Professor Iriye analyses the origins of the 1941 conflict against the background of international relations in the preceding decade in order to answer the key question: Why did Japan decide to go to war against so formidable a combination of powers?

​*** OVER 210,000 WEST POINT MILITARY HISTORY SERIES SETS IN PRINT ​*** Beginning with a look at the readiness of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy and the United States armed forces, this book gives a detailed account of the Allies’ brutal five-year struggle with Japan. It examines the interrelationship of land, sea, and air forces as they battled over the vast reaches of the Pacific Theater of War.

Paths to Power includes essays on US foreign relations from the founding of the nation though the outbreak of World War II. Essays by leading historians review the literature on American diplomacy in the early Republic and in the age of Manifest Destiny, on American imperialism in the late nineteenth century and in the age of Roosevelt and Taft, on war and peace in the Wilsonian era, on foreign policy in the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s, and on the origins of World War II in Europe and the Pacific. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the current literature, helpful suggestions for further research, and a useful primer for students and scholars of American foreign relations.

From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.

“A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe.” —James M. Scott, author of Rampage In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

A companion to World War II in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, this volume reevaluates the most enduring literature on basic aspects of the war in Asia and the Pacific. It also covers themes pertaining to societies at war, culture, the arts, and science and technology as well as international relations and the postwar world. Included are not only grand strategy, military and naval campaigns, and matters of diplomacy, but also resistance, collaboration, prisoners of war, and broad topics of the home front, including chapters on gender issues, film, literature, popular culture, and propaganda. This volume and its companion provide the first comprehensive historiographic reference work on the war. Each chapter describes the state of knowledge on the topic, relating each bibliographic reference to the chapter's themes and issues, and concludes with a bibliography. Recent original scholarship is included when it aids new understanding, and older works of enduring value also find a place. The essays in this volume will interest scholars and college teachers as well as advanced students and serious amateurs seeking insight into the history of the war and its literature.