Book Review: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy

• Published date: 01 July 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X15617452
• Date: 01 July 2016
• Author: Peter J. Woolley
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

trouble, requiring an inordinate amount of supervisory time and energy to manage.

Would any college educator be surprised at the news?

Chapter 10, titled ‘‘Hail & Farewell,’’ concludes that female Marines are gifted

and motivated citizens of our Republic, able to cope successfully with challenges

that most among our citizenry can hardly imagine. This insufficiency of imagination,

sometimes interpreted as insufficiency of support, appears to be the major source of

the chip on female Marines’ collective shoulder. That they bear this chip mostly with

stoicism while functioning admirably is a credit to their extraordinary resourceful-

ness and that of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Hotta, E. (2013). Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. New York, NY: Knopf. 320 pp.

Reviewed by: Peter J. Woolley, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X15617452

The American popular view of prewar Japan is of a military dictatorship that crazily

attacked the United States without context or warning. Readers of this volume will

find a much more complex and even disturbing picture with familiar strains from our

contemporary political cacophony. Before the infamous attack, negotiation, compro-

mise, and accommodation had become bad words among both civilian and military

members of Japan’s cabinet. And as the civilian and military leadership merged, the

very men who made policy oddly claimed no responsibility for it. They made little

effort to understand the outside world—and understood little of it. The cabinet’s mil-

itary goals became completely detached from and pursued without consideration for

a coherent political strategy. In their squabbles and debates, they thought in terms of

tactical and personal advantage rather than the nation’s health and prosperity. The

context in which they did all this was an unwinnable war in China, a conflict that

was itself a consequence of their dysfunction.

To get the most from Hotta’s volume, the reader must realize that Japan had been

at war in China since 1931, attempting to colonize and pacify the vast territory of

Manchukuo. In 1936, Japan widened the war, attacking Shanghai to punish Chinese

resistance but with no clear idea of how to win and no idea of how to get out. Hotta

shows by 1941, the Japanese population suffered deep privation. Yet no one was

accountable for the strategic mess, which the country had very deliberately

endorsed. No one was responsible for perpetuating, compounding, and extending the

mistake. No one came to the rescue of the Japanese citizenry, worn down, deprived,

and propagandized about progress, imminent victory, and heroism.

Hotta chronicles, then, the cabinet’s tortured policy debates in the year preceding

the attack on the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands. As the last vestiges of

civil–military distinctions vanished, politicians and military men alike postured in

public and argued a hard line in formal cabinet meetings to gain short-term

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