On this day, 7 December, in 1941, at dawn in Hawaii, the Japanese military engaged in a surgical strike against a US blockade. The rational Japanese mind could not begin to fathom the inscrutable Occidental response.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, Japan decided that it wanted to remain in an immutable stasis as an independent feudal state. To accomplish this, Japan closed itself off from
gaijin. The emperor had issued a decree prohibiting
gaijin ships from landing on the shores of Japan, and prohibiting
gaijin from setting foot on Japanese soil. With the help of the Gods, the military enforced that order.
Until 1853, when the US Commodore Perry entered Tokyo harbour with four steamships.
Since the Japanese military could not prevent the American ships from landing, and since the Japanese Emperor’s decrees could not be violated, the Emperor decreed that US ships were allowed to land in Japan, US citizens were allowed to stand on Japanese soil, and Japan signed a treaty with the United States opening its ports.
At this point, since the US had ruled out Japan’s prospect of remaining an isolated feudal state, Japan decided to industrialize; however, Japan could not follow the US path to industrialization, since Japan lacked the necessary raw materials to even initiate industrialization. Japan found itself heavily dependent on foreign trade for sources of raw materials and markets for its finished products. The US proved very helpful, giving Japan access to raw materials and technology.
Japan prospered under industrialization. By the 1920s, pictures of Japanese cities resembled pictures of thriving Western cities (except for the Japanese characters). Japan celebrated the day when Commodore Perry arrived, and a grateful Japan sent a gift of cherry trees to grace the US capital. Americans were welcome in Japan.
Then, in 1930, the US blocked almost all world trade, putting 25% of the US workforce out of work, with similar consequences for the UK. Germany responded by abrogating the Treaty of Versailles and militarising.
The major Western countries didn’t seem to mind that their people were starving, but the Japanese leadership couldn’t let this happen, and, in searching for an answer, they stumbled upon the Monroe Doctrine. Sadly, they read the Spanish version, rather than the English version.
The English version of the Monroe Doctrine is that the US promised its full assistance to all of Latin American to prevent predation and recolonization by the European mercantile empires. The Spanish version is that the US demanded the
droit de seigneur, the first rights to rape and pillage every Latin American country, turning the Latin American countryside into a land of feudal estates with Latin American serfs slaving for absent US feudal lords, and turning the Latin American cities into brothels.
So Japan put its people to work to liberate East Asia from all predators who were not East Asian, a liberation even more brutal than the Monroe Doctrine, as it is described by Latin Americans.
But the US and the UK had no intention of giving up their Chinese holdings, and the Japanese Navy was only 60% of the strength of the US Navy, and only 30% of the strength of the combined US-UK Navies.
However, the US and the UK had closed their factories. Their people were starving, but refused to work, instead standing in line for handouts. And, by December 1941, the UK were under seige from the Nazis, and were unable to send ships to protect their East Asian colonies and concessions.
As for the US, if the US people would not work to eat, they certainly would not work to build a Navy for the sake of a few very minor holdings on the opposite side of the world. This would make no sense at all.
Japan’s attempts to drive the Westerners from East Asia was called, in the US press, ‘The Cancer of the Pacific.’ Had Japan won the war, the Japanese name for the liberation of East Asia might have entered the history books (and would have had a very different description in Japanese than in Chinese, just as the Monroe Doctrine is very different in English than it is in Spanish).
However, Japan lost, so their attempt to make East Asia a Japanese preserve remains known as ‘The Cancer of the Pacific’ in the standard World History textbooks.
In late 1941, the US ordered a complete blockade of Japan. Washington warned the Philippines and Pearl Harbour to expect an imminent attack.
Since Pearl Harbour was impregnable, the only possible threat was sabotage by Japanese agents disguised as coolies, so the senior Pearl Harbour officers ordered the ships’ magazines secured in underground bunkers to prevent these agents from tossing lighted matches into the magazines and thereby destroying the ships. Pearl Harbour was prepared for the expected attack on the vulnerable and resource-rich Philippines, and was ready to steam to the rescue within hours of the initial Japanese attack.
Only the treacherous Japanese vipers (as they were convicted of being by US newspapers and US courts) used a new combined arms synthesis, one that had been extensively studied by the US military and ruled out as impossible to execute. The US military experts had determined, correctly, that, under wartime conditions, with ships under way and shooting at the planes, even suicidal bombers would find it almost impossible to sink a ship. However, with the US ships’ magazines safely secured in underground bunkers, the fiendishly clever Japanese were able to operate under peacetime conditions, bombing stationary ships that were not, for the most part, shooting back. The Japanese pilots took their time, aimed carefully from low altitudes, and generally managed to sink all the ships anchored at Pearl Harbour.
While the US Pearl Harbour commanders were all relieved of their posts and never given positions of authority again, the US military review found that the guilt lay entirely with the Japanese, since the Japanese had committed heinous violations of the rules of war.
The strike was against a military target of a nation that had ordered a blockade, a strike that, one would think, had some justification. Hawaii suffered only limited collateral damage to civilians, though the military target was severely damaged and thousands of US military personnel were killed. As already observed, why would a nation that refused to work to feed itself work to destroy an enemy thousands of miles away, an enemy that had struck a purely military target, a target justified by the blockade?
The US response was an immediate bombing of Japanese civilians, followed by a campaign to round up all people in the US of Japanese ancestry and send them to concentration camps. All the factories that had been closed before 7 December 1941 re-opened to produce materiel that could be used to turn all of Japan into desolate, uninhabitable, radioactive Trinitite, with devastating results for Japanese civilians. The Japanese considered these attacks on civilians to be war crimes, but losers do not get to run the trials for war crimes, this is a privilege reserved for the victors in a war. A few downed US pilots were tried in Japanese courts for war crimes and crimes against humanity and executed, but the officers of these Japanese courts were found guilty of war crimes by the US tribunals after the war and were, in turn, executed.
None of this made any sense to the Japanese leadership. They found the Occidentals completely inscrutable.
