Pearl Harbor Dbq

Why did Japan choose to attack Pearl Harbor as their declaration of war with the US?

Takeo argues that the Japanese plan for war with the United States by attacking Pearl Harbor would have “achieve[d] initial battlefield success” but ignored the “absence of rationality in selecting a course of national policy that [. . .] had no prospect for achieving final victory” (61). In other words, Takeo states that while starting a war with the United States would come with initial success, any ultimate success were not to be expected by the Japanese. If Japan was going to ultimately fail, why go into the war in the first place? This question identifies what was ‘weird’ in the Japanese decision-making at the time.

There are two major schools of thought about the Japanese plan for war with the United States and the attack on Pearl Harbor: 1) War between the two nations was inevitable, so the Japanese might have as well hit first and hit quickly and 2) neither side wanted war with each other, but the Chinese-Japanese conflict and the U.S.-Japanese crisis was interconnected in a way that war with one meant war with the other. Scholars such as Iriye, Nomura, and Kahn argue for the first school of thought. These authors argue that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable

First, I will explain how the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere is the underlying principle of both schools of thought. Second, I will use Ike’s translated records of the 1941 Japanese Imperial and Liaison Conferences to demonstrate that the decision-makers’ reference point—the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere—was discussed in more of the Conferences than either the inevitability of war or China, from an empirical