This book analyses two international incidents which impacted heavily in 20th century Japan-US Relations: the defeat of the Japanese proposed Racial Equality Bill during the Paris Peace Conference and the 1924 US immigration law that singularly excluded Japanese from immigration. Based on new materials from across Japan, the United States, Australia and Europe, this cutting edge study considers the life of Hanihara Masanao, Japanese diplomat, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and ultimately the Ambassador to Washington during the fateful years of 1923-24, and examines how these events contributed towards the drastic transformation of Japan, from the liberal thinking Taisho Democracy in the 1920s to the violent rise of ultra-nationalism in 1930's Japan.  

Sangjin Park received his PhD from the University of Oxford and served as Visiting Professor at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. He is now Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Busan University of Foreign Studies, Korea, and the author of Semiotics and Theory of Openness (English) and Reading Dante's Comedy: Universality of Classic and Sensibility to the Other (Korean) among others. Recently he translated Dante's Comedy and Boccaccio's Decameron with introduction and notes. He is preparing books on Dante and Comparative Literature.