Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Despite the vagueness of his official position, Konoe was a man of exceptional influence and personal charisma. He had served as prime minister on two separate occasions in the critical period between 1936 and 1941, which enhanced his prestige immensely but ultimately was to prove his undoing. It was during Konoe’s premiership, in 1937, that Japan launched its “war of annihilation” against China. He also was prime minister in 1938 when Japan declared a “New Order” in East Asia, and it was his government that brought Japan into the Axis Pact with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in 1940. The wonder was not that he was identified as a war-crimes suspect before the year was out, but rather that both MacArthur and Atcheson, the top American military and civilian representatives in Japan, initially deemed him an appropriate person through whom to promote constitutional democratization.