American, Chinese, and Japanese Perspectives on Wartime Asia, 1931-1949

The United States emerged from World War I as the preeminent nation on the globe. The financial center had moved from London to New York, and American admirals commanded a fleet that was at least arguably superior to that of their British colleagues. The United States possessed financial and naval power second to none. Throughout the 1920s, even without membership in the League of Nations, U.S. involvement in international affairs increased strikingly, especially in the development of markets and sources of raw materials. Then, in October 1929, the foundations of the American empire began to tremble. As the months passed, the economy of the country collapsed, and military power, which had not kept pace with economic power, declined sharply. America had entered the Great Depression, and its people and their leaders forgot Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover’s visions of a Pax Americana and concentrated desperately on restoring the economy. Empire and world power seemed irrelevant in a nation where 15 million were unemployed and many millions more faced hunger and despair. In the 1930s there was only one important question for America: Could democracy cope with and survive the gravest economic crisis in the history of the nation?

Americans had rarely demonstrated much interest in the affairs of East Asia in the best of times. During the depression foreign affairs of any sort did not easily penetrate American consciousness. East Asia commanded the attention of only that handful of Americans, a few score at most, whose life work was focused on China or Japan. Few Americans in the 1930s, in or out of government, concerned themselves with events in Asia—and most of these did so only under duress, under the pressure of crises across the Pacific that would not go away.

In the summer of 1931, American leaders responsible for East Asian affairs were pleased and complacent about relations between Japan and the United States. Shidehara Kijuro was highly respected by Americans, who had worked with him for nearly a decade and who admired the restraint with which Japan acted under his direction. If they thought much about it, American diplomatists must have assumed that he had the feisty Japanese military under control—but there is little to indicate that they thought much about it after Japan agreed to the Anglo-American proposals at the London Naval Conference in 1930. Japan showed promise of becoming an important American trading partner, far and away the most important outside of North America and Western Europe. American bankers were eager to lend money to the Japanese government, and J. P. Morgan and Company even found ways to circumvent State Department efforts to block loans that would enable Japan to tighten its grip on Manchuria. With a few unpleasant exceptions, such as the American immigration law of 1924 and the unruly behavior of the Japanese army in Shandong in 1927, the 1920s had been a showcase of Japanese-American cooperation and goodwill. The war scares of Wilson’s last months in office seemed to be ancient history.