Название: World War II in the Pacific: An Encyclopedia
Автор: Sandler S.(ed.)
Издательство: New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Год: 2001
Формат: pdf
Страниц: 1194
Для сайта: litgu.ru
Размер: 19 mb
Язык: английский
From the Japanese point of view at the time, war with the United States was almost entirely unprovoked. For they knew that it was the Americans who had despised Japanese immigrants and insultingly segregated them in West Coast schools. It was the Americans who had gone on about the “Yellow Peril.” It was the United States which had imposed a state of naval inferiority on Japan at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. And it was the United States government which, for its own imperialistic purposes, objected to Japan’s attempts to bring order (from Japan’s point of view) to a “decadent” and “corrupt” Nationalist China. In the war games played out on the polished floors of the U.S. Naval War College, Japan was the most likely enemy. These war games, of course, assumed that the U.S. Navy was by far Nippon’s most worrisome opponent; both nations fortified their Pacific island territories against each other. Yet the Japanese had never, certainly in public, brandished their swords against the Americans and their Pacific possessions, although they inveighed against European and American colonialism in Asia. Up to 1931 the provocation and the inflammatory rhetoric was almost entirely American. This one-sided animosity actually intensified after 1931, and for far more tangible reasons than any vague worries about the “Yellow Peril.” The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was an act of unmitigated aggression. Even so, it was certainly not directed against the United States and in no way tangibly affected American interests. But it did give a focus to the previously amorphous anti-Japanese feeling among many Americans. Six years later, the launching of full-scale warfare against China, for which Americans felt a sort of proprietary sympathy, sharply intensified that focus. The owner of the enormously influential Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, Henry Luce, the offspring of American missionaries to China, made sure that Japanese atrocities against the Chinese people were vividly documented.