Pearl Harbor -- Why Japan Attacked

By Dana Graham.

With the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we will doubtless see many articles about it and even descriptions of the attack, casualties, and pictures of ships blowing up or under water. I would like to offer a slightly different perspective – how Japan saw this as their most viable course of action given the nearly inevitable results:

The roots of the Pearl Harbor attack go back to the early 17th Century when Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, anxious to protect their culture and national identity, went into almost total isolation but for a few European countries allowed trading access to Nagasaki and a couple other ports. This continued until 1853 when American Commodore Matthew Perry, brother of the hero of Lake Erie Oliver Hazard Perry of War of 1812 fame, sailed into Tokyo Bay in the USS Wyoming and, at the point of that ship’s guns, forced Japan into opening up to the world.

This suddenly brought home to the last of the Tokugawas (still in power) how far behind the rest of the world Japan had fallen industrially and militarily during their isolation. If they were going to defend their country against “corrupting foreign influence”, they were going to have to enter into a crash industrialization program with the primary goal of making Japan’s military competitive with major world powers. The balance of Japan’s history thru 1945 was the story of their efforts to catch up.

In 1868, the Emperor Meiji was put on the throne (the Meiji Restoration), charged with getting Japan into a position where they could defend themselves. They modeled themselves after the premier military powers of the time – the Navy after Great Britain, and the Army after a newly united Germany. Japan sent representatives to Britain and Germany to take notes so that Japan could copy them. The #1 problem was that Japan had almost none of the natural resources in the homeland that they would need for industrialization – oil, rubber, tin, etc. These were available in the Far East, but were in what were now the colonies of European powers – France, England, the Netherlands, etc – colonized during the very time Japan was looking inward. If Japan was to industrialize and militarize on a world power scale, she was now going to have to fight for those resources/territories. But Japan needed ships and guns now, so she basically had them made in Britain, France, and Germany.

Japan began small, with a war against China in 1894-5 in which they handily defeated a disunified, corrupt China. The ostensible goal was to stabilize Korea which, at the time, was really messed up politically, economically, and in just about every other way. But it also provided a dry run for later adventures.

***Russian fleet at Port Artur prior to attack***

In 1904 Japan declared war against Russia . . . following a surprise attack on the Russian naval installations at Port Arthur 3 hours before (does this sound familiar?). The areas of contention were still Korea but now also Manchuria, which had some of the resources Japan would need for industrialization. The war lasted about a year, with the major decisive battle in Tsushima Strait, where the Japanese fleet obliterated the Russian one, forcing the Russians to ask President Teddy Roosevelt to convene a peace conference.

***Japanese battle line at the Battle of Tsushima Strait***

Their victory in this war shocked the world, elevated Japan to world power status, and had a lasting impact on their military strategy thru 1945.

***Treaty of Portmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War***

Skipping ahead to the Versailles Treat ending WW 1, Japan was miffed that, as an ally on the winning side, they got very little of benefit to them other than a few former German Pacific mandates. At the Washington Naval Conference following the war (thank you Warren Harding) Japan again felt disrespected by having to accept a naval tonnage ratio of 3/5 of either the US or Britain. Those ratios were re-affirmed at the London Naval Conference of 1930, shortly after which Japan said “heck with it” (in Japanese, I’m sure) and invaded China. This 2nd Sino-Japanese War lasted until 1945 and was basically the equivalent to Japan that Russia was to Germany in soaking up a lot of military resources.

***Matsuoka walks out. of League of Nations***

The problem was that now they were treading on the toes of the western powers who had a lot of interests in China. Relations with the West deteriorated steadily during the 1930’s, a high point (or low point, depending upon your perspective) being Foreign Minister Matsuoka’s walking out of the League of Nations Assembly after it voted in 1933 to condemn Japan’s Manchuria incursion. Japan’s aggression in China continued unabated, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking and the sinking of the US gunboat Panay later that year, which was there to protect US citizens.

***US gunboat Panay sunk in the Yangtze River***

Europe went to war 9/1/39 with Germany’s invasion of Poland with the rest of the continent falling under German domination within a year.

***German invasion of Poland made headlines in 1939***

Now those colonies whose resources Japan coveted were close to defenseless and ripe for the picking with the “parent countries” having surrendered to Germany. By July 1941 the Roosevelt administration had had enough of Japan’s aggression in China and froze Japan’s assets in the US, followed by an embargo on oil in August. The idea was that that would make it impossible for Japan to continue its aggression; but what it did was force Japan into a corner – by the time the Pearl Harbor attack came, Japan had an 18 month supply of oil with which to conduct the war. It was now or never.

Planning for the attack began in July with the steel embargo. There were several Japanese higher ups who were familiar with the United States, not least of which was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who had attended Harvard University in the early 1920’s, as part of Japan’s efforts to learn Western technology. This small cadre of (generally military) understood that defeating the United States (let alone the rest of the Allies) was a tall order, and Japan’s only chance was a short war in which the US suffered such a devastating attack that it sued for peace – a la Russia in 1905. If you consider the world situation in the last half of 1941, it could hardly have been more favorable for Japan – the European colonies in SE Asia were ripe for the picking with the mother countries flat on their backsides under German occupation, and Germany looked unbeatable in Europe with England and Russia also likely to fall. The obvious fly in the ointment of a “Strike South” toward the coveted resources, as it was known in Japanese planning circles, was the Philippines, an American possession. It was unlikely, in the Japanese view, that the US would stand idly by while the Philippines were either bypassed or conquered, so what better plan than to take out the US Pacific Fleet recently moved to Pearl Harbor which, according to Japanese estimates, would give them a year to complete their conquest of the resource-rich East Indies plus develop a line of island fortresses to defend the newly won empire?

Japan, driven to over-confidence by the fact that they had never lost a war, did not question the notion that they would win this one. The problem was that they had never fought a competent Western military, and centuries of isolation had denied them a realistic view of what they were up against.

Adm Yamamoto famously told Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and other leadership “I will run wild for six months to a year, but after that, I have utterly no confidence”. Yamamoto’s prediction came true almost exactly 6 months later when Japan suffered a devastating defeat at Midway. They were on the defensive for the rest of the War."

The effect of the surprise attack, as we now know, was just the opposite of what the Japanese predicted, galvanizing the US into a unified war of revenge. The Japanese declaration of war was intended to arrive in Washington 30 minutes before the attack but, like overly-complicated Japanese battle plans during the war, it was dependent upon everything going as planned, which it did not. In fact, the US code breakers/translators were faster at deciphering the cable than was the staff at the Japanese embassy.

***Cordell Hull with Japanese ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu***

US Secretary of State Cordell Hull had the Declaration of War and knew of the Pearl Harbor attack before he met with the Japanese diplomats, and the old Tennessee lawyer had time to prepare a blistering greeting, which began “In all my fifty years of public service, I have never seen such a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehood and distortions -- infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them”, after receiving which the Japanese diplomats slinked away.