Commodore Perry’s mission was not the first American overture to the Japanese. In the 1830s, the Far Eastern squadron of the U.S. Navy sent several missions from its regional base in Guangzhou (Canton), China, but in each case, the Japanese did not permit them to land, and they lacked the authority from the U.S. Government to force the issue. In 1851, President Millard Fillmore authorized a formal naval expedition to Japan to return shipwrecked Japanese sailors and request that Americans stranded in Japan be returned to the United States.
Perry first sailed to the Ryukyus and the Bonin Islands southwest and southeast of the main Japanese islands, claiming territory for the United States, and demanding that the people in both places assist him. He then sailed north to Edo (Tokyo) Bay, carrying a letter from the U.S. President addressed to the Emperor of Japan. By addressing the letter to the Emperor, the United States demonstrated its lack of knowledge about the Japanese government and society. At that time, the Japanese emperor was little more than a figurehead, and the true leadership of Japan was in the hands of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
His mission was to complete an agreement with the Japanese Government for the protection of shipwrecked or stranded Americans and to open one or more ports for supplies and refueling. The following spring, Perry returned with an even larger squadron to receive Japan’s answer.
The Japanese grudgingly agreed to Perry’s demands, and the two sides signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854. According to the terms of the treaty, Japan would protect stranded seamen and open two ports for refueling and provisioning American ships: Shimoda and Hakodate. Japan also gave the United States the right to appoint consuls to live in these port cities, a privilege not previously granted to foreign nations. This treaty was not a commercial treaty, and it did not guarantee the right to trade with Japan. Still, in addition to providing for distressed American ships in Japanese waters, it contained a most-favored-nation clause, so that all future concessions Japan granted to other foreign powers would also be granted to the United States. As a result, Perry’s treaty provided an opening that would allow future American contact and trade with Japan.
There were several reasons why the United States became interested in revitalizing contact between Japan and the West in the mid-19th century. First, the combination of the opening of Chinese ports to regular trade and the annexation of California, creating an American port on the Pacific, ensured that there would be a steady stream of maritime traffic between North America and Asia. Then, as American traders in the Pacific replaced sailing ships with steam ships, they needed to secure coaling stations, where they could stop to take on provisions and fuel while making the long trip from the United States to China. The combination of its advantageous geographic position and rumors that Japan held vast deposits of coal increased the appeal of establishing commercial and diplomatic contacts with the Japanese. Additionally, the American whaling industry had pushed into the North Pacific by the mid-18th century, and sought safe harbors, assistance in case of shipwrecks, and reliable supply stations. In the years leading up to the Perry mission, a number of American sailors found themselves shipwrecked and stranded on Japanese shores, and tales of their mistreatment at the hands of the unwelcoming Japanese spread through the merchant community and across the United States.
The same combination of economic considerations and belief in Manifest Destiny that motivated U.S. expansion across the North American continent also drove American merchants and missionaries to journey across the Pacific. At the time, many Americans believed that they had a special responsibility to modernize and civilize the Chinese and Japanese. In the case of Japan, missionaries felt that Protestant Christianity would be accepted where Catholicism had generally been rejected. Other Americans argued that, even if the Japanese were unreceptive to Western ideals, forcing them to interact and trade with the world was a necessity that would ultimately benefit both nations.
Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.Source Credit: “The United States and the Opening to Japan, 1853” | Office of the Historian, Department of State.
At the beginning of the Edo Period, Daimyo Hideyoshi had grand visions of a Pan-Asia empire that included China. Under the leadership of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the country set clear restrictions that mostly isolated Japan from face-to-face contact with the world. The nation remained open to commercial trade but not to social corruption from outside influences. Through the Dutch in Nagasaki, the advances in science and technology were available to them. But their world was largely an “internal” world. What was the impact of all this on their self-view vis-a-vis other peoples and nations?
With the advent of the Asia-Pacific war in the 20th century, there was a clear doctrine of racial, cultural and national superiority whose rightful destiny was as leader of the Asia Pacific regions (and perhaps more). But was that present in the 19th century when Japan became more open to the world?
What emerged was a layered self-view of cultural centrality and moral distinctiveness. The Tokugawa Shogunate did not view itself in terms of being the center of an empire, but it did see itself as a center of a superior civilization. Its criteria included moral cultivation, ritual propriety, and social harmony, governed by proper hierarchy and order.
This can be seen by its changing view of China. Where once China was the center of learning, governance, religious thought and social order, that view was increasingly a distant memory. Classical Chinese learning was still revered but in the present the Japanese held that the Chinese had lost their moral position in the world (Confucian) by internal revolts and external wars. Japan now viewed themselves as the true heir of classical civilization. They made this judgment as an ethical and historical assessment, not a judgement on the Chinese people.
Westerners were often described as technically skilled, morally crude, and socially disordered. Christianity was seen as a western import and was condemned not as “foreign” per se, but as socially destabilizing and politically subversive. Westerners were not viewed as racially inferior, but as culturally dangerous to the higher Japanese civilization and morally undisciplined. At the same time, the Japanese became far more certain and confident in their own institutions and traditions, becoming somewhat immune from foreign moral claims. Where once the Japanese looked to China and others for recognition and approbation, they no longer sought it or needed it.
Sakoku was certainly cultural insulation, but one that did not mandate superiority. It is later thinkers in another time that would radicalize the fruits of the Tokugawa Shogunate to become the Japan facing the world in the 20th century.
Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.
In the previous post, in the broadest of terms, we traced the relationship of China (and by extension Korea) and Japan from pre-history up to the 17th century and the beginning of the Edo period of Japanese history. Also known as the Tokugawa period, this was a period in Japan’s history which experienced prolonged peace and stability, urbanization, economic growth, and expansion of the arts and culture. During this period (1601-1868) the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional daimyo, or feudal lords.
The shogunate believed that the source of the previous era’s instability was the militarism and expansionism of Daimyo Hideyoshi, exacerbated by the dual effect of European traders and Christianity – most notably Portugal and Catholicism. Japan’s governance was dominated by regional daimyō who were rulers/war lords of regions (domains) of Japan. The daimyō discovered that direct trade with the Portuguese increased their wealth and power, even more so if the daimyō directed the people of the domain to accept Christianity. As a result, the traditional Shinto religion was weakened and, in some cases, virtually disappeared, especially among the poor and peasants.
As a result, the Tokugawa Shogunate began to implement policies designed to limit the access of the regional daimyō to foreign trade. The collection of policies issued between 1633 and 1639 are known today as Sakoku which essentially translates as the “locking of the country.” The name was a description coined in a later period. In their own day they were known as the “maritime restrictions.” There were several issues that gave rise to these policies:
The need for control and stability: the Shogunate wanted to prevent powerful regional lords (daimyo) from gaining wealth and power through foreign trade, which could challenge the central government’s control.
Elimination of European colonial influence: to remove the colonial ambitions of Spain and Portugal, who were perceived as threats while at the same time restrict Dutch trade to Nagasaki
Fear of Christianity: the Tokugawa Shogunate viewed Christianity as a subversive force that threatened the social order and the Shogun’s authority, leading to the persecution of Christians and expulsion of missionaries. The advantage of the Dutch trading relationship is that the Dutch Trading companies had no interest in evangelization.
Of interest were restrictions on Japanese citizens. The 1633 edict prohibited any Japanese citizen who had lived abroad for 5 years or more from ever returning to Japan. In 1638, the prohibition was expanded to exclude any Japanese citizen who had ever resided abroad for any amount of time.
During the implementation of the policies, the Shimabara Revolt gave an added incentive to further expand the restriction so as to preserve Tokugawa supremacy, enforce a rigid social structure, and ensure internal peace.
Shimabara Revolt
There was one major disturbance to the relative peace of the Edo period: the Shimabara Revolt. The daimyō of the Shimabara Domain levied incredibly high taxes on the people in order to build Shimabara Castle and other regal endeavors. The daimyō was very anti-Christian, a faith popular among the poor, because he believed it was destructive of the social order. There were strict laws in the Domain prohibiting Christianity which was actively persecuted. In December 1637, an alliance of local rōnin and mostly Catholic peasants rebelled against the Tokugawa shogunate due to discontent over the daimyō policies. The Tokugawa shogunate sent a force of over 125,000 troops supported by the Dutch to suppress the rebels who were defeated.
After the rebellion’s end, the shogunate forces executed an estimated 37,000 rebels and sympathizers as punishment. The daimyō, whose policies had fomented the revolt, was executed. The shogunate suspected that European Catholics had been involved in spreading the rebellion. As a result, the Portuguese traders were driven out of the country, an existing ban on Christian religion was strongly enforced, and an already ongoing policy of national seclusion was made stricter by 1639. Christianity in Japan survived only by going underground.
Sakoku … sort of…
Japan highly regulated its borders to most foreigners from 1639 until the mid-1850s. This isolation, enforced by banning most foreigners from entering and Japanese from leaving, lasted over 200 years until American “gunboat diplomacy” forced Japan to change policies, leading to the Meiji Restoration and modernization. In the retelling of the event, the myth grew that Admiral Perry’s sailing into Tokyo Bay forcibly opened Japan. Japan was “closed” to economic trade with the U.S., but Japan was never “closed.”
Japan was not “closed” under the sakoku policy. There was extensive trade with China through the port of Nagasaki, in the far west of Japan, that included a residential area for the Chinese. As well there were trade and diplomatic missions received from Korea. On a smaller scale there was also trade with the people of Hokkaido (in modern times the northernmost home island of Japan, then a separate Aniu people.) There was also trade with the Ryūkyū Kingdom whose major island is Okinawa. The only European contact permitted was the Dutch enclave on Dejima Island in Nagasaki harbor. Western scientific, technical and medical innovations flowed into Japan through Rangaku (“Dutch learning”). In this way Japan was still open to the developments in Europe of science and other topics.
Natural Isolation
Japan was “isolated” in ways that were natural to its context. It is an island nation whose closest neighbors, China and Korea, lived on the other side of the “Sea of Japan,” a body of water known by the Koreans as the “East Sea” and by the Chinese as the “Whale Sea.” It is a body of water which is often turbulent and stormy and thus naturally limits movement and trade between Japan and its mainland neighbors.
In addition to the maritime isolation, the topology of Japan contains mountain ranges that separate the eastern and western parts of Japan. This limited movement and contact between domains naturally led to a variety of dialects. By the 17th-century Japan had a variety of dialects (hōgen), with significant differences between eastern and western regions, and the Edo (Tokyo) dialect gaining influence over the traditional Kansai (Kyoto) standard during the Edo Era. The relative stability of the Tokugawa era, coupled with restrictions on movement between domains, allowed regional dialects to flourish and diverge further.
Japan was also “isolated” by language from its closest neighbors. Japanese and Korean languages are typologically similar (how the language works) and share loanwords from Chinese, but they aren’t genetically related to Chinese or necessarily each other. A whimsical description is that they are more like cousins who grew up in different houses but borrowed furniture from the same rich relative (China).
We will continue this look into Japan’s “isolation” period in our next post when the Americans arrive in the Western Pacific.
Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.
At the end of the previous post, a question was posited: “How did the currents of history bring the U.S. and Japan to this point in history when sanctions and an embargo were the final domino that moved the flames of war to become the firestorm that was the Asia-Pacific War from December 1941 until September 1945?” There is a lot of history upstream of the 1930s and 1940s to consider, but when one reads widely about the period, one recurring topic is China. Japan seemed to be possessed by an inexorable attraction for China. Look at a modern map of China and compare it to a map of East Asia in 1940. Japan occupies all of Manchuria (while trying to pass it off as the independent nation of Manchukuo), has encroached southward into what the Japanese called “mainland China” or simply “China.” Japan also controls virtually every major port along the South China Sea, East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. Meanwhile in the interior of China, Japan controlled vast areas to the Northeast and set up collaborationist regimes, with the Nationalist (KMT) government under Chiang Kai-shek and a loose affiliation of local war lords retreating to the interior and the Communists fighting from their bases to the Northwest. It created an incredibly complex military and political landscape.
If the Japanese were interested in securing the flanks of their advance to the oil and resource rich areas to the south, it would seem diplomatic means and mutually benefiting treaties and agreement would be more efficient and economical. But when one looks at the arc of history between the two nations it tells the tale of an apprentice who grows up and seeks to dominate the one who was once master. And so, in this post, I will attempt to paint with the broadest of strokes and cover 2,000 years of history between the two nations. There will be gaps, a lack of historical details, and a rash of broad assertions trying to summarize periods of the history. But the purpose is to place the 20th century conflict in a large current of regional and world history.
In the beginning
The Japanese archipelago was largely inhabited by the Jōmon people who were hunter-gatherers. During the 1st millennium BC, the Yayoi people migrated to Japan and quickly became dominant. There are different theories as to their origin: Korea or different parts of China, but what is clear is that they brought rice farming with them, beginning a slow transition from a hunter-gathering period to an agrarian society. If one took a snapshot of Japan in the 3rd century (AD), it would largely be an agrarian society. The people (known variously as Wajin or Yamoto) were marked by settled farming (largely rice), metal tools and metallurgy learned from mainland Asia, the development of fortified villages, early social stratification where accumulation of wealth through land ownership and grain storage fostered social hierarchy, and all the elements for later more developed social and political structures. Over time, as with most cultures, the politics moved from clans to chiefdoms, but without centralized government. But by 300 AD Japan experienced the rise of powerful regional leaders. The history of this period is thin, but the legends are plentiful.
The first recorded encounters, taken from Chinese dynastic histories, describe Japan (Wa) as a group of polities engaged in tribute and trade. It was clear that China was in the dominant position as the Japanese leaders sent tribute missions to Chinese courts to gain prestige, acquire recognized titles, and especially to gain access to advanced technology and knowledge. The Chinese character 倭 denoted the nation and the people of Japan. It translated to “dwarf” – which as you can imagine did not find favor with Japan who replaced it with 和 “harmony, peace, balance”.
Nonetheless, unwanted moniker aside, Japan gained writing (Chinese characters), bronze and iron technologies, and the introduction of Confucian ethical ideas. In the mix and middle of all this It is noteworthy that Baekje (one of the ancient three kingdoms that form Korea) often acted as a main intermediary. Its geographical location allowed it to trade with China and Japan and made it the natural route from Japan to the heart of China. Baekje’s contribution to Japanese culture is notable in pottery and Buddhism.
In what is known as the Yamato and Asuka Periods (6th–7th centuries) there was an active effort on the part of the Japanese to learn Chinese models of statecraft. Japan adopted and adapted centralized bureaucracy, legal codes and a calendar system. Students were sent to study administration, law, architecture, and religion but one can see the first movements of the apprentice beginning to rise. Records reveal correspondence asserting Japan’s dignity and implying an equality with the Chinese Emperor.
Part of that insistence is likely related to the idea of the Japanese Emperor. Legend holds that the first was Emperor Jimmu believed to have been born around 711 BC on the island of Kyūshū. He is said to be a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Most modern scholars regard Jimmu and the nine first emperors as mythical. Emperor Sujin, the 10th emperor, may have been a real historical figure, but even then the reach and reign of control was likely very regional and not across the entire archipelago.
In any case, in the early 8th century, known as the Nara period, was the age when the Emperor began to exert control. Administrative, civil and criminal codes were introduced (Ritsuryō), the land was organized into Provinces and Districts, and a caste system was introduced. The city Nara was the first urban population center. It had 200,000 residents – approximately 7% of the nation. The Nara period was the high point of Chinese influence. At this point Japan was fully embedded in the East Asian order with all traces of subordination to China largely gone.
By 894 AD, Japan stopped official missions to China. The Chinese Tang dynasty was greatly diminished, the Japanese were confident in their own institutions, and Chinese knowledge was considered acquired and was beginning to be considered “classical” rather than current/modern. For the next 800 years or so, until the late 16th or early 17th centuries, the relationship was largely trade with occasional moments of diplomacy when one side or the other wanted something. When China was in the ascendancy, it required Japan to become a tribute state in order to trade. When Japan was in the ascendancy, it left the tribute status. But in the big picture of East Asia, for thousands of years, China had been the intellectual, economic, military, and political center of East Asia.
During the Edo Period, things changed – and not for the better. On the Korean peninsula an internal reconfiguration of power led the Korean Emperor to become a tribute state to China – but as the most favored state – now a virtual part of China. Meanwhile, by the last decade of the 16th century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the most preeminent daimyo, had unified all of Japan, bringing about a period of peace. Hideyoshi was not emperor or part of the imperial lineage (and that is a complicated story, best left to others) but he was a “man with a plan.” He planned to invade China, in effect attempting to claim for Japan the role traditionally played by China as the center of the East Asian international order. As relayed to Jesuit missionaries, Hideyoshi spoke not only of his desire to invade China, but also subjugating the smaller neighbouring states of the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), Formosa (Taiwan), and the Philippines.
This was the first evidence (I found) of a Japanese vision of supreme leadership of East Asia. If the metaphor of apprentice-master once had meaning, that was no longer true. From this point in history, China and Japan are dedicated rivals.
Hideyoshi’s first international action was to invade Korea. He tried to solicit the assistance of Portugal, to no avail. Nonetheless he started what became known as the Imjin War, a series of two Japanese invasions of Korea. The first was in 1592 with a brief truce in 1596, and a second invasion in 1597. The conflict ended in 1598 with the withdrawal of Japanese forces from the Korean Peninsula after a military stalemate in Korea’s southern provinces. This period is interesting in that it sets a pattern: unified government, warrior culture dominated society (samurai), a reasonable naval force was available, and a vision of regional leadership as ordained by the gods – and in the background was the Imperial line, descendents of the sun goddess Amaterasu.
While still in the Edo Period, now post-1600, Japan stabilized internally during the Tokugawa shogunate. This ended the period of expansionism, but also restricted diplomacy. China remained a cultural source but no longer considered politically superior. The Tokugawa shogun initiated policies designed to limit the access of the word to Japan. The collection of policies issued between 1633 and 1639 are known today as Sakoku which essentially translates as the “locking of the country.”
And so remained the nation until Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay.
Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. Top image generated by WordPress AI on Jan-526
Depending on how one phrases and frames the question, one will arrive at different and often conflicting conclusions. While writing and posting the series on World War II in the Pacific (late August – early November, 2025) one of the recurring comments was that the United States started the conflict with its complete oil embargo on Japan on August 1, 1941. This followed the freezing of Japanese financial assets held in the United States during July 1941. Some folks asserted that those two actions were a blockade, which by international agreement is an act of war – hence the U.S. started the war.
There are two problems with that position. The first problem is that there is an important difference between a blockade and an embargo. A naval blockade is a military tactic where a belligerent power uses its navy to cut off a coastline or port, preventing all ships (enemy and neutral) from entering or leaving the nation under blockade. The intention is to stop supplies, trade, and communication, effectively starving the enemy’s war effort or economy. And yes, a blockade is indeed a recognized act of war under international law; an embargo is specifically excluded as an act of war.
In 1941 there were no U.S. naval forces operating in or around Japan. There were no restrictions on marine traffic in the western Pacific; Japan’s economic activities were unhindered for any nation that wished to trade with Japan. They were however finding that list of willing trading partners growing ever shorter given Japan’s aggressive expansion policies and military actions in the region.
And that leads us to the second problem. It is a completely myopic view to think war in the Pacific began on December 7, 1941. War in the Asia Pacific region was more than four years old with Japan being the provocateur and initiating agent in every instance. It is clear that the Asia Pacific War started in 1937 when the imperial ambitions of the nation of Japan launched military action against the nation of China, a conflict that some argue had started and been simmering since 1931. In previous posts we traced the rise of Japanese militarism that served as the agent of their colonial ambitions.
To be sure, the oil embargo was one of the dominoes in the chain. A few dominoes later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war as an active belligerent. The series to date followed the dominoes from the attack on the Hawaiian island of Oahu to the Japanese surrender in September 1945 – with few looks to events before that fateful day.
In case you are wondering about the phrase “the attack on…Oahu” it is good to remember that other installations were hit hard and suffered heavy casualties: Hickam Field, Wheeler Field, Bellows Field, Kaneohe Bay, and Schofield Barracks.
Long before December 1941, dominoes began to fall across the Asia Pacific region. China wasn’t the only nation that had been subjected to Japanese expansion. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, taken over Manchuria in 1931 (setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo – that no nation recognized), and these are just two of the territories Japanese expansion had acquired by military means. Well prior to 1941, other nations included the Kingdom of Ryukyu (including Okinawa), Taiwan and the Penghu Islands, South Sakhalin, Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Caroline Islands. The following map shows the Asia Pacific region in September 1939 at the outbreak of war in Europe.
If the Dutch (Netherlands) East Indies and their oil field are the critical domino, you can see why French Indochina (Vietnam) was essential to the Japanese in order to secure and safeguard merchant shipping from the East Indies to Japan.. However, there are still two barriers in the way: (1) the U.S. Territory of the Philippines and (2) the British presence in Malaya, notably the major British port of Singapore. These two represented bases of operation that could interdict any marine traffic in the South China Sea and choke off critical supplies such as oil, rubber, and metals.
Without elaborating, let me simply say that there was great rivalry between the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). This rivalry had existed since before the start of the 20th century, ebbing and flowing in intensity. When the 1939 IJA forays into the border areas of Soviet controlled Mongolia and Siberia (the Nomohan Incident) were easily repulsed, Japanese attention and planning turned to the Southeastern Asia region – which had always been the strategic priority in the eyes of the IJN.
If Korea and Manchuria served as a food basket and new homesteads for an exploding Japanese home population, then Java, Malay, Borneo and other nations were seen as sources rich in oil, rubber, and other materials needed for Japan’s military-industrial complex. There was a strong sentiment among Japanese leaders that their national destiny was to be the rightful leader of the “Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” It was an ideology that was part of the education system and propaganda from the 1920s onward. The ideology was promoted as a means to free other Asian nations from the colonial rule of European nations, but in reality it was to establish themselves as the new colonial master. The underlying motivations for their territorial expansion was explored in a previous post, The Eight Corners of the World. In any case, the 20th century saw Japan transform itself from an island nation to an Asian Imperial Empire founded on military action.
Japan signed the Tripartite Pact on September 27, 1940, in Berlin, forming a military alliance with Germany and Italy as the primary Axis powers in World War II. The reasons were to deter the United States from intervening in Japan’s expansion in Asia, formalize its alliance with Germany and Italy, and establish distinct spheres of influence (Europe for Germany/Italy, Greater East Asia for Japan) for a new world order, all while securing mutual defense against potential attacks, especially from the U.S. and the Soviet Union (which Germany invaded on June 22, 1941)
At this point in time, France was fully occupied by German forces with the south of France (Vichy France) as a puppet government of the Nazis. In an arrangement with the Vichy government, Japan occupied the region of modern-day North Vietnam (French Indochina) starting in September 1940. At the same time Japanese troops began to encroach into “South Vietnam” (also part of French Indochina). By July 1941 Japan expanded its occupation to include all of South Vietnam. Another key domino in the chain fell.
The 1941 occupation of French Indochina was a tactical and strategic military move by the Japanese to position themselves to secure the Dutch East Indies oil fields and to control the sea lanes from those fields to the home islands for merchant shipping. The Japanese viewed the Dutch colonies as vulnerable since Germany had occupied Holland in May 1940. Although Holland was occupied the Dutch army, navy and air forces had not surrendered and were able and willing to defend its colonies and the oil resources. As well, the British military held strongholds in Singapore and Malaysia, bases from which to assist the Dutch, as well as to keep open Burma Road and its supply line to the Chinese fighting the Japanese invaders – and threaten the sea lanes to Japan.
The August 1941 oil embargo did not start the war. The war in the Asia-Pacific region was already underway. One only needed to ask the Chinese, Vietnamese and Mongolians, as well as the Koreans. The embargo was a calculated political action in reaction to the occupation of French Indochina. It was a political action whose hope was to deter Japan from further expansion. Nonetheless, one can ask:
What was the background, purpose, and hope as regards the August 1941 oil embargo from the United States point of view?
The U.S. understood the goals for Japan southwest incursion, but did the U.S. truly understand the underlying motivations?
Was the embargo the decisive reason why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor or just more proximate than a collection of other reasons?
Was the embargo a virtual declaration of war hoping to draw Japan to military action so that the U.S. could enter the war in Europe?
Clearly the December 1941 and early 1942 “blitzkrieg” across Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific, and Central Pacific regions accomplished the mission of (a) capturing the resource rich nations and (b) setting a “line of defense” west of Hawaii – why did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor? Couldn’t they just have left the sleeping giant alone?
But all of the above only leads to a larger question: how did the currents of history bring the U.S. and Japan to this point in history when sanctions and an embargo were the final domino that moved the flames of war to become the firestorm that was the Asia-Pacific War from December 1941 until September 1945? It is not just an interesting question in history. Consider the terms “sanctions”, “embargo”, “frozen financial assets” and others that are current in our news here in 2026. Are there lessons to learn from history?
Stay tuned.
Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.
Last year (2025) I explored World War II in the Pacific in order to consider the moral framework of the war considering the counter-factual that no atomic weaponry was available. If you are interested in the series you can read (or review) it here. In the course of reading and research I came across lots of other interesting information. Some was related to specific campaigns, others to strategy, and others still to a range of topics large and small. But there were also questions.
Some of the questions I received most often was allocating some share of the blame for U.S. involvement in the already on-going Asia-Pacific War by its support and aid to China, freezing of Japanese financial assets, the oil embargo of August 1941 or negotiating in less-than-good faith. In some cases, the question was framed to imply that the U.S. wanted the Japanese to initiate military action to give the United States a reason to enter the war in Europe.
Starting tomorrow, a related series begins that explores the currents and eddies of history that brought Japan its wars with China (1894-1895 and 1937-1945), with Russia (1904-1905), the annexation of Korea, Manchuria and French Indochina, and to wider war in the Pacific that stretched from Hawaii to Australia and nations in between, notably the Philippines, Malay, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.
Perhaps the question that all of this raises is this: how did Japan think it could win such a war? Did its strategic and tactical planning understand the classic Clausewitz dilemma: a nation can be easy to conquer but extremely difficult to hold. Was Japan able to hold on to their gains and fight a war of attrition? We know the answer to the last question: no. But did Japan have other options it believed were viable?
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