The "room to live" view was often linked to a clearly selective argument that there were only three ways to ease the pressure of surplus population: emigration, advance into world market and territorial expansion? Japan was supposedly left with no alternative but the third since the west, with its anti-Japanese immigration laws and its trade tariffs, had effectively barred the first to options.

On 22 July 1941 it moved further south in Indochina, even though it realised this would probably provoke a reaction from the US. The official American response was to freeze Japanese assets in America and impose a comprehensive export embargo on American goods to Japan. These goods included the vital commodity oil. Japan depended on imports for than 90% of its oil and more than 3/4 of this imported oil came from the US.

The first Japanese strike in the Pacific War was not against America at Pearl Harbor. It was against British Malaya. About 90mn before Pearl Harbor, some 5k Japanese troops successfully attacked a British force in Kota Bharu, in the Kelantan Sultanate.

Certainly, it is beyond dispute that there were many warnings signs of the attack, including code intercepts, radar signals, sightings and intelligence given to America not only by its own agents but also by other nations such as the Dutch.

Okinawa was lost on 21 June, after almost 3 months of fierce fighting in wchich 110k Japanese troops and an estimated 150k civilians died. On the American side about 13k were killed and a further 40 injured. These were the highest American casualty figures in the entire war, and suggested the Japanese defense was indeed going to be tenacious.

Many who might be considered more culpable were never brought to trial. Among those who escaped trial were the staff of the unit 731, who had conducted numerous biological and chemical warfare experiments on civilians and prisoners of war. The whole business of 731 was hushed up by the Americans, who offered immunity in return for scientific data from the experiments that their own ethics and laws prevented

There was no real wish to dismantle the imperial institution itself, for this had a useful role in keeping the nation together, in maintaining national morale and also in legitimizing Occupation policy. The Japan specialists in the State Department were not unaware of the deep-rooted importance to Japanese people of the exercise of power being legitimized by high authority such legitimization, anarchy might prevail and expose the nation to communism.

Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which showed the darker side of American society, was one example of the banned book, while samurai movies were among the 236 films condemned by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers as feudalistic and militaristic. Alle reference do SCAP's involvement in government reforms were also prohibited.

Another major economic reform, seen as being in the interests of both demilitarization and democratization, was the move to dissolve the zaibatsu. At the end of the war tje Big Four - Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumimoto and Yasuda - controlled between them 25% of Japan's paid-up capital, and 6 lesser zaibatsu a further 11%.