Published on September 2, 2019.
Based on an essay by Watanabe Soki published in the monthly magazine WiLL, this chapter discusses how Henry Stimson became the highest-ranking practical official responsible for the atomic bombings.
It examines the Stimson Doctrine, Japan–U.S. diplomacy over Manchuria, the interventionists around Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and the worldview of American leaders who distorted the path toward the Japan–U.S. War.

Published on September 2, 2019.
To graduate from the University of Tokyo means to do work such as his, and the University of Tokyo does not exist in order to produce people who, like Wada Haruki, become utterly incompetent human beings who inflict serious damage on Japan.
The following is from an essay by Watanabe Soki, published in the monthly magazine WiLL under the title “Henry Stimson, the Man Who Dropped the Atomic Bomb.”
Watanabe Soki is the person doing the most splendid work in the postwar world as a researcher of modern and contemporary Japanese–American history.
This essay adorns the close of this month’s issue.
It fully proves that the four monthly magazines I have continued to mention are must-read books not only for the Japanese people but also 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 such as his, and not to become, like Wada Haruki, a pitifully foolish person whose true Japaneseness is not even certain, who spent his days flattering professors and never left the University of Tokyo for decades, and who takes pride only in such things.
In other words, the University of Tokyo does not exist in order to produce a human being who, as a completely incompetent person, inflicts serious damage on Japan.
How Did Henry Stimson.
Become the Highest-Ranking Practical Official Responsible for the Atomic Bombings?
In Watanabe Soki’s intensive series, “Roosevelt’s ‘True Enemy’: The America First Committee,” which was published through the May issue, he described in detail the struggle between the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration and the “America First Committee,” which was established to represent the overwhelming public opinion that advocated non-intervention in the European front.
Readers will have understood the course by which the FDR administration “destroyed” the America First Committee, which had suppressed America’s entry into the war, that is, interventionism, by making Japan attack Pearl Harbor.
In this series, he will reveal the conduct of Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, a representative figure among the interventionists, that is, believers in international liberalism, who nested in and around the FDR administration, which continued for four terms.
As FDR’s “Weapon.”
Through my previous books and the earlier series, I have challenged the “Roosevelt myth” fabricated after the war.
Through that work, I believe I have gained a certain understanding of the abnormal character of the person FDR and his involvement with that war.
FDR hardly read books.
There are traces that he read history books, but those were “war chronicles,” not history books in the true sense.
There was a great difference between him and Joseph Stalin, who boasted that his library exceeded twenty thousand volumes and that “the ways to deal with every event that will occur from now on are already written in such books.”
Even so, in 1940 he became the first president in American history to win a third term, and in 1944 he successfully concealed from the people that he was afflicted with a serious illness and also won a fourth term.
The reason was that he had a gift for clever speeches and a natural instinct as a “political operator” for striking domestic enemies, that is, non-interventionist forces, led by the America First Committee.
However, FDR, who was ignorant of both history and economics, had one more weapon.
It was the “excellent” interventionists who gathered around him.
The foremost among them was Stimson.
He was also the highest-ranking practical official responsible for deciding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His thought was peculiar in one respect, but it can also be called typical of the worldview of American leaders at that time.
To know Stimson is also to explore the inner minds of FDR and of 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 I wrote at the beginning, he was appointed Secretary of War in the FDR administration, but in the previous Herbert Hoover administration he had served as Secretary of State, the number-two post in the administration, from March 1929 to March 1933.
This corresponded to 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 the northeastern part of the Chinese continent, Manchuria, was the foundation of American diplomacy at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The policy advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt, who understood that, for Japan’s security, Korea or Manchuria was like a dagger thrust at Japan’s throat, bore fruit in the Katsura–Taft secret agreement of 1905.
The subsequent Takahira–Root Agreement of 1908, which reaffirmed that agreement, and the Ishii–Lansing Agreement of 1917 were also ones in which America understood the importance of Manchuria for Japan’s security and in effect understood, that is, accepted, Japan’s advance into Manchuria.
Therefore, Japanese diplomacy from the Manchurian Incident to the founding of Manchukuo must be interpreted on the premise of the existence of these three Japan–U.S. agreements.
However, Stimson showed no consideration whatsoever for the “history of understandings” in Japan–U.S. diplomacy.
He listened solely to China’s claims and criticized Japan’s Manchurian policy.
Behind this was the illusion in his own mind that “China is proceeding along the path of 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, that is, 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 chosen as the next president, and appealed for the continuation of the Stimson Doctrine, and succeeded.
Between Japan and the United States, there had been a common understanding by “aun no kokyu,” an unspoken harmony, regarding “Japan’s policy toward Manchuria and Korea.”
The person who disturbed that breathing rhythm and laid the path to the Japan–U.S. War was Stimson.
Stimson was born in 1867 into a wealthy family in New York (*1).
That year, his father Lewis, who had been pursuing the path of medicine, lost his wife Candice.
In the midst of that sorrow, when he decided to devote himself to scholarship, he entrusted his son Henry to his younger sister Mary.
At the age of thirteen, Stimson entered the prestigious private school Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, a boarding school for boys.
This was also the school at which Niijima Jo, the founder of Doshisha University, studied, graduating in 1867.
Stimson was so excellent that he skipped grades and graduated at the age of fifteen.
He wished to enter Yale University, but because of age restrictions he had to wait one year.
At Yale University, he majored in liberal arts and was recommended for membership in the university’s secret fraternal organization, Skull and Bones.
As is clear from the fact that secret initiation rites were required for admission, the society was an extremely exclusive organization.
Only those with excellent academic records were recommended as members, and many of them became American leaders, the establishment.
The aforementioned Secretary of War Taft, later president, and the two postwar Presidents Bush were also members.
From Lawyer to Secretary of War.
In 1888, Stimson graduated third out of 124 students, moved to Harvard Law School, and in 1891 obtained his qualification as a lawyer.
Through his father’s connections, he began training at the law office of Elihu Root, which operated in New York, and in January 1893 he was formally hired.
Elihu Root was a well-known expert in corporate law in New York and had major banks and railroad companies as clients.
Around this time in America, industrial oligopoly, that is, monopoly, was beginning to stand out.
In 1890, against the background of public opinion opposing market monopoly and oligopoly, the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted.
The practical operation of that law was difficult work for lawyers.
Both the government seeking to regulate and the companies seeking to escape the law needed excellent lawyers.
Stimson was active as a good assistant to Elihu Root.
The end of the nineteenth century was also a period when collusion between politicians and interest groups began to stand out.
Stimson, who had a strong sense of ethics, that is, justice, was also involved in founding the “Good Government Club,” and aimed to realize a moral society.
Stimson’s superior, Elihu Root, was close to Theodore Roosevelt (TR), a star politician of the Republican Party.
The two were members of the Boone and Crockett Club (B&C Club), established in 1888 with the aim of reviving the American frontier spirit (*2).
In 1899, the president of the time, William McKinley, a Republican, appointed Root as Secretary of War.
The United States had won the Spanish–American War of 1898, but in the process the backwardness of the army had been exposed.
It was an appointment that expected Root to reform the army.
The operation of the law office was entrusted to young partners including Stimson.
In 1906, TR, who had been president since taking office after the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901, appointed Stimson as federal district attorney for the Southern District of New York.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, New York City was a city swirling with corruption.
Influence-peddling by the Democratic vote-gathering organization Tammany Hall, stock-price manipulation by entrepreneurs, and market control by monopolistic companies were conspicuous.
The president, who aimed to correct such evils, singled out Stimson, who had a strong sense of right and wrong.
At that time, Stimson’s compensation from his firm had reached about twenty thousand dollars, or 570,000 dollars in present value, but becoming a prosecutor would cut his income in half.
Even so, he accepted the president’s request.
He entrusted the operation of the firm to young lawyers he himself had hired.
One of them was Felix Frankfurter, Jewish, born in 1822.
In the later FDR administration, he would become an economic policy adviser and a person who would create the theoretical foundation of the New Deal policy.
His connection with him became one of the reasons Stimson was reappointed as Secretary of War in the later FDR administration, despite being a Republican Party member; details will be given later.
In 1911, President Taft, who succeeded TR, selected Stimson as Secretary of War.
It was his first important government post, but he met Taft’s expectations.
With the defense of the Panama Canal, which was under construction, and the maintenance of public order in the colonial Philippines, where ethnic independence forces were stirring, in mind, he advanced the reorganization of the army in cooperation with Leonard Wood, who was Chief of Staff.
Wood had once been TR’s superior officer.
At that time, the strength of the U.S. Army was only seventy thousand, with about 4,300 officers (*3).
Until then, the main “enemy” of the U.S. Army had been the native Indians, and it had not needed forces of hundreds of thousands to a million men as did the countries of the European continent.
Because non-intervention in European problems had been the basis of American diplomacy under the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, an army of a scale to be dispatched abroad was unnecessary.
In the presidential election of 1912, the Republican Party split, and the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson won by profiting from the struggle between others.
Stimson, having completed his term, returned once again to the legal world, but he devoted much of his time to Republican Party affairs and did not distance himself from the world of politics.