Although events in East Asia were a sideshow in the great drama of World War I, what happened there shattered the accord between Japan and the United States. This book pursues the two-fold question of how and why U.S.-Japanese tensions developed into antagonism during the war by inquiring into the historical sources of both sides. Kawamura explains this complex phenomenon by looking at various factors: conflicts of national interests--geopolitical and economic; perceptual problems such as miscommunication, miscalculation, and mistrust; and, most important of all, incompatible approaches to...

This reexamination of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War gives particular attention to the question: If the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war with the Allied Powers in 1941, why was he able to play a crucial role in ending the war in 1945? Drawing on previously unavailable primary sources, Noriko Kawamura traces Hirohito's actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war, analyzing the role Hirohito played in Japan's expansion. Emperor Hirohito emerges as a conflicted man who struggled throughout the war to deal with the undefined powers...

In the post-Cold War era, problems of war and peace have become complicated and ambiguous, involving such nonmilitary issues as the north-south dichotomy of power, resource depletion, and globalization of capitalism. To create a twenty-first-century intellectual and theoretical foundation for peace studies, Building New Pathways to Peace considers both the old concepts of tolerance, shalom, and wa, and the relatively new concepts of human security, decent peace, credibility, accountability, plurality, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. It also elucidates impediments to and...