The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the seminal events of American history. It forced America’s entry into World War II and marked this country’s emergence as a world power and dominant actor on the world scene. Until that time, the US had been an economic powerhouse, but a military midget with little interest in pursuing global conquest. Unfortunately, few Americans today have any true understanding of why Japan, a comparatively small nation already engaged in a full scale war in China, would suddenly go to war with the US and Great Britain without any apparent provocation.
Teaching Pearl Harbor is one of my more difficult tasks as a professor of Asian Studies at a small Virginia college. All my students are well aware that wave upon wave of Japanese bombers hit the largest American naval base in the Pacific on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941. They feel a sense of outrage when they view a video of President Franklin Roosevelt’s powerful “Day of Infamy” speech, but they look at me incredulously when I muse that some Japanese considered their attack an act of self-defense. I get even stranger looks when I say that one immediate issue was oil, that the US had placed an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan with the hope of forcing the Japanese to withdraw their forces from Southeast Asia and possibly China. They nod understandingly when I demonstrate Japan’s goal of seizing Indonesia’s oil wealth and of attacking Pearl Harbor to prevent an immediate American counterattack. But, of course, there are far more complex issues that led to the crisis, as well as the overbearing question of which nation should shoulder the blame for the attack.
