Japan Times
June 22, 2005
Regarding the June 8 article “Tojo a scapegoat, granddaughter charges”: A detached analysis of the diplomacy leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 suggests that Yuko Tojo’s claim that Japan’s war against the Western powers was a war of self-defense is difficult to support.
Several months before Peral Harbor, Japanese troops had entered Indochina at gunpoint. The United States and other powers responded with an oil embargo as they feared that this encroachment would lead to an attack on British, U.S. and Dutch possessions in the South Seas. This was a time when Britain was fighting for its life against Adolf Hitler, who certainly was not fighting a war of self-defense in Europe. Japan at this point was faced with a choice:
(1) It could reach an amiable settlement with the U.S., Britain and other powers by desisting from further expansion on the Asian mainland, withdraw its troops from an exhausting war in China and break off its unholy alliance with Hitler. In return, normal trade relations with the West would be expected to resume, and Japan would be allied with the U.S. and Britain in their fight against Hitler. Or,
(2) Japan would reject U.S. demands; grab hold of American and European possessions in Asia and establish a Pacific empire that would allow Japan to achieve autarky so that it could severe economic reliance on the West.
A civilian-led Cabinet would have probably chosen a peaceful way out. Indeed, wartime Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo’s predecessor, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, was ready to acquiesce to U.S. demands. Under Tojo, however, Japan decided to take the military option.
In doing so, Tojo and his Cabinet members may have thought that they had enabled the military to save face and that they had protected Japan’s conquests as well as its national honor. But they did not take into consideration what their decision meant for the Japanese people who had already been oppressed at home by the military for some time.
If Yuko Tojo wants to insist that the war with the West was one of self-defense, why is it that Japan and the Japanese, of their own free will, now strongly adhere to the principles of freedom and democracy that the U.S. stood for in 1941 in its resistance against ultranationalism, militarism, fascism, and Nazism?
Ko Unoki
Tokyo
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