By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
US President Wilson and the Asian Monroe
Doctrine
In part one, we gave
a general overview of the 1919 or "Wilsonian moment,” a notion that
extends before and after that calendar year, in part two, issues
like the Asian Monroe Doctrine, how relations between China and Japan from the
1890s onward transformed the region from the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy
of space, Leninist and Wilsonian Internationalism, western and Eastern
Sovereignty, and the crucial March First and May Fourth movements, in part three the
important Chinese factions beyond 1919 and the need for China to create a new
Nation-State and how Japan, in turn, sought to expand into Asia through liberal
imperialism and then sought to consolidate its empire through liberal
internationalism. And in part four the various arrangements between the US and
Japan including The Kellogg–Briand Pact or Pact in 1928 and The Treaty for the
Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament of 1930. This whereby American
policy toward Japan until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack was not
the product of a rational, value-maximizing decisional process. Rather, it
constituted the cumulative, aggregate outcome of several bargaining games
which would enable them to carry out their preferred Pacific strategy.
In analyzing the Manchurian crisis and its connection to the
winding road to World War II it is tempting to fall into the conceptual trap of
simple dichotomies. A standard dichotomy for what happened in Manchuria is
that a small cabal of "militarists" hijacked power from a helpless
civilian government in Tokyo and ran amok for the next fifteen years. There are
many reasons for the tenacity of this historical interpretation, stemming from
facile contemporary assumptions, the imperatives of America's postwar
occupation of Japan, as well as influential popular histories like John
Toland’s The Rising Sim. The preponderance of evidence, however,
makes clear that a broad coalition of Japanese elites, including Emperor
Hirohito. members of the Privy Council and House of Peers, statesmen,
intellectuals, and military officials, were responsible for Japan's subsequent
retreat from liberal internationalism and the empire’s expansionism in Asia
over die next fifteen years (1931-1945).
From the beginning,
as noted, the Kwantung Army had the tacit endorsement of the Army General
Staffs operations and intelligence divisions. It also enjoyed support from
“renovationist" politicians and intellectuals. Renovationists (sometimes
called “reformists") carried with them a mash-up of resentment and indignation,
particularly against Anglo-American liberalism and the international status
quo.1
What bound this wide
swath of Japanese elites together on the Manchurian issue, from the crown to
statesmen, diplomats, scholars, and business leaders, and ultimately the mass
of Japanese society, were three layers of “special" rationale: special
rights, special interests, and special responsibilities. "Special rights”
comprised a legalistic defense, based on "rights of possession" from
previous wars and treaties. The transfer of leasehold rights in southern
Manchuria that Japan won in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) can hardly be
overstated. Japan mobilized more than one million troops during the war;
81.455 of them lost their lives. This considerable sacrifice cultivated a keen
sense of regional entitlement. Indeed, Manchuria became regarded as hallowed
ground, an impression seared into the consciousness of a generation of
Japanese who came into positions of political, military, and intellectual
authority m the 1930s. Adding to this sense of entitlement was that the empire
had sunk an enormous amount of capital into the leased territory. The South
Manchurian Railway became Japan’s biggest firm, with interests in rail freight,
shipping, coal mining, soybean production, and tourism.2 There remained as
well a psychological hangover from the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, a belief,
embedded into the fabric of historical truth, that China had freely accepted
the demands. And now, China was going back on its word, violating treaties, and
abusing Japan.
“Special
interests." on the other hand, referred to national security interests
that derived from “nature and geography." Japan's proximity to China, went
this “realist” argument, gave Japan unique decision-making prerogatives on the
continent. In modem diplomatic parlance, this meant that China and its
frontiers were a vital interest, economically and strategically. During the
Manchurian crisis. Japanese began to describe Northeast China as Japan’s
“lifeline.” There was much talk about the need for raw materials and outlets
for surplus trade and population. However inflated these claims, the important
point is that Japanese officials and commentators at the time became convinced
of their veracity.
A third factor is
that Japanese officials as we have seen became animated by a more chauvinistic
strain of Pan-Asianist thinking, which posited that Japan had a “special
responsibility” to rescue Asia from the West. Japanese grievance against the
West thus was melded with superiority toward the East. Japan was now
self-consciously cast as an exceptional nation, preordained to bring about the
regeneration of Asia. Japan, after all, alone among Asian nations, had modernized,
fought off unequal treaties, and stunned the world by defeating Tsarist Russia.
This paternalistic strand of Pan-Asianism recalled the spirit of imperialism's
“civilizing mission” from the late nineteenth century, in which a caretaker
nation had a moral obligation, the “white man's burden," to bring order
and progress to allegedly less-enlightened peoples In fact, during the
Manchurian crisis, the American-based Japanese journalist K. K. Kawa kami
claimed that Japan’s leadership in Manchuria was “one of the most significant
developments in the century, a great experiment in the reorganization,
regeneration, and rejuvenation of an ancient nation long wallowing in chaos and
maladministration....For the first time in history, a non-white race has
undertaken to cany the white man’s burden."3
Such expansive
purpose required a profound sense of national uniqueness. In the 1930s. as
scholars of Japan have made clear, strong currents of exceptional ism flowed
through Japan's body politic from a multiplicity of influential tributaries,
with some headwaters reaching back to the early twentieth century A
nationalist literary movement, the Japan Romantic School, for example, exalted
the unique traits and importance of Japanese civilization. Particularly
industrious was a group of philosophers from Kyoto Imperial University, led by
Professor Nishida Kitaro, who extolled the uniqueness of the Japanese family
state. Other significant sources included eminent academies who filled think
tanks. Nichiren Budding millennialists, ultranationalists
such as Kita Dcki, Kanji
Ishiwara, and Pan-Asianist ideologues like Shūmei
Ōkawa.4 That the Manchurian crisis acted as a powerful
ideological catalyst and coagulant in Japanese flunking can be deduced by
comparing Kawakami's spirited piece above on Japan's mission with a commentary
he wrote ten years prior, during the Washington Conference:
All the Powers ...
have bound themselves by agreements or resolutions not to return to the old
practice of spheres of influence or special interests [in China)....This
change is no shadowy thing. It is as definite as it is real. Twenty years ago
the Powers were talking only what they could take from China. Today they are
talking about what they can give her. Certainly that indicates a vast moral
progress.5
Thus, what was once
the “vast moral progress” of liberal self-denial now required Japan's
civilizing intervention.
Eventually,
Pan-Asianist-inspired "special responsibilities” developed into the
principal justification for Japanese expansionism in the decade following the
Manchurian crisis. The imperative of a Japanese rescue mission in Asia
resonated with the imaginings of an alternative world order, unfettered by the
liberal language of the Nine-Power Treaty and the Kellogg Pact.
Colonial dominoes fall
The war itself
quickly unfolded in favor of Japan’s regionalist ambitions. While Japanese
forces attacked Pearl Harbor, they also overran Guam. Hong Kong, and Wake
Island. Within a few months, colonial dominoes had fallen throughout Southeast
Asia, producing unforgettable images of white overlords capitulating to their
Japanese conquerors. In February 1942, more than eighty thousand British troops
surrendered in Singapore, a military defeat
considered, to this day, as one of Britain's worst. In March, the Dutch surrendered
Indonesia: in May, the Americans did the same in the Philippines A significant
turning point, however, came just as quickly. In June 1942, Japan’s gains at
Pearl Harbor evaporated at the Battle of Midway. Thereafter, the conflict
turned into a slow and tortuous slaughter across the vast expanse of Pacific
atolls and islands Whatever the private convictions among the young Japanese
and American combatants who faced one another in unfathomable existential
moments, hovering over every battlefield and landing zone were far-reaching and
competing ideas of world order.
At home and abroad,
Japan’s campaign into the South Seas glistened with the revisionist promises of
liberation and coprosperity. In January 1942, Premier Tojo told the Diet that
Japan had embarked on “truly an unprecedentedly grand undertaking . . . [to]
establish everlasting peace in Greater East Asia based on a new conception,
which will mark a new epoch in the annals of mankind, and proceed to construct
a new world order along with our allies and friendly powers in Europe."
More comprehensively, at a summer conference in Kyoto in 1942, a prominent
group of Japanese intellectuals gathered under the slogan “Overcoming the
Modern" and critiqued the “corrupting” influences of an Americanized
modernity. As one scholar has noted, the symposium's participants believed “all
the ills that had poisoned Japan were found in Americanism,” which included its
values, culture, and commodities.6 The claim of liberating fellow Asians
and overcoming the corrupt tenets of Anglo-Americanism was an intoxicating
ideological brew carrying great moral purpose. To this end, the Japanese
government reoriented the cultural programs of the Kokusai Buuka
Shiukokai toward the South Seas to help spread the
Pan-Asianist scripture of Japan’s alleged holy war.
Throughout occupied
Southeast Asia, the KBS disseminated publications, films, and Japanese language
textbooks to promote the empire's prestige and leadership. The conscious
intertwining between political and cultural motives can be seen in the words of
KBS Chairman Matsuzo Nagai who asserted
that the promotion of Japanese culture would make the peoples of Asia ‘ grasp
the true intention of Japanese actions" and "understand the significance
of our holy war " The KBS’s soft power programs thus were politically
malleable, the theme of Japanese cultural importance could be tailored lo
American cosmopolitans or Asian nationalists. What did not change was tire
irrefutable message of regional primacy.7 Tokyo's propaganda challenge
also remained the same: to square its promise of liberation with coercive rule.
Japan’s leaders were
not unaware of a gap between theory and practice. This was made clear in
November 1943 just as the empire's fortunes in the Pacific were becoming
increasingly bleak. In an attempt to reinvigorate the alleged altruism of
Japan’s motives, the Tojo government invited leading statesmen from around Asia
to attend the so-called Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo, under the
banner of the utopian strand of Asian solidarity. The puppet heads of the
Manchukuo and Nanjing regimes joined leaders from Burma, the Philippines.
India, and Thailand. Although die Tokyo conference accomplished little of
substance other than to issue an anti-Anglo- American “joint declaration,” it
nonetheless indulged the language of liberation and independence and portended
postwar decolonization, even if paradoxically wedded still to Japanese
autarky, As Fujitani Takasbi has argued, even if we
acknowledge such discourse as propaganda, “it is difficult to deny the
unintended or unavoidable consequences” of officially declaring disavowals of
racism and promises of greater equality.8
Under far more
auspicious circumstances, in July 1944, seven months after the Tokyo
conference, more than seven hundred delegates, including economists,
financiers, politicians, and industrialists, from forty-four
Allied nations trekked to northern New Hampshire to attend a virtual
renaissance party for liberal internationalism. The Bretton Woods Conference,
as it was called, breathed institutional life into that Wilsonian offspring,
the Atlantic Charter, with the goal of stabilizing a liberal postwar economic
order. It was an acknowledgment of the close and profoundly consequential
relationship inbetween national and international
economies. To secure the global monetary system, the system of exchange rates
and international payments that allows nations to transact with each other, the
conference created the International Monetary Fund. To provide developmental
financing, the World Bank was born. As in Wilson’s time, the overall goal of
these programs was to encourage global peace and prosperity through so-called
orderly processes.9
One month later, at
the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington. DC, the Allies began laying the
foundation for the United Nations, with hopes of making amends for the nearly
stillborn League of Nations. Of note, according to Fujitani, similar to the
effects of Japan's strategic wartime disavowals of racism. America's
universalizing wartime rhetoric of freedom and selfdetermination
not only "made it increasingly necessary to disavow- racist
discrimination” but to "demonstrate the sincerity of this denunciation
through concrete plans.” Beyond influencing the loosening of US immigration
restrictions (the United States began accepting Chinese immigrants again in
1943 and Japanese immigrants in 1952). wartime rhetoric played a key role in
the ensuing global era of decolonization. This is not to gloss over persistent
hypocrisies and complexities. As Mark Mazower lias noted, how docs one square
the United Nations’ stated ideals with the fact that a committed
segregationist. South Africa's Jan Smuts, helped draft the institution's lofty
preamble? Or, more palpably, cases of violent resistance to independence
movements by the colonizing powers and their allies.10
Self-interest, to be
sure, mingled with idealism. Every institution established at Bretton Woods
and Dumbarton Oaks, for better or worse, earned the ubiquitous imprint of
American leadership and liberal principles. After slugging it out against
fierce ideological foes in both Europe and the Pacific, the American mindset
could accurately be described as be sure not to make the same mistake
twice. Henry Luce's 1941 commentary “The American Century” represented an
early and forceful expression of this evolving worldview. calling for vigorous
American leadership. "In 1919,” wrote Luce, "we had a golden
opportunity ... to assume the leadership of the world.... We did not understand
that opportunity. Wilson mishandled it. We rejected it. We bungled it in the
1920s and in the confusion of the 1930s we killed it.” It must not happen
again, he warned Americans. “America is responsible.” Luce said, "for the
world-environment in which she lives.” He concluded with missionary zeal,
claiming “all of us are called... to create the first great American Century
”11 In some ways, despite different desired ends. Luce’s expansive call to
action mirrored Japanese rhetoric. Just as Japan viewed its struggle in Asia as
holy war. Luce characterized the conflict as a holy war for a free-market,
democratic order. The main ideological difference, albeit a significant one,
was that of an exclusive regionalism versus a more open internationalism.
The moment of America's
ideological redemption arrived in 1945. In May. Germany surrendered to Allied
forces. In the Pacific, the brutal islandhopping
campaign came to a halt on June 22 after the Battle of Okinawa. American
commanders subsequently scheduled an invasion of the Japanese home islands to
start in November. In the meantime, a methodical firebombing campaign
incinerated large parts of sixty-plus Japanese cites. And then, in early
August, with bewildering suddenness, came three shocks in four days. On August 6
an atomic bomb killed more than eighty thousand Japanese civilians in
Hiroshima. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. And on August
9. another A-bomb leveled the city of Nagasaki. (The sparing of Kyoto and its
cultural treasures from atomic destruction on account of Secretary of War
Stimson's personal intervention raises questions about the possible influence
of KBS programs.)12
Following Nagasaki,
and facing Total annihilation. Emperor Hirohito finally accepted Allied terms
for surrender. The forty-four-year-old emperor spoke to the nation for the
first time on August 15. Filled with regret and sadness, the recorded address
announced Japan’s surrender and encouraged the Japanese people “to endure the
unendurable" But ideology made an appearance as well. The emperor reminded
his subjects of the noble Asianist goals for which they allegedly fought.
"We declared war on America and Britain." asserted Hirohito.
"out of our sincere desire to insure Japan's self-preservation and the
stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe
upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.”
He also extended the nation's “deepest sense of regret to our allied nations of
East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with tire Empire toward the
emancipation of East Asia."13 Thus, despite the deaths of an
estimated twelve million Chinese from Japanese aggression, the myth of
coprosperity, that Manchukuo and the Wang regime were not puppet states, but
allied partners fighting side by side in a good fight for a new order in Asia,
was duly perpetrated.
In the United States,
President Harry S. Truman also described the end of the war in ideological
terms, stating: “This is the end of the grandiose schemes of the dictators to
enslave the peoples of the world, destroy their civilization, and institute a new
era of darkness and degradation. This day is a new beginning in the history of
freedom on this earth.”14 The uplifting words momentarily papered over aspects
of the Asia-Pacific War perhaps more properly defined in moral gradations
rather than absolutes. In the coming decades. Americans would be compelled to
grapple morally with their government’s decision to drop two nuclear bombs on
civilian populations, with the second bomb coming just three days after the
first, as well as the illegal internment of nearly 120.000 innocent Japanese
Americans. Bui for the immediate future, the thousands of American troops and
bureaucrats pouring into Japan, led by General Douglas MacArthur, seemed to
affirm Truman's declaration.
The American
occupation of Japan lasted nearly seven years (1945-1952).15 Despite
considerable Japanese agency, the occupation amounted to an unprecedented
undertaking in nation-building and ideological overhaul. Under the banner of
“demilitarization and democratization,” the American authorities instituted
land reform, education reform, and a free press and. of greatest significance,
drafted Japan’s postwar constitution. The liberal charter completely
transformed Japan's polity. It turned the emperor into a depoliticized symbol
of the slate, abolished the House of Peers and hereditary aristocracy, mandated
party cabinets, and gave women the franchise. Initially it also disbanded
Japan's military. The pacifist Article 9 inserted into the constitution
essentially incorporated the principles of the Kellogg Pact by prohibiting
Japan from using armed forces in an offensive war.16
At the same time, in
a move that had far-reaching effects. MacArthur chose not to prosecute Emperor
Hirohito for war responsibility; instead, he used the exalted crown to drive a
wedge between the nation as a whole and a culpable military clique. In other
words, the occupation resurrected the 1930s “dualism” of Ambassador Grew and
other so-called Japan Hands and superimposed it onto the occupation. On a
practical level, this helped stabilize the occupation, but it also cut the rope
to the anchor of self-reflection regarding war responsibility. In the postwar
years, the Japanese people drifted in a sea of moral ambiguity, leading to the
prevalence of the Grew-tinted “dark valley” thesis. According to this
interpretation, a small cabal of militarists defied the emperor and civilian
government and took ail innocent nation down the path of militarist min. Grew
himself publicized his convictions just before the end of the war. saying
Japan's military had established a “dictatorship of tenor" over the
people. Such views created lasting stereotypes about Japan's polity for years
to come As KBS official Aoki Setsuichi claimed two
decades after the war. “The military blatantly pressured us ... to conduct
cultural projects to camouflage military intent.” As a result of tills revived
thesis, after the war, former officials such as Shigeinitsu
Maniom, Yoshida Sbigeru,
and Kishi Nobusuke quietly traded in their imperialist clothes for
internationalist garb. Shigeinitsu subsequently
became involved in the United Nations, and Yoshida saved as premier for nearly
seven years.17
The Allies' Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal (1946-1948), meanwhile, set out to make a sweeping case against
Japanese militarists. In the process, it inadvertently opened up a Pandora’s
box to ideological sparring by charging the defendants with "crimes
against peace” (conspiring to wage war), a novel category in international law
established by the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945-1946). This allowed the accused to
recycle the specious claim that Japan had only sought to liberate Asian peoples
from Western oppression, and that, from
Manchuria to Pearl Harbor, the empire had acted in selfdefense
against Anglo-American encirclement, As a result, though the Allies disarmed
Japan's military and effectively extirpated the militarist ethos in society,
the tribunal earned the cynical moniker a “victors’ justice.”18 Such a
confused and conflicted legacy of the war, not unlike the sordid Lost Cause
legacy of the .American Civil War, has prompted a parade of postwar Japanese
politicians to make controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo as
well as tone-deaf remarks about Japan’s wartime responsibility. The result has
been repeated protests among Chinese and Koreans, not to mention protests by
Japanese pacifists.19
In the cultural
realm, the organization that had helped spread the idea of benevolent Japanese
leadership in the occupied territories, the Kokusai Rimka
Shiukokai, was left in institutional limbo
immediately after the war. One American scholar at the time eviscerated the KBS
as an apologist for military aggression, thus challenging the society's claims
of institutional autonomy and innocent dedication to the arts. Occupation
officials, meanwhile, tended to associate traditional Japanese cnlnire with feudalistic practices and thus initially
suppressed it. The specter of communism in Asia, however, eventually
stimulated a reappraisal and subsequent reversal of some occupation policies,
tire so-called reverse course, which included reconstituting the KBS.
Accordingly, in 1949, many former KBS officials, including Dan Ino, Maeda
Tamon, Kabayarua Aisuke,
and Prince Takamatsu, reprised their roles as cultural ambassadors, but this
time under a mission statement that heralded “a fresh stan with new ideals and
goals”, as part of "the rebirth of Japan as a cultural stale along
democratic lines.”20 And so began one aspect of Japan’s postwar transformation
from enemy to ally.
The first cultural
projects sprouted from myriad institutions, including die KBS, Japan’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and Cultural Properties Protection Commission, the US State
Department, and Japan societies. John D. Rockefeller III. a cultural advisor
for Washington’s 1951 Peace Mission to Japan, was a key figure. In the ensuing
years Rockefeller, along with Kabayama and Matsumoto Shigeharu
(a top Domei official and confidant of Premier
Konoe), poured energies into establishing a nonprofit, nonpolitical center for
intellectual cooperation and cross-cultural exchange in the heart of Tokyo.
This was the International House of Japan (I-Honse), which officially opened in
1955. Rockefeller also helped organize a major touring exhibition of Japanese
cultural treasures in 1953. which bore a sinking resemblance to the 1936 MFA
show. American critics uniformly praised the show, seen by nearly five hundred
thousand people. Japan’s ambassador to the United States, Araki Eikichi,
meanwhile, invoked standard "soft power” assumptions, saying the
exhibition "served to draw even closer the bonds of culture and
friendship which exists between our countries.” A 1955 publication sponsored by
the Council on Foreign Relations. Japanese and Americans: A Century of
Cultural Relations, echoed Araki’s sentiments, maintaining that “cultural
interchange can lay the groundwork for solution of mutual problems.”
Conclusion part six
One of the reasons
why we started this what will be an eight part investigation is among others
because as we have seen, the US is concerned that China is flirting with the
idea of seizing control of Taiwan as President Xi Jinping becomes more willing
to take risks to boost his legacy. A good reason why we covered the
Asia-Pacific War 1941 till September 1945. Like Japan due to earlier agreements
with China felt justified to take Manchuria, not unlike China perceives Taiwan
and a large part of the Pacific (the South China Sea) as their own. Similarly
when Japan saw itself in a special role as mediator between the West
(“Euro-America”) and the East (“Asia”) in order to “harmonize” or “blend” the
two civilizations and demanded that Japan lead Asia in this anti-Western
enterprise there are parallels with what Asim Doğan in his extensive new book
"Hegemony with Chinese Characteristics: From the Tributary System to the
Belt and Road Initiative" (Routledge Contemporary China Series April
2021).
With as Doğan
explains, China appears to be moving from a period of being content with the
status quo to a period in which they are more impatient and more prepared to
test the limits and flirt with the idea of unification also with Taiwan. As the
US prepares for a period in which Xi Jinping is entering his third term,
there’s concern that he sees capstone progress on Taiwan as important to his
legitimacy and legacy, and that there is a perception that he is prepared to
take more risks. This matched a warning from
Admiral Philip Davidson, head of US Indo-Pacific command, who told senators
China could take military action “in the next six years”.
Admiral John
Aquilino, who is scheduled to succeed Davidson, this week told Congress that
there was a wide range of forecasts but “my
opinion is this problem is much closer to us than most think”.
“We've seen things
that I don't think we expected,” Aquilino told the Senate armed services
committee. “That's why I continue to talk about a sense of urgency. We ought to
be prepared today.” Aquilino said China had taken other “aggressive actions”,
including clashes with India on their border that suggested it was emboldened.
Kurt Campbell, the
top White House Asia official, said that while China was acting in an
increasingly aggressive manner in many areas, it was taking the most assertive
activities in its approach to Taiwan. “We have seen China become increasingly
assertive in the South China Sea . . . economic coercion against Australia,
wolf warrior diplomacy in Europe, and the border tensions with India,” he said.
“But nowhere have we seen more persistent and determined activities than the
military, diplomatic and other activities directed at Taiwan.”
The simulation
occurred as Chinese warplanes spent two days flying in and out of Taiwan’s air defence zone just days after Biden was sworn in. One US defence official said the incident was not the first time
China had simulated attacks on US ships. The revelations highlight that
the intense military competition between the two superpowers around Taiwan and
the South China Sea has not eased, posing a challenge to any attempts the Biden
administration might make to improve US
relations with Beijing.
Part 1: Overview of
the discussions following the 1919 or "Wilsonian moment,” a notion that
extends before and after that calendar year: Part
One Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 2: Issues like
the Asian Monroe Doctrine, how relations between China and Japan from the 1890s
onward transformed the region from the hierarchy of time to the hierarchy of
space, Leninist and Wilsonian Internationalism, western and Eastern Sovereignty,
and the crucial March First and May Fourth movements were covered in: Part Two Can a potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 3: The important
Chinese factions beyond 1919 and the need for China to create a new
Nation-State and how Japan, in turn, sought to expand into Asia through liberal
imperialism and then sought to consolidate its empire through liberal
internationalism were covered in: Part Three Can a
potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 4: The various
arrangements between the US and Japan, including The Kellogg–Briand Pact or
Pact in 1928 and The Treaty for the Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament
of 1930. Including that American policy toward Japan until shortly before the Pearl
Harbor attack was not the product of a rational, value-maximizing decisional
process. Rather, it constituted the cumulative, aggregate outcome of several
bargaining games which would enable them to carry out their preferred Pacific
strategy was covered in: Part Four Can a
potential future Pacific War be avoided?
Part 5: The
Manchurian crisis and its connection to the winding road to World War II are
covered in: Part Five Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 7: Part Seven Can a potential future
Pacific War be avoided?
Part 8: While
initially both the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek (anti-Mao Guomindang/KMT),
including Mao's Communist Party (CCP), had long supported
independence for Taiwan rather than reincorporation into China, this started to
change following the publication of the New Atlas of China's Construction
created by cartographer Bai Meichu in 1936. A turning
point for Bai and others who saw China's need to create a new Nation-State was
the Versailles peace conference's outcome in 1919 mentioned
in part one. Yet that from today's point of view, the fall of Taiwan
to China would be seen around Asia as the end of American predominance and even
as “America’s Suez,” hence demolishing the myth that Taiwan has no hope is
critical. And that while the United States has managed to deter Beijing
from taking destructive military action against Taiwan over the last four
decades because the latter has been relatively weak, the risks of this approach
inches dangerously close to outweighing its benefits. Conclusion and outlook.
1. See Harada Diary,
August 21, 1931, 39, and October 2, 1931, 101-4 On reformists, see Sharon
Minichiello, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar
Japan (Honolulu University of Hawai’i Press. 1984).
2. On
remembrance, see Naoko Shimazu Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and
the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009) On the
development of the SMR zone before the 1931 crisis, see Yoshihisa Tak
Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932 (Cambridge.
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Ramon H Myers, “Japanese Imperialism
in Manchuria: The South Manchurian Railway Company, 1906-1933,”
in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1395-1937, ed Peter Duus.
Ramon H Myers, Mark R Peattie, 101-32 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 1989).
3. K.K.
Kawakami Manchukuo: Child of Conflict (New York Macmillan. 1933),
v-vi.
4. See Kevin
Doak Dreams of Difference : the Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994); Tetsuo Najita and Harry' Harootunian, “Japanese Revolt against the
West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century.” in The
Cambridge History of Japan. vol 6, ed Peter Duus, 711-74 (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1989), James Heiseg and John Maraldo, eds, Rude Awakenings: Zen,
the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu University' of
Hawai'i Press, 1995), Aydin Politics of Anti-Westernism, esp. 111-21,
141-88, Jacqueline Stone “Japanese Lotus Millennialism.” in Millennialism,
Persecution, and Violence, ed Catherine Wessinger. 261-74 (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), W. Miles Fletcher, The Search for a
New Order. Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill
University' of North Carolina Press. 1982).
5. K.K.
Kawakami Japan 's Pacific Policy' (New York E P Dutton & Co,
1922), 151.
6. Tojo quoted
in Perer Dims, “Introduction" in Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by
Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, 2002.
7. Nagai quoted
in Jessamyn Reich Abel, Cultural internationalism and Japan’s wartime
empire: The turns of the kokusai bunka
shinkōkai, p. 37-38.
8. On
comparisons between Tokyo's declarations and liberal internationalism
especially the Atlantic Charter, see Akira Iriye, Power and Culture : The
Japanese-American War, 1941-1945, 1982,, esp
112-21, and Jessamyn R. Abel, The International Minimum: Creativity and
Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964, 2015, 194-217.
Takeshi Fujnaiu Race for Empire: Koreans as
Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War U (Berkeley:
University of California Press. 2011), 23.
9. See
Borgwardt New Deal for the World, 88-193, and Mazower, Governing
the World, 191-213.
10. Takashi
Fujitani, Race for Empire Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during
World War II,2011, 17. Mark Mazower. No
Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and The Ideological Origins of the United
Nations, 2009, 19.
11. Oil FDR's
pragmatic liberalism, see Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin
Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, 1994, 185-200Alan Brinkley, The Publisher:
Henry Luce and His American Century, 2021, "61-65.
12. On the wars
final months, see Richard Frank Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese
Empire (New York Random House, 1999), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing
the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA
Belknap Press, 2006) Stimson knew about Kyoto s cultural treasures since at
least the 1920s, when he visited the city This study suggests that, given the
extent of KBS activities in the 1930s, a reasonable inference is that its
programs reinforced Stunsons awareness of Kyoto s
cultural importance. Still, why did Stimson, after approving the strategic
bombing of more than sixty Japanese cities, choose to spare a cultural center?
See Jason M Kelly. "Why Did Henry Stimson Spare Kyoto from the Bomb’’
Confusion in Postwar Historiography Journal of American-East Asian
Relations 19, no 2 (2012): 183-203.
13. Hirohito
surrender speech, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hirohito.htm.
14. Truman statement,
August 16, 1945,
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/105/proclamation-2660-victory-east-day-prayer.
15. Officially
it was called the "Allied" occupation of Japan, but Gen. MacArthur
was the supreme decision maker.
16. The
occupation historiography is voluminous See especially John
Dower, Embracing Defeat Japan m the Wake of World War II (New York W.
W. Norton 1999), and Eiji Takernae Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of
Japan audits Legacy, trans Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (New York
Continuum 2002). See also Hiroshi Knamura Screening
Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated
Japan (Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press 2010) On race relations see
Yukiko Kosluro, Trans Pacific Racisms and the
U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York Columbia University Press, 1999).
17. See
Dower, Embracing Defeat. 277-301, and Bix, Hirohito, 541-618
Grew, Ten Years, 217. See also Masanon
Nakamura, The Japanese Monarchy: embassador Grew
and the Making of the “Symbol Emperor System” (Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1992) Aoki cited in Shibasaki, Kindai
Nihon, 128. To this day the Japan Society of Boston bestows an internationalist
award in Shigemitsu’s name On Yoshida see Dower, Empire and
Aftermath On the politics of surrender, see Marc Galliceluo, The
Scramble for Asia: U.S. Military Power in the Aftermath of the Pacific
War (Lanharn, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield 2008).
18. See Richard
Minear, Victors' Justice: Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1972), and Yuma Totani The Tokyo War Crimes
Trial: Die Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War 11 (Cambridge. MA
Harvard University Asia Center 2009). Hirota was the lone civilian leader to be
hanged Matsuoka died in prison in 1946 from tuberculosis Konoe committed
suicide in December 1945.
19. Yasukuni Shrine
was founded in 1869 to memorialize Japan’s war dead See especially Aktko Takenaka Yasukuni Shrine: History,
Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (Honolulu University of Hawaii
Press, 2015), 131-89.
20. Harley F.
MacNair, "Japan and the Pacific war of Politics" 4, no. 3
(July 1942): 353, Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai:
Organization and Program (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shuikokai
1949). 1.
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