Best books about U.S.-Japanese diplomacy immediately preceding WWII

by replace_the_highway

I am currently researching FDR's foreign policy leadership in the lead up to WWII and I have not found a source that exclusively tackles U.S.-Japanese diplomacy immediately preceding WWII in depth. Most of the books that discuss this topic deal with it tangentially.

I have already ordered:Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941 - 1945 (from the AskHistorians book list) ,Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, The Reluctant Belligerent : American Entry into World War II, and America First: The Battle against Intervention, 1940-4 from my university library. Right now I am working through a smattering of biographies, histories of the pacific war, and books about FDR's european policy. If anyone knows of a book that explores this topic in depth it would be immensely helpful. Thank you in advance

amp1212

For any US diplomatic history subject, you'll want to look at Foreign Relations of the United States, the official history of the US State Department, in this case you're looking for

PAPERS RELATING TO THE FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, JAPAN, 1931–1941, volumes 1 and 2

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Topics like this tend to be more thoroughly covered in journal literature than as book length subjects. The talks between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Ambassador Nomura have been the subject of _many_ studies, they're important to scholars of the outbreak of WW II, but to political scientists as a type of negotiating failure.

And there's lots more in the literature beyond that. Some examples:

Robert J. C. Butow, The John Doe Associates: Backdoor Diplomacy for Peace, 1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974)

Power and Culture: Japan’s Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1934–1940

Documentary Discovery: Japan's Armed Services' Revisions to the Draft Understanding between Japan and the United States, April 1941

Diplomacy and the Military in Showa Japan

Revisiting Nomura's Diplomacy: Ambassador Nomura's Role in the Japanese-American Negotiations, 1941

DIPLOMACY IN A DEMOCRACY: THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN, 1937-1941

Considerations of Force in Cordell Hull's Diplomacy, July 26 to November 26, 1941

Backdoor Diplomacy in the Pacific: The Proposal for a Konoye-Roosevelt Meeting, 1941

A Bolt from the Blue? New Evidence on the Japanese Navy and the Draft Understanding Between Japan and the United States, April 1941

The Strange Diplomacy of Admiral Nomura

Facade and Failure: The Hull-Nomura Talks of 1941

A Reinvestigation of Japan's Final Memorandum to the United States and the Decoding of Roosevelt's Message to the Emperor, December 1941

Miscalculations in Deterrent Policy: Japanese-U. S. Relations, 1938-1941

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