In the name of national defense the Army proposed a national mobilization law, designed to take away the Diet’s last vestiges of control over war measures and direct every aspect of national life toward an efficient war economy. Army spokesmen argued persuasively and not unreasonably that Japan was a small, overpopulated country with almost no natural resources; surrounded as it was by enemies—Russians, Chinese, Americans and British—total mobilization of the nation’s strength was the sole solution. The law was passed in March 1938—the Diet, in effect, voting for its own capitulation to the
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