THE INFLUENCE OF MATSUOKA YOSUKE IN US-JAPANESE RELATIONS PRECEDING THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR, 1930–1942
To what extent did Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka’s pro-Nazi stance influence Japan’s decision to attack the U.S.?
Abstract
History reveals that all nations encounter a crossroads in their collective progress, one that insists upon the nation to decide between momentous courses of action to determine the security of their future. Such a debacle is a fit gestalt of Japan’s decision to attack the U.S. on the fateful morning of December 7, 1941—the day that will live in infamy as the day Japan answered their crossroads. Faced with a choice of whether to influence the Might remove this later
Japan entered the Second World War Japan allied with the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy by signing the Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940. This proved to be critically blunderous in mending the already-strained relations between the two countries, owing to a misunderstanding among the Japanese leadership of the American character. Matsuoka pushed for a more aggressive and flaunting manner when corresponding with the US, reasoning that such a bluff would earn the respect of the Americans. Quite contrarily, this approach to diplomacy catalyzed their animosity toward each other and, for the short term, annulled any chances of rapprochement. If one thing was certain, it was that there was an equally strong sense of violation
The Japanese decision to attack the U.S. on December 7, 1941, came in the midst of ongoing negotiations between the two nations Tripartite Pact, Germany and Italy declare war on U.S.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Pacific War was the theater of WWII waged between Imperial Japan and the United States of America across East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. The war spans a period in between December 11, 1941—when Japan triggered hostilities by attacking the U.S. Pearl Harbor naval base—to August 15, 1945—the Emperor’s announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender. Death toll estimates reach 30 million (of which three-quarters were civilian casualties), the decline of colonial possessions, and the first use of atomic weapons in warfare. In the years preceding the war, the Japanese Empire pursued an aggressive imperializing mission across Asia to create what Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke euphemized as the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”, an economic bloc lead by Japan. They were in a process of consolidating Manchuria into their own puppet-state, Manchukuo, and were fighting a stalemated war against the Chinese.
On September 27, 1940, the Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which was essentially a mutual security agreement. Hitler was waging a destructive war against Britain and was pressured by foreign incursion, primarily U.S. intervention. He was incredibly concerned about the U.S. as the Roosevelt administration had already pursued aggressive aid agreements with the Allies and wanted to intervene in Europe, and a Russian attack from the east. Hitler tried to convince the Japanese to attack the USSR from the eastern front, promising them the oil resources they needed. The Japanese military refused in 1941, citing concerns over the Nazi\’s racial ideologies as well as their previous experiences in \’37 and \’38 with the Russian military, possibly saving the Russians from German domination. This left them without the proper oil needed. The real strategy was now for the theory of self-determination
In 1941 Japan pursued a southern strategy which would focus on taking the colonies of Southeast Asia, including British Singapore, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, etc. This threatened U.S. interests in the region, which lead to an economic embargo by the US against the Japanese. The United States froze all Japanese assets in the US and slapped an embargo on exports to Japan, among other things. Although the Japanese did pursue legitimate diplomatic means of resolving the tension throughout this time, part of this southern strategy was to take over the Philippines, which was essentially a ward state under the United States.
In November 1941, the Japanese agreed that if negotiations failed, they would go to war with the United States. To do so, they would have to address the strategic threat of Pearl Harbor, which had a significant buildup of US naval forces. The Roosevelt Administration was focused on Europe, and essentially rebuffed the Japanese\’s negotiations. The Japanese then decided to attack Pearl Harbor, preemptively, which would theoretically disable the US fleet enough for them to continue their southern strategy.
Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union placed Japan in a conflicting position. It froze the Japanese leadership into icy silence. The official response was that there would be no response.
Upon hearing the news of Germany’s wholly unexpected mobilization in Russia’s western front, codenamed “Operation Barbarossa” by the Nazis, Prime Minister Konoe saw this to be a ripe opportunity for Japan to abandon the Tripartite Pact and sent an aide to Army Minister Tojo Hideki to discuss such an action. Tojo, however, staunchly opposed such a cunning betrayal, reasoning that Japan must uphold their alliance with Germany to protect Japan’s honor.
Main reasons why Japan attacked the U.S. below
I) Imperialism: Japan’s leaders had long believed, and inculcated in their people a belief, that the Japanese Yamato were a superior “race”, the descendants of gods, and entitled to rule over the world (“bringing the four corners under one roof”). Thus as they emerged from isolation after the humiliation imposed upon them by the US fleet under Admiral Perry, they set about modernizing (almost) everything, becoming much more industrialized, more urban, transforming the forms of their government into what looked like a parliamentary democracy with a monarchy (resembling Great Britain’s, or the German model developed under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I), and modernizing their military and navy, the army along German lines with a lot of German advisors, and the navy along British Royal Navy lines with a lot of RN advisors. Once they had made a lot of progress in this they decided to assert themselves in the world, and since the Europeans and Americans were heavily involved in Asian colonial possessions (especially the British with India, Malaya, Hong Kong, but also the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies islands, the French in Indochina, and the US in the Philippines), plus all those nations had staked out special privileges in parts of China, the Japanese decided this was the thing to do to be a modern nation. So they embarked upon a series of campaigns to enlarge their territory, taking full control of nearby islands (Okinawa, the Bonins including Iwo Jima, etc), and then expanding further via a war with China, a war with Imperial Russia, and joining the Allies in WW I against Germany so that they could take possession of the German enclave in China plus many Pacific islands the Germans had claimed.
After WWI the Japanese plans for further expansion ran into several problems. First, a lot of the territory they wanted “belonged” to someone else, a powerful potential enemy they were not ready to fight. Second, in the aftermath of WW I the financially stressed European nations, especially the victors, sought to prevent future wars and to cut costs by engaging in arms control negotiations. The Japanese participated in these discussions, and found to their dismay that they were, in their view, being treated as second-class powers. At the time the biggest symbol of world military might was a fleet of battleships, and the US and Great Britain brokered a treaty that cut down the mighty RN from over 40 battleships that had fought at Jutland (so many older ships were scrapped and a lot of planned new construction was stopped), stopped US plans for a massive expansion of their fleet, etc. The ratio of capital ships, which at the time meant battleships and battlecruisers, was to be 10:10:7 for the US, Britain, and Japan in that order, with even smaller numbers for the French and Italian navies. The Germans were prohibited from having any modern battleships. The US and Britain argued that they had to cover the entire world’s oceans whereas Japan’s interests were only in the Pacific, to justify the lower number of such ships allowed to the Imperial Japanese Navy, but while the Japanese eventually signed they were resentful. This more or less ended the close alliance and relations between the IJN and the RN.
The somewhat democratic nature of the Japanese government was progressively undermined during the 1920s and especially the early 1930s by the rise of a highly militant, nationalistic young officer corps in the Imperial Army. As Japan’s industries were heavily dependent on imports of raw materials including iron ore, other metals, and petroleum, and Japan’s growing population needed more food than the Japanese could produce locally, the government leaders and the Army leaders looked at their colonies as sources of both food and materials for industry and decided that they needed even more. The Army had a group of officers for whom nationalism outweighed any sense of duty to the Constitution or civilian authority, and, viewing China as weak and backward, the Chinese as an inferior people and culture, they took their opportunities and began an aggressive war, seizing Manchuria (which the Chinese didn’t securely maintain anyway). Japanese armed forces established a puppet state, Manchuoko—a fiefdom of the Kwangtung Army. The officers disobeyed orders from their senior leaders and from the government. When Prime Ministers and Army Ministers tried to rein them in, they started a campaign of assassination, and the Japanese court system either didn’t prosecute the perpetrators or gave them light sentences because their ‘patriotic’ actions were met with a
Thus Japan fell into a somewhat fascist-like state in which the military dominated the government, and increasingly it limited the press, civil rights, and other liberties in the name of patriotism. The Constitution required that the Army Minister be a serving officer, ditto the Navy Minister, and the resignation of either of these figures would bring down the Cabinet and force the Emperor to find a new Prime Minister to reorganize the government. Thus the military held ultimate power over the civilian government, no matter who had a majority in the Diet.
II) The US, China, and Japan: The US had long had a romantic as well as predatory relationship with China. We opposed European domination there because it inhibited our ability to make money by trade with China, plus so many American 19th century and early 20th century Christian missionaries had gone there that religious evangelists felt a strong attachment to China. This was both epitomized by, and then further stimulated by, the novels of Pearl Buck and others like her. Thus when Japan began to behave aggressively toward China, the US viewed this as bad behavior, and we made a lot of objections. During the 1920s this was not much of a factor in US-Japanese relations, but after the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 it became more of an irritant. Of course the Great Depression occupied the US and the Japanese government to a considerable degree in the early 30′s, and the Japanese solution to their economic woes was in part to further expand their empire.
In 1937 the Japanese military again went “off the reservation” and against orders began a new aggression against China. The US, by now under the leadership of FDR, was strongly against this, and not only remonstrated with the Japanese but began to consider the Japanese as potentially hostile. This fit with FDR’s view of Hitler and Mussolini, and he regarded the Japanese as of the same ilk. He began to reverse the American policy of not reinforcing and modernizing the military installations we had in the Philippines, and on Wake Island and Midway, although the US was limited by treaties which pledged not to fortify those places. (The Japanese were pledged not to fortify the islands they had taken from the Germans after WW I under League of Nations mandates, but they cheated, just as they ended up cheating on the naval treaties).
III) The Chinese war goes badly: From 1937 the war in China came to resemble, in modern terms, the US experience in Vietnam. The Japanese never lost a battle, they took territory, but they could not “win”; Chiang and Mao retreated but never surrendered, and the Japanese were slowly bleeding men and money and oil reserves and metal for planes and tanks, etc. As they became more obviously brutal to the rest of the world, the US objections grew, until in the end FDR moved the Pacific fleet to Hawaii as a gesture of deterrence, reinstated MacArthur as an active US officer and instructed him to build a modern Filipino military, and otherwise took actions to protect US trade routes and US facilities such as at Wake and Midway. The Japanese viewed these as threatening gestures. Ultimately, as relations deteriorated further, FDR put in place an embargo on materials that would support the Japanese war, including steel, aluminum, other metals and ores, and, most importantly, petroleum. He also got the Dutch, who by now were a government in exile in Britain with their country occupied by Hitler, to also embargo their oil. The Japanese faced a crisis: they could not maintain their campaigns in China without oil and metals, and they had no resources sufficient to themselves. They resolved, after a lot of discussion, to go take the Dutch islands, and to get Malaya from the British for its tin and its rubber, two other essential commodities. They were inhibited from going north into Siberia by a punishing small campaign they had against USSR troops led by Zhukhov, who badly defeated the Kwangtung Army forces.
IV) Pearl Harbor: So, having resolved to take what they needed in the western Pacific, they examined the risks. The Philippines lie right on the seaways between Malay, Indochina, Indonesia, and Japan; a US fleet and US air force in the Philippines could interdict Japanese shipping along those routes. So any attack had to include taking the Philippines (or so they reasoned). Yamamoto, by now in command of the IJN’s main fleet, reasoned that they would lose a war to the US, unless they could knock out the Pacific fleet and then convince the US to sign a peace treaty. He therefore developed the Pearl Harbor attack plan and, after a lot of negotiations, sold it to the Imperial Army leaders who by now openly ran the government (Tojo was Prime Minister) and, not incidentally, to Hirohito.
http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-ww2/pearl-harbor
From History.com: Pearl Harbor appeared to be a huge success for Japan. It was followed by rapid Japanese conquests in Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, Malaya and New Guinea. Yet in the long term, the attack was strategically catastrophic. The ‘sleeping giant’ had been awoken, and in America, a sense of fury now accompanied the mobilisation for war of the world’s most powerful economy. The losses at Pearl Harbor would soon be more than made good, and used to take a terrible vengeance on Japan.
Links:
- http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/speech-analysis-franklin-roosevelt-pearl-harbor-fdr-infamy/
- http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/real-reason-japanese-attacked-pearl-harbor/#!
- https://archive.org/details/HVKaltenbornPearlHarbor
- https://prezi.com/fuapk1-ltf2m/fdrs-pearl-harbor-address-rhetorical-analysis/