Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvi, 311 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-5180-5.
Professor Yukiko Koshiro of Nihon University’s College of International Relations sets herself an ambitious historiographical task with Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking About Continental Asia Before August 1945. In the ongoing project to recover the imperial identity Japan lost in 1945, Koshiro seeks to demonstrate how continental concerns underlay Japanese strategic thinking, especially in the last months of the war. The book contends that over the empire’s birth, life and, especially, death, Russia/the Soviet Union, much like a black hole, exerted a powerful yet generally hidden influence over Japanese strategic decision makers. The book is designed to illuminate this underappreciated effect.
Koshiro asks us to re-conceptualize the conflict in which the empire was lost. She rejects the Pacific War narrative as a US imposition which posits the United States as the primary influence on Japan both pre- and post-war. However, a Second Sino-Japanese War narrative emphasizing the struggle between Japan and the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek is equally problematic. The notion of a Greater East Asian War is also too limited for her scope. Instead she makes the Soviet Union a key strategic factor in the struggle and, as the USSR was both an Asian and a European power, posits the name Eurasian-Pacific War to describe the conflict.
However conceived, Koshiro’s key contribution is the interrogation of numerous collections of records thought lost in the bonfires which consumed, and served to obscure, Japan’s imperial project. However, the manner in which she employs this new source material is problematic, and ends up demonstrating a rather different point from the one she intended. While she seeks to challenge the prevailing view of Japan’s orientation between the Soviet Union and the United States, the quality of Japanese strategic thought during the war years, and the termination of the war itself, her source material often proves considerably less authoritative than she claims.
Koshiro’s central contention is that Japanese government and military leaders, anticipating defeat at the hands of the United States, sought to gauge likely postwar continental developments and their effect upon Japan. “The Japanese Government and Imperial General Headquarters monitored the plans of the allies for the disposition of Japan’s colonies, began to anticipate insightfully how postcolonial East Asia would emerge, and built exit strategies around them.” Yet it is in the concept of an “exit strategy” for the war where her argument most seriously breaks down.
Until the very end, Japanese at virtually all levels continued to believe that they had some degree of initiative in determining how the war would end. Strategic thinking about the evolution of postwar continental affairs remained premised on the assumption that these developments would influence Japan, and Japan would retain some degree of influence over them, no matter how modest. But this was a delusion. With the Cairo Declaration of November 1943 the allies (without input or consultation from Stalin) determined that Japan would be stripped of its empire. This was reiterated in the Potsdam Declaration of July 1945. Despite this, Japanese leaders still clung to the belief that Soviet mediation, or even Soviet entry into the war, could be used as leverage against the United States. “Even without playing the mediator,” Koshiro notes on page 285, “Stalin still could have taken diplomatic advantage of Japan’s strategic stalemate on the Soviet-Japanese front by arranging Japan’s surrender and determining the postwar disposition of the Japanese empire to the Soviet advantage.”
The fact that Stalin chose not to do this, renouncing the neutrality pact which still had six months to run, constitutes the “betrayal” of Japan by the Soviet Union. She further notes on page 244 that “bilateral communication between Tokyo and Washington defined the nature of Japan’s surrender. The two nations focused so much on the future of the emperor system that they neglected the fate of Japan’s continental empire, much less Japan’s commitment and responsibility to it. Stalin … let the United States single-handedly define the nature of Japan’s surrender.” But there was no neglect. Japan’s “commitment and responsibility” to the empire had long since been extinguished by the allies and Stalin had already secured all the advantage he desired through the Yalta agreement of February 1945. Ultimately Koshiro does not simply describe the Japanese inability to grasp that they had lost the initiative regarding the end of the war, but manages to recreate it.
While this is the largest problem with the book it is hardly the only one. Koshiro’s contention that the Pacific War narrative is a US imposition simply ignores the extent to which Japanese collaborated in this construction for their own purposes, as Yoshikuni Igarashi has well demonstrated (Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Most of the secondary literature she uses to bolster her contentions is old and has been superseded by more recent work. Notably, she cites Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) but does not engage him and she entirely ignores the work of Richard Frank (Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, New York: Random House, 1999). Finally, given the new primary source material and ambition to rewrite the scholarly consensus on such a contentious topic the absence of a bibliography is a most curious omission.
Yukiko Koshiro’s Imperial Eclipse adds weight to the case that Soviet entry was the primary motivator for Japan’s surrender in 1945 but its failure to engage the considerable recent historiography, questionable premises and conclusions, and problematic use of evidence severely undercuts the book’s central thesis.
Paul E. Dunscomb
University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, USA
pp. 608-610