| This dissertation analyzes American perceptions of Japan during the 1930s from cultural, social, and political perspectives. According to traditional historical interpretations, U.S.-Japan relations grew steadily hostile following Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931. Contemporary American views of a "road to war," however, were far more complex. I look at how various officials and non-state actors discerned and commented upon two competing Japans: one militaristic and feudal, the other politically moderate, socially modern, and culturally refined. Positive images revealed a Japanese element that seemed to embrace a way of life that many Americans themselves exalted, including representative institutions, jazz, Hollywood films, baseball, golf, and soda fountains. I argue that the perception of "tension" between two allegedly opposing Japans contributed to a restrained American foreign policy until the late 1930s. In the minds of some American officials and observers, a policy of restraint toward Japan could embolden "liberals" and facilitate their ascendance in Japanese political culture.; Notions of a likeminded "liberal element" returning to power, however, proved to be fabulously illusory. For many years, American policymakers and Asian specialists simply misread Japan, underestimating the breadth of autocracy in the country. Only after the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and China in the summer of 1937 did American notions of irreconcilable tension and political cleavage within Japanese society begin to collapse. The disintegration was gradual but inexorable. Japanese civilian statesmen themselves were the principal agents for precipitating a perceptual shift among American officials and opinion-makers---their support for domestic and foreign policies normally attributed to militaristic "mad dogs" raised doubts about Japan's supposed political divisions and modern patina. American officials thus steadily drew conclusions based on perceptions rooted ever deeper in reality. Partly as a result of this revised view, from 1938 through the fall of 1941, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt incrementally hardened its policy toward Japan with concrete measures, including economic sanctions and financial and military assistance to China. Significantly, despite the emergence in the late 1930s of a universally malignant view of the Rising Sun, the earlier American perception of Japanese "liberals" locked in mortal political combat with "militarists" laid the rhetorical and conceptual groundwork for a postwar construct that guided American occupation and Cold War policies in Japan. |
