focused on continental Asia. This was the root cause of the Sino-Japanese War
of 1937-45. ⁸

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Japanese leaders tended to
view China as a moribund and effete civilization incapable of responding on its
own to the Darwinian challenges of the modern world. As success pricked their
own ambitions, many Japanese leaders saw China as the primary arena in which
to strive for a Japanese version of Manifest Destiny. Like other imperialist na-
tions, the Japanese believed they were different from their international competi-
tors. They laid claim to a "special relationship" with China based on race and
culture, but this myth scarcely concealed a contempt for the Chinese that was
given free rein in the course of the war. ⁹

Japan's stake in China grew rapidly in the first three decades of the twentieth
century. By 1930, Japanese outnumbered all other foreigners resident in China,
and Japan had become the main foreign economic power in China with signifi-
cant interests in manufacturing, commerce, transportation, banking, and so forth.
For these reasons, most Japanese leaders resisted the piecemeal erosion of the
privileged imperialist order in China that the United States, Great Britain, and
France grudgingly accepted in the 1920s in response to the rise of Chinese
nationalism. ¹⁰ Believing that their economic interests in China were vital to
Japan's prosperity, and concerned as well with continental threats to their secu-
rity, by the late 1920s Japanese military and civilian leaders increasingly per-
ceived the rising tide of Chinese nationalism as a menace that only military force
could suppress.

The ease with which Japan conquered Northeast China ( Manchuria) in 1931-32
and expanded its military and political presence in North China over the next
several years appeared to confirm the opinion of Japanese leaders that they faced
no significant obstacles in China. The force of Chinese nationalism seemed no
more substantial a barrier in their path than the ephemeral shield of international
opinion had been in the way of their conquest of Manchuria. Thus, Chiang
Kai-shek's decision for war in July 1937 came as an unpleasant surprise. China's
determination to resist further Japanese aggression raised the awkward question
in Tokyo of just what Japan's goals actually were in China. If these goals could
be specified, how best might they be pursued? As so often happens in wartime,
the destruction of Chinese resistance became Japan's primary goal in and of
itself, largely substituting for any coherent vision of China's place in the new
Asian international order that Japan was haphazardly constructing. By 1941, as
the goal of subduing China continued to elude its grasp, Japan attacked European
and American possessions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, hoping to take
advantage of the German victories in Europe. The sequence of events that these
attacks set in motion culminated in the linking together of the European and
Asian components of what now truly became the Second World War, a war that
Japan could not win.

If, as the chapters that follow suggest, China was ill-prepared for its War of

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