- [Matthew] Honolulu, Hawaii. April 12th, 1941.
Tadashi Morimura, the new vice consul
at Japan's Consulate General in Honolulu,
is unusually daring for a civil servant.
A private pilot, he rents small aircraft to fly
around the island and swims the southern waterways.
He also visits the geisha bars favored by local Japanese
and visiting naval officers
and loves chatting up the girls for gossip.
And he lives unusually far away from work,
eight miles, to be precise,
in a second-floor apartment overlooking Pearl Harbor.
Now, if that all sounds odd to you, there's a good reason,
because that identity is a cover.
In reality, he's Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa
of Imperial Japanese naval intelligence,
a specialist in US Navy warships.
His job is to provide descriptions of the harbor
and monitor which vessels are in port,
and he reports this information back to Tokyo
via diplomatic cables, cables that he has no way
of knowing are being read by the American military.
The countdown has started.
(lively music)
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April 13th, 1941.
A train station in Moscow.
Foreign Minister Matsuoka
and the Japanese delegation are in high spirits.
They're slapping backs, hugging,
many of them a little intoxicated
after a celebration banquet.
For half a century,
Japan has feared an attack by Russia, but no more.
Over the last several months,
Matsuoka has been negotiating a non-aggression pact
between Japan and the Soviet Union,
and today, they signed it.
And as the conversation on the platform dwindles,
Matsuoka turns to see an unbelievable sight.
Walking through the crowd is Stalin himself,
come to see Matsuoka off.
This never happens.
Stalin doesn't go to the train station
to give diplomats a personal farewell.
And it's at that moment
that Matsuoka feels the weight of history
and how badly the Soviets wanted this arrangement.
Now, Stalin can withdraw troops from its border
with occupied Manchuria and send them west, and Japan,
for its part, could remove their own troops and push south.
But when Matsuoka arrives back in Tokyo,
he found that plan had become a bit more complicated,
for in Washington, Ambassador Nomura
had hashed out a draft resolution
that could normalize relations with the US.
If Japan would agree to withdraw troops from China,
merge its Chinese puppet state government
with Chiang's nationalist government,
and pledge to recognize Chinese independence,
the United States was prepared to recognize Manchuria
as a Japanese possession, normalize trade,
and end racially discriminatory immigration laws.
And Prime Minister Konoe was considering it.
After all, he wanted out of the Chinese quagmire.
And while it might come off as a betrayal
of the Japanese soldiers who died in China,
it could prevent thousands more
from dying in a Pacific-wide conflict.
Matsuoka was livid.
He insisted that the draft be shown to their German allies
and said that the time to attack British Singapore had come.
After all, he'd spent over a year
forging diplomatic agreements with Germany
and the Soviets to keep the pressure off Japan, and what?
Now they were just gonna give in?
Matsuoka started to go rogue.
He made a counteroffer where Japan gave up nothing
and started to denigrate Konoe in public.
Worse still, once Nazi Germany
broke its nonaggression pact
and invaded the Soviet Union in late June,
he insisted that Japan should abandon the Southern Strike
and instead invade the USSR in support.
Konoe, deeply embarrassed, had to personally apologize
to the emperor for Matsuoka's conduct and give assurances
he did not plan to provoke a war with Stalin.
In fact, the fiery diplomat's presence
had even become a sticking point in negotiations,
with Secretary of State Cordell Hull
suggesting that talks could not go forward
with Matsuoka still in government.
He also demanded that Japan quit the Tripartite Pact.
And when Matsuoka started to act
without consulting the cabinet,
Konoe decided it was time for him to go.
So his ministers dissolved the cabinet
and reformed it without him.
In Washington, Roosevelt and Hull were overjoyed.
With Matsuoka out, perhaps this signaled
a cooling off of military aggression.
Their hope was misplaced.
Four days later, under the threat of military action,
Japan had reached an agreement
to occupy the southern portion of French Indochina,
moving into air bases that would allow them
to bomb British Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines.
A hard response was needed, and Roosevelt delivered.
He announced he would formally cut relations,
put an embargo on goods, and freeze all Japanese assets
in the United States, with that last measure
cutting all American oil sales to Japan.
Yet, days later, he gave Nomura a new offer.
Pull out of Indochina and make it a neutral territory,
and the assets would be unfrozen.
See, the US oil embargo wasn't a full embargo.
That would leave Roosevelt
without much flexibility in negotiations.
Japan obtained American oil by buying licenses
to purchase a certain volume,
and Japan had already obtained enough licenses
to keep them supplied until 1943.
But that oil had to be paid with US currency
held in American banks, and those were the assets
that were frozen, though technically,
the Treasury Department could decide on a case-by-case basis
to allow Japan's license purchases to go through.
So Roosevelt could essentially loosen
or tighten Japan's supply of oil
in a carrot-and-stick approach.
Nomura didn't even pass on the proposal to Tokyo,
knowing that the militarists,
especially Minister of War Hideki Tojo,
had boxed Prime Minister Konoe in.
On August 1st, the economic measures went into effect,
yet Roosevelt's measured approach was not followed.
As he took a two-week diplomatic visit to meet Churchill,
the treasury went hard line
and denied all Japanese oil purchases.
Then, given the popularity of this tough stance
among friendly nations, Roosevelt retroactively endorsed it.
What he didn't endorse, however,
was coming to those nations' defense.
All summer, British and Dutch diplomats had tried
to get Roosevelt to commit, even informally,
to fight together should Japan attack in Southeast Asia.
American diplomats instead ducked, saying negotiations
with Japan were ongoing and the time was not right.
In truth, Roosevelt was unsure
that the isolationist American public would support him
going to war, even if Japan attacked.
Would American parents, he wondered, accept their sons dying
just to hold on to the Philippines
or preserve British control of Singapore?
At the time, probably not.
But Roosevelt's attempt at deterring war
again did the opposite.
Now Japan was on the clock.
With over 90% of its oil obtained from the US,
if war was coming, every day they waited to strike south,
they would have less fuel to operate with.
Under wartime consumption patterns,
they predicted they could only keep their ships moving
and planes flying for a year.
So their options now were to either pull out of China,
which the army wouldn't accept, or strike south.
And yet, American negotiators dawdled.
They were in no hurry, each day seeming
as if their hand in a potential war grew stronger.
Over the next several months,
Prime Minister Konoe tried desperately
to find a middle ground,
including brokering a face-to-face meeting
with Roosevelt in Alaska.
Meanwhile, the planning for the Strike South
with an optional attack on Pearl Harbor advanced.
The plan had gained formal approval
as a contingency should negotiations fail,
but militarists increasingly found
that Emperor Hirohito did, in fact,
favor a diplomatic solution.
At a meeting on September 6th, 1941,
a militarist officer told Hirohito that a war
with the United States would be over in three months.
Not believing this, the emperor pushed back,
saying that they'd said the same thing about China.
"China is big," explained the officer.
"Bigger than the Pacific?" the emperor responded,
and he finished the meeting by reading a poem
his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, had written
on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War,
a poem about how the sea linked all nations
and should be at peace.
But he did give his assent to war if diplomacy failed.
And as the weeks dragged on without progress
and the Alaska summit looked doubtful,
pressures began to mount,
and at a conference on September 25th,
Minister of War Tojo pushed for an internal deadline.
If no diplomatic options were reached by mid-October,
Japan must put in motion plans for a military solution.
It was agreed.
Fleets began to gather and make ready.
October 12th, 1941, near Mount Fuji.
Konoe has brought the biggest figures
in government to his private estate
for a last-ditch effort to prevent war.
There, he leans on Tojo, saying that he's not confident
a war with the United States can be won
and that he's not equipped to lead the country through it.
He threatens to resign.
He also enlists allies from the navy
who privately oppose the war
and think that defeat is likely
but who are also not brave enough
to make their anti-war views known amongst their colleagues.
The best he can get from them in the moment is to say
that setting a deadline was a mistake and that they'd asked
for imperial approval of the strike too early.
Tojo will not budge.
The sticking point is what it's always been.
The army refuses to pull troops out of China.
Not only does Tojo see doing this
as betraying the dead, but much
of the army's political power is wrapped up in the war.
After many contentious hours, the meeting breaks up,
and four days later, Konoe resigns from his post
and the emperor appoints his successor,
Hideki Tojo, who tells Admiral Yamamoto
to begin preparing his strike force for war.
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