West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Here the contrast reveals itself: between Hilary Conroy’s search for a delicate balance between idealism and realism, focusing on diplomats, peacemakers, and other in-between people, and more idealistic ideological approaches like Selden’s and my own, focusing on Mao and the people. Critics of Hilary Conroy’s approach may level arguments concerning his apparent backgrounding of the mass movement, for does he not leave it in the margins? And yet turning things around, perhaps those of us who have taken more radical positions could also be said to have backgrounded; in this case, backgrounded the compromisers of the world. We radicals push our more ideological positions, yet one could argue that we depend all the while on the in-between people—the peacemakers, diplomats, diplomatic historians, and a stable, peace-loving public—to provide the tranquil background into which we can fall back. We depend on those whose efforts to maintain the gently fluid status quo of peaceful family, community, and institutional life allow us to venture to left (and right?) extremes and yet always return, reconnecting our ideological purism to the underlying stability of a real world. From the Tao Te Ching, “Know the masculine, but maintain the feminine.” Perhaps even the most just new social arrangements can, in their purity, become cruel without a diplomat. A Mao Tse-tung needs a Chou En-lai.

In chapter 10, with which we close, we have come full circle back to Hawaii. “Prewar Hawaii and Japan” opens: Hawaii served as the halfway station between the United States and Japan, culturally, as well as geographically. Here the bombs of Pearl Harbor would fall.”

By examining more than 50 stories in the Hawaiian press from 1931–1941, Conroy reconstructs the thoughts and actions of the Hawaiian Japanese, the ultimate in-between people for these times. What he finds is this: