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He had thought up to then that, beyond his specific duties of monitoring Japanese phone conversations in the Tokyo telephone office to foil terrorist plots, he was there as one of the good guys who won and who would now teach the Japanese society democracy. But Conroy had always suspected easy black-and-white answers, so he began to do research and to think.
Why do we fight? Why do they fight? These quickly became big questions, and in other hands such questions become the occasion for the advance of ideologically driven left or right agendas. Yet Professor Conroy’s method of an empirical examination of diplomatic records teaches us the restraint of more effective peacemakers and neutralists. As he patiently demonstrates, building on his earlier book, The Japanese Seizure of Korea: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations, that Japan was in many ways like us; she saw herself as bringing good things (family values, self-determination for Asians, and economic interdependence) to Asia much as the United States perennially sees itself bringing good things (democracy, freedom, and free market) to other lands, we become more sober, reciprocally minded, and diplomatically enlightened.
The Chapters
The small theme of Hawaii and Japanese immigration on the one hand, and the great theme of China and contested Asia-Pacific geographies on the other, weave in and out of Conroy’s ten chapters. Each opens as a page-turner would.
When chapter 1, “Japan and the American Frontier in Asia,” opens, we find that the new U.S. Secretary of State, on the eve of ensuing imperial adventures from Cuba to the Philippines, was actually old and tired. Stubborn, cautious, and cranky, John Sherman had already decided when McKinley appointed him secretary of state in March 1897 that he would have no adventurous diplomacy, no extending of limits or acquiring of territory to add “new dangers” to the United States. Nevertheless…old John immediately found himself with Hawaiian annexation on his hands, and an irritated Japan to mollify.