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

266 • YAMAMOTO, ISOROKU
family, and became close friends with Alice Mabel Bacon. In 1878,
Yamakawa and Shigeko Nagai entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie,
New York. Yamakawa graduated in 1882 with honors, becoming
the first Japanese woman to graduate from an American university.
Yamakawa, who married General Iwao Oyama soon after her
graduation from Vassar College, often worked to improve educational
opportunities for Japanese women in the late 19th and early
20th centuries.
YAMAMOTO, ISOROKU (1884–1943). As the architect of the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and as commander-inchief
of the Combined Fleet throughout the first half of World War II,
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto remains one of Japan’s best-known
wartime leaders. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1904 and
first came into contact with the United States in 1908. From April
1919, he began a two-year period of study at Harvard University, and
revisited the United States on an inspection tour in 1923–1924. He
again returned to the United States in December 1925, having been appointed
naval attaché to the Japanese embassy in Washington. He remained
in this post for two years.
Yamamoto’s experiences in the United States left him with two
firm convictions. First, naval power depended as much on abundant
sources of oil as it did on the traditional indices of naval strength,
such as the quality and size of a fleet. This, in turn, informed Yamamoto’s
belief that Japan could not hope to defeat the United States
in war because the latter was matchless in terms of its abundant oil
reserves. Yamamoto’s second conviction revolved around the novel
concept that naval aviation would play a decisive role in any future
conflict. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond, he thus stressed that
carrier-based aircraft represented the future of naval warfare.
Rear Admiral Yamamoto was a delegate to the First London
Naval Conference of 1930. He revealed himself through the course
of the conference to be antithetical to the naval limitation system that
allotted Japan an inferior ratio vis-à-vis the United States and Great
Britain. He soon dropped his opposition to the naval limitation system,
however, believing that it prevented a potentially ruinous naval
armaments race, which Japan could not hope to win. He was Japan’s
chief delegate to the Second London Naval Conference of 1935,