The heated rhetoric of recent months suggests that interpreting the behavior of both China and Japan during the war years will become increasingly controversial. Meanwhile, the tensions between the two countries could destabilize the American-dominated postwar order in East Asia. We may be about to witness the most important moment of change in the relations among the powers in the region since the events that led to Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In this atmosphere, understanding the reasons for Japan’s decision to go to war in the Pacific has an urgency that goes beyond the purely historical. Fortunately, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by the Japanese historian Eri Hotta, proves an outstanding guide to that devastating decision. In lucid prose, Hotta meticulously examines a wide range of primary documents in Japanese to answer the question: Why did Japan find itself on the brink of war in December 1941?
The answer begins long before the year of the book’s title. In the 1920s, Japan gave many signs of being integrated into international society. It had taken part, albeit in a limited way, in World War I and had been one of the victorious nations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Its parliamentary democracy was young but appeared promising: in 1925, a new law greatly widened the male franchise. The country had become a part of the global trading system, and Japan’s external policy was defined by the liberal internationalism of Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro.
Yet interwar Japan was ambivalent about its status in the world, perceiving itself as an outsider in the Western-dominated global community, and aware that the bonds among different parts of its own society were fraying. The Western victors of 1919 had refused Japanese demands for a racial equality clause as part of the peace settlement, confirming the opinions of many of Tokyo’s policymakers that they would never be treated as the peers of their white allies. At home, labor unrest and an impoverished countryside showed that Japan’s society was unstable under the surface. After the devastating earthquake in Japan’s Kanto region in 1923, riots broke out against members of the local Korean population, who were falsely accused of arson and robbery. In 1927, one of the finest writers of the era, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (whose short story “In a Grove” became the basis of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon), took his own life. In his will, he declared that he was suffering from “a vague insecurity.”
Japan’s sense of insecurity was real but by no means vague, and expressed itself most vividly in the drive toward building an empire. In the early twentieth century, Japan was the only non-Western country to have its own colonies. In 1895, Japan won a war against China and was ceded Taiwan; it gained territorial and railway rights in Manchuria in 1905 at the end of its war with Russia; and in 1910, it fully annexed Korea. The depression devastated Japan’s economy after 1929, and its leaders became obsessed with the idea of expanding further onto the Asian mainland.
Japanese civilian politics also started to fall apart as the military began to make its own policy. In 1931, two officers of the locally garrisoned Japanese Kwantung Army in the south of China set off an explosion on a railway line near the city of Shenyang (then Mukden) in Manchuria, the northeastern region of China. Within days, they prepared the way for the Japanese conquest of the entire region. Protests from a commission sent by the League of Nations had no effect other than causing Japan to quit the League.
By the mid-1930s, much of northern China was essentially under Japanese influence. Then, on July 7, 1937, a small-scale clash between local Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, a small village outside Beijing, escalated. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, used the clash to make further territorial demands on China. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, decided that the moment had come to confront Japan rather than appease it, and full-scale war broke out between the two sides.
Within eighteen months, China and Japan were locked in a stalemate. The Japanese quickly overran eastern China, the most prosperous and advanced part of the country. But they were unable to subdue guerrilla activity in the countryside or eliminate the Communists based in the north. Nor did Chiang’s government show any inclination to surrender: by moving to the southwestern city of Chongqing, his Chinese Nationalists dug in for a long war against Japan, desperately hoping to attract allies to their cause, but gaining little response over the long years until 1940. Yet between them the Nationalist and Communist forces had more than half a million troops in China. The United States, increasingly concerned that all Asia might fall into Japan’s hands, began to assist China and impose sanctions on Japan. At that point, desperate to resolve their worsening situation, Japan embarked on the path to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and four years of war with the United States and its allies.
Hotta makes it unambiguously clear that the blame for the war lies entirely at Japan’s door. The feeling of inevitability in Tokyo was a product of the Japanese policymakers’ own blinkered perspectives. One of the most alarming revelations in her book is the weak-mindedness of the doves and skeptics, who refused to confront the growing belligerence of most of their colleagues.
by Rana Mitter, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild/Granger Collection
In this atmosphere, understanding the reasons for Japan’s decision to go to war in the Pacific has an urgency that goes beyond the purely historical. Fortunately, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by the Japanese historian Eri Hotta, proves an outstanding guide to that devastating decision. In lucid prose, Hotta meticulously examines a wide range of primary documents in Japanese to answer the question: Why did Japan find itself on the brink of war in December 1941?
The answer begins long before the year of the book’s title. In the 1920s, Japan gave many signs of being integrated into international society. It had taken part, albeit in a limited way, in World War I and had been one of the victorious nations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Its parliamentary democracy was young but appeared promising: in 1925, a new law greatly widened the male franchise. The country had become a part of the global trading system, and Japan’s external policy was defined by the liberal internationalism of Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro.Yet interwar Japan was ambivalent about its status in the world, perceiving itself as an outsider in the Western-dominated global community, and aware that the bonds among different parts of its own society were fraying. The Western victors of 1919 had refused Japanese demands for a racial equality clause as part of the peace settlement, confirming the opinions of many of Tokyo’s policymakers that they would never be treated as the peers of their white allies. At home, labor unrest and an impoverished countryside showed that Japan’s society was unstable under the surface. After the devastating earthquake in Japan’s Kanto region in 1923, riots broke out against members of the local Korean population, who were falsely accused of arson and robbery. In 1927, one of the finest writers of the era, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (whose short story “In a Grove” became the basis of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon), took his own life. In his will, he declared that he was suffering from “a vague insecurity.”
Japan’s sense of insecurity was real but by no means vague, and expressed itself most vividly in the drive toward building an empire. In the early twentieth century, Japan was the only non-Western country to have its own colonies. In 1895, Japan won a war against China and was ceded Taiwan; it gained territorial and railway rights in Manchuria in 1905 at the end of its war with Russia; and in 1910, it fully annexed Korea. The depression devastated Japan’s economy after 1929, and its leaders became obsessed with the idea of expanding further onto the Asian mainland.
Japanese civilian politics also started to fall apart as the military began to make its own policy. In 1931, two officers of the locally garrisoned Japanese Kwantung Army in the south of China set off an explosion on a railway line near the city of Shenyang (then Mukden) in Manchuria, the northeastern region of China. Within days, they prepared the way for the Japanese conquest of the entire region. Protests from a commission sent by the League of Nations had no effect other than causing Japan to quit the League.
By the mid-1930s, much of northern China was essentially under Japanese influence. Then, on July 7, 1937, a small-scale clash between local Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, a small village outside Beijing, escalated. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, used the clash to make further territorial demands on China. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, decided that the moment had come to confront Japan rather than appease it, and full-scale war broke out between the two sides.
Within eighteen months, China and Japan were locked in a stalemate. The Japanese quickly overran eastern China, the most prosperous and advanced part of the country. But they were unable to subdue guerrilla activity in the countryside or eliminate the Communists based in the north. Nor did Chiang’s government show any inclination to surrender: by moving to the southwestern city of Chongqing, his Chinese Nationalists dug in for a long war against Japan, desperately hoping to attract allies to their cause, but gaining little response over the long years until 1940. Yet between them the Nationalist and Communist forces had more than half a million troops in China. The United States, increasingly concerned that all Asia might fall into Japan’s hands, began to assist China and impose sanctions on Japan. At that point, desperate to resolve their worsening situation, Japan embarked on the path to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and four years of war with the United States and its allies.
Hotta makes it unambiguously clear that the blame for the war lies entirely at Japan’s door. The feeling of inevitability in Tokyo was a product of the Japanese policymakers’ own blinkered perspectives. One of the most alarming revelations in her book is the weak-mindedness of the doves and skeptics, who refused to confront the growing belligerence of most of their colleagues.
by Rana Mitter, NY Review of Books | Read more:
