Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (1981)

This is a book that looks at the war along the lines of cultural differences between the two nations, and it's filled with quite a bit of interesting information.

Most books talk about the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, naming it Manchuko, but this book details the plans before the actual takeover. The idea was to resettle Japanese into the Manchuria area and then take over its economic development (to favor Japan, of course). A plan made in 1937 was scheduled for some twenty years, to resettle one million Japanese households into the Manchuria area, and about half a million Japanese actually ended up migrating to Manchuria before the end of the war, some 250,000 of which were farmers.

Another plan, made a year earlier, looked at economic development of north China under the control of Japan and Manchuko.

A lot of the justification, on the Japanese side, for the attack on China was to free it, and other Asian areas, of domination by the western powers. Sort of an “Asia for Asians” concept, with the Japanese at the tip of the pyramid of power.

One of the early things to tip the balance of whether or not there would be war with the US was the US freezing of Japanese assets, and the revocation of all export licenses for shipping oil to Japan. The Dutch authorities in the East stopped their shipping of oil to Japan, and this put Japan under a lot of pressure since it didn't have its own oil supplies. It was sort of like “how dare you do this to us” response from Japan. (Getting the oil through peaceful means rather the invasion of other countries didn't seem to be considered very strongly, though.)

I've read elsewhere that Yamamoto, the great Japanese admiral, said he would run wild pretty much for a year but after that things would turn against Japan due to the strength of the US and that's just what happened. A year after the attack on Pearl Harbor things were already starting to go badly for Japan. A good part of the problem was the effectiveness of US submarines, which were sinking Japanese shipping faster than anticipated. The Japanese navy was finding it was not getting ships replaced fast enough.

One really interesting thing in the book is that the US was considering, even in 1942, what to do after the war was over, and what to do with Japanese territories. More detailed plans were begun in May of 1943. The meetings included talks about what to do with the Emperor and the militarist group after the war was over.

If they kept the Emperor, the thinking ran, than he could be used to “rally inform-minded forces within Japan to reconstruct the country along peaceful paths.” In other words, he would become a front man for US policy in Japan.

A Navy man, Captain H.L. Pence, argued that Japan should be destroyed as a power and as a culture, both. He called for “the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.”

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