From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States

This is not a book on naval strategy or tactics, not a review of Imperial Japan's national policy or its governmental system or the militarism it engendered, and not an assessment of naval theory. Rather, it details the history of Japanese naval policy and its application to the American rivalry. It is an extremely valuable work.
Among the authorities available to Western readers, Dr. Asada knows this subject perhaps better than anyone else. Nevertheless, his writing escapes the bonds of dusty scholarship, making the book accessible to folks approaching the subject for the first time. His style is unpretentious, even warm, and it seems more like a front-porch chat than a heaving of hefty source material, though that is exactly what it is. Asada completed his doctoral dissertation, Japan and the United States 1915-25, in 1963 and has had four decades to deepen his research.
Many people considering this book will already have read Kaigun by Evans and Peattie. The two books are complementary. Kaigun presents a broader scope of chronology and subject matter, dealing with some of the topics I specifically excluded above. Given Asada's focus, the two books provide perspective for each other. Another work that pairs well with Asada is Making Waves by Schencking, which dissects the political side of naval development up to the Washington Treaty.
The naval treaties are central to Asada's book. Simultaneously symptom and cause, they mark the downward spiral from the acknowledgment of Japan's place in an imperialistic world to an inert core of self-worshiping delusion.
I would like to have seen a few more things from Dr. Asada. The Mahan connection is an artificial starting point in considering Japanese naval policy, though a natural for pinpointing its American context; a chicken-or-the-egg study would be fitting--did Mahan inspire Japanese navalism or simply codify a pre-existing movement? Likewise, there would be plenty of grist to mill in analyzing the fundamental flaws in Japan's Mahanian theory. You may note that these quibbles apply to matter outside the scope of the work, so I must confess to some unfairness here. Perhaps the book's biggest blemish is something entirely outside the author's control: the incorrect front-cover caption about the battleship "Yamamoto."

I've read virtually every English-language book on the subject of the history of Japanese militarism and history from Perry through World War II. Had I another life or more time, I would do a PhD on the topic, as it fascinates me deeply. Thus, I greatly anticipated this book, and, despite my low rating (3/5) treasure it as an important part of my collection. Prof. Asada has truly done the world a great service by writing this book, as, if nothing else, it can be used as a stepping stone for futher clarification and thought on the basic question of "why did Japan initiate World War II in the Pacific?" I thank Prof Asada deeply from his work, and apologize to him that my review in the following will be a bit harsh.

Basically, while book itself is full of "facts", it is a monumentally dull read, even for a person fascinated by the subject as I am. I literally have used this book as a sleeping aid. The details of the various naval limitation treaty conferences are hashed and rehashed ad nauseum, and the littlest tweaks in IJN strategic doctrine are hashed and rehashed ad nausuem. This, in and of itself, however, is not damning.

The problem is that I feel like I am too often presented with a mountainfull of historical facts but a teacup of insight. For example, one of the major themes of the book is the question of treaty limits - would the Japanese get 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, or 70% of the US tonnage limit? Apparently the debates on the exact number were enough to have made Japanese officers cry, protest, resign, un-resign, declare that they had been mortally wronged, etc. We are presented of the details of who wanted what number and when, and why they changed their opinions and views, but none of this really ever gets to the heart of the matter.

There is no attempt at (for lack of a better term) psychoanalysis of either indivuals or groups to really make us understand, at a really deep level, WHY.

For a while, I thought that this was because the author was content to play the dispassionate historian. But, with time, the actual reason for this blase treatment became obvious. It's basically the same reason that the book stops at Pearl Harbor: the author, if not an Emperor and Japan apologist, takes great pains to NOT provide any analysis since such analysis would be offensive to Japanese readers.

Remember, this guy is a senior professor Emeritus at a Japanese university. Perhaps the analysis itself is too hard for the author to do for personal reasons? Perhaps, if he is intellectually honest, given where he is in life, he is waiting for an eager student to build upon his base and do what he could not, for reasons of political correctness?

(This is why it gets 3 stars, not 4), the author quite unfairly cherry-picks sources and believes third-hand quotes that make the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) come off smelling like a rose. There is no attempt to refute other historians who have presented far more compelling cases for the Emperor's complicity. Prof. Asasa does not attempt serious source analysis - the rest of us have very good reason to understand why somebody, writing, for example, in the 1940s or 1950s would feel compelled to write in their memoirs things that protected the Emperor. Often, such writings are recollected quotations that contrast sharply with the historical record elsewhere. No attempt is made to analyze such emperor-defending sources. Rather, they are taken as gospel and then lofty and overbroad conclusions of the Emperor's innocence are made.

I do not speak Japanese so well, though perhaps with a little bit of study it would get much better. Therefore, as a specialist 'amateur' I dig deeply into whatever translated sources on the matter I can find. Often, this means the occasional rare translated book that can be found, for example, at the bookshop of the little museum near Yasukuni. Such books enjoy english readership probably in the hundreds, but they allow people like me a rare glimpse into what the Japanese are saying about their own history. Yes, Yasukuni Jinja is in some ways a right-wing haven, but what to be said when a book about an ostensibly neutral topic such as, say, Saburo Sakai (a famous IJN ace), has paranthetical comments hinting at the nobility of the Japanese cause?

Certainly Prof. Asada's book is far too intelligent and mature to go off into tangents about the reality of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere (even if that concept were in the ken of the book, which it is not). However, "From Mahan to Pearl Harbor" in some sense represents the high end of the Japanese millieu of writing on the war (and of course I am exclusing the writings of firebrands like Ienaga Saburo) - that is to say, it's still full of rationalizations, apologetics, and, obfuscatory-through-overdetail.

Prof Asada, you painted a wonderful picture of trees. It's the forest that you missed.

For the reader: worth reading if you are interested in the topic. However, don't let the scholarly approach lull you or overwhelm you into forgetting that this book is guilty of large errors of omission.