Abstract
Paradox, like accident, is one of the main engines that drive history. The divergence of interests and perceptions that catapulted Japan into the “Pacific War” phase of the Fifteen Years’ War is a clear case in point. The Imperial Navy’s surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and its opening of hostilities with the West point to some of the most poignant and profound paradoxes to be found in the studies of war origins. Especially confounding are the seeming inconsistencies between Japan’s decision to enter the war to ensure its national survival, when Tokyo was sufficiently informed of the self-destructive implications of such a war in material terms.
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Notes
For instance, an August 1941 report from an information-gathering mission indicated that the United States had a far greater industrial capacity than Japan (12 times its GNP and 527.9 times its petroleum production). See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 113.
Yasuda Takeshi, “Sekaishi no Tetsugaku” [Philosophy of World History], in Kindai Nihon Shisoshi no Kiso Chishiki: Ishin Zenya kara Haisen made [Basic Knowledge of the History of Ideas in Modern Japan: From the Restoration to the Defeat], eds. Hashikawa Bunsō, Kano Masanao, and Hiraoka Toshio (Yuhikaku, 1971), 443.
The Kyoto School has attracted much scholarly attention, with ramifications for some interesting revisionist debates. For example, Graham Parkes, “The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political Correctness of the Modern Academy”; Christopher S. Goto-Jones, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (London: Routledge, 2005).
Katō Yoshiko, Saitō Mokichi no Jugonen Sensō [Saitō Mokichi’s Fifteen Years’ War] (Misuzu Shobō, 1990), 124.
For more on this thesis, see Richard Rorty Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 46.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49.
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© 2007 Eri Hotta
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Hotta, E. (2007). The War of “World Historical Significance”. In: Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Transnational History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609921_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609921_7
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