Obviously a very misguided plan.Even Yamamoto { Vice Admiral } who was educated at Harvard and worked as an assistant naval attache in Washington warned his fellow countrymen ... " We can run wild for six months and maybe a year,but after that I have utterely no confidence. ". Japan felt that it's pending Empire was being hampered greatly by the U.S. Oil embargo.Japan was already in dire straights as to their own oil reserves. Therefore the move to strike Hawaii { Pearl Harbor }. However way before Pearl Harbor the Empire of Japan signed a Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany.That was in late September,1940. Japan fought dirty.We know that from the many examples portrayed in the War Movies of the 40's & 50's. But was wasn't known { Besides the horrific Bataan Death March } was Japan's Air force dropping ceramic bombs filled with bubonic-plague infested fleas in China.Leading to thousands of deaths years after the war ended.Plus Japan's poisoning of more than one thousand Chinese village wells . Japan obviously learned all but too well the lessons of a World War. As did Germany and Italy. Not so sure about this China.
Japan went to war to secure much needed raw materials. They have so few resources of their own that they needed to acquire them from outside sources. The oil embargo took away the legal opportunities to acquire much needed oil and other resources so they were left with no alternative but to take them by force. Obviously I'm not justifying their actions but that was the reasoning behind them.
Simple. The economic warfare the United States was waging against Japan was going to destroy them war or no war. This is something many Americans simply can't understand but that the Japanese still basically agree to. From their standpoint they simply had no choice. Don't go to war and their economy would be destroyed. Go to war and it still might be destroyed or they would win control of enough resources to keep it going. So in the Japanese mind they simply had no choice. Ignoring the fact that American economic warfare against Japan was due to the Japanese aggression against China
Japan had been an expansionist and aggressive nation since the Meiji Restoration, and that rapidly accelerated during the Showa era. In fact, Japan had been constantly at war since at least 1932. And was rarely at peace with everybody for more than 5 years going all the way back to the 1880's and before. To be factual, WWII started in Asia, not in Europe. With first the Russo-Japanese conflicts, the "creation of Manchuko", then the Second SIno-Japanese War. A great many historians recognize the war actually started somewhere between 1932-1936, it just took longer for Europe itself to get involved. Oh, and the attack on Hawaii was a sideshow and a warning, in addition to the hope it might knock out the US quickly. Japan in reality did not really give a damn about the US itself. What it was worried about was the Philippines, which sat right on the supply route between them and the territory they really wanted (primarily the Dutch East Indies). But they could not dare take that area over, and leave the threat of intervention by the US and UK. If the US had not been in the Philippines, they never would have attacked the US in the first place.
I never understood that claim. Since when it is "economic warfare" to not trade with a nation? It is the most nonsensical thing I have ever heard to be honest. That is like saying the US was at war with OPEC in 1973, or been at war with CUBA for over 60 years. The US decided to not trade with Japan, fine. As a sovereign nation, I believe they (and every other nation on the planet) has a right to decide who to trade with, and who not to trade with. It was an embargo, not a blockade. There is a huge difference. And they had plenty of chances to end that blockade. Simply stop their criminal behavior in China.
I really don't care about the why's and wherefore's. I had a lot of family fighting in the Pacific so I'm overjoyed that the USA stopped their expansion, beat them back into Japan, and then nuked them. My country is always right.
The argument would be that by interfering with natural market forces (trade) in pursuit of advancing a particular geopolitical agenda that you are using "economics" as a weapon. And the Japanese view was that their war against China was an "Asian matter" that should've been left to Asians (them and China) to decide. The Japanese vastly underestimated the historical sympathy that America had for the Chinese.
And anybody that thinks that should then be screaming at the UN. Because that is all that "sanctions" really are. n Or thqt they think that nations are really not free to conduct their own trade as they wish. And do not forget, China ws still under occupation at that time. Including sectors being managed by France, the US, and the UK. The first conflicts between the US and Japan happened when they attacked a US ship patrolling their own area of Japan. But overall, I find those kinds of claims only in those who are the most moronic isolationists and xenophobic. Who would happily see the entire world burn, so long as it does not affect themselves. So I rarely take them seriously.
