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By Root 2107 0

and without his contribution Japanese-American relations deteriorated. Rather than accept Japan as a legitimate imperial power in Asia—such as the United States had become with its annexation of the Philippines in 1898—American policy, often colored with an ugly tincture of racism, became gratuitously condescending.4 After the Japanese victory over the Russian fleet at the Tsushima Strait in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, who arbitrated the Russo-Japanese peace settlement at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, denied Tokyo’s claim for indemnity and ruled out significant Russian territorial concessions in Manchuria. As the Japanese saw it, the United States denied them the fruits of victory.5 The so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908 closing off immigration from Japan fueled that resentment.* In 1913 the United States summarily dismissed Japan’s protest against California legislation forbidding Japanese citizens to own land in the state. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson rejected a Japanese proposal to include a declaration of racial equality in the League of Nations Covenant. And in 1924 Congress permanently barred Japanese immigration to the United States.6 But the most unforgivable action (in Japanese eyes) was American refusal to recognize Japan’s acquisition of Manchuria in 1932.

The Japanese takeover was scarcely unexpected or without precedent. As early as the Root-Takahira agreement of 1908, the United States recognized Japanese hegemony over Manchuria.7 Japan controlled the province’s economy, owned its principal railroad, and managed its seaports. And the fact is, there was little armed resistance (and certainly no atrocities) when the Japanese Army finally took complete control. The League of Nations formally condemned the action, however, prompting Japan to quit the League, and the United States responded with the Stimson Doctrine, promulgated by high-minded Henry L. Stimson, who was then Hoover’s secretary of state. The Stimson Doctrine declared that the United States would not recognize any territorial arrangements imposed on China by force. “The Western powers taught Japan the game of poker,” lamented the Japanese diplomat Yosuke Matsuoka, “but after it acquired most of the chips they pronounced the game immoral and took up contract bridge.”8

The Japanese saw themselves as colonizers rather than conquerors—like the Dutch in the East Indies, the French in Indochina, the British in Burma and Malaya, and yes, the Americans in the Philippines. They invested heavily in Manchuria, installed the boy emperor of China (who had been deposed in 1912) as sovereign, renamed the territory Manchukuo, and immediately dispatched half a million citizens to settle there, with another 5 million slated to join them. Between 1932 and 1941 Japanese public and private investment in Manchuria totaled $3.3 billion (roughly $45 billion in today’s currency.)9

Nevertheless, the Stimson Doctrine suited America’s sense of righteousness. It reflected the influence of generations of American missionaries in China as well as latent public support for Chinese independence. Yet it ignored strategic reality in the Far East, overlooked the needs of the growing Japanese economy, and underestimated the advantages of modernization that accompanied Japanese colonization.

Roosevelt embraced the Stimson Doctrine wholeheartedly. Despite warnings in 1932 by brain trusters Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell that America’s interests lay with Japan, FDR, as president-elect, backed Stimson down the line. “How could you expect me to do otherwise, given my Delano ancestors?” he asked.10 Roosevelt’s comment was flippant. Yet it determined American policy for the next decade.

As Moley and Tugwell had warned, the Stimson Doctrine curdled U.S. relations with Japan but had little effect on the situation in the Far East. As a policy, it was purely rhetorical: “an attitude rather than a program” in the words of historian Herbert Feis.11 When Japan stepped over the line with its assault on China in 1937, the United States took few tangible steps to oppose it. Roosevelt condemned