Over the years I have profited from interuniversity research projects and Japanese-American historical conferences, most importantly the Kawaguchiko Conference held in July 1969 under the leadership of Hosoya Chihiro. The late Nomura Minoru of the National Defense College (director of the Second Division of the War History Office, the Defense Agency) and the late Admiral Suekuni Masao, also of the War History Office, were of great assistance. The late Admiral Tomioka Sadatoshi, Chief of the Operations Division and, after the war, President of the Historical Sources Research Society, was generous with his time. The late Enomoto Jūji, Senior Councilor to the Navy Ministry, kindly invited me to examine his unparalleled collection of interwar naval conference materials at his house in 1975. Hatano Sumio helped me obtain copies of important diaries.
American and British scholars also guided me during their stays in Kyoto. The late Arthur Marder, then working on his Old Friends, New Enemies (1981), befriended me; it was a pleasure to contribute to his Festschrift. He was greatly helpful with a Mahan anthology I was editing and translating. The late British political scientist Joseph Frankel carefully commented on one of my papers from the viewpoint of decision making. In London, D. C. Watt and Ian H. Nish commented on several of my chapters.
My friends in America have done everything in their power, which is a great deal, to be of help. I am especially grateful to Robert H. Ferrell, the most distinguished of Bemis’s students, for constantly encouraging and helping me by commenting on and improving my English-language publications. For more than ten years, Edward S. Miller has provided me with friendly support, and he made a generous endowment to the Naval Institute Press on behalf of this book. Robert J. C. Butow took pains to improve the manuscript even though he was so busy with his F. D. Roosevelt and Japan. Dean Allard, Former Director of Naval History, Department of the Navy, was always helpful. It is impossible to name all those to whom I am indebted, so I shall confine myself to several more friends who read and commented on this book manuscript either in part or entirely—James Auer, Michael A. Barnhart, Waldo H. Heinrichs, Charles E. Neu, Ronald H. Spector, and the late David A. Titus.
In acknowledging the help I received I must also include experiences with such people as Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. who invited me to her mansion (“Old Orchard”) on Long Island to examine the papers and diary of her husband and even to be an overnight guest. I fondly recall how I entered the world of the Theodore Roosevelts, pere et fils. That was back in 1959. My years in America included a notable visit in Washington with Ambassador Stanley K. Hornbeck, long of the State Department, where he was Far Eastern adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He not only let me see portions of his papers in his apartment but also introduced me to Ambassador Joseph C. Grew, my benefactor who made my college education in America possible.
I am grateful to Paul Wilderson, former Executive Editor of the Naval Institute Press, for his constant encouragement, and new editor Eric Mills for his help in the final stage of revising and editing the manuscript. Peter Mauch of Ritsumeikan University helped proofread the manuscript. Nakatani Tadashi was helpful in multiple ways as my graduate assistant. Among my former students, Ken Yoshimura has taken the greatest interest in the completion of this book. It goes without saying that errors of omission and commission or remaining stylistic infelicities are solely mine.
Gratefully I dedicate this book to Samuel Flagg Bemis and to his memory, which I warmly share with Robert H. Ferrell.
A Note on Translation Japanese documents are incredibly difficult to translate. In addition, national policy papers in the years in which I have been working were studies in deliberate ambiguities, being products of tortuous interservice compromises. Rear Admiral Tomioka wrote in his memoirs Kaisen to Shūsen that “the Japanese language is so ambiguous, vague, and pregnant with meaning that it is not suited to operational planning.” Usually I trusted my own translations, but when English translations existed, I sometimes gratefully availed myself of them, with minor changes for stylistic consistency.
In accordance with the established convention in academic works, Japanese names are presented with the family name preceding the given name. Because my account deals with history before World War II, I have spelled place-names in their contemporary form.