Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

JAPANESE–AMERICAN NEGOTIATIONS, 1941 • 141
JAPANESE–AMERICAN NEGOTIATIONS, 1941. The Japanese–
American negotiations of 1941 opened in February 1941 and ended
some 10 months later with the Japanese attack on the American naval
base at Pearl Harbor. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Ambassador
Kichisaburō Nomura were the principal protagonists. From the
outset, the gulf separating the two nations was wide.
The Japanese government months earlier had decided that if favorable
circumstances arose, it would advance militarily into the
resource-rich colonial regions of Southeast Asia. The United States
government, for its part, was convinced that the defense of Great
Britain was the best defense of the United States. In this connection,
it was hardly amenable to a Japanese advance against Britain’s Far
Eastern possessions. Compounding the issue was Japan’s ongoing
war in China. As early as January 1940, Washington had put Japanese
policymakers on notice by abrogating the two nations’ treaty of
commerce. Then when, in September 1940, Japan allied itself with
Nazi Germany, its war in China presented itself to American policymakers
not as a regional or local war but as part of “an organized and
ruthless movement of conquest.”
The course taken by the negotiations reflected the slim chances of
success. To be sure, the prospect of diplomatic rapprochement—in
the form of the so-called Draft Understanding between Japan and the
United States—flickered briefly in April. For reasons of his own,
however, Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka refused to play ball. In
the meantime, as Matsuoka raised the ire of American officialdom,
Germany launched its assault on the Soviet Union. Matsuoka counseled
an immediate attack on the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern
provinces, although the army and navy chiefs of staff carried the debate
with their insistence on an attack to the south. Japanese troops
occupied the Indochinese peninsula in its entirety in late July 1941.
From Washington, Ambassador Nomura had repeatedly warned
his government that an advance into Southeast Asia would torpedo
his negotiations with American officialdom. He also sought to bring
America’s state of war-preparedness to his government’s attention.
Nobody listened until Washington responded to the occupation of Indochina
first by freezing Japanese assets and then by slapping a total
embargo on oil. In August Foreign Minister Teijirō Toyoda (who replaced
Matsuoka in mid-July) and Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe