It should be stressed that the book's focus is more on the decision process, rather than the decision itself, which as a bad one was a given. That it was a bad decision was not only clear in hindsight, you will see from the book that there were more people (including the emperor) who believed that it was a bad decision to go to war with the US than those who believed it was right, which only makes it more perplexing. Representing those who were really pushing for war with the US was the Imperial Army and very vocal too. The rest, represented by the Imperial Navy, successive prime ministers, and other members of the cabinet knew it would be disastrous to go down that road, but as the story developed, the reader gets to see how the strange behaviours among the 'doves' eventually made their own positions untenable, and had to be driven along to war with the US.
The author used the concept of Honne to Tatemae to throw some light on these behaviours. This is the concept of saying something or saying something is a certain way but carrying with it an intended meaning. In simple terms, the opposite of "calling a spade a spade". The trouble with doing this was that the listener who did not understand this might misinterpret what the speaker was trying to say, but more seriously, as shown in this book, it could be maneuvered by the listener to mean something else totally. And many a times it was used to good effect by those who advocated war while everyone else looked helplessly at each other, hoping that someone else would find this one small gap to exploit so that they could heap on more doubts and hoped that it snowballed into something big enough for all to decide that war was a bad idea, apparently even the army faction was hoping for that while advocating war (p.g., 210).
Yet they did attempt to find a way out of the situation, initiating many contacts with the US which unfortunately led to nowhere. They attempted to have a summit and when that was not progressing well , Sato Kenryo was quoted in the book saying "What idiots they are in Washington! If they agreed to meet with Konoe without any conditions, everything would go their way." For many it would be hard to imagine staging this summit between two heads of states when everything Japan was saying and doing was pointing towards preparing for war. But for the Japanese leaders, there was no contradictions, they have to keep up the appearance while trying to avert war - Honne to Tatemae.
Dr Hotta wrote an earlier work Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931-1945 which I had enjoyed very much. It was written in the academic style and was not so easy to read. This one, Japan 1941, is clearly meant for lay-readers and is therefore much more readable. Unfortunately I think I was spoilt by her earlier book and had hoped that she would repeat that feat. She did in contents, but she had to avoid going into too much analysis in a book thus positioned. Still I must commend her for being very immaculate, for example she used "U.S." and not "US" and implanted her reasoned voice throughout. The inclusion of the timeline of major events in the book was of great value and the Prologue makes a compelling introduction to the whole book. I was however unsure about the purpose of including characters like Richard Sorge, the poet Kafū Nagai, and Soldier U. These are important people in their own rights but while it has added colour to the book, they were not important to the development of the author's narrative and sometimes came out distracting.
The author, being Japanese, has a nuanced understanding of her own culture and therefore was able to explain the behaviours of the Japanese in 1941 exceptionally well. Paradoxically it can be misinterpreted as an attempt to excuse their behaviours and so she would sometimes have to illuminate her own attitudes towards them and the war itself by criticising them severely. I think it is something that she had to do in order for us not to dismiss her too quickly.
We read history in the sometimes vain hope of learning from it, so that we do not repeat it. The lessons in this book were most obviously "what not to do / how not to behave when making an important decision." Many readers would take the series of events as too ridiculous to conceive that we would ever do the same. Yet we have to be careful; as illogical and unimaginable as they have behaved in 1941, would we not have done the same? How many of us would really stand up and confront a seemingly stupid idea? Have we not come across situations in which everyone sitting in a meeting knew that a course of action was disastrous but finding everyone quiet, kept to our own counsel? I certainly have. Somehow the long-term and more severe pain cannot make me suffer the short-term embarrassment. And we will go out of the meeting whispering to each other that the decision taken in the meeting was a wrong one. Everyone suddenly appeared to agree to something opposite of what was agreed upon in the meeting, but no one was really at fault, because "someone" else pushed everyone along.
Pay attention to all the conversations in the meetings in the book, pick a character who disagreed with the war, then ask what you would do if you were him.
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