Japan’s Transition from “Greater East Asia” to a Trans-Pacific Order, 1931–1960

Abstract

History does not change, but interpretations often do, and in a way quite unrelated to their subject. Japan’s course through modern history is no exception to this, and especially the interpretation of the great watershed that traditionally divides Japan’s modern past from the present, the Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945). Throughout Japan’s postwar period unto the end of the Cold War, the conventional reading of the Asia-Pacific War and its build-up in the 1930s was one of a singular aberration from Japan’s otherwise successful path of modernization and integration into the international community. The war from this perspective had been a fateful Manichaean conflict between the principles of militarism and democracy, of which the latter triumphed and to which Japan pledged itself through declaring unconditional surrender in August 1945. Thus, interpreting the war as the ultimate watershed enabled both parties to start from scratch, and leave the scorched past behind. And to be sure, on the surface no picture could offer a greater contrast between wartime (including the 1930s) and postwar Japan.