In 1891, Japanese English scholar Uchimura Kanzo resigned from the First National Higher School in Tokyo after refusing to deliver a deep bow to Emperor Meiji’s Imperial Rescript on Education. In an era when State Shinto deified the Emperor, Uchimura justified his defiance through Christianity’s staunch opposition to idolatry. What began as a minor transgression at a school ceremony quickly escalated into a national controversy, as Japanese nationalists cast him not only as an obstinate Christian but as a disloyal subject of the Empire. Straddling the tension between domestic expectations and foreign influences, Uchimura later reflected on his alienation from both: ‘hated by [his] countrymen for Jesus’s sake as a yaso’ and ‘disliked by foreign missionaries for Japan’s sake as national and narrow.’
Born in Edo (Tokyo), Uchimura turned to the Christian faith at a young age after extensive exchanges with Americans, not least William Smith Clark, President of UMass Amherst and a co-founder of Uchimura’s alma mater in Sapporo. As an international student in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Uchimura was heavily influenced by Quaker pacifism. Later on, as a prominent thought-leader in Japan, Uchimura seemingly stood for everything the Empire was not: Christianity when the Emperor was sanctified, pacifism when the Empire delivered a striking blow against China and Russia, and even environmentalism when the country industrialized at an astonishing pace. More importantly, Uchimura’s intellectual foundation had an American accent that came at odds with Meiji-era nationalism. Although Japan unabashedly adopted Western modernization, it was not prepared—nor planned—to welcome Uchimura’s religious-intellectual package deal. As his faith became ‘an ellipse with two centres’, Uchimura’s advocacy against unrestrained warfare fell apart soon after his death. In 1931, the Kwantung Army seized Manchuria, marking the beginning of wars which ended, in our collective psyche, with two atomic bombs.
When I visited Uchimura’s grave at Tama Cemetery in the outskirts of Tokyo this winter, I discovered that a short walk from the Christian pacifist took me to another prominent figure in Japanese history: Marshall Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. The two graves symbolize two contrasting yet interlinked struggles against Japanese militarism. Just like Uchimura, Yamamoto spent time in Massachusetts as a student. Likewise, Yamamoto was caught between clashing superpowers on two sides of the Pacific Ocean. Today, the world remembers Yamamoto as the chief architect of the Pearl Harbor attack and a villain representative of Japan’s gambling disorder. The downing of Yamamoto’s aircraft by American pilots near Bougainville Island satisfied the American public’s desire for vengeance and even inspired a West Wing episode on assassinating a foreign leader.
Harvard alumni are known for starting wars they cannot win, but the characterization of Yamamoto as a delusional gambler is rather unfair. In fact, Yamamoto’s contemporaries, particularly those in the Imperial Army, frequently castigated the Admiral for his reluctance to enter a decisive battle with the Western world. Of course, having served as a naval attaché in Washington, Yamamoto’s warning against war with the United States came from a position of practicality. He was certain that Japan would have to march into the White House to obtain a final victory: ‘I wonder if our politicians… have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.’
One can only appreciate Yamamoto’s clairvoyance with a balanced assessment of Japanese strategic desires in the 1930s. On the one hand, Japan’s deep-rooted fear of a foreign takeover tracing back to the arrival of Perry’s “black ships” led its leaders to learn and internalize a social Darwinist interpretation of international affairs. In other words, the only alternative to being colonized was to become a colonizer. For those such as Prime Minister Hara Takashi, who favored a pro-Western foreign policy, the opposition from the U.S. and white British dominions to their Racial Equality Proposal in the Parisian Summer of 1919 signaled the ill-fated future of the Japanese liberal internationalist project. Hara was stabbed dead at Tokyo Station in 1921, and Japan would soon enter an era defined by rampant political assassinations and the consolidation of far-right forces. Throughout the 1930s, anxious militarists saw Yamamoto—who opposed war with China and apologized to the U.S. following the USS Panay incident—as an obstacle to the realization of Japanese strategic ambitions. The admiral was even rightfully convinced that the Army’s security detail sent to protect him could be his next assassin.
On the other hand, excessive optimism on the “fate” of the Japanese Empire permeated throughout the liberal and far-right factions alike. The post-Shogunate Japanese state’s success in following a Western path to “modernization” and “civilization” relied on bold gambles. No one saw the nascent Imperial Japan as the favorite in its clashes with the Qing, the Russian Empire, and the Kaiserreich. Yet, Japan repeatedly defied expectations, emerging victorious against superior powers and obtaining Western recognition. Combined with insecurity about its relative position in the international order and discomfort with being racially categorized with minor powers, Japanese “Young Turks” dedicated themselves to expansionist causes in East Asia, forever staining Japan’s relationship with its past. Influential militarists like Ishiwara Kanji proposed ludicrous theories about how Japan must assume leadership over the “yellow race” in a global struggle against Euro-Americans. Yet, it was precisely fellow Asians he intended to liberate who suffered the most under the Kwantung Army. The aspiration to ascend the civilizational ladder was coupled with an image of the world with either sheep or wolves: Westernization became Tokyo’s license to maim.
Uchimura’s Quaker roots led to his conviction that war was an inherent vice. For Yamamoto’s contemporaries, however, launching a war—no matter how risible—was seen as the best way to forestall Japan’s domination by Western powers. Militarists performed mental gymnastics to frame even the most criminal behavior of Japanese armed forces as necessary to prevent greater harm. When fighter planes under Yamamoto’s command pierced through dawn skies west of Honolulu, I cannot imagine how the Admiral struggled through his compatriots’ celebration of his feats as Japan’s attempt to “overcome” Western modernity. Unlike Uchimura or Yamamoto, the West remained an abstraction of evil in the Japanese collective consciousness throughout the Pacific War. To former students who studied in the United States, however, the ‘land of the free’ embodied profound contradictions, simultaneously representing religious and technological advancement while treating those students as inferior beings. Even long before Pearl Harbor, American policymakers created a standard of civilization East Asians could never surpass. It was the same standard that drove Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose distant cousin praised the Japanese as the whites of the Orient, to place 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps throughout the American West. Whilst Uchimura failed to reverse the tide of war as an outsider, Yamamoto worked within the system against a cause for which he would be remembered, yet both struggled in vain.
Revisionist accounts today—including from reflexive liberals in America and far-right remnants in Japan—suggest that FDR and Truman were at fault for domineering trade practices toward Tokyo, indiscriminate bombing against civilians (including two nuclear bombs), and imposing “victor’s justice” on a racially discriminated population. These stories neglect the devastation endured by those under Japanese occupation and understate Washington’s role in enabling Japan’s earlier territorial expansions. Nonetheless, one can see how American practices during the Pacific War, often divorced from ethical considerations originating on the European Front, were repeated on Chinese and Korean troops a few years later. Chinese historiography today struggles to portray the same American troops as compassionate liberators in 1945 and wannabe colonizers in 1951. This historical complexity often goes unappreciated across post-war East Asia.
For Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, who presided over the escalation of war with China and approved the Pearl Harbor attack, anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States that threatened his Princeton-educated son constituted a key casus belli against Washington. Viewing Japan as one of the “have-not” powers unfairly shut out of global influence by the dominant Western empires, Konoe believed that an alliance with similarly resentful Germany and Italy offered the best path out of Tokyo’s diplomatic isolation. His notorious successor, Tojo Hideki, was equally convinced that Washington would never grant Japan the respect it deserved unless it forced the issue through war.
Brief exposures to American society left Konoe and Tojo frustrated and vengeful—sentiments that likely resonated with many of their peers in Tokyo. Japanese nationals living in America, caught between two worlds, found themselves at home in neither their birthplace nor their adopted land. This frustration mirrored that of Japan’s political elites, who, after turning away from a ‘backward’ Asia to embrace Western modernization, found themselves spurned by the Janus-faced Euro-American international order they had sought to join as equals. The humiliation of this rejection fueled resentment in Tokyo, reinforcing the belief that brute force, in lieu of prudent diplomacy, was needed to compel the West to recognize Japan’s rightful status.
These complexities associated with the breakdown of Japan-U.S. relations leading to Pearl Harbor are now conveniently tucked under Harvard professor Graham Allison’s concept, ‘Thucydides’s Trap’. Arguing that war is difficult to avert when ‘a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one’, Allison overlooks the psychological discomforts and entanglements forged through decades of Japan-U.S. exchanges. Instead, policymakers learned that the U.S. and China today are ‘destined’ for the same wars of power transition, as it once was with Japan. Decades of prudent diplomacy to stabilize Beijing’s rise repackaged as strategic naivety, Secretary of State Pompeo declared that U.S. engagement with China was a ‘failure’. Whether one can avoid war by bringing it on remains an open question, but those who champion this logic—much like their counterparts in the imperial capital—now hold the reins of power, shaping policy with the conviction that a clash of titans is not just a tragedy but a necessity. ‘We don’t deny [cold wars] are dangerous,’ writes Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, ‘the problem is that the United States is already in one.’ Situated in the epicenter of historical amnesia, Trump’s erstwhile Director of Policy Planning Kiron Skinner further elaborated that whilst the Washington-Moscow Cold War was ‘a fight within the Western family’, China was America’s first ‘great power competitor that is not Caucasian’.
The discourses on China’s geopolitical transgressions or America’s hegemonic behavior today leave little room for nuance when hawks in Beijing and Washington loudly predict a decisive war in the Western Pacific for which they seem extraordinarily enthusiastic. I do not know who the Uchimuras and Yamamotos of our age would be, but I have witnessed the discomfort widely shared amongst those who, as we often describe, are “caught between competing superpowers.” It is not hard to parse the deterministic cynicism amongst international students, business leaders, cultural ambassadors, and others who traverse across the Pacific Ocean. Although some of these people have dedicated themselves to becoming the next Konoe Fumimaro, it has been more common for me to find those who identified with either Uchimura’s unrelenting pacifism or Yamamoto’s practical opposition to unwinnable wars. Likewise, we will have to struggle—as many of us already are struggling—with the vilification of neutrality and accusations of betrayal. There are currently 4.7 million Chinese Americans and more than 70,000 Americans living in China—together around 40 times the number of Japanese Americans interned under FDR. As popular anger and resentment mount in both countries on military, economic, and ethical grounds, I know that the concerns of those caught between Japan and the U.S. will also be ours. The voices of those who recognize legitimate grievances in the international system yet refuse to join the warmongering chorus are often drowned out, but they exist—caught in the uneasy space between acknowledging the frictions between superpowers and resisting the fatalistic march toward conflict. History is not obliged to offer redemption. Far from the crowds and grand monuments, Uchimura and Yamamoto lay in near silence. The world remembers those who ride the waves of history, not those who try in vain to hold them back.