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  • Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan: A Bridge to Reality
  • Antony Best (bio)
Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan: A Bridge to Reality. By Roger B. Jeans. Lexington Books, Lanham, Md., 2009. xx, 275 pages. $75.00.

In the wake of a great conflict, it is sometimes necessary for former enemies to perpetuate the idea that the recent war between them was an aberration and that their normal stance toward each other is one of mutual trust and respect. In order to construct such an image, it is necessary to find examples from history to illustrate this closeness and, if anything, to enhance the narrative so that it becomes something more akin to a myth. A case in point is the story of Terasaki Hidenari, one of the Japanese diplomats at the Washington embassy at the outbreak of the Pacific War. Terasaki has been lauded in popular culture on both sides of the Pacific for his efforts to avert war in 1941 and his efforts to rebuild Japan-U.S. relations in the occupation period. Indeed, his story even led in 1961 to a film of his life, Bridge to the Sun, which was based in turn on a best-selling memoir produced by his American wife, Gwen. In reality, of course, Terasaki's career did not live up to these giddy heights of praise, for the other side of the story was that while in Washington in 1941 he was acting as Japan's intelligence coordinator in the Western hemisphere, which is hardly the role one would associate with a peacemaker. Terasaki's reputation is thus a contested one, but fortunately in this new book by the historian Roger B. Jeans we are finally presented with a new three-dimensional image of the diplomat and the man.

Jeans is in a position to provide a rich and interesting account of Terasaki's life in large part because of the wide array of documents he has consulted. Aside from using the Foreign Relations of the United States series and the collection of MAGIC documents published by the U.S. government, he has drawn on recently declassified files from the FBI archive and on a swathe of private papers collected by those Americans who had close contacts with Terasaki both before and after the war. In addition, a translator provided him with access to some important Japanese sources. Drawing on this material, Jeans has been able to paint a comprehensive and nuanced picture of Terasaki's career in Washington and Tokyo that puts his intelligence and peacemaking activities in context.

One important point that Jeans makes which underpins his argument throughout the book is that Terasaki, despite his marriage to an American, was first and foremost a Japanese patriot who was dedicated to upholding the status of the emperor. Jeans notes, for example, that Terasaki believed that Japan was in the right over the Manchurian crisis and that he supported [End Page 188] withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. At the same time, however, he argues that, in relation to other Gaimushō officials, Terasaki held relatively moderate views and that he was strongly opposed to army intervention in foreign policy. Reinforcing this argument, he identifies Terasaki's most notable patron within the Gaimushō as being Shigemitsu Mamoru, who he also argues was a moderate. This, however, is a bit problematical, for Jeans fails to acknowledge that Shigemitsu's reputation is itself a matter of historical dispute. For some, Shigemitsu as the vice minister for foreign affairs between 1933 and 1936 appears as an aggressive figure determined to extend Japanese influence over East Asia, most notably in the form of the Amau statement of 1934, while others stress his desire to avoid war with the West when he was Japanese ambassador to Britain between 1938 and 1941. Identifying Shigemitsu as Terasaki's patron is thus interesting, but it raises a lot of questions about Terasaki's moderate views, which Jeans unfortunately does not fully address. What is clear, however, is that Terasaki's primary loyalty was to Japan and that he pursued friendship with the United States largely because he believed that this was in the...

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