Planning for War: Elite Staff Officers in the Imperial Japanese Army and the Road to World War II

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Planning for War: Elite Staff Officers in the Imperial Japanese Army and the Road to World War II
Richard J. Smethurst Nov. 1, 2020

The Asian Pacific Journal/ Japan Focus

What is it that pulled all of these men together in leading Japan into wars it could not win in China and with the US/UK? First, clearly many Japanese at all levels of society, whether emperor-centric, top-down leaders like Konoe and Hiranuma, elite military officers of the sort discussed above, rank-and-file officers who trained soldiers for and then led them into battle, the soldiers and their families back home, advocates of a command economy like Kishi Nobusuke, and even anti-militarists like Takahashi resented the arrogance of the Western imperialist powers which ran the world as they saw fit because they had the power to do so. The difference between Takahashi and these other men was not in how they conceived the problem, but in how they planned to resolve it—Takahashi by diplomacy and by strengthening the Japanese economy and competing with the Anglo-Americans economically, the ultranationalists by taking a tough diplomatic stance and even by going to war with the two English-speaking powers if necessary, a war which Takahashi understood Japan would lose—and he said this repeatedly before his murder in 1936.

https://apjjf.org/2020/21/Smethurst.html