Japan and Britain at War and Peace (review)

The issue of the Pacific War continues to cause great concern and conflict at times within Northeast Asia, particularly regarding the history of Japan and China. This volume, first considered in a conference in 2005 and published in 2009, assesses another area of the war which is connected to Japan but is far less commonly covered in the normal analysis of the Japanese role in World War II. The book deals with the history between Japan and the United Kingdom and, consequently, there is a considerable amount of information that those with an even slightly above-average interest in the war and reconciliation will find valuable.

Hugo Dobson and Kosuge Nobuko have gathered a series of essays dealing with the relations between Britain and Japan while the countries were at war and at peace. The war chapters, which are disappointingly few, analyze the different areas in which the British worked within Asia against the Japanese. The peace chapters range from a discussion of the return of Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) (by Ian Nish) to analysis of Japan's global position in the twenty-first century (Reinhard Drifte). While reading the book, I was surprised by how unfamiliar the information was regarding the Japanese and British conflict during the Pacific War. Though these early chapters are the foundation of the other analyses of the book, the work as a whole would have been enhanced in many ways had this section been longer.

Chapter 1, by C. G. H. Dunlop, recounts the Japanese-British conflict in the Pacific arena and the increasing power of the British against the under-supported Japanese troops after initial British problems. At first, "British preparations for war within the theatre were characterized widely by complacency, slackness and poor or inappropriate training. Intelligence of the Japanese was sparse and their military capabilities were woefully underestimated" (p. 15). In his overview of the Pacific War, Dunlop describes the British gradually becoming more accomplished and the Japanese underestimating "the new-found British capabilities" as they became overconfident (p. 20). The Japanese and British war in Southeast Asia was very similar to the overall war as the Allied forces managed to become more strategic. But the final point of this chapter is the reminder of how the Japanese fought to the death "and for that . . . they earned the grim respect of the British they fought in Burma" (p. 23).

Philip Towle's chapter makes the fundamental point that the United Kingdom underappreciated the war against Japan in the Pacific both at the time of the war and now. He offers interesting data about things such as Britain working with India (p. 32) and the difficult relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt (p. 30). The main point of the chapter is discussion of the Germans seeming worse than the Japanese to the public quite simply because the British people were more aware of what had been inflicted upon Europe (p. 25). As Japanese investment in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, started in the 1980s, a sense of dislike of the Japanese began to emerge (p. 27). Emperor Hirohito's death in 1989 was the death of Japan's "last enemy" (p. 37) and, as such, once this part of history had gone, better relations could finally begin to be considered.

Chapter 3 by Kurosawa Fumitaka assesses the difference in the numbers of deaths of POWs in the European and Pacific theaters. In the former, the death rate was 5.1 per cent for those held by the Italians and Germans; for those held by the Japanese, it was 24.8 per cent (p. 30). This shocking difference explains the long-term resentment that Towle describes in chapter 2; greater effort to connect these points would have been useful. Kurosawa emphasizes how the British perceived the lack of food, clothing, and medical care as an attack upon them, yet most Japanese at this time did not have food or clothing...