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

Preface

I could also have called this book, A Documentary History of the American Intrusion into East Asia from 1898 to the Vietnam War. In constructing the following chapters, I have used materials from many archives, such as the U.S. Library of Congress and its collection of Japanese War Crimes Documents; Japan’s Gaimusho (Foreign Office) Documents; Japan’s Diet Libraries Collections (with assistance from Yasushi Akashi, former Director of Japan’s Diet Library); the British Foreign Office and Oxford University Archives; the Hoover Institution (Stanford) and the Hoover Archival Collection (West Branch, Iowa); the Archives of Hawaii and the East-West Center (Honolulu); Chinese archival materials from former students Professor H. S. Lin and George C. C. Chang; Korean materials from former students Professor H. B. Rhee and Dr. Peter Yong-shik Shin; Filipino documents from former student Dr. Serafin Quiason; Vietnam documents from my son F. H. Conroy III’s former classmate and Ho Chi Minh biographer, Professor Sophie Quinn-Judge of Temple University; various French, German, and Russian documents (mostly in translation); and many memoirs, books, and articles by participants and/or journalists and observers of the events discussed, including my own memories of the occupation of Japan in which I participated.