Japan and the Pacific - American History, 1493-1945

"Nothing will miscarry in the attainment of our war aims"

8 December 1941

View the declaration of War against the United States and Britain in the resource

The text of this functional-looking, almost austere, document was published in Japanese newspapers on the evening of 8th December 1941, hours after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii had brought the United States into the Second World War.

Much of the text is devoted to a lengthy justification of Japan’s policies and actions. Justifications are unexceptional in declarations of war; the near-simultaneous U.S. declaration against Japan refers curtly to the "unprovoked acts of war" by the Japanese which have prompted the United States to take up arms in response. But the Japanese document is much longer, devoting just over 360 words in English – over twice the length of the entire U.S. declaration – to an elaboration of the imperial government’s grievances and its decision to use the tool of war to "cultivate friendship among nations".

Japan’s foreign policy during the 1930s had been steadily expansionist, aimed at securing Japanese dominance of east Asia and the western Pacific to provide a guaranteed supply of raw materials for its industrial economy. A string of invasions and conquests is characterized in the declaration as an attempt to "ensure the stability of East Asia and to contribute to world peace". By 1941 the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", the euphemistic name given to the array of puppet states Japanese arms had conjured into being, encompassed Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria and much of the coast of China proper – after years of small-scale skirmishes, in July 1937 China, "failing to comprehend the true intentions of Our Empire, and recklessly courting trouble", had been invaded by the Japanese in order better to effect "neighbourly intercourse and cooperation".

The rise of Japan had been watched with growing alarm by the United States, which, in the Philippines and in other islands scattered through the Pacific, held various territories directly in the path of its expansion. In 1937, the Japanese attack on the USS Panay, a gunboat anchored on the Yangtze River, coupled with the news of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking to turn American public opinion away from international isolationism, at least as far as concerned confronting Japanese aggression. By the time of Pearl Harbor the United States had established an oil embargo against Japan and begun the provision of military help to Nationalist forces in China, including a volunteer air force, the Flying Tigers. These actions, according to the Japanese declaration, would, left unchallenged, not only have undone "Our Empire’s efforts of many years […] but also endanger[ed] the very existence of our nation".

The remedy to this fundamental threat was war. Japan would "crush every obstacle in its path" to see "an enduring peace immutably established in East Asia" – a peace, of course, on solely Japanese terms. The attack on Pearl Harbor did, after four long years, bring peace, but on terms over which the Japanese had no say. Once the wrath of the American people and the military might of the American government had been turned on Japan, there began the inexorable series of events leading to the nation’s devastation, defeat and transformation into a liberal democracy, reinvigorated industrial giant and ally of the Western world.