The adults in town were surprised. Isoroku Takano, later Yamamoto*, was an introverted child. At school, he usually sat quietly with his arms crossed. After school, he didn’t stop to play with the other boys, but headed straight home. Unusually, though, the boy seemed to come out of his shell when he talked to an American who had recently arrived in town.
The man, a missionary named Horatio Newell, had left an impression, especially after he constructed the first baseball diamond in the area. Yamamoto was one of the local boys who eagerly learned the new American sport. He played hard and was once even knocked out by a thrown ball as he was trying to reach second base.
Yamamoto also joined the Sunday School classes. Newell had a knack for making the lessons engaging for little boys, at one point even pulling a live snake out of his pocket as he told them the story of the fiery serpents from the Book of Numbers. Beyond the stories of the Christian Bible, Yamamoto was also fascinated to hear stories about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and American ideals like freedom and democracy.
Yamamoto’s father was supportive of his son’s interests. He was a tough ex-samurai, but he was also a scholar. He approved of his son learning more about the West and, like the other adults in town, noted that Newell was having a positive influence on the young Yamamoto’s development.
In middle school, Yamamoto obtained an English-language biography of Benjamin Franklin. He painstakingly read the book, stopping often to look in the English dictionary. In the front of the book, he scribbled Franklin in English and then scribbled kanji characters that spelled out Franklin in Japanese. He told those around him that he was inspired at how Benjamin Franklin had worked to free the colonies from the English king, and that he wanted to be like that someday.
After graduating high school, Yamamoto entered the Japanese Naval Academy. At the time, Japan was becoming increasingly nationalist — the cult surrounding the Emperor growing more fervent. Yamamoto received some abuse from older students who didn’t like that he had a Christian Bible on his desk. He simply replied that it held many valuable lessons.
In 1909, Yamamoto and his classmates were sent on a training cruise to the West Coast of the United States. Their ships stopped in Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney, Australia, before crossing the Pacific on their way to their first destination in the U.S., the rapidly growing city of Los Angeles, California.
Yamamoto’s initial exposure to America through Newell had given him a positive, somewhat idealized view of the country. However, relations between Japan and America had recently become strained, and the issues were well covered in the Japanese press. For example, three years earlier, San Francisco had kicked all Japanese children out of the city schools. The order had been popular, leading to further anti-Japanese laws. Two months before Yamamoto’s ship arrived in California, the state’s legislature passed a statewide ban of Japanese students, and there were another dozen anti-Japanese bills passed that year.
The two Japanese Navy ships carrying Yamamoto and his classmates arrived in Los Angeles on April 28th. Reading about the anti-Japanese sentiment in the press was one thing, but it must have been unnerving for them to meet Americans in person and face their hostility. Yamamoto sent his brother a postcard that said Los Angeles is “a fast-growing city of 300,000 that was a small town not long ago. It is extremely anti-Japanese and there is no goodwill towards us at all.”
After a few days, the Japanese ships sailed north, crossed through the Golden Gate and docked at the port of San Francisco on May 3. Although there was abundant anti-Japanese feeling at the citizen level and in the legislature, the Japanese sailors were given a warm official welcome by the U.S. Navy. The Japanese officers attended a dinner at the Fairmont Hotel, where James Gillett, the Republican governor of California, noted that “on the other side of the Pacific there is Japan, a great world power. On this side, there is America, another world power, and there is every reason why these two governments should always maintain their friendly feelings.”
The next morning, Yamamoto and the other young officers were treated to an outing to see the magnificent views of Mount Tamalpais, before returning to San Francisco Bay, where they were hosted to dinner parties on board the USS Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California.
Despite the official niceties, Yamamoto got a full dose of the prevalent anti-Japanese sentiments. Dropping another postcard to his brother, he wrote, “San Francisco is the source of the anti-Japanese feelings in the U.S. We get an unfriendly welcome from everyone we meet, be they Americans or not.”
After leaving San Francisco, the ships sailed to Seattle and Vancouver, where they had a similar warm official welcome. On Memorial Day in the city of Tacoma, Yamamoto and other cadets marched in a parade along with U.S. military veterans, basking in the attention of 100,000 spectators. Yet, before the celebration, the police had needed to crack down on people posting “fire the Jap” on local telephone poles.
Yamamoto’s next postcard to his brother said, “The image of America is that it’s a country of freedom where you can make money. But there is another side to the story. Money rules over principles and there is no compassion.”
He spent the next decade rotating among various roles in the Japanese Navy. Destined for higher ranks, he and some of the other most promising young officers were selected to go abroad and learn more about the designated future enemy, the United States.
In the Spring of 1919, Yamamoto boarded the mail ship Suwa Maru in Yokohama, again bound for San Francisco. At the top of the gangplank, he turned and waved goodbye to the friends and family who had come to see him off. As the ship left Tokyo Bay, he and the other passengers on the deck all looked with awe at the sight of Mt Fuji in the distance. Yamamoto had met the occasional foreigner before, such as Newell, but now it felt different. Almost all the people around him on the deck were Americans.
Yamamoto had been given a two-year assignment. His orders were simple: Study English, and learn about the United States, particularly about its Navy, government, and industry.
Crossing America and arriving in Boston, he was greeted by Mrs. Clifford and Mrs. Morrow, who were running the new boarding house in Brookline where he would be living. Staying with the women and having breakfast every morning was enjoyable and good for his English. The conversations surfaced things that Yamamoto found surprising. For example, unlike typical Japanese women, they were educated, and they relied on servants to do manual work, rather than doing the cleaning themselves.
A shock to Yamamoto was the prices. Everything cost more than in Japan, so he was happy to find some strange low-cost restaurants that had no waitresses. As he explained to his brother in a letter, these “cafeterias” were a good way to save money. Another way of saving money was to skip a meal and then go for cheap Chinese food.
In September, Yamamoto filled out the two-page application to the Harvard “special student” program. This wasn’t the same as applying to Harvard undergrad; it was a special program where foreigners could study English. He filled out the application in pencil, answering most of the questions with single sentences and leaving the optional essay blank. He purchased, for his own use, a complete works of Shakespeare and a nice leather Bible.
He also read half a dozen biographies of great Americans; the one that moved him the most was about Abraham Lincoln. He later told one of his staff that Lincoln had been born in a small shack, “similar to many you can find in the poor parts of Japan,” and rose to be the “champion of freeing the slaves — in short, of human freedom.” Yamamoto admired that Lincoln “put faith in himself, always, even though he committed many errors. But the errors didn’t detract from his greatness, and in fact, the errors made him human, and this humanity was what made people admire and follow his leadership.”
Perhaps Yamamoto admired Lincoln because of their similarities in personality. Like Lincoln, Yamamoto was an introspective leader who was keenly aware of his own flaws and had bouts of melancholy.
In January 1920, classes started at Harvard, and the newly promoted Commander Yamamoto showed up to the first day of English for foreign students. Being around a group of non-Americans was likely not what he wanted, so after a couple of classes, he quit. He then made some money tutoring other students in the evening.
He was able to watch the Boston Red Sox at the newly built Fenway Park, and one imagines he enjoyed watching the home team of his childhood baseball coach, Newell. A couple of other Japanese students invited Yamamoto to join them in running the Boston Marathon. The run along the Charles River was tiring but beautiful. As they approached the bridge that marks the end of the race, the other students were taken aback at how Yamamoto was able to turn on extra speed at the end and pass everyone. He also spent time in Washington doing work for the Japanese embassy.
As Yamamoto’s two-year stint in the United States came to a close, he reflected on his time there. He was impressed by the wealth and industrial strength of America, but his opinion of Americans was as low as it had been when he first visited a decade before. He found American students to be unmotivated and lazy. In the two years in the United States, much of which was on a college campus, he didn’t make a single American friend, nor did he make any American friends later in life.
Many historians have portrayed Yamamoto as someone who understood, maybe even liked, America and Americans. But the truth is more complex. Over the course of his life, Yamamoto had a contradictory and complex set of experiences with the country he idolized in his youth. He was impressed by the sheer size and wealth of the nation. At the same time, anti-Japanese racism and America’s pursuit of cold winner-take-all capitalism pulled his feelings in the opposite direction.
About 20 years after he returned to Japan from his American stay, he picked up his writing brush and wrote a proposal to the Navy Minister, where he put forward a plan to attack the American base at Pearl Harbor. He noted that if he could crush the country’s fleet, then perhaps the Americans would be so discouraged they would be open to a negotiated peace with Japan.
As he completed his proposal, it must have been a complex mix of emotions and experiences that set the table for his thoughts. Was he thinking of the America he idolized as a child — the America of Lincoln, Franklin, and baseball — or was thinking of the America he disliked, a country of racism and greed? Perhaps, in the end, he was thinking of both.
* Author’s Note: Yamamoto was born Isoroku Takano in 1884. He took his better-known surname in the mid-1910s after being adopted into the Yamamoto family. For simplicity, I refer to him as Yamamoto throughout the article.
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