Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.” Yet white powers would never allow Asian independence, the Japanese insisted. It had to be seized. Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past, in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. With the most idealistic of the Allies unwilling to
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racial dynamics that led to Japanese pretext for WW2?
