Review of Aldric Hama's Essay "The Buildup to the 'Greater East Asian
War' from the Japanese Perspective"
By Seishiro Sugihara, Former Professor at Josai University
August 7, 2017
Aldric Hama's essay, "The Buildup to the 'Greater East Asian War' from the Japanese
Perspective", notes how differently the people of Japan and the West view the origins ofWorld War II, and attempts to explain this vast discrepancy in perceptions. The Westernimage is, in a word, a regurgitation of the opinions put forward at the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East (the IMTFE or Tokyo Trials) that World War II was an illegal warof aggression launched by Japan's militarist faction in order to dominate East Asia and therest of the world. Although it is true that Japan did ultimately initiate the Greater East AsianWar, the series of events that led Japan to the war were not at all conveyed in an accurate
manner by the IMTFE. Mr. Hama's essay makes this point very clear.
Where does the discrepancy lie? Essentially, the IMTFE believed that it was principally
Japan's aggressive attitude toward China that led to the war and strongly focused on thispoint. However, Mr. Hama points out that, from the Japanese perspective, Japan's central
preoccupations during the first half of the twentieth century, said to be the period inquestion, were actually to raise the standard of living of the Japanese people and improveits unequal relationships with the Western powers.
Mr. Hama has combed through a great many works of history, and he provides a succinct
account of the words and actions of contemporary leaders as well as the historical facts
illuminating the discrepancy between the Japanese and Western perspectives. Those likemyself who are not under the influence of the masochistic view of Japanese history willfind Mr. Hama's arguments very compelling. And yet, even those Japanese who arethoroughly steeped in the masochistic view still do not adhere to an interpretation of history
as simplistic as that advanced by the verdict of the IMTFE, and so they, too, will find it
interesting to read Mr. Hama's elucidation of the relevant historical facts and of the stancesof the key figures of the time.
It can be said in broad terms that Japan's relations with China in the first half of thetwentieth century were part of the reason for the Greater East Asian War, but, as I indicatedabove, they were far from the central reason. Still, it is true that Japan was forced to get
involved in China and thus was caught in a quagmire from which it could not extricate
itself. However, the other Western powers were also strongly involved in China during thesame period, and each had its own unique interests there. They saw Japan's involvementwith China in the context of their own involvement and interests. Nevertheless, deep
misunderstandings arose in the way that they understood the situation. The country that,right from the start, committed the greatest errors in regard to China was the United States,and Mr. Hama concludes that America is continuing to make the same errors right up to thepresent day.

This conclusion is quite persuasive, but there may have been a better way of presenting it. It
is possible that Mr. Hama's essay would have been easier to understand if he had described
the motivations of each of the Western countries, including the United States, Great Britain,
and other European countries, under separate headings rather than discussing themcollectively, and then had traced the sequence of events chronologically. When theimportant countries are dealt with individually, the key player is of course the United States.
When discussing the United States, it may have been clearer if Mr. Hama had explained
America's oversized influence in the region, then how America acquired such great
misconceptions about China, and in turn how this caused America to view Japan'sinvolvement in China through the prism of these misconceptions.
To set the record straight for people in the West, the essay includes a fine account of theWesterners who did understand Japan's real intentions towards China. However, if Mr.
Hama had divided the text by country and rearranged it into a clearer chronological order, it
may have been easier to expose the areas where the Japanese side also should have donethings differently in its interactions with the nations of the West, such as, for example,
Japan's failure to engage in effective counter-propaganda.
Mr. Hama's essay also occasionally touches on current problems, even making reference tothe policies of US President Donald Trump, but the biggest mistake made by the UnitedStates and other Western countries since the end of World War II was probably their
response to the Tiananmen Square Protests that broke out near the end of the twentiethcentury. They expected that once they had invited China to join the capitalist world andhelped to make China a rich country with a free market economy, China would soon
embrace the system of international law and grow into a benevolent superpower playing ahealthy leadership role in the world. Unfortunately, that was not to be. It was alreadyconspicuous in the first half of the twentieth century, and likewise in the second halffollowing World War II, that China still remains imbued with Sinocentric ideology
deeming the Chinese as the rightful rulers of the world and other countries as inferior. It
seems that Westerners are only now in the twenty-first century beginning to realize how
wrong they have been about China.
In closing, I would like to introduce two informative books concerning this last point. On
China's failure to free itself from the Sinocentric worldview, see Ko Bunyu's Ko Bunyu no"Rekishi to wa Nanka" [Ko Bunyu's "What Is History?"]i published by Jiyusha. On
America's misreading of China's intentions, I recommend Michael Pillsbury's THE
HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as theGlobal Superpower published by Henry Holy & Co., NY, 2015.ii
i

It is under translation work by SDHF.
[China 2049 – China's Secret 100-Year Plan to Conquer the World] translated into
Japanese, published by Nikkei BP Sha, Tokyo in 2015.
ii