The Decision to Go to War — Why March Into a War You Cannot Win

To start a war yourself against an opponent that holds more than a tenfold advantage in national power — viewed calmly, there can hardly be a more reckless choice. Japan’s leaders of the day also knew well, in numbers, the gap in national power between themselves and the United States. They depended on America for much of their oil and iron alike. And yet, in December 1941, Japan stepped of its own accord into a war it had little prospect of winning. Textbooks sum this up briefly as ‘the Japan-US negotiations broke down and led to war.’ But the truly difficult question lies elsewhere: why, knowing it could not win, could Japan still not turn back? This is not a tale of reckless running fueled by ignorance; rather, it is the story of an organization that ‘understood, yet could not stop.‘

The Day the Oil Stopped — A Clock Running Out

What greatly shifted the drift toward war was not a single bullet, but oil.

In July 1941, Japan pushed ahead with its advance into southern French Indochina. In response, the United States first froze Japanese assets held in America, and then, on August 1, completely banned oil exports to Japan. Japan was also deepening its confrontations with Britain, the Netherlands, and others, and such economic pressure against Japan is often called the ABCD encirclement, after the initials of the countries involved.

Why was this measure decisive? At the time, Japan relied on imports for most of its oil and depended heavily on the United States as its source of supply. Its domestic oil reserves were said to last a few years even in peacetime, and far less once a war began. In other words, if it did nothing, Japan’s warships and aircraft would eventually grind to a halt for want of fuel. From the moment the oil was cut off, Japan’s leadership stood before a clock that was running out, where ‘the longer we wait, the worse our position becomes.’

What we should look at calmly here is that being cornered was not caused by outside pressure alone. To begin with, the advance into Indochina, and the war on the Chinese mainland that had continued before it, had provoked strong reactions from the United States. The path of expansion that had run since the Manchurian Incident, seen in earlier installments, had come full circle to tighten the noose around Japan’s own neck. The oil embargo was not a calamity that fell from the sky; it must also be understood as a consequence produced by the accumulation of earlier choices.

Did the Negotiations Really Have No Choice but to Break Down?

As the oil stopped, Japan and the United States went on negotiating for more than half a year from April 1941. Between Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and others and Secretary of State Hull and his side, exchanges were repeated dozens of times. To the very end, there were people on both the Japanese and American sides who wished to avoid war.

But the gulf between the two sides’ demands was too wide. The United States demanded that Japan withdraw from the Chinese mainland and elsewhere. For Japan, a full withdrawal from China meant giving up what many soldiers had shed blood to obtain, and was not a condition it could easily accept. Then, on November 26, what came to be called the Hull Note, presented by the American side, was so severe — including a full withdrawal from China and elsewhere — that the Japanese side received it as something close to a final ultimatum that it could by no means accept. As Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo is said to have felt that there was no longer any move left to make, the hope of a negotiated settlement was effectively cut off here.

Views on the Hull Note remain divided even today. While there is a view that America drove Japan into war, there also persists a strongly held view that it was Japan’s path of expansion from earlier on that lay at the root of the confrontation. To pull out only one side and simplify it into ‘therefore Japan is not to blame’ or ‘therefore Japan is entirely to blame’ is to lose sight of the long accumulation of confrontation. Even if it is certain that a single document was the trigger, the situation in which the trigger was pulled had been built up over many years.

The People Who Knew They ‘Could Not Win’

Here lies the heart of this installment. Japan’s leadership was by no means unaware that its prospects of beating the United States were slim.

Before the war, the government and the military repeatedly examined comparisons of national power. Steel production, oil, industrial capacity — in every indicator the gap with the United States was plain, and the calm analysis that Japan had little chance in a long war was shared among those concerned. That Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the Combined Fleet, is said to have left words to the effect that he could run wild for the first year but could feel no certainty beyond that is, it is said, an expression of this very recognition.

And yet, the tilt was toward war. Why? For one, there was the sense of urgency, driven by the oil clock, that ‘if we are to fight, it must be now.’ For another, there was the atmosphere in which, having pushed a hard line this far, a full concession now would mean a loss of face and would invite charges of being ‘weak-kneed’ from the hard-line domestic public opinion and from within the military. And most deeply rooted of all was the structure in which matters were decided by the mood of the meeting room, with no one taking on ultimate responsibility. The critic Shichihei Yamamoto named such invisible pressure ‘air’ (kuuki), and argued that even when data and logic are correct, once the air of the room tilts toward ‘we should do it,’ opposing opinions become hard to voice.

Decided, Though No One Decided

The opening of the Pacific War was finally decided at the Imperial Conference of December 1, and on December 8 the fighting began. In form, it was a state’s decision that followed proper procedures. But when you look inside, eerily, here too it is unclear ‘who took responsibility and decided.’

The government and the military, and within that military the army and the navy, and within each of these in turn — many organizations were involved, yet none stood in a position to bear responsibility for the whole. The navy, while inwardly harboring doubts about the odds of victory, found it hard to be the one to say ‘we cannot fight.’ The army strongly opposed withdrawal from China. The political side, too, faced with hard-line public opinion, could not bring the drift to a halt. As each acted by the logic of its own post, a total war that no one was supposed to have wanted gradually became the foregone course. This carries the same disease as the structure that came into view with the Manchurian Incident and the withdrawal from the League of Nations. There is no center, anywhere, to the mechanism for stopping.

It is easy to dispose of the decision to go to war with the words ‘the madness of militarism.’ But what is truly terrifying is rather that, while many people dimly understood it to be a plainly disadvantageous choice, the structure of face, air, and irresponsibility meshed together, and the road of retreat was blocked off. Rather than laughing at the people of that time as fools from the safe vantage of the present, the lesson to be learned from this decision lies precisely in continuing to ask the mechanism: why could people who ought to have been wise all fail, together, to stop?

And the war that began this way was not confined to the battlefield. Next time, we follow the everyday called the home front — the figures of people who lived the gap between reporting and reality amid rationing and control.