{"product_id":"japan-1941-isbn-9780307739742","title":"Japan 1941","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e Best Nonfiction Book of the Year\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Japan attacked the United States in 1941, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. In a groundbreaking history that considers Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective, certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific, Eri Hotta poses essential questions overlooked for the last seventy years: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens in harm's way? Why did they make a decision that was doomed from the start? Introducing us to the doubters, bluffers, and schemers who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a hidden Japan—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, deluded by reckless militarism, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable.\u003c\/p\u003e | “Hotta illuminates the extraordinary ideological and military predicament in which Japan found itself  in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor…[She] brings to life the key figures of a deeply divided Japanese leadership…[and] scrupulously details [their] negotiations and squabbles…against a backdrop of dauntingly complex domestic and international maneuverings.” \u003cbr\u003e             —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Outstanding...In lucid prose, Hotta...persuasively sketches the very distinct personalities shaping the decisions that drove Japan toward war….She makes it clear that there are two versions of the Asia-Pacific War in China and Japan that hardly meet at all…[and] concludes that after 1945, Japan’s actual ‘past, with its improbable story of how the war came to pass, became another country.’ It is a country that policymakers in Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington should seek to understand, not least through this humane and fair-minded book.”\u003cbr\u003e             —Rana Mitter, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Chilling…Constitutes a warning of the literally earth-shattering dangers that can emerge when the political system of a powerful nation fails to work.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e     —The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hotta’s groundbreaking work is both a fascinating history and a cautionary tale for those who wield power today.”\u003cbr\u003e             —\u003ci\u003eThe Dallas Morning News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Hotta’s] account is a warning to any country that would talk itself into a foolish war.”\u003cbr\u003e             —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this focused, informed and persuasive book…Hotta effortlessly returns us to the moment just before the dice were so disastrously rolled. From a perspective little known to Americans, a masterful account of how and why World War II began.”\u003cbr\u003e             —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A fascinating read for anyone interested in Japan’s involvement in World War II…While scholarly and thoroughly researched, it’s also a highly enjoyable read…A real page turner.”\u003cbr\u003e             —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this fast-moving, persuasive account of Japan's road to Pearl Harbor, Eri Hotta describes the pathetic leadership of a country who argue among themselves endlessly when the crisis across the Pacific requires decisive action to preserve the peace. It is a story of self-delusion, irresponsibility, and ignorance from which Japan is not entirely free even today.”\u003cbr\u003e     —Akira Iriye, author of \u003ci\u003ePearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This ambitious, groundbreaking history builds new layers atop a story that we thought we knew.”\u003cbr\u003e     —\u003ci\u003eEveryday eBook\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Finely nuanced…[Hotta]  forcefully reframes how we should consider the Japanese with respect to their positions as emerging world powers in [an]…era of international turmoil. \u003cbr\u003e            —\u003ci\u003eAsian American Literature Fans\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Riveting…This important book should be in every major library. It will interest anyone attempting to make sense of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War, or bureaucratic dysfunction and its possibly tragic consequences.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e             —Choice\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e | \u003cp\u003eEri Hotta, born in Tokyo and educated in Japan, the U.S., and the U.K., has taught at Oxford, in Tokyo, and in Jerusalem, specializing in international relations.\u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003ePROLOGUE \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e What a Difference a Day Makes\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn the early-morning hours of a frosty day, December 8, 1941, the Japanese nation woke to astonishing news. It was announced, shortly after seven, that Japan had “entered into a situation of war with the United States and Britain in the Western Pacific before dawn.” Though no specifics were given, by then the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, had been successfully attacked—the first wave of planes was dispatched at 1:30 a.m., Japanese time, and the surprise operation was completed by 5:30 a.m. When news of the attack arrived at 11:30 a.m., the nation was electrified. This was soon followed by Japan’s formal declaration of war on the Allies and the report of its further military successes in British Malaya and Hong Kong. (The Malayan operation actually preceded the Pacific offensive by almost two hours.) Throughout the day, the public broadcasting network, NHK, aired twelve special news reports in addition to six regularly scheduled ones for the millions of Japanese glued to their radios.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn what, because of the time difference, had been December 7 in Hawaii, the air force division of the Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk or damaged numerous ships, aircraft, and military facilities. About twentyfour hundred people were killed in the raid or died shortly afterward from their injuries. The devastating attack was carried out without a formal termination of diplomatic relations by Japan, let alone a declaration of war, a heavy, infamous legacy for the nation. But such tactical details did not interest ordinary Japanese citizens on December 8. The immediate public reaction was one of celebration.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When Japan sent planes to attack Pearl Harbor, it was mired in economic and political uncertainties. A sense of helplessness pervaded its population as the state took more and more control of public life. From the beginning of Japan’s war with China in mid-1937, its people were led to believe a swift, decisive victory was imminent. Despite all the announcements of Japanese victories in China, however, the Guomindang (a.k.a. Kuomintang, frequently referred to as the Nationalist Party) leader Chiang Kai-shek was not about to give up. Similar to Napoleon’s army in Russia, the Japanese forces were drawn far too deep into harsh, unfamiliar terrain to carry out an effective operation. The jingoistic tone of Japan’s media coverage continued regardless, but people were privately beginning to question why the war had not ended. Though largely ignorant of the true state of Japanese diplomacy, they had been told that Nomura Kichisaburo, a navy admiral and former foreign minister, had been dispatched to Washington, D.C., in early 1941 to negotiate a peaceful solution to Japan’s international isolation. But no good news was forthcoming, and its absence made people fearful. Many knew the United States was upset over recent Japanese initiatives—such as allying with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy and occupying first northern and then southern French Indochina—and seemed intent, unless a diplomatic settlement could be reached soon, on crippling Japan with economic sanctions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In everyday life, luxury goods had quickly disappeared, and there was a shortage of food, most noticeably the main staple, rice. As the conflict in China went on and on, those remaining in the countryside—the best men had gone to the military and war-related industries—faced increased pressure to produce more food for the troops. Starting in the summer of\u003cbr\u003e 1940, even the fanciest restaurants in Tokyo resorted to serving cheaper imported rice—the drier kind some scornfully called “mouse poops”— mixed with potatoes. After April 1941, in six major metropolitan cities once replete with all the conveniences of modern life, people could obtain rice only with ration coupons. By December 1941, this system applied to\u003cbr\u003e 99 percent of Japan. In a country where domestically grown rice occupied an exalted, almost sacred place in the national diet, this was seen as a scandalous hardship.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Life was becoming monochromatic—or “grave yard–ish,” in the words of a contemporary observer. Fashionable men and women, who until recently dressed in colorful kimonos or the latest Western-style clothes and spent their time in cinemas and dance halls, now tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. The novelist Nagai Kafu (known as Kafu), an aging bohemian chronicler of urban life who felt as much at home in the opium dens of New York ’s Chinatown and the cafés of Montmartre as he did in the raffish parts of old Tokyo, deplored those changes. A tall, scrawny man, Kafu did not strike one as a fussy dresser. He actually knew and cared a lot about fashion—a remnant of his high-bourgeois upbringing—though he made sure not to look too perfect in his well-tailored European suits. But he felt the recent Japanese inattention to keeping up appearances had gone too far, even for his unorthodox taste. In the autumn of 1940, the sixtyyear-old complained in his diary:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The townscape [of central Tokyo] belies its prosperity of only half a year ago. There are no activities and it is all quiet. Around 6:00 p.m., it fills with crowds of commuters just as before. But the clothes that those men and women are wearing! To say that they have become subdued is an understatement. They have become old-mannish and dowdy. Women do not seem to care what they look like anymore, not bothering to put on any makeup. The street does not get lit at night, so people hurry home. Those people who squeeze themselves into the trains, shoving one another, look like refugees.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The deglamorization of city life signified the resounding triumph of a publicity campaign to promote nationwide austerity—prompted by the prolongation of Japanese military engagement in China—that started in the summer of 1940. Fifteen hundred signs bearing slogans such as “A True Japanese Cannot Afford to Be Indulgent” and “Luxury Is the Enemy” (\u003ci\u003eZeitaku wa Tekida\u003c\/i\u003e) were put up all over Tokyo (though the insertion of one syllable by a graffitist often turned the latter phrase into “Luxury Is Wonderful” [\u003ci\u003eZeitaku wa Su-Tekida\u003c\/i\u003e]).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVolunteers from patriotic women’s associations took to the streets, leading this campaign. These righteous women admonished those who, in their vigilant eyes, wore the kind of lavish clothes they themselves had given up, and they handed out note cards asking them to “please exercise self-restraint.” Women who wore permed hairdos, rings, nail polish, lipstick, or gold-rimmed glasses were also targeted because they were seen as endorsing a “corrupt” and “individualistic” Western lifestyle. There was some angry resistance to this type of witch-hunting. One woman was spotted crying and shouting hysterically, “I can’t stand this!” A young man strutted down the street wearing makeup, daring the patriotic fashion police: “Well, aren’t you going to say something?” But these were very small acts of defiance in the larger scheme of things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDepartment stores, once places where dreams were sold, came under strict surveillance, too. Every store was told to enforce a one-item-percustomer policy to discourage excessive spending, which was deemed disrespectful of the general austerity efforts. In 1935, the cosmetics company Shiseido began having beautifully presented “service girls” give free makeup lessons to customers at its department store counters, increasing sales of its beauty lotion twenty-three-fold within two years. But as the China War dragged on, “wartime care packages” replaced cosmetics as top-selling products. These packages, filled with little snacks, handkerchiefs, pencils, and notepads, were sent to soldiers at the front as a show of moral support from home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On the evening of October 31, 1940, the night before dance halls and jazz performances were to become illegal (they, too, were thought to undermine people’s sense of morality and public order), every hall was packed with men and women having one last, desperate fling. They crowded the dance floors like “new potatoes being boiled up in a pot, constantly bumping into one another,” as the metropolitan newspaper \u003ci\u003eAsahi \u003c\/i\u003ereported the following day. In fact, only women who were professional dancers had been allowed in dance halls since mid-1938, and their numbers had declined by half, having been pressured to join women’s associations, which competed with one another for recruits and urged new members to take up more “respectable” (but much less profitable) jobs as typists and factory workers. But that evening, even after the bands had finished playing the farewell song of “Auld Lang Syne,” the men and women refused to leave the dance floors, as if to defy—again, in a very small, too small, way—the coming of Japan’s long journey into night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut December 8, 1941, changed everything. The gloom of the national impasse that had arisen over the past couple of years turned almost instantly into euphoria as most Japanese cheered the successful attack. A man who was a second grader at the time of the attack, whose father owned a radio shop in Tokyo, recalled his surprise at the sight of a long line forming in front of his father’s store. People were waiting to get their radio sets repaired, in anticipation of more special government announcements. He never saw his father do so much business in one day before or after.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was very little of the famous Japanese reserve. Strangers con-ratulated each other on the street. Others gathered at the public square outside the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo, falling to the ground and thanking the emperor for his divine guidance of their nation. Aboard an overcrowded train that evening, the diarist Kafu detachedly observed “a fellow making speeches in shrill voice,” apparently unable to contain his excitement over the day’s news. This outpouring of emotion stood in stark contrast to the many contrived victory celebrations orchestrated by the government over the previous few years in an effort to rouse support for its lingering war in China.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Men of letters were not immune to the Pearl Harbor spell. One of the most distinguished poets of twentieth-century Japan, Saito Mokichi, fiftynine at the time, recorded in his diary: “The red blood of my old age is now bursting with life! . . . Hawaii has been attacked!” The thirty-six-yearold novelist Ito Sei wrote in his journal: “A fine deed. The Japanese tactic wonderfully resembles the one employed in the Russo-Japanese War.” Indeed, that war started with Japan’s surprise attack on Russian ships in Port Arthur on February 8, 1904, two days before Japan’s formal declaration of war. Japan won that war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven those Japanese who had previously disapproved of their country’s expansionism in Asia were excited by Japan’s war with the West. In an instant, the official claim, gradually adopted by the Japanese government over the preceding decade, of liberating Asia from Western encroachment gained legitimacy in their eyes. Until then, the innately self-contradictory nature of fighting an anti-imperialist war for Asia against fellow Asians in China had tormented them. Takeuchi Yoshimi, a thirty-one-year-old Sinologist, now said he and his friends had been mistaken in doubting their leaders’ true intentions:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Until this very moment, we feared that Japan, hiding behind the beautiful slogan of “Building East Asia,” was bullying the weak. [But now we realize that] our Japan was not afraid of the powerful after all. . . . Let us together fight this difficult war.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Despite the celebratory mood that dominated the country on December 8, there were still people with cool minds and hearts who were doubtful about, if not dismayed by, Japan’s new war. Private sentiments also often differed substantially from the pubic outbursts of joy. Many were simply tired of war and its restrictions on daily life. Others seriously worried about their loved ones having to fight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA nine-year-old in a rice-growing village forty-five miles (seventy-two kilometers) northeast of Tokyo learned of the Pearl Harbor attack when he came home from school. His mother had been waiting for him outside their house. She cried and said, “We’re at war.” Those were no tears of joy; rather, she was anxious for the lives of her six older sons. If this war was to be anything like the China War, who knew how long it would go on, and the new war might even take her youngest away. The boy was struck by the vivid contrast between the deep sadness of families all over his village and the upbeat voice coming out of the radio.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  small  number  of Japanese  with  substantial  knowledge  of the West could not celebrate, either. They were too aware of Japan’s limited resources and were convinced that the country would be annihilated in the end. A young man working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagoya recalled a strange combination of exhilaration and fear upon hearing the radio announcement at work. Though he felt a certain satisfaction over the successful attack on Pearl Harbor, he was afraid of what awaited Japan in the long term. His workplace, dedicated to the manufacturing of the Zero fighter plane, would become a prime target of U.S. bombing in a few years’ time. Most of his colleagues perished, and he would barely escape death himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut to voice such concerns in the midst of post–Pearl Harbor excitement was to risk arrest for insufficient patriotism. A great tidal wave of enthusiasm following victories in the Pacific and Southeast Asia was felt by most Japanese. They were able to forget, at least for the moment, the immensity of the task that lay ahead.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e On the other side of the Pacific, Pearl Harbor had stimulated an equally pervasive and patriotic response. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in a measured but determined voice: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” Roosevelt’s cabinet, led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, initially urged the president to present to Congress a comprehensive history of Japan’s international misconduct. Roosevelt decided instead on an accessible five-hundred-word speech so that his message would get through to as many people as possible: The Japanese attack was treacherous, and the United States had to defeat this cowardly enemy, no matter what it took.\u003cbr\u003e   \u003cbr\u003e The presidential tactic to stir his nation’s deepest emotions against Japan succeeded. The isolationist opposition with which Roosevelt had been struggling over his desire to take the United States into the European theater of war was nowhere to be seen, and his request for a declaration of war was immediately approved, with just one dissenting vote, cast by Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist Republican from Montana. From that historic moment on, Pearl Harbor was etched in the American psyche, reinforced by the powerful battle cry memorialized in the hit song “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Recorded within ten days of the attack, it urged Americans: “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we go to meet the foe. Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we did the Alamo. . . . Let’s remember Pearl Harbor and go on to victory!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHawaii must have seemed almost like an exotic foreign country to the majority of Americans before the Japanese attack. Ironically, Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry accounted for nearly 40 percent of its population. Now this unique island state in the peaceful Pacific Ocean suddenly found itself forever ensconced at the heart of the U.S. patriotic narrative.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Pearl Harbor attack also changed the fate of those already at war. Chiang Kai-shek was jubilant when he heard the news. He reportedly played “Ave Maria” on his gramophone (he was a converted Methodist) and danced. Many months of lonely fighting were finally over for Britain, too. Winston Churchill was dining with the U.S. envoy Averell Harriman and the U.S. ambassador, John Gilbert Winant, when he received a call from Roosevelt, informing him of the attack. That night, Churchill said, he “went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States four days later reaffirmed Churchill’s feeling of relief.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e On December 8, 1941,  cinemas and theaters in Japan were made to temporarily suspend their evening performances and broadcast a speech recorded by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki earlier that day. U.S. films—films such as \u003ci\u003eMr\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003ci\u003eSmith Goes to Washington, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich the Japanese relished in easier times—were now officially banned. That night, audiences were confronted with the voice of a leader who hardly resembled Jimmy Stewart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTojo was a bald and bespectacled man of middle age with no remarkable features other than his mustache. His exaggerated buckteeth existed only in Western caricatures, but he did not look like a senior statesman who had just taken his country to war against a most formidable enemy, and his voice was memorable only for its dullness. He recited the speech, “On Accepting the Great Imperial Command,” with the affected diction of a second-rate stage actor.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Our elite Imperial Army and Navy are now fighting a desperate battle. Despite the empire’s every possible effort to salvage it, the peace of the whole of East Asia has collapsed. In the past, the government employed every possible means to normalize U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations. But the United States would not yield an inch on its demands. Quite the opposite. The United States has strengthened its ties with Britain, the Netherlands, and China, demanding unilateral concessions from our Empire, including the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the imperial forces from China, the rejection of the [Japanese puppet] Nanjing government, and the annulment of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Even in the face of such demands, the Empire persistently strove for a peaceful settlement. But the United States to this day refused to reconsider its position. Should the Empire give in to all its demands, not only would Japan lose its prestige and fail to see the China Incident to its completion, but its very existence would be in peril.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision. True, Tojo is famous for having said, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu,” and these words, referencing a Buddhist temple in Kyoto known for a veranda that juts out over a cliff, are often cited as a sign of his rash adventurism. But even Tojo, vilified as a military dictator who blindly pushed Japan into war, felt torn, especially in the two months preceding the attack. Throughout the course of the government’s final discussions over going to war, Tojo was acutely aware of the small possibility of Japanese victory. As a result, at the last minute, he tried to conciliate those who argued for immediate war. When he became prime minister on October 18, 1941, the first task he set himself was to attempt to resurrect diplomatic options with the United States.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome leaders were misguidedly hopeful, but \u003ci\u003enone \u003c\/i\u003ewere confident of Japan’s eventual victory. Tojo’s predecessor, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a civilian politician, was prime minister on and off for nearly three of the four years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor. His flirtations with a totalitarian style of leadership did incalculable damage to Japan’s international standing and helped to maximize the military voice in the government. But at the same time, Konoe was unmistakably against a war with the West. According to his aide and son-in-law, Hosokawa Morisada, upon hearing the news of Japan’s entry into war, Konoe barely managed to say, “What on earth! I really feel a miserable defeat coming. This [favorable situation for Japan] will only last two or three months.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike Prince Konoe, the novelist Ito Sei did not have access to political or strategic information. But that very absence of information led him to intuit correctly. On December 22, just two weeks after he joyfully compared Pearl Harbor to the Russo-Japanese War, he expressed his rising suspicions in his diary:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e They’ve so far only announced that a couple of [Japanese] steamships were damaged upon landing on Malaya and the Philippines. Nothing has been damaged after that? Or is it their policy not to announce any loss on our part? If it is the latter, I would be worried.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Whatever their fears about the war’s resolution, most Japanese were inclined to see it as a war of liberation not only for Japan but for the whole of Asia. This was understandable, especially for soldiers. Who would not prefer to believe that one was dying for a meaningful cause, rather than a misguided one?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSure enough, the so-called Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere began with great fanfare as the Western colonial possessions fell one by one to Japanese military advances from late 1941 to early 1942. Almost all the nations in the sphere—including Burma (now Myanmar), British Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia),French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and the Philippines— had been part of Western colonial empires (though the last was no longer a colony at the time of Japanese invasion). So the Japanese occupiers could conveniently claim that they were finally freeing their oppressed Asian brothers and sisters in order to help them reorganize their societies into a viable cultural, economic, and political bloc under Japan’s leadership. Though cloaked by a veneer of a civilizing mission, however, the sphere was first and foremost about Japanese economic imperialism, meant to strengthen its hold over much of the Southesast and East Asian resources needed for Japan to continue fighting. That need would grow all the more pressing with time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Imperial Navy would lose its winning momentum soon, owing to a major defeat at Midway in June 1942. The tactical planning for that battle had been carried out by the same team that devised the Pearl Harbor attack. This time, Japan lost more than three thousand lives, 289 aircraft, and four aircraft carriers. Midway also revealed that the Japanese had left many jobs unfinished at Pearl Harbor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn December 7, 1941, the pilots under the command of Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi did accomplish their most immediate goal of hitting all eight U.S. battleships, sinking four and damaging four others. But Nagumo’s team missed other vital targets that proved to be of more critical importance. Oil tanks and ammunition sites were spared from Japanese strikes. Repair facilities were not struck, either, and this allowed for the majority of the damaged battleships to be quickly repaired or even improved. Of the eight battleships hit by the Japanese, only the \u003ci\u003eArizona \u003c\/i\u003eand the \u003ci\u003eOklahoma \u003c\/i\u003ecould not be salvaged. Most important, no American aircraft carriers were present during the attack, which allowed the United States to win at Midway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From then on, almost everything went badly for Japan. As a result of the strict censorship that Ito had already suspected in his diary in December 1941, the Japanese long remained officially ignorant about their country’s losses. But as the months and years passed, they came to sense Japan’s slipping control over the war situation, and their acute hunger was proof. The rationing system wasn’t working because there was too little to be distributed to begin with. Longer and longer lines formed, and fresh products such as vegetables and seafood became impossible to find. One doctor’s wife in her forties, who had lived in the United States for many years before the war, noted in her diary: “Rationed goods don’t actually mean that you don’t pay for them. You pay for every bit, but you still get treated like beggars. It’s so infuriating!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe caloric consequences were undeniable by the second and third year of the war. The rationed diet alone provided only about fourteen hundred calories a day. (A 140-pound adult male requires twenty-four hundred calories daily.) The government told individuals to be “inventive” in the way they procured food. This meant, for instance, buying on the black market, growing their own vegetables, and using straw, sawdust, or rice husks as fillers when baking “bread.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy late 1944, life on the home front had become even more desperate, with Japan’s major cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Sendai, Nagoya, and Yokohama, burned to ashes by U.S. carpet bombing. In the wee hours of March 10, 1945, much of old Tokyo was engulfed in fire in one of the most devastating air raids carried out by B-29 bombers. Kafu, awakened by the neighbors’ shouting, hastily gathered his diary and manuscripts and fled with his briefcase. He made a dash through billowing smoke, helping others on the way. But when he finally reached a vacant plot on a hill, an irrepressible urge to witness the fate of his home of twenty-six years made him turn around. His house had been miraculously spared from the devastating fire that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and so perhaps he hoped for another miracle. He hid himself behind trees and telegraph poles in order to escape the eyes of a policeman who was directing people from harm’s way. Kafu managed to get back to his neighborhood, where he was halted by black smoke. He looked to the sky as flames suddenly\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338545246437,"sku":"NP9780307739742","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307739742.jpg?v=1769572624","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/japan-1941-isbn-9780307739742","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}