Japan's War in China: Historical Parallel to Vietnam?

Abstract

ITN I952 THE AUTHOR concluded a small contribution to the Pacific Historical Review with the sentence: In answer to these one can hardly do more than suggest that the ground of ideological conflict is unbelievably treacherous and the line between righteous conviction and self-delusion almost imperceptible.' The questions concerned Japan's in China during the crucial years I937-I94I, as what began as a Manchurian (I93I) spread into a China Incident (I937) and a Pacific War (ig4i). A whole generation of Japanese lives was wasted, and many millions of other lives as well, because the Japanese government and people did not answer these correctly. It is a story of escalation into tragedy, from a small matter of 31 inches of railroad track on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway to appalling horror done, in China, in Southeast Asia, in the Pacific Islands, and ultimately in Japan itself. Americans witnessed Japanese aggression from the outside, as outraged supporters of its victims, but they have given very little attention to the rationale of that aggression, except to assume that it was false and that the war criminals who led it got their just desserts at the Tokyo crimes trial. This is partly because they have assumed that there was a Hitler-like gang in Japan, which obtained control of the government and then consciously plotted aggression. Unfortunately for simplicity, this is revealed by recent research not to be true. It will no doubt come as a shock to many Americans to learn that Japan's in China, which later became merged into the Pacific War, was to the Japanese government and the majority of the Japanese people in many ways like today's in Vietnam. To them it was not at all a of aggression, not a against China, not a to seize Chinese territory. It was not a at all, but a defense action against Communists and their allies in China. Furthermore it was not conducted by irresponsible military extremists. Japan had some of these, and their spectacular plots and attempted coups