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

192 • NOMURA, KICHISABURO –
territorial integrity, and allowing equality of commercial opportunity
in that nation. In other words, he argued for an explicit Japanese commitment
to the American principle of the Open Door. Backed by cabinet
unanimity on this score, Nomura entered conversations with
Grew in early November. By December, Nomura proposed that Japan
would compensate the United States for damages it had inflicted on
American interests in China. He also promised to honor and respect
American interests in China, and, as a show of good faith, he offered
to partially open the Yangtze River to foreign ships. In return, he
sought a new treaty of commerce from the United States. Through
Grew, Washington responded coolly to Nomura’s overtures. This, in
turn, convinced those in the Japanese government who opposed Nomura’s
diplomatic stance of the futility of seeking a rapprochement
with the United States, and the Abe cabinet collapsed in January 1940.
Within days, the United States formally abrogated the two nations’
treaty of commerce. See also PACIFIC WAR.
NOMURA, KICHISABURŌ (1877–1964). Kichisaburō Nomura was
an admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy who sought throughout his
career to establish cordial relations between Japan and the United
States. The third son of a former samurai family in Wakayama prefecture,
he graduated second in his class from the Naval Academy at
Etajima in 1899. His first extended contact with the United States
came in World War I, when he served as naval attaché to the Japanese
Embassy in Washington from 1914 to 1918. He returned to the
United States as Admiral Tomosaburō Katō’s chief aide de camp at
the Washington Conference of 1921–1922. In the face of violent opposition
from within naval ranks, Nomura offered Katô his unequivocal
support for the latter accepting Secretary of State Charles Evan
Hughes’s proposal for the reduction of capital ship strength according
to the ratio of 10:10:6 for the United States, Great Britain, and
Japan. Over the ensuing years, Nomura emerged as a leading figure
among those who supported the naval limitation treaties. After retiring
from active service in 1937, he served as foreign minister (September
1939–January 1940) in the short-lived cabinet of General
Nobuyuki Abe, and reemerged in the postwar era as the “father” of
Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces.
Nomura inevitably will be remembered best as Japan’s ambassador
to the United States at the time of Pearl Harbor. Although historians