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Chapter 8, called simply “Manchuria Changes Japan,” begins with a certain poignancy and irony: “William Elliot Griffis, a ‘Rutgers Graduate,’ as he liked to sign himself, went to Japan in 1870 to deliver a Phi Beta Kappa key earned by a deceased Japanese classmate at Rutgers to the young man’s family. He stayed four years…He returned for a six months’ visit (1926–27) to see how his adopted country of his youth had made out. ‘They have made it,’ he proclaimed. ‘Within a half century, feudalism, despotism and age old hermitage have given way to general intelligence, enlightened government, economic prosperity, world interests and international brotherhood…Japan had even ‘turned the other cheek.’ Thus ‘when our sapient legislators in Washington passed the Japanese exclusion act, the Tokyo government set a policeman in front of every missionary’s house and guarded all Americans from any importation of the California variety of patriotism.’?”
The chapter goes on to detail the emergence, after the Manchurian incident of 1931, of a contrasting and uniquely Japanese Asian-fascist ideology. In foreign policy terms, this would propel Japan “through Manchuria, far into China, into Southeast Asia and ultimately to Pearl Harbor”—a drive that Conroy notes seemed “pathological,” but one we might understand in terms of what a principal ideologist of the movement, Kita Ikki, called “the ouster of imperialists.” An embrace of the military in the honorable samurai tradition took place as did at the same time a portrayal of Japan in her own textbooks as “a family state with a spiritual foundation.” Japan would now lead a new East Asian international order, called Dai Toa Kyoeiken: the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Her parliamentary government would recede, and actual power would fall to a kind of “face-to-face encounter group” of the elite, claiming to be “the basic unit of Japanese politics.” As in the past, perceived inroads of Bolshevik-style communism into Japan became a stated fear, driving some leaders to recommend these uniquely Japanese antidotes.
Conroy opens chapter 9, “The Politics of Escalation,” with the following:
“The years 1937–1941 saw Japan become ever more deeply entangled, and ultimately mired, in undeclared war on the China mainland.”