In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo. What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, "Inventing Japan" is surely it.
http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Japan-1853-1964-Library-Chronicles/dp/0812972864
This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun, it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.”
http://www.amazon.com/Rising-Sun-Decline-Japanese-1936-1945/dp/0812968581
Prince Fumimaro, who served as the Prime Minister of Japan in the lead-up to Japan entering World War II, was a Marxist as a college student and he later turned to fascism in the 1930s when Hitler came to power. To change Japan into a totalitarian state, Konoe pushed a National Mobilization Law through the parliament in 1938, which allowed the central government to control all manpower and material available in Imperial Japan. Due to his prior Marxist background, Konoe was still sympathetic to Soviet Russia and he surrounded himself with socialist advisers and one of his top advisers was a Soviet spy who obstructed the peace process between Japan and China. Because a prolonged war with China would have made Japan unable to launch a coordinated attack on the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, the Comintern manipulated the Konoe government through Hotsumi Ozaki, who was an expert in Sino-Japanese relations, and Ozaki was recruited by the Comintern leadership based in Shanghai to work with Richard Sorge in Japan. As an influential member of the inner circle of the Konoe government, Ozaki supported Japanese expansion towards the Dutch East Indies and Singapore and he was against Hitler's request to invade Siberia, which suited Russia's national interests. Harry Dexter White, who was a Soviet agent as well as a top advisor to President Roosevelt, also played a key role in scuttling the peace efforts by the Konoe government that was striving to avoid war with the United States. Under Operation Snow, White was responsible for authoring the Hull Note, an ultimatum against Japan, and he advised Roosevelt to implement a full-scale economic embargo against Japan after it occupied French Indochina, which made war inevitable as its oil reserves would be exhausted in two years. The Soviets were extremely fearful of a Japanese attack against the Soviet Union and they expended great efforts through their spy networks in Japan and the US to ensure that Japan would strike America, instead of the Soviet Union, by playing the US and Japan off against each other. Imperial Japan blundered into an unnecessary war because of a handful of Soviet agents but the Japanese takeover of European colonies in Asia severely undermined European colonial control in the region, which depended on the notion of European cultural and military supremacy, thus paving the way for these former colonies' eventual independence in the post-war era.
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