"Japan and World War II: Going Along if Going Alone?" Topic

"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 outgrowth of 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 Japan in the 1850s and Japan's aggression in 1937 and 1941? Various wartime and postwar Western and Japanese scholars have forwarded all of these views in discussing Japan's involvement in World 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?…"

Main page

link

Armand

As in most cases in life, I suspect that it is not just one reason but a combination of factors that are in the end "the reason" for something to come to pass.

Thanks

Armand

The state was in chaos. Extremist junior Army officers staged multiple attempts at coups in the Thirties, the net effect of which was to push the senior officers in more radical directions. Nobody wanted to lose face or back down, which meant the government tended to double down when faced with external pressure. Tojo famously compared going to war against the US and Britain to jumping off a temple balcony- but he did it just the same.

To properly understand Axis decision making in WWII, you have to put aside the picture that the regimes advanced of totally controlled societies, advancing in lockstep toward unified objectives. It ain't so; Germany and Japan were both chaotic messes. It's arguably the case that Mussolini's Italian fascist state made better and more rational decisions that either Germany or Japan- the fact simply gets obscured by the relatively poorer performance of its armed forces.