Japan at War and Peace: Shidehara Kijūrō and the Making of Modern Diplomacy by Ryuji Hattori

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japan at War and Peace: Shidehara Kijūrō and the Making of Modern Diplomacy by Ryuji Hattori Antony Best (bio) Japan at War and Peace: Shidehara Kijūrō and the Making of Modern Diplomacy. By Ryuji Hattori. ANU Press, Canberra, 2021. 362 pages. $60.00, cloth. Open Access. One welcome development over the past few years has been that prominent scholars in Japan have arranged for translations of their original Japaneselanguage works to appear in English. Sometimes this has been commissioned by thinktanks in Japan and sometimes through simply the personal initiative of scholars seeking a wider audience for their findings. Among [End Page 263] the latter is Ryuji Hattori of Chuo University in Tokyo who is one of Japan's leading experts on the history of modern Japan's foreign policy. In recent years Hattori has focused his attention on postwar diplomacy, but he first built his reputation as a historian of the interwar period. It is therefore good to see that, alongside his three recent translated works on Japanese diplomacy in the 1970s, he has also brought out in English his 2017 overview of the career of one of Japan's most important twentieth-century figures, Shidehara Kijūrō. 1 Shidehara, as Japan's leading diplomat at the Washington Conference of 1921–22, its foreign minister from 1924 to 1927 and 1929 to 1931, and prime minister from 1945 to 1946, has had, of course, more than a walk-on part in many histories of modern Japan. Indeed, his name has been invoked, in the form of "Shidehara diplomacy," to describe a cooperative approach toward foreign policy in the 1920s that exists in stark contrast to the aggressive expansionism of the 1930s. Surprisingly, though, despite his prominence as a diplomat and a politician, he has largely escaped the attention of biographers. In English, we can, for example, only turn to the work of Klaus Schlichtmann for a detailed account of Shidehara's life, but his two volumes are overly hagiographic and, moreover, do not draw on Japanese primary sources. It is therefore important for us to have this new balanced biography which traces the evolution of and continuities in his thinking and provides a full assessment of his life. Hattori is in an excellent position to provide such a study. His first book, Higashi Ajia kokusai kankyō no hendō to Nihon haikō 1918–1931 (Yūhikaku, 2001), was a thorough analysis of Japan's diplomacy that drew on a large range of sources, including material from the United States and Britain. He then produced a book that looked at Shidehara as an exemplar of the 1920s, Shidehara Kijūrō to nijū seiki no Nihon: gaikō to minshushugi (Yūhikaku, 2006), and after the publication of that volume he continued to produce work that shed light on different aspects of Shidehara's career. Hattori is thus able to see Shidehara in the round and, as such, gives us an authoritative analysis of the latter's role during the Taisho and early Showa periods. The Shidehara that Hattori presents is a more conservative figure than one might expect. He was a diplomat who admired what he perceived as the British style of bipartisanship in foreign policy—in other words, a system within which changes to the political party in office had little effect on the [End Page 264] foreign ministry's handling of diplomacy. Influenced by this perspective, Shidehara duly felt little need to explain his policy to the public and showed disdain toward the Japanese press. In his hardheadedness he also owed something to one of the early foreign ministers under whom he had worked, Komura Jutarō, who had, of course, fallen foul of the public at the time of the Hibiya riot in 1905. In the same vein, Hattori draws our attention to Shidehara's pride in his professionalism. He notes that an important influence on Shidehara's diplomacy was Henry Willard Denison, the American-born legal advisor to the Gaimushō. Denison, among others, taught Shidehara the art of composing notes and memoranda. This underlines the fact that Shidehara saw diplomacy as primarily the prerogative of professionals and thus something which should not be tainted by...