Noriko Kawamura, Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese-U.S. Relations During World War I

Tuesday, March 7 | 6:00 pm
$10 regular price | FREE for museum members

Sponsored by Colonel (IL) Jennifer N. Pritzker, IL ARNG (Retired) and the United States World War One Centennial Commission.

Although events in East Asia were a sideshow in the great drama of World War I, what happened there shattered the accord between Japan and the United States. Noriko Kawamura's book Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese-U.S. Relations During World War 1  pursues the two-fold question of how and why U.S.-Japanese tensions developed into antagonism during the war by inquiring into the historical sources of both sides. Kawamura explains this complex phenomenon by looking at various factors: conflicts of national interests―geopolitical and economic; perceptual problems such as miscommunication, miscalculation, and mistrust; and, most important of all, incompatible approaches to foreign policy. America's universalism and the unilateralism inherent in Wilsonian idealistic internationalism clashed with Japan's particularistic regionalism and the pluralism that derived from its strong sense of racial identity and anti-Western nationalistic sentiments. 

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