One of the great spectacles of modern naval history is the Imperial Japanese Navy's instrumental role in Japan's rise from an isolationist feudal kingdom to a potent military empire stridently confronting, in 1941, the world's most powerful nation. Years of painstaking research and analysis of previously untapped Japanese-language resources have produced this remarkable study of the navy's dizzying development, tactical triumphs, and humiliating defeat. Unrivaled in its breadth of coverage and attention to detail, this important new history explores the foreign and indigenous influences on the navy's thinking about naval warfare and how to plan for it. Focusing primarily on the much-neglected period between the world wars, two widely esteemed historians persuasively explain how the Japanese failed to prepare properly for the war in the Pacific despite an arguable advantage in capability. Maintaining the highest literary standards and supplemented by a dazzling array of charts, diagrams, drawings, and photographs, this landmark work provides much important information not available in any other English-language source. Consciously avoiding the Eurocentric bias of conventional military scholarship, David Evans and Mark Peattie make a unique contribution to naval historiography that will be prized by serious historians and casual readers alike and that promises to spark debate within the academic community.

With this book the editors complete the three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism that began with "The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945" (Princeton, 1983) and "The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937" (Princeton, 1989). The Japanese military takeover in Manchuria between 1931 and 1932 was a critical turning point in East Asian history. It marked the first surge of Japanese aggression beyond the boundaries of its older colonial empire and set Japan on a collision course with China and Western colonial powers from 1937 through 1945. These essays seek to illuminate some of the more significant processes and institutions during the period when the empire was at war: the creation of a Japanese-dominated East Asian economic bloc centered in northeast Asia, the mobilization of human and physical resources in the older established areas of Japanese colonial rule, and the penetration and occupation of Southeast Asia.

Introduced by Peter Duus, the volume contains four sections: Japan's Wartime Empire and the Formal Colonies (Carter J. Eckert and Wan-yao Chou), Japan's Wartime Empire and Northeast Asia (Louise Young, Y. Tak Matsusaka, Ramon H. Myers, and Takafusa Nakamura), Japan's Wartime Empire and Southeast Asia (Mark R. Peattie, E. Bruce Reynolds, and Ken'ichi Goto), and Japan's Wartime Empire in Other Perspectives (George Hicks, Hideo Kobayashi, and L. H. Gann).

Building upon a previous study of Japan's colonial empire, this volume examines the period from 1895 to 1937 when Japan's economic, social, political, and military influence in China expanded so rapidly that it supplanted the influence of Western powers competing there. These fourteen essays discuss how Japan's "informal empire" emerged in China and how that "empire" influenced Japan's own internal development. "Describes in rich detail Japan's organization of a wide range of cultural, educational, economic, military, and bureaucratic institutions that formed the mainstays of Japanese influence in China along with the trading, manufacturing, intelligence-gathering, and political intriguing which they managed."--Wen-hsin Yeh, The Journal of Asian Studies Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.