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

KONOE–ROOSEVELT SUMMIT MEETING • 159
of leading bureaucrats and intellectuals—including Hozumi Ozaki,
who in 1941 was executed for his involvement in the Sorge spy ring—
in the so-called Shōwa Research Association.
Konoe assumed the prime minister’s post in June 1937. A month
later, Japan was at war with China. His leadership at this crucial moment
was wanting. Utterly incapable of capitalizing on the desires of
both nations for a speedy local settlement, Konoe instead allowed reinforcements
to be sent and then looked on as the fighting intensified and
developed into a major war. With no exit strategy in sight, in the following
January, Konoe proclaimed that his government would deal with
Chiang Kai-shek only on the battlefield and at the surrender table.
Having in November 1938 announced a “new order” in Asia, Konoe
in January 1939 resigned as prime minister. He returned to office the
following July, launching a series of foreign policies with disastrous
consequences. His foreign policy rested on an alliance relationship with
Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, which, far from bringing an end to the
war in China, threatened to embroil Japan in a much wider war against
the United States and Great Britain. Not until late August 1941 did Konoe
recognize how close he had brought Japan to war with the United
States. His effort at warding off such a disaster, which amounted to a
proposal for a personal summit between President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and himself, was a classic too-little, too-late response.
Late in the war, Konoe feared an impending Communist revolution
and thus advised the emperor to seek a conditional peace with the
United States. He saw such a peace in the terms of the Potsdam
Proclamation. After the war, he attempted to rewrite the Meiji Constitution.
The American authorities not only rejected his efforts, but
arrested him as a war criminal. Embittered, Konoe committed suicide
in December 1945.
KONOE–ROOSEVELT SUMMIT MEETING (1941). Foreign Minister
Teijirō Toyoda in early August 1941 instructed Japan’s ambassador
to Washington, Kichisaburō Nomura, to sound out American policymakers
on the possibility of a summit meeting between Prime Minister
Fumimaro Konoe and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Talks to this
end continued for some two months, although Japanese policymakers’
inability to define the terms to which Konoe would agree at the summit
meeting ensured that the proposal never got off the ground.