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Imperial Eclipse: Japan's Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945 . By Yukiko Koshiro . Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2013. xvi, 311 pp. ISBN: 9780801451805 (cloth, also available as e-book).
Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China . By Sheila A. Smith . New York : Columbia University Press , 2015. xviii, 361 pp. ISBN: 9780231167888 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book).
Book Reviews--Japan
At first blush, these two books appear to have only a passing connection. Each presents a study of Japanese policy for the Asian mainland, but their contexts are starkly different. Yukiko Koshiro's Imperial Eclipse is a history based on extensive archival research on Japan's thinking on Soviet Russia before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Sheila Smith's Intimate Rivals is a work of political science that employs numerous interviews with high-level policymakers and analyses of policy pronouncements from Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington to examine Japan's relations with the People's Republic of China over the past fifteen years. The two books also have different objectives. Koshiro has the lofty goal of recasting and even renaming our historical understanding of World War II in Asia. Smith, on the other hand, has a narrower objective: understanding how Japan dealt with recent crises in Sino-Japanese relations so that it can better prepare for future ones.
Despite these differences, the books present a surprisingly similar narrative in which Japan is forced to manage relations with a powerful continental neighbor during a time of upheaval in the regional (and global) order. China in the early twenty-first century strangely resembles the Soviet Union in 1945. Both were powers on the rise whose very ascendancy changed the calculus of Japan's relations with each. With Japan's defeat assured, Japanese policymakers, attempting to capitalize on the emerging Cold War order, sought to leverage the Soviet Union's growing strength in East Asia to create a more palatable surrender scenario. China's rise more recently presents mostly challenges rather than opportunities for Japan. The expansion of China's economy, military, and regional leadership ambitions has tested Japanese authority in a number of ways, from questions of food safety and territorial boundaries to issues of disputed island sovereignty and historical memory. Just as the end of...