The United States' continued presence is a major and far more important factor than Japan's defense efforts and than anything else. Japanese leaders are taking matters into their hands only in close consultation and coordination with the United States and with other countries like Australia if necessary, and are given strong support by East Asian countries except China and perhaps South Korea.



The emergence of a modern, industrial nation-state in a very short time, first in Japan in all of non-European parts of the world owed to a historical accident, fortunate for Japan, and not to any "Japanese barbaric violence" often mistakenly ascribed to her, that she had developed in the preceding two hundred and fifty years a nationally cohesive and well-developed commercial and industrial society, industrial though not based on modern scientific technology, and a kind of hard-working ethics comparble to Protestantism. If she had faced industrialized and imperialistc West two hundred years earlier, she would have fallen to the same fate of being colonized.



Prof. Chellaney said "Asia's first global military power." I am afraid he is somewhat mistaken. How could Japan have maintained her national indepedence without being armed in the imperialistic, Darwinian age of the West? And Japan's concern was always regional, not global; this is where a large fundamental difference exists between her and China in their attitude to the outside world; Japan saw herself situated at a periphery and China customarily saw herself at the top of the world.



The Japanese wars with China and with Czarist Russia can be understood only in a world context of rivalry between imperial Great Britain and imperial Russia in three parts of the world, the Balkans, Central Asia and around China. Japan and China faced the menace of Western imperialism in common, and fought each other instead of the two European powers directly taking each other on. "Viewing the lumbering giant to its west with its increasingly hollow pretensions to world supremacy, the Japanese had begun to conceive of supplanting China as the predominant Asian power....Now with Chinese imperial influence waning, Japan sought to secure dominant position on the Korean Peninsula, and began asserting its own economic and political claims (Henry Kissinger, On China.)" Kissinger was totally wrong. Japan feared that if the Russo-British contest in North East Asia, taking place around the Korean Peninusula at that time, was left as it was developing, her territory would be carved up and Japan would be divided. This was the nightmare that excruciated the Japanese leaders day and night, and to forestall it they thought it imperatively important to cut Korea off from the Chinese suzerainty and make it an independent country. Virtually all Western observers thought when the war broke out that Japan would be easily brought to its knees by China.



Kissinger is a China-lover. Though Japan won the Sino-Japanese War, Russian commercial interests and influence grew in the penisula, not Japan's. This was not palatable to Great Britain and the United States and Japan. So ten years later Japan had to engage Russia in war with a huge sum of money she borrowed from the two English-speaking countries, and of course Japan had to pay it back and at interest, and she had to fight it with Japanese blood as the Anglo-Saxon countries did not lend blood.



One very big and very important fact, which is missed, ignored or misrepresented about modern Japan and its foreign policy, is that the pivot in making foreign policy decisions was to take well into account and make necessary compromises with the US and British views and interests.

Japan wanted to avoid armed conflict with the United States, for instance. I would like anyone to read my five comments on www.yaleglobal.yale. edu/Alistair Burnett/War Drums in Asia: Back to the European Future?



If interested in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, read my (Michi's) two replies to Alan Dale Daniel's comment, Good But Partisan, on Freedom Betrayed, amazon usa.

I would like those who are interested in Tojo and in how Japan had started to prepare for surrender, to read my (Michi's) twenty comments on http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/Jed Lea-Henry/Hiroshima: the beginning and the end of nuclear history.



Seventy years have passed since August 1945 and it is time to release Japan from misconceptions and misunderstandings.