A12 THE SPOKESMAN • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2022
OFFBEAT OREGON
Part 2 of the opium smuggler’s foster son
E
ditor’s note: This is the
second in a three-part
series on Oregon-
raised Yosuke Matsuoka, who
became the foreign minister of
Imperial Japan.
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
Yosuke Matsuoka left his
Oregon home for the last time
in 1902, when he was 22 years
old. He’d lived in Oregon and,
briefly, California, since age
13. His Oregon years had been
happy ones, and he would re-
member them fondly for the
rest of his life.
Oregon would remember
him fondly, too — until Pearl
Harbor Day, of course. Within
25 years of his graduation he
would be probably the most
famous University of Oregon
alumnus in the world. Within
50, he was its most notorious.
That, of course, was all far
in the future. Just now, back in
Japan, Matsuoka was not find-
ing his hard-earned U. of O.
degree very useful; no Japanese
universities would recognize
it. That effectively foreclosed
future studies at Tokyo Impe-
rial University. As the son of a
merchant, he lacked any of the
family connections that might
be parlayed into a civil service
career, nor did he have any law-
school connections that could
help him in Japan.
So he took the Foreign Ser-
vice exam instead and launched
upon a career as a diplomat.
As a diplomat, Matsuoka
was excellent. His natural “gift
of gab” had been nurtured and
shaped in the boisterous, out-
going style of frontier Oregon.
He’d worked in a newspaper
office in Oakland, Calif., for
long enough to know how to
get along well with reporters.
He could be garrulous and gaffe
prone, but he was generous
with his time, was obviously
brilliant, and was very good at
the political games that always
come along with diplomacy. He
quickly rose through the ranks.
After World War One, he was
in the Japanese delegation to the
Versailles Peace Conference.
For many years after that
Matsuoka served as an exec-
utive in the South Manchu-
rian Railway Company, a Jap-
anese-owned railroad cutting
through Chinese territory
which Japan had seized from
Tsarist Russia in the Russo-Jap-
anese War.
Then in 1931 came the
“Manchuria Incident.” A cabal
of Japanese army officers blew
up some dynamite near a South
Manchurian Railway Company
line, blamed the Chinese for it,
and used it as a pretext to invade
and occupy Manchuria and set
up the puppet state of Man-
chuko there. Faced with this fait
Sources
Agony of Choice: Matsuoka
Yosuke and the Rise and
Fall of the Japanese Empire,
1880-1946, a book by David
J. Lu published in 2002 by
Lexington Books; “Yosuke
Matsuoka: The Far-Western
Roots of a World-Political
Vision,” an article by Masa-
haru Ano published in the
Summer 1997 issue of Or-
egon Historical Quarterly;
“Americans Rate Canada,
Britain, France, Japan Most
Favorably,” an article by Me-
gan Brenan published on
news.gallup.com on March
14, 2022
accompli, and wanting to keep
the conquered territory, the
Japanese government backed
the officers up. The League of
Nations strongly objected, and
Matsuoka, by now a widely in-
ternationally known diplomat,
was assigned to the League to
handle the fallout.
Matsuoka was bitterly op-
posed to the idea of Japan with-
drawing from the League of
Nations and tried very hard
to prevent it. But, ironically
enough, it was he that had to
lead the Japanese delegation in
their dramatic walkout on Feb.
24, 1933.
On the way back to Japan,
Matsuoka worried about what
his reception might be. After
all, his diplomacy had failed
— Japan had withdrawn from
the League of Nations. As a
businessman, he knew what
that meant. Internationally, it
was a bad look. It made Japan
look like a rogue state and an
unreliable foreign investment
partner.
But when he arrived back
home, he was welcomed as a
hero. The pageantry of the Jap-
anese delegation’s dramatic exit,
heads held high in solemn dig-
nity, had appealed to the pop-
ulace. Matsuoka was, at that
moment, the most popular man
in Japan other than the actual
emperor.
But all was not as peachy as
it might have looked. With no
personal family networks to
support him, he had to seek
support where he could find
it. And the business elites that
would ordinarily be with him
were furious about Japan’s with-
drawal from the League. It may
have been an important point of
national honor, but it was going
to cost them a lot of money. Ja-
pan was now almost an interna-
tional pariah.
And yet the population of la-
borers and farm workers loved
him.
So Matsuoka took the path of
William Jennings Bryan, whom
he had once met in California,
and stepped into the role of a
populist politician. His idea was
to build a fascist-style grassroots
organization similar to the one
Mussolini developed in Italy.
But after two years of barn-
storming around the country
giving populist speeches, he
knew he was not going to be
able to get enough traction to
build the mass support he’d
need to overcome the challenges
of being a political outsider. So
in 1935, when offered the pres-
idency of the South Manchuria
Railroad, he accepted and went
back to Manchuria.
Then in 1940, Matsuoka’s old
acquaintance Fumimaro Konoe
took over as prime minister.
Seeking a foreign minister who
knew diplomacy and would get
along well with the army and
navy ministers, Konoe tapped
Matsuoka for the job.
Matsuoka was only foreign
minister for a year. But it was an
extraordinarily action-packed
year. From the start, his goal
was to forge an official alliance
with Nazi Germany. He was
convinced that only as a part-
ner with Germany could Japan
negotiate on an equal footing
with its greatest Pacific rival, the
United States.
And he hoped that the treaty
could be spun as a failure for the
Roosevelt administration, caus-
ing Roosevelt to lose the 1940
election. Matsuoka had given up
on ever being able to do busi-
ness with Roosevelt’s people
— they were too intransigently
opposed to Japan’s occupation
of Manchuria, which he consid-
ered an indispensable “lifeline”
of raw materials for the island
empire.
A new administration under
Wendell Wilkie would be eager
to break from the old regime,
and perhaps with the right
kind of diplomacy it could be
brought around to Japan’s way
of thinking. Then the U.S. could
broker a peace-with-honor deal
for both China and Japan. Both
countries had been bogged
down in a stalemate in Manchu-
ria for half a decade.
The problem was, Mat-
suoka thought he understood
America, when in fact what
he understood was the rough-
and-tumble waterfront districts
and lumber camps of 1890s
Portland. He thought of Amer-
icans as a bluff, straightforward
bunch who despised weakness
but respected guts and strength.
He also thought of them as not
being too hung up on things like
anti-smuggling laws. The sheer
audacity of the Blum-Dunbar
gang’s opium operations had
commanded respect in Port-
land. Matsuoka thought Amer-
icans would respond positively
to similar kinds of audacity
played out on the international
FIND IT in the SPOKESMAN CLASSIFIEDS
stage in Manchuria. He also
seems not to have understood
that the Japanese army’s atroci-
ties in Manchuria were the real
problem there.
But America in 1940 was
completely unlike waterfront
Portland in 1893. In fact,
throughout the late 1930s, Or-
egon raconteur Stewart Hol-
brook made a good living
pumping old retired waterfront
gangsters for stories of those
crazy old days and publishing
them in the Morning Oregonian
for modern readers to shake
their heads over in amazement
at how much different their
world had become.
Matsuoka was a living anach-
ronism, and his confidence in
his understanding of the coun-
try he spent his teenage years in
was about to bite him, and his
country, really hard.
— This is the second install-
ment of a three-part series. We’ll
talk about how that Matsuoka’s
misplaced ideas played out next
week.
█
Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon
State University and writes about odd
tidbits of Oregon history. His book,
Heroes and Rascals of Old Oregon, was
recently published by Ouragan House
Publishers. To contact him or suggest a
topic: finn@offbeatoregon.com or 541-
357-2222.
Yosuke Matsuoka in 1933, during his
service as Japan’s chief diplomat at the League of Nations in Geneva.
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