John Gripentrog

12-7-11

John Gripentrog is Associate Professor at Mars Hill College near Asheville, NC. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. He teaches courses in both U.S. foreign relations and modern Japan. In addition to “The Transnational Pastime: Baseball and American Perceptions of Japan in the 1930s,” which appeared in Diplomatic History 34:2 (April 2010), he recently participated in an H-Diplo roundtable review of Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans. He is currently working on an interwar history of U.S.-Japan relations. This article is cross-posted from a roundtable on SHAFR's blog.

Anniversaries are not easy for the historian. Defining moments in history are typically commemorated in solemnity or regaled in celebration, both of which rely principally on emotional investment. For the historian, however, anniversaries are moments to reflect more critically on complex questions such as causation, consequence, and context. The seventy-year anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—a watershed event that precipitated a slow-moving slaughter across the Pacific, culminating in the hell-fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—reminds us of these humbling challenges.

A central question surrounding Pearl Harbor is whether the U.S.-Japan collision was preventable. In particular, did the eleventh-hour diplomatic negotiations that occurred in 1941 offer a viable chance to reconcile differences? In the years since the end of the war, a number of historians have maintained that a window of opportunity did in fact exist as late as the summer and fall of 1941 and that war therefore was avoidable. In this narrative, war ultimately came because the Roosevelt administration was too uncompromising and wrongly assumed that Japan posed a threat to American national security. One scholar even claims that the American position was “extreme” and that Secretary of State Cordell Hull “should have sought a way for Japan and the United States to peacefully coexist with their differences.” Other historians avoid blame-laden ascriptions but nonetheless locate critical junctures and missed opportunities in the months before Pearl Harbor. [1]

The scholarly focus on individual actors (FDR, Hull) or official lobbying efforts (Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburō upon leaders in Tokyo) has its merits, but these microscopic views often fail to account for the larger historical context. For what is most conspicuous about the protracted negotiations between the United States and Japan in 1941 is how they make plain the profound geopolitical and ideological disconnect between the two adversaries—a divide that had progressively widened after the Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937 and even more so after the formation of the Tripartite Pact in 1940. Essentially, compromise on either side would have required not just accepting “differences,” but altering fundamental worldviews. It would have required undoing the underlying Weltanschauung that drove Japan to send 27 divisions to subjugate China, join hands with Nazi Germany, and occupy Indochina—all of which compelled the United States to counter with economic sanctions. Because of this impossible undoing, by the summer of 1941, Japan and America headed irrevocably toward war.

Many scholars have presented the “road to Pearl Harbor” and the viability of “missed opportunities” by portraying Japan’s body politic as having been meaningfully divided between “moderates” and “militarists.” Implicit in this alleged dichotomy is the assumption that a countervailing “liberal element” remained in Japan’s government in the months leading to Pearl Harbor (more precisely, until the end of Premier Konoe Fumimaro’s third cabinet in October 1941)—one with which U.S. policymakers could have found some kind of accommodation. [2] And yet, what stands out in speeches and leadership appointments in the lead up to war is that foreign policy positions among Japan’s so-called moderates mostly harmonized with the policy agenda of the militarists. This is not to deny tactical deviations among civilian statesmen, the emperor, and military officials. Differences of opinion, indeed, surfaced over methods and approaches. But these arose over how to achieve largely similar ends. In the main, disagreement was one of degree, not of kind.

http://hnn.us/articles/143407.html