Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

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2/7/11: 2012 OAH Annual Meeting to Include “Record Number” of Panels on US Foreign Relations read more….

1/23/11: Call for proposals to host the 2013 SHAFR Summer Institute read more….

12/1/11: Results from SHAFR 2011 election read more….

10/24/11: Come to SHAFR 2012 in Hartford read more….

10/24/11: SHAFR Summer Institute for 2012–Does Culture Matter? read more….

10/17/11: The online panel proposal database for the SHAFR 2012 conference is now up and running. The proposal deadline is 1 December 2011. You can access the database here: http://shafr.org/2012conference/.

9/1/11: Call for Papers for SHAFR 2012 Annual Meeting read more…

9/1/11: New “Panelists seeking panelists” site launched for SHAFR 2012 Annual Meeting read more…

Japan’s surprise attack of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was a dramatic event that destroyed and wrecked at least eighteen U.S. vessels and 188 planes, while killing some 2,400 Americans. The experience was spectacular and horrifying. Yet the impact of the military operation far transcended the immediate damages it inflicted on the strategically valued harbor. Throughout the years afterwards, the “day of infamy” would yield far-reaching influence on politics, diplomacy, society, and culture in the United States, Japan, Hawai’i, and other parts of the world. 

SHAFR.org is proud to present a roundtable on the Pearl Harbor attack as we approach its seventieth anniversary. We have asked four historians—Emily S. Rosenberg, Greg Robinson, John Gripentrog, and Yujin Yaguchi—to reflect on this fateful experience and address its broader significance. The contributors offer insight on a wide range of issues, including politics, diplomacy, memory, popular culture, racism, and education. We hope this forum will aid readers in grasping the complexity of this important event.

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Is 12/7 or 9/11 the date that lives in infamy? The possibility that popular historical memories of the attack of 9/11 may be crowding out those of the Japan’s 1941 attack, making 9/11 the central infamous episode in recent U.S. history, raises larger questions about how and why nations, collectively, remember major events.

“Remember Pearl Harbor” loomed large in American popular memories for more than half a century. During World War II, the phrase helped to silence Americans who had opposed involvement in the war and to galvanize support for a massive war effort. Franklin Roosevelt’s initial “infamy speech” made the attack a central symbol of treachery committed by racial and religious others that needed to be remembered and avenged. The words “Pearl Harbor” came to provide an emotionally powerful answer to why Americans needed to fight. Songs, posters, and bond drives invoked the call to “remember Pearl Harbor.”  

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific triggered the mass removal of 112,000 American citizens and longtime residents of Japanese ancestry from the U.S. Pacific Coast during mid-1942, which then resulted in their confinement in government camps for the balance of the war. However, when I was first asked by the editors of this forum to reflect on the meaning of Pearl Harbor as a historian of Japanese Americans, I replied somewhat stiffly that I really had nothing to say about Tokyo’s bombing raid, since the Japanese Americans were in no way responsible for it. The editors quickly assured me that the assignment was not about causal links or historical revisionism, but about the commemoration and collective memory surrounding the surprise attack. Here, once again I hesitated: it is a tricky and complex business to generalize about the collective psyche of any group. Yet in speaking to countless Nisei (second-generation U.S. citizens), especially those on the U.S. mainland, I have been struck forcefully by how deeply December 7 remains for them a day of infamy, and of trauma. For Japanese Americans, the words “Pearl Harbor” are an accusation, a standing charge against them of a crime they did not commit, and one that has generated a reaction still unknown to many Americans. After some further thought, I agreed to touch on some issues that I believe are particularly relevant.

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Anniversaries are not easy for the historian. Defining moments in history are typically commemorated in solemnity or regaled in celebration, both of which rely principally on emotional investment. For the historian, however, anniversaries are moments to reflect more critically on complex questions such as causation, consequence, and context. The seventy-year anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—a watershed event that precipitated a slow-moving slaughter across the Pacific, culminating in the hell-fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—reminds us of these humbling challenges.

A central question surrounding Pearl Harbor is whether the U.S.-Japan collision was preventable. In particular, did the eleventh-hour diplomatic negotiations that occurred in 1941 offer a viable chance to reconcile differences? In the years since the end of the war, a number of historians have maintained that a window of opportunity did in fact exist as late as the summer and fall of 1941 and that war therefore was avoidable. In this narrative, war ultimately came because the Roosevelt administration was too uncompromising and wrongly assumed that Japan posed a threat to American national security. One scholar even claims that the American position was “extreme” and that Secretary of State Cordell Hull “should have sought a way for Japan and the United States to peacefully coexist with their differences.” Other historians avoid blame-laden ascriptions but nonetheless locate critical junctures and missed opportunities in the months before Pearl Harbor.[1]

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Every year on December 8, I ask my first-year undergraduate students if they can think of anything significant about that day. Some students point out that it is the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Others say it is the day John Lennon was shot to death in 1980.

Obviously the two incidents did not actually happen on the same date—Pearl Harbor was attacked at 7:55 a.m. Hawai‘i time on December 7^th and Lennon was shot at around 10:50 p.m. in New York City on December 8th. In Japan, however, the Pearl Harbor attack is remembered by Japan time—2:25 a.m. of December 8th—whereas Lennon’s murder is remembered by the U.S. Eastern Standard Time, and it causes confusion among the students.

This setting of the date is symbolic of the way in which the attack on Pearl Harbor is defined and understood in Japan. It is primarily seen from the Japanese perspective. Every high school history textbook refers to the 8th rather than the 7th as the day of the attack and the start of the war against the United States. The cause of the attack is often explained by reference to various external pressures—the U.S. oil embargo, the U.S. decision to aid England and others with the Lend-Lease Act, and the formation of the ABCD line. The mounting pressures against Japan, the story goes, made the Japanese military believe that there was no alternative but to launch a surprise attack, even though in retrospect this is understood to have been an unwise decision which resulted in the terrible suffering of millions of people.

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