As the Grews were getting ready to board the train to San Francisco, it was already May 15 in Japan (because Japan was thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time). Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was no doubt hoping to spend a quiet Sunday at his Tokyo residence with his daughter-in-law, who had just given birth. It had started out as a pleasant spring morning, and the diminutive seventy-five-year-old leader with closely-cropped hair and a full gray moustache and goatee surely thought he would have a day without disruption. It was not to be.
Around five o’clock that evening, two cabs pulled up in front of the Prime Minister’s expansive two-story stone residence. Construction had been completed in 1929, and the Art Deco style of the residence appeared to mimic the motif of the nearby Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Nine men, aged between twenty-four and twenty-eight, emerged from the two cabs. All were wearing military uniforms, and they were armed with revolvers and daggers. They broke up into two groups, with one group approaching the front gate and the other group going to the rear gate.
The men approaching the front gate expected resistance, but the guards with the regalia of the Emperor allowed the men to enter the building without objection or inquiry. The uniforms worn by the group surely assuaged any concern the guards might have had. Once inside, the young officers assumed they would find Inukai in the private quarters of the building, but they had no idea where those quarters were located. They eventually wandered upstairs and heard a key turning in a lock. The group assumed that it was the Prime Minister and rushed the door.
Inukai had to know why they were there. Although he had been in office only since December 1931, he had already incurred the wrath of many in the armed forces, primarily because he had criticized the Kwantung Army’s action in Manchuria and had refused to recognize the puppet regime of Manchukuo as an independent nation. Many in the Navy and the Army—especially the extremists recruited from the farms and small towns of rural Japan—saw him as an impediment to a glorious future for Japan.
Whatever concerns he may have had for his life, Inukai displayed a calm demeanor, which impressed the young officers. He led them to an interior room and asked them to remove their shoes. Inukai’s daughter-in-law was there with her baby. The men, “knowing what would happen in a few minutes,” suggested that she leave, but the young woman refused. Inukai lit a cigarette and appeared eager to engage the group in conversation. But that opportunity soon evaporated. The other group of officers burst into the room, and the leader, carrying a dagger in one hand, yelled, “No use in talking. Fire!” The officers immediately commenced firing, and Inukai quickly slumped to the matted floor.
The conspirators included two other officers who had thrown grenades at the offices of the Bank of Japan and the offices of Inukai’s political party. All of the conspirators surrendered almost immediately to the military police and were soon put on trial for murder. Much of the trial was devoted to statements by the defendants explaining their patriotic motivations. “The Japanese, for some curious reason,” Henri Smith-Hutton later observed, “have felt that if someone is serious enough to attack and kill a political enemy, he is showing what they call ‘great sincerity,’ and his ideas merit considerable attention.” One of the judges failed to appreciate that perspective, and he was removed from the case because “his attention had wandered” during one of the defendant’s speeches.
In the course of their testimony, the defendants explained that their original plans had included the assassination of Charlie Chaplin, who had arrived for a visit in Japan the previous day and was watching a sumo wrestling match with Inukai’s son on that fateful Sunday. There was no mystery behind that plan. The conspirators assumed that the actor’s demise would trigger a war for the United States. For the same reason, they had also considered assassinating the new American ambassador, who was due to arrive in Tokyo within the month.
Despite the heinous nature of the crime, there was broad sympathy throughout Japan for the defendants. A petition with about 350,000 signatures in blood was delivered to the court seeking leniency. Eleven youths from the countryside advised the court that they were prepared to take the position of the eleven defendants and, as proof of their sincerity, included eleven severed fingers in the package. Those and similar public sentiments appeared to have an impact. None of the defendants received a severe punishment from the court.
Grew knew nothing of the assassins’ motivations—or their plan to assassinate him—as he began his train trip to San Francisco, but a correspondent from the Chicago Herald-Examiner did hand him a newspaper which blared the headline, “Japanese Premier Slain.” Although the new ambassador was very much aware of Japan’s proclivity to political assassinations, he could not help thinking, “There must be something wrong here.” He knew he was entering a political cauldron. But he remained hopeful that his mission could help turn things around.
The SS President Coolidge arrived in Yokohama in the early morning hours of June 6, 1932, and as the dawn lifted, Joe and Alice could see the relatively new docks and wide streets, all a product of the reconstruction undertaken throughout the Tokyo area after the earthquake of September 1923. Within a short time, he and Alice were in the Embassy car, taking the bumpy eighteen-mile drive in a drizzling rain to the American Embassy in the Akasaka neighborhood, the location of many government buildings, including the Prime Minister’s residence. They passed narrow, crowded streets that had no names and were lined with small shops, shanty homes, and newly-constructed office buildings, some of which were eight or ten stories high. Although engaged in conversation with the Embassy’s counselor, Grew remembered the “ugliness of the route” and how the Embassy seemed like “a real oasis in the more or less ugly surroundings of the new-grown city.”
From the start, Grew wanted to create a cooperative atmosphere in the Embassy. Within a week after his arrival, he convened a meeting with the professional staff to convey his perspective. He said that he “wanted them to drop in whenever they had any information, views, or suggestions which they thought would be helpful.”He also wanted them to send him “confidential memorandums whenever they picked up any significant opinions or information, especially of a political nature.…” But the ability to work with others was paramount. As Grew explained in one of his letters to Groton describing the requirements for his private secretary, the candidate had to “be personally qualified to fit harmoniously into our closely-knit and intimate official family where the factor of congenial teamwork, both in work and play, is important.” In keeping with the aura of informality, the Ambassador was prone to call staff members on the phone himself and, when the staff member answered, simply say, “Grew speaking.”
For his part, Grew adopted a schedule that varied with the time and circumstance but usually resulted in him getting up around 6:30 a.m. and getting to his Chancery office by 7:15. There was almost always an endless number of communications coming in and going out of the Embassy. Sometimes Grew drafted the important telegrams and other outgoing communications himself and then shared drafts with the senior staff; at other times, he would edit the drafts of his staff. But rarely would he let any significant matter escape his attention. As Marshall Green later commented, the Ambassador “had an infinite capacity for detail.”
Developing and maintaining relationships with Japanese government officials, representatives from other embassies, journalists, and members of Japanese society occupied a good portion of Grew’s time. That preoccupation required attendance at meetings and other functions inside and outside the Embassy that might occur during the day or evening. As Grew later commented, the evening affairs were “generally a great deal less amusing than sitting at one’s desk watching the hands of the clock get around to six.” Many of the outside meetings and functions were at the nearby Tokyo Club, an upscale venue for prominent foreigners and Japanese. As explained by Gene Dooman, who was born in Japan and would become the Embassy’s Counselor in 1937, the club “promoted an aura of intimacy and personal intercourse which existed nowhere else in Japan.”
Never, however, would Grew try to speak to members of the Japanese community in their native language. He had a flair for foreign languages and spoke fluent French as well as German. But he knew that learning Japanese far exceeded the demands of any other language he had studied. The Japanese language consisted of thousands of characters, and each year the State Department would appoint individuals (usually recent college graduates) to become language officers. They would endure two or three years of intensive study to learn the language. Dooman, for one, remembered that his final examination as a language officer required him to know 6,000 characters. Smith-Hutton, a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis (who spoke fluent French), was assigned by the Navy to the American Embassy in Tokyo in 1926 to learn Japanese. After completing the required program of instruction, he concluded that “Japanese is perhaps the most complicated and difficult language of any of the world’s great languages” and that “it is capable of being interpreted in several different ways, particularly if you try to hide your real thoughts or your real intentions.” It was a telling point that would have serious repercussions in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack when American intelligence officers incorrectly translated secret Japanese cables.
Grew intuitively understood the challenges of mastering Japanese. As he told John Emmerson, a young language officer in the Embassy, he “feared that the dangerous hazards of ludicrous wrong usages would impair the dignity and esteem of the president’s representative.” It was a judgment Emmerson shared, later saying, at most, Grew would have had time only to learn “a collection of polite phrases that might have amused the Japanese he met, but would not truly have won him respect.” And so at the beginning of each day, the Ambassador would usually have one of the Embassy’s language officers read to him relevant sections from the many periodicals which populated Tokyo in those years.
Although she had learned a few phrases when she visited Japan in her early years—before she met Joe—Alice too was unable to speak or read Japanese. On one occasion, it resulted in some embarrassment to the Ambassador’s wife. She had purchased a bowl in a Tokyo market and placed it on a table in the foyer of the Embassy, only to see it disappear the next day. When she inquired about the missing bowl to the Japanese butler, he said it was in the pantry. Alice said she wanted it returned to the foyer, and the butler dutifully complied. But after another day, it disappeared again, and again the butler said he had placed it in the pantry. Alice was not one to keep her silence, and she took the butler to task for ignoring her instructions. He then explained that the writing on the bowl advertised it as an artifact for a Geisha house and made it inappropriate for the Embassy.
Joe and Alice’s inability to speak Japanese did not impede their ability to socialize with the Japanese community. Dinners at the Embassy were a frequent occurrence. They would sometimes be small affairs, but they would sometimes involve dozens of guests. Whatever the number of guests, the event almost always provided an occasion for the Ambassador to enjoy a Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whiskey cocktail before dinner and to serve wine from the extensive collection he had brought with him from the United States.
Grew also had to be available at hours when others might be sleeping because, given the time difference between Tokyo and Washington, he would often be awakened by the Embassy’s night clerk about a telegram or other communication from the State Department that required his immediate attention. He was never one to shirk any of these responsibilities, but, as he told his daughter Anita at one point, it was important to maintain “a reasonable sense of balance and proportion”—so he found time to indulge interests outside work.
He loved tennis, but as his age advanced, he found it more and more difficult to pursue that sport. He had an unremitting devotion to golf (playing left-handed with an unusual croquet style of putting, which seldom enabled him to break 100) and would play as often as he could—a fact well known in the diplomatic community. Grew became aware of that notoriety in the fall of 1941 when tensions between Japan and the United States were escalating. Grew casually asked a member of the French embassy at a diplomatic function why people would always ask him about his golf game. “Why, Mr. Ambassador,” the French official responded, “your golf is the thermometer which measures the temperature in the Diplomatic Corps. If a week goes by without your playing golf, the fact is cabled to every chancellery in the world over, for the situation is then indeed critical!”
Grew was also a voracious reader, usually favoring biography and history but occasionally reaching for a detective story. Music was another passion. The demands of the Tokyo position precluded him from practicing the piano as much as he had in earlier years, but music never lost its appeal. It became a refuge for him as the Pearl Harbor attack neared, and the tension mounted. At one point in October 1941, he remarked in his diary that, after attending church on one Sunday morning, he worked all day and “that evening enjoyed what is to me the most perfect form of relaxation—a comfortable chair, the lights out, and that glorious violin concerto of Brahms coming over the radio.”
Throughout all of this, Grew continued to maintain the diary he had started at the beginning of his diplomatic career. On many evenings and sometimes on weekends, he would sit at his desk, his pipe clenched between his teeth, and peck out the words on his seemingly ageless Smith-Corona typewriter. He placed great stock in that diary and would share copies of certain sections with his daughters (when they were older and living away from home) as well as friends and State Department colleagues, hoping that his contemporaneous comments would be interesting and, in the case of the State Department, useful in formulating policy.
In the meantime, one of Grew’s first obligations as ambassador was to present his credentials to the Emperor of Japan. On the morning of June 14, 1932, imperial coaches pulled up in front of the Chancery with Japanese cavalry flanked in the front and rear. Grew, dressed in formal wear with a top hat, entered the lead coach by himself (which already included a representative of the Emperor). The procession of cavalry and coaches (which carried Alice and the Embassy staff as well) then proceeded through the rain to the Imperial Palace, an imposing structure of high stone walls surrounded by a moat of greenish water. The Imperial Palace grounds encompassed almost one and a half square miles of land with numerous buildings, gardens, and ponds.
After passing over the moat through the main gate, the procession pulled in front of the main palace, a large, austere building reflecting traditional Japanese architecture. Grew and the rest of the party entered the palace and ascended the red-carpeted stairs through a large hall emblazoned with gold screens and ceilings. In due course, they proceeded to an interior room where Hirohito, Japan’s 124th emperor, dressed in full military regalia, was waiting for them.
The thirty-one-year-old monarch was an unimposing man of medium build and height (for Japanese) with a small moustache on an oval face, sloping shoulders, dark hair parted on the side, horn-rimmed glasses, and a modest countenance. Ned Crocker wrote his mother that Hirohito “was the most unimpressive monarch” he had ever seen—“[s]mall, pasty-faced, soft, and he holds himself terribly badly.…” In other circumstances and dressed in other clothes, the Emperor could have easily passed for an aspiring marine biologist—which did indeed reflect one of his passions (one of his favorite pastimes being the study of marine life, whether on the Palace grounds or at his vacation resort at Hayama on the Japanese coast).
His reign officially began on December 25, 1926, when his father, the Emperor Taisho, succumbed at the age of forty-seven to a long-standing illness that was probably precipitated by meningitis. Hirohito, as the Emperor’s first son, had already been acting as his father’s regent since November 1921 because Taisho’s physical and psychological deterioration had already left him largely incapacitated—a condition exemplified by Taisho’s inability to read a statement of five sentences at the opening of the Diet, Japan’s legislative body, in December 1919.
Hirohito was a soft-spoken man with a high-pitched voice who never smoked, preferred carbonated water, and had a passion for discipline and frugality. He would, for example, wear nondescript clothes inside the Palace until they wore out and use pencils until they were worn down to the stub. He maintained a rigid schedule for his work and hobbies, rising around 6 a.m. (in the summer) or 7 a.m. (in the winter) and going to the Palace study (which included busts of Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and Napoleon) to dispose of whatever papers or meetings were required. His outdoor activities included golf and riding (usually a white Arabian stallion or gelding). If he had to travel locally, it would be in a maroon automobile—the Emperor being the only Japanese allowed a car of that color. He did not travel outside of Japan; his only visit beyond Japan’s borders was a trip he had taken in 1921 to Western Europe, where he visited heads of state and royalty. He had led a sheltered life, being raised in isolation from his parents to prepare him for the role he would ultimately assume, and the exposure to Western European societies made him realize that he had been living “like a bird in a cage.”
Hirohito’s mild manner concealed a quick mind and deep-seated convictions which would periodically surface in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. These traits were in evidence long before he became Emperor. In 1918, the Palace elders had selected three princesses as suitable brides for the Crown Prince. Hirohito chose Princess Nagako, and he persisted in that choice despite the elders’ effort to recant her selection because they had discovered color blindness in her family history.
Whatever his preferences, Hirohito recognized the need to preserve the Emperor’s status in Japanese life. The line of his predecessors—so the Japanese believed—began in 660 BC. According to Japanese mythology, the first Emperor was the descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, which, to most Japanese, made the Emperor the divine representative of their country. “His Majesty is not human,” said Tojo Hideki, Japan’s Prime Minister in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. “He is God.” The veneration for the Emperor was so entrenched that, when Japan celebrated the 2,600th birthday of the empire outside the Palace grounds in November 1940, no one was allowed to witness the festivities from the windows and rooftops of nearby office buildings because it was forbidden to look down on the Emperor.
The reverence for the Emperor was a critical component of Japan’s military strength. He was the inspiration, the rallying point, that made sacrifice by the country’s soldiers not only possible but also honorable. “[T]o die for the Emperor,” said New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus, was the soldier’s “greatest glory, to surrender his greatest disgrace.” Grew himself saw evidence of that perspective in 1941 before the Pearl Harbor attack. He received word from the Chinese government of a Japanese soldier who had been taken prisoner and who wanted his family to know that he was still alive. Grew passed the information on to the Japanese Government, but he soon received a reply that the Japanese Government was not interested in receiving such information. So far as the Government and the man’s family were concerned, “that man was officially dead” because “[t]he man who allows himself to be captured has disgraced himself and his country.”
The Imperial Household Law stipulated that the Emperor was a living god, and that divine status was recognized in the Japanese Constitution promulgated in 1889. The Emperor was identified as “sacred and inviolable” and the “head of the Empire.” In accordance with that elevated status, the Emperor was endowed with all powers of sovereignty, including the right to “supreme command of the Army and Navy,” the right to appoint and dismiss ministers, the right to convoke and dismiss the Diet, and the right to issue all other orders necessary for the governance of the country, including any ordinances of “urgent necessity” required when the Diet was not sitting. Many of these imperial orders were called “Rescripts.” (Japan’s declaration of war on the United States on December 7, 1941, was identified as an Imperial Rescript.)
Although it was seemingly based on the political systems of Western European countries—primarily Germany and Great Britain—the Japanese Constitution, as implemented, resulted in an unusual form of governing that could be easily distinguished from the political systems of those other countries. The Japanese people had virtually no direct role in the selection of their government’s leaders or in the shaping of its policies, especially in the years before the Pearl Harbor attack. They only elected members of the House of Representatives of the Diet. The other chamber, the House of Peers, consisted of members of the Imperial family, members of nobility, and other persons appointed by the Emperor. Although it could adopt budgets and enact certain laws with the concurrence of the Emperor, the Diet rarely formulated national policy. Rather, the Diet—which was in session for only limited time periods—generally responded to the initiatives of the civilian and military leaders.
As Dooman later explained, “What the ordinary person—the man in the street—thought about important events was really of little moment.… National policies were not the formulation of the hopes and aspirations of the masses, but rather what a small group of people considered in the interests of the nation.” It was a critical point that Cordell Hull often disregarded when discussing a possible agreement with Japanese representatives in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. The Secretary of State repeatedly told those representatives that the negotiations would have a better chance of success if only Japanese leaders could educate the Japanese people about the benefits of policies that were not dependent on military aggression.
The public’s lack of involvement in public affairs was reflected in the selection and retention of the Prime Minister, the chief executive of the civilian government and the one who chose the other ministers of the cabinet (other than the Navy Minister and War Minister, who had to be approved by the Navy and Army, respectively). The Prime Minister was selected by the Emperor, who generally relied only on the recommendation of the Genro, or elder statesmen. When the last Genro died in 1940, the Emperor then relied on the jushin, a group composed of former Prime Ministers. The Prime Minister’s tenure could be terminated at any time—not by an upheaval of criticism from the public, but usually because he lost the confidence of the Army and the Navy and, to a lesser extent, other individuals who exercised influence over government policy.
Unlike in Great Britain or Germany, the Prime Minister of Japan had no direct control over the Army or the Navy. Each of those branches reported directly to the Emperor. As Dooman later observed, this structure constituted “a two-headed monstrosity” because the civilian government “was not cloaked with authority over the Armed Forces.” That separation was exemplified by the Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor: although the Prime Minister and the ministers in his cabinet ultimately approved (with the concurrence of the Army and Navy) the decision to go to war with the United States, the civilian members of the government knew nothing of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor until after it had commenced.
Beyond all these divisions of responsibility in the government, Hirohito was imbued with the notion that the Emperor should never be placed in the position of being blamed for an erroneous government decision. It was his responsibility, or so he was taught, to appear infallible. That point was drilled into his thinking in 1928 by Prince Saionji, the last remaining Genro, when the Kwantung Army assassinated Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the aging Chinese warlord of Manchuria. The army had blown up the train in which Chang was riding because they thought he was contemplating a pact with Chiang Kai-shek. The young emperor was furious that the Army had allowed the Kwantung Army to engage in such nefarious action and contemplated what he could do. Saionji disabused Hirohito of any such thoughts, telling him that his obligation was to “reign, not rule.” And so, as Hirohito later told an aide, he believed that the emperor had to accept any decision which reflected a consensus of the civilian government and military command “even if he personally does not agree with it.” Otherwise, said Hirohito, the emperor would not be acting like a “constitutional monarch” but as “an absolute monarch.”
That limited perspective of his prerogatives did not prevent Hirohito from trying to influence the consensus in government decision-making. He would convey his views in private meetings with cabinet ministers as well as the leaders of the Army and Navy. He would probe, push, and pull in whatever direction he thought would best serve the country. Sometimes—but especially after the death of Prince Saionji in 1940—he would exert his influence indirectly through the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, his principal aide (and the one who impressed the Imperial seal on all ordinances, orders, and other documents). At other times, especially in formal conferences, he would rely on the President of the Privy Council, the constitutional advisory arm of the emperor. For their part, the cabinet ministers as well as the members of the Army and Navy command were generally eager to accommodate the Emperor, believing that his sanction was a prerequisite to any action they might take—although there were occasions, especially with respect to the Kwantung Army and the other military forces in China, where the Emperor’s wishes were ignored.
All of this often made it difficult for Grew to pinpoint the locus of governmental decision-making or to nail down the direction of government policy. His principal government contacts were almost entirely within the civilian cabinet and its ministries. His naval and military attachés did have some contacts in the Army and Navy, but, as subordinate officers, they did not have comparable contacts in the highest levels of the armed forces. And so, in trying to assess Japan’s intentions or actions from a military perspective, Grew was often reduced to communicating with civilian leaders who had no direct control over the Army or Navy and frequently had no information on what the Army and Navy had done or what they were planning.
None of those limitations prevented Grew from drawing general conclusions about the Japanese people. He found that they were almost always unfailingly polite, smiling and bowing at the commencement of a meeting and during the course of conversation. But it was a trait that, at least to the Ambassador, could not be taken at face value. “Their traditional politeness,” he confided to his diary at one point, “is generally but a veneer, save in the case of well-bred families” and “does not comprise thoughtful consideration of others in any degree.”
Discipline was another hallmark of the Japanese personality. They rigidly adhered to patterns of life, regardless of any change in circumstance. Bob Fearey, Grew’s private secretary, well remembered the scene when he was allowed to leave the Embassy for a doctor’s appointment in 1942 while the Embassy staff was interned after the Pearl Harbor attack. Petroleum products were reserved almost exclusively for military purposes, and “the streets were almost barren of cars.…” said Fearey. But “when the traffic light was against them, the crowds, without a car in sight in either direction, would pile up en masse on the sidewalk corners until the light turned green.” For his part, Grew recognized that the Japanese discipline would be an advantage to the country in any armed conflict. In contrast to the German citizenry he had observed while stationed at the Berlin embassy during World War I, said Grew, the Japanese “will not crack morally or psychologically or economically, even when eventual defeat stares them in the face. They will pull in their belts another notch, reduce their rations from a bowl to a half bowl of rice, and fight to the bitter end.”
There were, however, moments of kindness, and in the first years of Grew’s tenure in Tokyo, none was more endearing—or more notorious—than the fate of Sambo, the Grews’ black cocker spaniel. The dog initially belonged to Cecil Lyon, the twenty-nine-year-old Third Secretary in the Embassy, who was ardently pursuing Grew’s twenty-one-year-old daughter Elsie. After they became engaged, Lyon had planned to visit Elsie during the summer of 1933 at the house her parents had rented in Karuizawa, a wooded mountainside resort about an hour outside of Tokyo. Cecil passed word that he was bringing Sambo with him, but he soon received some discouragement through the Embassy staff: “Mrs. Grew says not to bring Sambo. You’ve got to choose between Elsie and Sambo.” Being a headstrong diplomat, Lyon disregarded the Embassy warning and traveled to Karuizawa with Sambo, who jumped out of the car on arrival, ran up the stairs to the Grews’ bedroom, and jumped into bed with Alice. “And,” as Lyon later recalled, “I never got him back.”
Cecil did receive a compensating benefit a few months later. He and Elsie planned to take a honeymoon after their marriage in October, but State Department regulations said a Foreign Service officer could receive leave only if he had been employed for one year, and Lyon had not been in the service that long. He discussed the matter with Grew, who pulled out the regulations and saw that leave could be granted in an emergency. The Ambassador looked up at his future son-in-law and said, “This is certainly an emergency.”
Cecil and Elsie proceeded with their marriage, but Sambo remained the Grews’ dog. The following January, Elsie was taking a walk with Sambo and her father near the Palace grounds on a cold, wintry day when they realized that Sambo was nowhere to be found. They soon saw that Sambo had fallen into the moat surrounding the Palace and, as Grew remembered, the dog was “struggling in the ice and water with only his head showing, like a drowned rat.” The wall surrounding the moat was a steep vertical drop, and neither Grew nor Elsie could reach the hapless dog. Joe ran to the guardhouse to see if there might be a rowboat which he could maneuver into the moat, but the guard said no such vessel was available. The dejected Ambassador returned to where Elsie was, assuming that they had seen the last of Sambo. But when he reached Elsie, he saw a crowd surrounding the shivering dog. Elsie explained that a passing taxi driver, along with a nearby delivery boy and the Grews’ chauffer, had worked together to use a rope to descend the vertical moat wall and retrieve the dog.
Grew never saw the taxi driver, who had already left the scene without giving Elsie his name. Upon hearing the story, one of Grew’s Japanese friends thought it warranted publication, and he arranged to have Grew interviewed by the press. In the ensuing articles, Grew mentioned his desire to know the name of the taxi driver so that he could be given an appropriate reward—a watch that Alice had purchased. A few days later, a man arrived at the Chancery, saying he was the taxi driver who had rescued Sambo. Before Alice could come down to the Chancery to give him the watch, the alleged rescuer was assaulted by another taxi driver, who said that the purported hero had stolen his taxi in an effort to claim the reward. A few days later, the real savior showed up at the Embassy to receive the watch from Alice. By then, the tale of Sambo was well known in Tokyo circles. So Grew could not have been entirely surprised when the Emperor asked him at a Palace function, “How is Sambo?”
Long before then, Grew was more worried about his continued status as the American ambassador to Japan than the fate of a dog. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected president in November 1932. Grew sent the president-elect a “Dear Frank” letter, saying that “Groton, Harvard, and the Fly are immensely proud”—although Grew confided to his diary that they were now entering a period of “watchful waiting” because he had “very little knowledge of Frank Roosevelt’s potential capabilities.” Despite the personal connection with the President-elect, Grew followed protocol and submitted his resignation—even though he hoped to remain in Tokyo. He made his interest known to well-connected intimates, including John W. Davis (the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee), Colonel Edward House (for whom Grew had worked during the Versailles Treaty negotiations), and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (whom he and Alice had entertained in Tokyo the previous October). His efforts paid dividends. In March 1933, Grew received word that the newly-elected president wished him to remain at his post.
Even before he received word of his retention, Grew had seen the hand of the Japanese military—whose influence had expanded after the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai—in preparing the nation for war. The press was replete with articles and speeches attacking foreign powers, especially the United States, who were critical of Japanese actions in Manchuria and elsewhere. “This situation reminds me strongly of the efforts of the German Government… to build up a public war psychology in 1914,” Grew had written Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, on August 13, 1932. “The German military machine, supported by a carefully nurtured public war psychology, took the bit in its teeth and overrode all restraining influences in 1914. The Japanese military machine is not dissimilar. It has been built for war, feels prepared for war, and would welcome war.”
His assessment was shared by Stanley K. Hornbeck, Chief of the State Department’s Division of Far Eastern Affairs. Hornbeck held that position when Grew had arrived in Tokyo in June 1932, and he would hold that position until 1937. He then became the Secretary of State’s Adviser on Political Relations and Hull’s principal aide on matters relating to Japan, a job he would retain up to and even after the Pearl Harbor attack. Like Grew, Hornbeck recognized the dominant influence of the military, especially in foreign affairs. Japan’s foreign policy, said Hornbeck in a 1933 memo, constituted a “two-faced policy.” To the West, Japan presented a diplomatic, “smiling, refined face.” To its neighbors, Japan presented the face of “Attila,” the notoriously violent leader of the Huns. Behind the diplomatic façade, said Hornbeck, the United States and its allies were really “dealing with a military and militant state.”
The Ambassador’s and Hornbeck’s agreement at this early stage of Grew’s tenure would not stand the test of time. Although they would always maintain cordial relations and would communicate frequently (with Grew sometimes sending Hornbeck excerpts of his diary entries), the two men had diametrically different views on how to handle Japan. The divergence was reflected in Hornbeck’s propensity to write critical comments with a red pencil on the diary entries which Grew sent to him. Years after the war, Dooman—who served on the Embassy staff between 1937 and 1942—acknowledged that he and Grew realized “that we were dealing in Washington with a person—I am here referring to Stanley Hornbeck—who was on the opposite side of the fence, who was being extremely busy negating, as it were, the purport of our reports from Tokyo.” Rarely, if ever, would that personal frustration with Hornbeck—who almost always had the upper hand in shaping American policy—surface in any document or written communication Grew generated before the Pearl Harbor attack. Instead, the frustration would almost always emerge when Grew expressed disappointment with the policies and decisions of the Roosevelt administration.
Hornbeck was fifty years old when he wrote that 1933 memo on the two-faced Japanese foreign policy. A lean, intense, chain-smoking man with a balding head, an angular and often unsmiling face, dark eyes, a sharp nose, and large ears, Hornbeck’s interest in China and Japan took root when he traveled to China in 1909 at the age of twenty-six. He had been an instructor at the University of Wisconsin (where he would later earn his doctorate), having graduated from the University of Denver and then having spent three years in Oxford, England, as a Rhodes Scholar. One day when he was at Wisconsin, Stanley saw an article in a school newspaper which said that a provincial college in Hangchow, China, was looking for professors. Then and there, the young scholar decided that he was going to China.
Hornbeck’s four years in China proved to be an indelible experience. He met many interesting and important Chinese, including the Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin, whom Hornbeck later described as “a courteous, soft-spoken Chinese gentleman” who was “small in stature but large in capabilities and in vision.” (Years later, after Chang had been assassinated by the Kwantung Army, Hornbeck would remember with fondness a visit in Washington from “a bright-eyed and charming Chinese girl” who told Hornbeck that Chang was her grandfather.) Those treasured memories of the Chinese were counterbalanced by stories he had heard from a British citizen about boys at one of the many Japanese schools who “talked most” about the “war which Japan was going to have with the United States” and how “Japan would defeat the United States.”
All of these early experiences in China no doubt played a large role in Hornbeck’s later perspective on American policy toward Japan. Dooman, who worked with Hornbeck in the Far Eastern Division of the State Department between 1933 and 1937, remembered that it was “a very unpleasant experience” because, as the Embassy Counselor said, “I did not feel I could deal with Dr. Hornbeck as a person with a completely objective mind. I discovered that he had two supreme passions. One was a feeling of affection and sympathy for China. And the second was a pathological hatred of Japan and the Japanese.”
For those who worked with him, Hornbeck’s firm views on China and Japan were complemented by an unyielding perspective. He was “very dictatorial,” said Dooman, and those who worked in the Far Eastern Division were “terrified by him.” That dogmatic demeanor was particularly pronounced when it came to writing memos and other communications. Hornbeck was an unforgiving taskmaster. The sentence structure had to be precise, the grammar impeccable, and the word selection flawless. One staff member recalled Hornbeck telling a subordinate to spend a few hours studying the difference between “in regard to” and “with respect to.”
“For an officer assigned to Far Eastern affairs,” remembered John Emmerson, who worked in the Far Eastern Division in the months before Pearl Harbor, “getting a piece of paper as far as Hornbeck, let alone beyond, was a moment of minor triumph.” The roadblock was Max Hamilton, who had assumed Hornbeck’s position as Chief of the Far Eastern Division in 1937. Although he had been elevated to the status of Adviser on Political Relations, Hornbeck exercised supervisory control over his former division. “Fearful of his chief’s eagle eye for error,” said Emmerson, “Max Hamilton would fix on every phrase, every word, and every comma to achieve the perfection that would pass the Hornbeckian judgment.”
Despite these demands, there were those who respected the long-time State Department employee. Joe Ballantine, who had worked in the Embassy with Grew and then returned to Washington in 1937 to the take over the Japan Desk in the Far Eastern Division, said of Hornbeck and Hamilton, “I never could have worked with two more selfless persons.”
Long before Ballantine began to work with Hornbeck, the Japanese military experienced a transformation that was to affect the dynamics of Japanese policy in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. The precipitating event was brutal, and it was one that Joe Grew would long remember.