Book Review: Japan 1941

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamyby Eri HottaKnopf, 2013 The fatal miscalculation of the Empire of Japan in the months leading up to its war with the United States wasn't the December 7 "date which will live in infamy" nodded to in the title of Eri Hotta's lean and gripping new book Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, although Hotta is right (and not the first) to point out how incredibly wrong-headed that attack was both tactically and strategically. The fatal miscalculation happened half a year earlier, when the military forces of Japan, acting in the idiotic spirit of hokushu nanshin ("hold north, go south"), surged into the territories of southern French Indochina in July of 1941. If the aggressive colonizing party in Tokyo had thought the Western powers would be too distracted by the march of Nazism in Europe to care much about this annexation, they were immediately disabused of that notion: Americans in particular (including the ambassador to the Empire, that redoubtable Bostonian Joseph Grew) warned Japan that the move was totally unacceptable. Japanese assets in the United States were frozen; vastly increased monies were voted to beleaguered China; embargoes were threatened. All of this genuinely caught the Japanese by surprise, and in that stunned, blinking moment, the country had its true chance to stop and reconsider.It famously didn't, and Hotta's book not only delves into all the complex political factioning behind that sudden bend toward political suicide but also fleshes out - in some wonderfully-done scenes - the weird kind of schizophrenia that grips a culture when it knows it's on the brink of possible destruction:

On the evening of October 31, 1940, the night before the dance halls and jazz performances were to become illegal (they, too, were thought to undermine people's sense of morality and public order), every hall was packed with men and women having one last, desperate fling. They crowded the dance floors like "new potatoes being boiled up in a pot, constantly bumping into one another," as the metropolitan newspaper Asahi reported the following day.

The main strength of Hotta's book is hardly its originality - to put it mildly, this is well-trod ground - but rather its richly compassionate understanding of the people who fill out her stories. Japan 1941 is nominally about headstrong politics and inept statecraft, large-scale topics that have occupied countless historians before her, but her focus time and again turns to the small-scale, to the ordinary human beings caught in the conflicting forces of their time ... and of course on one not so ordinary human being, the only actor on this stage who claimed also to be a god:

Hirohito had strong views on military matters. He had come back from Europe convinced of the horrors of war. After salmon fishing in the Scottish Highlands, he was taken to the infamous battlefield of Ypres, in Flanders. Three years after the end of the Great War, those bleak fields were still filled with the remnants of bloody battles that had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men. Numerous broken shells and bullets were scattered about, as if they were a permanent fixture of the landscape ... The Belgian army officer who acted as his tour guide broke down in the middle of explaining something to Hirohito. When he learned that the man's son had perished on that field, the crown prince's eyes welled up.

The final act of Hotta's book - an interesting addition to any WWII library - is etched in stone from the beginning: a country prostrate in defeat and blasted by apocalyptic weapons making their debut in war. But the might-have-beens all around her story are made all the more heartbreaking by the fallible, hopeful, very human characters who might have made them happen.