Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi, 210 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$24.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-107-67616-9.
S.C.M. Paine of the Naval War College builds on her well-regarded books on Imperial Russia and China to complete her tryptic on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century grand strategies of Northeast Asia with this compelling short study of Imperial Japan. The overall thesis is not new—that Japan tragically shifted from a maritime strategy in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars to an unwinnable continental strategy aimed at an elusive Chinese centre of gravity in the wars from 1931 to 1945. This misguided continentalism was identified by Masataka Kosaka in the 1960s and more recently by Makoto Iokibe, and it was anticipated as far back as the eighteenth century by Tokugawa scholar Shihei Hayashi. However, what Paine brings is a fresh comparative treatment at a time when echoes of past imperial rivalries are again shaping the international relations of East Asia.
The Japanese Empire captures the rise and fall of Japanese maritime strategy over time while applying a critical template to Japanese grand strategy in each of the separate wars between 1894 and 1941. One can imagine how this would suit the Naval War College curriculum perfectly, but professors of history and international relations will also find it useful in their own graduate and undergraduate courses on East Asia. For that reason, I will probably slot this in for my courses either as a supplement to, or in lieu of, W.G. Beasley’s authoritative 1987 volume on Japanese imperialism.
In Paine’s account of Japan’s imperial wars certain themes recur. Each of the conflicts began with a surprise attack before a formal declaration of war (something planners at the Naval War College warned about in the decades before Pearl Harbor). Each of the conflicts aimed at overturning the regional balance of power by replacing China, then Russia, and then the United States as the dominant regional power. Each conflict also produced a new enemy as imperial rivals were dispatched. And each conflict profoundly changed the balance of power within Japan.
Thus, Japan’s strategic approach shifted in the early- to mid-twentieth century from a focus on maritime control to a focus on continental control, where Japan steadily lost its competitive edge. The Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars were a narrow victory, but Japan prevailed through superior definition of objectives and unity of command. By the China wars of the 1930s, that unity of command was crumbling as competing army and navy priorities crippled Japan’s early advantages over her adversaries. War termination became impossible to define as Japan struggled after 1937 to knock China out by alternately capturing the capital of Nanjing, destroying the Nationalist Army, attacking the economy, and suppressing insurgencies. Each successive assault on China’s perceived centre-of-gravity met with a measure of tactical success, but never a strategic outcome. Meanwhile, Japan only made its own centre of gravity more vulnerable: the Japanese economy stalled, nationalism within China rose to levels previously unseen, and ultimately Japan found itself in a suicidal war with the United States that resulted in the complete collapse of Japan’s maritime security. Paine takes the reader through this evolution with a clarity and cadence that make the book hard to put down. One cannot help but think of the perils maritime powers have always faced in continental wars, from the invasion of Sicily by Athens to the Vietnam War.
The great strength of The Japanese Empire—situating the evolution of Japanese grand strategy in the geopolitics of Northeast Asia and applying a grand strategy test to each conflict—may also be the source of the few weaknesses in the volume. Paine describes the book as an effort to “turn inside out” her previous work on Imperial Russia and China, and a welcome contribution that is. But in certain places Paine takes shortcuts to describe Japan’s strategic culture that do not do justice to the contents of the book. On the first page, for example, Japan’s objectives in the wars from 1894 to 1945 are defined as containing “the march of Russian imperialism into Asia that became the march of Communist Imperialism post-1917”—a description belied by the twists and turns that follow. Chapter 4, on the transition from a maritime to a continental security paradigm, is the most important in the book and does an excellent job isolating factors such as the external environment and the loss of strategic cohesion caused by the death of the Meiji oligarchs. Yet this pivotal chapter also tosses in state Shintoism as an ideological driver without connecting it to the core theme of the demise of maritime strategy (Imperial Navy ships were also blessed by Shinto priests, for example). The Japanese Empire is on very strong footing when unpacking the structural and material drivers of Japanese grand strategy, but somewhat less so when trying to account for ideational factors.
I suspect, though, that Paine was not trying to write the definitive book on the domestic sources of Japanese strategic culture. In a tightly argued 187-page monograph, she has arguably done something more useful for the general student of global history and international relations, and that is to place an earlier and more tragic era of Japanese grand strategy into a context that has obvious if unspoken implications for East Asia today. As Paine notes in the final line of the conclusion, Japan and her neighbours have yet to overcome the consequences of the wars from 1894 to 1945. This is certainly true and we will likely live with the challenge for decades more. The more interesting contemporary application of Paine’s history is to the emerging maritime grand strategies of Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping. Abe is evoking a strategy in which Japan defends its maritime approaches while upholding a maritime-based neoliberal order, which Paine rightly notes has always been “positive-sum,” and which, for all its many flaws, “is the only world order that benefits all who join because its laws and institutions are designed to promote economic growth in order to create wealth” (178).
The maritime strategy relies on alliances, and the core of Japan’s modern approach is to deepen the alliance with the United States and like-minded maritime powers rather than break away in search of autarky again. It is this aspect of Japan’s emerging grand strategy that many of Abe’s critics have missed as they focus on the seeming links to Japan’s predatory prewar strategy. But, as Paine emphasizes, Japan’s prewar strategy was flawed precisely because it had shifted away from a maritime focus.
Meanwhile, Xi has articulated and programmed for a maritime strategy that looks in the South China Sea like it could be the antithesis of a positive-sum and rules-based vision of a maritime order. But then, Chinese strategists could learn from this book as well. For if maritime powers risk destroying their domestic democracy and stability by engaging in protracted wars on the continent, continental powers have also created the conditions for their own demise when seeking to dominate at sea: think of Imperial Germany’s contest with Britain or the Soviet Union’s failed attempt to challenge the Pacific at the end of the Cold War.
These questions are well beyond the scope of The Japanese Empire, but are precisely the kind of strategic thinking this highly readable volume will prompt.
Michael J. Green
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, USA
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