At first blush, these two books appear to have only a passing connection. Each presents a study of Japanese policy for the Asian mainland, but their contexts are starkly different. Yukiko Koshiro's Imperial Eclipse is a history based on extensive archival research on Japan's thinking on Soviet Russia before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Sheila Smith's Intimate Rivals is a work of political science that employs numerous interviews with high-level policymakers and analyses of policy pronouncements from Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington to examine Japan's relations with the People's Republic of China over the past fifteen years. The two books also have different objectives. Koshiro has the lofty goal of recasting and even renaming our historical understanding of World War II in Asia. Smith, on the other hand, has a narrower objective: understanding how Japan dealt with recent crises in Sino-Japanese relations so that it can better prepare for future ones.
Despite these differences, the books present a surprisingly similar narrative in which Japan is forced to manage relations with a powerful continental neighbor during a time of upheaval in the regional (and global) order. China in the early twenty-first century strangely resembles the Soviet Union in 1945. Both were powers on the rise whose very ascendancy changed the calculus of Japan's relations with each. With Japan's defeat assured, Japanese policymakers, attempting to capitalize on the emerging Cold War order, sought to leverage the Soviet Union's growing strength in East Asia to create a more palatable surrender scenario. China's rise more recently presents mostly challenges rather than opportunities for Japan. The expansion of China's economy, military, and regional leadership ambitions has tested Japanese authority in a number of ways, from questions of food safety and territorial boundaries to issues of disputed island sovereignty and historical memory. Just as the end of the war in 1945 determined Japan's trajectory for decades after, the Japanese response to the rise of China, according to Smith, will decide the future of East Asia. Thus, with three-quarters of a century in between, Japan, in each book, confronts a changing environment that has the real potential to significantly alter the course of the nation's history.
Koshiro's story is mostly told through the eyes and experiences of little-examined policy planners working on the continent in the Japanese military, colonial apparatus, and diplomatic corps. These actors were outside the highest halls of government, but, as Koshiro argues, “war cannot only be understood exclusively as a phenomenon of elites who are responsible for policymaking” (Koshiro, p. 7). While this is certainly true, considering that her main arguments revolve around Japanese policy, Koshiro's use of this echelon of government official makes it at times difficult to discern the direct impact on policy from their proffered plans. Still, Koshiro should be commended for using these mid-level planning documents—and other nontraditional sources from the period like the popular Russia-focused monthly magazine Gekken Roshiya—in an ambitious attempt to craft an overarching argument on the nature of the war itself.
Koshiro feels that our current understanding of the war is insufficient. Given the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the exigencies of the Cold War during the occupation, the Americans have taken on outsized significance in the conflict that began on the continent and predated the above events. Her book seeks to restore the primacy of place of the USSR and accordingly renames the war the “Eurasian-Pacific War” (Koshiro, p. 1). Japan's connection to Russia was varied and deep. Japanese intellectuals, Koshiro argues, were as enamored with Russian socialism as they were with American democracy. Moreover, according to Koshiro, Japanese commoners were more interested in the Soviet Union, as evidenced by the Japanese government's perceived threat of a communist revolution at home. One reason for the Japanese affinity for Russians, and by extension communism, was the integration of Russian emigres into Japanese society. While the Americans in Japan remained exclusive and elitist, preferring to socialize with the elites of Japanese society, if at all, Russians fleeing the continent to Japan instead tended to hold modest socioeconomic status, worked menial jobs, and sent their children to Japanese schools. Pointing out this history, as well as the inclusion of Russians into the empire in places like Manchuria and Korea, Koshiro contends that the Russians were very much part of Japan's pan-Asianist reconstruction plan for the region.
The connection between the two nations goes beyond people and plans to politics. Koshiro regards the signing of the Neutrality Pact in 1941 as a “watershed” moment in Soviet-Japanese relations and argues that it amounted to an alliance (Koshiro p. 17). More than just the product of geo-strategic expediency, Koshiro believes Japan allied with the USSR as a “buffer against Anglo-America's advance into Asia” (Koshiro, p. 38). While this interpretation is unique, it is not borne out by historical facts. Calling it an alliance, even if some in the Japanese government, like Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke, perceived it as such, does not make it one, as there was no formal agreement for mutual support during the war between the two countries.
Koshiro then moves out of the Japanese home islands to the empire's continental holdings to argue the significance of Eurasia to Japan's wartime planning. Japan, via its North China Area Army, had a sophisticated understanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Staff officers and intelligence analysts quickly made two important realizations: the communists had much greater appeal to the average Chinese than the Guomindang, and the CCP had strained relations with Moscow. Using this information in their planning for postwar China, Japanese leaders, Koshiro maintains, appeased CCP leader Mao Zedong by recognizing his Yan'an regime in November 1944, because they believed that “Mao had the power to check both Soviet and US ambitions and keep Asia for Asians” (Koshiro, p. 87). If Koshiro is to be believed here, the Japanese government, despite turnover and disparate voices within it, had been engineering a complex balance-of-power scheme for the continent since the Neutrality Pact of 1941. Now, here in 1944, Tokyo, having successfully kept the United States out of Asia with its “alliance” with the Soviet Union, sought to stem Soviet influence in China by recognizing Yan'an. In between these two events, of course, and something that does not get much attention in the book, is a disastrous war in the Pacific.
This balance-of-power scheme for the continent changed slightly into a “balance-off-our enemies” approach as Japan's defeat grew imminent (Koshiro, p. 171). Japanese war planners, attentive to the growing Soviet-American rivalry, sought to keep Japan squarely in the middle of the two, each buffering the other to the benefit of Japan. They believed the United States and Soviet Union would get dragged down in Chinese politics, which would “deepen their mutual antipathy” (Koshiro, p. 210). Likewise, the Korean peninsula would become another competitive arena for the rivals, with Japan fighting the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. The continental Japanese empire would ensnarl the Soviets and Americans, perhaps granting Japan a better chance at a more independent postwar state. Thus, the Potsdam Declaration, Koshiro argues, which arrived without Stalin's signature, gave the Japanese leadership pause because it signaled a postwar order dictated by the United States. What jolted Tokyo to move was Stalin's declaration of war—not the atomic bombs—an argument made forcefully by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa in his Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), which Koshiro cites but does not fully engage.
On balance, there is much to laud in Koshiro's study. The history of Japan's strategic planning on the continent during the war, particularly the analyses of the various communist and nationalist groups in China and Korea by Japanese agents, provides a wealth of new information on which future scholars will certainly build. Moreover, Koshiro's broadening of our field of reference for the Second World War in Asia to more comprehensively include the Soviet Union is surely welcome by all war specialists.
The question remains, however, as to the USSR's true importance. Koshiro seems to argue that Japan's neighbor to the north was preeminent in the minds of the Japanese leadership, and that they were conducting the war always with an eye toward Moscow. Given the continental provenance of her sources from such organizations as the North China Area Army, the South Manchuria Railway Company, and the Korea Governor-General's office, it is no wonder that the USSR and its communist-affiliates loom large in their reports and planning documents. But, of course, the raging conflict in the Pacific also vied for attention. In other words, the strategic plan from the continent presumably competed with a plan for the Pacific from the Imperial Japanese Navy when the two crossed the policymakers’ desks in Tokyo. It is this story that is largely missing in Imperial Eclipse and thus relegates to conjecture many of Koshiro's contentions regarding the Japanese leadership's grand strategy of playing the Soviet Union against the United States.
Smith, in her study of Japanese domestic politics confronting a rising China, is able to place her conclusions on a more solid footing by adopting the case study approach and tying herself more tightly to the evidence at hand. Before delving into the case studies, Smith looks at postwar Sino-Japanese relations, which were centered on trade and held the mutual belief that economic interdependence would lead to positive interactions. Since the early 2000s, Japanese policymaking for China has increasingly become subject to a diverse set of domestic interests. Accompanying this widening of interested parties has been a significant souring of Japanese popular opinion regarding China. As Smith explains, “Japanese attitudes toward China have become increasingly suspicious and negative” (Smith, p. 55). Negative feelings and diverse interests have made managing crises with China, as in the four cases, an imposing challenge for the Japanese government.
The subject of the book's first case study, former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, highlights this complex task. Due to previous Chinese criticism, a Japanese prime minister had not made an official visit to Yasukuni since 1985. In the intervening two decades, the shrine, with the backing of powerful domestic political interests like the Izokukai (Bereaved Families Association), had become a conservative lightning rod for rejecting foreign criticism. The conservative Koizumi, who owed his rise in part to groups supportive of Yasukuni, vowed to make an official visit after becoming prime minister in 2001. Still, Koizumi did not visit the shrine until 2006, at the very end of his tenure. This hesitancy shows the difficulty of formulating China policy, as Koizumi was forced to balance conservative domestic interests against maintaining positive, business-friendly Sino-Japanese relations. In the end, Koizumi fulfilled his pledge but only after China's near-constant proclamations of resurgent militarism in Japan had caused the Japanese public to grow resentful of their neighbor. Koizumi's visit, a win for some Japanese interest groups, ultimately harmed relations with China, making handling future disputes even more challenging.
One future dispute involved a disgruntled Chinese worker poisoning frozen dumplings that were then sold in Japan in 2008. The incident laid bare Japan's dependence on Chinese food producers and the lack of regulatory oversight and consumer protections at the time. Japanese consumer outrage was directed at both China and the Japanese government, leading ultimately to stronger Japanese regulation of food producers in China and the establishment in Japan of the Consumer Affairs Agency. Another dispute is the ongoing rift over Japan's shared maritime boundary with China in the East China Sea, where Japan and China have overlapping exclusive economic zones (EEZ). An increasingly emboldened China has challenged Japan by fishing, researching, and drilling in Japan's EEZ, alarming the Japanese seafood, natural gas, and oil industries. Despite political pressure from these groups, the Japanese government has continued to pursue compromise solutions with China to no avail. China's position could backfire, for, as Smith explains, “China's efforts to declare its sovereign rights in the East China Sea are making Japan less likely to compromise” (Smith, p. 143). The boundary issue has become particularly problematic because it has dovetailed with the question of Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands (Ch. Diaoyu Islands).
Japan's territorial dispute with China over the islands had been manageable until 2010, when a Chinese fishing trawler confronted two Japan Coast Guard vessels, dramatically ratcheting up tensions between the two nations. The incident and the resultant diplomatic kerfuffle came to be known in Japan as the Senkaku shokku (Senkaku shock) and resulted in a strong outpouring of popular sentiment demanding that the government defend the island. This Senkaku nationalism, as Smith terms it, advocates a tougher stance vis-à-vis China and a strong defense of Japanese sovereignty. Japanese activism made these positions hot political issues, in part leading the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), then the ruling party, to purchase several of the islands. The situation later led to the DPJ's electoral defeat when the Liberal Democratic Party hammered the incumbents as weak on China.
While Japanese policy toward China has risen to the top of popular political concerns, where it can now make or break the fortunes of Japanese politicians, there is no clear path for politicians to follow. This is because a wide variety of Japanese groups, from consumer advocates to fishermen, hawkish right-wing nationalists to the Izokukai, all have an interest in some aspect of China policy. Smith notes that as a result there was never a unified stance on China during the four controversies; Japan adapted its response to the issue at hand. Rather than adopting a new China policy to guide Sino-Japanese relations, Tokyo managed each problem as it arose.
Smith's excellent study should be required reading for those seeking to understand Japan's response to its neighbor's growing power, as it offers the most comprehensive currently available examination of contemporary Japanese policymaking with regard to China. Readers may find the format of the book repetitive, but the issue is minor. The book has an introductory chapter and then introductions for each subsequent chapter; these sections repeat information so that the reader learns about, for example, the Chinese trawler incident multiple times. More problematic is that the policy implication section of Smith's book is surprisingly short and underdeveloped, comprising about eight pages out of over two hundred sixty. The global importance of this relationship warrants a more robust analysis of possible ways forward beyond the familiar suggestions of focusing on areas of mutual interest for compromise solutions and finding “new and creative solutions” to current Sino-Japanese problems (Smith, p. 262).
These are small quibbles, however, as the strength of Smith's book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The fact that there appear to be few good options for Japan offers another connection between the two studies under review. Facing a changing world order due to the rise of neighboring powers, the Japan of each book floundered. Japanese planners in 1945, caught between the Soviets and the Americans, concocted elaborate but ultimately futile plans to preserve some sort of Japanese independence. Likewise, policymakers in Tokyo in the early twenty-first century ran from one diplomatic brushfire with China to another, unable to formulate a durable policy for the future. The two books, then, paint a surprisingly consistent, if pitiable, picture of a Japan subject to the will of larger neighbors despite its leadership's best efforts.
