Michi,

Thanks for that very informative and unbiased and objective explanation.

It all makes sense: Japan was the innocent party and Japan was drawn into wars it didn't want.

Well, only one thing to do now. Yes, you guessed it: we have to rewrite all the history books.

Ni hao cobber mates!

Who would have guessed something like this would happen:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/asio-red-flags-liberal-party-donor-huifeng-haha-liu-over-foreign-interference-risks/ar-BB1cqO3L

Mr Opinion, that's who!

I TOLD YOU SO.

Sorry but I've a little more to say. But take comfort I'm nearing the end of my life, oh, oops, the end of the story.

Joseph Grew was the last US ambassador to prewar Japan. He was about ten years in Tokyo. He wrote Ten Years in Japan, which I read in Japanese translation. A reader comments on it at amazon usa, "The book offers great insight into the political struggles and turmoil of Japan in the early Showa period. Many people who are familiar with World War II may think that the Japanese of the time were solely fixated on going to war with the United States to win dominance in the Pacific, but Ambassador Grew reveals that most Japanese actually wanted peace with the US." The Japanese were abysmally shocked on the early morning of December 8, 1941, to hear that Japan had started war on the US and Great Britain. They knew instinctively that the United States was a giant. My mother whose education was eight years in primary school of a provincial area was shocked, as I heard from her. The Japanese knew Japan was negotiating with Washington for peace in China, not for dominance in the Pacific. But they took consolation and heart in the thought that now they would be released from the big problem that had pestered Japan for years.

Grew said somewhere in the book that when the Japanese came to an impasse they would turn tail without facing up to it for true solution. Much of the Meiji leadership and culture was lost in the Taisho period 1912-1926. Mass elements had come, if not to the fore, to the middle of Japanese society. Meiji leaders would not have done the thing that the new generation had done.

I understand Peal Buck's The Good Earth had a big impact on the American public opinion. Prof. Seiji Imahori of Hiroshima University ,specialized in China, was strongly opposed to Japanese aggression; he was rather sympathetic with postwar Mao's regime in view of the magnitude of the problems that faced China.

To be continued.

A lot of people aren't aware of Perry's Black Ships in 1853 which led to the Japanese civil war sales of weapons to Japan by the west and the Meiji Restoration in 1890. Hirohito came to power in 1910 at 25.

Continued.

Imahori said The Good Earth was far from describing the tremendous sufferings of the Chinese peasants.
"Pear Buch and her husband escaped from that atrocity (that was perpetrated in Nanjing by Chinese in 1927) and fled to Japan. From there they wrote how good it felt to be where there was things were peaceful. Last year, Mrs. Buck published an article in the Yale Review in which she expressed her admiration for the Chinese, because, she said, when she got back to her home at Nanking (Nanjing) after the murder and looting, she found no bawdy scribblings on the wall. This article struck some of the foreigners in China as worth reflection. It did not seem strange to them that an army given over to wholesale raping of the native women, with murders of foreigners and wholesale looting going on, should neglect to take time out for drawing vulgar pictures. Mrs. Buck said further in the article such clean-mindedness 'would hardly have been true if Western soldiers had occupied it' [her home]. 'I like the Chinese as they are,' she wrote.
'The glory and the strength of the Chinese are in their humanity.' She did not relate how the British Consul at Nanking was upon that occasion shot down in his own yard by jeering Chinese troops, how an American was likewise slain for no provocation...We have lent them money and they have misused it, and defaulted. We have built schools and hospitals and they have burned them down...Our diplomatic support and general leniency have seized upon as encouragement to atrocities with exemption from punishment...(Ralph Townsend, Way That Are Dark: The Truth About China. pp.330-1.)"

No such things of these sorts happened even in the 1930s' Japan. No Japanese threw eggs or anything at foreign embassies and consulates, let alone stones, as they do in China today. An egg was a too precious thing to throw away even in my boyhood in Japan. We did not eat it except on a festive occasion or for lunch on a picnic.

To be continued.

The Japanese army's hypothetical enemy had been Czarist and Communist Russia despite a group who rose and desired strong ties with Russia. "In 1937 all Japan's military planning was predicated on the assumption that the Soviet Union was Japan's only serious enemy in East Asia. By 1935 Russia had more troops in its Far Eastern Provinces...than Japan had in Manchuria...the last thing that Japan needed was a full scale war with China. Indeed, apart from Manchuria, Japan's strategic concern in China was limited to the formation of buffer zones in North China to protect Manchuria from surprise attack during a possible war with Russia (Reischauer, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, pp. 713-4.)" Manchuria was already the most industrialized part of China.

"The 'conspiracy theory' advanced by the International Tribunal for the Far East in its Judgment of 1948 rested on very shaky grounds from the start, and has since then been refuted by historians (Ben=Amy Shillony, Myth and Reality in Japan of the 1930s, Modern Japan: Aspects of History, Literature and Society, edited by W. G. Beasley, first published by George Allen & Unwin, 1975, Charles E. Tuttle edition, 1976, p. 85."
The accident happened at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937. It is thought among experts that the shots were fired by the communists that had infiltrated the Nationalist Army. As the battle escalated the Japanese army was perplexed and confounded with their initial easy expectation betrayed.

The Japanese army failed to face up to the reality of the prolonged second Sino-Japanese War. Drift is a cardinally useful concept in knowing the truth. "When we are confronted with policies of drift rather than of clear purposes, the identification of initial decisions becomes a futile game as exemplified in the sequence of events leading to the war between Japan and the United States (Joseph Frankel, The Making of Foreign Policy, Oxford University Press, 1963, p.203.)"

The Japanese army service men were far more afraid of losing face or dignity in the eyes of the Japanese public than in the eyes of international society.

To be continued.