The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Over the next few years, as Tokyo elaborated its claims to a “mission” and “special responsibilities in East Asia,” Japanese politics seethed with conspiracies, ideological movements, and secret societies that rejected liberalism, capitalism, and democracy as engines of weakness and decadence. It was thought that there was nothing more noble than to die in battle for the Emperor. Yet some elements in the Japanese military were also, by the mid-1930s, focusing on the more practical question of how to wage modern warfare. Promulgating a doctrine of total war, they sought to establish a “national defense state” in which the industrial and military resources of the country would all be built up and harnessed for that grim eventuality. Those officers who had either closely observed or studied the German failure in World War I attributed that nation’s defeat to its economic vulnerability—its relative lack of raw materials and its inability to withstand the Allied naval blockade. Japan, they gloomily recognized, was far less well-endowed than Germany. Indeed, it faced a unique problem of supply. It was almost bare of the resource of oil. While petroleum held a relatively small place in the country’s energy mix—accounting for only about 7 percent of total energy consumption—its significance was in its strategic importance. Most was consumed by the military and in shipping. By the late 1930s, Japan produced only about 7 percent of the oil it consumed. The rest was imported—80 perce...