Published on November 30, 2019.
Based on Soeki Watanabe’s essay “Henry Stimson, the Man Who Dropped the Atomic Bomb,” published in the monthly magazine WiLL, this article examines the thought and conduct of Henry Stimson, the interventionist who supported the Roosevelt administration.
Through the Stimson Doctrine, the non-recognition of Manchukuo, the history of U.S.–Japan diplomacy over Japan’s special interests in Manchuria, and Stimson’s role as the highest practical official responsible for the atomic bombings, it explores how the path to the U.S.–Japan war was formed.
It also criticizes Haruki Wada, Kenzaburo Oe, Haruki Murakami, and others in connection with international debates over the legality of the Japan–Korea annexation.

November 30, 2019
The National University of Tokyo does not exist in order to train people like Haruki Wada, who inflict serious damage on Japan.
I am republishing a chapter originally published on September 3, 2019, under the title: “In the past, South Korea, seeking to distort the historical facts of the Japan–Korea annexation, gathered famous scholars from Japan, the United States, and Europe and held three international conferences.”
The following is from an essay by Soeki Watanabe published in the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Henry Stimson, the Man Who Dropped the Atomic Bomb.”
Soeki Watanabe is the person doing the finest work in the postwar world as a researcher of modern and contemporary Japan–U.S. history.
This essay brings the current issue to a close.
It fully proves that the four monthly magazines I have continued to mention are must-read publications not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Mr. Watanabe graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo.
To graduate from the University of Tokyo means to do work like his.
The National University of Tokyo does not exist in order to train people like Haruki Wada, who inflict serious damage on Japan.
According to a friend of mine who is an avid reader, Haruki Wada seems to be the kind of person who takes pride only in having stayed quietly at the University of Tokyo for more than thirty years.
In the past, South Korea, seeking to distort the historical facts of the Japan–Korea annexation, gathered famous scholars from Japan, the United States, and Europe and held three international conferences.
South Korea wanted to distort the Japan–Korea annexation by calling it illegal.
At the third conference, held at Harvard University, a scholar of the highest authority from Britain flatly pointed out that the Japan–Korea annexation had been fully recognized by the international community of the time as legal.
He further pointed out that trying to deny that fact on the basis of present-day emotions was completely unacceptable academically as well, and it is a clear historical fact that the South Korean side left the conference hall in dejection.
In spite of this, Haruki Wada issued the Japan–Korea Intellectuals’ Joint Statement on the 100th Anniversary of the “Annexation of Korea,” with a total of 105 signatories, in an attempt to make the Naoto Kan Democratic Party administration of the time issue a statement saying that the Japan–Korea annexation had been illegal.
It would make more sense to think that Haruki Wada, who does such things, is in fact Korean rather than Japanese.
Or, as with Alexis Dudden in the United States, it is no exaggeration at all to say that he is unmistakably an agent of South Korea.
Because Kenzaburo Oe also supported and signed this joint statement, my contempt for him became decisive.
He is, as a Japanese person, the lowest kind of man.
Therefore, regarding the fact that such a person was given the Nobel Prize, I presume that there must have been strong backing from forces that want to keep Japan permanently in the position of a political prisoner in international society.
As I have mentioned before, the same is true of Haruki Murakami, who probably did not appear only because at the time he was staying at some luxury resort in the world and his whereabouts were unknown.
Like Oe, he was formed by subscribing to and carefully reading the Asahi Shimbun, and he is a hypocritical pseudo-moralist, a brain steeped in the masochistic view of history, and a man who continues to make statements that it is no exaggeration at all to call those of an agent of China or South Korea.
How did Henry Stimson become.
The highest practical official responsible for the atomic bombings?
In Soeki Watanabe’s intensive series, “Roosevelt’s ‘Real Enemy’: The America First Committee,” published up through the May issue, he described in detail the struggle between the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and the America First Committee, which was established to represent the overwhelming public opinion advocating non-intervention in the European war.
Readers will have understood how the FDR administration, by making Japan attack Pearl Harbor, “destroyed” the America First Committee, which had been restraining America’s entry into the war, that is, interventionism.
In this series, he will reveal the conduct of Henry Stimson, secretary of war, who was a representative figure among the interventionists, or believers in international liberalism, who nested in and around the FDR administration that lasted for four terms.
As FDR’s “weapon.”
Through his books to date and the previous series, the writer has challenged the “Roosevelt myth” fabricated after the war.
Through that work, I believe he has obtained a certain understanding of the abnormal character of FDR as a person and his relationship with that war.
FDR hardly read books.
There are traces that he read history books, but they were “war chronicles,” not history books in the true sense.
He was very different from Joseph Stalin, who owned more than twenty thousand books and boasted that “the methods for dealing with all events that will occur from now on are already written in those books.”
Even so, in 1940, FDR achieved an unprecedented third term in American history, and in 1944, he concealed from the people that he was suffering from a grave illness and succeeded in winning a fourth term.
The reason was that he possessed a clever ability to make speeches and an innate instinct as a “political operator” for attacking domestic enemies, namely non-interventionist forces, represented above all by the America First Committee.
However, FDR, who was ignorant of both history and economics, had one more weapon.
That weapon was the “excellent” interventionists who gathered around him.
The foremost among them was Stimson.
He was also the highest practical official responsible for deciding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His thought is, in one respect, peculiar, but it can also be said to be typical of the worldview of American leaders at the time.
To know Stimson is also to explore the inner minds of FDR and Truman, who followed him.
By knowing him, it becomes possible to “interpret that war more rationally.”
The Stimson Doctrine.
Henry Stimson was the foremost politician who distorted America’s diplomacy toward Japan.
As written at the beginning, he was appointed secretary of war in the FDR administration, but in the preceding Herbert Hoover administration he had served as secretary of state, the number-two position in the administration, from March 1929 to March 1933.
This was the period from the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 to the establishment of Manchukuo in March 1932.
Recognizing Japan’s special interests in northeastern China, Manchuria, was basic to American diplomacy at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The policy advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt, who understood that, in terms of Japan’s national security, Korea or Manchuria was like a dagger pressed against Japan’s throat, bore fruit in the secret Taft–Katsura Agreement of 1905.
The subsequent Root–Takahira Agreement of 1908, which reconfirmed that agreement, and the Lansing–Ishii Agreement of 1917 were also agreements in which the United States understood the importance of Manchuria for Japan’s national security and, in substance, understood and accepted Japan’s advance into Manchuria.
Therefore, Japan’s diplomacy from the Manchurian Incident to the founding of Manchukuo must be interpreted on the premise that these three Japan–U.S. agreements existed.
However, Stimson showed no consideration whatsoever for the “history of understanding” in Japan–U.S. diplomacy.
He listened only to China’s claims and condemned Japan’s Manchurian policy.
In his own mind, there was the illusion that “China is walking the path toward democratization.”
As a result, the Hoover administration decided not to recognize Manchukuo.
To Stimson, Manchukuo seemed to be “a factor obstructing China’s democratization.”
His diplomacy, the policy of non-recognition, was called the “Stimson Doctrine.”
At the beginning of 1933, just before leaving office, he visited the private residence of FDR, who had already been elected the next president, and appealed for the continuation of the Stimson Doctrine, and he succeeded.
Between Japan and the United States, there had been a common understanding, almost by tacit agreement, regarding “Japan’s policy toward Manchuria and Korea.”
The person who disrupted that tacit understanding and laid the path toward the Japan–U.S. war was Stimson.