ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that misunderstanding and misperception were in large part responsible for the outbreak of the Pacific War. 'Misunderstanding' is an elastic concept. The chapter demonstrates that it extends from stereotypes developed over centuries, through the cumulative misperceptions associated with twentieth-century international politics to the mistakes in the decoding and translating of Magic. It presents the work published in the West by, for example, Heinrichs, and in Japan by C. Hosoya and S. Sudo, by examining the final negotiations between the United States and Japan in close detail and showing the mistakes of decoding and translation. Magic has been a subject of study ever since the Tokyo Trial and most scholars have argued that the mistranslations made no difference to the final outcome. Considering that only a very small number of the scholarly works in Japanese have been translated into English.
