Revisiting Nomura's Diplomacy
Ambassador Nomura's Role in the Japanese-American Negotiations, 1941
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16529696 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Mauch (0000-0002-9817-7968, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 353-383 |
| Publication date | 2004-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diplomatic History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0145-2096 • E-ISSN: 1467-7709 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-7709.2004.00416.x |
| OpenAlex | W2120859076 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Neither his contemporaries nor majority historical opinion have looked favorably upon admiral of the Imperial Japanese navy Nomura Kichisaburô's eleventh-hour efforts, as ambassador to the United States in 1941, to avert the Japanese-American war.1 In his final meeting with United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull on 8 December 1941, some forty minutes after Japanese carrier-based torpedo bombers had laid waste the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hull dismissed Nomura (along with Special Ambassador Kurusu Saburô), as “scoundrels and piss-ants.”2 Hull later asserted that Nomura “was a serious difficulty.”3 Taking their cue from Hull, the majority of diplomatic historians have agreed that Nomura “provided a case study of how Japan's diplomacy deteriorated when military personnel moved into pivotal overseas embassies after the mid-1930s.”4 For example, the standard account of the conversations in Washington in the period preceding Pearl Harbor, Robert Butow's John Doe Associates, insisted that “Nomura was a man of many admirable qualities, but he had no business being where he was.... He had been regarded in some quarters as Japan's ‘last trump card,’ and yet the painful truth is that he was a greenhorn at the game of diplomacy. From the beginning to end in Washington, he played his hand so poorly that he might just as well have been trumping his own side.”5
Ancient history · Diplomacy · Diplomatic history · Economic history · Eleventh · International relations · Navy · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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