Editing Mr. Moto (section)

==Speech==
In the prewar novels, Moto speaks a faintly comic English, with elaborate 'Oriental'-style politeness, with misuse of the [[Article (grammar)|definite and indefinite articles]].{{citation needed|date=September 2013}} In ''Stopover: Tokyo'', the final novel, he works directly with U.S. intelligence agents and speaks to them in perfect English.

===Personal life===
Mr. Moto rarely discusses his personal life but in ''Think Fast, Mr. Moto'' he talks about his many talents.
<blockquote>
Yes, I can do many, many things.  I can mix drinks and wait on table, and I am a very good valet.  I can navigate and manage small boats.  I have studied at two foreign universities.  I also know carpentry and surveying and five Chinese dialects.  So very many things come in useful.
</blockquote>

In ''[[Mr. Moto Is So Sorry]]'' he states that one of the foreign universities was in America where he studied [[anthropology]].  It is noted in this novel that he has enough knowledge of America to distinguish regional accents.

The novels generally involve a romance between the main character (often a disenfranchised expatriate American) and a mysterious woman. While Mr. Moto often despairs of the hero's attempts at saving the girl, he notes in ''[[Mr. Moto Is So Sorry]]'' that he himself is not immune to their charms.{{citation needed|date=September 2013}}

<blockquote>
"So often", he said, "I have seen such gracious ladies disrupt political combinations."  He sighed and still stared at the ceiling seemingly lost in memory. "Such a lovely girl in Washington – I was so much younger then. She sold me the navy plans of a submarine.  The price was thirty thousand yen.  When the blueprints came, they were of a tugboat. Such a lovely lady. Such a lovely lady in Tokyo. She took me to see the goldfish in her garden, and there were the assassins behind the little trees. Not her fault, but theirs that I am still alive – they were such poor shots. I do not understand lovely ladies, but I still trust them sometimes."
</blockquote>

===Politics===
While he is a devoted servant of the [[Emperor Hirohito|Emperor]], he is often at odds with the Japanese military. He believes in the manifest destiny of the Japanese expansion into China, but unlike the military, wants to achieve this slowly and carefully. Millicent Bell in her biography of [[John P. Marquand]] notes how this may have influenced the audience:

<blockquote>
There is political significance, too, in the calculated appeal to American readers of the ever resourceful Mr. Moto, the representative of Eastern subtlety combined with Western efficiency, who emerges as a gentleman of wit and charm.  This characterization had to survive some anti-Japanese sentiment that followed Japan's invasion of China in 1937. Up to 1939 it may have seemed possible, especially to those Americans unaware of or indifferent to the atrocities of the Japanese military in China, that Japan would be moderate and reasonable in its expansion in the Far East and that the Mr. Motos would defeat the Japanese military fanatics.  Pearl Harbor ended American neutrality and American hopes for Japanese moderation, but not before Marquand's Moto series had become one of the most popular fictions ever to be run in an American magazine.<ref>''Marquand: An American Life'' by Millicent Bell.  Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1979. Pg.221.</ref>
</blockquote>