Japan and World War II: Going Along if Going Alone?
Richard J. SmethurstI
Why did Japan invade China in 1937 and attack the British and Americans in 1941? Was it, as a
Korean student once told his American instructor, "because the Japanese are mad dogs"? Or,
did Japan's leaders, as the American prosecutors at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials alleged in
1946, conspire from the time of the so-called Tanaka Memorial in 1927 to fight an aggressive
war to conquer Asia? Was this aggression and its subsequent wartime atrocities the outgrowthof a Japanese state with a uniquely intense nationalism, or of a particularly coercive social
order, or of repressive methods of child-rearing, or of economic and social inequalities? Or had
Japan by the late 1930s entered a stage of late capitalist development that naturally segued into
fascism? Was there a direct causal connection between the West's forced intrusion into Japanin the 1850s and Japan's aggression in 1937 and 1941? Various wartime and postwar Westernand Japanese scholars have forwarded all of these views in discussing Japan's involvement inWorld War II.
One cannot analyze Japan's entry into World War II without discussing the broader question of
why any country goes to war. Do leaders think through their reasons for beginning wars? What
are their goals in doing so, their prospects of achieving those goals, the anticipated costs-in
lives, in money, in destruction, in the war's impact on their society's values? Do decision makers
have a reasonably clear view of how to end the war and how the postwar peace will be better
than the prewar peace?
In the case of World War II, did the Japanese military leaders ask themselves these questions
before they invaded China in 1937 and attacked the British and Americans in 1941? And if
Japan's decision-makers did not ask these questions, or asked them but answered themincorrectly, why so? What was the impact of nationalism on their decision to go to war? To what
extent did the political and military leaders who initiated Japan's aggression in China and attackon the United States and its allies let their views of their nation's and soldiers' superiority topotential enemies influence the decision-making process?
Before describing Japan's road to World War II, it might be best to lay out the five premises ofthis essay. First, before Japan's Manchurian takeover in 1931-1932, and maybe even up until
the mid-1930s, Japan's foreign policy was not significantly different from that of the UnitedStates or Britain or other powers. Japan was an imperialist state that operated within theconstraints of what was acceptable imperialist behavior. Only after 1931, and especially after its
aggression in China in 1937, did Japan leave that framework. Second, Japan had legitimate
grievances toward Britain and particularly the United States: Western refusal to accept Asians
as equal to Europeans and North Americans, restraints on Japanese trade, unwillingness toallow the Japanese the same kind of freedom in Manchuria that Americans and British regularlytook for themselves in Latin America and the British empire, and the insulting policies of theUnited States toward Japanese immigration. Third, these grievances, real as they were, did notjustify war-neither in policy terms, nor, given Britain's and United States's more powerful
economies (the United States' GNP was then eight to ten times greater than Japan's), more
highly developed levels of technology, and greater access to raw materials, in realistic terms.
Japan undertook wars in China and against the United States that it could not win. Fourth,Japanese leaders like General Araki Sadao, who wrote in an interview in 1934 that "Japanesesoldiers with bamboo spears are superior to Western soldiers with machine guns," let theirchauvinistic views influence their decision-making.
This was especially true in the case of the invasion of China-Japan's leaders in the summer of1937 were so sure of the overwhelming superiority of Imperial Army soldiers over Chinese ones
that they thought the war would be ended by the following year. Fifth and most tragically forJapan, there was an alternative before 1936 that was not considered again until after Japan's
defeat in 1945: because Britain and America were more advanced economically and industriallythan Japan, it benefited more from cooperation than confrontation with the two English-speaking
powers. In fact, as one Japanese critic of militarism pointed out shortly before his assassination
by young right wing officers in 1936, Japan's army and navy themselves depended on American
raw materials and technology-by going to war with the United States, the Japanese military not
only took on a stronger country, but also cut itself off from the benefits of cooperation with thatcountry.

II
Japan entered the modern world when the Americans, and the then much more powerful British,forced open its gates in the 1850s. When the Western countries revisited China and Japan in
the mid-19th century, they came out not asking for trade, but demanding it. In the 100 years
before Matthew Perry's incursion in 1853, and earthshaking revolution had occurred in Britain,
and then in continental Europe and America: the industrial revolution. The West returned to Asiawith new steamships, improved weapons, and a new attitude, an attitude that demanded China
and Japan open themselves to trade. It also imposed the infamous "unequal treaties" on the twocountries: treaty ports, extraterritoriality, tariff restrictions and the most-favored nation clause.
Japan's response presaged the cooperation-autarky dichotomy in later foreign policy debates.
One group of samurai advocated cooperation with the West-open the country to learn how tomake Western weapons in order to defend Japan from the West. The other group advocatedresisting the West no matter what the costs-forerunners of General Araki's "bamboo spear"
theory. In 1868, the former group came to power and Japan began to remake itself on theWestern model. But you should keep in mind, of course, that the reform group's goal inremaking Japan using Western models was to defend Japan from the West. Members of bothgroups were nationalists reacting to what they saw as excessive and unwanted Westerninterference in their country's affairs.
The primary goal of Japan's leadership in the 1870-1890 period was to rid Japan of the unequal
treaties; both the government and public opinion objected to the treaties' limitations on importduties and to the despised extraterritoriality, the right of foreigners to live in treaty ports like
Yokohama and Kobe under the laws of their home countries. Thus, the newly nationalistic Meiji
leadership undertook a host of reforms aimed at creating a Japanese state. To them Japanneeded to be unified in the face of the outside threat. The government promulgated a new
taxation system, a modern, Western style army and conscription, a centralized local government
structure, universal education, a legal system, and a Prussian-style constitution. The
government built model factories to import up-to-date Western industrial technology, andencouraged entrepreneurship among rural landlords and the urban merchant class. Two
reforms in this process of state-building stand out: the creation of an orthodox nationalist
ideology centered on the emperor, and the creation of a unified and standard Japanese
language.
The ideology focused on the emperor as descended from the founding deities, as national father
figure, and as the focus of the citizens' loyalty. He became the symbol of the new nationalism.
The newly created elementary school system was used as the primary disseminator of thispatriotism. But in 1873, Japan did not have a unified language to spread nationalism. People
spoke local dialects that were often mutually unintelligible, and the literate few wrote in a variety
of difficult writing systems that were totally unlike the spoken language, consisting of Chinesewriting in a variety of Japanized styles; sōrōbun, for example. Even the simplest took years tomaster. The writing system was not fit for creating mass literacy and spreading nationalism.
Debates over how to reform the language raged throughout the late nineteenth century. Finallyaround 1900, the Education Ministry decided on implement a language reform: elite Tokyo
spoken Japanese would become the basis of kokugo (that is, the national language) and thewriting system, now simplified, would be based on this new language. In other words, thespoken and written languages would be more or less the same. These two reforms: the creationof a new nationalist ideology and of a new national language allowed the government to turn"peasants into Japanese," to borrow Eugen Weber's title of his book on France in exactly thesame time period.
By the end of the 19th century, these reforms were well underway. Japan had remade itself tothe point that it was able to negotiate an end to the unequal treaties. Japan regained tariff
autonomy and Westerners in Japan came under Japanese law. But this did not end theJapanese quest for equality with the West. Once Japan had escaped its status as a victim of
imperialism, it joined in the European and American game. That is, Japan began to build its own
empire, to be one of the perpetrators. The drive for empire can be better explained innationalistic than economic terms. Great nations have empires; if we are to be able to be a great
nation, we need an empire. In 1894-1895, Japan won a war from China and gained its firstcolony, Taiwan; it also gained a huge indemnity from China and thus was able to take its
monetary system onto the gold standard, a point of great national pride. Membership in thesetwo clubs-the imperialist club and the gold standard club-reinforced Japan's fledgling statusamong the powers.
In 1902, Japan also made an alliance with Great Britain, another sign of its success, another
Asian first, that is, an alliance with the world's primary power of the time. In 1904-1905, Japanfought a war with Russia, and won once again. This brought Korea into Japan's empire, andManchuria into its economic sphere of influence. These annexations of territory when viewed
from today's perspective, look like blatant aggression; however, keep in mind that they were wellwithin the acceptable framework of Western imperialism. Britain, by signing its treaty with Japan
in 1902, and then re-signing the pact after the war, endorsed the Japanese annexation of Korea.
Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, mediated the treaty that
ended the war. The Treaty of Portsmouth recognized Japan's supremacy in Korea and thus theUnited Stares pre-approved Japan's annexation of Korea (this was only seven years after theUnited States had taken the Philippines from Spain).
In 1905-1906, the conflict between the cooperative and the autarkic schools appeared again.
Japan's military leaders, flushed with victory, pushed for larger military appropriations,
nationalization of the railroad system for easier wartime mobilization, and greater funding fororganizing the empire. Takahashi Korekiyo (1854-1938) was one of the leaders of the
opposition, that is, of the anti-military approach.
The government had sent Takahashi, who had begun his study of English at age ten in 1864, toLondon to sell Japanese war bonds, at which he was eminently successful. Foreigners provided
over 800 million yen, 47% of the cost of the war, through buying Japanese treasury bonds. (Thelist of purchasers is a who's who of London, New York, and later Hamburg and Paris finance:
Jacob Schiff, John Baring, Ernest Cassel, Otto Kahn, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds, and even
Britain's crown prince, later George V). Takahashi learned two lessons in London and New York.
Japan's victory depended on the goodwill of the Anglo-American capital (thus, Takahashi's
adherence to the cooperative approach); the costs of paying the interest and repaying theprincipal of these loans required fiscal prudence in Tokyo. (Thus, his opposition to new militaryspending and the nationalization of Japan's railroad system). Takahashi's view won out for themost part from 1905 until World War I.
The conflict arose again in the wartime years over Japanese policy toward China. One groupadvocated a more autonomous Japanese policy on the mainland of Asia. Japan should issueloans to competing Chinese warlords and military intervention to gain what it saw as its
deserved imperialist position in China. The Twenty-One Demands of 1915, the Japanese
government's attempt, in the absence of an Anglo-American presence during World War I, tobecome the primary imperialist power in China, represented this view. Takahashi and others
opposed this approach on two grounds: it alienated China, with whom Japan should cooperate
economically, and it endangered Japan's relations with Britain and America. In 1920, Takahashi,
while serving as finance minister, not only criticized his own government's China policy, but evenadvocated the abolition of the army's and navy's general staffs because they undermined thedemocratizing government's control over foreign policy. As one Japanese Marxist historian
wrote, "Takahashi was the leading representative of the bourgeois politicians who advocatedcivilian control of the military." His China policy views won out temporarily. His prime minister,
Hara Takashi, squelched his inflammatory memo on the general staff issue before it was madepublic.
Hara was assassinated in 1921, and Takahashi replaced him as Prime Minister to oversee
Japan's enrollment in the Washington Treaty System, the symbol of international cooperation inthe post-World War I decade. This system, which went into effect with the signing of the
Washington Treaty in 1922, limited Japan's navy (capital ships) to three-fifths of the UnitedStates and United Kingdom navies, required Japan to give up its leasehold of the naval base atTsingtao in China that it had won from the Germans during the World War I. It also limited
American, British and Japanese bases in the Pacific and required all signatories to "respect the
territorial integrity of China," a euphemistic expression which meant no further aggressive
military intervention in China. Takahashi, with the support of most of his party and all of the
opposition party, thus bought into a policy of cooperation with the United States and GreatBritain over China. Not all of Japan's leaders, and particularly not most of the army's and navy's
leadership, agreed with this policy. That is, they still advocated a strong military and autonomy,
but given the antiwar public mood of the 1920s, they acquiesced for the time being.
Under the façade of cooperation, several ominous portents appeared for Japanese who
advocated internationalism. First was the success of the spread of nationalism through theschool system. One can safely say that by the 1920s, Japan existed as a nation of Japanese.
Second was the success of rising standard of living and spreading education in creating a masssociety. This, at one level, was a positive trend. Japan in the 1920s was more nearly democratic
than at any time in its history before the allied occupation of Japan after World War II. But thecreation of a mass society does not lead necessarily to peace. Even democracies can startwars.
Third was the Western, and particularly American, immigration policy, toward Japan. The UnitedStates government practiced blatantly anti-Japanese immigration policies, much of whichdeveloped out of the growing importance of California in American politics.
Anti-Japanese feeling was rampant on the West Coast of the United States (and later led to thearbitrary imprisonment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II). This
stimulated the Roosevelt administration to negotiate a "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Japan in
1907-1908 to limit Japanese emigration to the United States. It also played a role in thepassage of the Immigration Exclusion Act during the Coolidge presidency in 1924, which
excluded all Japanese immigration into the United States, even from Canada. Added to this,Japanese immigrants to the United States were prohibited from naturalizing as American
citizens. And the powers, when they negotiated the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 which
established the League of Nations, rejected a Japanese/Chinese proposal to add a racialequality clause to the treaty.
Fourth was Western foreign policy toward Japan. The United States, which had encouraged
Japan's activities up until and through the Russo-Japanese War, began to see Japan as apotential threat. The Philippines, part of America's empire from 1898, was much closer to Japan
than to the United States. Hawaii, another American colony, was also vulnerable to a strong
Japanese naval presence in the Pacific.
The fifth portent was the newly developed Anglo-American rapprochement during World War I.
Britain and the United States, after a century of estrangement, realized as they defeatedGermany in 1918 that they had similar foreign policy interests. The two English-speaking
powers engineered the Washington Treaty of 1922, and the subsequent London Treaty of 1930
which extended the naval armaments ratios to other categories of ships, both to set up an
overall security system in the Pacific and to provide cover for Britain to terminate its alliance withJapan. Under the treaty, Britain would be required to maintain neutrality if Japan and the UnitedStates went to war. The Anglo-Americans reasoned that Japan would not need the alliance if itwere part of a regional security arrangement. One British historian has written that theabrogation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1922, which the Japanese took as an insult equal
to the anti-immigration law, provided the stimulus that began to turn Japan from cooperation toautonomy, and thus to World War II.
But the façade of cooperation continued to work in the 1920s, largely because key politicians
like Takahashi, and Hamaguchi Osachi (1820-1931) and Shidehara Kijūrō (1872-1951), leadersof the Democratic Party (Minseitō), the other major political party of the 1920s, were committed
to the cooperative policy of the Washington Treaty System. (To finance ministers like Takahashi
and the Democratic Party's Inoue Junnosuke this policy had the added benefit of allowing Japanto maintain fiscal probity by avoiding a costly naval arms race).
1929 brought a bomb-shell to the region, and in fact to the world. In October the New York stock
market crashed, and the Great Depression ensued. By 1931, reduced demand and thus
reduced investment in new technology and facilities led to unemployment, underemployment
and falling incomes.
Worldwide, economies spiraled downward. Given the panoply of policy choices available intimes of economic downturn, one is stunned to find that virtually every country in the world
chose the wrong ones in the early 1930s. Rather than increasing spending, governments raised
taxes and balanced budgets, which drove their economies more deeply into deflation anddepression. To protect employment at home, nations raised tariffs and quotas to keep foreign
goods out. This led to retaliation and the destruction of their own export industries. Autarky, thatis, economic self-reliance, became the order of the day. The United States passed the
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 and Britain gave preferential treatment within its empire to thevarious members. Takahashi, Inoue, Shidehara, and other advocates of cooperation were
gradually discredited. Their opponents attacked them for relying on untrustworthy foreigners andadvocated diplomatic autonomy and economic autarky.
The most powerful segment of the autarky group, or to use James Crowley's term, the people
who led "Japan's quest for autonomy" were the military. They invaded Manchuria in September
1931 to thundering public applause. The mass society that they had brought Japan democracyin the 1920s helped bring it something else in the 1930s. The various portents discussed above:
latent nationalism, resentment over America's treatment of Japanese immigrants, theincreasingly unified British and American resistance to Japanese actions in China, and thesuffering of many Japanese during the depression came together to create a climate of support
for the military-the men on horseback, the men who had the easy answers, the men who
advocated direct action, not weak-kneed democratic compromise. From 1931 until 1936,
various segments of the military instigated overseas aggression, coup d'état attempts at home,and assassinations that changed the nature of Japan's government and foreign policy. The
military killed or silenced the people who advocated cooperation. The threat of assassination
was a powerful weapon for keeping opponents in line.
Students of Japan have commented on the few voices of opposition to the rise of militarism, orfascism if you want to use that word, in Japan in the 1930s. Many of Japan's leaders (including
important members of the mainstream and left-wing political parties) shared their right-wing
countrymen's resentments toward the United States and the United Kingdom and segued fromthe cooperation to the autonomy camp. The socialists in the Diet, for example, supported
Japan's road to war and war effort. Many who did not move to autonomy/autarky weremurdered. For instance, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was assassinated in 1930; his Finance
Minister, Inoue Junnoske, Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, and the head of the Mitsui
Corporation, Baron Dan, in 1932; former Prime Minister Saitō Makoto and Finance Minister
Takahashi in 1936. It was with this in mind that the New York Times correspondent, Hugh Byas,
entitled his book on the 1930s, Government by Assassination. Right wing or military youths
murdered three of five prime ministers, and a fourth escaped only when young officers shot his
brother-in-law by mistake. Two of three finance ministers were killed, and the third diedprematurely from ill health. Takahashi, who served as Japan's pre-Keynesian, Keynesian-stylefinance minister from 1931 to 1936, fought the military constantly, both at budget-making timeand in between, because he thought that the military's quest for political autonomy andeconomic autarky courted disaster. He was convinced that such politics would lead to economic
stagnation, inflation, and worst of all, war with the United States.
The Tokyo and regional press frequently reported Takahashi's anti-military rhetoric in this period(during one cabinet meeting for example, he told the army minister not to speak like an idiot).
On another occasion, when told that a young officer had publicly shouted, "Bury Takahashi," hereplied, "If all the lieutenants in the army shot me it would be too much." But such courageousstands against the rise of militarism were few, so few that the great Marxist economist, Ōuchi
Hyōe, wrote that Takahashi's murder in February 1936 destroyed any hope of stopping themilitary.
This did not mean that war was inevitable in February 1936, but it meant that the chances weremuch greater than they had been before the coup d'état attempt of that month. The last
opponents of autarky had been removed by murder or the fear of murder. Takahashi's
successor as finance minister doubled the military budget in one year, Japan invaded China in
1937, and Japan was involved in a war it could not win. The invasion of China was not planned
aggression-the war broke out over a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops in thesuburbs of Beijing (why Japanese troops were there is another story). Japan's military leaders,caught up in their own nationalistic rhetoric, decided to use the incident to punish the Chinesearmies in north China, because they believed that the Chinese soldiers could not possibly resist
the Japanese, who were backed not so much by modern weaponry as by their Yamato
damashii, that is, their "Japanese spirit." But the Japanese generals were wrong. In spite ofunspeakable atrocities (or maybe because of them), the Chinese soldiers fought well and theJapanese military was never able to pacify China. One assumes Takahashi, if he could look

down (or over?) from the Buddhist Western Paradise, would have shuddered when he saw what
his countrymen were doing.
The story of the transition from aggression in China in 1937 to the attack on Pearl Harbor is acomplex one that includes an alliance with Germany and Italy. This alliance of was one for "havenots," that is, the nations that felt they were excluded from full membership in the Westernimperialist order. But you should not overlook the role the war in China played in the Japanese
decision to go to war with Britain and the United States. Since Japan's generals could not
accept the fact that the Japanese imperial army could not defeat Chiang Kai-shek's and Mao
Tse-tung's soldiers in an army-versus-army conflict (how could the emperor's army not defeat
the benighted Chinese?), they had to find another explanation for Japan's inability to pacify
China. The answer they came up with was Anglo-American support of China. The way to defeat
China was to cut off its supply lines from the West. In other words, move into Hong Kong andSoutheast Asia. There were other reasons that Japan moved into French Indo-China, and thendecided to attack the American, British, and Dutch colonies, but one important reason was tooutflank China, to cut off its connections with the allied powers.
When Japan took its first step southward and moved into the French colony in Indo-China in thesummer of 1941, the United States answered by placing an embargo on the export of scrap ironand petroleum to Japan. Takahashi's prophecy about Japan's dependence on Western raw
materials began to come true. Without the needed petroleum and iron, Japan had to lookelsewhere: British Malaya for iron ore and the Dutch East Indies for oil. This led to the decision
to attack Southeast Asia, and the United States bases in the Philippines and Hawaii to protect
the Japanese navy's flank. One mistaken step led inexorably to another.
Which brings us back to the beginning. The Western imperialist impact on Japan set in motion aseries of events: the rise of Japanese nationalism, of Japanese economic and military power, ofJapan's quest for an empire, of Japanese emigration to America and elsewhere, and of theWestern reaction to all of these things, that led almost a century later to Pearl Harbor. One
cannot say that Pearl Harbor was the "inevitable, delayed rejoinder" to Perry's visit in 1853-farfrom it. In fact, as we have seen, there were two basic approaches Japan took in its relations
with the British and Americans-the cooperative and the autarkic approaches. Unfortunately forJapan, those who wanted Japan to follow an autonomous, independent approach to dealing
with the world won out after 1936 and led Japan into a disastrous war. After Japan's defeat in1945, its postwar leaders returned for good to cooperative policies of men like Takahashi.

Richard J. Smethurst
Richard J. Smethurst is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Pittsburgh. His
research interests include the origins of Japan’s World War II in Asia, the modern history of nohtheatre in Japan, and Japanese industrial policies of the late 1800s.