Abstract
Ambassador Takeo Iguchi has written a frank and well-researched account of the events leading up to 7 December 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on the US base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. Iguchi is well-qualified to write a book on this subject for several reasons. The first is that he was actually in Washington D.C. when the attack took place; he was a young boy at school at the time. Using archival materials available in the US and Japan he has done meticulous research. He has described the sequence of events as they unfolded from the perspective of the ambassador and his staff, which included his father, who was a Counsellor at the Japanese Embassy, in charge of administration. The senior Iguchi was, therefore, personally responsible for overseeing the work of the communications staff including the cipher machine operators.
Second, Takeo Iguchi followed his father into the diplomatic Service; in fact he is the third generation in his family to have chosen this career. As a former senior ambassador, Iguchi gained access to official papers in Japan and America and interviewed several of the dramatis personae involved in many of the critical aspects of this tragic drama.
Third, Takeo Iguchi is a student of law and has taught the subject at universities for many years after he retired as an ambassador. He is, therefore, able to bring a legal perspective to his work and to discuss aspects of international law which relate directly to the contentious issues that have been hotly debated by politicians and academics for the last 60 years.
Iguchi starts his story on the fateful day, ‘The Day of Infamy’, as some have labelled it. He describes the tense atmosphere in the embassy in those critical days leading up to the 7 December 1941. After the outbreak of hostilities and the cessation of diplomatic relations, nationals of the ‘enemy countries’ were taken into custody and interned. Iguchi takes us through the trauma experienced by the Japanese during their incarceration by the US government and the many acts of hostility and occasional gestures of kindness they witnessed. After a mutual exchange of internees was agreed upon, Iguchi describes the long and arduous journey home. In order to avoid the dangers of the North Atlantic, their Swedish ship made a circuitous journey. They travelled via Brazil, round the Cape of Good Hope to Portuguese East Africa and then across the Indian Ocean to waters controlled by the Japanese navy and then to Singapore. By the time the ship reached Singpore, it had become a Japanese colony, which they called ‘Shonan’.
The book talks about the background to the developing tensions between Japan and the US and Japan and the British, French and Dutch Empires in Asia. It also deals in detail with the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the start of the war with China in 1937. Iguchi mentions the existence of racist feelings among the European countries and the US towards the Japanese; he cites this racism as one of the factors that encouraged and indeed hastened military action by Japan in China and later in the Pacific. These racist attitudes are however, not cited as an extenuating factor, or as a justification, for what the author asserts was clearly a war of aggression, against China to begin with and later against the French in Indo-China and ultimately against the Dutch in Indonesia and the British in Malaya and Burma.
This book gives an extensive account of the negotiations that ended in the delivery of the famous ‘Hull note’, so called because its author was Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under President Franklin Roosevelt. The author does not subscribe to the commonly held Japanese view, that the Hull note was in fact a US ultimatum served on Japan. He argues persuasively, that the Hull note merely outlined known American positions on points of difference and could not be construed as an ultimatum at all. In fact, the day before the Hull note was delivered to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura in Washington, the Japanese naval strike force had already left the Kurile Islands and was steaming its way towards Pearl Harbour! (p. 138).
This example cited by Iguchi is a theme which runs through the book: the constant effort of diplomats like ambassador Nomura, Shigeru Yoshida (served as Prime Minister for three terms after the war) and others in the Ministry in Tokyo to bend every sinew to avert war. These sincere efforts were constantly thwarted and at times sabotaged by hardliners in the military, especially at the middle level and their stooges in the foreign ministry. This duality in the Japanese political system, which gave an edge to the military over the civilian government, was the cause of much of the confusion in policymaking and in its implementation. It was this constitutional infirmity in the Japanese system, which led to the perception in the West, that Japan was ‘duplicitous’ in its diplomacy. A dramatic demonstration of this ‘duplicity’ was the manner in which the Memorandum from Japan, in response to the Hull Note, was handled by the Japanese. The lengthy secret message sent to the Japanese embassy in Washington, outlining the reasons for the inability of the Japanese to accept the US positions, was divided into 14 parts. In those days when telegrams sent in cypher went through the Post Office, it was possible to interfere in the physical process of transmission. This is precisely what happened in this case. Middle level military officers, acting on instructions from the highest level, according to Iguchi, which would be Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, actually delayed the despatch of the critical 14th part of the lengthy telegram to the embassy. They also tampered with the priority classification, downgrading the level of urgency originally given to the message. The result was that by the time the 14th part was received in Washington, deciphered and typed and the complete message delivered to the Americans, it was too late: the attack on Pearl Harbour had already begun. It was wrongly assumed at the time by the Americans, that the Ambassador in Washington was part of the conspiracy to keep the Japanese plans secret and to spring a surprise on the unprepared Americans. This led to the conclusion that the Japanese were ‘duplicitous’ and had violated the Hague Convention, by attacking without going through the procedures and warnings required under international law.
Similar dubious and diversionary tactics were employed by the military, in several other important episodes in the run-up to the war, and even during the war. The most notable and tragically conclusive was the case of the last-ditch efforts to avert war by the US, when President Roosevelt addressed a personal message to the Emperor of Japan. Here again scheming military officers, using pliable staff in the Post Office and the Foreign Office, delayed delivery of the President’s telegram to Ambassador Grew in Tokyo, till such time as the operations of the Navy for the attack on Pearl Harbour had reached a point of no return.
Iguchi’s concluding chapters deal with the aftermath of Japan’s defeat and occupation. He has made an effort to show the manner in which the military and sympathetic politicians in the Foreign Ministry, including Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, tried to save their skins at the Tokyo Tribunal, by resorting to all manner of half-truths and downright lies. This included the shameful effort to shift the entire blame for the delays in the transmission of the critical telegram, containing the Japanese response to the Hull note, to the Japanese Embassy in Washington. It was alleged that the embassy had been tardy in its deciphering and typing of the message. Iguchi argues convincingly, that ambassador Nomura and his staff in Washington DC were, in fact, mere scapegoats; they were deliberately kept out of the loop by the military and its allies in the Foreign Ministry, in order to maintain the illusion that negotiations had not broken down; this enabled the military to complete their plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour and simultaneously on the British positions in Malaya. In fact deliberate action was taken by the military to make the work of the embassy as difficult as possible; instructions had gone out from Tokyo, just before these critical last few days, to destroy all but one of the embassy’s cipher machines and not to employ skilled American typists to type the final message to the Americans containing the Memorandum (p. 206).
Iguchi explains cogently that even though the US had broken the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s machine-operated cypher system, they had not mastered the navy’s separate code system. For this and for other valid reasons mentioned in the book, the arguments advanced by some historians, that Roosevelt may have known, in advance, about the attack, but chose not to take any defensive action, because he was keen to enter the war on the Allied side, are untenable.
Iguchi details the massive cover-up operations undertaken by guilty personnel in Japan after its defeat, which included tampering with records and the complete disappearance of crucial notes and memoranda. These machinations were unsuccessful. Almost all of them received sentences of imprisonment at the hands of the Tribunal. The book serves a vital purpose in the present political atmosphere in Japan. There are far too many politicians in Japan who do not wish to face the truth about the origins of the war and still seek to obfuscate issues relating to Pearl Harbour, ‘comfort women’, the ‘Rape of Nanking’ and other atrocities committed by the Imperial Army.
This book is a courageous attempt to counter the opinions of right wing groups in Japan. It sets the record straight, for the sake of the Japanese academic community and the youth of Japan. The country’s education material sadly lacks vital facts about the conduct of the Japanese, in the events leading up to the China war of the 1930s and the wider Pacific war which involved the US and its allies. Such facts and opinions are either not included in the curricula of Japanese schools,or when included, they are offered in a perfunctory and cursory manner. This leads to a distorted and incomplete vision of the country’s history. Ambassador Iguchi’s book is a valuable contribution that brings an element of rationality to the study of history in Japan.