Gwen Terasaki's Bridge to the Sun, an idealized memoir of her marriage in the 1930s and 1940s to a Japanese diplomat, Terasaki Hidenari, is still widely read as an inspiring tale of a 'bridge' between two cultures that waged savage war against each other from 1941 to 1945. However, neither this memoir nor charges that Terasaki was a master spy and a double agent are the whole historical truth. In Terasaki Hidenari, Pearl Harbor, and Occupied Japan, Roger B. Jeans reassesses Terasaki Hidenari's story, using the FBI's voluminous dossier on Terasaki, decoded Japanese Foreign Ministry cables (MAGIC), and the papers of an isolationist, a pacifist, and an FBI agent and chief investigator at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Jeans reveals that far from being simply a saint or villain, Terasaki, despite his opposition to an American-Japanese war, served as a Foreign Ministry intelligence officer, propaganda chief, and liaison with American isolationists and pacifists in 1941, while using all means to protect Hirohito during the postwar occupation.

"This brief but well-organized study features meticulous research and will be of interest to students and scholars interested in modern Japan. Recommended." - CHOICE

"A carefully researched, extraordinarily detailed account of what Terasaki did during the last eleven pre-Pearl Harbor months and the first three years of America's postwar occupation of Japan." - The Journal Of Military History

"This is a comprehensive and readable account of Terasaki's life." - The Journal of Japanese Studies

"Footnoted in detail, this is an informative study....This is a straightforward, jargon-free biography aimed at teasing out the details of a complex life in challenging times. Accessible to undergraduates and the general public it illuminates both the road to Pearl Harbour and the road to Japan’s postwar system." - Pacific Affairs

"Was the Japanese diplomat Terasaki Hidenari a master spy and double agent, or was he a saintly peacemaker who desperately attempted to avert war between Japan and the United States? Roger B. Jeans sets out to challenge both of these simplistic views and, instead of recycling cliche´s and stereotypes, ventures back to the available sources to painstakingly reconstruct a more complex and comprehensive image of the man who acted as a ‘bridge’ between two nations, Japan and the United States, during two national crises: the outbreak of the Asia Pacific War and the Allied Occupation of Japan." - Japanese Studies