For those that have visited the Yushukan Museum located adjacent to the highly controversial Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, there is definitely an alternative history of World War II taught in Japan. The majority of people in Japan do believe that the Imperial Japanese militarism was a great folly, but there are people who believe the history taught at the Yushukan Museum that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was to preempt an American attack on Japan and liberate Asian people from western colonialism:
World War II era Japanese zero fighter aircraft at the Yushukan Museum in Tokyo.
The Pearl Harbor attack that led the United States into WWII is normally a historical footnote in Japan, rarely discussed on anniversaries or in depth at schools.
That changed when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27 to offer “comfort to the souls of the victims.”
Most Japanese today view the war as a great folly. The clause in Japan’s constitution that renounces the nation’s right to wage war has taken root so deeply that even new, restrictive laws allowing Japan to defend its allies were viewed with suspicion last year.
However, some divergent perspectives over history remain among two of the world’s closest allies.
Americans are taught that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked sneak attack.
The view among some Japanese, and particularly among some otherwise pro-U.S. alliance conservatives, is that a Western economic embargo forced Japan’s hand.
By 1941, Japan controlled large parts of China and other parts of Asia. In July, its military occupied parts of Southeast Asia, including a key port in what is now Vietnam.
The U.S., Britain and The Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets in their countries, which included access to most of Japan’s oil supply.
“Indeed, the oil embargo cornered Japan,” Emperor Hirohito said in an audio memoir recorded shortly after the 1945 surrender. The memoir was found in 1990 by the Bungei Shunju magazine and then translated by The New York Times.
“Once the situation had come to this point, it was natural that advocacy for going to war became predominant,” Hirohito said. “If, at that time, I suppressed opinions in favor of war, public opinion would have certainly surged, with people asking questions about why Japan should surrender so easily when it had a highly efficient army and navy, well trained over the years.” [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but the best book I have read about the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor is Eri Hotta’s: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?
There was actually a lot of dissenting opinions in Japan, but the militarists eventually were able to convince enough people they could replicate the success of the Russo-Japanese War with a decisive naval victory against the US at Pearl Harbor. As history has shown the bombing of Pearl Harbor became one of the great misjudgments in military history.
Regardless of the history involved it is good to see Prime Minister Abe finally make the visit to Pearl Harbor and hopefully put an end to any remaining hard feelings about World War II.
Short answer no. The US withheld economic support for Japan who was busy gobbling up China and committing atrocities on civilians (see “Rape of Nanjing” and “Unit 731” among many others).
Longer answer is along the lines of Pearl Harbor sneak attack while still negotiating in Washington plus Japanese refusal to surrender when war was obviously lost plus suicidal aircraft attackers (and likely suicidal land attacks to oppose invasion) made Hiroshima and Nagasaki mandatory.
Meanwhile! Japan, freed from their short-sighted militaristic rulers, has become a world leader in many other areas. So it does no good to beat up 21st Century Japanese for acts done by dead people none of us or them ever met.
The staff of the Yushukan Museum is apparently at least partly populated by their equivalent of “Obama Birthers” (mind you, Obama did continue to troll these people and fan the flames), “9/11 Truthers” (especially those who say Bush did it), “Holocaust Deniers” (some people are all about hating joos), and “Scientologists” (and other UFO religionists).
I should add that the Yushukan Museum and the Yasukuni Shrine are funded by a private Japanese organization and not affiliated with the government. This is what allows them to push their slanted viewpoint about the righteousness of Imperial Japan.
@setnaffa, the embargo on oil to Japan by the US is arguably because the Japanese expansion into China was threatening the West’s own colonial interests in China. If Japan would have just held on to Korea and the parts of Manchuria they controlled and not expanded further into China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident the embargo may have never happened and war ultimately avoided. The Imperial Japanese leadership got greedy and expanded their military conquests further into China and Southeast Asia which forced the US to respond with the embargo.
Arguably; but that still doesn’t justify attacking Pearl Harbor. That attack was simply to prevent us from intervening after they attacked the British and Dutch possessions in what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. They wanted resources to fuel their Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere (i.e, get white Europeans out of the colonial business and replace them with dapper sons of Nippon).
And they knew we were the only speed bump left…
Auroraalpha
7 years ago
Short answer, no. The Japanese were such a horrible colonial power that they are reviled in China/Korea and just about anywhere in South East Asia over their atrocities in WW2. Arguably, although “everyone else was doing it” with regards to colonies, the Japanese managed to possibly be the worst of the lot (Perhaps rivaling Belgium in the Kongo?).
Also, if Pearl Harbour is justified, then the Nomonhan Incident is also justified. The context of the eventual attack on Pearl Harbour lies with this incident. With the Japanese Army/Navy split, the Army tried their “Strike North” plan to take Siberian riches back in ’39 way before they tried to go to South East Asia. It culminated in the Battle of Khalkin Ghol in failure. The border skirmish was also another “surprise attack”, albeit on Russia. Also, the USSR could rally and counterattack much faster, while the Japanese Army marched a lot slower than expected.
That being said, it may be an interesting scenario where Pearl Harbour succeeds in achieving surprise, but fails in a similar fashion to the Battle of Khalkin Ghol. In this, the US suffers some casualties, but inflicts sufficient losses on the Japanese Navy that they are unable to conduct further operations. Also, Pearl Harbour is technically avenged, so there is no further need for war. Perhaps under this scenario, Japan may have a negotiated peace.
@Auroraalpha, even if the Imperial Japanese failed with their Pearl Harbor attack I don’t think the US public would ever support a negotiated peace with Japan because they also attacked the Philippines and Guam.
I think a more interesting scenario would be what if the Imperial Japanese had instead waited until the Soviet Union was bogged down with the Nazi invasion and instead attacked into Siberia? Would the US intervene to help the Soviet Union? It seems like they would have had a better chance of winning a war against the Soviets then they would the US, but the Battle of Khalkin Ghol apparently really influenced their decision making to attack the US instead.
Please forgive my butting in again on Christmas Day.
Admiral Nimitz is quoted as saying the attack on Pearl Harbor had the best of possible outcomes. He listed three “great mistakes” the Japanese made; but all were intentional, doctrinal, and unlikely to have even occurred to the Japanese leadership.
However, we would have lost this fight under any circumstances. We might have shot down more than the 29 aircraft; but our aircraft would have been damaged or destroyed and our ships sunk.
We did not have enough operational fighter aircraft to defend against the attack (Roughly 90 vs 353 in two waves, not to mention none were the match for the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” which outnumbered our P-36s and P-40s). We did not have enough operational bombers to inflict significant damage (compare the dismal performance of land-based bombers at the Battle of Midway, six months later… one ship damaged, none sunk). All we could have done was lost more airman. And even if we had our radar tied in with the so-called “Intercept Center”, there was no practiced coordination between units, no one talked to the Navy, and it would have taken a much different set of commanding officers to have all the available aircraft armed and fueled, all the pilots on alert… A type of officer that might not have existed prior to 7 December 1941.
If the US fleet had sortied, it was too slow to do more than be sunk in deep water like Repulse and Prince of Wales a couple days later. And we could easily have lost both Saratoga and Enterprise, the only two pre-war carriers that actually survived the war and the main targets of Nagumo’s bombers. Nimitz suggested we might have lost as many as 38,000 sailors. Very difficult to recover from a blow like that. We might well have lost the war.
As for Japanese losses fighting the Soviets, it seems like maybe Stalin missed purging *all* of his good army officers… 😉
@setaffa, I’m handwaving that all away. In this, the US is prepared to the degree that the Russians were in Khalkin Ghol and the Japanese managed to lose there and then and are forced to recall their invasion fleets. It’s less about the US fleet going out of port, and more about dealing with the repurcussions of a naval “Nomonhan Incident”. I do not believe the Japanese or the Americans can reasonably be expected to make too many different decisions on Dec 7th. The set of decisions required to change requires a fair amount of handwaving, hence why I am less concerned about the “how”, as much as the “what next”.
@GIKorea, you are right that they arranged for practically near-simultaneous attacks throughout the pacific. You’d have to delay those attacks by about a week or so, pending the results of Pearl Harbour to see any effects.
As for the other topic, if the Japanese wait for the Germans, they’d have to wait till after 22 June 1941. You have 3 possible scenarios:, wait till about past Winter ’41 to allow the Russians to maximize material gains; invade with the Germans for maximum surprise; invade slightly after the Germans (probably 3 months or so?) to allow STAVKA to redirect military forces from Siberia to the Germans and industry eastwards, maximizing confusion. The question then becomes one of “when” the Japanese make that decision. The strike south plan was pretty much already in effect by early ’41, so you’d probably have to have no Nomonhan Incident in ’39 to force the Army to shelve their plans. That also means no Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and the Japanese do not implement too much of their army reforms post-Nomonhan. With that being said, the Russian garrisons in the Far East are still substantial. The Russians probably still out-mechanize the Japanese. Assuming the Japanese commit their best generals to the fight, they’d arguably have better leaders. That only leaves the question of Japanese logistics in question. The Japanese Army doctrine isn’t really built to support a fast mechanized force on the open plains and rolling hills. If the Japanese lose, it will be due to this. The Japanese will have to rely on the shock of the attack and confusion to break the Soviets before they can win. I am not sure whether the Russians will break in time or shift too many troops to counter this potential offensive. Also, the question becomes of who commits too many troops to the area. The Russians can’t or they will suffer in the West. The Japanese cannot really do so either, or they suffer in China. Either way, it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Also, while the US may not go to war over the USSR, will they do so over China? America has had a huge obsession over China during this period. Even with the isolationist stance, most of that isolationism is directed at Europe and the Old World. Asia is a different story, as seen through American ventures in China and the Philippines. I think that if you want to halt the US from intervening, you have to necessarily prevent the Japanese from invading China and send that mass to Mongolia instead. Can the Japanese be realistically expected to restrain their Army from ’37-’41 to achieve that objective?
@auroraalpha, another way to look at it, is the Japanese could have withdrawn back to Manchuria and exited Southeast Asia to appease the United States and end the embargo back in 1941.
This would have been a great embarrassment to the Japanese Army, but what if plans were put in motion for a Russian Far East campaign to appease them?
The Japanese knew that the Nazis were going to invade Russia and needed time to redirect their industrial base to build the tanks needed to fight the Soviets. It seems that by summer 1942 they could have been ready to launch a campaign against the Soviets at the same time the Nazis were attacking Russia. Still no guarantees of victory, but it seems going against one weakened Soviet Union would have more chance of success then going up against the United States and its allies.
I think the temptation of raw materials from the “Dutch East Indies” overrode the Japanese “fear” of the USA (who they saw as decadent and weak), plus their are few Asians (or Americans for that matter) willing to embarrass themselves like the Japanese Army would have needed to do. Their attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines was “just business”.
@setnaffa, from reading Hotta’s book she writes that the Japanese Army leadership did not want to withdraw from the contested areas of China and from Southeast Asia as the US demanded. It would basically be too much of a loss of face to them to back down to the US.
Instead the Japanese Army was confident Japan could replicate the naval success during the Battle of Tsushima that allowed them to win the Russo-Japanese War despite a lot of misgivings within Japan. Interestingly Admiral Yamamoto fought in that decisive 1905 naval battle and was severely wounded. They also believed that any shortages in production capacity and manpower compared to the US could be offset by the warrior mindset of Japan’s military.
There was a lot of bad assumption made by the Imperial Japanese Army that many in the Navy like Yamamoto recognized, but in the end went along with it. To me it seems the critics of the Imperial Japanese Army’s plan to attack the US were not willing to be the guy labeled as an appeaser of the West. Being the guy to advocate withdrawing from contested areas of China and Southeast Asia would have took great courage because of how humiliating a withdrawal would have been after all the blood already spilled to take it. Instead the critics all looked at each other to be the guy to stand up strongly against the plan and when no one did they had no choice but to go along with it as war became inevitable.
Short answer no. The US withheld economic support for Japan who was busy gobbling up China and committing atrocities on civilians (see “Rape of Nanjing” and “Unit 731” among many others).
Longer answer is along the lines of Pearl Harbor sneak attack while still negotiating in Washington plus Japanese refusal to surrender when war was obviously lost plus suicidal aircraft attackers (and likely suicidal land attacks to oppose invasion) made Hiroshima and Nagasaki mandatory.
Meanwhile! Japan, freed from their short-sighted militaristic rulers, has become a world leader in many other areas. So it does no good to beat up 21st Century Japanese for acts done by dead people none of us or them ever met.
The staff of the Yushukan Museum is apparently at least partly populated by their equivalent of “Obama Birthers” (mind you, Obama did continue to troll these people and fan the flames), “9/11 Truthers” (especially those who say Bush did it), “Holocaust Deniers” (some people are all about hating joos), and “Scientologists” (and other UFO religionists).
I should add that the Yushukan Museum and the Yasukuni Shrine are funded by a private Japanese organization and not affiliated with the government. This is what allows them to push their slanted viewpoint about the righteousness of Imperial Japan.
@setnaffa, the embargo on oil to Japan by the US is arguably because the Japanese expansion into China was threatening the West’s own colonial interests in China. If Japan would have just held on to Korea and the parts of Manchuria they controlled and not expanded further into China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident the embargo may have never happened and war ultimately avoided. The Imperial Japanese leadership got greedy and expanded their military conquests further into China and Southeast Asia which forced the US to respond with the embargo.
Arguably; but that still doesn’t justify attacking Pearl Harbor. That attack was simply to prevent us from intervening after they attacked the British and Dutch possessions in what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. They wanted resources to fuel their Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere (i.e, get white Europeans out of the colonial business and replace them with dapper sons of Nippon).
And they knew we were the only speed bump left…
Short answer, no. The Japanese were such a horrible colonial power that they are reviled in China/Korea and just about anywhere in South East Asia over their atrocities in WW2. Arguably, although “everyone else was doing it” with regards to colonies, the Japanese managed to possibly be the worst of the lot (Perhaps rivaling Belgium in the Kongo?).
Also, if Pearl Harbour is justified, then the Nomonhan Incident is also justified. The context of the eventual attack on Pearl Harbour lies with this incident. With the Japanese Army/Navy split, the Army tried their “Strike North” plan to take Siberian riches back in ’39 way before they tried to go to South East Asia. It culminated in the Battle of Khalkin Ghol in failure. The border skirmish was also another “surprise attack”, albeit on Russia. Also, the USSR could rally and counterattack much faster, while the Japanese Army marched a lot slower than expected.
That being said, it may be an interesting scenario where Pearl Harbour succeeds in achieving surprise, but fails in a similar fashion to the Battle of Khalkin Ghol. In this, the US suffers some casualties, but inflicts sufficient losses on the Japanese Navy that they are unable to conduct further operations. Also, Pearl Harbour is technically avenged, so there is no further need for war. Perhaps under this scenario, Japan may have a negotiated peace.
@Auroraalpha, even if the Imperial Japanese failed with their Pearl Harbor attack I don’t think the US public would ever support a negotiated peace with Japan because they also attacked the Philippines and Guam.
I think a more interesting scenario would be what if the Imperial Japanese had instead waited until the Soviet Union was bogged down with the Nazi invasion and instead attacked into Siberia? Would the US intervene to help the Soviet Union? It seems like they would have had a better chance of winning a war against the Soviets then they would the US, but the Battle of Khalkin Ghol apparently really influenced their decision making to attack the US instead.
Please forgive my butting in again on Christmas Day.
Admiral Nimitz is quoted as saying the attack on Pearl Harbor had the best of possible outcomes. He listed three “great mistakes” the Japanese made; but all were intentional, doctrinal, and unlikely to have even occurred to the Japanese leadership.
However, we would have lost this fight under any circumstances. We might have shot down more than the 29 aircraft; but our aircraft would have been damaged or destroyed and our ships sunk.
We did not have enough operational fighter aircraft to defend against the attack (Roughly 90 vs 353 in two waves, not to mention none were the match for the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” which outnumbered our P-36s and P-40s). We did not have enough operational bombers to inflict significant damage (compare the dismal performance of land-based bombers at the Battle of Midway, six months later… one ship damaged, none sunk). All we could have done was lost more airman. And even if we had our radar tied in with the so-called “Intercept Center”, there was no practiced coordination between units, no one talked to the Navy, and it would have taken a much different set of commanding officers to have all the available aircraft armed and fueled, all the pilots on alert… A type of officer that might not have existed prior to 7 December 1941.
If the US fleet had sortied, it was too slow to do more than be sunk in deep water like Repulse and Prince of Wales a couple days later. And we could easily have lost both Saratoga and Enterprise, the only two pre-war carriers that actually survived the war and the main targets of Nagumo’s bombers. Nimitz suggested we might have lost as many as 38,000 sailors. Very difficult to recover from a blow like that. We might well have lost the war.
As for Japanese losses fighting the Soviets, it seems like maybe Stalin missed purging *all* of his good army officers… 😉
@setaffa, I’m handwaving that all away. In this, the US is prepared to the degree that the Russians were in Khalkin Ghol and the Japanese managed to lose there and then and are forced to recall their invasion fleets. It’s less about the US fleet going out of port, and more about dealing with the repurcussions of a naval “Nomonhan Incident”. I do not believe the Japanese or the Americans can reasonably be expected to make too many different decisions on Dec 7th. The set of decisions required to change requires a fair amount of handwaving, hence why I am less concerned about the “how”, as much as the “what next”.
@GIKorea, you are right that they arranged for practically near-simultaneous attacks throughout the pacific. You’d have to delay those attacks by about a week or so, pending the results of Pearl Harbour to see any effects.
As for the other topic, if the Japanese wait for the Germans, they’d have to wait till after 22 June 1941. You have 3 possible scenarios:, wait till about past Winter ’41 to allow the Russians to maximize material gains; invade with the Germans for maximum surprise; invade slightly after the Germans (probably 3 months or so?) to allow STAVKA to redirect military forces from Siberia to the Germans and industry eastwards, maximizing confusion. The question then becomes one of “when” the Japanese make that decision. The strike south plan was pretty much already in effect by early ’41, so you’d probably have to have no Nomonhan Incident in ’39 to force the Army to shelve their plans. That also means no Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and the Japanese do not implement too much of their army reforms post-Nomonhan. With that being said, the Russian garrisons in the Far East are still substantial. The Russians probably still out-mechanize the Japanese. Assuming the Japanese commit their best generals to the fight, they’d arguably have better leaders. That only leaves the question of Japanese logistics in question. The Japanese Army doctrine isn’t really built to support a fast mechanized force on the open plains and rolling hills. If the Japanese lose, it will be due to this. The Japanese will have to rely on the shock of the attack and confusion to break the Soviets before they can win. I am not sure whether the Russians will break in time or shift too many troops to counter this potential offensive. Also, the question becomes of who commits too many troops to the area. The Russians can’t or they will suffer in the West. The Japanese cannot really do so either, or they suffer in China. Either way, it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Also, while the US may not go to war over the USSR, will they do so over China? America has had a huge obsession over China during this period. Even with the isolationist stance, most of that isolationism is directed at Europe and the Old World. Asia is a different story, as seen through American ventures in China and the Philippines. I think that if you want to halt the US from intervening, you have to necessarily prevent the Japanese from invading China and send that mass to Mongolia instead. Can the Japanese be realistically expected to restrain their Army from ’37-’41 to achieve that objective?
@auroraalpha, another way to look at it, is the Japanese could have withdrawn back to Manchuria and exited Southeast Asia to appease the United States and end the embargo back in 1941.
This would have been a great embarrassment to the Japanese Army, but what if plans were put in motion for a Russian Far East campaign to appease them?
The Japanese knew that the Nazis were going to invade Russia and needed time to redirect their industrial base to build the tanks needed to fight the Soviets. It seems that by summer 1942 they could have been ready to launch a campaign against the Soviets at the same time the Nazis were attacking Russia. Still no guarantees of victory, but it seems going against one weakened Soviet Union would have more chance of success then going up against the United States and its allies.
I think the temptation of raw materials from the “Dutch East Indies” overrode the Japanese “fear” of the USA (who they saw as decadent and weak), plus their are few Asians (or Americans for that matter) willing to embarrass themselves like the Japanese Army would have needed to do. Their attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines was “just business”.
@setnaffa, from reading Hotta’s book she writes that the Japanese Army leadership did not want to withdraw from the contested areas of China and from Southeast Asia as the US demanded. It would basically be too much of a loss of face to them to back down to the US.
Instead the Japanese Army was confident Japan could replicate the naval success during the Battle of Tsushima that allowed them to win the Russo-Japanese War despite a lot of misgivings within Japan. Interestingly Admiral Yamamoto fought in that decisive 1905 naval battle and was severely wounded. They also believed that any shortages in production capacity and manpower compared to the US could be offset by the warrior mindset of Japan’s military.
There was a lot of bad assumption made by the Imperial Japanese Army that many in the Navy like Yamamoto recognized, but in the end went along with it. To me it seems the critics of the Imperial Japanese Army’s plan to attack the US were not willing to be the guy labeled as an appeaser of the West. Being the guy to advocate withdrawing from contested areas of China and Southeast Asia would have took great courage because of how humiliating a withdrawal would have been after all the blood already spilled to take it. Instead the critics all looked at each other to be the guy to stand up strongly against the plan and when no one did they had no choice but to go along with it as war became inevitable.