by JANIS MIMURA
A 1938 Japanese propaganda poster promoting the Tripartite Pact: “Good friends in three countries” – Germany, Italy, and Japan. IMAGE/Wikipedia
In 1915, the theorist of technocracy Thorstein Veblen prophetically wrote about a temporary window of opportunity for Japan to combine its national spirit and recently acquired industrial technology with maximum effect in a major military offensive. Veblen predicted that the window would gradually close as modern technical advances eroded traditional notions of community and loyalty and introduced a materialistic and commercial mindset bringing about the “sabotage of capitalism.”1 A quarter of a century later, however, Japanese technocrats remained exceedingly optimistic about their country’s prospects for war and empire. They were determined to “overcome the modern,” despite the attempts of “status quo” businessmen and bureaucrats to derail the New Order movement. They believed that more than Japan’s material resources, its human resources, namely the patriotic spirit, courage, discipline, and creativity of its people, were the fount of national strength.
On August 1, 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Y?suke announced the government’s policy to build a so-called “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” The term Greater East Asia implied that in addition to the core region of Japan, Manchukuo, and China, the sphere would include Southeast Asia, Eastern Siberia, and possibly the outer regions of Australia, India, and the Pacific Islands. The new policy to expand the boundaries of Japan’s empire beyond East Asia emerged after France and the Netherlands fell to Nazi Germany in the late spring of 1940 and forfeited their colonies in Southeast Asia. Japan subsequently advanced into French Indochina in June 1940. Three months later in September 1940, Japan concluded the Triple Axis Pact with Germany and Italy. When diplomacy failed to lift economic sanctions imposed by the United States, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941. These actions set the country on a course of brutal occupation of Asia and a destructive war against the United States and its allies that culminated in Japan’s total defeat in 1945.
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