How Japan went to war

Citation

Jacques G. Richardson (2015), "How Japan went to war", Foresight, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 291-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-04-2014-0025

Historical context

It is now nearly 75 years since the crippling Japanese strike destroyed much of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor. While some hundreds of studies have been written about why and how this happened, a young Japanese historian has now taken another tack. While few analyses outside Japan in languages other than Japanese have relied on materials published in the Japanese language[1], Ms Hotta has produced a well-written book in English based almost exclusively on sources in her native tongue. This leaves the reader with not only a strong sense of source authenticity but also confidence that one is penetrating the minds of the planners, strategists and deciders of Japan’s war against China and the West[2].

After the conflict, some of the policymakers were tried internationally as war criminals and executed. But a plurality of the architects of the war lived on, wrote their memoirs or were interviewed by mass and specialized media. Their eyewitness accounts, still growing in number every year, are the unofficial record – together with the present volume – of what actually happened.

Japan began extending its empire in the 1890s with the annexation of the island of Formosa (today’s Taiwan) and then gained concessions in mainland China. Korea was annexed in 1910. Japan took part in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but failed to have integrated within the League of Nations’ covenant, as it strongly desired any allusion to racial equality among its members. Its delegation, although capably led and staffed, deemed itself very much a second-class, yellow-skinned group trying to function among predominantly white-skinned diplomats representing well-established and powerful countries. As a former wartime Allied nation itself, however, Japan managed to keep control – under League of Nations mandate – of strategically situated island clusters in the northern Pacific, formerly held by Germany (the Marshall, Marianas and Caroline groups), and also of China’s Shantung peninsula (MacMillan, 2001).

Who was in charge in Tokyo?

Only Japan’s navy, as senior service (because of its remarkable record in defeating two Russian Imperial fleets in 1904), together with the army’s conscripted mass had the emperor’s ear. Constitutionally, the emperor reigned; he did not rule. Yet, his senior uniformed subjects made sure that their views were the only counsel the crown received. A future of intensely aggressive warfare thus became Japan’s foreign and domestic policy. Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a scion of the historic Fujiwara clan, served several times as prime minister; he vacillated repeatedly, however, regarding a possible war with the West. Despite his rank and responsibilities, he proved an unreliable advisor to his emperor.

Spurred on now by a hunger for both territory and power, Japan hardened its position in China by seizing Manchuria in 1931. This land-grab between two member-states was immediately condemned by the League of Nations. Japan left the League in 1933 and, in 1937, extended its military operations deeper into China. With Germany’s defeat of France in 1940, Japan occupied northern French Indochina (today’s Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and threatened to move farther into Southeast Asia, with an eye to taking control of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies with their riches in metals, rubber and petroleum.

Further effects of Europe’s spreading war

By the end of the 1930s, the Second World War was well under way. President Franklin Roosevelt began a campaign of economic warfare against Japan’s empire-building, banning American exports of petroleum, iron and rubber to Japan (1940-1941). This economic pressure severely affected the strategic reserves of Japan’s naval and air arms. Signing the Tripartite Pact (or Berlin–Rome–Tokyo “Axis”) in September 1940 encouraged Japan to believe that Nazi Germany would come to its aid in case the growing rivalry with Washington for hegemony in the Pacific should come to armed conflict.

To fight or not to fight? Rivalry quickly transformed itself into tension. Japanese sabers had left their scabbards in China ten years earlier, and, as the new decade of the 1940s began, leading figures in Japan’s army and navy clamored for expanding war across international waters.Envisaging two possible scenarios, the army’s leadership favored a northern engagement with the USSR, itself perilously involved since summer 1941 in a desperate war against Hitler’s Germany. Japanese naval leadership, on the other hand, favored making a major move southwards to acquire strategic materials and – by anticipation – ultimately engaging in direct confrontation with the USA and the three other “ABCD” powers, Britain, China and the Dutch.

Was dissent within Japan possible? Author Hotta asks this question more than once in her account. In retrospect, it is amazing how few individuals became the deciding elements in planning a war that could bolster or wreck the hegemony that Tokyo sought in the greater Asian-Pacific region. (See Hotta’s list of major characters, p. xv.) They numbered, including the emperor, not more than a few dozen in a Japanese population of 100 million. The military prevailed among those responsible for strategic foresight, whereas civil society (the nation as a whole, including educators and the professions, religious and associative institutions, and, in this case, even industry and commerce) was neither consulted nor much heard.

Absorbing this book as a futurist

In a search for root causes of Japan’s war in East Asia and the Pacific and her failed strategy, there are several methods of retro-reflection available to the futurist. (Successful strategies are rarely put under the microscope for such enquiry, although political parties and the advertising/public relations industry with their post-campaign appraisals and the military with their after-action critiques occasionally come close to critical retro-casting.) Here your reviewer has selected as method Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)[3], a stratified taking apart of why and how planning may have fallen short.

CLA is a post facto dissection by tiers of endemic and external factors having a bearing on the emergent features of a given process, system or event. The four layers of the disassembly, in the order they are examined by the analyst, are:

• litany, the unchallenged, official view of reality by the system’s authors;

• societal or systemic causes of such concepts of reality;

• world view , deeper assumptions and ideological certainties; and

• metaphor/myth: subconscious perspectives, yet capable of generating review of a, b, c and thus of d itself.

[Short-term gains - - - - - > to - - - - - > More sustainable changes]

When we probe the first (a) or litany level among Japanese military leaders (the Emperor included), we recall that the purpose of Japan’s grand strategy combined a basic desire to: (i) rid the region of white-faced (i.e. Western) intrusion, (ii) obtain more living space and through this, (iii) gain access to new natural resources needed to sustain a wartime (and ulteriorly a peacetime) economy. In this multi-step process, Japan should be able furthermore to (iv) acquire political leadership of the entire region. In other words, Japan would reign supreme in East Asia and the western Pacific. No timetable was specified although, with steeply rising losses in manpower, the Japanese leadership was in a hurry to accomplish (i) through (iii) as quickly as possible.

The systemic (b) level of analysis reflects Japan’s severe lack of every resource, including the energy required by a competitive industrial nation. Goaded by her earlier victory over Russia and her experience at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan repeatedly re-assessed its role in East Asia and the Pacific as one of indisputable leadership – even if this must be imposed by force of arms. In addition, here senior military management was counted on to show the way.

The outside worldview (c) interpreted Japan’s position very differently, beginning with its condemnation by the League of Nations for aggression against China. Soviet Russia maintained a highly defensive posture in Siberia lest a Japanese assault occur there. After the war in Europe became a shooting conflict in early 1940, Japan’s intentions toward French, British and Dutch territories in Asia complicated Tokyo’s relations with these colonial powers with whom it might otherwise have remained peaceful. Japan’s long, drawn-out conflict with China, against both Nationalist and Communist forces, as well as its notoriously harsh treatment of urban and agrarian populations, also had worldwide repercussions.

Appraisal of Japan’s behavior at level (d), metaphor or myth, was tantamount to an aggravation of intensity of the three previous levels (a, b and c). Ripostes from her main enemies in the Pacific and on the Asian mainland effectively left Japan in complete isolation by 1943-1944. It desperately required raw materials and fuel to continue waging war, all the while addressing the needs of a starving and increasingly homeless population, combined with a military establishment all but incapable of either offense or defense. A vicious war could no longer be won. Author Hotta and her authoritative sources make this repeatedly clear throughout the book.

How systemic is system?

The question needs to be asked, whether it concerns the above method of examining causes in layers or any other. We know from fault-tree analysis[4] and similar parsings of failure that no system is perfect. Any system will ultimately manifest defects. The Western Allies’ conflict in the Near East during the First World War was, for example, despite its almost random organization, a system. The concentrated effort by the British and French to involve the desert clans and tribes of the northern and central Arabian peninsula against German-Turkish influence was an intensive enterprise in military operations and tactics – but rather patchy in strategy and logistics. Yet, it proved effective by progressively weakening Ottoman governance and power. The systemics of Japan’s war effort between 1931 and 1945 yielded, as Eri Hotta makes clear, no satisfactory results.

Conclusion

Author Hotta stresses in her very readable text that the totality of Japan’s policy was foreordained. Nonetheless, there were respectable, demurring voices at the highest levels of government. One of the most consistent was that of the elder statesman Saionji Kinmochi, lord privy seal and very much Europe-oriented. (Prince Saionji had headed Japan’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.) Another articulate dissenter was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, part of whose career was spent at Harvard University and as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington. He had opposed the invasion of China in 1931 and then the continuation of the war in mainland Asia, but to no avail.

While a “great bluffer” (p. 99) but always a loyal son of Nippon, Yamamoto warned his navy’s general staff as late as September 1941 that “a war [against the USA] with so little chance of success should not be fought” (p. 20). Ironically, it was this same distinguished flag officer who designed and meticulously followed through the successful attack on Pearl Harbor the following December. The beginning of the war was the end of Japan’s dream of a regional empire.

Notes

In an e-mail to the reviewer, a former chief historian of the US Air Force, Colonel Dr Stanley Falk, stated that Japanese army and navy planners “compromised by adopting both plans […] There was no joint planning as such, but rather joint bargaining sessions” (19 March 2014).

Some of the thorough authors include Bix (2000), Iriye (2000), Tohmatsu and Wilmott (2004), Watanabe (2006).

CLA is an epistemological/philosophical invention of futurist Sohail Inayatullah, a university professor in Australia and Taiwan. Instead of predicting the future, CLA delimits “transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures” at four levels of reality (as perceived during the process of analysis). These are the “litany” (a), societal causes (b), the world view (c) and metaphor or myth (d). “The challenge is to conduct research that moves up and down”. Inayatullah’s four layers, each of which embraces different forms of knowing. See The Futurist, January-February 2014, p. 20.

Fault-tree analysis is another what-went-wrong analytical method, from which CLA is in part derived, and originally introduced by the aerospace engineering industry. It is not pertinent here.

About the author

Jacques G. Richardson, who spent many years in Japan, is a member of Foresight’s Editorial Board. Jacques G. Richardson can be contacted at: jaq.richard@noos.fr