Author: Eri Hotta
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.
Author: L. M. Cullen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521529181
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
This 2003 book offers a distinctive overview of the internal and external pressures responsible for the emergence of modern Japan.
Author: Mark Peattie
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612514367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This acclaimed sequel to the Peattie/Evans prizewinning work, Kaigun, illuminates the rise of Japanese naval aviation from its genesis in 1909 to its thunderbolt capability on the eve of the Pacific war. In the process of explaining the navy's essential strengths and weaknesses, the book provides the most detailed account available in English of Japan's naval air campaign over China from 1937 to 1941. A final chapter analyzes the utter destruction of Japanese naval air power by 1944.
Author: Michael A. Barnhart
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468450
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security, drawing on a wide array of Japanese and American sources.Barnhart focuses on the critical years from 1938 to 1941 as he investigates the development of Japan's drive for national economic self-sufficiency and independence and the way in which this drive shaped its internal and external policies. He also explores American economic pressure on Tokyo and assesses its impact on Japan's foreign policy and domestic economy. He concludes that Japan's internal political dynamics, especially the bitter rivalry between its army and navy, played a far greater role in propelling the nation into war with the United States than did its economic condition or even pressure from Washington. Japan Prepares for Total War sheds new light on prewar Japan and confirms the opinions of those in Washington who advocated economic pressure against Japan.
Author: John E. Moser
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393532999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Reacting to the Past is an award-winning series of immersive role-playing games that actively engage students in their own learning. Students assume the roles of historical characters to practice critical thinking, primary source analysis, and both written and spoken argument. Adopted by thousands of instructors at all types of institutions, Reacting to the Past games are flexible enough to be used across the curriculum, from first-year general education classes and discussion sections of lecture classes to capstone experiences and honors programs.
Author: Dr. Jeffrey Record
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786252961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.
Author: John Gripentrog
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538149443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
In this absorbing account of the origins of the Asia-Pacific War, historian John Gripentrog argues that competing ideologies of world order—chiefly the rift between liberal internationalism and Pan-Asian regionalism—lay at the heart of the conflict. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary and secondary sources, the author also examines the Japanese government’s vigorous cultural diplomacy in the U.S., which sought to win over American hearts and minds and soft-pedal its imperialist ambitions in Asia. The result is a book that both challenges and amplifies standard interpretations of US-Japan relations in the interwar era, while weaving diplomatic, political, intellectual, and cultural history. Moreover, the author’s wide-angle lens offers readers insights into a fascinating assemblage of historical actors—from Japanese and American diplomats, politicians, and military leaders, to cosmopolitan art enthusiasts and major league baseball players.
Author: Paul H. Kratoska
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
Japan attacked British-ruled Malaya on 8 December 1941 as part of a wave of military actions that toppled the British, Dutch and American colonial regimes in Southeast Asia. Within seventy days, the conquest of Malaya was complete, and British forces in Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942. The three and a half years of Japanese rule are generally considered to mark a profound transition in the history of the Malay peninsula, but little is known about this period. This book uses the limited administrative papers that survived in Malaya, oral sources, and accounts written by Japanese officers involved in the Malayan campaign to flesh out the story.
Author: Dorothy Cave
Publisher: Sunstone Press
ISBN: 0865345597
Category : Prisoners of war
Languages : en
Pages : 486
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Book Description
Bataan, the last bastion stemming the Japanese tidal wave across the Pacific, was about to fall. Only one unit, ROld Two Hon'erd," a small band of New Mexico National Guardsmen, remained intact. In her award-winning history, Dorothy Cave follows the members of this small unit who played a key role in this pivotal moment in history.
Author: Dan Van der Vat
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671792172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Naval history of the United States and Japan in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.
