Steve Kemper, "Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Mar 2, 2023 · 40m

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. was represented in Japan by Ambassador Joseph Grew: born from a patrician family, Harvard-educated, ran away to the foreign service, and deeply respected by his fellow diplomats and Japanese politicians alike.

From his arrival in Tokyo in 1932 to when he was eventually repatriated back to the US in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, Grew dutifully reported to and advised the U.S. on what to do with an increasingly imperialist, militarist—and, at many times—dysfunctional Japan.

And if officials had listened to Grew, as Steve Kemper tells it in…