Between 1941 and 1945, Americans routinely expressed outrage over Japan’s “treacherous” attack on Pearl Harbor and their subsequent acts of military aggression launched throughout Asia and the Pacific. Surprisingly, numerous commentators, citizens, and political elites regularly vilified Japanese for “ingratitude,” what one popular newspaper described as “the blackest of crimes.” Others argued that the “dastardly Japanese enemy” had simply forgotten how America had once before “saved its people” from misery and suffering following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake or worse still, never thanked America at all.

Why, amidst the great whirlwind of inhumanity did Americans so frequently harken back to their 1923 humanitarian engagement with Japan? They did so, I suggest, to forge and reinforce constructions of their enemy’s “sub-human” character, to assist wartime mobilization, and to lionize America’s righteous global stature — past, present, and future. But what of the claims made that Japan had never thanked America? In my paper, I also document Japan’s extensive and unprecedented campaigns of gratitude undertaken to highlight how easy it was, and remains, to reconstruct Japanese-American relations deterministically from the perspective of WWII backward in time. “The violence of the 1930s,” as historian Fred Dickinson has argued, “has cast a pall over our understanding of 1920s Japan.” Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war that followed, I suggest, helped obliterate one aspect of an earlier “shared history” shaped by humanity, generosity, and gratitude.