masatake, 117, 119, 120
Senate confirmation of, 192 Territory of the Pacific Islands, 240
surrender debate and, 247, 251-53, 254 Tet Offensive, 346
Yalta agreements and, 242-43 Thailand, 193, 281, 345,367
stock market crash (1929), 153-54 Thatcher, Margaret, 386
stock market crash (1937), 184 Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (film), 224
stock market crash (1987), 378 'Three Nuclear Principles," 340—41
Straight, Willard, 86, 91-92, 93, 95, 103, 107, Tiananmen Square massacre, xxi, 385-86, 403
116, 167 Tibbets, Paul W, 247
Structural Impediments Initiative (1988), 380 Time, 206, 216, 222, 229, 353, 359
Suharto, Sen T. N. J., 345 Times (London), 331, 337
Sukarno, Achmed, 345 Tinian, 234
Sumner, William Graham, 79 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 3-4, 30, 39

Sunday Chronicle (London), 275 Togo Heihachiro, 84

SunYat-sen, 109, 141, 147 Togo Shigenori, 208, 252, 253
Supreme Court, Japanese, 318-19 TojoHideki, 181, 192,207,208,209,211,
Supreme Court, U.S., 220-21 223, 228, 264
Susquehanna, USS, 13 background of, 205
Suzuki Kantaro, 251, 252, 254 Doolittle raid and, 225
Suzuki Zenko, 370, 371 made Prime Minister, 205-6
Swordfish, USS, 346-47 militarism of, 205-6, 215
ouster of, 250-51, 315
Taft, William Howard, 92, 95-96, 97-98, 103, Tokugawa era, xix, 8-9, 15-17, 23, 26, 43, 93,
105 134
"dollar diplomacy" and, 93 Harris mission and, 18-22
Katsura's agreement with, 85-86 Shogunate's decline in, 29, 32-33
InJc 5 5

Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, 1 56 United States:

Tokyo Radio, 250 depression of late 19th century in, 33-34
Tokyo Times, 50 general strike of 1877 in, 33
Tonkin Gulf incident, 341-42 GNPof, 215, 313. 331
Townsend, Ralph, 186 manifest destiny doctrine and, 9-11, 17, 45
Toyoda Soemu, 254 miiitarv' spending by, 296
Toyota company, 328, 362, 378 per capita income of, 398
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 7 western expansion and, 3-5
Trading with the Enemy Act (1917), 351 United States Federal Council of Churches of
Trans-Siberian Railway, 48, 50, 74, 78, 81, Christ, 248
117 United States-Japan relationship:
Treasur\' Department, U.S., 264, 274, 313, Acheson's assessment of, 311. 323, 324
344, 379-80 agricultural cooperation and, 42-43
Trezise, Philip, 351 Axis alliance and, 193-95
Trilateral Commission, 364 baseball and, 63, 201, 356, 365, 372
Triple Intervention, 51, 52, 62, 68, 76, 108 bases issue and, 288, 289-91, 334-35, 346,
Trotsky, Leon, 116, 118, 119 348. 350. 395, 404
Truman, Harr\' S., 242, 248-49, 250. 258, Choshu attack and, 28-29
259, 270, 275, 280, 282, 283, 284, Clutton memorandum and, 306-8
288, 289, 291, 308-9, 342, 399 conflicting capitalist systems and, 373-79,
atomic bomb decision of, 246-47, 256 384. 389-90, 391, 399,400
on MacArthur, 260-61 contrasting societies and, xviii, 5-7
NSC-48/2 and, 277-78 Convention of 1866 and, 29, 35
NSC-68 and, 285 cultural exchanges and, 299-300, 399, 400
at Potsdam Conference, 244-46 Deming's cooperation theory and, 301-3
Stahn and, 243, 246 direction of Japanese trade and, 293-94
surrender debate and, 251-53 domino theory and, 308-10
Truman Doctrine announced by, 271 as "equal partnership," 332-38
Yalta agreements and, 242-43 and exploitation of U.S. market, 317
Truman administration, 282, 305 and first formal diplomatic relations, 21
Truman Doctrine, 271, 273 foreign investors issue and, 303-4
Tsutsui Isao, 31 Girard case and, 316
Turkey, 271 human rights and, 390, 403
Twain, Mark, 10 immigration debate and, 88-89, 94. 97, 105
Twenty-one Demands, 109-11, 136 Japanese dependency and, 296-97. 304-5,
"2/26" revolt, 180-81, 251 396-97
Tyler, John, 1 Japanese imperialism and. 41, 43, 49-50,
98
Uchida Yasuya, 172-73 Japanese knowledge-seeking diplomatic mis-
Ugaki Kazushige, 188 sion and, 23-25, 37-39, 42, 46
Ulmer, Alfred C, Jr., 318 Japanese war record and, 40 -2 1

ULTRA program, 234, 242 "Japan Inc." and, 365, 373

unconditional surrender policy, 215, 217, Kissinger on, 348-49
237-38, 244, 246-47, 248, 249, 251- Korean-Japanese War of 1894-95 and, 47-
52, 253,256 52
unilateralism, 112-13 Lockheed scandal and, 357, 369
Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, Manchuria clashes and, 84-87, 92-98
301 manifest destiny credo and, 9-11, 17, 45
United Nations, 240, 264, 268 NAFTA and, 398
Japan in, 311-12, 389 1987 crash and. 378
Korean War and, 284-85 Nixon's economic policies and, 352-53
 1 5

Indc 5 6

United States-Japan relationship {continued} partition of, 309-10

oil crises and, 360, 361-62, 369 U.S. initial involvement in, 280—81
peace treaty issue and, 270, 273-74, 281- Vietnam, Democratic Republic of (North), xx-
82, 283, 288-93, 297 xxi, 341, 343, 344, 366
popular culture and, 300-301 Vietnam, Republic of (South), 342, 344, 366
possibility of war and, 89-90 overthrow of Diem regime in, 338
security partnership and, xxi, xxii, 292, 297, Vietnam War, xviii, xx, 330
313, 314-21, 342, 350, 356, 371, 380, antiwar protests and, 331, 344, 349, 350
391, 394-95,403-5 China's role in, 337-38, 339, 340, 341,
Shimonoseki Straits incident and, 26-27 342-43
Siberian intervention and, 1 16-20, 130, Diem's overthrow and, 338
134 end of, 358, 360
Smithsonian controversy and, 400-401 escalation of, 339, 341-42, 343
speculative bubbles and, 383-84, 389, 392, Sino-Japanese trade and, 330-31
393 Tet Offensive in, 346
strong yen and, 377-78 Tonkin Gulf incident and, 341—42
tourism and, 363-64 U.S. -Japanese relations and, 346-47, 351
trade imbalance and, 327, 329-30, 334, Villard, Oswald Garrison, 241
353, 354, 357, 363, 369, 371, 375, Vining, Elizabeth Gray, 262
376-77, 378, 379 Vogel, Ezra F., 365-66, 373
unequal treaties and, 29, 42, 48, 96-97
upgrading of Japanese military and, 371— Wages of Guilt, The (Buruma), 402
73 Wakasugi Kaname, 205
U.S. -Asia initiatives and, 391-93 Wakatsuki Reijiro, 1 70
U.S. banking consortium and, 130—32 Wakelsland, 212, 223
U.S. fleet's around-the-world cruise and, Walker, Robert, 1

90-91 Wallace, George, 358

commitment and, 364-65
U.S. military Wang Ching-wei, 232
U.S. Vietnam War economy and, 331-32 War Cabinet, British, 191
* U.S. Western expansion and, 3—5 War Department, U.S., 207, 242, 248
Whitman's perception of, 24 see also Defense Department, U.S.
see also specific issues and topics "warm-feeling principle, " 156
Uno Sosuke, 382, 386 War of 1898, see Spanish-American War
U.S. -Hawaiian reciprocity treaty (1875—76), War Plan ORANGE, 90, 135
53-54 WarPowersAct (1973), 360
U.S. -Japan Cultural and Educational Coopera- Warren, Earl, 219-20
tion Committee, 333 Washington, George, 1

U.S. -Japan Joint Committee on Scientific Washington Conference (1921-22), xix, 132-
Cooperation, 332-33 43, 145, 149, 160, 172, 176, 207. 288,
U.S. News & World Report, 329, 346 399
U.S. Steel, 93, 189 Anglo-Japanese alliance and, 135, 136. 138,
U-2 incident, 320 139, 140, 141, 143
assessment of, 143
Valor of Ignorance, The (Lea), 94 battleship ratio debate and, 137-38, 140,

Vance, Cyrus, 364, 368, 370 414

Vandenberg, Arthur H., 189 Black Chamber and, 139-40
Vanderlip, Frank, 61 Five-Power Treaty and, 141-42
Vichy France, 193, 200 Four- Power Treaty and, 139, 141
VietMinh, 295, 341 Great Britain and, 137-38, 139
Vietnam, 230, 232, 308, 313, 373 Hara and, 135—36
Japanese trade with, 366-67, 390 Hughes and, 141-42, 143
InJc 5 7

Japan and. 135-36, 138-39 in U.S., 39, 80

Lamont-Kajiwara agreement and, 132 World Bank, 390
Lansing-Ishii agreement and, 142 World War I, 99, 141, 162, 184, 215
Nationalist China and, 141-43 recession after, 132-34
naval buildup race and, 134-35 secret treaties and, 129

Neville memorandum and, 136 U.S. Asia policy and, 1 12

Nine-Power Treaty and, 141—43 U.S. economy and, 106-7
postwar recession and, 132-34 eWorld War II, 214-56
race and, 142 "American Century" concept and, 216—17,
Washington Post, 400 257
Watergate scandal, 360 Asian independence movements and, 230-
Webb-Heney Alien Land Act (1913), Califor- 31
nia, 106 atomic bombing of Japan in, 247-48, 252
Webb-Pomerene Act, 122 breaking of Japanese codes in, 225, 228,
Webster, Daniel, 11, 12, 13 234,241-42
Weinberger, Caspar, 372 Cairo Conference and, 237
Welfield, John, 321 China in. 231-33, 236-37, 239
Welles, Orson, 185 Coral Sea Battle in, 225
Welles, Sumner, 205 Doolittle raid in, 224-25, 228
Westmoreland, William, 338 Emperor question and, 237-38, 244, 247,
Whig Party, U.S., 11 250-51,252, 256
White, Theodore, 143, 233, 255 Europe-first policy and, 224
White, William Allen, 194 fall of Phihppines in, 223-24
Whitman, Walt, 6, 24, 25 "four policemen" concept and. 231, 233,
Whitney, Courtney, 264, 266-67, 268 239-40
Willkie, Wendell, 194,216 Guadalcanal Battle in, 228
Willoughby, Charles A., 264 Hirohito's surrender announcement in,

Wilson, Charles E., 305 254-55

Wilson, Horace, 63 Holl}^wood propaganda and, 222
Wilson, James Harrison, 78 Japanese economic policy and, 228-29
Wilson, Woodrow, 97, 98, 100, 108, 109, 112, Japanese expenditures in, 228
115, 116, 129, 133, 135, 139-40. 143, Japanese fanaticism and. 229-30, 234
147, 179,259,278, 374 Japanese losses in, 218
background of, 102 Japanese surrender debate in, 250-55
California race problem and, 105 Japan's invasion of Manchuria and, 160—61,
decision for war of, 1 13—14 166
Fourteen Points of, 117 kamikaze in, 235, 236, 240-41, 253
House as adviser to, 121, 122-23 Leyte Gulf Battle in, 235
Joint Board abolished by, 106 Midway Battle in, 225
at Paris peace conference, 1 19-20. 121. Nationalist China and, 231-33, 236-37,
122-26, 127, 130-31 239
racist views of, 101-3, 113-14 Okinawa Battle in, 240-41
Siberian Intervention and, 118-19 onset of, 1 90
Yamagata contrasted with, 102 open-door policy and. 243, 246
Wilson administration, 136-37 postwar planning and, 236-39
Witte, Sergei, 82, 83 Potsdam Conference and, 244-47
Wolferen, Karl van, 378, 392 proposed invasion of Japan and, 241-42
Wolfowitz, Paul, 373 racism and, 217-23, 229, 230
women: Siberian intervention and, 1 19
in Japan, 13, 155-56, 265-66, 268, 322, Soviet-Japanese relations and, 228-29, 239,
339, 387, 389, 394-95 242-45, 246, 247-50, 252
Ind* 5 8

World War II (continued) Yoshida Shigeru, xx, 265, 266, 275, 279, 308,
systematic bombing of Japan in, 235-36, 311, 315, 339, 374
241, 253-54 "autonomous Japan" sought by, 289
unconditional surrender policy in, 215, 217, background of, 263
237-38, 244, 246-47, 248, 249, 251- bureaucracy installed by, 277
52,253, 256 China trade policy and, 280, 305
U.S. expenditures in, 228 Constitution of 1948 and, 267-68
U.S. forced relocation program and, 218-21 Dulles's talks with, 289-92, 293
U.S. -Japanese outlooks and objectives con- Eisenhower-Nixon policies and, 298—99
trasted, 214-16 emergence of, 263
U.S. losses in, 218 exclusion of foreign investors and, 269
U.S. trusteeship idea and, 240 fall of, 312
Yalta system and, 239, 242-43, 244, 246 foreign policy of, 276-77
Wyoming, USS, 26 intelligence organization formed by, 287
Kennan-Draper policy and, 277
Yalta Conference (1945), 239, 242-43, 244, Korean War as viewed by, 286-88, 302
246 nickname of, 289
Yamada Seitaro, 182 NSC- 13/2 and, 276
Yamagata Aritomo, xv, 35, 47, 48, 49, 52, 67, peace treaty and, 281-82, 283, 289-91,
68, 77, 80, 86, 107, 117-18, 151,400 293
background of, 101 political vision of, 263-64
military and, 101-2 racial attitude of, 276
race war predicted by, 101-2, 106 Yoshihito, Emperor of Japan, 101
reforms of, 74-75 Young Men's Christian Association, 91
Wilson contrasted with, 102 Yuan Shih-k'ai, 103, 104, 109
Yamamoto Isoroku, 234
background and career of, 210—11 zaihatsu, xix, 86, 109, 122, 134, 155, 156,

death of, 228 157, 160, 174, 182, 315,403

Midway Battle and, 225 banking system and, 303-4
Pearl Harbor Attack and, 209-1 1, 213 "control associations" and, 202
Yamamoto Mitsuru, 404 foreign trade and, 188

Yamato, 241 government and, 93

Yap, 142, 143 Japanese imperialism and, 175
Yardley Herbert O., 139-40, 143 Lamont-Kajiwara discussions and, 132
Yasukuni Shrine, 377, 402 Zengakuren, 319, 320, 321
Yen-Dollar Agreement (1984), 376 Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang), 1 52
Yokohama Cricket and Athletic Club, 63 Zhang Zuolin, 152
Yokohama Specie Bank, 132, 269 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), 305, 355-56,
'Yoshida letter," 305 357
k
 (continued from front flap)

Japanese sources, LaFeber provides the history

to understand these long-rooted differences,

bringing us to the present-day tensions in U.S.-

Japanese trade talks, the vicissitudes of rearm-

ing Japan, Japan's continuing importance in

financing America's huge deficit, and the loom-

ing economic shadow of China— not only the

world's most populous country but certain to be

the next economic superpower.

Jacket design by Bernadette Evangelist © 1 997 by

Robert Anthony, Inc.
Jacket art courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
Author photograph by Jonathan Levine
Prir'.red in the United States of America
9-97
''[This] work will easily become the best history of U.S. -Japanese
relations in any language."

— Akira Iriye, Professor of History, Harvard University

Walter LaFeber is the author of eight other books, includ-

ing Inevitable Revolutions and The American Age. He

is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History and a Steven
Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University, where

he has taught since 1959. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

W W
• • NORTON

ISBN 0-393-03950-1
90000 > NEW YORK LONDON

9 '780393"039504