From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States (review)

Sadao Asada’s underlying contention is that a failure of leadership within Japan’s naval establishment was ultimately responsible for the slide from the naval arms limitations regime of the 1920s and 1930s to the desperate gamble of attacking Pearl Harbor and invading Southeast Asia, in spite of clear indicators that Japan had little prospect of prevailing against the United States in a prolonged conflict. Asada debunks two assumptions in the process. The first is that war was the inevitable outcome of irresistible historical forces. The second, a revisionist view that has gained some currency in Japan, is that the Imperial Navy was dragged reluctantly into war with the United States by the army. Asada documents how a few within the naval establishment fought a rear-guard action to avert war but puts it beyond doubt that Japan’s own “navalists” were just as belligerent and reckless as their army counterparts.

When Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History was published in 1890, it established his reputation as the leading exponent and “propagandist” of the navalist era. Asada argues convincingly that Mahan’s association of powerful navies with national greatness and belief in the decisive fleet encounter sowed the seeds of a deterministic logic on both sides of the Pacific that commercial and naval rivalry between Japan and the United States would eventually force a showdown for maritime supremacy. The Imperial Navy’s “mirror-imaging” of the U.S. Navy did not properly materialize until the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 shifted its strategic horizons to the Pacific under the influence of Mahan’s contemporary and nearest Japanese equivalent, Satō Tetsutarō.

Mahan’s advocacy of naval expansion quickly wrought the desired effect. In 1901, the United States possessed a mere seven battleships to Japan’s twelve. By 1907 the balance was reversed to 35:25 in American favor. Mahanian “mirror-imaging” took on increasingly dogmatic appeal in Japan, where an unsuccessful bid was even made to lure Mahan to teach at the Naval Staff College. Japan’s navalists, protective of the navy’s special position within the Meiji constitution, feared eclipse and extinction with the U.S. Navy’s reach expanding westward. In their search for a budgetary enemy, partly to compete for resources with the army, they forgot “Mahan’s real teaching . . . that the decisive battle was a means to securing command of the sea” (p. 182).

Although Japan and the United States were briefly both British allies in World War I, the naval arms race continued, absorbing an extraordinary one-third of Japan’s national budget in 1921. Asada reconstructs in impressive detail, from personal and official archival material, how Japan’s chief negotiator to the Washington Conference in 1922, Admiral (later Prime Minister) Katō Tomosaburō, on his own initiative and in the teeth of opposition from the Navy General Staff, accepted a capital ship ratio of 10:6 vis-à-vis the United States. Firebrands, led by Chief of the Naval Staff Katō Kanji, developed a “ratio neurosis” wedded to the idea that maintaining 70 per cent of U.S. frontline strength was the Imperial Navy’s nonnegotiable margin for survival. Although the naval limitations treaties were maintained and extended to auxiliaries in 1930, the navalists worked throughout to undermine an arms control regime that had done much to enhance Japan’s security and spare it financial pain. Asada notes that relations with the U.S. Navy improved thereafter, until Katō Tomosaburō’s death removed the main obstacle to hard-line opponents of arms limitation.

The death knell of civilian government in 1936 cleared the path for all-out rearmament and full-scale war in China. In this destabilized environment, deteriorating relations with Washington and resulting pressure on Japan’s oil supplies led the navy to advocate an “advance to the South Seas,” equal to the army’s expansionism in China, risking...