Scholars studying the origins of the Second World War in Asia are almost universally agreed on two points. A new synthesis is required to cover new work, especially new work for players besides the United States and Japan. For this very reason, a more satisfactory name for the conflict would be in order, since “Pacific War” seems inadequate. Unfortunately, this agreement exists despite international efforts at scholarly cooperation and exchange spanning decades and unparallelled in comparison to any other topic in the history of American foreign relations.

In fact, the first generation of scholarship on the war's origins was itself characterized by team studies. William Langer and Everett Gleason's classic two-volume work has stood the test of time. On the Japanese side, a team of scholars collaborated to produce a five-volume History of the Pacific War, a deliberate attempt at a broad synthesis of the origins and course of the war in terms of the social, economic, and political conditions that resulted from Japan's incomplete adjustment to the challenges of Western capitalism. Both of these broad syntheses, perhaps because they were syntheses, focused on the global environment of the path to Pearl Harbor. Both portrayed a United States and a Japan that considered each other distinctly secondary to more pressing concerns, America's in Europe and Japan's in Asia. In addition, because both were written at a time when it was hardly clear that Japan would emerge from deep economic difficulties, or that a Japanese-American partnership would amount to much in the Coming decades, attention to the Pacific conflict, while certainly present, was indirect.

Unhappily, the first burst of direct attention to that conflict was concerned with anything but wider issues. The controversy over the American disaster at Pearl Harbor generated a Publishing industry unto itself, one with a remarkably long lifespan. These books fall into two groups, those blaming Roosevelt for engineering a “back door” to war at a frightful cost of American lives in Hawaii, and those blaming anyone but Roosevelt for incompetence, pettiness, and piain stupidity. The latter may be passed over with scant loss. They apportion blame differently but, read as a whole, argue sufficiently well that there was plenty of blame to apportion. None is greatly interested in placing American unpreparedness at Pearl Harbor, much less Japan's decision to attack Hawaii, within the context of the origins of the Pacific war.