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• 3 Pearl Harbor and Decision Making The decision to start a war with the United States and its allies by attacking Pearl Harbor and a number of other bases in Southeast Asia, by surprise, was long in coming. It was a decision, contrary to many analysts’ opinions, in which the emperor took part. Documentary evidence shows this conclusively. In Chapter 2, some of these documents from the Imperial Navy were introduced. We also have numerous records from the Imperial Army, which were not all destroyed as was thought for many years.1 The preservation of army records after the war, unlike those from the Imperial Navy, was not due to happenstance. Some were preserved by a Lieutenant Nakane with the approval of his superior officer. In August 1945 he transported them to his house and buried them in a steel drum. At the end of the same year they were retrieved and given to Lt. Col. Hara Shirò. To prevent their recognition and confiscation by the occupation forces he removed the cover sheets from the documents and burned them. Under the direction of Col. Hattori Takushir ò, in December 1946 the records were divided among three persons to be preserved until after the occupation so that a history of the war based on reliable information could be written. In 1953 Hattori published his Daitòa Sensò zenshi (Complete History of the Greater East Asian War) based on these documents.2 These war records have been systematically copied and edited since the establishment of the Self-Defense Agency Defense Research Institute, War History Office, in 34 • Hirohito and War 1956 (now called in English the National Institute for Defense Studies). Since June 1960 they have been stored there permanently.3 These are the documents on which Tsunoda and Ike based their works,4 but they did not exhaust the resources of this institute. Since the publication of the works by Tsunoda and Ike, a number of scholars have made use of the various resources of the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS). But these materials have yet to be fully explored, and studies based on these documents have not always been free of controversy. A case in point is the work of Hara Shirò (1911–1991), formerly of the War History Office. At the end of the war he was serving in Section 20, War Operations (Sensò shidò), of the Army High Command. As noted above he was instrumental in preserving these records. Later, drawing on them and other materials, he made a detailed study of the way military decisions were made by the imperial Japanese government , including the emperor’s involvement. Hara wrote five thick volumes , “Particulars on the Beginning of the Greater East Asia War,”5 and much later an accompanying commentary.6 He intended to show how the Pacific War began and why Japan lost it. The five-volume compendium is an extremely detailed account of the decisions and the personalities behind them that finally led to Japan’s attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. His documentation, citing innumerable diaries and official and unofficial records from that time, is overwhelming. Nevertheless, the publication of his manuscript was almost as problematic as the saving of the original records. Hara completed his work between February and May 1964, and it was circulated for additions and corrections among the members of the War History Office from November 1964 until May 1967.7 Then the work was withheld from publication until 1973–1974 due to protests from former members of the Imperial Navy who objected to his interpretations in some forty different places. Originally his work was to be titled “Imperial Headquarters, Army and Navy Departments, Particulars on the Beginning of the Greater East Asia War.” The word “Navy” was eventually deleted to accommodate these objections and allow the work to be published.8 Later Uchida Kazuomi, former navy chief of staff of the Self-Defense Forces, edited a two-volume work presenting the navy’s viewpoint.9 Hara’s final book, a commentary on the events described in detail in the preceding five volumes, was published in 1987. His last study was published after Uchida’s work but, like his earlier publications, is in no way a vindication of the army’s role in what he describes as a political debacle that led to a military catastrophe. During the time it took to resolve this dispute—a vestige of the [52.14.85.76] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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