Power and Culture Redux

Abstract

John Gripentrog’s Prelude to Pearl Harbor: Ideology and Culture in US-Japan Relations, 1919–1941 is a throwback to a transitionary era in the historiography of U.S. foreign relations. On the one hand, it is a traditional, chronological diplomatic history of bilateral interwar relations, with six of its substantive chapters covering the 1930s. On the other hand, throughout the narrative, Gripentrog weaves themes of ideology and culture, the major preoccupations of the field in the last three decades. But the author’s approach to both themes dates to the 1980s, when historians like John Dower and Akira Iriye first started incorporating them into the study of war and peace between Japan and the United States. In Prelude to Pearl Harbor, ideology is how elites view the world, and culture is “the arts” (6). Despite this traditional approach, Gripentrog’s history of “ideology, cultural interactions, and conventional diplomacy” offers a thoughtful reassessment of the United States’ and Japan’s march to war (7).