DP History – IB1 – C.
Pache
Left- wing Japanese
historians
Date the beginning of the
war in the Pacific as 1931 –
with the Manchurian
incident. The left in Japan
tend to hold the “militarist
capitalist clique” responsible
for a “15 year war”.
Saburo Ienaga:
Critical of Japan's role in
causing the war arguing that
Japanese imperialism and
militarism were key factors.
Sterling Seagrove:
The emperor was a force
supporting Japanese
expansionism. He could have
intervened to stop the
expansionists but he did not
want to.
Overview: Perspectives - Historiography Japan
Right-wing historians in
Japan
Identify December 1941 as
the starting point of the
“Great East Asia War”-
Japan was freeing Asia from
the exploitation of Western
colonialism. Japan had been
forced into war with the USA
by the oil embargo.
Hayashi:
The "Holy War" was in fact a
100-year struggle with the
West following the arrival of the
Americans in 1853.
Masaaki Tanaka:
Even argues that the Rape of
Nanjing was a fiction.
Michiko Hasegawa:
Japan only went to war
because of the oil embargo.
Orthodox historians in the
USA
Argue that the Pacific War
began in 1937 after the
Marco Polo Bridge incident.
Japan waged the war of
aggression and expansion.
Pearl Harbor is the key
evidence of Japan’s
aggression. Japan held
solely responsible for the
war in the Pacific.
Robert Dallek:
The surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor ‘greatly distressed’
Roosevelt, but ‘it also relieved
him’ because he no longer had
to make decisions as ‘Japan
had now made the decision for
him’
Revisionist US historians
Argued that Japan’s actions
up to 1941 were primarily
aimed at purging Asia from
Western corruption. Some
suggest that as the USA did
not act to resist Japan in
China in the 1930s, it
encouraged Japanese
actions.
Antony Best:
Britain has to take some
responsibility for war, because it
wanted to maintain its authority
in the Far East and chose to
ignore the rise of Japan as a
regional power.
Andrew Crozier:
Japan and the USA
had a ‘mutual
misunderstanding’ that resulted
in ‘mutual underestimation’.
Niall Ferguson:
Japan went to war because it
believed it was better to
‘gamble on immediate
war, rather than submit to
relative decline in the near
future’
Traditionalist
Historians claim that
emperor of Japan did not
want war but he had no
choice but to submit to the
militarists.
Rana Mitter:
A diplomatic solution could
have been reached if Konoe
had remained prime minister of
Japan but his successor,
General Tojo Hideki, was
already planning war and
thought it was ‘inevitable’
Ian Buruma:
Tojo grasped the Hull
Note as a pretext for war, but
‘the Hull Note was just an
excuse. The plan for the
attack on Pearl Harbor had
already been made’