Even more difficult for Kazuo Kawai to navigate during the 1930s than the balance between teaching and research were the dilemmas he faced in his role as a public intellectual. As previously noted, Kawai’s expressed mission as a Japanese American was to promote mutual understanding and better relations between the United States and Japan, and his path to advancement rested on his status as an academic expert on the Far East. Indeed, it was on the basis of his presentation on the Manchuria question that he had been recruited by UCLA.
Yet Kawai was wary of being a “talking head” or publicist. Kawai insisted that the most important service he could make to the cause of the Nisei lay in building up a scientific attitude among his students in regard to the Far East, rather than in making rousing public speeches. On the contrary, he complained that community leaders clearly expected him to throw himself into public controversies, something that not only took up his time but directly threatened his status as an academic expert.
In his 1936 New Years Shin Sekai article, “A Nisei Professor Teaches UCLA Students,” he insisted that the community pressure he received was not only unwelcome but harmful: “The Japanese community thinks that I am not patriotic and dutiful unless I go out and debate with every Chinese propagandist in sight and get up and make speeches everywhere praising Japan. (Don’t they realize that my usefulness in the university would end the minute I got a reputation for being a propagandist!)”
Kawai did his best to maintain a balance. In his first months at UCLA, he gave a variety of lectures on the Manchurian situation, but in more academic forums. For example, in March 1932, he spoke at the Emerson Club on campus, and then to the Kindred Spirits Club at the campus YWCA. His comments were not publicly shared. In April 1932, he spoke on Manchuria at an international relations conference sponsored by the California Federation of Women’s Clubs in Los Angeles. In Spring 1933, after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations over Manchuria, Kawai delivered radio talks on stations KCEA, KPO, and KMTR, on the “Far East situation.” He pointed to the importance of studying the Far East, noting that Japan was America’s third best customer in terms of trade. Japan alone, Kawai claimed, bought more goods from the United States than all the South American countries combined, and more than either France or Germany. In the January 29, 1933 issue of The Los Angeles Times Magazine, he brought an academic viewpoint to the analysis of Japan’s activity in China:
“Smaller than California and much more mountainous, Japan has a population of 60,000,000, which is increasing by nearly a million a year. This fact…should make other nations tolerant toward the aspirations of a people who must either stop breeding or find more standing room….A century from now, when twice-breathed air becomes bothersome in most countries, Anglo-Saxons will be better able to weigh the worries now being weighed in Tokio.”
It is interesting to compare the case of Kawai with that of Ken Nakazawa, his older counterpart at USC. Both were Japanese-born and American-educated, and both were the first Nikkei professors at their respective institutions. Both were pressed into service to defend Japan’s actions in Manchuria. Indeed, in March 1933 the two spoke together on a program on “Understanding Japan” at the monthly travel dinner of the Pan Pacific Association for Mutual Understanding. However, there were important differences between the two.
Nakazawa, who was a writer and lecturer adept at communication with the general public, gave a wide variety of public presentations on Japan’s international policy. Conversely, Kawai was a trained international relations scholar, who was reticent in speaking before large public forums. Furthermore, unlike Nakazawa, who was openly employed by the Japanese consulate, Kawai was outraged over charges (coming from what he referred to as “a small portion of the American community”) that he was a paid propagandist.
Considering that the chair occupied by his Stanford mentor Yamato Ichihashi had been initially endowed by Japanese benefactors (including the Foreign Ministry), he may have been protesting too much. What is more, when in 1943 William Magistretti published in the Pacific Historical Review a list of historical Japanese-language sources on Japanese Americans, his list included a 1940 essay collection entitled Kogoro Hirobatake Zaibei Dainisei no Shinro [Future course of the Nisei in America]. That work was described as including remarks by Kazuo Kawai, who was identified in its pages as a representative of the Japanese Foreign Office.
In the mid-1930s, as the topic of Manchuria grew less heated, he largely withdrew from public speaking on the matter. In 1934, he visited Manchuria, China. Korea, and Japan during his summer vacation, but did not rush to report on his findings following his return.
According to the West Los Angeles Independent newspaper, he publicly dismissed the attempted coup by Japanese army officers in Tokyo in March 1936: “The recent revolutionary outbreak in Japan was a final desperate effort on the part of the reactionary group of army officers to gain control of the Government.”
The following week, the English editors of Kashu Mainichi announced that Kawai would be submitting an exclusive article on the significance of the events taking place in the Far East, but it never came to pass. It is unclear what happened. Most plausible is that Kawai failed to deliver the article, either due to the press of other business on his part or to his caution in publicly sharing his views.
In the aftermath of Tokyo’s full-scale invasion of China in Summer 1937, Kawai returned to public discussion of the Far East crisis. He expressed wildly shifting views, varying across the period and the audience. In September 1937, shortly after the Japanese inavasion, he spoke at a Y.M.C.A. forum at the Union Church that featured a packed house largely composed of Nisei.
According to Kashu Mainichi, Kawai called for more effective presentation of the Japanese side of the controversy. “One of the sources of the Chinese propaganda in the United States, Dr. Kawai said, were the hundreds of Chinese students who come here to study, and to explain the merits of China; whereas, comparatively few Japanese students study here, and most of them possess meager command of English.” The result, he said, was that at least 90 per cent of Americans were sympathetic toward China and cool toward Japan.
The Roseville Press newspaper countered that Kawai had been more explicitly pro-Tokyo in his forum speech, telling his audiences,”Japan has no imperialist ideas, but a perfectly reasonable program for China beneficial to both nations. Sympathizing with Japan's activities is not disloyalty to the United States!”
In January 1938, in the same New Years article in Shin Sekai already mentioned, he insisted that the Nisei must learn more about Japan in order to defend Japan in discussions of international affairs. “That does not mean to swallow uncritically the super-patriotic lectures that the first generation would like to force down the throats of the indifferent Nisei, nor conspicuously to flaunt Nippon-ism in the face of a slightly annoyed American.”
Kawai maintained, however, that the Nisei should know at least as much about Japan and China as did the better-informed class of Americans, in view of of their own responsibility for persuading Americans of the merits of the Japanese case—though at the same time he subtly telegraphed his own doubts about it. “Not only has Japan had an inherently difficult case to explain, but through their lack of intuitive understanding of American psychology the Japanese, by their well-meaning but clumsy efforts at explanation, have actually placed themselves in a worse light than the true facts of the case warrant.”
Kawai expressed little hope that knowledgable white Americans could help correct the distorted public images of the situation. “There are far greater numbers of American missionaries, teachers, and business men who have lived in China than in Japan…and [who] are active in painting an unfavorable picture of Japan. As the consequence, America’s views of the Far East are naturally one-sided.”
In March 1939, Kawai was interviewed by a UCLA student, Tom Smith, in the pages of the Daily Bruin. Quoting Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang’s comment on the Sino-Japanese war that “China will win, and Japan will win,” Kawai countered that in fact, China had lost and Japan had won—the Japanese would never be forced to withdraw from Chinese territory, for China had not the organized strength to repel them, though the Japanese had been forced by the tremendous expense of the occupation to scale down their initial plans. Kawai made a bold forecast,”The impasse that has been reached at present between China and Japan will probably continue for 2 or 3 years until public feeling and excitement have died down.
During this time Japan will concentrate on consolidating its power in the area already conquered. If possible, a subservient government will be formed, consisting of capable Chinese leaders willing to accept Japanese hegemony. Japan wants economic dominance and co-operation upon the Asiatic continent, and if this can be attained without the necessity for prolonging expensive and difficult political rule, it will make it that much easier for all concerned. A puppet state will be formed only as a last resort.”
In June 1939 Kawai gave a Town Hall speech on “Domestic Factors in Japanese Foreign Policy,” Japan at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. According to Kashu Mainichi, he remarked, “The problem of Japan is essentially pathological, calling for the services of a psychiatrist rather than those of a policeman.”
In an August 2, 1940 Daily Bruin article, “Kawai Views Oriental Situation,” he asserted that there were not sufficient grounds to warrant a conflict between the Unlted States and Japan, as American interests in the Far East were too small to justify a war concerning them. He added, “The military clique in Tokyo today has no outright control, but though quasi-fascistic pressure groups, it exercises a very great undue influence over the foreign policy of Japan.”
Kawai’s complex and ambivalent attitude in regard to his own racial identity and national loyalty went hand in hand with his shifting feelings towards Tokyo’s foreign policy and its involvement in China. His goal throughout the period was to serve as a bridge between East and West, and he tried to see the growing Japanese-American conflicts in perspective, but even though he understood that the fate of the Nisei in America was tied up with mainstream attitudes towards Japan, he could not close his eyes altogether to Japanese military and imperialist aggression in Asia. As for the thought he expressed in his 1937 Shin Sekai article, namely that he would like to live his later years in Japan, since life would be easier for him there, he would soon have an undesired opportunity to test such a proposition.
© 2025 Greg Robinson
