Demystifying Pearl Harbor: A New Perspective from Japan (review)

At eleven years of age, Iguchi Takeo lived a carefree life in a West Virginia resort hotel, attending Japanese classes by day, watching Bob Hope movies at night. Interned with the U.S.-based Japanese diplomatic corps after Pearl Harbor, Iguchi's time at the Greenbrier was, in fact, no vacation. But his story hints to the remarkable cosmopolitan spaces that can thrive even in the midst of calamities such as the Pacific War.

Now a retired diplomat (having served as Japanese consul-general in Boston and ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, and New Zealand), Iguchi might be surprised by the lack of comparable cosmopolitan spaces in academe. Originally published in Japanese to a wide and receptive audience, Iguchi's study of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath is, unfortunately, destined for a much smaller readership across the Pacific. While Japanese publishing powerhouse Chūō Kōron produced the original Kaisen no shinwa,¹ Demystifying Pearl Harbor comes, as is typical these days for orthodox diplomatic histories in English, from a much less prominent press.

Compelled to occupy a very different intellectual space in English-language academe, Iguchi's study suffers immediately from a problem of packaging. The somber dust jacket depicts a dour U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull accompanying Japanese envoys Nomura Kichisaburō and Kurusu Saburō to final, unsuccessful negotiations at the White House in November 1941. The sterile academic title for the volume is, moreover, bound to turn away all but the most ardent Pacific War buffs.

The challenge of the intellectual leap across the Pacific is unfortunate. Despite its somber face and anemic promise to "demystify," Iguchi's investigation is an electrifying tale of young love, patriotism, wartime hysteria, conspiracy, loyalty, deception, and, above all, filial devotion.

For its English-language readership, Demystifying Pearl Harbor is a useful primer on the road to the Pacific War. Preliminary notes and appendixes provide a convenient overview of the institutions of Japanese wartime decision making and a timetable of key political and diplomatic events in Asia, Europe, and the United States between 1931 and 1951. Parts 2 and 3 offer a general narrative of bilateral relations from the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) to Pearl Harbor. Based upon Iguchi's reading of secondary sources, these sections serve best as an overview of major debates about the road to war: nomenclature for the conflict; relationship between the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War and the nature of both; the reality of "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity"; the role of U.S. code breaking in the breakdown of U.S.-Japan negotiations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt's abandonment of a planned modus vivendi with Japan in November 1941; U.S. intentions behind the Hull Note of November 26, 1941; and a possible conspiracy by Roosevelt and/or British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to bring the United States into war.

Iguchi's personal interpretation of these issues generally echoes mainstream conservative scholarship in Japan. He attributes the beginning of Japanese territorial expansion, the 1931 Manchurian Incident, to uncontrollable forces such as Chinese nationalism, Soviet power, Japanese population expansion, and economic distress, relegating the start of Japanese "aggression" to the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). The war against the United States was a struggle less to protect the nation than to ensure national honor and independence. Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity aimed less to "liberate" Asia from Western imperialism than to establish economic autarchy in the region. The United States was culpable for the hard-line policies of the State Department's Stanley Hornbeck, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and President Roosevelt. But neither Roosevelt nor Churchill actually plotted a "back door" to war. There was no inherent ideological conflict between the United States and Japan, but U.S. policymakers underestimated Japanese military capabilities and made little effort to understand the emotional patriotism in Japan. Japanese leaders, for their part, consistently overestimated their own military power...