Editing Mr. Moto (section)

===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:

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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>
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