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As often happens in surprise attacks, however, the surprise of Pearl Harbor was largely a matter of national illusions. The leaders on both sides fully expected a war, indeed considered it inevitable, even to some extent desirable, but neither side really wanted to fight unless it had to. Up to the last minute, each antagonist thought the other was bluffing.
Japan's navy had already begun planning and training for the attack on Pearl Harbor when Emperor Hirohito startled his assembled advisers on Sept. 6 by asking an imperial question. In the midst of a fervent debate over when and how to go to war, the Emperor, who traditionally never spoke during such gatherings, suddenly pulled out and read in his high-pitched voice a poem by his revered grandfather Emperor Meiji:
All the seas, in every quarter,
are as brothers to one another.
Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife
rage so turbulently throughout the world?
Roosevelt, re-elected to a third term in 1940 after pledging that "your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars," knew that Hirohito was just a figurehead ruler over a militarist government dominated by the flinty General Hideki Tojo. Still, Roosevelt staked his hopes for peace on a last- minute message to the Emperor. "Both of us," Roosevelt said, "have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world."
Japanese military censors delayed that message for 10 hours, so it was almost midnight on Dec. 7 in Tokyo when U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew sped with it to the Foreign Ministry. It was past 3 a.m. -- and Fuchida's bombers were within sight of Pearl Harbor -- when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, in full diplomatic regalia, reached the Imperial Palace. He found the Emperor listening to his shortwave radio. Togo read him the message and then the response that the government had already written for him. It said that peace was the Emperor's "cherished desire." This would "do well," Hirohito told Togo. The Foreign Minister bowed low.
If war between the U.S. and Japan was inevitable, it had probably been inevitable for a long time, perhaps as long ago as July 8, 1853. That was the day when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his black-hulled steam frigate Susquehanna into Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) and "opened" Japan at gunpoint, after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation, to American merchants and missionaries. Humiliated, the Japanese decided to modernize their feudal regime by imitating the barbarian invaders. They hired French officers to retrain their soldiers and British shipbuilders to create their navy. From the Germans they learned the secrets of modern science and from the Americans the secrets of modern commerce.
But as Japanese commerce and Japanese emigration increased, so did Western talk of a "yellow peril." In 1922 the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants were ineligible to become U.S. citizens. The following year it ruled that they could be barred from owning American land -- Japanese farmers were then growing 10% of California's agricultural produce on 1% of its land. In 1924, when Congress imposed national immigration quotas, the figure for Japanese was zero.