February 10, 2009
Strategic Studies Institute
Abstract:
The Japanese decision to initiate war against the
United States in 1941 continues to perplex. Did the
Japanese recognize the odds against them? How did
they expect to defeat the United States? The presumption
of irrationality is natural, given Japan’s acute imperial
overstretch in 1941 and America’s overwhelming
industrial might and latent military power. The
Japanese decision for war, however, must be seen in
the light of the available alternatives in the fall of 1941,
which were either national economic suffocation or
surrender of Tokyo’s empire on the Asian mainland.
Though Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root
cause of the Pacific War, the road to Pearl Harbor was
built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations,
most of them mired in mutual cultural ignorance and
racial arrogance.
Japan’s aggression in China, military alliance with
Hitler, and proclamation of a “Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere” that included resource-rich
Southeast Asia were major milestones along the road to
war, but the proximate cause was Japan’s occupation of
southern French Indochina in July 1941, which placed
Japanese forces in a position to grab Malaya, Singapore,
and the Dutch East Indies. Japan’s threatened conquest
of Southeast Asia, which in turn would threaten
Great Britain’s ability to resist Nazi aggression in
Europe, prompted the administration of Franklin D.
Roosevelt to sanction Japan by imposing an embargo
on U.S. oil exports upon which the Japanese economy
was critically dependent. Yet the embargo, far from
deterring further Japanese aggression, prompted a
Tokyo decision to invade Southeast Asia. By mid-1941
Japanese leaders believed that war with the United States was inevitable and that it was imperative to
seize the Dutch East Indies, which offered a substitute
for dependency on American oil. The attack on Pearl
Harbor was essentially a flanking raid in support of
the main event, which was the conquest of Malaya,
Singapore, the Indies, and the Philippines,
Japan’s decision for war rested on several assumptions,
some realistic, others not. The first was
that time was working against Japan—i.e., the longer
they took to initiate war with the United States, the
dimmer its prospects for success. The Japanese also
assumed they had little chance of winning a protracted
war with the United States but hoped they could force
the Americans into a murderous, island-by-island
slog across the Central and Southwestern Pacific that
would eventually exhaust American will to fight on to
total victory. The Japanese believed they were racially
and spiritually superior to the Americans, whom
they regarded as an effete, creature-comforted people
divided by political factionalism and racial and class
strife.
U.S. attempts to deter Japanese expansion into
the Southwestern Pacific via the imposition of harsh
economic sanctions, redeployment of the U.S. Fleet from
southern California to Pearl Harbor, and the dispatch
of B-17 long-range bombers to the Philippines all failed
because the United States insisted that Japan evacuate
both Indochina and China as the price for a restoration
of U.S. trade. The United States demanded, in effect,
that Japan abandon its empire, and by extension its
aspiration to become a great power, and submit to the
economic dominion of the United States—something
no self-respecting Japanese leader could accept.
The Japanese-American road to the Pacific War in
1941 yields several enduring lessons of particular relevance for today’s national security decision-makers:
1. Fear and honor, “rational” or not, can motivate
as much as interest.
2. There is no substitute for knowledge of a potential
adversary’s history and culture.
3. Deterrence lies in the mind of the deterree, not
the deterrer.
4. Strategy must always inform and guide operations.
5. Economic sanctioning can be tantamount to an
act of war.
6. The presumption of moral or spiritual superiority
can fatally discount the consequences of an enemy’s
material superiority.
7. “Inevitable” war easily becomes a self-fulfilling
prophesy....
September 5, 2008
The Washington Quarterly
Abstract:
The main theme of the foreign policy debate in the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign is how to restore the U.S. reputation in the world. Five years after the Iraq war, a consensus has emerged, not just in the United States but throughout the rest of the world, that the war will not bring about the Iraqi state for which the Bush administration had originally planned and hoped. As a result, the post–September 11 U.S. strategy, consisting of preemptive warfare, democracy promotion, and unilateralism, has been widely discredited. The United States has suffered from what could be described as 9/11 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has enormously hindered its capability to play the role of world leader.
Japan is one of the states that is most vulnerable to such damage to U.S. leadership because it does not have any viable strategic options other than remaining a junior alliance partner. As the U.S. reputation has progressively deteriorated since the September 11 attacks, it has become more difficult for allies and friends to follow its lead. It is no coincidence that nearly all of the national leaders who supported the decision to go to war in Iraq suffered fatal political blows later, including Prime Ministers Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, John Howard of Australia, and Tony Blair of the United Kingdom....
October 15, 2007
York University
Abstract:
Through a feminist analysis of the South Korean and Japanese governments' responses to the 1990-2006 redress movement for the 1930-1945 Imperial Japanese WWII military's 'comfort women' prostitution system, this paper examines a number of very pertinent issues. It considers the ways in which perceptions of prostitution have become a part of nationalist discourses and examines how policies related to women's sexuality, including prostitution and rape, become non-issues in wartime. Through a study of the various parties that have governed in both countries during this sixteen year period, this paper comparatively analyzes the South Korean and Japanese governments' denial of this period of military sexual slavery. It argues that the Japanese government's and South Korean government's respective manipulation of the 1990-2006 'comfort women' redress movement is predicated on nationalistic imperatives, no longer related to physical geographical sovereignty, but to ideological sovereignty....
May 10, 2007
Atlantic Council of the United States
Abstract:
The United States has few more important policy goals than eliminating North Korea's nuclear weapons program. The risk that the repressive Pyongyang regime could transfer nuclear weapons and materials to rogue states or terrorist groups weighs particularly heavy on the minds of U.S. policymakers. U.S. negotiators in February 2007 achieved a breakthrough in the Six Party talks towards the goal of reversing Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The "joint agreement" - among the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia - set in motion a process for dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. But this agreement still leaves the parties a long distance from denuclearizing North Korea or resolving other fundamental security, political, and economic issues on the Korean peninsula. The report that follows describes a path and the elements of a comprehensive settlement to achieve the full range of U.S. strategic goals in Korea....
November 20, 2006
Japan Focus
Abstract:
Fresh from a serious setback in Iran, where it lost its controlling stake in the huge Azadegan oilfield, Japan has launched diplomatic efforts in earnest to secure petroleum in neighboring Iraq. Recently, Tokyo invited Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to Japan and they issued a joint communique pledging Japanese assistance for improvements to the oil and gas infrastructure in the war-torn country. Japan specifically pledged loans of about 20 billion yen (US$170 million) to Iraq as part of the $3.5 billion aid package already committed. Iraq is believed to have the world's third-largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia and Iran. Despite its huge potential, however, the country is relatively unexplored after years of sanctions and war. Only a quarter of its 80 discovered fields are pumping oil at present. By extending loans and increasing involvement in the reconstruction process, Tokyo is hoping it can acquire a good share of these massive oil reserves....
Japan 
