I got a copy of a Japanese school history book from a friend once. I wanna say it was middle school, maybe, and from the mid-90’s. I was interested in their take on Pearl Harbor, and while I don’t remember all the details (and it was a short section), there was nothing very propaganday about it. They mainly focused on the declaration of war being delayed…
It mattered a great deal at the time because the US used the sneak attack aspect to motivate the response in prosecuting the war. International law required (and still does) that the participants be informed hostilities would be forthcoming. Would an hour’s notice have been enough to get planes in the air and ships out of harbor? Assuming instant understanding, probably not. Three hours? Yes.
Typically an ultimatum is issued with a week or more deadline to comply with the demands of the nation offended. But the Japanese need militarily was to wipe out the US naval capacity in the Pacific, which would not have been met with an ultimatum under any circumstances. Yamamoto predicted a string of victories for the first six months, and Midway was just over six months later. But at Midway the experienced Japanese naval aviators were wiped out when every break in the battle that could have gone to the Americans did.
Had the carriers been at Pearl Harbor and destroyed and damaged as much as the battleships, the entire Solomon Islands campaign could not have been launched, and it is questionable whether the top brass would have realized the supreme importance of carriers. The actual destruction of the battleships forced the use of carriers as supremely important and probably shortened the war.
Pure anecdote, but my wife remembers it being mentioned in passing as just another fact like “in 1492 Culubus sailed the ocean blue”.
When she came to America as an exchange student her class studied WWII and she was absolutly blown away at how her school in Japan glossed over it as nothing of consequesnce when it was clearly a defining moment in history as far as most Americans were concerned.
The elimination of the battleships forced the Navy to become a carrier navy. The big gun club officers looked down on Naval Avation and considered it a career killer.
A couple people briefly mentioned it, but I’m curious now. Exactly HOW are the bombings of Hiroshima/Nagasaki viewed and taught in Japan? Is it an extreme sore spot? Is it taught as something bad that shouldn’t be forgotten but should be forgiven? Something that was an unfortunate consequence of going to war? Somewhere in the middle?
On the subject of Japanese attitudes towards Pearl Harbor, while I am sure they give in to the strong human instinct to pay as little attention to the failings of their country as possible, I would imagine that most educated Japanese adults understand that regardless of any claims that they were ‘forced’ into war, without a doubt the war was disastrous for their country. As such, I imagine a lot of them regard it with 20/20 hindsight as being exactly what it was, a tactical victory that guaranteed their strategic defeat and as such they place even more of the blame on the right-wing government at the time, after all, if those idiots had listened to Yamamoto they would have at least had a chance a pursuing a winning strategy. Given the disparity in raw materials, production capacity, and population between Japan and the United States it’s unlikely Japan could have ever won the war, however, starting it off by handing Washington the best possible propaganda tool for making allies and isolating Japan diplomatically while simultaneously convincing virtually everyone in the United States to go for blood was possibly the worst opening move they could have made.
AllFree
Somewhat unrelated, but an amusing anecdote none the less, while playing that game where you say the first word that comes to your mind when you hear the word the previous person said w/ a bunch of Japanese friends, the progression went something like this: 物質、電子、電子爆弾 (Matter, atom, atomic bomb), w/ me being next. As the only non-Japanese there, the only word that came to mind was ‘気まずい’ (Awkward), which cracked up the room.
Up until that moment, I was really unsure how they would respond to any reference to that type of thing, especially since the group included older ones born in the years immediately following the war. But it wasn’t really a touchy subject. I think I can agree w/ whoever said that the Japanese aren’t all that introspective… at least in this specific case…
Your remark reflects a rather ungenerous estimate of my intelligence.
I did not imply that either I believed this of FDR, nor especially that he was interested in provoking the specific attack on Pearl Harbor. I believe the theory goes that he was rather complacent about the idea of provoking some unequivocal act against the US that could serve as a casus belli. I don’t think anyone believes that he was in favor of this specific debilitating attack.
Also, you seem to have forgotten that I was discussing this as a possible “saving grace” point of view that Japanese people might take to dissociate themselves from any moral responsibility for Pearl Harbor.
Roddy
I don’t think that Japanese people feel they need to take any “moral responsibility” for Pearl Harbor for a few reasons:
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The wartime “militarists” are those held to be responsible for any wrong doings during the war. This is a result not just of the natural desire of people to shift responsibility to someone else but also of Allied policies during the aftermath of the war.
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All Japanese know that Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, but that’s not really viewed as a bad thing. Such attacks are prominent in Japanese military history; the best example being the Russo-Japanese War (1905) which began with a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur (something that was praised by American officials at the time, including President Roosevelt). Such sneak attacks only became violations of international law in 1910, after the Japanese officers who planned Pearl Harbor had already entered service. At the time and now, the failed attempt by the government to declare war immediately before the attack means that people can shrug and say “we didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
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The atomic bombings are viewed as an atrocity which, having been inflicted on Japanese civilians, balances the scales for wartime wrong doings. Everyone is a victim in war.
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The US won and are the strongest nation in the world. There’s no real reason to feel bad about things that happened to them.
Really, the only reason that we make such a big deal out of the sneak attack nature of Pearl Harbor is because it happened to us. I mean, we don’t seem to particularly care that the Israelis kicked off the Six Day War with a sneak attack, but I bet the Arabs do.
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I think you mean 原子 and 原子爆弾. 電子 means electron.
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Keep in mind as well, it’s doubtful FDR would ever want his casus belli to be from a Japanese attack. FDR had been trying to drag the isolationist majority into the war in Europe since it started, that’s the war he wanted to fight. Remember, the alliance between Japan and Germany contained no public or private commitment to come to war in each others defense, the Japanese didn’t even inform their German allies that they were going to attack and open up a gigantic new theater of war. If Hitler hadn’t tripped over himself to declare war on the U.S. he could have forced FDR to spend at least some time and political capitol to get the War declaration against Germany he wanted, though he would probably have gotten it. It was in the U.S. interest to only fight one hemi-sphere at a time, and of the U.S. public who wanted to go to war, they were virtually 100% concentrated on war in Europe, no one wanted war with Japan, and most people thought of the tensions with Japan as relatively unimportant. We had embargoed them, their diplomats were still in Washington and to all appearances actively engaged in diplomacy. I believe the low U.S. attention on Japan as a real threat intensified the U.S. reaction to the ‘sneak attack’. In any case, if he knew a Japanese fleet was on the way, it’s not like anyone was going to believe they sailed that close to Hawaii with a fleet of aircraft carriers in top secrecy as part of ‘training maneuvers’ The Japanese fleet would have to choose (or more likely pass the buck up the chain of command back home as fast as possible for instructions) if they were to engage the deployed U.S. fleet since they had been discovered with no element of surprise and at sea instead of in port, or try to disengage and head home. So either the Japanese would have provoked the war without their ‘crippling blow’ to the pacific fleet, or give up their ambition for war for at least a year. Either way, it’s a lot better outcome for the U.S. and F.D.R. So he had no rational reason to allow Pearl Harbor to occur.
Another factor is that if you take away all the political and strategic context, the Pearl Harbor attack was a masterful military operation. The Japanese had to plan and scout out the operation, design new weapons and new tactics, train everyone involved in what they had to do, maneuver several different forces to arrive simultaneously, conduct a major operation at extreme long range, and keep everything secret - and everything went off exactly as planned. So maybe some Japanese look at the battle site and think “we shouldn’t have done it - but we did it very well.”
They did. But there was no rule that they had to, so for our side to get annoyed if they changed their tactics, it would seem a little ridiculous.
Well, it does to me, anyway.
Hell, the manufacturers of Zyklon B could say the same damn thing.
This strikes me as incorrect from my readings. The Japanese weren’t aiming at the battleships, they were aiming at the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Yamamoto and co. were hoping that the U.S. carriers would be in port, just like the battleships. Whether the U.S. yet appreciated the supremacy of naval air power or not, the Japanese certainly did, and they wanted to catch the American carriers at dockside if they could.
Thankfully, they didn’t, and given that the carriers were all that we had left for a while, they inevitably became the primary “battlewagons” for the U.S. response.
That said, the writing was on the wall for some time, and the influence of the “carrier mafia” in the American navy had been on the rise well before Pearl Harbor. We weren’t stupid-- like the Japanese, we saw what the British did at Taranto, the importance of carrier aviation was recognized. It just took Pearl Harbor to convince everyone that carrier aviation was more than important, it was invaluable.
You know who else made bad analogies? Hitler.
All of the anti-FDR conspiracy theorists (and there are some who might otherwise be reputable historians) ignore the fact that FDR, as a former assistant secretary of the Navy, loved the Navy with a passion, and took an interest in it second only to his cousin Theodore, who held the same posts. FDR would never have done anything that would’ve endanged the Navy so badly. As noted earlier, his greater focus was on Europe at the time anyway.
Also, if FDR had had any kind of warning that an attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, through decoding of Japanese signals or through some other source, it would’ve passed through a number of hands before reaching the Oval Office. There is not a scintilla of evidence that any such warning was ever received, and no one, out of the dozens of people who would’ve had to be involved, has ever come forward to 'fess up. There’s no way that kind of conspiracy could’ve held together over all these years.
Well, the 6 day war sneak/preemptive attack doesnt really compare, as Egypt did amass some 100k soldiers and hundreds of tanks virtually on the Israeli border - the US did nothing of the kind to bring on the PH attack.
Until the thread is moved to GD and retitled “Was the Pearl Harbor attack smart?,” I’ll stay within the CG scope and provide factual answers.
They don’t. It’s not emphasized in the history they learn and it’s not generally covered comprehensively in media discussions about the war.
The reasons for which are beyond this discussion.
I believe the Japanese high command worried about industrial capacity in the US but they felt smashing the US navy would give them the breathing room they needed to consolidate their hold in the South Pacific and after that the US, despite industrial capacity, would be too late and just have to live with the new status quo.
Unfortunately they seriously underestimated US industrial might and its willingness to turn nearly all of it to war production. We got back in the fight sooner than they expected (add in the huge oversight in not bombing the dry docks at Pearl Harbor as well as missing the American carriers).
Kind of along those lines, I think Japan’s expansionism in the first half of the twentieth century was (at least in their perception) a case of riding the proverbial tiger and not daring to get off. When the Western imperial powers came sailing in in their black ships, Japan *had no choice *but to become an imperial power itself, warring with Russia and China and establishing its own colonies and spheres of interest, lest Nippon allow itself to become weak and subjugated as China had been.
With those colonies and spheres of influence in place, then when China finally started getting its stuff back together in the 30s, Japan had no choice but to jump in feet first into a long drawn out war there to protect its interests in Korea and Manchuria.
And when it became clear that the protracted China conflict made Japan dangerously dependent on imported oil and material, it had no choice but to move to secure its own supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
And with the US standing in the way of this southward expansion, Japan naturally had no choice but to make a preemptive move at Pearl Harbor and hope for the best.
Doesn’t excuse them for being militaristic shitheads, but I can see how they might have justified the whole thing to themselves.