Japan's Road to the Pacific War - Deterrent Diplomacy

The Japan Association on International Relations, which embraces Japan's leading scholars of international affairs, undertook an ambitious collaborative research project on the origins of the Pacific War from the 1920 to 1941.

The result was a collection of remarkably objective essays, designed not to fit an overall interpretation of events, an approach that was consciously rejected, by, as one researcher put, "to provide clues and materials for future historians."

Japan's Road to the Pacific War is a translation of selected parts of that work, principally to include those essays that focus primarily on the policy of Japan rather than other countries and draw on materials of an unusual character.