This book is based on the recent discovery of the personal papers of Kichisaburo Nomura – Japanese admiral, one-time foreign minister, pre-Pearl Harbor ambassador to the United States, and “spiritual godfather” of postwar Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force. The volume reproduces Nomura’s occupation-era correspondence with his American friends and associates, including Navy Secretary Daniel Kimball, SCAP Political Advisor William Sebald, former ambassadors William Castle and Joseph Grew, Army and Navy Journal owner John Callan O’Laughlin, as well as Admirals William Pratt, Arleigh Burke, Charles Turner Joy, Ralph Oftsie, and Harold Martin. The correspondence is extraordinarily revealing, and provides rich insights into domestic conditions in occupied Japan, U.S. policies toward occupied Japan, the Cold War in Asia, and Japan’s eventual rearmament. In this way, the book enables readers to confront for themselves a hitherto largely neglected attempt at defining and cementing the post-WWII Japanese-U.S. partnership.
