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By Root 864 0

a trade embargo. The U.S. had swallowed Japanese colonisation of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria and eastern China. Washington acquiesced, albeit with distaste, in the huge British, French and Dutch empires in Asia. Why should Japanese imperialism be any less acceptable to American sensibilities? Although Japan’s experience of war in China was painful, it also seemed successful. Few Japanese knew that military victories on the mainland had not been matched by economic gains of anything like the necessary magnitude. They possessed no national memory of slaughter in the trenches, such as many Germans retained from World War I, to check their rejoicing at Pearl Harbor.

Cultural contempt for the West was widespread. “Money-making is the one aim55 in life [of Americans],” asserted a Japanese army propaganda document. “The men make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much. Their lack of real culture is betrayed by their love of jazz music…Americans are still untamed since the wild pioneer days. Hold-ups, assassinations, kidnappings, gangs, bribery, corruption and lynching of Negroes are still practised. Graft in politics and commerce, labour and athletics is rampant. Sex relations have deteriorated with the development of motor cars; divorce is rife…America has its strong points, such as science, invention and other creative activities…[But while] outwardly civilized it is inwardly corrupt and decadent.” If such descents into caricature of the enemy were often matched by Allied propaganda about the Japanese, they were unhelpful in assisting Tokyo’s commanders realistically to appraise their enemy.

To an extraordinary degree for a nation which chose to launch a war, Japan failed to equip itself for the struggle. Its leaders allowed relative economic success woefully to delude them about their ability to sustain a conflict with the United States. Pre-war Japan was the world’s fourth largest exporter, and owned its third largest merchant fleet. The nation’s industrial production rose strongly through the thirties, when the rest of the world was striving to escape from the Depression, and amounted to double that of all the rest of Asia, excluding the Soviet Union. Japan’s consumption index for 1937 was 264 percent of the 1930 figure. The country was still predominantly rural, with 40 percent of the population working on the land, but the industrial labour force grew from 5.8 million in 1930 to 9.5 million by 1944, much of this increase achieved by a hesitant mobilisation of women and the exploitation of a million imported Koreans.

Between 1937 and 1944, Japan achieved a 24 percent increase in manufacturing, and 46 percent in steel production. But these achievements, which seemed substantial when viewed through a national prism, shrank into insignificance alongside those of the United States. Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. produced 2,154 million metric tons of coal, Japan 189.8; the U.S. 6,661 million barrels of oil, Japan 29.6; the U.S. 257,390 artillery pieces, Japan 7,000; the U.S. 279,813 aircraft, Japan 64,800. Overall Japanese industrial capacity was around 10 percent of that of the United States. Though Japan possessed some of the trappings, and could boast some of the achievements, of a modern industrial society, in mind-set and fundamental circumstances it was nothing of the kind. In an Asian context it seemed mighty, but from a global perspective it remained relatively primitive, as the Japanese army discovered when worsted by the Russians during the Mongolian border clash of August 1939 at Nomonhan.

Japan was a military dictatorship, insofar as the army dominated decision-making. Popular dissent was suppressed as the country entered its kurai tanima—“dark valley”—from 1931 onwards, when the power of the nominally civilian elected government was progressively eclipsed by that of the military. The war minister, always a serving soldier, was the most influential cabinet member. Yet the direction of the Japanese war machine was feeble, fractious and inept. Rivalry between