The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire

Japanese historian Saburo Yannaga argues that this is what led the empire to recalibrate and that they did in 1941 with an attack on Pearl Harbor. The path to war predicted by Lenin between the US and Japan was plain as day by 1937. In 1941, the United States froze Japanese economic assets and squeezed its oil supplies in an effort to prevent it from undertaking further territorial expansion. Here was the final confrontation foreshadowed decades earlier when Japan successfully trounced Russia in 1905 to Western applause.