IB History

3.7 Historiography – different interpretations

of the outbreak of war

Many reasons have been suggested to explain the outbreak of war in the Far East. They

include the following:

● Japan wanted to establish a system that would allow it to be the dominant economic

power in China and the Far East, and was willing to go to war to achieve this.

● Japan wished to end European imperialism in Asia.

● Japan was pushed to go to war because the US trade embargos were crippling its

economy.

● Japan was concerned that the longer it delayed going to war, the more time the

United States would have to arm itself.

● Events in Europe and Operation Barbarossa made Japan more confi dent about

waging war with the United States.

● Roosevelt imposed trade restrictions on Japan, even though he knew these would

greatly harm Japan.

● Roosevelt insisted that Japan withdraw from China but must have understood that

this was would be seen as an ultimatum and thus lead to war.

Below are the views of a number of historians regarding the main factors of war during

this period:

● Rana Mitter is a British historian and professor of history. He argues that the United

States’ insistence in 1941 that Japan withdraw from China was a crucial factor. He

considers that a diplomatic solution could have been reached if Konoe had remained

prime minister of Japan but that his successor, General Tojo Hideki, was already

planning war and thought it was ‘inevitable’ (Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945,

2014, p. 235).

● Ian Buruma, a writer who specializes in the Far East, states that Tojo grasped the Hull

Note as a pretext for war, but that ‘the Hull Note was just an excuse. The plan for the

attack on Pearl Harbor had already been made’ (Buruma, Inventing Japan 1853–1964,

2004, p. 119).

● Robert Dallek, an American historian and professor of history, argues that the

surprise attack on Pearl Harbor ‘greatly distressed’ Roosevelt, but ‘it also relieved him’

because he no longer had to make decisions as ‘Japan had now made the decision for

him’ (Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–45, 1981, p. 311).

● Antony Best, a British historian, argues that Britain has to take some responsibility

for war, because it wanted to maintain its authority in the Far East and chose to

ignore the rise of Japan as a regional power. In particular, he notes that ‘the sheer

complexity of the events... shows that the idea of Japanese guilt is hard to apply in

the Pacifi c War – it was rather a never-ending struggle between those who “have”

and those who “have not”’ (quoted in Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War, 1997,

pp. 247–48).

● Andrew Crozier, a British historian, suggests that Japan and the United States

had a ‘mutual misunderstanding’ that resulted in ‘mutual underestimation’. Crozier

maintains that while ‘the causes of the war in Europe can be studied virtually without

reference to the Pacifi c war, the causes of the war in the Pacifi c cannot be treated in

isolation from Europe’ (Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War, 1997, p. 256).

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3.7

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In Japan, World War II has many names. In 1990, Bandō Hiroshi from the National

Committee of Japanese Historians wrote an article in which he pointed out how, in

1956, Japanese historian Tsurumi Shunsuke referred to this period as the Fifteen-

Year War (1930–45) comprising the Manchurian War, the China War, and the

Asia-Pacifi c War. According to Bandō, Shunsuke had argued that ‘[they] were not

incidents unrelated to each other’ and that each war was fought because of Japanese

imperialism (Historical Studies in Japan (VII): 1983–1987, 1990). This claim is supported

by other Japanese historians who claimed that the Tanggu Truce, intended to end the

Manchurian Incident in 1933, was referred to by sections of the Japanese army as the

North China Truce, meaning that it applied only to part of the confl ict that had started

in 1931. Another compelling argument is that 41,000 Chinese were killed in battles

fought between 1933 and 1936, suggesting that this was, indeed, a time of continual

(if not continuous) warfare. During the war itself, the name used in Japan was Greater

East Asian War, but this was prohibited by the US authorities who occupied Japan in

1945, stating that the correct (and only) name for the confl ict was the Pacifi c War.

● Niall Ferguson is a British historian and a professor of history in America. His view

is that Japan went to war because it believed it was better to ‘gamble on immediate

war, rather than submit to relative decline in the near future’ (in other words, to risk

being dominated by the United States) (Ferguson, The War of the World, 2006, p. 490).