SDHF Newsletter No.57 Review on Sugihara’s Book

Review: “BETWEEN INCOMPTENCE AND CULPABILITY: Assessing the Diplomacy of Japan’s Foreign Ministry from Pearl Harbor to Potsdam” By Sugihara Seishiro
University Press of America, Inc. (1997)
Reviewed by Date Kunishige, journalist
May 14, 2013

Japan and the United States were the two nations who clashed against each other on the Pacific in the Greater East Asian War (also referred toas the Pacific War); and a simplistic historical perspective has long been disseminated in the postwar period, namely the Tokyo Trial view of
history, that Japan was the villain and America, the hero. Even today, many intellectuals in Japan still apply this infantile good-versus-evil historical viewpoint to the complex international politics of the time. Propaganda promulgated by GHQ in the post-war period had an enormous influence upon the Japanese people.
In the United States, it would be no exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of Americans view the war through the prism of “the Allied camp of democracies” versus “the Axis camp of fascist powers” to grasp the broader framework of the entire Second World War, not just the war between Japan and the United States. The United States, who led the Allies, had an uncomplicated viewpoint, that it had prosecuted a just war, and was fighting the evils of Japanese Militarism, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism. This historical perspective which favors the victors established a paradigm based on certain stereotypes that brooks no rebuttal or objections.
However, if we closely examine in greater detail the actual situation in each country with respect to international relations, both before and after the Second World War, a different sort of truth emerges. Even those who accept the construct that “the Allies” were synonymous with the
“democratic camp”, would find it hard not to question whether “the Communist Soviet Union, and the warlord regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang” really belonged amongst the democracies.

Review:　 https://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_4/6_S1.pdf

Questions are welcome.

Sincerely,

MOTEKI Hiromichi, Secretary General
for KASE Hideaki, Chairman
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact