His most influential book was Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (1940) where he argued that persisting feudal class relations were responsible for government oppression at home and the imperialistic expansion that led to World War II in Asia.

These were the years when socialist students often moved to the left to join the Communist Party, and Norman came under the tutelage of John Cornford, who soon went to Spain and was killed in the Spanish Civil War.

[3] In 1936, Norman entered the graduate program in Japanese history at Harvard University, where he studied under Serge Elisséeff, a Russian émigrée Japanologist.

His elder brother, Howard, who also became a missionary, worked in Canada during World War II to support Japanese who were placed in internment camps.

Lester Pearson, Secretary of State for External Affairs, immediately told the Canadian press that "reports" of Norman's leftist tendencies had been fully investigated and had resulted in a "clean bill of health."

Norman then admitted under a harsher interrogation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he had indeed been close to communists in his days in Cambridge, though he denied having been a member of the party.

Norman arrived on the eve of the Suez Crisis of late 1956, and played a key role as a neutral between the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and the western powers.

[5] John Howes suggested that Norman took his life because he was concerned that the repetition of the allegations against him could jeopardize negotiations in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis.

Lyon reported that Norman was not a spy; that he was a sympathiser with Communism and the Soviet Union before joining the public service in 1939; that he was never a member of the Communist Party of Canada; and that he did not lie, but had "understated" his degree of commitment to Marxism and his leftist activities.