On Japan’s part, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a great gamble. This overestimation of the wisdom of Japan’s strategies in the Pacific ultimately helped none of the Axis powers. The impact was to drag the US, a major economic power, into the war as an adversary. Even though Japan had initiated the attack, he declared war on the US a few days later on 11 December. The news of Pearl Harbor delighted Hitler, who saw the initial success of Japan’s surprise attack as an opportunity. Ironically, Tokyo had hoped to negotiate with the US through this alliance, while keeping it in check. The Tripartite Pact, signed between Japan, Germany and Italy in September 1940, was a military alliance promising mutual political, economic and military assistance should any of them be attacked. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor changed the other Axis powers’ discourse in Europe. This proved the outcome, despite Japan being far inferior to the US in terms of national strength, natural resources and production capacity. The navy, which had been criticised as ‘useless’ since the London Naval Treaty of 1930 – an agreement between the United Kingdom, the US, Japan, France and Italy to regulate naval warfare and limit shipbuilding – advocated war with the US in order to restore its raison d’être.

The Japanese government strove to avoid war through diplomatic channels, while the army was keen to fight the Soviet Union, its hypothetical enemy. Japan had, until that point, avoided conflict with the US, but lacked a united strategy due to a severe lack of communication between its government, army and navy, which each had different agendas. On 7 December 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on the naval base of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, triggering war with the US.

Satona Suzuki, Lecturer in Japanese and Modern Japanese History at SOAS, University of London ‘The attack would signal the beginning of the end of Japan’s empire in Asia and the Pacific’

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