A history of the United States and Japan, 1791–1941
An Uncertain Friendship
The United States and Japan from Perry to Pearl Harbor
In 1906, Japan sent more earthquake relief to a burning San Francisco than any other nation on earth: $244,960.10 — over half of all the foreign aid the city received, more than the next two largest donor nations combined.
In 1923, when an earthquake devastated Tokyo, America repaid the debt in full: one of the largest disaster relief efforts in its history.
A year later, Congress passed a law that closed America's door to Japanese immigration for good.
In 1941, whatever remained of the friendship between the two nations ended at Pearl Harbor.
Between those dates lies a century most people think they already know — and almost entirely don't.
A Japanese immigrant taught jujitsu to a sitting American president, inside the White House itself. Japanese farmers built the flower markets of California. American diplomats admired Japan as a rising civilization — even as American law declared its people unfit for citizenship.
An Uncertain Friendship is the story of how two nations that had genuine reason to like each other ended up at war — told through the immigrants, the diplomats, and the ordinary acts of memory, gratitude, and forgetting that neither side has fully reckoned with, even now.
On the surface, it looks like a simple story: a debt repaid in full, and a year later, a door shut for good. In reality, it was never that simple — this is not a story where one side was right, and the century from Perry's arrival to Pearl Harbor is the reason why.
日本語で読む
1906年、日本は世界のどの国よりも多くの震災義援金を、燃え盛るサンフランシスコに送った。その額24万4,960ドル10セントは、同市が受け取った海外からの支援総額の半分以上を占め、支援額で2位・3位だった国を合わせた額をも上回った。
1923年、東京を襲った大地震に対し、アメリカはその恩に十分に報いた ― 同国史上最大級の災害支援である。
その1年後、連邦議会は、日本からの移民の門をこの先ずっと閉ざす法律を可決した。
1941年、両国の間に残っていた友好関係のすべてが、真珠湾で終わりを迎えた。
この2つの日付の間には、ほとんどの人が「もう知っている」と思い込んでいながら、実はほとんど知らない一世紀が横たわっている。
ある日本人移民が、ホワイトハウスの中で、現職の米国大統領に柔術を教えた。日本人農家は、カリフォルニアの花市場を築き上げた。米国の外交官たちは、勃興する文明国として日本を称賛していた ― まさにその同じ時代に、米国の法律は、その国民を市民権にふさわしからざる者と宣告していたにもかかわらず。
『An Uncertain Friendship』は、互いを好きになる十分な理由を持っていた二つの国が、いかにして戦争に至ったのかを描く物語である ― 移民たち、外交官たち、そして、どちらの側も今なお十分に向き合えていない、記憶と感謝、そして忘却というありふれた営みを通して。
単純化して言えば、恩義は十分に返され、その1年後、門は閉ざされて終わった ― という話になる。だが実際には、事はそれほど単純ではなかった。これは、どちらか一方が正しかったという物語ではない。ペリー来航から真珠湾までの一世紀こそが、その理由である。
“Grave reflections. Ominous of change. Undoubted beginning of end. Query — if for real good of Japan?”— Townsend Harris, first American consul general to Japan, journal entry for September 4, 1856, written the evening he raised the first American flag ever seen in the empire, over the temple of Gyokusen-ji in Shimoda
By the Numbers
About the Book
In the century before Pearl Harbor, the relationship between the United States and Japan was never one thing. It was diplomacy conducted by statesmen who genuinely admired one another. It was Japanese immigrants who built irrigation systems in California and revolutionized West Coast fishing. It was Japanese aesthetics and martial arts reshaping American art, architecture, and the temperament of a sitting president.
And running alongside all of it was a campaign, concentrated on the American West Coast but never confined to it, to exclude Japanese immigrants from American life by force of law. This book argues that campaign — not any single treaty or battle — was the central fact that determined how the other three relationships would ultimately fail.
“Understanding the relationship between America and Japan is also a way of understanding America itself — and understanding America is one of the clearest vantage points from which to see the rest of the world.”— John Suzuki, author of An Uncertain Friendship
Read an Excerpt
From the Introduction
It is a remarkable sentence for the man who did the deed to have written. Harris was not a bystander lamenting a change forced on Japan by someone else; he was the American official who had just forced it himself, and he knew it. Even at that moment of American triumph — three years after Commodore Perry's warships had first appeared in Edo Bay, and with the treaty system that would define the relationship for the next half-century now underway — the man responsible could not escape the question of whether what he was doing was actually good for the country on the receiving end of it.
That question — whether the encounter between the United States and Japan was, on balance, a good thing, for whom, and at what cost — runs through the entire century that followed, and it is the question this book tries to answer with more care than it usually receives. What followed Harris's flag-raising is, on its surface, a familiar story: an isolated nation forced open by superior force, a rapid and remarkable modernization, a rise to great-power status, a slide into rivalry, and finally, catastrophic war. It is a story most readers, American and Japanese alike, believe they already know.
They do not know it, or at least not all of it. This book is an attempt to fill in what has been left out.
Contents
- —Introduction: An Uncertain Friendship
- 1The Genealogy of U.S.–Japan RelationsFrom uneasy embrace to Pacific confrontation, 1791–1941
- 2The Truth of West Coast DevelopmentChinese and Japanese immigrant contributions and exclusion
- 3The Shizoku DiasporaThe formation of Hawai'i's Japanese American community
- 4Theodore Roosevelt's Japan PolicyThe paradox of an uncertain friendship
- 5The White House DojoRoosevelt and jujutsu
- 6Pioneers of PrejudiceAnti-Japanese discrimination in California and Washington State
- 7Spaces of ToleranceRegional variation amid the anti-Japanese tide
- 8The Architecture of VictoryAmerican strategic planning in the Pacific War
- —Afterword
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