Word: kichisaburo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura dispatched a courier posthaste from the embassy in Washington before his departure set reporters asleuthing. With a guard of two FBI agents the courier hustled into a closed car and whisked away. His mission: the purchase of one pair of underdrawers...
There were other signs that Japan was licking her chops over Russia. In Washington the "exploratory conversations" between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura slowed down, principally over Japan's unwillingness to commit herself against further adventures. Fresh from a tour of southern French Indo-China, Correspondent Leland Stowe reported that Japan held that country with too small forces for offensive operations to the south...
...Kichisaburo was the son of a samurai-a warrior knight. But the father was a sickly samurai, and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which abolished the samurai, the family went broke. Little Kichisaburo had to be satisfied with lowly sweet potatoes instead of more expensive rice in his school lunchbox, and he earned a few coppers as a fishmonger's delivery...
...Kichisaburo's first fight, it happens, was in defense of the West. The day he wore his first pair of Occidental shoes the school bully razzed him. Nomura pulled off one shoe, beat the bully with it until the shoe was unwearable. But his thrifty mother had declared that the shoes must last six months, so for six months Kichisaburo clumped around in one western shoe, one Japanese clog...
...Admiral is a naval man and so not very literary. But once in a while he reads a book in the evening. His favorite is the military strategy of Sun Tzu, the Chinese Clausewitz. Sun Tzu's first precept is one that Kichisaburo Nomura especially relishes. Ironically, it is also often on the lips of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. Also-and this is why Admiral Nomura's hopeful mission seems doomed to failure-it is the unspoken precept of the U.S. State Department. The Admiral's translation...