Using previously unexamined World War II Japanese and US archival records a University of Queensland PhD graduate has unearthed fresh historical discoveries relating to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Dr Peter Mauch has questioned previously held historical opinion relating to the assumptions underlying American and Japanese governmental policy.
He has argued that prior to the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Japan’s ambassador to the US, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo offered his colleagues in Tokyo an “accurate, penetrating, forceful and even courageous assessment of the likely outcome of Japan’s aggressive path”.
“The conclusions I reached regarding Nomura flew in the face of existing knowledge and beliefs, which condemned him as an ineffective diplomat,” Dr Mauch said.
“I reached these conclusions based on extensive use of the Japanese diplomatic archives, something which to my knowledge not even Japanese historians have undertaken.”
Dr Mauch was awarded his PhD in September 2003 having studied Diplomacy, War and Policy Planning: The United States and Japan, 1940-1945 under the supervision of UQ’s Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts Professor Alan Rix. Dr Mauch currently lectures in Japanese diplomatic history of the 20th Century at Doshisha University – one of Japan’s most prestigious academic institutions.
He said in the past English-language historians who were unable to read pre-war Japanese archival material had relied solely on the American Government’s records, which provided only part of the picture.
“In fact it provides far less than half the picture because the focus of Nomura’s diplomacy throughout the Japanese-American negotiations of 1941 rested not with his American counterparts, but with his colleagues in the Japanese Government,” he said.
“My research has therefore yielded results that have either been overlooked or unnoticed by other historians.”
Unlike previous historical studies Dr Mauch’s thesis argued Nomura’s position mattered enormously because his interpretation of events differed markedly from most of his colleagues in Tokyo.
“In adopting a role as proactive policy developer he presented Japanese policymakers with a dilemma they were loath to confront. American acquiescence in Japan’s aspirations could only be guaranteed by the use or threat of force, yet the force Japan could muster was merely a fraction of that which the US possessed,” he said.
“It’s my opinion that Nomura understood and tried to accommodate the potential of Japan’s new adversary far better than did any of his colleagues in Tokyo.”
Dr Mauch’s work in the field of the pre-Pearl Harbor negotiations between Japan and the US has resulted in a major publication entitled Revisiting Nomura’s Diplomacy: Ambassador Nomura’s Role in the Japanese-American Negotiations, 1941. It will be published in the prestigious journal Diplomatic History in 2004.
Media: For more information, contact Dr Peter Mauch (telephone 00 11 817 5361 2601, email mauch.peter@a0013046.mbox.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp) or Chris Saxby at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2479, email c.saxby@uq.edu.au).
