The Road to War (1989) s01e03 Episode Script
Part 3
Many years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, officers of the Japanese navy drew up their first operations plan to destroy the American fleet in the Pacific, lt was based on the latest technology and the best military advice available, When it was finished, the plan became a cornerstone of Japanese defence policy, The date was August 15th 1907, The greatest double-cross in history, Jap envoys talk peace in Washington, Jap planes without warning bring war to America, Our Pacific outpost in the Hawaiian islands is ruthlessly bombed as Japan's perfidious declaration of war, Death and destruction unleashed on a nation at peace, Our battle cry is, ''Remember Pearl Harbor, '' That is how Pearl Harbor is remembered to this day, ln an unprovoked attack without prior declaration of war, Japanese naval bombers killed 2,403 unsuspecting Americans and knocked out the United States Pacific Fleet, To Americans it was an act of simple treachery, but history is usually written by the winners and some contemporary Japanese historians see their country as a victim, When you look at it from the Japanese point of view and take into account the Japanese state papers and documents, as well as the testimonies of survivors, l don't see that Japan really wanted to start the war against America, l think war broke out because there was a strong desire on the American side to force Japan into war, That desire came from the top, ln Japanese eyes, America and the British Empire were major obstacles to Japan's territorial ambitions, Most of these were directed at the mainland in Asia, at China, where Japan had been at war since 1931 , The roots of Japan's conflict with her neighbours go back to the 19th century, for Japan's road to war was also her struggle to come to terms with the ways of the West, Until the 1850s the Japanese had lived in deliberate isolation, Their history and their culture were their own.
Their emperors came from the oldest ruling house in the world.
lt was the intrusion of foreign traders and the fear of colonisation by the West that compelled them to modernize.
Japan adopted a parliament, a penal code and even a peerage, as in Britain, She also acquired an ambition, to become, like her mentors in the West, an imperial power, lt was Britain that Japan took as her guide, ln 1902 they entered into the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, Japan was quite convinced she would not make any mistakes as long as she followed the British example in diplomacy, Western powers had followed Britain in developing their international relationships to suit their own convenience.
They all went about securing their own colonies and ruled over them.
Japan came on the scene rather late in the day, but she followed the rules in a most exemplary fashion, Early in the century, Japan held a substantial presence on the mainland of Asia.
Korea was a protectorate.
Further north, Japan held extensive rights in South Manchuria and neighbouring provinces.
ln all, Japan's empire stretched from Taiwan in the south to Sakhalin in the north.
With an eye to further expansion, her naval and military leaders identified the powers they thought most likely to block her supremacy in Asia.
The first lmperial Defence Policy was drawn up in 1907.
There a hypothetical enemy was actually decided upon.
The army would be at war with Russia and the navy with America.
Thereafter all drills and military exercises were carried out with this in mind.
Since these two countries were depicted as Japan's potential enemy over a long period, the idea gradually arose among the young officers that it was Japan's fate to go to war with both of these countries, l think it was inevitable.
ln 1904 Japan issued her first direct challenge to a Western power.
ln a territorial dispute over Port Arthur, on the coast of mainland China, the Japanese army fought imperial Russia for several months.
lt was one of the first wars to be recorded in moving pictures.
On land, it was the Japanese who won.
To save the day, Russia despatched its Baltic Fleet to the Far East.
The fleet took seven months to sail halfway round the globe, only to be wrecked in less than a day by Japanese warships.
The world was impressed.
Not for centuries had there been such a rapid rise to international power.
There was special praise from Britain, whose alliance with Japan had been signed two years before.
For the British had built the ships and trained the officers that defeated the Russians.
Later, in the First World War, Japan fought on the side of the Allies.
ln the victory celebrations in London, Japanese soldiers and sailors marched alongside their British and American comrades, When Japan's future emperor Crown Prince Hirohito paid a state visit to Britain, Anglo-Japanese ties became closer still.
His visit to the fleet at Portsmouth with the Prince of Wales was one of the highlights of his tour.
ln contrast, relations with America were strained by race discrimination.
For decades California's farmers had relied on cheap Japanese labour, but in the 1920s fear of the so-called Yellow Peril led to a total ban on Japanese immigrants.
Among those who had been able to enter, discrimination extended to their children's use of swimming pools.
They would clean the pools every Friday.
The reason - Saturday, when the pools were clean and the water was nice and clear, the white boys and white girls would come in and swim.
Sunday and Monday too.
Then, on Tuesday, the Hispanics, or the Mexicans as they were called then, were allowed to come in, and they would cavort for a day or two.
And when they got through and were no longer using it, then the blacks were admitted and welcomed to the pool.
Then, either Thursday night or Friday, just before they cleaned the pools, they would allow us Asian-Americans to come in and swim.
lf we went to a theatre, we had to pay the full price admission, then we had to go up to what they called Nigger Heaven.
Way up at the top.
And occasionally even on certain streetcars, we had to sit in the back.
And so there was a tiered discrimination against us, based upon whether we came from Europe or the Hispanic group or the Asian group.
On the west coast we were at the bottom of the totem pole.
When the Covenant of the League of Nations was drawn up in Versailles, an anti-racism clause had been on the agenda, The refusal of the Anglo-Saxon powers to include it caused bitter resentment among the Japanese.
Moreover, when the spoils of defeated Germany were divided up, Japan was allowed a much smaller share than she considered to be her due, More humiliation followed when the great powers met in Washington in 1921 to discuss disarmament, Japan was made to limit her navy to just over half the size of the British and American navies, The Japanese were left with clear superiority in the Pacific, but national pride was hurt, The naval representative, Admiral Kato, was so upset that he vowed one day to turn the tables on the Anglo-Saxon powers in the Pacific, But nine years later the restrictions were extended, The serving admirals and officers were angered by the situation thus created, whereby America was now in a position to defeat Japan in the event of war, My own opinion is that by this time America had succeeded in breaking the back of the Japanese navy and thus had already beaten her chief potential enemy without a fight, Britain added to Japan's gradual isolation, Under American pressure, she scrapped the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, causing offence to a wartime ally who valued the treaty as a symbol of Japan's membership of the family of major powers, But these tensions at the diplomatic level tell only part of the story, To young Japanese, Americana was all the rage, The fruits of westernisation soon turned sour, America's Great Depression in 1929 had a devastating impact on Japan and Japanese nationalists blamed the attachment to Western values for the ills of their own society, Japan could not feed its population, which had been growing at a rate of a million a year, The farmers worked plots that could barely support one family, Much of Japan's staple food, rice, had to be imported, To pay for the rice, Japan exported silk.
Silk prices collapsed and as Western countries erected tariff walls to protect their own industries, Japan's export trade sank to its lowest level ever, Millions went hungry.
Unable to reduce its surplus population by emigration.
Japan turned to a drastic solution.
the acquisition of living space in China, the great land mass 400 miles to the west, China was Japan's manifest destiny, Poverty-stricken, seemingly ungovernable, torn by warlords, banditry and civil war, China needed law and order as badly as Japan needed space, or so Japan's leaders were able to reason, China had remained an independent country, but in the 19th century she had been forced by European invaders, notably Britain and France, to lease settlements to foreign powers, The biggest was in Shanghai, where Britain, America and other powers ran their own affairs independently of nominally sovereign China, Both Britain and America wanted to protect China, or rather they wanted to defend their economic interests there, Their policies towards China had always been economically motivated, From the American point of view, any Japanese advance into China would upset the balance of power in the Pacific, and wasn't distractiable for that reason.
For Japan, the gateway to China was Manchuria, where Japan already had commercial rights to the railway and a garrison to guard it, This overseas force, called the Kwantung Army, was in many ways a law unto itself, ln 1931 , radical Kwantung officers decided to colonise Manchuria, They manufactured an incident by blowing up a section of the railway, They then presented it to the outside world as an unprovoked attack by Chinese troops, Only years later did the full story emerge, The fact that the Manchurian incident arose as a result of a Japanese plot was known only to a very few people, l think Japan managed to conceal it very skilfully, l've recently managed to find one of the soldiers who was directly involved in the incident, According to him, Kawamoto and two other soldiers went off down the railway line at about 10,30 at night, Kawamoto gave the order to halt, ''You two keep guard on both sides, '' he said, Kawamoto was doing something furtively behind him, Suddenly he shouted for them to get down and the railway line blew up, Then Kawamoto said, ''The Chinese army has just blown up the Manchurian railway, ''Let's go immediately and tell everyone, '' Within hours of the explosion, the fighting spread to the outskirts of Mukden, the capital and headquarters of the Kwantung Army, A senior staff officer there, Tadashi Katakura, recalls the need for a quick decision, whether to cover up and press on or withdraw, There was a meeting of the chiefs of staff following a phone conversation with the army commander, who'd returned, We all wore Japanese kimonos except lshihara, who was in his military uniform, Before the meeting, four of us talked under a willow tree in the headquarters garden, We agreed it looked like a plot concocted by lshihara and ltagaki and we discussed what we ought to do, We agreed that unless we worked together to settle the incident, not only would the army have to retreat from Manchuria but Japan would lose all rights and interests in the country, So we decided to back the plotters, Unhindered by a weak and embarrassed government in Tokyo, the Kwantung Army swept across Manchuria, Manchuria became Manchukuo, a puppet state under Japanese protection, As titular head of state, Japan secured the services of Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, China appealed to the League of Nations, but the League was an instrument of conciliation, not an international police force, lt sent an Englishman, the Earl of Lytton, to investigate, His report condemned Japan, Manchuria, you will see on this map, is a part of China situated north of the Great Wall.
lt is about the size of France and Germany combined.
The trouble began on 18th September last year, when Japanese troops occupied the town of Mukden.
The excuse given by them was that Chinese soldiers had blown up a section of the South Manchuria Railway and fired upon a Japanese patrol.
We found that the Japanese occupation of this large part of China was notjustified on the ground of self-defence and that the new state which had been set up was a Japanese protectorate rather than a genuine case of Manchurian self-determination.
The issue is very critical and the peace of the world hangs in the balance.
Lytton's verdict was overwhelmingly endorsed by the League to the fury of Japan's delegate Yosuke Matsuoka.
l call on His Excellency Mr Matsuoka, delegate of Japan.
China has long been derelict in her international duties as a sovereign state Matsuoka accused the Western imperial powers of hypocrisy, pointing out they had been the first to acquire interests in China, and with that, he and Japan walked out of the League.
At home, Matsuoka was treated as a hero.
Defying the great powers, Japan had made off with a share of the decaying Chinese Empire.
As for the League, it had shown itself to be ineffective and it was never to recover its authority, A fleet of merchant ships carried Japanese reinforcements across the Yellow Sea to Manchuria.
ln their wake went settlers, farmers and industrial workers who would exploit Manchukuo's potential, Japan had found new living space.
ln propaganda films made to encourage civilian migration, Manchukuo was celebrated as a land of opportunity where Japanese families could prosper, protected from Chinese bandits by the ever-watchful Kwantung Army.
But many of the settlers had been conscripted and living conditions came as a shock.
l thought Manchuria was like places which l saw in American movies, but life in reality was very cruel.
The weather was cold and food was bad.
We couldn't eat Japanese food, only millet and barnyard grass.
We Japanese have miso soup, but in their soup there was something sour and salty.
Anyhow, there was no nutrition, only cold.
Not only l but everyone wanted to go home, but we had been sent from home like soldiers.
We couldn't give up so easily.
ln the house, we could see the stars through the holes in the ceiling.
On a cold night l needed padded bedding and an overcoat on top of that.
Outside there were wolves, l knew that l'd come to a horrible place.
The local Chinese were treated severely.
Some collaborated.
Many worked as coolies for the Kwantung occupation army, ln a remote area some Chinese were doing roadworks, They escaped but some Japanese soldiers caught and tortured them, kicking and beating them in front of us.
We were 15 or 16 years old, Those elderly Chinese men weren't young enough to be spies or anything.
l was watching and wondering why they were doing such violent things to the Chinese people.
Reflecting back, we used to think the Japanese were a superior race.
Chinese and Koreans were lower-class.
Even in our pioneer group, some of them despised the Chinese.
We all did.
Japan's military elite now controlled foreign policy.
By law, the army and navy enjoyed direct access to the emperor and effective independence of the government.
The army was deeply conservative, suspicious of political parties, academic freedom, disarmament and the West.
Many middle-ranking officers joined ultra-nationalist groups, demanding colonial expansion.
Civilian government gradually collapsed.
ln a six-year period the army forced three prime ministers out of office.
Two more were assassinated, as were several cabinet ministers.
The violence reached a climax in 1936, when fanatical officers staged a revolt.
Soldiers broke into the houses of ministers and officials.
Several were murdered before the government, backed by the emperor and the navy, restored an uneasy peace.
This cabinet in Tokyo fell victim to an attempt to seize power by part of the Japanese army.
Admiral Okada, the prime minister, was shot by assassins in his home.
The veteran Count Saito was also shot.
The recent speech by his son, Ambassador Saito, has a dramatic significance.
Japan is a spoiled child who may go astray any moment, who may run amok at the slightest provocation.
The one source of stability in Japan was the emperor, Hirohito.
The first of the emperors had begun his reign in 660 BC.
He and his successors were believed to be arahitogami, human and at the same time a god.
Hirohito was a slight and timid figure, but all the warring factions owed him allegiance and emperor-worship was central to the life of his people.
Every school had to have a special little shrine called a honden for photographs of the emperor and empress, together with a copy of the lmperial Rescript.
Every time we passed in front of this shrine, we had to perform a deep bow.
There were different degrees of bowing, from light to deep, according to the occasion, but when it came to anything to do with the emperor, we had to lower our heads by 45 degrees.
When we looked in the direction of the photographs, we didn't look at them directly.
We had to bow so deeply and so long that if we wanted to see the photographs, our only chance was to roll our eyes upwards very briefly.
l remember when l was five years old, the emperor came and visited a military exercise in Hokkaido.
A week before the visit, the police went to every house, ordering any invalid lying in an upstairs room to come down to the ground floor.
They said no one should be on a higher level than the emperor.
The emperor's constitutional position was hedged about with ambiguities, but no one has ever denied that if he had cared to command, all Japan would have obeyed.
After the war, Hirohito was made to renounce his godly status, but up to his death, his hold on the affections of his people was as strong as it had been in his days as the divine ruler of Japan.
By 1936 a rearmed and bellicose Japan had occupied much of China to the north of the Great Wall.
lt was time to develop relations with the expansionist powers in Europe.
The Anti-Comintern Pact, with Mussolini's ltaly and Hitler's Germany, was designed to protect its signatories from the Soviet Union.
lt was the first treaty between Japan and the Axis powers.
For Japan, intent on expanding into China, it was some insurance against interference from the Russians.
ln Manchuria the quality of iron ore and coal was poor and the pressure to expand further was compelling.
On July 7th 1937, a restless Japanese army turned a trivial incident into another opportunity for conquest.
Japanese infantry were training at night by the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking.
They were divided into groups, one representing an imaginary enemy.
At 10,30pm the exercise had just ended.
Within a minute, two or three shots came whizzing over our heads.
They were from the Chinese soldiers on the embankment.
You can generally tell the difference between blank and live ammunition.
When it was fired it made a bang and came straight over our heads and we could hear it landing.
Staff Sergeant lwaya told the battalion commander what was going on and the commander immediately ordered a muster.
By this time it was beginning to get light, 8th Company was ordered to advance again as far as Ryobyo, the place they'd been the night before.
When we got to the bridge an enemy officer appeared and shouted, ''Stop!'' One of our officers went to speak to him ''We've been ordered here as we were yesterday, '' he said.
The Chinese officer said, ''No way'' and returned to his men.
As soon as he got back, the Chinese started firing at us, l was the commander of the 3rd Light Machine-Gun Platoon and had seen plenty of action.
So l took a machine-gun from a soldier and blazed away at the enemy, forcing them to pull back.
This was the start of the Sino-Japanese War.
lt quickly escalated as Japanese forces made for Shanghai, the biggest commercial city in the East and the home of thousands of expatriate Americans and Europeans.
The army's own newsreels recorded the triumphant advance.
The fate of Manchuria had attracted little notice in the West.
As an American newspaper remarked.
''The American people don't give a hoot in a rain barrel who controls North China, '' But an attack on Shanghai was a challenge to Western interests.
Here's where it started, the Marco Polo Bridge south-west of Peiping.
A bridge destined to be as famous in China's fight for independence as the bridge at Concord is to American history.
The first clash brings China's new army to the scene, this time determined to resist the invader, and the fat is in the fire.
With Japan quickly pouring 20,000 men into the Peiping area, Chinese infantry forces are quickly reinforced.
Greatest damage is caused by Japanese bombing raids, with many parts of Chinese towns and cities reduced to a shambles.
Wounded pour into the city from the outskirts, where the 29th Route Army threw back the Japanese after fierce fighting, Red Cross facilities are overtaxed but the traditional rickshaw bears the brunt of the transfer of the wounded to the rear.
But reinforcements go forward to bolster the heroic defence of the 29th Route Army.
Within a month of the encounter at the Marco Polo Bridge, the assault on Shanghai began.
The navy struck first in amphibious landings.
The army followed.
And then the bombing began.
Thousands of Chinese civilians fled into the European enclaves.
But there was no room for all the refugees.
To escape the terror, men, women and children fled into the countryside.
The lucky ones got away in trains, but there were not enough trains.
With most of eastern China overrun by invaders, the flood of refugees became the biggest exodus in history.
Some 20 million Chinese trudged westward for hundreds of miles.
China's government in Nanking appealed to the League of Nations.
The League was powerless.
But in the vastness of China, the Japanese army's lines of communication became hopelessly overstretched.
The advance bogged down and casualties mounted.
Japan was trapped in a war too big to win and impossible to abandon.
Her soldiers were hardy and brave.
They had been taught that death in battle would be rewarded by a place of honour among the spirits of their ancestors.
The ashes of the war dead were brought back to Japan.
ln solemn ceremonies at a sacred temple, the Yaskuni Shrine, they were presented to bereaved families.
The names of the war dead were placed in the inner recesses of the temple, where even the emperor came to bow.
Japan's ancient martial tradition demanded total obedience to superior orders.
Surrender on the battlefield was profoundly dishonourable.
A defeated enemy was beneath contempt and this the citizens of China were now to discover.
After the fall of Shanghai the Japanese army pushed westward up the Yangtze valley to the capital, Nanking.
Nanking fell in December 1937, lf Shanghai had been hell for the civil population, there is no name for what now took place.
ln ten days Japanese soldiers shot and bayoneted and beheaded tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war.
Shiro Azuma was a private soldier who kept a diary during the massacres, He himself killed several captured Chinese soldiers and lived to regret what he had done.
lt was mass murder.
When l went to the Yangtze river, corpses just covered the ground.
l couldn't help stepping on them to go to the boat.
The number was limitless, Some people never examine their conscience.
They want to say that l'm exaggerating, that there was no massacre at Nanking.
There are people who try to play down what we had done and l have to fight against them.
lf we don't reflect on our actions, we never improve.
We were tried and brought to court by your country, for the Japanese have never reconciled themselves to what they've done in the past.
Hitler thought the Germans were a chosen people and the Jewish race were inferior.
They discriminated against other races too, We did the same.
The Japanese were superior, the Chinese inferior.
We used to call a Chinese person a ''colo'', a small stone, ''Let's kick it,'' We despised the Chinese, That's why we could be so cruel to them.
Because we were so overpopulated, we didn't take human life seriously.
We didn't respect ourselves, so why should we have cared for the Chinese? News of the atrocities had reached the West from doctors, missionaries and journalists.
ln America anti-Japanese feeling found an outlet in demands for economic sanctions, but President Roosevelt was determined not to provoke Japan.
America showed its reluctance even to contemplate war when the US gunboat Panay was sunk by Japanese aircraft while patrolling the Yangtze river.
All that was needed to keep relations on an even keel was an apology and an offer of compensation from the government in Tokyo.
lt was a great mistake.
lt was an unintentional and unexpected occurrence.
The Japanese government and people wish to express their sincerest and profoundest regrets to the American government and people on account of this deplorable incident.
By the summer of 1938, the Japanese army had occupied all the sea ports and the richer parts of China.
But the cost of Japan's colonial war was crippling the economy.
Raw materials, especially scrap iron, were removed from the market and diverted to defence production.
By 1938 the armed forces were absorbing 70% of government spending.
The results were spectacular.
The army had 2,000 first-line aircraft, including fighter bombers as effective as any in Europe and America.
The navy, defying the disarmament treaties of Washington and London, had built the largest and most powerful battleships afloat.
Many of the navy's 3,500 pilots had years of experience in combat.
On the other side of the world an equally formidable military power.
Nazi Germany, invaded Poland.
By May 1940 Hitler's Wehrmacht had overrun much of continental Europe.
The Japanese were dazzled.
Foreign minister Matsuoka flew to Berlin to sign a new pact of mutual military support.
Henceforth Germany, ltaly and Japan would spring to one another's defence if a co-signatory were attacked, But the meeting also endorsed the claims of the Axis powers to supremacy in Europe and Japan's right to impose a new order in Asia.
For Japan now needed even further territorial advances to sustain her existing empire.
Beyond China, the Philippines, lndo-China and the Dutch East lndies had the raw materials for which Japan's voracious military machine was desperate.
Above all, there was oil.
The navy alone was consuming 400 tons of it an hour and Japan's reserves were running out.
To get reliable supplies of oil, Japan would have to invade her neighbours to the south.
The first objective was French lndo-China.
By agreement with the defeated government of France.
Japan occupied the north of the colony.
Ten months later Japan swallowed the rest of lndo-China, securing a base for further expansion in South-east Asia.
By now alarm bells were ringing in London and Washington, From that moment on, Singapore, the key British base in the Far East, was within range of Japanese bombers, Should Singapore fall, the Dutch East lndies would easily come under Japanese occupation.
All this was seen by President Roosevelt as very dangerous because it meant Japan could dominate the whole of Asia and the Pacific.
Roosevelt's response was immediate.
On 26th July he banned all exports to Japan of oil.
His move forced Japan into a corner.
She could either fight her way out or capitulate.
The Japanese were loath to start a war just to assure the country's oil supplies, but they felt that this was what it had come to.
Even though it would mean fighting America to get that oil from the East lndies, there was no other way out, that's how they saw it.
There was a widespread feeling that Japan was unlikely to win a long-drawn-out war with America and people wondered how Japan could have got into such a situation.
Even most military leaders had little confidence that Japan could fight a long war with America, but a short war, that was something else.
Many felt that after one or one and a half years of fighting.
Japan might well be in a good enough position to call a halt and to offer peace.
Japan's leaders were divided.
The prime minister, Prince Konoe, urged continued negotiation with Washington.
The military leaders pressed for war.
On September 3rd they compromised.
lf there was no agreement with Washington by the end of October, Japan would attack the Far Eastern possessions of America, Britain and the Netherlands.
At the imperial palace the plan was put to the emperor.
He revealed grave doubts.
Pulling a paper from his pocket, he read out a poem composed by his grandfather.
''All the seas in every quarter are as brothers to one another.
''Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife rage so turbulently throughout the world?'' The emperor didn't want war with America, but his position had always been to respect the established political system.
l'm only speculating, but it may well be if the emperor had stepped in firmly and made clear his strong opposition to war, then it might not have happened.
He couldn't have done that, lt would have set a constitutional precedent.
There was the danger of provoking a military revolt.
The Army Minister, General Tojo, now took over the government, replacing Prince Konoe.
The deadline for negotiations was extended to the end of November and an special envoy was sent to Washington to continue the talks.
ln an attempt to avert war in the Pacific, Saburo Kurusu comes as a special envoy of the Tokyo government.
ln an interview he says; Gentlemen, you all know how difficult my mission is, but l'll do all l can to make it a successful one for the sake of two countries, Japan and the United States.
The talks became less and less cordial, Washington insisted the Japanese withdrew from China before lifting the oil embargo, Tokyo refused.
By now the Americans had broken the code between the Japanese envoys and their masters in Tokyo.
They knew that attack was imminent, but exactly where or when it was coming remained a mystery.
Karusu continued to negotiate.
But as he talked, a Japanese task force of six aircraft carriers, two battleships and an escort of cruisers and destroyers was crossing the Pacific, bound for Pearl Harbor.
The naval commander who drew up the operational plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor is still alive.
ln his Tokyo home he has a model of the aircraft carrier from which he helped direct the attack.
ln order for us to succeed, the torpedoes had to find their target unimpeded.
The water at Pearl Harbor is shallow and there was a chance the torpedoes might get stuck in the sea bed, so we called in specialists who could sort this out.
Secondly, we had to use large aerial bombs.
We aimed to attack the harbour by horizontal penetration, so accurate knowledge of local landmarks was crucial.
ln an attack like this it's more important to have a good pilot than a good bomb-aimer.
We also used high-speed bombs, which are smaller and easier to control.
lt was the use of these three main weapons that we had to perfect.
The attack on Pearl Harbor caught the US Pacific Fleet completely by surprise.
Most of the warships were tied up at their moorings and in two hours 19 ships, including eight battleships, were sunk or badly damaged.
Nearly 200 American planes were destroyed on the ground.
But the Japanese missed their principal target.
The fleet's three aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped the attack.
To the high command in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor was a pre-emptive strike, an attempt to disable the only power that could block a Japanese conquest of South-east Asia.
Even President Roosevelt gave Japan's planners their due.
''Our enemies, '' he said, ''performed a brilliant feat of deception, ''perfectly timed and executed with great skill, '' Four years later the Japanese empire was in ruins.
The military technology she had pursued so keenly had been turned against her with lethal effect.
Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo itself had been flattened by American bombers, Japan's new constitution was written by the victors.
ln it, Japan renounced war and the emperor his divinity.
What Japan had aspired to was imperial grandeur in the European mould.
Too late, she discovered that imperialism by military conquest was no longer an ambition the world could tolerate.
Their emperors came from the oldest ruling house in the world.
lt was the intrusion of foreign traders and the fear of colonisation by the West that compelled them to modernize.
Japan adopted a parliament, a penal code and even a peerage, as in Britain, She also acquired an ambition, to become, like her mentors in the West, an imperial power, lt was Britain that Japan took as her guide, ln 1902 they entered into the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, Japan was quite convinced she would not make any mistakes as long as she followed the British example in diplomacy, Western powers had followed Britain in developing their international relationships to suit their own convenience.
They all went about securing their own colonies and ruled over them.
Japan came on the scene rather late in the day, but she followed the rules in a most exemplary fashion, Early in the century, Japan held a substantial presence on the mainland of Asia.
Korea was a protectorate.
Further north, Japan held extensive rights in South Manchuria and neighbouring provinces.
ln all, Japan's empire stretched from Taiwan in the south to Sakhalin in the north.
With an eye to further expansion, her naval and military leaders identified the powers they thought most likely to block her supremacy in Asia.
The first lmperial Defence Policy was drawn up in 1907.
There a hypothetical enemy was actually decided upon.
The army would be at war with Russia and the navy with America.
Thereafter all drills and military exercises were carried out with this in mind.
Since these two countries were depicted as Japan's potential enemy over a long period, the idea gradually arose among the young officers that it was Japan's fate to go to war with both of these countries, l think it was inevitable.
ln 1904 Japan issued her first direct challenge to a Western power.
ln a territorial dispute over Port Arthur, on the coast of mainland China, the Japanese army fought imperial Russia for several months.
lt was one of the first wars to be recorded in moving pictures.
On land, it was the Japanese who won.
To save the day, Russia despatched its Baltic Fleet to the Far East.
The fleet took seven months to sail halfway round the globe, only to be wrecked in less than a day by Japanese warships.
The world was impressed.
Not for centuries had there been such a rapid rise to international power.
There was special praise from Britain, whose alliance with Japan had been signed two years before.
For the British had built the ships and trained the officers that defeated the Russians.
Later, in the First World War, Japan fought on the side of the Allies.
ln the victory celebrations in London, Japanese soldiers and sailors marched alongside their British and American comrades, When Japan's future emperor Crown Prince Hirohito paid a state visit to Britain, Anglo-Japanese ties became closer still.
His visit to the fleet at Portsmouth with the Prince of Wales was one of the highlights of his tour.
ln contrast, relations with America were strained by race discrimination.
For decades California's farmers had relied on cheap Japanese labour, but in the 1920s fear of the so-called Yellow Peril led to a total ban on Japanese immigrants.
Among those who had been able to enter, discrimination extended to their children's use of swimming pools.
They would clean the pools every Friday.
The reason - Saturday, when the pools were clean and the water was nice and clear, the white boys and white girls would come in and swim.
Sunday and Monday too.
Then, on Tuesday, the Hispanics, or the Mexicans as they were called then, were allowed to come in, and they would cavort for a day or two.
And when they got through and were no longer using it, then the blacks were admitted and welcomed to the pool.
Then, either Thursday night or Friday, just before they cleaned the pools, they would allow us Asian-Americans to come in and swim.
lf we went to a theatre, we had to pay the full price admission, then we had to go up to what they called Nigger Heaven.
Way up at the top.
And occasionally even on certain streetcars, we had to sit in the back.
And so there was a tiered discrimination against us, based upon whether we came from Europe or the Hispanic group or the Asian group.
On the west coast we were at the bottom of the totem pole.
When the Covenant of the League of Nations was drawn up in Versailles, an anti-racism clause had been on the agenda, The refusal of the Anglo-Saxon powers to include it caused bitter resentment among the Japanese.
Moreover, when the spoils of defeated Germany were divided up, Japan was allowed a much smaller share than she considered to be her due, More humiliation followed when the great powers met in Washington in 1921 to discuss disarmament, Japan was made to limit her navy to just over half the size of the British and American navies, The Japanese were left with clear superiority in the Pacific, but national pride was hurt, The naval representative, Admiral Kato, was so upset that he vowed one day to turn the tables on the Anglo-Saxon powers in the Pacific, But nine years later the restrictions were extended, The serving admirals and officers were angered by the situation thus created, whereby America was now in a position to defeat Japan in the event of war, My own opinion is that by this time America had succeeded in breaking the back of the Japanese navy and thus had already beaten her chief potential enemy without a fight, Britain added to Japan's gradual isolation, Under American pressure, she scrapped the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, causing offence to a wartime ally who valued the treaty as a symbol of Japan's membership of the family of major powers, But these tensions at the diplomatic level tell only part of the story, To young Japanese, Americana was all the rage, The fruits of westernisation soon turned sour, America's Great Depression in 1929 had a devastating impact on Japan and Japanese nationalists blamed the attachment to Western values for the ills of their own society, Japan could not feed its population, which had been growing at a rate of a million a year, The farmers worked plots that could barely support one family, Much of Japan's staple food, rice, had to be imported, To pay for the rice, Japan exported silk.
Silk prices collapsed and as Western countries erected tariff walls to protect their own industries, Japan's export trade sank to its lowest level ever, Millions went hungry.
Unable to reduce its surplus population by emigration.
Japan turned to a drastic solution.
the acquisition of living space in China, the great land mass 400 miles to the west, China was Japan's manifest destiny, Poverty-stricken, seemingly ungovernable, torn by warlords, banditry and civil war, China needed law and order as badly as Japan needed space, or so Japan's leaders were able to reason, China had remained an independent country, but in the 19th century she had been forced by European invaders, notably Britain and France, to lease settlements to foreign powers, The biggest was in Shanghai, where Britain, America and other powers ran their own affairs independently of nominally sovereign China, Both Britain and America wanted to protect China, or rather they wanted to defend their economic interests there, Their policies towards China had always been economically motivated, From the American point of view, any Japanese advance into China would upset the balance of power in the Pacific, and wasn't distractiable for that reason.
For Japan, the gateway to China was Manchuria, where Japan already had commercial rights to the railway and a garrison to guard it, This overseas force, called the Kwantung Army, was in many ways a law unto itself, ln 1931 , radical Kwantung officers decided to colonise Manchuria, They manufactured an incident by blowing up a section of the railway, They then presented it to the outside world as an unprovoked attack by Chinese troops, Only years later did the full story emerge, The fact that the Manchurian incident arose as a result of a Japanese plot was known only to a very few people, l think Japan managed to conceal it very skilfully, l've recently managed to find one of the soldiers who was directly involved in the incident, According to him, Kawamoto and two other soldiers went off down the railway line at about 10,30 at night, Kawamoto gave the order to halt, ''You two keep guard on both sides, '' he said, Kawamoto was doing something furtively behind him, Suddenly he shouted for them to get down and the railway line blew up, Then Kawamoto said, ''The Chinese army has just blown up the Manchurian railway, ''Let's go immediately and tell everyone, '' Within hours of the explosion, the fighting spread to the outskirts of Mukden, the capital and headquarters of the Kwantung Army, A senior staff officer there, Tadashi Katakura, recalls the need for a quick decision, whether to cover up and press on or withdraw, There was a meeting of the chiefs of staff following a phone conversation with the army commander, who'd returned, We all wore Japanese kimonos except lshihara, who was in his military uniform, Before the meeting, four of us talked under a willow tree in the headquarters garden, We agreed it looked like a plot concocted by lshihara and ltagaki and we discussed what we ought to do, We agreed that unless we worked together to settle the incident, not only would the army have to retreat from Manchuria but Japan would lose all rights and interests in the country, So we decided to back the plotters, Unhindered by a weak and embarrassed government in Tokyo, the Kwantung Army swept across Manchuria, Manchuria became Manchukuo, a puppet state under Japanese protection, As titular head of state, Japan secured the services of Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, China appealed to the League of Nations, but the League was an instrument of conciliation, not an international police force, lt sent an Englishman, the Earl of Lytton, to investigate, His report condemned Japan, Manchuria, you will see on this map, is a part of China situated north of the Great Wall.
lt is about the size of France and Germany combined.
The trouble began on 18th September last year, when Japanese troops occupied the town of Mukden.
The excuse given by them was that Chinese soldiers had blown up a section of the South Manchuria Railway and fired upon a Japanese patrol.
We found that the Japanese occupation of this large part of China was notjustified on the ground of self-defence and that the new state which had been set up was a Japanese protectorate rather than a genuine case of Manchurian self-determination.
The issue is very critical and the peace of the world hangs in the balance.
Lytton's verdict was overwhelmingly endorsed by the League to the fury of Japan's delegate Yosuke Matsuoka.
l call on His Excellency Mr Matsuoka, delegate of Japan.
China has long been derelict in her international duties as a sovereign state Matsuoka accused the Western imperial powers of hypocrisy, pointing out they had been the first to acquire interests in China, and with that, he and Japan walked out of the League.
At home, Matsuoka was treated as a hero.
Defying the great powers, Japan had made off with a share of the decaying Chinese Empire.
As for the League, it had shown itself to be ineffective and it was never to recover its authority, A fleet of merchant ships carried Japanese reinforcements across the Yellow Sea to Manchuria.
ln their wake went settlers, farmers and industrial workers who would exploit Manchukuo's potential, Japan had found new living space.
ln propaganda films made to encourage civilian migration, Manchukuo was celebrated as a land of opportunity where Japanese families could prosper, protected from Chinese bandits by the ever-watchful Kwantung Army.
But many of the settlers had been conscripted and living conditions came as a shock.
l thought Manchuria was like places which l saw in American movies, but life in reality was very cruel.
The weather was cold and food was bad.
We couldn't eat Japanese food, only millet and barnyard grass.
We Japanese have miso soup, but in their soup there was something sour and salty.
Anyhow, there was no nutrition, only cold.
Not only l but everyone wanted to go home, but we had been sent from home like soldiers.
We couldn't give up so easily.
ln the house, we could see the stars through the holes in the ceiling.
On a cold night l needed padded bedding and an overcoat on top of that.
Outside there were wolves, l knew that l'd come to a horrible place.
The local Chinese were treated severely.
Some collaborated.
Many worked as coolies for the Kwantung occupation army, ln a remote area some Chinese were doing roadworks, They escaped but some Japanese soldiers caught and tortured them, kicking and beating them in front of us.
We were 15 or 16 years old, Those elderly Chinese men weren't young enough to be spies or anything.
l was watching and wondering why they were doing such violent things to the Chinese people.
Reflecting back, we used to think the Japanese were a superior race.
Chinese and Koreans were lower-class.
Even in our pioneer group, some of them despised the Chinese.
We all did.
Japan's military elite now controlled foreign policy.
By law, the army and navy enjoyed direct access to the emperor and effective independence of the government.
The army was deeply conservative, suspicious of political parties, academic freedom, disarmament and the West.
Many middle-ranking officers joined ultra-nationalist groups, demanding colonial expansion.
Civilian government gradually collapsed.
ln a six-year period the army forced three prime ministers out of office.
Two more were assassinated, as were several cabinet ministers.
The violence reached a climax in 1936, when fanatical officers staged a revolt.
Soldiers broke into the houses of ministers and officials.
Several were murdered before the government, backed by the emperor and the navy, restored an uneasy peace.
This cabinet in Tokyo fell victim to an attempt to seize power by part of the Japanese army.
Admiral Okada, the prime minister, was shot by assassins in his home.
The veteran Count Saito was also shot.
The recent speech by his son, Ambassador Saito, has a dramatic significance.
Japan is a spoiled child who may go astray any moment, who may run amok at the slightest provocation.
The one source of stability in Japan was the emperor, Hirohito.
The first of the emperors had begun his reign in 660 BC.
He and his successors were believed to be arahitogami, human and at the same time a god.
Hirohito was a slight and timid figure, but all the warring factions owed him allegiance and emperor-worship was central to the life of his people.
Every school had to have a special little shrine called a honden for photographs of the emperor and empress, together with a copy of the lmperial Rescript.
Every time we passed in front of this shrine, we had to perform a deep bow.
There were different degrees of bowing, from light to deep, according to the occasion, but when it came to anything to do with the emperor, we had to lower our heads by 45 degrees.
When we looked in the direction of the photographs, we didn't look at them directly.
We had to bow so deeply and so long that if we wanted to see the photographs, our only chance was to roll our eyes upwards very briefly.
l remember when l was five years old, the emperor came and visited a military exercise in Hokkaido.
A week before the visit, the police went to every house, ordering any invalid lying in an upstairs room to come down to the ground floor.
They said no one should be on a higher level than the emperor.
The emperor's constitutional position was hedged about with ambiguities, but no one has ever denied that if he had cared to command, all Japan would have obeyed.
After the war, Hirohito was made to renounce his godly status, but up to his death, his hold on the affections of his people was as strong as it had been in his days as the divine ruler of Japan.
By 1936 a rearmed and bellicose Japan had occupied much of China to the north of the Great Wall.
lt was time to develop relations with the expansionist powers in Europe.
The Anti-Comintern Pact, with Mussolini's ltaly and Hitler's Germany, was designed to protect its signatories from the Soviet Union.
lt was the first treaty between Japan and the Axis powers.
For Japan, intent on expanding into China, it was some insurance against interference from the Russians.
ln Manchuria the quality of iron ore and coal was poor and the pressure to expand further was compelling.
On July 7th 1937, a restless Japanese army turned a trivial incident into another opportunity for conquest.
Japanese infantry were training at night by the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking.
They were divided into groups, one representing an imaginary enemy.
At 10,30pm the exercise had just ended.
Within a minute, two or three shots came whizzing over our heads.
They were from the Chinese soldiers on the embankment.
You can generally tell the difference between blank and live ammunition.
When it was fired it made a bang and came straight over our heads and we could hear it landing.
Staff Sergeant lwaya told the battalion commander what was going on and the commander immediately ordered a muster.
By this time it was beginning to get light, 8th Company was ordered to advance again as far as Ryobyo, the place they'd been the night before.
When we got to the bridge an enemy officer appeared and shouted, ''Stop!'' One of our officers went to speak to him ''We've been ordered here as we were yesterday, '' he said.
The Chinese officer said, ''No way'' and returned to his men.
As soon as he got back, the Chinese started firing at us, l was the commander of the 3rd Light Machine-Gun Platoon and had seen plenty of action.
So l took a machine-gun from a soldier and blazed away at the enemy, forcing them to pull back.
This was the start of the Sino-Japanese War.
lt quickly escalated as Japanese forces made for Shanghai, the biggest commercial city in the East and the home of thousands of expatriate Americans and Europeans.
The army's own newsreels recorded the triumphant advance.
The fate of Manchuria had attracted little notice in the West.
As an American newspaper remarked.
''The American people don't give a hoot in a rain barrel who controls North China, '' But an attack on Shanghai was a challenge to Western interests.
Here's where it started, the Marco Polo Bridge south-west of Peiping.
A bridge destined to be as famous in China's fight for independence as the bridge at Concord is to American history.
The first clash brings China's new army to the scene, this time determined to resist the invader, and the fat is in the fire.
With Japan quickly pouring 20,000 men into the Peiping area, Chinese infantry forces are quickly reinforced.
Greatest damage is caused by Japanese bombing raids, with many parts of Chinese towns and cities reduced to a shambles.
Wounded pour into the city from the outskirts, where the 29th Route Army threw back the Japanese after fierce fighting, Red Cross facilities are overtaxed but the traditional rickshaw bears the brunt of the transfer of the wounded to the rear.
But reinforcements go forward to bolster the heroic defence of the 29th Route Army.
Within a month of the encounter at the Marco Polo Bridge, the assault on Shanghai began.
The navy struck first in amphibious landings.
The army followed.
And then the bombing began.
Thousands of Chinese civilians fled into the European enclaves.
But there was no room for all the refugees.
To escape the terror, men, women and children fled into the countryside.
The lucky ones got away in trains, but there were not enough trains.
With most of eastern China overrun by invaders, the flood of refugees became the biggest exodus in history.
Some 20 million Chinese trudged westward for hundreds of miles.
China's government in Nanking appealed to the League of Nations.
The League was powerless.
But in the vastness of China, the Japanese army's lines of communication became hopelessly overstretched.
The advance bogged down and casualties mounted.
Japan was trapped in a war too big to win and impossible to abandon.
Her soldiers were hardy and brave.
They had been taught that death in battle would be rewarded by a place of honour among the spirits of their ancestors.
The ashes of the war dead were brought back to Japan.
ln solemn ceremonies at a sacred temple, the Yaskuni Shrine, they were presented to bereaved families.
The names of the war dead were placed in the inner recesses of the temple, where even the emperor came to bow.
Japan's ancient martial tradition demanded total obedience to superior orders.
Surrender on the battlefield was profoundly dishonourable.
A defeated enemy was beneath contempt and this the citizens of China were now to discover.
After the fall of Shanghai the Japanese army pushed westward up the Yangtze valley to the capital, Nanking.
Nanking fell in December 1937, lf Shanghai had been hell for the civil population, there is no name for what now took place.
ln ten days Japanese soldiers shot and bayoneted and beheaded tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war.
Shiro Azuma was a private soldier who kept a diary during the massacres, He himself killed several captured Chinese soldiers and lived to regret what he had done.
lt was mass murder.
When l went to the Yangtze river, corpses just covered the ground.
l couldn't help stepping on them to go to the boat.
The number was limitless, Some people never examine their conscience.
They want to say that l'm exaggerating, that there was no massacre at Nanking.
There are people who try to play down what we had done and l have to fight against them.
lf we don't reflect on our actions, we never improve.
We were tried and brought to court by your country, for the Japanese have never reconciled themselves to what they've done in the past.
Hitler thought the Germans were a chosen people and the Jewish race were inferior.
They discriminated against other races too, We did the same.
The Japanese were superior, the Chinese inferior.
We used to call a Chinese person a ''colo'', a small stone, ''Let's kick it,'' We despised the Chinese, That's why we could be so cruel to them.
Because we were so overpopulated, we didn't take human life seriously.
We didn't respect ourselves, so why should we have cared for the Chinese? News of the atrocities had reached the West from doctors, missionaries and journalists.
ln America anti-Japanese feeling found an outlet in demands for economic sanctions, but President Roosevelt was determined not to provoke Japan.
America showed its reluctance even to contemplate war when the US gunboat Panay was sunk by Japanese aircraft while patrolling the Yangtze river.
All that was needed to keep relations on an even keel was an apology and an offer of compensation from the government in Tokyo.
lt was a great mistake.
lt was an unintentional and unexpected occurrence.
The Japanese government and people wish to express their sincerest and profoundest regrets to the American government and people on account of this deplorable incident.
By the summer of 1938, the Japanese army had occupied all the sea ports and the richer parts of China.
But the cost of Japan's colonial war was crippling the economy.
Raw materials, especially scrap iron, were removed from the market and diverted to defence production.
By 1938 the armed forces were absorbing 70% of government spending.
The results were spectacular.
The army had 2,000 first-line aircraft, including fighter bombers as effective as any in Europe and America.
The navy, defying the disarmament treaties of Washington and London, had built the largest and most powerful battleships afloat.
Many of the navy's 3,500 pilots had years of experience in combat.
On the other side of the world an equally formidable military power.
Nazi Germany, invaded Poland.
By May 1940 Hitler's Wehrmacht had overrun much of continental Europe.
The Japanese were dazzled.
Foreign minister Matsuoka flew to Berlin to sign a new pact of mutual military support.
Henceforth Germany, ltaly and Japan would spring to one another's defence if a co-signatory were attacked, But the meeting also endorsed the claims of the Axis powers to supremacy in Europe and Japan's right to impose a new order in Asia.
For Japan now needed even further territorial advances to sustain her existing empire.
Beyond China, the Philippines, lndo-China and the Dutch East lndies had the raw materials for which Japan's voracious military machine was desperate.
Above all, there was oil.
The navy alone was consuming 400 tons of it an hour and Japan's reserves were running out.
To get reliable supplies of oil, Japan would have to invade her neighbours to the south.
The first objective was French lndo-China.
By agreement with the defeated government of France.
Japan occupied the north of the colony.
Ten months later Japan swallowed the rest of lndo-China, securing a base for further expansion in South-east Asia.
By now alarm bells were ringing in London and Washington, From that moment on, Singapore, the key British base in the Far East, was within range of Japanese bombers, Should Singapore fall, the Dutch East lndies would easily come under Japanese occupation.
All this was seen by President Roosevelt as very dangerous because it meant Japan could dominate the whole of Asia and the Pacific.
Roosevelt's response was immediate.
On 26th July he banned all exports to Japan of oil.
His move forced Japan into a corner.
She could either fight her way out or capitulate.
The Japanese were loath to start a war just to assure the country's oil supplies, but they felt that this was what it had come to.
Even though it would mean fighting America to get that oil from the East lndies, there was no other way out, that's how they saw it.
There was a widespread feeling that Japan was unlikely to win a long-drawn-out war with America and people wondered how Japan could have got into such a situation.
Even most military leaders had little confidence that Japan could fight a long war with America, but a short war, that was something else.
Many felt that after one or one and a half years of fighting.
Japan might well be in a good enough position to call a halt and to offer peace.
Japan's leaders were divided.
The prime minister, Prince Konoe, urged continued negotiation with Washington.
The military leaders pressed for war.
On September 3rd they compromised.
lf there was no agreement with Washington by the end of October, Japan would attack the Far Eastern possessions of America, Britain and the Netherlands.
At the imperial palace the plan was put to the emperor.
He revealed grave doubts.
Pulling a paper from his pocket, he read out a poem composed by his grandfather.
''All the seas in every quarter are as brothers to one another.
''Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife rage so turbulently throughout the world?'' The emperor didn't want war with America, but his position had always been to respect the established political system.
l'm only speculating, but it may well be if the emperor had stepped in firmly and made clear his strong opposition to war, then it might not have happened.
He couldn't have done that, lt would have set a constitutional precedent.
There was the danger of provoking a military revolt.
The Army Minister, General Tojo, now took over the government, replacing Prince Konoe.
The deadline for negotiations was extended to the end of November and an special envoy was sent to Washington to continue the talks.
ln an attempt to avert war in the Pacific, Saburo Kurusu comes as a special envoy of the Tokyo government.
ln an interview he says; Gentlemen, you all know how difficult my mission is, but l'll do all l can to make it a successful one for the sake of two countries, Japan and the United States.
The talks became less and less cordial, Washington insisted the Japanese withdrew from China before lifting the oil embargo, Tokyo refused.
By now the Americans had broken the code between the Japanese envoys and their masters in Tokyo.
They knew that attack was imminent, but exactly where or when it was coming remained a mystery.
Karusu continued to negotiate.
But as he talked, a Japanese task force of six aircraft carriers, two battleships and an escort of cruisers and destroyers was crossing the Pacific, bound for Pearl Harbor.
The naval commander who drew up the operational plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor is still alive.
ln his Tokyo home he has a model of the aircraft carrier from which he helped direct the attack.
ln order for us to succeed, the torpedoes had to find their target unimpeded.
The water at Pearl Harbor is shallow and there was a chance the torpedoes might get stuck in the sea bed, so we called in specialists who could sort this out.
Secondly, we had to use large aerial bombs.
We aimed to attack the harbour by horizontal penetration, so accurate knowledge of local landmarks was crucial.
ln an attack like this it's more important to have a good pilot than a good bomb-aimer.
We also used high-speed bombs, which are smaller and easier to control.
lt was the use of these three main weapons that we had to perfect.
The attack on Pearl Harbor caught the US Pacific Fleet completely by surprise.
Most of the warships were tied up at their moorings and in two hours 19 ships, including eight battleships, were sunk or badly damaged.
Nearly 200 American planes were destroyed on the ground.
But the Japanese missed their principal target.
The fleet's three aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped the attack.
To the high command in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor was a pre-emptive strike, an attempt to disable the only power that could block a Japanese conquest of South-east Asia.
Even President Roosevelt gave Japan's planners their due.
''Our enemies, '' he said, ''performed a brilliant feat of deception, ''perfectly timed and executed with great skill, '' Four years later the Japanese empire was in ruins.
The military technology she had pursued so keenly had been turned against her with lethal effect.
Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo itself had been flattened by American bombers, Japan's new constitution was written by the victors.
ln it, Japan renounced war and the emperor his divinity.
What Japan had aspired to was imperial grandeur in the European mould.
Too late, she discovered that imperialism by military conquest was no longer an ambition the world could tolerate.