Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. xxxi, 437 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$135.00, cloth. ISBN 978-17936-3276-0.
Greg Gubler’s biography of Satō Naotake, one of the prominent Japanese diplomats of the past century, is a thoroughly researched and engagingly written volume that presents a sympathetic portrait of its main subject. Satō was a Japanese diplomat who spent over three decades working in Japan’s embassies abroad, served as foreign minister for three months in 1937, and spent three unrewarding years as Japan’s ambassador to the USSR in the latter half of World War II.
This hefty volume is remarkable because few of Satō’s contemporaries—even those in arguably more consequential positions—have received full biographical treatment in English. This state of knowledge is, thankfully, changing, helped in part by recent translations of prominent and highly readable biographical surveys of the leading lights of Japanese interwar diplomacy. (Notable recent translations include, Hattori Ryūji, Japan at War and Peace: Shidehara Kijūrō and the Making of Modern Diplomacy, Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2021, and the three volumes of biographical accounts by the former diplomat Okazaki Hisahiko, all translated by Noda Makito: Shigemitsu and Togo and Their Time, Tokyo: JPIC, 2019; Yoshida Shigeru and His Time, Tokyo: JPIC, 2019; and Shidehara Kijūrō and His Time, Tokyo: JPIC, 2020.) Along with the growing number of books on the Japanese Empire, Gubler’s biography of Satō comes with a promise of illuminating the familiar events of the past through the eyes of a disciplined and principled civil servant who had a first-row view on the proceedings. That this civil servant was also a “gentleman samurai”—a cosmopolitan and an internationalist who strived to preserve against all odds his nation’s prestige and cordial relations with the outside world—enriches the history of the period long dominated by militarists and nationalists. Satō’s words and deeds provide a window into the inner struggles that Japan’s diplomatic and political establishment in the Taishō (1912–1926) and prewar Shōwa periods (1926–1945).
In 14 chapters, the book follows the length of Satō’s nearly nine decades of life—from his childhood and adoption by a prominent diplomat, to his entry into diplomatic service at age 23, first and subsequent postings to Europe, and a challenging stint as Japanese consul in Harbin—all the way to his elevation to the highest diplomatic job in 1937 and his return from retirement to take up perhaps the hardest posting of all, to the wartime Soviet Union. The book’s most gripping chapters cover these three difficult years Satō spent in the USSR trying to maintain the fragile neutrality between the two nations. The account of the ambassador’s clear-eyed, urgent, and ultimately fruitless attempts in late 1944 to early 1945 to jolt his superiors in Tokyo out of delusional plans to seek Soviet help as mediator between Japan and the Allies also makes for captivating reading. Gubler has reconstructed these events using an eclectic source base while relying heavily on the US Signal Intelligence Service’s Magic Project of intercepts of Japanese diplomatic cables, as well as Satō’s personal recollections.
The book’s narrative is most engaging and memorable when it deals with Satō the man: the principles he followed in life; the turmoil he felt when these principles were tested by the contradictions and conflicts that his job necessitated; and the ultimate sense of calm and control that he exuded—and that Gubler well conveys—even in moments of uncertainty and anguish. In what is clearly one of the book’s merits, Gubler shines light on the remarkable prescience of views—and the courage to express them openly to unsympathetic superiors—of a man who was otherwise seen as unremarkable in the Japanese diplomatic establishment dominated by eccentric characters such as Matsuoka Yōsuke and Hirota Kōki.
Gubler’s sympathy toward his subject, however, results in the book’s greatest weaknesses. The flip side of sympathy is often the inability to be critical; while one should not go so far as to accuse Gubler of biographer’s bias, there are instances when the author clearly misses a chance to see beyond Satō’s diplomatic façade. This is especially jarring when Gubler writes about claims that Japan had no territorial designs on China, or when, desperate to end the war on more favourable terms, the Japanese government insisted on its concern for world peace. True, Satō was merely a messenger, but the contradictions inherent in the message should be pointed out. One such instance was Satō’s diplomatic tangle with the representative of China, the articulate Dr. W. W. Yen, during his tenure as director of the Japan Office of the League of Nations. The one-sidedness of the author’s analysis also extends to Satō’s views on the Japanese leftists in postwar Japan; remarkably, when writing about Satō’s criticism of the leftists’ “massive propaganda” efforts during the 1960 Anpo Riots against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty, Gubler does not devote even half a sentence to this momentous occasion of citizenship activism. It seems that anyone who was Satō’s opponent is not worthy of serious consideratioin, which includes the Soviets, to whom Gubler rather unsubtly refers as “wily Russians” and “masters of deceit.” The final chapters of the book, perhaps intended as a conclusion, descend into sentimentalism that is out of tune with the clear-eyed analysis in the chapters on Satō’s wartime exploits.
Also, it would not be too harsh to say that the book is poorly edited. While readable, the narrative is marred by an abundance of repetitions, typos, and factual errors that should not have been so difficult to weed out. Paragraphs and sometimes pages are not very well linked; it is not unusual for the author to repeat a fact or a story on subsequent pages, as if he has forgotten he has already mentioned it. There is no consistency in rendering names; in a representative example, the Japanese name Sejima, which can also be transliterated as Seshima, appears twice as if the author were speaking about two different people. Only Seshima makes it into the index. The Soviet diplomat Solomon Lozovskii becomes, inexplicably, Lovovskii. And the examples do not end there. Considering the monumental effort in researching and writing such a volume, it certainly deserves better copyediting.
Its shortcomings aside, this biography deserves to be read by both students and practitioners of history, as well as the general reading public curious about the behind-the-scenes workings of Japanese imperial diplomacy.
Sherzod Muminov
University of East Anglia, Norwich