School of War - Ep 63: Steve Kemper on Interwar Japan

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Steve Kemper, author most recently of Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor, joins the show to talk about the political chaos in Tokyo in the years leading up to WWII and the man that tried to keep the peace, U.S. AmbassadorJoseph C. Grew. ▪️ Times  • 01:18 Introduction  • 01:50 Who was Joseph C. Grew?  • 04:36 Japanese politics in the ’30s  • 07:30 Imperial Army vs Imperial Navy • 11:00 First impressions • 17:31 Insurrection  • 22:12 Drifting towards war  • 26:08 Dynamics in D.C.  • 28:24 Appeasement  • 35:05 Japan’s plans • 37:40 Embargoes and FDR • 42:48 Distinct parallels

Japan in the interwar years was wrecked by economic and political instability, by the demands of making war across the sea in Manchuria and in China more broadly, and by no small amount of political violence as assassinations and attempts at a coup rocked Tokyo. How did the United States understand these developments? What did we do to maintain relations with the ever-shifting governments claiming to serve the divine interests of the emperor? Could we have been better prepared for the general war that ultimately came? Did we, in fact, see that war coming?

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am joined today by Steve Kemper. Steve is a freelance journalist and author, and most recently the author of Our Man in Tokyo, an American ambassador in the Countdown to Pearl Harbor. Steve, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for inviting me.

So the book is a biography and a really detailed account in particular of the years that a man named Joseph Clark grew spent as ambassador, American ambassador to Japan. So I want to talk to you about this very interesting man. And I also want to talk to you about just the interwar period in Japan and the politics and evolution of Japanese policy. So if we kick off maybe just who was, Gru, where did he come from? What was his sort of social class?

And how did he end up in Japan when he did? He was a Bostonian from an old Bostonian family, wealthy Bostonian family, Heaken Hill, the North Shore in the summertime, rotten, Harvard. So when he got out of Harvard, he was supposed to go into business or banking, following his father and his brothers. And the idea bored him to tears, so he went off on a jaunt to the Far East, hunting and hiking his way through jungles, getting malaria. When he came back, his father expected him to settle down in Boston and do something productive. And instead, he chose foreign service.

He wanted to serve his country in foreign places. And instead of the cushy life that he could have had, he chose a life of what he considered a guncher and service. He ended up in Japan because in 1931, Japan had invaded Manchuria. The army had invaded Manchuri without asking permission of the Japanese government because they wanted Manchuria's raw sources, resources. So it was obviously a hotspot on the globe. It was the hot spot on the globe in 1936.

1932, when Herbert Hoover, President Herbert Hoover, asked our best diplomat, Joseph Gru, to take the hot spot on the globe at that point and see if he could change the direction that Japan seemed to be heading. And before we talk about Japan, can I just ask, how did you come across, Gru? Why did you decide to write this book? Maybe you're familiar with Eric Morrison's book in the Garden of Beasts. I know of it. I've never read it. Well, it's about the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the early 30s when Nazism just started to rear its head. And the book was fascinating about how an entire ancient civilization can go insane and accept what was happening there. And it made me wonder who was our man in Japan. And literally, that's where asking that question led me to Joseph Gru.

It was in Japan for 10 years, right up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. So you said something in your first response about the Japanese army invading Manchuria without permission. You know, I'm not an expert on Japan or on the period, and I confess reading your book. You're very fine and very informative book. I still found Japanese politics and keeping track of the various ministers and dynamics to be dizzy over this period. You know, German politics, I imagine post-Hitler's rise is a little more straightforward. It's a story about Hitler and Hitler's cronies. you know, it's fundamentally a story about Hitler, right?

Whereas Japanese politics is so complex during this period. Maybe you could just give us, give listeners a bit of a survey of the major entities and dynamics. Like, what's it important to know about Japanese politics in the 1930s? Well, that's a pretty big question. You're absolutely right. You put your finger on Joseph Cruz, one of his main problems. Who are the players? Where are the points of influence?

Who can pull the levers of influence to make anything happen? It isn't a story about one man. In Japan, there were all of these different places and people who had power at different times. During his 10 years there, he dealt with 17 foreign ministers and 12 prime ministers. That's why there are so many names. And the cabinets kept falling, and I'll explain a little bit why. It goes back to the Japan system of government. You have the emperor who is the commander-in-chief, the spiritual leader, and a god, considered to be a god, literally by the Japanese people.

So since he's a god, he can't make any decisions because he might make the wrong decisions. God don't do that. And to keep him as a guide, you've got to let him keep him out of the loop of responsibility. So he's the commander-in-chief, the leader of the nation, and he can't make any decisions on his own. You see a problem right there. Secondly, the way the Japanese government was set up, it was a parliamentary democracy at this point, based on the British model and the German model. And that meant that the prime minister was chosen not by the parties, people, but by the emperor who appointed someone based upon his senior palace advisors and political advisors said, you should name this person. That was always the person named.

That's another peculiarity of the system. So the prime minister then gets to appoint the ministers, but not the minister of Navy and the minister of the Army. So the Army and the Navy get to appoint those ministers. The idea was keep the Army and the Navy out of civilian affairs. But what happened is it gave them leverage in the Cabinet. So whenever they didn't like a Prime Minister, let's say he wanted policies friendly to the West. One of those ministers could resign, the Cabinet full.

falls. Or let's say the prime minister, they don't like the prime minister in the first place at all, so they just refuse to appoint a minister, the cabinet falls. So you can see where Gru is going to have a big problem here. He's got the palace has power, the prime minister and the cabinet has power, and the military have tremendous power. Where do you go as an ambassador to try to fix things? Yeah. And then within the army, well, I would should say within the defense apparatus, then there are further, there's sort of wheels within wheels here, right? There's tension between the Army and the Navy, and maybe let's just start with that. What, what, as the period unfolds and I guess Gru writes this memo in which he outlines, right, the difference between

a kind of blue water approach and a continental approach, what are the different views of the world between the Japanese Army and the Japanese Navy? Well, the Army was by far the more belligerent of the two services, and they were far more committed to this idea of imperial expansion throughout Asia. The Navy wasn't that far behind, but the Navy also knew that the Army's plans were going to fall heavily on the Navy, because Japan's an island, and that means they're going to expand. There's oceanic warfare going to be occurring. So the Navy's a little bit behind the Army, gets pulled along by the Army, resist the Army for quite a while in the 30s, and then succumbs to the Army's plans.

So the blue water plan was, let's expand south in Asia and take China, Indochina, move to Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines. The army, its traditional, Japan's traditional enemy was Russia. So the army preferred to go into North China and Russia. And obviously, the blue water plan became predominant by the end of the 30s, and that's what they did. So Gru arrives in Tokyo in 1932, right, the summer of 1932. Yeah. What is, talk about Tokyo. What does he see?

What does he experience? What does it like to come to Japan at that time? That's a good question because it changed so much. When he came in 1932, the tasks between the U.S. and Japan were still very tight and pervasive. There were all sorts of businesses that did business in both countries because Japan The man's main trading partner was the United States, exports and imports. So there were all sorts of consortiums. There were all sorts of linkages, culturally, politically.

There were American movies. There were American restaurants. American dance halls. American music was tremendously popular. Movie star posters were everywhere in Japan. American movie star posters. Baseball became very popular in Japan. Golf.

These imports from the West were still very important. Japan had adopted many Western ways, not just these cultural things, but political systems, business systems, industrial ways of operating. So that was all still very prominent, but there was this undercurrent because of the invasion of Manchuria and this idea that Japan was this rising power, and the United States had better stay on its side of the ocean and leave us. our side of the ocean, if you do that, we'll all be fine. So that was the tension that was there from the beginning, which got greater and greater, obviously. And in general, as this war is playing out in Manchuria, what are Gruz relations like with the Japanese government? But of course, this is itself something that evolves and evolves rapidly. The prime minister is assassinated right just before he shows up, or a prime minister is assassinated? Yeah, he's on his way across the United

States towards Japan. And he sees a head. line in Chicago, Prime Minister, you know, like I assassinated and officers, you know, palaces in turmoil, people are arrested, so on. Yeah. That's what he stepped into. Yeah. And so he shows up and what is the, what is the initial interaction like between him and the government? Is it still relatively positive?

I mean, I assume we have a positive to negative trend over 10 years. I'm just curious about the major muscle movements there. The correct assumption, yeah. When he got there, he was intent upon repairing relations because it's like, it's like, of state, Henry Stimson had made some remarks about the invasion of Manchuria that this was not acceptable. The United States will never recognize any territory taken by force. So the Japanese press had become very anti-American.

The press controlled mostly by the military, by the way, that got worse and worse, too. So when he got there, his job, he thought, was to explain. He called himself an interpreter between the countries. and he wanted to, if in other words, grew believed as a diplomat, if we only understood each other a little better, we could fix this because that's what diplomacy is. It's a mutual self-interest. We have many interest in common. It's foolish for us not to be friends, as we always have been. So let's figure out how to become friends again.

And he was really sincere about that. And the Japanese politicians understood that, even the military understood that, because it was sincere. So he did start to repair relations, but he also wrote back to Stimson and Hoover. There's no way they're leaving Manchuria. That's what you sent me here to do to get them out of there, and they're not leaving. So we have to, that's a given, and now let's move on from there and see what happens. And, you know, obviously the Japanese army fighting in Manchuria and China takes a brutal approach to the local population. How does Gru sort of encounter those reports and what does he report back to Washington?

What's his whole attitude to that and how does it evolve? Yeah, at first he didn't believe the reports of atrocities that were occurring being inflicted by the Japanese military because he believed his Japanese sources and he believed that these gentle people that are saying it's not true, I believe them because I want to believe them. The reports became so numerous that eventually grew, obviously accepted the facts. He was good at changing his opinion.

He preferred optimism. He preferred the sunny side, but he did not ignore the darker side. And when he saw it often enough, he changed his view. He was flexible. So, you know, I don't think a lot of Americans don't know much about the second Sino-Japanese war and how horrifying it was. Just, I mean, the 10 to 20 million Japanese Chinese civilians were killed in that. war, 10 to 20 million. That's a lot of people. And it was partly because the Japanese

instituted this indiscriminate bombing of cities, which, as we know, became practiced. And that horrified grew, it horrified America until it didn't, and we started using it, too, in Germany and in Japan. But the Japanese kind of started that, and who changed his view? And when he told the Japanese about what he was reading, the reports he was getting, they refused to believe it because their censored press and their censored radio, one radio station, told them it wasn't true. These were all, this was all propaganda and fake news intended to undermine the Japanese government.

It was kind of a tough point for him. Yeah. And I mean, you started to speak about it a little bit when you were talking about the emperor and politics more broadly. But, you know, what is the attitude towards Chinese civilians and I guess you could say the attitudes towards warfare more generally, what does it say about the nature of the Japanese regime and the nature of Japanese politics at the time? Like, it's not exactly the same as fascism, right, in the sense, or German and Italian fascism, in the sense that there is actually

an emperor, right? So it's not entirely a kind of modern performance of ancient things. There is actually something ancient knocking around Japanese politics. But just if you could, just, what is driving all this tremendous violence and inhumanity? That's a really good question. And I'll tell you what I think. It's a very complicated psychological question. It appears, it seems to me, that the Japanese could justify anything they did if they did it in the name of their divine ruler. They believed that they were the master race of Asia, as the Germans did in Europe.

And they believe that anything that they needed to do to impose the emperor's imperial will on the people of Asia was justified. And if they refused to accept the emperor's will peacefully, well, then they deserve whatever they got. And so, in fact, they said things like that. Our whole mission is peace in Asia, or doing everything we're doing for the sake of peace. while they're demolishing massive areas of civilian neighborhoods in these large Chinese cities. It's crazy. You have this wonderful passage that you quote in the book from Barbara Tuckman. I guess she was Barbara Werthe time at the time.

She was writing under her maiden name addressing just this point, right? And maybe say a little bit about that. She writes a piece and Gru reads it. This is the author of The Guns of August, and many of our listeners may know her, but she's a marvelous writer of the 20th century of military history and other affairs. Yeah, I think she spent, I think it was a year there, and she was struck as everyone was very quickly by the concept of face and by the Japanese ability to ignore facts and reality in order to preserve face and to preserve their necessary illusion about

the Japanese people. And a group quotes a long passage from her book that I think it was in Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Affairs Journal, because he said it chimed exactly with what he was seeing and feeling and running into. What do you do? How do you become a diplomat to people who refuse to face facts, partly because they're not getting the facts? But even when Gruve tried to show them all of these news articles and statistics, they refuse to believe it. It's a conundrum. Yeah. No, of course, the awfulity of it is in 1945.

The same thing is going to happen to Tokyo, where Gru is attempting all this diplomacy that's being inflicted on China right now. So let's kind of move forward through the 30s. And you document all these sort of details of Japanese politics in the period and Cruz's various responses to them. One of the major things is this insurrection in 1936. What happens there? What are the results in how do American view?

of Japan shift, if at all, as a consequence? What happened is that the army staged a coup, a section of the army, decided that the current cabinet was not expanding fast enough, was not serious enough about the emperor's imperial destiny. And so they rose up and took part of central Tokyo, including military headquarters and some other things. So they were convinced that this was the right thing to do. It's an interesting point to go back to one of your earlier questions.

All of these, there were all these coup plots, coup plans in Germany at the time. You know, let's kill Hitler. Let's get rid of them. And they were all from the left. Everything in Japan came from the right. It was that our government is not right wing enough. It's not expansionist enough. It's not, you know, going quickly enough through Asia to suit us.

So the army, it was only about 1,500 people or so, but it was enough to stymie the city. And after they had murdered the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, who was the emperor's main political advisor inside the palace, they murdered a couple of main military people. They murdered a number of people. And then they stopped. And they said, okay, now we're done. And we just want you to appoint a new cabinet and we'll be happy. And no more shots were fired. And there was a standoff.

And then they finally, the emperor and the army. army reined down pamphlets saying, you are embarrassing your families. If you want to retire with honor and save your face and the face of your family and the face of the emperor, you will go home. And almost all of the soldiers did because they were, their commanders had told them, we're having a coup. And in Japan, that meant your boss says you're doing this, you're doing it. But when the biggest boss, the emperor says, go home, you go home. And except for the the coup planners, and they thought they were going to get a show trial and they'd be able to pontificate about the purity of their motives and how this was necessary for the future of Japan.

Instead, the army put them against the wall and shot them because they were afraid that these young hotheads that they had kind of not tamped down, in fact, had often encouraged, were getting out of hand. So it looked for a moment, just for a brief, brief moment, as if the tad towards the right might be stemmed a little. And that's not what happened. Is there, your comment about left and right raises a question for me. I genuinely have no idea what the answer is, you know, is there a left in Japan? I mean, granted, as you just pointed out, it's not very successful. But the Japanese German alignment, the sort of the foundational

access agreement or agreement that becomes part of the access, right, has to do with opposition to communism or the Soviet Union in some fashion. Correct me if I'm going wrong here. What is the status of the left if there is a status of the left in Japan at this time? There's no real presence of the left in Japan during these years. There are the communists were the bogeymen far the right as they have been throughout history and many, many countries, as we know. They were the bogey men in Japan because they had an emperor. They saw what the communists did to the czar. And so they thought, we're not letting those people near our emperor. So there was no strong presence of the left. What they were often, the moderates in Japan were as far left as you could, as you could go in

Japan. And they were sometimes even called liberals, a total misnomer. And even the moderates supported the idea of Japanese expansion into Asia. But they wanted to maintain good relations with the West. They didn't want a war. And that's what made them moderate. I mean, that's pretty a pretty, you know, scanty definition of moderate, right? That was the case. So in 1937, things really pick up pace. We have an invasion of China beyond Manchuria. We have Roosevelt giving a speech talking about quarantine lawless nations or lawless parts

of the world. Talk a bit about this year. Talk a bit about Gru and Gru's own evolution throughout these incidents. Well, despite Gru's best efforts, Japan kept drifting. towards war, drifting towards aggression, and not just drifting, I mean, invading people. So this little incident in China at a bridge, a couple of patrols fired at each other. They thought they were going to settle it right then. Everybody wanted to settle it on both sides. And instead, this posturing occurred between Changkha-shek and the Japanese military, and it escalated, escalated. And then it got to the

point where Premier Konoye, who was the prime minister at the time, said, well, now we can't withdraw because we'll lose face. So it was that sort of idiocy that just got multiplied. And then the military saw this as their great opportunity. They wanted China. That was the big plum in the middle of the fruit platter. If we could get China, then we'll have all the natural resources we need. We'll have a vast market. We'll have everything that Japan needs to continue to expand. And so Grus saw all this. I mean, he saw it coming. He tried to protest, complain, advise the U.S. government about what was coming, what he saw happening.

And, you know, it really was like he was trying to hold back the ocean. And he couldn't. You know, what happened with the, and forgive me if I mispronounce this, but the, the, the, the Penae, the ship that is caught, the American ship that's caught up in all of this. Well, that was a very important point. That's 1937, December 1937. The Chinese capital of Nanjing has just been overrun by the Japanese forces, one of the worth of the trussies of the 20th century, and we all know about the rape of Nanjing, horrifying. People were fleeing the city. The Pannet, the USS Pane, was a gunboat that patrolled the Yangtzee because a little background that your listeners may not understand about the open door of China, which allowed, it was an agreement between us, several Western powers, China and Japan, to allow.

commercially quality in China. And so that's why the USS Penne was there to protect U.S. interest in China. The Panay went way up river to avoid what was happening in Nanjing. It had flags flying from its mast. It had flags draped across its decks. It had flags painted on its sides. Nevertheless, Japanese bombers appeared out of the sky, bombed, it, strafed it, sank it. As the crew members were trying to swim to shore, the bombers came back and strafed the survivors trying to reach the reeds. Then army gunboats came up and strafed the side of the boat when aboard looking for survivors, no doubt, to finish them off. This looked, and when Gru got this report, he thought, we better start packing. This is going to be a declaration

of war. But he tried to, you know, he did what diplomats do, and he tried to be the referee, and the conveyor of negotiations, and it worked, to the great relief of Japan and the United States. Japan did not want a war. These out-of-control military pilots had almost precipitated the war. The Japanese said we didn't know it was a U.S. boat. Now, this was a complete fabrication, obvious fabrication, but that's what the Japanese stuck to. They did pay compensation to the U.S. They did penalize the people who were supposedly in control of these pilots.

So by this point, our Secretary of State was Cordell-Hull. He was satisfied with this. Both sides were satisfied. The Japanese promised it was never going to happen again. It immediately began happening again. Yeah. Well, and actually, since you raised it, we should talk a bit about Cruz's relationships in the other direction. So the key players there being whole, obviously, the Secretary of State.

And then he knew FDR. Maybe we should talk a bit about that. And then let us say he knew him socially long before they were statesmen. And then there's this other figure that you write about in the book, who's very significant hornback. So talk a bit about dynamics in Washington and Gru's relationships there and how they affect the situation. Yeah, that's a really interesting part of the story. He grew and Roosevelt knew each other from Groton and Harvard. Roosevelt was two years behind him at both places, and they'd both been on the Crimson and so on.

They called each other Joe and Frank, but they weren't good friends. They were acquaintances. And when Roosevelt came in, Greer wasn't certain that he put in his diary. I'm not sure Frank has what it's going to take to guide the country through this period. He turned out to be a massive admirer of Roosevelt. He liked the way Roosevelt handled foreign policy and handled the country. Now Hornbeck and Hull, that's a different matter. Hull was his direct boss. Hornbeck was at first the chief Far East advisor. He was ahead of the

Far Eastern desk and then he became Hull's chief advisor on the Far East. Hohenbeck never was a diplomat. He had a doctorate in history, I believe. He taught in China for a couple of years, came home and he was a very intelligent, opinionated, stubborn, know-it-all, and he disliked the Japanese intensely, and the Japanese diplomats, this was well known among the Japanese diplomatic community in Washington. So that was a problem. He's the chief forest advisor. He's got Hull's ear. On the other hand, Gru is trying to send whole reports from on the ground about what's happening. Hornbeck often discounts these reports, calls them absurd, says that Gru has gone native. He's an appeaser. So there began to be tension as the 30s developed between the State Department and between Gru.

Gru never showed that to the Japanese. He never talked about it. And he certainly never misrepresented the U.S. policy to the Japanese government. But it was there. And it's a very interesting part of my story. So as the 40s begin, there's a sense of, well, actually, you know what, let's talk about 38, 39, and then 40. I want to skip that. So there's, there's acceleration all around.

there's war in Europe. What is Gru's attitude actually towards the lead up to war in Europe and to diplomatic efforts there, the policy of appeasement? You know, if Hornbeck thinks he's an appeaser, what is his attitude towards actual appeasement happening in Europe? Like many, many people who had experienced World War I, as Gru had in Berlin, he was relieved at the agreement that was reached in Munich. But he also had no delusions that this meant that Hitler was going to be satisfied. He called, he said it was, it was, you know, it was diplomacy at gunpoint and he said, this is just going to make Hitler we're more hungry than it's not going to appease. It's not going to satisfy him.

So he, he saw Hitler for what he was and he suspected that war was coming. And then, of course, it did. As far as how it affected the Japanese, which is an interesting part of the story, one of the things that surprised me, there were so many things because I was ignorant about a lot of this stuff, is that the Japanese and German alliance was not tight. It was not close. The Japanese had their own agenda. The Germans were constantly trying to pull the Japanese into their agenda, and the Japanese resisted. They did not want to have a military alliance with Germany that would force them to a war because Hitler decided to do something.

They didn't want it to be in the European war. They wanted to focus on taking Asia or Japan. So I'm getting lost in my answer here a little bit, but when Hitler started to, and I'm moving from 1939 to 1940, you know, they had that interegneum where you had the invasion of Poland, September 1st, the war begins, wars declared, but not much happens until April of 1940. And that's when the Blitzkrieg plows through Western Europe into Paris in June of 1940. And the Japanese military became delirious with this.

If Hitler's doing this in Europe, why aren't we doing it over here? France is conquered. Britain can't do anything. They're under siege. They're going to fall any day now. Let's take everything we want right now. And that's what Gru was trying to deal with. Do not do that. Do not allow yourself with the Germans. They're going to lose eventually,

and you're going to be alone, and you can't afford that. That's fairly pressure. So we also, in this period, there's sort of this, you know, uptick and alarmed messages from Brew back to Washington. You know, talk a bit about that traffic, and then you single out one message in particular, I guess, from September of 1940, the green light telegram. So what's the character of Brew's communicates back to Washington during this period? And what's the green light telegram? Well, he as a diplomat, grew his main mission, of course, is to keep the peace. That's his first priority. But then in comes this new foreign minister named Matsuoka Yoshuki. And he is a fan of Hitler. And he's,

some people think he's crazy. He's certainly not like most Japanese. He's very chatty, gregarious, openly ambitious. And he's, he loves the axis, and he's a blusterer. and a threatner and a bully. And Gru, after meeting with him, and he only came in in July, I believe, of 1940, by September, Gru realized, I can't deal with this guy. There's no way diplomacy is going to work with this guy in charge of Japan's foreign policy direction. And he writes what he calls his green light telegram because all of his other telegrams had

been red lights. Let's be cautious. Let's not say anything that's too inflammatory. Let me work over here. But the green light was, I can't do anything with this guy. We need to start really thinking about other modes that may be necessary. Build up the Navy, build up the Army. Let's even think about embargoes, which he had always been against because it's a, it's a path towards war.

So Matsuoka changed his mind about the possibilities in Japan. And as we get to 1941 and all these things, you know, begin to come to pass, right? We have an asset freeze in July. We have the embargo in August. But even before that, right, grew is alarmed about the possibility of a Japanese attack on America or American assets at least. What is he saying to Washington? What is what are the nature of his warnings? Well, he starts saying basically, and he said it several times in different ways, that Japan is perfectly capable of striking with sudden dramatic violence. You need to believe that that's true because Ornebeck in particular and most people in America

did not believe Japan would dare to attack the United States, that we have all the resources, we have, we're wealthy, we're big, we'll crush them. And Gru is saying, trying to tell them, you're wrong. If they get desperate and they need to save face or they need to expand or they feel like if we don't strike first, you're going to crush us, they will strike. And nobody believed them until, really until November of 1941. So he sends the, and by the way, he was saying the same thing to the Japanese. He was saying, you can't keep bombing American properties and interests. You can't keep doing these things.

And when a new foreign minister would come in, Gru, would hand him this thick sheaf, incidents, bombings of mission schools. There were over 300 incidents back like 1940. He kept telling him, you can't keep doing this. And if you kill any more Americans, you're going to have a war, and it's not going to be good for Japan. We'll kill you, we'll crush you. And Japan thought, you know, no, the American people are isolationists,

they're pacifists. They will not allow Roosevelt to declare war. So we feel pretty good that we're going to be able to get away with everything that we're doing. And for a long time, they were right. And not to sound a conspiratorial note, and it's not really a conspiratorial note because of the timing and the nature of the warning. But he's warning about Pearl Harbor as a target at the start of 1941, right? You're sort of passing along rumors. I mean, it's kind of an obvious observation, but it's still striking.

It is striking. It's a very interesting note. He heard a rumor. It came from one of the ministers. It was passed to a third secretary in our embassy at a party. and it got passed on to Gru, and so Gru passed it along, that he had overheard, he had heard rumors that, that Japan was planning to strike Pearl Harbor.

And Gru thought, that's highly unlikely, but that's what I heard, I'm going to pass it along to you. The State Department said, yeah, we agree, is highly likely. Well, they passed it along to the Army and Navy. They had already considered it and decided it was highly unlikely. That if Japan did strike anywhere, it would probably be Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong. So nobody really took it that seriously for a long time.

And so you alluded to November is the time when Washington starts to focus in on the problem. What actually is happening in November? What is happening in Washington? What is Grusay in doing? Let me back up for just a minute. And I remind you that another thing that I didn't know was that we had decrypted all diplomatic traffic, Japanese diplomatic traffic between Tokyo and Washington, Tokyo and Berlin, and Tokyo on everywhere. And that started happening early in in 1941. We were getting Hull and Roosevelt were getting all the cable traffic. That's unbelievable. I mean, they were, so in all Japanese

strategies, plans, everything. Hull was reading them. And so they, Grew didn't know this. They felt they couldn't tell Gru this was such a valuable source of intel. They couldn't risk letting Gru know in case our traffic was being read by the Japanese. So Gru was unaware of that. Hull, in other words, knew a lot of things that Gru didn't know, just as grew new things that Hull didn't perceive. So by the time you get to November, when Hull really starts sitting up straight in his chair

is when the diplomatic traffic starts telling the ambassador in Washington, you're going to get a code word in one of these dispatches. And when you see that code word, burn the code book, burn one of the code books and one of the decryption machines. And all of a sudden, it becomes clear that Japan is planning something and they want to cover their, you know, they want to not leave any tracks behind if possible. And that's when Gru goes to the cabinet meeting, I mean, Gruho goes to a cabinet meeting and says, Japan might attack at any moment, which is what Gru had been sort of warning them

about for a while. Yeah. Give us your opinion, your analysis on a big question here, if you would. I mean, I've visited Tokyo once. I went to the museum associated with the shrine there, Yasakuni. And, you know, to this day is a, we'll just say it's a right of center count of Japanese history and the Japanese military. And in it, you know, if you go to the sort of the room devoted to the lead up to the war,

it basically says, you know, Roosevelt, embargoed Japan enforced her hand. And so we very reasonably and understandably attacked America. On one level, it's a bit outrageous. And I was indeed outraged in the moment. looking at it. On another level, it's hard to say, right, that the embargo plays no role in Japanese thinking. So how should we think about this? Now, should we think about it? Well, to me, it's very clear that, I mean, that, you hear that, you still hear that in Japan. It's in the museum. I heard it from a guy at the Huntington Library once, a Japanese guy doing research

that, you know, the war was all if the R's ball. We kept telling the Japanese, if you do this, we're going to respond with this, and the Japanese would do it. And we would respond. We would stop the commerce treaty, so you're no longer a favored nation. The Japanese were, why did you do that? What did we do? Well, we told you we were going to do something, and then you did it anyway. And it kept going like that through 1940, 1941.

The embargo occurred because Japan invaded southern Indochana. And we had told them, if you do that, that's going to be the end of talks, and we're going to have to take strong action. And they went, oh, okay, and then they invaded. And they were shocked. Why would you embargo oil? This is very dangerous for Japan. Well, that's the point.

It's an economic sanction. We were trying everything we could short of war to make them alter their path. And instead, and this was true throughout the 1930s and still true, Japan considered themselves the victims, always. were the victims of an embargo. We're the victims of a freeze. We're the victims.

You know, it's like you don't seem to get it. You brought this on yourself. And the Yakasuni Shrine, let me just make one point about that. In the 1970s, 14 or 17 class A war criminals were inducted into that shrine by Japan, including Tojo and Matsuoka as Shoa martyr. Shoa was the era of Hirohito. They're in that shrine is honorable Shoa martyrs. Can you imagine that in Germany with gerbils going?

I mean, it's inconceivable, and yet Japan did that. There's something odd about the psychology there. And then I want to ask you a specific question because it was very important to grew in his postmortem of the events of 41. But the prime minister, the Japanese prime minister, was seeking some sort of summit with Roosevelt, right, throughout this period and obviously it didn't come to pass. So what was Gru's opinion about, you know, why that was a missed opportunity? And do you agree?

I mean, were things actually avertible? I agree that with Gru, that there was an opportunity that was missed, whether it would have made difference, the difference in the long run, I doubt. But the point at the Gru's point was that, that at least we should try. And that was, I think, his biggest disappointment with American policy. That was, you're talking about a secret meeting that was proposed by Prime Minister Cornier between himself and Roosevelt in American territory. And no Prime Minister of Japan had ever left the country, certainly not to talk to a potential enemy.

Cornier said, I will do this. He had the support of the Army and the Navy to see what would happen. And Hull basically smothered it in the crib. he made all of these preconditions before the U.S. would agree to have such a meeting. Groot kept saying, you can't have preconditions. It's Japanese psychology, Japanese face. They can't accept preconditions because it's an insult to face. Just go there, listen to them, and if we don't like it, we can find more things to embargo,

greater penalties for them. But let's try it. And by that point, for very good reasons, completely distrust. of the Japanese, didn't believe that anything that they said and killed it. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean, there's part of me, I kind of want to bring this up to the present day and solicit your opinions about contemporary applications of what you've learned here in this research.

I mean, it's part of me that's sympathetic to Hall, as you describe him just now. It doesn't seem like there's a whole heck of a lot to trust there and a whole heck of a lot to respect. And yet at the same time, you do end up in this dynamic, as you put it very well. like, does the embargo play a role in the Japanese decision to attack? Undoubtedly. But was the embargo some aggressive act of American state craft originating from a vacuum? Absolutely not.

It was in its way a quite reasonable response to Japanese actions. And you're in this cycle of escalation with a hostile power that sees itself through the lens of victimhood and an American liberal power that's struggling to understand an adversary. and, you know, there are, I'm going to keep drawing this analogy out. There are elites who are aware that war is a distinct possibility and are trying to prepare the nation for it, but the nation at large is certainly hoping there won't be a war. You can see where I'm going with all this. Like what can we learn from what you've written here and from what you've learned

that's applicable to the U.S. situation with China today, which unfortunately, it's hard to put a year on it, but there are parallels, distinct parallels between the two situations. Yeah, there are. What you can learn, I guess, is to try to keep talking, try to keep the channels open, try to meet, try to combine diplomacy with preventative measures that will make the other side think and stop. That was Gru's hope that he said diplomacy by itself can't do it. It has to be backed up by plausible penalties. And he didn't mean war or attack. He just meant any sort of penalties that would make that other power stop its aggressive policies. And the problem is that when you're dealing with true believers, diplomacy isn't enough. It just isn't going to. And it turned out that the embargo was enough.

The freeze wasn't enough. The ending the Commerce Treaty wasn't enough. Nothing was enough to stop these fanatical people who thought. that they had a destiny despite their war planning, which told them we're not going to be able to last more than a year or maybe two, we won't be able to do it. And they did it anyway because they thought that the United States was soft and would, once we bombed, once they bombed Pearl Harbor, we would say, let's go to the negotiating table because we're scared.

So I guess knowing your opponent is the other thing. Greer was very intent upon understanding Japan trying to convey his understanding to Washington and to convey the American perspective to Japan. But if no, if the saddest aren't listening or think that you're appeasing or think that you are making threats that the United States isn't going to follow through on, and if nobody believes you, then there you are. Well, this, this prompts kind of a huge but sort of obvious follow-up question, which is, it's a big question. Maybe it's a discussion for another time, but accepting everything you just said in principle, you know, what was what was the practical mix of diplomatic outreach

and sort of hard policy response that would have averted a war in the Pacific? You know, it's not, I have no idea. I mean, I don't know if you do, but I mean, that does seem like I do hope there are some people out there looking into that with a sense of urgency because it seems like a very relevant question. I think that it is the question for your podcast, the school of war, what do we learn here? I hope we learn that you have to have both diplomacy and measures that will discourage aggression. But the other thing that you learn is no matter how good those things are, they are going to be enough to prevent war if you're faced with a group of absolute believers in their mission who can't be swayed by mutual self-interest. by rational enlightenment, by the things that diplomacy depends upon, to keep the peace.

And that's what happened with Japan. It's it happened with Germany too. I mean, it's, I don't, I don't think there's a way to avoid some of these, some of these really strong fanatical movements. Steve Kemper, author most recently of Our Man in Tokyo, an American ambassador in the countdown to Pearl Harbor. Really fascinating discussion. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.