² Crowley, J. B., Japan's quest for autonomy. national security and foreign policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, N.J., 1966), esp. pp. 322– 5, 17 393, and review byGoogle ScholarCoox, A. D., Journal of Asian Studies, XXVI (1966–1967), 708–9Google Scholar. Yoshitake, Oka, Konoe Fumimaro: a political biography (Tokyo, 1983) attempts to moderate the case. Cf.Google ScholarChurchill, W. S., The Second World War. III. The grand alliance (London, 1950), pp. 519–20, on Konoe as a supposed restraining influence, although, like a number of other Japanese leaders, he committed suicide at the war's end to avoid Allied prosecutionGoogle Scholar.

³ Minear, R. H., Victor's justice: the Tokyo war crimes trial (Princeton 1971), p. 131Google Scholar He gives a total of 920 other executions of Japanese performed locally in other Asian countries following the war's end. Cf. also Minear with Chihiro, Hosoya, Nisuke, Ando and Yasuaki, Onuma (eds.), The Tokyo war crimes trial' an international symposium (Tokyo, 1985), andGoogle ScholarPiccigallo, P. R., The Japanese on trial: allied war crimes operations in the east, 1945–51 (Austin, 1979)Google Scholar, Dower, J., War without mercy: race and power in the Pacific war (Boston and London, 1986), p. 307Google Scholar, acknowledges a sense in which they were made scapegoats. But it is no part of his brief in emphasizing the influence of race in how the war was fought on both sides, to consider how it came about.

⁴ Similarly motivated recent resentment on the part of Southeast Asian peoples should be considered quite distinct from wartime feelings towards the Japanese.

⁵ Cf. the multi-authored History and works of field marshal Sant Thanarat (Bangkok, 1964), part translated inGoogle ScholarChaloemtiarana, Thak(ed.), Thai Politics I, 1932–1957 (Bangkok, 1978), pp. 681–715Google Scholar.

⁶ Cf. Akira, Iriye, ‘Japanese imperialism and aggression: reconsiderations II,’ review article in Journal of Asian Studies, XXIII, 1 (1963), 103–13Google Scholar; vol. v, The final confrontation: Japan's negotiations with the United States, 1941, translated and edited by Titus, D. A., is expected in 1988Google Scholar.

⁷ Review of Morley series vol. III Deterrent diplomacy Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, by Cook, Theodore F., Journal of Asian Studies, XXXVII (1977–1978), 363–Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid

⁹ Of course, as with Thailand, serious Western historiography is a fairly recent phenomenon, in the Japanese case, largely post-1945, and always designed implicitly to ‘explain’ Japan's 1941 initiatives.

¹⁰ Cf. Iriye review, as in note 6 above.

¹¹ Vol. III, Deterrent diplomacy, esp. pp. 185–8, 215, 257. Costello, J., The Pacific war (London, revised edn., 1985), pp. 548–9, attributes a similar motive to Matsuoka's boss, Prince Konoye, in his parallel efforts in early 1941, to drive a wedge between Washington and London through his ‘John Doe’ Washington feelers. Even at his August Newfoundland talks with Churchill, FDR seems to have been offering a reinforcement of the Philippines as a deterrent to the Japanese as an alternative to a more direct commitment to the European conflictGoogle Scholar.

¹² Highly revealing in this respect is the fact that the Japanese army also maintained close relations with Poland until its renewed partition between Germany and Russia in 1939. Britain's traditional fears of Russia which went a long way towards prompting the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance, extended in 1905 when a Japanese diversionary intervention in Manchuria was already visualized, had largely disappeared after 1917, as the Russian threat to India dissipated.

¹³ Cf critique by Sato, Kyozo ‘The historical perspective and what is missing’, Modem Asian Studies, XX, 2 (1986), 375–87, reprinted in hisCrossRefGoogle ScholarJapan and Britain at the crossroads, 1939–1941 (Tokyo, 1987), pp 199–218Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Again, in the meanwhile, ProfHosoya, had contributed an essay on ‘Retrogression in Japan' [1930s] foreign policy decision-making process’ in Morley, J W (ed), Dilemmas of growth in prewar Japan (Princeton 1971), based on a Puerto Rico conference in 196Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Fateful choice, pp. 118, 122. In fact, a ‘Japanese Monroe doctrine’ as a kind of forerunner of the Greater E. Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere/Japanese New Order had been supported even by the supposed moderate diplomat and wartime foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru, from as early as 1934. Nish, I., Japanese foreign policy, 1869–1942 (London, 1977), p. 199. But of course the original American version is not normally equated anyhow with Western imperialism in Asia, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Scalapino's work has been mainly confined to Northeast AsiaGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Peattie, M R, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's confrontation with the west (Princeton, 1975), esp p 52Google Scholar, indicates that for some time there had been those amongst the Japanese military envisaging an ultimate contest with the United States and all that it stood for in terms of values, but only in an apocalyptic fashion, decades ahead

¹⁷ Chapman, J W M, ‘The “have-nots” go to war the economic and technological basis of the German alliance with Japan’in Nish, I (ed), The tripartite pact of 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy (L S E International Studies, 1984, II), 49–50, cites evidence that, for a while atleast, Hitler himself fancied securing all the credit for defeating Russia for Germany alone, but according toGoogle ScholarHosoya, in The fateful choice, pp 99–100, it was Ribbentrop's stance that was taken by the Japanese to be the official onGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Masanobu, Tsuji, Singapore: The Japanese version (Sydney, 1960), pp. 3, 24Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Crowley, J. B., Modern East Asia: essays in interpretation (New York, 1970), p. 263Google Scholar, citing veteran Japanese journalist Tokutomi Soho. Japan's assets in the United States had been frozen at once, in July, even this coming as a shock in Tokyo.

²⁰ This is surprising given the alarmist fears of Japan already being expressed at the time of the first Shanghai Incident in early 1932. Thorne, C., The limits of foreign policy: the West, the League and the Far Eastern crisis of 1931–1933 (London, 1972), pp. 238, 242, 266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Of course, the United States was still a non-combatant at this stage and apparently hoping to stay clear even of the European war, fighting through a surrogate Britain. On the other hand, agreement on priority even in terms of aid and supplies of materiel for the European war had already been reached with London, presumably as another measure of the relative unimportance accorded the possible war with Japan.

²² Lehmann, J. P., The roots of modern Japan (London, 1982), p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Trotter, Ann, Britain and East Asia, 1933–1937 (Cambridge, 1975), p. 36, claims influence exerted over him as well as his successor, 1934–7, Sir Robert Clive, by G. B. Sansom, the eminent Japanologist. But during 1931–2, H. A. Macrae, who was much more sympathetic to modern Japan, was standing in for Sansom as commercial counsellor in Tokyo. Lindley gets a bad writeup inGoogle ScholarThorne, , The limits of foreign policy, esp. pp. 99, 100, 362–3, but he appears to have remained an active and fairly influential figure on his return to England. Cf. frequentGoogle ScholarThe Times (London) refs. 1935–1939Google Scholar.

²⁴ His takeover had been preceded by a brief but vain effort under Sir Samuel Hoare to break the mould of British foreign policy. The reactions in London to the Shanghai crises seem to have been very much the consequence of the scale of British China investments located in that port-city, some 77 per cent of the whole in the early 1930s. Trotter, , Britain and East Asia, p. 18. In a sense, Japan was regarded in the West as the ‘Israel of the 1930s,’ standing similarly for efficiency and progress, but disposing of more power, more alien, and without the same pressure-groups in the West to sustain her cause, let alone Holocaust guilt to exploitGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Actually the phraseology of the Hon. N. H. Charles, future ambassador to Brazil and Turkey, and a member of the Tokyo embassy staff 1926–8, in a minute of 24 Aug. on Lindley to Sir A. Henderson, 23 July 1931. Public Record Office, FO 371/15521.

²⁶ This was a common fate of independent Asian countries at this time, unprotected by Western systems of imperial preference, yet poorly perceived by such as the FO staff in London. Cf. my Thailand and the fall of Singapore: a frustrated Asian revolution (Boulder and London, 1986), ch. 1Google Scholar.

²⁷ T. M. Snow to Henderson, 10 February 1931, and G. H. H. Thompson minute, 1 May on same. FO 371/15520.

²⁸ The differences in terms of power and populousness are obvious, but there are many other points of comparison.

²⁹ Wakatsuki, the eventual compromise choice, had previously been discredited in a financial scandal in 1927, and had also been widely attacked for the London conference sellout. Shidehara was a brother-in-law of the head of the Mitsubishi conglomerate.

³⁰ Enclosure 1 in Lindley to Simon, 27 September 1932. FO 371/16246. Cf. British military attaché in Peking, Col. Badham-Thornhill, to Lampson, 28 May 1931, in Lampson to Henderson, 15 June 1931. FO 371/15522.

³¹ Haslam, J., ‘Soviet aid to China and Japan's place in Moscow's foreign policy, 1937–1939’, in Nish, I. (ed.), Some aspects of Soviet-Japanese relations in the 1930s (L.S.E. International Studies 1982, II), 37, reports Soviet army enthusiasm as late as 1937 for a revenge war against Japan to amend the outcome of 1905Google Scholar.

³² Ike, , Japan's decision for war, pp. 72–5, 86–9. For military opinion, seeGoogle ScholarHosoya, in Morley, (ed.), Fateful choice, 102–4Google Scholar.

³³ According to Chapman, , ‘The “have-nots” go to war’, pp. 26–8, the pact itself came as a sequel to earlier Japanese approaches to Berlin, albeit parallel with a similarly anti-Soviet Japanese–Polish understandingGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Cf. views of Japanese ambassador to Spain, Suma Yakichiro, cited in Chapman, ‘The “have-nots” go to war’, 52 n. 62. A point of broader significance is the seriousness of the Japanese in accepting German suggestions that the Soviet Union should be encouraged to renew traditional Russian southward expansion in the direction of British India. Fletcher, W. M. III, The search for a new order: intellectuals and fascism in prewar Japan (Chapel Hill, 1982), andGoogle ScholarOates, L. R., Populist nationalism in Japan: a biography of Nakano Seigo (Sydney, 1985), are useful for the general intellectual and ideological development of 1930s Japan, which also reached a crisis-point in 1940–1Google Scholar.

³⁵ See, for example, Conroy, H., The Japanese seizure of Korea, 1868–1910 (Philadelphia, 1960).CrossRefGoogle ScholarMyers, R. H. and Peattie, M. R. (eds.), The Japanese colonial empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, 1984), at one extreme neglect the Ryukyus, and at the other, Manchuria (bar the Kwantung peninsula), China and Southeast Asia. The ambiguity in the early annexations relates to the decision not to grant voting and other citizenship rights to the peoples of Korea and Taiwan, which were subordinated toJapanese governors-general, usually seconded senior military or naval officersGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Allen, , Burma, pp. 150–2Google Scholar. This followed the unnerving American Doolittle air-raid on Tokyo in April 1942, and also the disastrous first major naval defeat at Midway Island, in early June. Both represented defeats specifically for the navy, not the army, and Midway was kept largely secret for some time by the navy ministry. But they raise doubts about the prevalence even at this period, of the Japanese so-called ‘victory disease’ oudined by the very America-centric Costello, The Pacific war, pp. 220–4. But the same author, ibid., p. 546, does emphasize Japanese reluctance to contemplate war with the USA as opposed to its anti-European colonial crusade in Southeast Asia, prior to July-August 1941. He also talks of ‘the main weight’ of Japan's assault, as anticipated, uncoiling in Southeast Asia. Ibid., p. 565.

³⁷ Thailand and the fall of Singapore, ch. I.

³⁸ Allen, , Burma, pp. 21, 23, 27,Google ScholarGough, R., SOE Singapore 1941–42 (London, 1985), pp. 55–6Google Scholar,Lunt, J., A hell of a licking: the retreat from Burma 1941–42 (London, 1986), pp. 104–7.Google ScholarAllen, , Burma p. 165, characterizes wartime Thailand as ‘the ‘core’ country of the Southeast Asian peninsula, and central to any plan for creating a [Japanese] redoubt against an Allied counter-offensive.’ By contrast,Google ScholarIriye, , Origins of the Second World War, pp. 127, 131–2, treats Thailand as a mere pawn in the wider gameGoogle Scholar.