This question inspired by reading the reviews of the movie PEARL HARBOR…
I’d always been lead to believe that Admiral Yamamoto did in fact say, “I fear we have awoken a sleeping giant” after the attack on Pearl. And indeed, a quick Web search revealed hundreds of Web sites attributing the quote to him…without a cite.
However, I also found a couple of sites that hinted that Yamamoto never said it, and one that hinted that the line was invented for the '60s movie TORA! TORA! TORA!
Anyone out there have the Straight Dope – a proper cite showing he did say it, or a cite that shows its an urban legend?
John Deane Potter’s Yamamoto (part biography, part WWII history) does not mention that line, although he does indicate that Yamamoto was very pessimistic.
On November 11, 1941, he wrote to a friend, Admiral Hori, wondering about the fate that brought him to engage in an act against which he was personally opposed (war with the U.S., not the Pearl Harbor attack).
On December 18, he wrote to his sister,
At about the same time, on the same day that a celebratory party was thrown for him by one of the Japanese senior admirals, he wrote to another friend,
Nearly a year earlier, writing to a hawkish supporter of the government in an effort to dampen that man’s enthusiasm he wrote:
Ironically, the “sign the treaty in the White House” line was taken by the Japanese military and used as a prediction, which, in turn, was taken up by the U.S. as counter-propaganda of his “boasting.”
It at least sounds like something Yamamoto would’ve said. I read a few biographies of him in college (I need to find copies of a couple of those books for myself) and gained a healthy dose of admiration for the man. I can’t remember if that particular quote was in one of the bios or if I saw it in a movie, though.
And just to nitpick, Tora! Tora! Tora! was released in 1970. Good movie, though.
I don’t recall that Yamamoto quote, but he allegedly said something to the effect that if Japan declared war on the United States, they would be successful for six months but after that he would not be confident about their chances.
In addition to too many other historical inaccuracies to mention in the new Pearl Harbor movie, if the quote is from Yamamoto, they have him saying it on the bridge of one of the Japanese carriers. Yamamoto was not with the strike force but back in Japan when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
The Napoleon quote is rather different: “[China] is a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! If he wakes, he will shake the world.” Though obviously the (real or fictional) Yamamoto quote was inspired by Napoleon.
I’m beginning to suspect the TORA! TORA! TORA! theory is correct–this specific quote was manufactured for the movie. It wouldn’t be the first time that Hollywood has superceded history in the minds of the public.
As Wampus said, Hollywood does take many liberties with history. Still, Tora! Tora! Tora! seemed to take some pains to ensure accuracy. Yamamoto’s quote was superimposed on the picture at the end of the movie, which leads me to think that the writer believed that Yamamoto said it. I’ll have to watch the movie again with the director’s commentary on to see if he says anything about it. On the one hand, I hadn’t heard the quote before I saw Tora! Tora! Tora!. On the other, I was a single-digit-old kid when the movie came out.
when you posted this yesterday, I spent a bit of time researching it. What I found were a bunch of sites that ‘quoted’ Yamamota “as Yamamota said…” and a bunch more that stated “as Hollywood had Yamamota say in Tora Tora Tora”. I didn’t find either illuminating, since they were mutually exclusive and neither referred to source data (ie, none of the places that attributed the quote to Yamamota went on to say 'as he said to… at…", nor did the places that attributed it to Hollywood mention who specifically claimed authorship (yea, I know, ‘the writer’).
But, one thing I also did, was check the on-line quotation sources (Bartletts etc) and found zero mention of this quote.
So, to me, there wasn’t a ‘definative’ answer that I could find, but the lack of mention in something like Bartletts leads me to suspect that it’s a Hollywood fabrication.
I suppose the real test of the TORA TORA TORA theory would be to try to find a reference to Yamamoto’s “sleeping giant” quote that pre-dated 1969 (when the movie was made.)
I researched for about three hours. Ignoring GeoCities pages and so forth, there are tons of references to the quote in one form or another. Many of them disagree on little details. Most say that Yamamoto made the remark after the attack, but there are a few, like the American Air Power Heritage Museum, that say he uttered the fateful words before the actual attack. Some say he was heard to say the remark; others say he wrote it in a diary.
The Admiral’s alleged quote is a popular item. I tracked down twelve pages of Google references, before they began obscuring into personal home pages of Japanese people named “Yamamoto”. I also search Excite, Hotbot, Yahoo, and a couple of others. It’s mentioned in an official court document, a dissenting opinion from West Virginia’s Justice Maynard:
That particular usage of the alleged quote, as an analogy to pissing off a bully, is common everywhere. It was even used to summarize what DOJ did to Microsoft.
There is an historian and author, William Martin, with an English degree from Harvard, and a masters in fine arts from USC, who gave a plenary address to the Massachusetts Historical Records Advisory Board:
Military sources are no help. The Navy archives turn up nothing, but the Air Force does! Lt. Colonel Matthew Caffrey, Jr, USAF Retired, writes in Toward a History-Based Doctrine for Wargaming:
Tantalizingly, he ends the above passage with a footnote that regretably turns out to be an irrelevant comment toward our purpose here, and not a citation of his source.
Even Senator John McCain writes in his introduction to the book, Pearl Harbor:
Sometimes, the sources seem at first sight to be surprisingly good, like Great Lakes Virtual Harbor, which has an otherwise fantastic tribute to the USS Arizona (complete with original newspaper picture of the ship when it was christened). There is a long and impressive expository on the Pearl Harbor attack, when suddenly, just as it,s attributing the alleged quote, it spells the Admiral’s first name “Ishoroku”. [sigh…] One can forgive a typo, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t help. Of course, that wasn’t as bad as the site that called him “Yamamuchi”.
Things went downhill from there. Oddly, the very best biography I found online was at Find a Grave. If you’re truly interested in Yamamoto, you don’t want to miss it. It does indeed paint a picture that the admiral did not want to drag Britain and the U.S. into a war with Japan:
So, the thing is that the alleged quote is something that Yamamoto might easily have said. He was intimately familiar with the U.S., having been educated here and having lived here for quite some time. Unfortunately, he likely didn’t say it. At Naval History Magazine’s site, Lawrence Suid writes an article called Pearl Harbor Comes to the Big Screen, about the new movie. In it, he says:
Hmmm… The site credits him with having written “frequently on Hollywood’s portrayal of military and naval history. He is the author of Sailing on the Silver Screen (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996)”.
You’d think a quote like this would have attributions all over the place, but even Hiroyuki Agawa’s book, The Reluctant Admiral, apparently never mentions it. There is not a citation for the quote to be found in twelve pages of Google.
Except one. And a telling one at that. But it isn’t attributed to Isoroku Yamamoto. It’s attributed by Amazon as follows:
Quotes from T3, indeed. My money goes on the real Yamamoto never having said it. Or having written it in any diary, either.
Here’s some hard evidence in favor of the “It was made up for TORA TORA TORA” theory. A park historian at the Pearl Harbor monument thinks the quote is made up:
“Martinez said he could find no historic documentation that Yamamoto had any second thoughts until months later, when the tide of war began to change. The “sleeping giant” quote seems to have been an invention of the 1970 movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”
“It’s as if the movie created the phrase and suddenly it came to be accepted as real history,” Martinez said.”