Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan A Bridge to Reality

Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a "bridge" between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from 1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari's story, using the FBI's voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in 1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar occupation.

Roger B. Jeans is Elizabeth Lewis Otey Professor of History Emeritus at Washington and Lee University.