In Spring 1941, Kazuo Kawai was promoted by UCLA to the rank of assistant professor of history, a move that became official in July 1941. It might have seemed that his life and career had reached a new level. However, he would never teach a class at UCLA after attaining his new rank. Meanwhile, his personal life was turned upside down.
During the 1930s Kazuo’s wife Yuri was a visible presence in campus activities, and in sponsorship of community organizations. Sometime during 1940–41, she suffered a nervous breakdown and remained in delicate condition. In April 1941, while visiting her family in Hayward, CA, she took her own life. Kazuo Kawai was presumably devastated, for aside from his wife’s memorial service, he made no recorded public appearances in the next weeks. Instead, he travelled to Japan for a summer visit to his parents, with the intention of returning for the fall term at UCLA.
Tragically, Kawai was unable to secure passage on a boat to return from Japan to the United States. In a letter to a UCLA colleague, Dr. J. A. C. Grant, Kawai explained that his not being an American citizen prevented him from leaving Japan (presumably he could not obtain official assistance for his departure) and that he was not permitted to transit to America via Shanghai or Manila. Kawai contacted Dr. David Bjork, chairman of the history department, requesting an emergency leave of absence, and explained that he hoped to return home in time for the autumn 1942 semester. Amid growing tensions between Japan and the United States, he remained stuck in Japan indefinitely.
In a letter to a friend cited in the Los Angeles Times in November 1941, Kawai alluded to the hardships of life in Japan: ”Petty inconveniences have multiplied a thousandfold, but considering the fact that the war in China has been going on for more than four years the inconveniences are surprisingly minor in character. The cost of living here has just about trebled in the past four years, but there is no real hardship. I don't know how they do it, but people still manage to live pretty well and quite normally.”
On December 7, 1941, Kawai’s hopes for a quick return to the United States collapsed completely with the outbreak of the Pacific War. His reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is not recorded, but he surely grasped that he would be stuck in Japan for the duration. Around the same time, he became involved with a Japanese woman named Miyo Tase. The two married in Tokyo in April 1943.
Though kept under police surveillance, Kawai was permitted to take a position with Nippon Times (the “patriotic” name given to the longstanding English-language newspaper Japan Times). The newspaper was subsidized by the Japanese Foreign Office, which was considered “moderate,” and its editorial line was less anti-American than its Japanese-language counterparts.
Accounts differ as to the nature of Kawai’s position and duties at the Nippon Times. In a later biographical statement, Kawai described himself as having served as “editor” during the war and “editor-in-chief” afterwards.Yet his name did not appear during the war years on the newspaper’s masthead, which featured only that of publisher Shoichi Kawamura. Most crucially, it is impossible to know whether Kawai was involved in the decision by the Nippon Times to commission and serialize during 1943 the book Singapore Assignment by “Tatsuki Fujii” (AKA T. John Fujii), a Japanese American journalist living in Singapore who had suffered wartime deportation and internment under the British authorities. (The lives of Kawai and Fujii had some interesting parallels, though they were a decade apart in age: Both were born in Japan, the sons of ministers; both grew up in the Bay Area, but attended college in Southern California; both were excluded from citizenship and suffered discrimination on that account in prewar America; both were stuck in Asia with the coming of war. After living in Singapore and being interned by the British, Fujii would settle in postwar Japan and live the rest of his life as a Japanese.)
In 1943, Kawai was identified in the pages of the Nippon Times as a “chief editorial writer.” That said, the newspaper’s editorials remained uncredited, so it is not possible to trace Kawai’s contribution to them with certainty. However, beginning at the tail end of 1943, Nippon Times published a series of articles under Kawai’s byline on the current state of the United States, as part of a joint publication agreement with Contemporary Japan, a semi-scholarly English-language magazine.
In these articles, produced under the stringent constraints of wartime Japanese censorship (likely all the more severe for a publication produced in the “enemy” language), Kawai was heavy-handed in his negative portrait of American society. Yet his analyses reflected wide reading in the enemy press and an up-to-date knowledge of American society. Presumably he had access to resources beyond that of ordinary Japanese—even as in the USA wartime government agencies such as the Office of War Information were able to obtain and analyze Japanese periodicals.
Kawai’s wartime articles are interesting to read now, not only for their informed, yet horribly distorted, view of American society, but for how they anticipate the future. For example, Kawai’s first article, titled “The New American Imperialism,” begins with a stark characterization of American policy (along with a glancing defense of Tokyo’s role in the Pacific War):
The menace of America appears to the people of Japan as a reality so obvious as to be beyond question. They assume it to be a self-evident truism that the United States aims at the domination of East Asia and at the attainment of world supremacy as well. In fact so thoroughly conscious are the Japanese of the reality of American expansionism and so seriously do they regard it as endangering the security of their country that they have been constrained to resort to the extremity of a perilous war to thwart this threat.
Kawai went on to examine the movement in American foreign policy from isolationism to internationalism, which he claimed in fact represented a new form of American imperialism. The author claimed that such a shift was engineered by a coalition of the “realists” and the “idealists.” The “realists” were old-fashioned imperialists bent on extending American power and reaping financial advantage. The “idealists” wanted to spread the model of American society—Kawai mentioned such figures as TIME editor Henry Luce and Vice-President Henry Wallace, who had each proclaimed an “American Century.” Yet Kawai was scathing and one-sided in his caricature of that society:
The obsolete character of America's capitalistic society with its perennial depressions, mass unemployment, and wastefulness; the reactionary character of the American political system with its cumbersome, confused and overlapping legislative, judicial, and administrative machinery precariously held together to a semblance of workability by the coercion of a demagogic dictator; the myopic provincialism of the American masses who idealize freedom; justice, morality, and humanitarianism in the abstract while tolerating in practice the greatest crime waves, the most lurid moral and social laxities, the most extravagant theological monstrosities, the most backward educational and welfare activities for their rural and mountain communities, and the most vicious discriminations against the Negroes and other minority elements—these are hardly conducive to universal acceptance of America’s pretensions to world leadership.
Whatever the distorted portrait of American society—and it is interesting that the author did not include the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans in his denunciation—Kawai’s analysis contained an interesting grain of truth in its contention that postwar American world leadership would lead not to world peace but to the development of a “Pax Americana.” Kawai did not mention the Soviet Union or the wartime Russian-American alliance. Nonetheless, his description of the expansion of American military intervention throughout the world does anticipate the development of the Cold War and permanent American military occupations (albeit with the consent of those occupied):
A Pax Americana, however, it may be disguised as a voluntary association, will have to be maintained by a preponderant American strength blanketing the whole world. For it is inconceivable that any large portion of the world, other than those sycophantic countries which are dependent on the economic largesse of the United States, will willingly subordinate their just and natural interests to an arbitrary set of international rules framed under the aegis of the United States to consolidate her own supremacy.
In the months that followed, Kawai proceeded to contribute a set of articles on American industrial development (which he termed a “Frankenstein” monster that threatened to engulf the country in economic crisis once the war ended), and the 1944 election. There he successively predicted correctly that New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey would be the Republican candidate, that Franklin Roosevelt would be easily renominated by the Democrats, and that FDR would prevail in the election—though he made no prediction as to the Congressional elections.
In late January 1945 he contributed a post-mortem analysis of the 1944 US presidential election. Here Kawai’s discussion was much freer of anti-American propaganda than his previous articles. Instead, he provided a largely dispassionate and reasoned analysis of the factors behind Roosevelt’s victory. Interestingly, even though (or perhaps because) the war was drawing to an end and the chances of Japan’s defeat were growing more evident, Kawai did not address international policy, and instead focused on domestic factors:
[T]he elements which voted for Roosevelt were the industrial workers who stand to benefit from the socialistic reforms of the New Deal, the commercial class of the big cities who see in the international interventionism of the Roosevelt regime a promise of a vigorous government sponsorship of overseas trade expansion, the intellectuals of the cosmopolitan centers who are most susceptible to the influence of international, politics and social theories, the poor farmers of the less prosperous rural areas who hope for government relief under the New Deal, and the tradition-bound Southerners who are motivated by sentiment.
It is not clear whether Kawai did any news reporting for Nippon Times during the war, but in mid-1945 he took on a major “on-the-spot” reporting assignment, covering the official Japanese response to the Potsdam Declaration and the debates within government circles as to whether and how to end the war (which will be discussed further in due course).
As Kawai later described it: “The present writer was editor of the Nippon Times at this time. Sensing that something significant was afoot during these days, he supplemented the coverage of his staff by personally spending several hours each day during this period in the Japanese Foreign Office. Wartime censorship prevented the publication of the material thus collected at the time…but the [author retained] his own notes and diary written while the events described were taking place.”
In his study of Kawai’s postwar writings (which will be discussed in the next instalment), Historian Brian P. Walsh later charged that “Kawai worked as propagandist for the Japanese foreign ministry during the war and evidence strongly suggests that he also did so both before and after the war..” However, Walsh provides no clear evidence for this startling claim, which (at least for the prewar years), seems refuted by the known facts.
Whatever hostility he expressed in regard to the United States in his wartime articles, after the end of the war Kawai expressed his approval of the US occupation, and his support for democracy. By December 1945, he was proposing tentative suggestions to curtail the power of the privy council in order to democratize the Japanese government. Scripps-Howard reporter Sidney Whipple, reporting on these plans, referred to him as “the brilliant young editor of the Nippon Times.” In January 1946, he joined a journalist from the US Military newspaper Stars and Stripes at a forum on “Japan today” sponsored by the American Veterans Committee.
Kawai later claimed that in 1946 he had been promoted to Editor-in-Chief of Nippon Times (whose ownership had passed to a cooperative of its employees) by the Occupation forces under General MacArthur, as a reward for his support for the Occupation and for democracy. However, when the journal announced an essay contest in March 1947 on the Japanese Constitution, for which Kawai was one of the judges, he was still identified in its pages as an “editorial writer”. It was only on May 1 that he was identified as the newspaper’s Editor in Chief, and on May 17, 1947 he spoke in that role at a 50th anniversary banquet for the journal.
To be continued ...
© 2025 Greg Robinson
