The Japanese Empire Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War

The Japanese experience of war from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century presents a stunning example of the meteoric rise and shattering fall of a great power. As Japan modernized and became the one non-European great power, its leaders concluded that an empire on the Asian mainland required the containment of Russia. Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War (1894?5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904?5) but became overextended in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931?45), which escalated, with profound consequences, into World War II. A combination of incomplete institution building, an increasingly lethal international environment, a skewed balance between civil and military authority, and a misunderstanding of geopolitics explains these divergent outcomes. This analytical survey examines themes including the development of Japanese institutions, diversity of opinion within the government, domestic politics, Japanese foreign policy and China's anti-Japanese responses. It is an essential guide for those interested in history, politics and international relations.

Acknowledgements; 1. The Meiji generation; 2. The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5); 3. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–5); 4. The transition from a maritime to a continental security paradigm; 5. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1931–41); 6. The General Asian War (1941–5); 7. Japan betwixt maritime and continental world orders; Selected bibliography; Index.

S. C. M. Paine, William S. Sims Professor at the United States Naval War College, has spent eight of the last thirty years engaged in research and language study in Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, and Australia. Her funding has included two Fulbright Fellowships along with fellowships from Japan, Taiwan, and Australia. She is the author of The Wars for Asia (Cambridge, 2012), which received the Richard W. Leopold Prize and the PROSE Award for European and World History, and was longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and Imperial Rivals (1996), which received the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize.