Imperial Eclipse

The "Pacific War" narrative of Japan's defeat that was established after 1945 started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, detailed the U.S. island-hopping campaigns across the Western Pacific, and culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's capitulation, and its recasting as the western shore of an American ocean . But in the decades leading up to World War II and over the course of the conflict, Japan's leaders and citizens were as deeply concerned about continental Asia—a