Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War

Reviewed by: Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire by Peter Wetzler Tatiana Linkhoeva (bio) Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire. By Peter Wetzler. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2020. xiv, 241 pages. $114.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $103.50, E-book. The year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War and another occasion to contemplate imperial Japan's prolonged decision to capitulate on August 15, 1945. Who exactly among the Japanese decision makers should bear responsibility for the war—was it the army or the navy, the cabinet or the military-bureaucratic elites? What about the common public or various nationalist groupings? But most important, what was the role of the emperor? If it was by his decree that the war ended, why did he not stop the attack on Pearl Harbor or Shanghai? Questioning the end of the war unavoidably leads us to the issue of the nature and logic of imperial Japan's warfare. In his new book, Peter Wetzler engages with these issues and presents the reader with a convincing exposé of the military and political elite's thinking during the wartime period. Wetzler explains that finding an answer to the question of what was behind the decision to go to war in Asia and the Pacific will also help us understand the decision-making process behind the surrender in August 1945 and the role of the emperor in it. The book is thus a sequel to Wetzler's previous work, Hirohito and War: Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 1998). The strength of Wetzler's works is most of all in the numerous primary sources. For Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War, Wetzler worked with the Shōwa tennō jitsuroku (Actual record of the Showa emperor), compiled and completed by the Imperial Household Agency only recently in 2014. As far as this reviewer is aware, in English only Wetzler and Peter Mauch (Western Sydney University) have published research based on their work with the Shōwa tennō jitsuroku. This archive totals about 12,000 pages and 61 (unpublished) volumes and contains 3,000 separate documentary source materials. Most of those records have been unavailable to researchers, but now with their publication, many historical facts, especially those regarding Hirohito's involvement in the war, are open for research. The archive understandably presents a positive image of the emperor, but because it contains the official account of the emperor's daily activities, Shōwa tennō jitsuroku is still an exceptionally valuable source of information, which Wetzler has used extensively. Other important official sources in Wetzler's book include the well-used and still reliable Senshi [End Page 469] sōsho (War history series) from the Japanese National Institute for Defense Studies, Center for Military History, and the Imperial Headquarters Army Department Records Relating to Imperial Audiences. The Imperial Headquarters Army Department was the same as the Army General Staff, and its records provide an indispensable glimpse of the planning and military operations, as well as the army's interactions with the emperor. For his framework, Wetzler draws a distinction between the nation and the state, in which the nation was responsible for ideological and quasireligious matters, and the state for the matters of executive and military order. In answering the question "why go to war?" Wetzler falls back on the traditional explanation: Japanese leaders believed in their own racial superiority which was based on mythology and quasi-religious traditions. School and military academy education indoctrinated both civilian leaders and military officers into considering the emperor and the imperial institution as a sacred entity upon which the survival of the nation depended. Therefore, the prolongation of the war was rooted in the "self-assuring hubris based on the unquestioning belief in their [officers'] nationalistic religious ideology" (p. 7). Not only the military, but also the emperor believed himself to be the divine heir to the imperial lineage, endowed with the sacred task of maintaining and perpetuating the "unbroken line" of the imperial household. The emperor thus would

Ancient history · Bureaucracy · Cabinet (room) · Decolonization · Economic history · Elite · Emperor · Empire · Just war theory · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Surrender · World War II · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies