Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (review)

The blurbs on the jacket of Racing the Enemy praise the work for offering a truly international history never told before. But what history did Hasegawa rewrite and how did he present it to which nation's audience? While receiving accolades for its "innovative" narratives, the book has sparked debate among American scholars of A-bomb and Pacific War studies. Some examined the efficacy and legitimacy of Hasegawa's criticism of President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs. Others expressed fury over his treating Japanese and American leaders' decisions on the same moral plateau and even claimed that his work only pleased neonationalists in Japan.¹

Hasegawa's central argument seems to be: "Despite their destructive power, the atomic bombs were not sufficient to change the direction of Japanese diplomacy. The Soviet invasion was" (p. 298). He argues that Japanese leaders, even after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, hoped for Soviet mediation. The shock of the Soviet invasion was therefore so devastating that it prompted the Japanese government to surrender. Since the cold war, such narrative has been unacceptable for some American pundits who believe American nuclear weapons expedited Japan's surrender and brought much-needed peace. So Hasegawa, perhaps aware of such American patriotic sensitivity, compromised and credits the atomic bombs as well.² In the conclusion, he writes: "Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese would never have accepted surrender in August" (p. 295).

If Hasegawa chose to avoid a groundbreaking interpretation of the effect of Truman's A-bomb decision on Japan's surrender, what history did he attempt to rewrite? In the second and third chapters of the book, while switching between American and Russian actions, Hasegawa tracks Tokyo's negotiations with Moscow to secure the Neutrality Pact. He also delineates the army's fanatic determination to continue fighting the United States at all costs. Here Hasegawa criticizes the Japanese wartime leaders for failing the objective analysis and prolonging the decision to surrender even after Hiroshima.³ There is nothing new about this narrative. In 1981, Akira Iriye, in Power and Culture, argued just that. Not only castigating the military's irrationality, Iriye called Japan's approach to Moscow a tragic mistake and argued that Japan should have approached Washington, abandoned the Pan-Asian crusade, and returned to Wilsonianism (in the ensuing cold war).⁴ In contrast, Hasegawa presents in his conclusion hypothetical scenarios of the roads not taken by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (pp. 290–98). But these are all about the manner of Japan's surrender per se. Hasegawa's international approach does not examine U.S.-Soviet rivalry beyond World War II into the cold war, or postwar Japan's place in it. He does not speculate on what postwar world might have emerged had the war concluded differently.

The fundamental problem with Racing the Enemy is that it fails to present any new understanding of World War II. In the introduction, Hasegawa explains the three parts of his international paradigm of the war: the Pacific War, the Soviet-American rivalry, and the tangled Soviet-Japanese relationship (pp. 2–3). The Soviet Union was an important player. Hasegawa's narrative begins with Tokyo and Moscow concluding the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and ends with the Soviet-Japanese War, particularly the Kuril Operation that finally halted on September 5, 1945. He also details the famous Hirota-Malik talks of June 1945. Notwithstanding, toward the war's end, Hasegawa gives his Japanese protagonists only two choices: continue fighting with or surrender to the United States. He does not specify what Japanese leaders wanted from the Soviet Union beyond neutrality after the war, long-term peace or future confrontation.

Hasegawa does not see the war simply as between a fascist Japan and the U.S.-Soviet Grand Alliance. But...