Why Did Japan Attack Pearl Harbor?

This paper addresses the question “Why did Japan attack PearI Harbor?” It was obvious to its military leaders that they could not win a war with the US. Did they not anticipate that the US would react? Did they think they had the capacity to win the war? In the historical literature, the most common answer is that the attack was simply not rational. For example, Roberta Wohlsetter, in her classic book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, says “the decision to take on the US as an opponent is simply not explicable in rational terms”. She and other historians also show that the evidence does not support the idea that it was miscalculation. As to the idea that the Japanese are particularly warlike, it should be noted that Japan was totally peaceful for the 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate, which lasted until US Admiral Perry sailed to Japan and demanded they “open up”. Other simple explanations, eg the idea that Japan was a dictatorship are also discussed and shown to be inadequate in the paper. The paper then suggests a new explanation– that Japan at that time was a “quasi theocracy”–a regime where rule is divided between a civilian administration and a religious authority. Because decision making was divided between the religious and secular authorities, and because there was no formal separation of individual values from the state, an inversion of power occurred whereby decisions from the top were in effect led by the military, and decisions by senior military were influenced by the actions of their subordinates, in a process which was dysfunctional for the whole. Senior levels within the military and other bureaucracies themselves became vulnerable to pressure from below, and much of this pressure was belligerently pro-war. Because no one had the responsibility and the power to make decisions on behalf of the whole, each party made decisions which served its own interests, which in part were to alleviate these pressures, and the result was disastrous for the whole. The paper concludes that similar arguments about dysfunctionality might apply to other regimes which look like quasi theocracies, such as modern Iran.