War with Japan

It was on this day in 1941, following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare that, “a state of war has existed between the United States of America and the Japanese Empire”. In a show of solidarity with their Axis partner Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy subsequently declared war on the United States, bringing America fully into the Second World War. It is worth reflecting on a moment such as this that the popular perception of the war with Japan is not as simple and clear-cut as many think it is, especially in regards to the United States. Now, this is not an effort at revisionism. Some things are simple. Japan attacked the U.S. and this provoked American entry into the war. Firing the first shot can be extremely important. It is also true that this attack did not come completely out of nowhere but rather was the culmination of a long and often antagonistic relationship between the U.S. and Japan.

Not long ago it was revealed that, in the process of his negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, Theodore Roosevelt had endorsed the expansion of Japan on the grounds that the Japanese Empire was the one modern, dynamic power among the nations of the Far East. It is also true that it was the United States which had pressured Great Britain to spurn Japan, who had long been their loyal ally, in order to have a closer friendship with the United States. Of course, Great Britain did not have to give in to that pressure, and I think it was a huge mistake that they did, but this added to anger Japan felt toward the west in general. The Japanese had entered World War I alongside their British allies, later joined by the United States, yet were not treated with great respect afterwards. Furthermore, Japanese efforts to expand their influence and colonial holdings were denounced as aggressive imperialism by the western powers like America and Britain. The Japanese viewed this as rank hypocrisy and again as something of a betrayal.

When the United States opposed Japanese expansion into Manchuria the vast majority of people in Japan, not just the government, wondered why America thought it was any of their business what Japan did in Manchuria. While the U.S. asked Japan what “right” they had to Manchuria the Japanese could likewise ask what “right” the U.S. had to the Philippines; on the path to independence it was true but where they had previously used quite brutal methods to suppress a rebellion against U.S. authority. How could Japan take it as anything other than bigotry when they were lectured about “imperialism” by the west when every East Asian country besides Japan and Thailand was ruled by a western power or in the case of China heavily influenced by foreign spheres of influence? As one Japanese minister said the west had taught the Japanese how to play poker and then, once they had all the chips, declared the game immoral and took up bridge.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor the U.S. had taken their opposition to Japanese aggression in China to the extent of imposing an oil embargo on Japan. This was not something Japan could endure indefinitely and the only other source of quick, ready-to-ship oil was the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Moreover, the U.S. sent an ultimatum to Japan along with harsher restrictions which would not be removed unless the Japanese retreated from mainland China and effectively abandoned their whole colonial enterprise. That was obviously not going to happen. Japan had been fighting for years, expending huge amounts of money and thousands of lives in their campaign and they were not prepared to say it was all for nothing just to please the United States. The only other choice was attacking south to seize the Dutch oil fields which would certainly provoke a war with the U.S. anyway. Seeing that as inevitable they decided on a surprise attack that would at least give them a better chance of evening the odds at the outset.

All the aggressive propaganda aside, Japan did not want a war with the United States. Although in terms of quality the Imperial Navy was more than a match for the American Pacific fleet the Japanese certainly knew that the industrial capacity of the United States would ensure that they would be totally outmatched. When it came to land fighting the Japanese had a formidable army but they already had their hands full in China and had recently taken a drubbing from a soon to be famous Soviet general named Zhukov on the Mongol border. When confronted with the plans for war with the U.S. the Emperor was extremely skeptical and bluntly asked how they could expect to conquer the Pacific in only a few months when they had not conquered China in nearly ten years. Yet, from their point of view, there was no choice. Likewise, most in the United States had, at that point, already accepted that a war with Japan for dominance in the Pacific area was inevitable. They could not have realistically believed that Japan would have actually responded to the American ultimatum by pulling, lock, stock and barrel out of China.

The result, as we all know, was a slow and extremely deadly war to bring down the Empire of Japan, ending finally in a nuclear holocaust that took hundreds of thousands of lives in an instant. It also meant an East Asia that was made safe for communism. Let me assure everyone that, in going over all of this, I am in no way trying to deny the fact that Japanese military forces committed some unspeakable atrocities over the course of their war in China. What I would like everyone to remember is that, in spite of those atrocities and the fact that battles had been fought since as far back as 1931, the Republic of China never actually declared war on Japan until the United States did so in 1941. Does that seem odd to anyone? Furthermore, and I have taken a lot of heat for pointing this out in the past and no doubt will continue to do so, even the highest accusations of those killed by the Japanese in World War II in Korea, Manchuria, China and Indochina are positively miniscule when compared to the millions wiped out by the communist dictators of those countries themselves after the Japanese had long gone home. Keep that in mind the next time someone refers lightly to the Emperor of Japan as a ‘war criminal’.