We have longed believe that after Pearl Harbor, Americans demanded the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast and into concentration camps. This views stems largely from the racist sentiments expressed by some prominent politicians and media figures along with one oft-cited poll showing fifty-nine percent of Americans supporting internment. But a closer look at public opinion polls conducted in the months after Pearl Harbor but before the President’s interment order reveal remarkably low support for the policy. The letters that supposedly flooded into the White House calling for mass evacuations only swelled after the order on February 19, 1942. In other words, it was only after Japanese Americans were framed as dangerous that the general public approved of internment.Unfortunately for the roughly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast, they were about to become the victims of one of America’s worst cases of misplaced revenge. Tragically, this would be only the first of many vengeful acts America inflicted upon the innocent during and shortly after the war. And with each destructive deed, a majority of Americans insisted that this is not who we are. Why, then, did the politics of vengeance prevail?

The Abe administration had two goals with regard to historical legacy issues: to enrich national pride through historical revisionism; and to change the global narrative of Japan as perpetrator. Unfortunately, these goals were fundamentally incompatible. Further, they failed to take into account that public memorialization today is not only the purview of the state. It has democratized to include various domestic, transnational, and international actors. Through case studies of comfort women, Yasukuni Shrine, and Pearl Harbor, this chapter explores the degree of success for the Abe administration in achieving its goals in each of these areas and what the enduring challenges are that make these goals difficult to achieve.

Japan began to play a major part in Hitler’s calculations after Italy’s spate of military disasters from November/December had made it clear that Mussolini’s military were turning from asset to liability. From that point onwards, considerable diplomatic leverage was invested into goading the Japanese into joining the war against the UK (January-June 1941) and then, the USSR (July-October 1941). At the same time, German representatives consistently urged the Japanese not to bring the Americans into the war. Bilateral relations between the two would-be allies were far from harmonious, however. Some Japanese spokesmen would make quite specific promises about the imminent participation of Tokyo in the war, while others kept insisting on further German military successes before they would consider making the jump. The pro-German foreign secretary Matsuoka was sacked in July and between May and September 1941, US-Japanese negotiations appeared to presage a détente between both countries and Tokyo’s withdrawal from the Tripartite Pact.

It is against this background that in mid-November a renewed Japanese commitment to enter the war produced a breakthrough. Japanese insistence to extend hostilities to the US might could have turned into a hindrance, but the coincidental abolition of the US Neutrality Law had prepared the ground for US-German hostilities.

This chapter looks at developments in Japan and the USA before December 1941, and the triumph of Japan’s forces in Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the first four months after they began a war against Britain and the USA. Why Japan attacked: unresolved war in China and developments in Europe. Resource objectives in Southeast Asia. American economic strength, and President Roosevelt’s response to developments in Europe. Growth of the US Navy from the late 1930s. Support by neutral USA for Britain and Russia, including Lend-Lease military aid. American economic pressure on Japan. Failure of American-Japanese negotiations in Washington. Pearl Harbor: the ‘Southern Operation’ versus the ‘Hawaiian Operation’. The German declaration of war on the USA on 10 December 1941. Failure of American forces in the Philippines. British naval disaster off Malaya. Japanese advance into Malaya, Burma, and the Netherlands Indies; the fall of Singapore and its implications for the British Empire.