Steve Kemper’s Our Man in Tokyo is the second book in three years to deliver fulsome praise on the untiring yet unsuccessful effort by Joseph Grew, the US Ambassador to Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, to avoid a war between the US and Japan. Like Lew Paper’s 2019 In the Cauldron, Kemper’s book depicts Grew as an unheralded diplomatist trying to avoid armageddon, while portraying policymakers in Tokyo and Washington as stubbornly blundering into war.
Kemper, who previously taught literature and journalism at the University of Detroit, the University of Connecticut, City University of New York and Fairfield University, decided to write about Grew after reading Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts about America’s Ambassador to Germany in the 1930s. In the book’s acknowledgments, Kemper expresses his admiration for “the quiet bravery and devotion to duty, patriotism, and diplomacy” of Foreign Service officers and foreign policy specialists. What he sometimes downplays, however, is the occasional tendency of ambassadors and other Foreign Service officers to become “captive” to the countries where they live and serve. Joseph Grew liked Japan, the Japanese people, and many high-ranking Japanese officials he dealt with in the 1930s. But he also understood the danger posed by the influence of militarists and imperialists on Japan’s foreign policy. It was less so Grew’s affinity for the Japanese people and more his understandable and laudable desire to avoid war that shaped his diplomatic approach.
Kemper’s account of the countdown to Pearl Harbor is familiar ground to historians, though perhaps not to the general reader. Japan’s policy of conquest with the aim of establishing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was opposed by some Japanese diplomats and policymakers, but such opposition carried the risk of assassination. There were several Japanese officials and high-ranking military officers, including Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who wanted to avoid going to war against the United States and Great Britain, but in the end they would do their duty in the name of the emperor.
Grew sought to find a diplomatic formula that would satisfy both Washington and Tokyo, but the positions taken by the two governments were irreconcilable. Japan was not going to end its occupation of Manchuria and China’s eastern coastal regions. It was not going to pull its forces from Indochina. It was not going to end its involvement in the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. These were all demands made by US policymakers.
Kemper believes that perhaps war could have been avoided or at least delayed if Washington had followed Grew’s advice to relax some US demands and lift economic sanctions. But America’s best chance of avoiding war with Japan was if Japan attacked the Soviet Union instead of American, British, and Dutch possessions to the south. That it didn’t do so was a result of decisions made in Tokyo (especially after the Soviets defeated Japan at the Battle of Nomonhan) and, perhaps, treachery in Washington. Kemper does not explore the impact, if any, on Japan’s policy of “Operation Snow”, which was a covert Soviet effort to harden US policy toward Japan involving a high-ranking Treasury Department official named Harry Dexter White. Kemper doesn’t mention White or Operation Snow, but does note that US Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his top adviser for East Asian affairs Stanley Hornbeck favored using economic leverage to compel Japan to end its imperial ways, and President Roosevelt sided with them instead of the more conciliatory approach recommended by Grew.
In Kemper’s telling, Hull and especially Hornbeck are the villains on the American side who refused to see merit in Grew’s less confrontational approach. “Hull and Hornbeck”, writes Kemper,
increasingly believed that Grew was too close to the Japanese to see them clearly, but in fact he saw things they missed, and understood nuances lost on people far away and unfamiliar with Japanese politics and thinking. Hull and Hornbeck sometimes ignored or dismissed diplomatic opportunities that Grew detected.
Kemper criticizes Hull’s “devotion to honorable principles” that made him “inflexible and blind to nuance”. And he ridicules Hornbeck’s equating Grew’s conciliatory approach with Munich-like appeasement. “Hornbeck”, he writes, “was blind not only about the situation in Japan but about the dangers posed to the United States by an imperiled, desperate Japanese government”. But even as Kemper notes, Hull and Hornbeck were reading MAGIC intercepts (the name assigned to successful Allied code breaking efforts aimed at Japan), which they failed to share with Grew, and therefore knew more than Grew did about Japan’s internal policy debates.
But Kemper is also clear that the main people responsible for war were in Tokyo–the militarists and expansionists who dominated Japan’s foreign policy (Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoke, Prime Minister Fuminaro Konoye, War Minister Hideki Tojo, Navy Minister Admiral Osami Nagano, Army Chief of Staff Hajime Sugiyama) and Emperor Hirohito who refused to block the militarists’ policies.
Grew became desperate as October 1941 drew to a close to arrange last minute efforts with Prime Minister Konoye to negotiate peace directly with FDR. Here, Kemper places blame where it belongs. Konoye, he writes:
had pushed Japan into a disastrous war with China, entangled Japan with the Axis, ruined Japan’s economy, and overseen a military expansion that took Japan to the edge of war with the West.
None of that was Hull’s fault or Hornbeck’s fault. In the end, it was Japan’s leaders, not US policymakers, who brought on armageddon despite Grew’s best efforts to escape from the gathering storm.
After Pearl Harbor, Grew and the embassy staff in Tokyo were prisoners in the embassy for seven months. They witnessed the Doolittle Raid which raised embassy morale. Grew and the other staffers were allowed to leave Japan on 25 June 1942. Back home, Grew made speeches “to boost the war effort”, wrote a short book about his ambassadorial experiences, and continued to work at the State Department, eventually becoming Under-Secretary of State. Interestingly, after the war ended and the first stirrings of a new Cold War emerged, Grew resigned from the State Department, Kemper notes, because colleagues “disliked his views about Japan and his adamant warnings about Soviet Russia and communist China.”
Grew wrote a two-volume memoir titled A Turbulent Era, which appeared in 1952. He died 13 years later at the age of 84. Kemper notes that Grew understood that he failed at his most vital mission, but given the tragedy of war even failed peacemakers deserve praise.