Kurusu Saburo
Kurusu Saburō ( Japanese 来栖三郎; born March 6, 1886 in Kanagawa Prefecture ; † April 7, 1954 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese diplomat . From 1939 he was the Japanese ambassador to Germany and in this capacity he signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940 . In 1941 he was sent to Washington, DC as a special envoy and, together with Nomura Kichisaburō , conducted final negotiations with the USA until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Life
Kurusu studied law at Hitotsubashi University . After graduating, he attended consular high school in Tokyo and joined the Japanese foreign service in 1910. In 1913 he was sent abroad for the first time, working as a consul in Chicago . There he met the American Alice Jay Little (1891-1973), whom he married in 1914. Alice Kurusu took on Japanese citizenship and the marriage produced three children, two daughters and a son. In 1921 Kurusu was transferred to Manila as consul , in 1922 as first secretary to the Japanese embassy in Chile , then to Greece . In 1925 Kurusu was appointed 1st Embassy Secretary at the Embassy of Japan in Rome. From 1927 to 1931 he was Consul General in Hamburg. After a stint as Envoy Extraordinary in Peru , Kurusu was recalled to Tokyo in 1932, where he was appointed Director of the Foreign Ministry 's Department of Commerce . In July 1936 he became Japanese ambassador in Brussels . When war broke out in September, he was recalled in 1939 and returned to Tokyo.
As ambassador in Berlin (1939–1941)
In December 1939, Kurusu was sent to the post of ambassador to Berlin. In May and June 1940, the Wehrmacht in the western campaign forced France, Belgium and the Netherlands to capitulate within a very short time and drove the British forces from the continent. This course of events, which hardly any observers expected, also changed Japan's assessment of foreign policy. The colonial powers of the Netherlands and France were defeated, and their colonies in the Far East ( Dutch East Indies and French Indochina ) seemed to fall into the laps of the Japanese. To back up these claims, the Japanese Foreign Ministry stepped up propaganda for the establishment of a Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere . On the one hand, this propaganda was aimed at the countries in Asia that were still under colonial rule – especially India. On the other hand, the propaganda was also directed in the direction of Germany, because the Japanese leadership feared a German grip on the French and Dutch colonies and wanted to stake out these areas as a sphere of interest .
On August 1, 1940, Secretary of State Matsuoka in a speech offered cooperation to all countries that would "understand" [and accept] the new state of power in East Asia. This was a clear offer to Germany. On August 7, 1940, Kurusu met with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and his State Secretary Weizsäcker and explained the Japanese concept of the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere in more detail, which was to include Greater East Asia and the South Pacific. In this sphere, Japan should have political and military primacy, for which Germany's consent was required. On August 22, 1940, Kurusu met with Ministerialdirektor Emil Wiehl , head of the Trade Policy Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and informed him that Germany would only have economic interests in the Dutch East Indies. These agreements finally culminated in the Tripartite Pact , which Kurusu signed in the Reich Chancellery on September 27, 1940 together with Ribbentrop and the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano . Kurusu also signed the subsequent accession of other countries to the three-power pact for Japan.
In early 1941, Kurusu resigned as ambassador. In his memoirs, Kurusu gives his distaste for the Tripartite Pact as the reason for his resignation. The decisive factor will probably have been that Kurusu was sidelined during the actual drafting of the pact. The negotiations between Germany and Japan were conducted exclusively in Tokyo by the German diplomats Heinrich Stahmer and Eugen Ott with Foreign Minister Matsuoka . After Kurusu's resignation was accepted, he returned to Japan via the United States in the spring of 1941. In the process, he met his friend Nomura in Washington .
As Special Envoy in Washington (1941)
In October 1940, in response to the aggression against China and the occupation of French Indochina , the US imposed an embargo that severely restricted imports of oil and scrap metal into Japan. (See there .)
In the summer of 1941, negotiations between the United States and Japan stalled. The Japanese Ambassador to the United States, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburō , asked the Japanese Foreign Ministry on August 4, 1941 for reinforcements from "someone like Kurusu" to get the negotiation going again. As a result, Kurusu himself was appointed special envoy. Prime Minister Tōjō commissioned Kurusu before his departure to find a compromise with the USA, for which there should be only one condition - a withdrawal of Japanese troops from China was excluded. Tōjō estimates the chance of success for an agreement at 30%.
Kurusu arrived in Washington, DC on November 15, 1941 . In the three weeks that followed, there were ongoing negotiations between Kurusu and Nomura with Cordell Hull . On November 17, 1941, Hull met President Roosevelt for the first time. On November 20, 1941, Kurusu presented the Japanese proposal, which included ending American aid to China and resuming US-Japan trade relations that had been frozen since December 1939. The American leadership rejected this on November 26, 1941 with the Hull Note . On November 28, the Japanese Foreign Ministry sent a telegram to Nomura and Kurusu: The Hull Note was rejected. During the three weeks between his arrival in Washington and the start of the war, Kurusu's last hope for peace was to establish a direct channel of understanding between Roosevelt and Emperor Hirohito , bypassing the War Cabinet in Tokyo. To do this, Kurusu brought in the preacher E. Stanley Jones and the financier Bernard Baruch , both with access to Roosevelt. On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, Kurusu delivered the Japanese government's reply, which stated that the negotiations had failed. By this time, Japanese naval planes and bombers were already attacking Pearl Harbor.
Return to Japan and postwar period (1942–1954)
In December 1941, Kurusu was interned with his family , along with hundreds of other diplomats, business leaders, and senior Axis officials in the United States. First the Japanese were accommodated in the luxury hotel Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, then from spring 1942 in the Greenbrier in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. In June 1942, Kurusu was taken with his family along with other Japanese internees aboard the Swedish MS Gripsholm to neutral Lourenço Marques (now Maputo ), then a Portuguese colony. There the approximately 1,500 Japanese were exchanged for the same number of interned Americans and then brought to Japan on the Asama Maru .
After the family's home in Tokyo was burned down by an American airstrike , Kurusu moved with his wife to the summer home in Karuizawa , where he lived until his death. Their son Ryō Kurusu (1919-1945) was a pilot in the Japanese Air Force and died in an accident on the runway in February 1945. The younger daughter Teru "Pia" Kurusu (* 1926) married an American officer in 1947 whom she had met as an occupation soldier. Elder daughter Jaye Kurusu (1915–1999) also married an American officer, Lieutenant William J. Maddox Jr (later Major General ) in 1948. Jaye Kurusu Maddox was first denied entry to the United States in 1950. In 1950, after a petition from her mother-in-law to Senator Irving Ives , supported by a letter of recommendation from former ambassador and family friend Joseph Grew , the US Congress enacted legislation specifically granting Jaye Kurusu Maddox naturalization.
In preparation for the Tokyo trials , Kurusu's involvement in preparing for a war of aggression was investigated, but he was not charged. After 1946 he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo . In the fall of 1947, Kurusu was expelled from government and civil service by decree of the American occupying forces , along with more than 200,000 other Japanese bureaucrats, senior officers, ultra-nationalists, and businessmen. Kurusu lodged four unsuccessful appeals against this exclusion, which was only lifted in March 1952 at the end of the occupation period - as was the case for all those still affected. By this time, however, Kurusu was unable to work due to a heart attack and never returned to the diplomatic service. In 1952 Kurusu wrote his memoirs . To the end of his life, Kurusu maintained that he was unaware of the Japanese attack plans against Pearl Harbor during his diplomatic mission in Washington.
reception
Nomura and Kurusu were hated in the US from the start of the war. They were seen as the archetype of the “insidious Japanese” who only pretended to conduct peace negotiations. Eleanor Roosevelt described Kurusu as a "nasty little Jap" who talked to her husband while Japanese warplanes were already attacking Honolulu and Manila. Roosevelt adviser Sumner Welles wrote in a 1944 book that Kurusu was "his oily manner" who was sent to Washington in the same way that "a goat is tied to a pole -- to trap a tiger." Curls". According to Sumner, Kurusu never offered a convincing reason for his sudden assignment to Nomura's side, nor does such a reason exist. The whole mission was just a sham - to lull the Americans into security and to gain time for the deployment of troops.
The image of Kurusu in the American public did not change even after the end of the war. According to Kurusu's memoirs, in August 1945 the chief prosecutor at the Tokyo trials , Joseph B. Keenan , confronted him with the following assessment: "The name which the American people cannot forget in connection with this war is neither Tōgō [Secretary of State] nor Tōjō [Prime Minister] , his name is Kurusu.” In the American and British media in the immediate post-war period, Kurusu was referred to as “diplomatic Judas ” and “one of the most hated men in America”. Secretary of State Hull wrote in his memoirs in 1948:
“Neither his appearance nor his attitude commanded confidence or respect. […] I felt from the start that Kurusu was deceitful. […] It did not seem possible to me that Kurusu, when he left Japan, did not know the plan of his Government and the role he was intended to fill.”
“Neither his appearance nor his demeanor inspired trust or respect. […] I felt from the beginning that Kurusu was acting insidiously. […] It seemed inconceivable to me that when Kurusu left Japan he was unaware of his government’s plan and the role he was to play in it.”
Among the few defenders of Kurusu right after the end of the war was Joseph Grew , formerly the American ambassador to Japan. Kurusu addressed Grew in 1946 with a letter he had last seen remotely in 1942 during the exchange of internees at Lourenço Marques. Grew assured Kurusu in his reply letter that he had never had any doubts that Nomura and Kurusu were doing their best to keep the peace. Grew and his American colleagues in the diplomatic service would never have believed in the image of the "treacherous ambassador" who "rewarded their trust with treason and contempt". Instead, his "integrity and sincerity are beyond question."
Western public opinion in the post-war period was not affected by this private correspondence. In 1954, the Times obituary for Kurusu stated that whether and when Kurusu knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor was immaterial - what mattered was the effect. Kurusu's mission to Washington increased the Japanese element of surprise at this critical moment, throwing sand in the American side's eyes.
In the war film Tora! Torah! Torah! from 1970, Hisao Toake played the role of Kurusu Saburō. In 1982, a historical novel by Otohiko Kaga was published in Japan , depicting the fate of Kurusu Saburō ("Saburo Kurushima"), his wife ("Alice Kurushima"), and their son Ryō ("Ken") in the style of Herman Wouk . The novel was published in English translation in 2002, although the post-war part was severely shortened.
Kurusu's memoirs were published in English in 2016, and Kurusu translated them himself during his lifetime. This publication did not cause a fundamental reappraisal of Kurusu's role. In previous decades, historians had "more or less exonerated" Kurusu from being accused of underhandedness. What was new, however, was the knowledge of Kurusu's attempt to establish a direct channel of understanding between Roosevelt and Hirohito behind the scenes. Ultimately, Kurusu achieved this goal, but too late: on December 6, 1941, Roosevelt finally sent a personal telegram to Hirohito, but the machinery of the Japanese attack was already in motion.
web links
- Total War – American and Japanese Perspectives , panel discussion with Pia Kurusu White, daughter of Saburō Kurusu (2020)
- Historical footage of Kurusu in the Getty Images Picture Library
itemizations
- ↑ a b c The Times Tokyo Correspondent: Saburo Kurusu . In: The Times (London), 8 April 1954, p. 8.
- ↑ Mrs Alice Kurusu . In: New York Times, May 12, 1973. (Obituary)
- ↑ Entry Kurusu, Saburo in Munzinger Online , International Biographical Archive
- ↑ a b Jeremy A. Yellen: Into the Tiger's Den : Japan and the Tripartite Pact, 1940 . In: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (July 2016), pp. 555–576, JSTOR 44503998 .
- ↑ a b c Immanuel CY Hsu: Kurusu's Mission to the United States and the Abortive Modus Vivendi . In: The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 24, No. 3 (1952), pp. 301–307. ( JSTOR 1875485 )
- ↑ a b c d e f g Masako R. Okura: The Desperate Diplomat Revisited: Toward More Comprehensive Studies on Kurusu Saburo . In: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations , Vol. 23, No. 4, Brill, 2016, JSTOR 26549189 , pp. 303–333.
- ↑ The Gripsholm WWII Exchanges , Densho Encyclopedia
- ↑ Masako Endo: "Good Women" or "Bad Women"?: Japanese Women Consorting with Foreign Men during the US Occupation . In: Conference Papers - American Sociological Association. 2019, pp. 1–19.
- ↑ HR 8935, 81st United States Congress . Calendar no. 2346, Report 2344. ( Online )
- ↑ Kurusu Saburō: Nichi-Bei Gaikō Hiwa : waga gaikōshi . Sōgensha, Shōwa 27. [Tokyo 1952] ("A Confidential Account of Japan-US Relations: My Diplomatic History")
- ↑ Sumner Welles : The time for decision . Harper & Brothers, New York 1944, pp. 294-295.
- ↑ Cordell Hull: The memoirs of Cordell Hull , Vol. 2. Macmillan, New York 1948, pp. 1072 and 1062. (Quoted from Masako R. Okura: The Desperate Diplomat Revisited . In: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations , Vol. 23, No. 4 (2016), p. 305.)
- ↑ Hisao Toake (1908–1985) at the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Otohiko Kaga : Ikari no nai fune . Kodansha, Tokyo 1982, ISBN 9784061193819 .
- ↑ Otohiko Kaga : Riding the East Wind , translated from Japanese by Ian Hideo Levy . Kodansha International, Tokyo 2002, ISBN 978-4770028563 .
- ↑ Saburō Kurusu: The desperate diplomat : Saburo Kurusu's memoir of the weeks before Pearl Harbor . University of Missouri Press, Columbia (Missouri) 2016, ISBN 978-0-8262-2037-0 .
- ^ a b c Clifford R. Gates, MR Okura: Review of The Desperate Diplomat: Saburo Kurusu's Memoir of the Weeks Before Pearl Harbor . In: The Journal of American-East Asian Relations , Vol. 23 (2016), No. 4, pp. 410–412. JSTOR 26549194
- ↑ December 6, 1941: Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu report to Japan that US President Roosevelt had sent a personal telegram to the Emperor . Records of US-Japan negotiations in the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Institute for Defense Studies of the Defense Agency, and the National Archives of Japan (NAJ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kurusu, Saburo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 来栖三郎 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese diplomat |
| BIRTH DATE | March 6, 1886 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kanagawa Prefecture |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 7, 1954 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Tokyo |