| NOTA |
(★)(Japan´s Advance into Southeast Asia 1939〜1941, Selected translations from ´Taiheiyoo sensoo e no michi : kaisen gaikoo shi´)(In 1976, Columbia University Press began publishing a projected five-volume series of selected translations from the influential Japanese work ´Taiheiyoo sensoo e no michi : kaisen gaikoo shi [Japan´s Road to the Pacific War]´. When the first volume,´Deterrent Diplomacy´, appeared, the London Times Literary Supplement remarked : ´This volume is greatly to be welcomed. The full complexity of policy-making is revealed... We can look forward with enthusiasm to the publication of the later volumes in this series.´ ´The Fateful Choice´ is the second in the series. It takes up the dilemma posed to Japan´s expansionists in 1939-1941 : how to exploit the opportunities suddenly open to them by Germany´s assault on Europe ---whether to thrust northward against the Soviet Union and try to drive the Russians from the Pacific or thrust southward into the colonial empires of southeast Asia, driving out the Europeans and Americans and acquiring control of the vast resources there that made Japan´s dream of autonomy seem possible. The first part of this volume, translated with an introduction by Peter A. Berton, presents a detailed account by one of Japan´s leading international relations specialists, Hosoya Chihiro of Hitotsubashi University, of how Japan came to decide against the northern option, negotiating instead a treaty of neutrality with the USSR in 1941. The second part, composed of four essays by three other Japanese authorities, Nagaoka Shinjiro, chief editor of the Foreign Ministry´s Diplomatic Documents, Hata Ikuhiko, an authority on Japanese military history, and Tsunoda Jun, a highly reputed diplomatic historian, probes the underlying rationale for the option taken, the ´southern advance.´ These essays, translated and introduced by Robert A. Scalapino, examine both military and economic aspects of this fateful decision, which ultimately brought Japan into direct confrontation with the United States. ◆James William Morley, professor of government at Columbia University, is the author of ´Japan´s Foreign Policy 1868-1941 : A Research Guide´.) |
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