Japan S Rush To The Pacific War

This book investigates the phenomenon of overbalancing through an analysis of Japan’s foreign policy during the interbellum. In the mid-1930s, Japan withdrew from a naval arms control framework that had restrained military buildup on both sides of the Pacific Ocean since the early 1920s. By doing so, Japan not only triggered a naval arms race with the United States that exhausted its economy, it also destroyed the last institutionalized structure regulating the relationship between the two Pacific powers. Japan and the United States became caught in a spiral of tensions that culminated with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Puzzling is the fact that the international environment in the Asia-Pacific was relatively stable in the mid-1930s, while Washington was pursuing a policy of accommodation toward Tokyo. By rejecting arms control and engaging in unfettered naval expansion, Japan overbalanced against the United States and began its rush to the Pacific War. The book explains Japan’s overbalancing with a neoclassical realist model that combines the literatures on threat perception and civil-military relations. Amid the Manchurian crisis of 1931-1933, as the Japanese government collaborated with the military institution to address the situation in China, military influence on the formulation of foreign policy surged. The perceptual and policy biases of the military, which include the tendency to distrust other countries’ intentions, to adopt worst-case analyses of international dynamics and to strive to maximize military power, gradually penetrated the decision-making process. Dysfunctions in the preexisting structure of Japanese civil-military relations, engendered by an over-depoliticization of the military institution, allowed the navy to convince policymakers that the United States was inherently hostile to Japan, hence the necessity to prepare for war. The government was brainstormed, adopting the biased military perspective on international affairs. Japan overbalanced in a myopic but conscious way.

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

This gripping blow-by-blow account of a war between the United States and Japan, originally published in 1925, predicted actual events. Writing 16 years before the japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Bywater, the world's leading naval authority in the period between the two world wars, prophesied a Japanese surprise attack on the U.S. in the Pacific, while simultaneously invading the Phillippines and Guam.

In Decemeber 1941, WW2 became a truly global war with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, dragging the US into the war both in Europe and Asia. What is not widely known is that war had been going on since 1931 in Asia, provoked by Japan seeking dominance of Asia. Why Japan chose such aggressive course of action is even less well understood. This book seeks to explain how Japan's internal conditions and external relations led her to a war in Asia that would in turn lead to a head-on collision with the US and the Western colonial powers. Japan did not plan for such a general conflict with the entire West. Japan's frustration at the failure to defeat China, however, made her decide that they had no choice but to fight the US also. Japanese strategic thinking was thus still very premature, with Japanese military leaders unable to think through the likely consequences of such a course of action; they certainly did not have flexibility to adjust to changing strategic environment due to change of technology, economic balance and the sheer commitment of the US to the war aim of completely defeating Japan. Neglecting war logistics and obsessed with the idea of decisive fleet action, the Japanese were worn down by the increasing air and naval power of the US and was crushed in the end. Such outcome had been anticipated by the Western Allies in their war studies before the 1940s. Hence the tragedy is Japan's failure to come up with any effective scheme to defeat American strategy. Defeated comprehensively in war of logistics, starving Japanese soldiers acted badly everywhere, a legacy of WW2 in Asia which Japan has to live with even today. Read more: http: //www.quest-publications.com/books/japans-pacific-war/

By the coauthors of "At Dawn We Slept" and "Miracle at Midway"

Assembling more than thirty primary documents - including proposals, memoranda, decrypted messages, and imperial conference reports - Iriye presents diplomatic exchanges from both American and Japanese perspectives to determine how and why the United States and Japan went to war in 1941. A detailed introduction provides background on Japanese aggression in China and Southeast Asia during the 1930s and economic unrest and isolationism in the United States. Readings add an interpretive dimension, placing Pearl Harbor in global context with essays from American, Japanese, Chinese, Soviet, German, British, and Indonesian perspectives that explain how various countries applied pressure, offered assistance, exacerbated rifts, and significantly affected negotiations and Japan's ultimate decision for war.

‘I had no qualms fighting the Australians, just as I have killed without remorse any of the Emperor’s enemies: the British, the Americans and the Dutch’, so admits Takahiro Sato in this ground-breaking oral history of Japan’s Pacific War. Thanks to years of research and over 100 interviews with veterans, the Author has compiled a fascinating collection of personal accounts by former Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen. Their candid views are often provocative and shocking. There are admissions of brutality, the killing of prisoners and cannibalism. Stark descriptions of appalling conditions and bitter fighting blend with descriptions of family life. Their views on the prowess of the enemy differ with some like air ace Kazuo Tsunoda who believed the Australians ‘worthy’. Some remain unrepentant while others such as Hideo Abe are ashamed of his part in Japan’s war of aggression. The result is a revealing insight into the minds of a ruthless and formidable enemy which provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

In this provocative history, James B. Wood challenges the received wisdom that Japan's defeat in the Pacific was historically inevitable. He argues instead that it was only when the Japanese military prematurely abandoned its original sound strategic plan—to secure the resources Japan needed and establish a viable defensible perimeter for the Empire—that the Allies were able to regain the initiative and lock Japanese forces into a war of attrition they were not prepared to fight. The book persuasively shows how the Japanese army and navy had both the opportunity and the capability to have fought a different and more successful war in the Pacific that could have influenced the course and outcome of World War II. It is therefore a study both of Japanese defeat and of what was needed to achieve a potential Japanese victory, or at the very least, to avoid total ruin. Wood's argument does not depend on signal individual historical events or dramatic accidents. Instead it examines how familiar events could have b