The Swedish liner Gripsholm sat in New York harbor in June 1942, painted white, flying enormous Swedish flags, and carrying the word “diplomat” painted along her sides. Aboard were 1,065 Japanese and 18 Thai passengers, including the two men who had handed Secretary of State Cordell Hull Japan’s final note on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, after the bombs had already fallen on Pearl Harbor. Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura had been Japan’s ambassador in Washington since early that year. Saburo Kurusu had been sent out in November as a special envoy to assist him.
For six months, the United States had been keeping them. The route home had been arranged on paper long before the ship arrived. Gripsholm would sail from New York to Rio de Janeiro, where she would lie in the stream with a military guard on the quay and take on more Japanese from South America. From Rio she would cross to Lourenço Marques, the neutral Portuguese port in East Africa that is now Maputo.
There she would meet the Japanese liner Asama Maru coming the other way from Yokohama with American diplomats aboard, and the two cargos of people would be swapped across the quay. The captivity had actually begun in the last week of 1941. It started with a promise. On the day of the attack, Hull cabled his own ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, that the American government had taken steps to accord absolute protection to the Japanese official establishments and official personnel.
Six days later, through the Swiss, Washington spelled out the terms. The personnel of the former embassy would receive correct and liberal treatment in accordance with international law. The staff could stay in their own building, and one of them could go out into the city to buy whatever the others needed. Police would guard the place, but no officer would be posted inside.
At the end of that note came the clause that explained everything after it. Washington assumed, the note said, that Tokyo would accord similar treatment on a reciprocal basis to American nationals. Whatever Washington gave the Japanese here, it expected Tokyo to give Grew and his staff, who were confined in their own embassy on the other side of the Pacific. On December 27, the protocol division put the next stage in writing.
The diplomats were to be moved to the Homestead, a resort hotel at Hot Springs in the Virginia mountains, and they could have the run of the grounds within whatever limits were set. None of the Japanese personnel would be permitted direct communication with any outside person in any way. A representative of the Spanish embassy, which now looked after Japan’s interests, would have a room in the hotel and could talk with them unsupervised. Mail between the Spanish ambassador and Nomura would travel under seal, unopened, carried by the State Department’s own man.
There were to be no sending sets or shortwave receiving sets permitted in the hotel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation put its own agent on the internal security of the party. The move came on Monday, December 29. Loading began at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue after eight in the morning under a heavy police guard, and a Washington evening paper inventoried what went into the vans.
There were trunks and valises and wooden crates, tennis rackets, baby carriages, and golf clubs. No surviving account shows anyone playing golf at Hot Springs, but the clubs went anyway. At about nine, a line of buses pulled out through the gates, the last of them carrying nothing but baggage. As each bus passed, the people inside turned toward the embassy, took off their hats, and lowered their heads.
Nomura came out carrying his hat in his right hand and a cane in his left, moved slowly and unsmilingly to his car, and would not pose. A federal agent rode in his front seat. Kurusu stood for the cameras for about fifteen seconds without smiling. A special train in charge of State Department officials took them into the mountains, and the Associated Press reported that the trip and arrival were made without incident.
Behind that June sailing lay five months of hotels. The Homestead was closed to the public for the Japanese, and the rest of the country had to work around them. In March, the American Bankers Association moved its spring meeting out of Hot Springs because the diplomatic and consular officers were still in residence. By then, the party had grown to about three hundred as consular staffs from other cities joined the embassy people.
In the first days of April, the hotel wanted its season back. The Japanese were moved out, and within two hours of their departure, the first new guest arrived. They went to the Greenbrier at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, a bigger and grander place where the German embassy had already been living since before Christmas, and from which the Italians and Hungarians were moved on to a hotel in North Carolina in the same days. At the Greenbrier, the Japanese ate in a dining room of their own, and the two allies lived strictly apart.
The party included one American. Hidenari Terasaki, an official at the embassy, had married a woman named Gwen, and they had a daughter, Mariko, who was nine. On the afternoon of the attack, he had telephoned his wife and said, “Japan is doomed. ” The family went into confinement with the others.
Mariko, writing about it decades later, put it in a single plain sentence: they were interned at the Greenbrier and repatriated to Japan in the summer of 1942. Not every neighbor was pleased. In the town of Lewisburg nearby, residents demanded a public meeting, and a man from the State Department’s protocol division came to explain. The town council passed a resolution against Japanese enemy aliens being interned in or near the town, worded in the most vigorous terms it could find.
A letter writer in Washington state asked his senator why the government thought it necessary to pamper the delegation at one of the country’s finest winter resorts. The war came to the Greenbrier by radio and newsprint. On April 18, American bombers flying off a carrier hit Tokyo, and when Tokyo’s news agency reported that the Imperial Palace had come through unharmed, Nomura is said to have ordered his whole staff to a Shinto service of thanksgiving. That detail comes from a syndicated Washington gossip column written four days later and from nowhere else.
A later magazine account adds that German diplomats greeted their allies in the dining room with long shrill whistles like falling bombs, culminating in loud slaps on the tables. On June 6, twelve days before the sailing, Admiral Chester Nimitz had put out a communiqué from Pearl Harbor on the fighting at Midway, and over the following week the American papers filled with it. A Japanese fleet beaten and turned back. Nomura had first come to Washington long before as the naval officer his embassy kept there to watch the American fleet, and he did what such officers are trained to do, which was to follow it in the press.
He described it himself three years later, in November 1945, in Tokyo. A team of American interviewers sat down with him and asked about the war, and his answers survive in their transcript. He told them he had studied the country in those early years at the embassy. Then he came to Midway.
“The results of the Battle of Midway were concealed from the people,” he said. “I left New York just after this battle, so that I knew what had happened from reading the New York papers, but the people at home did not know at all. ” A Japanese admiral had found out the result of his own navy’s worst defeat so far from the newspapers of the country that was holding him. By the evening of June 18, the last passengers were coming aboard Gripsholm.
A special plane brought up a party of Japanese from Peru and Ecuador held until then in Louisiana in time to make the sailing. At the last moment, the State Department put Ichiro Matsudaira on board, son of the president of the Imperial household. Down on the Jersey City pier, where the ship had docked nine days earlier, the baggage had included crated bicycles and sewing machines, and many trunks carried the rising sun. People who expected shortages at home had been buying what they could carry.
At twenty-two minutes past eleven that night, Gripsholm sailed. More would come aboard at Rio. She reached Lourenço Marques on July 20. The Asama Maru and an Italian liner sailing for Japan came in two days later.
The exchange itself was done in under four hours, on July 23 by Japan’s reckoning and July 24 by the American shipping lines. On the dock, a Japanese news agency correspondent who had been interned with the embassy compared notes with Max Hill of the Associated Press, who had spent the same months in Japanese custody. Grew had known Nomura and Kurusu for years, and according to the Associated Press, Nomura let it be known that he wanted to exchange greetings, then sent word asking to talk. Grew would not speak to either man.
At one brief wordless encounter, he merely touched his hat and walked on. It was the most polite thing either government had left to offer the other. On August 20, the Asama Maru and the Italian liner came into Yokohama, and Japanese broadcasts announced that the two envoys were home. What came of it once Nomura got home sits in the same 1945 transcript, and it did not go far.
He said he had meant to tell people at home what he had seen in America, and that at the time they did not wish to believe it. When the ship reached Singapore on the way home, he said he submitted his resignation. It was not confirmed for two or three months. The interview never says whether one led to the other, and the old admiral did not volunteer it.
By then, the Homestead had been open for its own season for months. The Greenbrier lasted as a hotel only a little longer. In September 1942, the United States Army bought it, and on November 14 it took in its first patients as Ashford General Hospital, which it remained for the rest of the war.
