[Spktyr]

The reason that the US pursued anti-Japanese policies in the interwar years was to protect US interests in the Pacific and to counter what at one point immediately post WW1 but pre-Naval Treaties was looking like a joint British and Japanese plan to kick the US and other nations out of the Western Pacific. That ended with the treaties, but tensions were high during that period and it could have easily gotten into a shooting war if things had gone on and the Treaties hadn't intervened. It also became obvious when the Japanese withdrew from the treaties that they were building a fleet specifically to take on the US Pacific Fleet and we decided it was a good idea to deprive them of the resources to do so. Japan's fleet construction project was dependent on imported oil and steel, among other materials. We had a hard fight in the Pacific - imagine how much harder it would have been if the Japanese had unrestricted access resources to not only complete Yamato and Musashi, but Shinano and her unnamed sister as battleships plus the unnamed Super Yamato before 1943. And their planned carrier force, including the 16 Unryū-class carriers they'd hoped to have by mid-1943. And the Zero replacements they'd planned - all of which were massively delayed by materials shortages.

[Reily]

From the Japanese standpoint the 4 Power, Washington Navy & 5 Power treaties looked like the west UK, & US were ganging up on Japan. They viewed the 5:5:3 capital ship ratio in the 5 Power treaty as ominous and insulting.

The agreements forced the US to scrap 15 old battleships and two new ones, along with 13 ships under construction. Britain had to scrape ships too—indeed, more warships were “lost at Washington” than at any battle in history. Anyway we wanted carriers and the rest is history.

[Nothingburger]

Thanks for that contribution.

I’m just working from memory here, but I know that the US Navy staff was drafting the first of many editions of War Plan Orange during the early 1920s.

Are you familiar with British journalist Hector Bywater? He wrote a rather prophetic book titled “The Great Pacific War” that predicted a US-Japan confrontation at sea during the early 1930s.

I don’t have my copy in front of me, but if memory serves, the Japanese fired the first shots in a surface attack on the US Asiatic fleet — not unlike the way the Japanese touched off their war with Czarist Russia with a destroyer torpedo raid on the fleet at Port Arthur.

Bywater’s book remains a good read. He was only partially successful in forecasting the impact of air power. His Pacific War was essentially a battleship confrontation in the Alfred Thayer Mahan tradition. The climax of his book came in a bloody Jutland-style gunfight, with the US winning.

One rather odd side note — Bywater’s Japanese enemy treated their American prisoners like fellow samurai. Of course, we know things turned out in 1941-45. But Bywater only had the past as his guide, and the Japanese treated their German prisoners from the 1914 siege of the concession port of Tsingtao quite well. I believe their conduct during the war with Russia was much the same.

What a godawful war we had to fight in reality. And the supreme irony may have been how quickly MacArthur — love him or hate him — managed to get things straightened out during the occupation. From the standpoint of 75 years, it’s easy to ask “how could people as civilized as the Japanese have gone so wrong?” I have only tentative answers.