Content area
Full Text
THE JAPANESE EMPIRE: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War. By S.C.M. Paine. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi, 210 pp. (Maps, B&Wphotos.) US$24.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-107-67616-9.
S.C.M. Paine of the Naval War College builds on her well-regarded books on Imperial Russia and China to complete her tryptic on the nineteenthand early twentieth-century grand strategies of Northeast Asia with this compelling short study of Imperial Japan. The overall thesis is not new- that Japan tragically shifted from a maritime strategy in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars to an unwinnable continental strategy aimed at an elusive Chinese centre of gravity in the wars from 1931 to 1945. This misguided continentalism was identified by Masataka Kosaka in the 1960s and more recently by Makoto Iokibe, and it was anticipated as far back as the eighteenth century by Tokugawa scholar Shihei Hayashi. However, what Paine brings is a fresh comparative treatment at a time when echoes of past imperial rivalries are again shaping the international relations of East Asia.
The Japanese Empire captures the rise and fall of Japanese maritime strategy over time while applying a critical template to Japanese grand strategy in each of the separate wars between 1894 and 1941. One can imagine how this would suit the Naval War College curriculum perfectly, but professors of history and international relations will also find it useful in their own graduate and undergraduate courses on East Asia. For that reason, I will probably slot this in for my courses either as a supplement to, or in lieu of, W.G. Beasley's authoritative 1987 volume on Japanese imperialism.
In Paine's account ofJapan's imperial wars certain themes recur. Each of the conflicts began with a surprise attack before a formal declaration of war (something planners at the Naval War College warned about in the decades before Pearl Harbor). Each of the...