Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 15.

And then the war came.

So, we finally arrived.

It's time to talk about the Pacific War.

And this is a topic that, frankly, I've been dreading.

It's easy to look back and say that a lot of time has passed between then and now.

Passions have cooled, alliances have been reshaped,

and the enemies of the 1940s have been friends for decades.

And yet, there's a lot of bad feeling lying beneath the surface.

The titanic efforts of every nation involved in the war necessitated that the war be made

out as some kind of end-all-be-all struggle of good versus evil for every state on every side

involved.

The kind of emotion that kind of fight produces doesn't go away easily.

I've been very worried about how I'm going to tread this still controversial ground.

I'd like, first and foremost, to reiterate the statement I made two podcasts ago about how

right now, I plan to deal primarily with the simple what and why of Japanese reasoning in

the war.

Later on, if there's interest, I can go into more depth

regarding specific issues like the morality of war

or the apportionment of blame for how things turned out.

But having that kind of conversation necessitates first knowing what happened

and why, or at least my interpretation of why,

...