The Pacific War and defeat
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and sweeps across Southeast Asia, then is driven back island by island; its cities are firebombed and some 3 million Japanese die before the emperor announces surrender.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
- Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan — Herbert P. Bix, HarperCollins (2000)
- Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan — Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2005)
By 1941 Japan had been at war in China for four years and controlled its coast. When Japanese troops moved into French Indochina, the United States, Britain and the Netherlands froze Japanese assets and cut off oil. Japan’s leaders, led by Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, chose war over withdrawal from China.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan — Herbert P. Bix, HarperCollins (2000)
Expansion
On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Japan), Japanese carrier aircraft struck the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, while other forces invaded Malaya, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Within months Japan held Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and Burma. It proclaimed a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” of Asian liberation from Western rule; in practice occupation was often brutal, with forced labour, massacres and the death of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners and Asian labourers on projects such as the Thailand–Burma railway.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
The long retreat
The tide turned at Midway in June 1942. American forces advanced island by island, through Guadalcanal, Saipan, the Philippines and Iwo Jima. Japanese soldiers were taught never to surrender, and many units fought almost to the last man; from late 1944 young pilots flew tokkō (kamikaze) suicide attacks.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
From 1944 US bombers burned Japan’s wooden cities. The firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed around 100,000 people. In the battle of Okinawa (April–June 1945), perhaps a quarter of the island’s civilian population died, some pressured by Japanese soldiers into mass suicide, a memory that still shapes Okinawa’s uneasy relationship with mainland Japan and with US bases.
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
Surrender
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war on 8 August, Emperor Hirohito intervened to accept the Allied terms. On 15 August 1945 Japanese people heard his voice on the radio for the first time, speaking in formal court language of “enduring the unendurable”. Historians still debate whether the bombs or the Soviet entry weighed more heavily.
- Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan — Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2005)
- Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan — Herbert P. Bix, HarperCollins (2000)
About 3.1 million Japanese died in the war, military and civilian, according to the Japanese government. Millions more were left homeless, and some 6.5 million soldiers and settlers had to be brought home from across Asia.
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
- A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present — Andrew Gordon, Oxford University Press (2003)
Many families remember the war chiefly as their own suffering: sons who never came back, cities burned, hunger and the atomic bombs. Militarist leaders dragged ordinary people into a hopeless war; "never again" is the lesson.
- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower, W. W. Norton (1999)
- War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 — Franziska Seraphim, Harvard University Asia Center (2006)
Japan fought for self-preservation against Western encirclement and to free Asia from colonial rule. The Yūshūkan museum at Yasukuni presents a version of this view.
- War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 — Franziska Seraphim, Harvard University Asia Center (2006)
Japan's war was aggression, and focusing on Japanese victimhood obscures the millions it killed across China, Korea and Southeast Asia, from Nanjing to Manila, and the forced labourers and "comfort women" it exploited.
- Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937–1945 — Rana Mitter, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2013)
- Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II — Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Columbia University Press (2000)
Filipinos remember the war as an invasion they resisted alongside the Americans, from Bataan to the guerrillas, and as a time of atrocity, above all the massacres of the Battle of Manila. Many also remember that the Americans' return levelled the capital.
- The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction — Ikehata Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose (eds.), Ateneo de Manila University Press (1999)
- Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila — James M. Scott, W. W. Norton (2018)
Why it matters today
The war is the great dividing line of modern Japanese history: everything is "prewar" or "postwar". Memories of firebombing, hunger and loss shaped a deep popular pacifism. At the same time, how to remember the dead, the soldiers, and the suffering Japan inflicted on others is still contested.
The Philippines was a major battlefield: Bataan, the occupation and the destruction of Manila in 1945 killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Today relations with Japan are friendly and Japan is a leading aid donor, but surviving "comfort women", the lolas, still seek a full apology.