JAPAN’S DECISION FOR WAR IN 1941: SOME ENDURING LESSONS

Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is
widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How
could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an
enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial
base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan
was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s
decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them?
Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding
defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable
peace?
Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision
for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese
pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by
the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in
East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues
that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well
as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from
cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that
the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in
Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness
of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the
Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an
aroused American society and overestimated their own martial
prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He
believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that
the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains
lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign
policy and defense decisionmakers.
The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph
as a contribution to the national security debate over the
use of force to advance the objectives of U.S. foreign policy.