The steps made by the Japanese led to War. Not the steps made by the Americans.
I’ve always been told it takes two to tango.
This isnt a dance. Look the Japanese were planning for a war vs the USA since the Russo-Japanese war. They built up a huge navy- which was designed for exactly one opponent- the USA.
They acted, the USA reacted.
The USA reaction to the Invasion of China was mild, if truth be told. Just stop selling them the oil they needed to keep on killing the Chinese people. If the USA hadnt done that then we would have been an accessory. Just like the Pope was condemned for not speaking out about the Holocaust.
The Japanese have been pushing their version of Southern Apology now for decades, that the USA forced them into the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is totally false.
DrDeth is right. The logic used to defend Japan morally infantilizes them and their leadership; placing them entirely in a passive role, and acting as if they did not make choices for themselves. It assumes that their actions are entirely forced upon them. They had no enemies in the region that they did not make themselves. Each of their wars were wars of aggression, and they went to war with the United States in order to continue their wars of aggression.
It was not the the United States which forced war on Japan. Japan forced the United States into the position of becoming complicit with Japanese warmongering and mass-murder - or cutting off economic ties. When we chose the latter, they responded with violence.
It’s also interesting to contrast this with people who claim that IBM was complicit in the Holocaust because they sold the German government machines for tabulating census information that were later used to help with putting people into camps. It’s very weird to try to figure out how those go together - in the IBM case, selling something that is primarily used for a legitimate government purpose and that is later used for something bad means you’re complicit in the ‘something bad’, but in the US embargo case ceasing to sell something that is explicitly being used for mass murder and conquest is an act of aggression that makes you responsible for the other party attacking you.
The point is, it takes two (at least) to go to war. This is not done in a vacuum solely by one country.
We can cast blame and say the other country was bad so we HAD to act but it still takes two.
Few will give Japan a pass for what they were up to in those times but we can see, even in this thread, that the US was not exactly innocent in pushing Japan towards war. You can argue the US was being just and righteous in its actions but it remains that those actions were a part of what lead to war.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to absolve Japan of anything here. But it is ridiculous to think the US had no role in the lead-up to war. It really does take two to tango.
Not when one nation sneak attacks the other. Then- it only takes one.
The USA was totally innocent in pushing Japan towards war. Japan was pushing itself.
You’re really stuck on that aren’t you? Which sounds to me like you’re making a moral argument, not a historical argument.
My contention is the USA mostly inadvertantly (thanks Acheson!) forced the timing of the war. Not the fact of the war. As I interpret the far more learned @TokyoBayer he contends the same. As does much of the professional scholarship on the topic.
In this thread ostensibly about occupying Midway, all of this gigantic “who started it” hijack is about timing.
You’re right the Japanese were hell-bent on having their war with everyone. Nobody here has disagreed with that contention. And had they miraculously subdued all of China there’s no reason to think they’d have stopped there.
Racially motivated totalitarian governments are like that. Something to think about in 2020.
I disagree with these statements if you making them in general and not limited to the interaction between Japan and the US. There have been countless invasions and war over time where one side simply decided to take over another.
One of the problems with statements such as “not innocent in pushing Japan towards war” is that it’s too easy to conflate with moral judgments. The responsibility for the war falls on Japan and not the US. This is why I said earlier that steps the US undertook did lead to war.
Thinking more about this discussion and the various arguments put forth by different, people I thought of an analogy. I’m an older father and have children in or approaching adolescence. Comparing prewar Japanese leaders to adolescent children is an insult – to kids – but any parent can tell you that you have to pick your battles with your children. You and be 100% in the right and the children 100% in the wrong, but they still will rebel. You have to decide if something is really worth it or not.
As @LSLGuy points out, the timing of the war was triggered by US actions. The Japanese were in the wrong and they shouldn’t have been there, but the US had the free choice if they were going to force the issue or not.
A comparable situation occurred in Europe where Churchill and then later Roosevelt held their collective noses and despite hating and distrusting the Soviets, joined in partnership with them to defeat the Nazis. History could have been completely rewritten if Chamberlain had been willing to deal with the Soviets in 1939. He wasn’t – for good reasons – much like the US – for good reasons – decided to force the issue with Japan.
Of course, real politics is for more complex than alt-hist allows, and the myriad of other complicating factors may have prevented and Anglo-French-Soviet partnership from being formed in 1939. Likewise, even if the Japanese assets weren’t frozen or the oil not embargoed, that may not have prevented the Japanese from launching a war, but those are unknowns.
The Japanese themselves had forced the situation into this tight window of timing as they wanted to option to go to war if diplomacy failed. That is clearly their responsibility. However, it was recognized by US military leaders that the US actions could lead to a shooting war, and these top leaders urged Roosevelt to not take these actions at that time because the US wasn’t prepared yet.
There were Japanese military leaders who were urging Japan to attack the US sooner than later because they recognized that time was not on their side. It’s unknowable what would have had happened if the US had not frozen Japanese assets or stopped the flow of oil, but it would have been a more difficult case for those leaders to have prevailed.
See Post 33, this has already been stated and in more detail in response to @txtumbleweed’s excellent analysis in post 14.
This is the scary part of prewar Japan (sorry, China, prewar to the US, not prewar with China). The hubris is mindblowing. “Let’s go to war with everyone!” Insane.
Unfortunately for Japan, all the territory they grabbed in Asian wasn’t particularly industrialized and they weren’t able to seize weapon manufacturing plants or ransack the treasuries like the Nazis in Europe.
See the posts (14 and 33) above. They could not have occupied Midway even had the Pacific Fleet been defeated, but you are right that the carriers were tasked with dual objectives.
In times where many people don’t have jobs or are underemployed, I should be grateful for my busy schedule, but it doesn’t give much time to respond in a timely fashion. I apologize. Here are a few more thoughts.
This is a very interesting question, see below.
Not even close.
@gdave gave an excellent answer about the major reason his role was covered up, but let me elaborate. Three good resources for understanding the role of the Emperor are Herbert P. Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Eri’s Hotta’s 1941 Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy and Dan Carlin’s series on Japan, Supernova in the East. There are multi other sources and cites, but any of these give a good overview. Carlin spends some more time directly addressing the question while Hotta is more concerned with the other leaders, but still explains things such as the Imperial Councils, where the top military leaders, key cabinet officials and some other elites met to make decisions in the presence of the Emperor.
Carlin directly poses the question of the Emperor flexing his muscle, and could he have prevented it, but doesn’t really come to a definitive answer, although he does ask some great questions. For Hotta, this is from a review of her book;
As @gdave said, too much was whitewashed after the war to be able to give definitive answers to these questions. It is known that the emperor was much better informed than the postwar story, and seems to have approved of many of the military actions.
The historian Herbert P. Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, the seminal autobiography of the emperor is one of many historians who find that the emperor had responsibility for the war. Here is an article by Bix.
Traditionally, very few emperors held actual power, and were kept busy with ceremonial stuff while the bakufu shogunate government actually ran most of the country. Without getting too deep, the shoguate system was having major problems around the time Perry showed up and certain lord used the threat of foreign barbarians to attempt to gain power for themselves. Not that modern politicians would ever do that!
Rather than start a civil war and overthrow the bakufu, they cleverly declared that they were going to “restore” the emperor so they sort of had to give him some power after all in the Meiji Constitution, but there wasn’t either a clear role or a long tradition of actual power.
@Little_Nemo incorrectly claimed that by the eve of the Pacific war with America, that only the IJA and IJN were making decisions. He declined to provide a cite for his mistaken assertion (well, it would be impossible to find one) that no one was considering logistics or diplomacy and the military would unilaterally make decisions which Hirohito was forced to accept.
Bix clearly demonstrates this was not the case, and Eri Hotta’s book gives cite after cite after cite on how the key civilian minsters were essential in the decision making process. The decision to make war against the US could not have been made by the military alone, it required as a minimum, the acquiescence of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, either of which could have resigned and brought down the cabinet, forcing the matter back to the emperor.
In asking @Little_Nemo for a cite, of course, I was prepared to provide ones myself, including this one concerning his assertion that logisitics were never considered.
The civilian led National Planning was very much involved in the discussions leading up to the war. Sadly for Japan, none of the leaders chose to listen.
Concerning the decision making process, Hotta states:
Hotta disagrees with Bix on the level of involvement on the Emperor, which is interesting because both are respected scholars, so it would be very interesting to see a conversation between the two.
As an aside, Hotta is Japanese and follows the Japanese custom of using the title to refer to the Emperor where the American Bix uses his name as that was more well known abroad. Japanese never actually would have said Emperor Hirohito. Upon ascension to the throne, the new emperor is addressed and called Emperor (Tennō 天皇) and after death he is referred to primarily by his posthumous name, which for Hitohito is Emperor Shōwa (昭和) .
Major policy decisions reached at Liaison Conferences were forwarded to Imperial Conferences for pro forma approval by the Emperor.
I hate to disagree, but I dont see how “They presented plans to him. I think he more or less just sat there and nodded or something.” differs a lot from “pro-forma approval”.
TokyoBayer gave two extensive sets of cites.
Per those cites, Herbert Bix argued that Hirohito had a direct and active role in shaping Japan’s war policies. That’s obviously a lot more than “sitting and nodding”.
The other historian cited, Eri Hotta, does claim that “[m]ajor policy decisions reached at Liaison Conferences were forwarded to Imperial Conferences for pro forma approval by the Emperor.” But look at the first cite TokyoBayer provided:
According to [Hotta]…[Hirohito] was involved in many high-level meetings at which his role was expected to be merely ceremonial, and yet he sometimes broke tradition and interrogated or scolded his generals and admirals and cabinet ministers. He was probably unaware of Japanese atrocities, but he was certainly aware of, and approved, Japanese aggression.
Even Hotta, who assigns a much more indirect role to the Emperor, writes that at times he actively participated in the conferences where the “pro forma” decisions were handed to him. He didn’t just “sit and nod” - he interrogated and scolded officials, and at least indirectly made his wishes known.
Now, if Hotta’s portrayal is accurate, that still leaves open the question of just how involved and responsible Hirohito was. It’s possible the officials just took the scolding, answered the questions, and then just went back to their own councils and forgot everything the Emperor said and did. They might have just viewed Hirohito as a cranky family member whose rants they had to tolerate. It’s also possible, though, that they put real effort into avoiding those scoldings and interrogations by shaping policies to conform to what they thought the Emperor wanted, and that the Emperor wielded significant indirect influence.
Either way, the best historical evidence is that he did more than just “sit and nod”.
So, the evidence is lacking, several differing cites, and mine agrees totally with one experts but disagrees with another.
Umm, no. Again,
[Hirohito] was involved in many high-level meetings at which his role was expected to be merely ceremonial, and yet he sometimes broke tradition and interrogated or scolded his generals and admirals and cabinet ministers. He was probably unaware of Japanese atrocities, but he was certainly aware of, and approved, Japanese aggression.
That’s from the expert who supposedly “agrees totally” with you. Even according to her, Hirohito didn’t just sit and nod. He interrogated and scolded officials. I’m not sure what else to say here. If you honestly think that’s the same as just sitting and nodding, then I guess we just have to agree to disagree about Hirohito’s role.
I think you are struggling with the concepts being presented here. You seem to be confused regarding the difference between moral culpability and strategic wisdom.
Has anyone in this thread made this ridiculous argument?
Has anyone in this thread claimed that anyone in this thread has made that particular ridiculous argument?
Your introducing this seems to be a total non sequitur if you aren’t suggesting this. What does this weird IBM story have to do with this subject at hand? Your full quote was:
Uhh… so can you explain how they DO go together? You seem to be suggesting that holding both their beliefs would be hypocritical, or at least illogical. Well, okay. So?
IMB was blamed for selling stuff to the Nazis before the war, which made them a better war machine, which killed Americans and Allies. If we kept selling oil to the Imperial Japanese, we’d be complicit in the Rape of Nanking etc, and of course, helping them kill more American GIs.
So, it would be wrong for us to sell oil to them.
If one accepts both positions, then there is no moral course of action to take in that situation as you’ll either be responsible for provoking further bad actions (if you embargo) or for assisting with further bad actions (if you don’t). And yet a lot of people seem to argue both that ‘you shouldn’t sell stuff that helps someone commit genocide’ and ‘the US is responsible for starting the war because of the oil embargo’. Also, there’s literally no weird IBM story unless you somehow consider “IBM was doing their usual business at the time with various governments” weird in some fashion. Since you just seem engaged in more complaints than discussion, this is likely the last time I will respond you on this.