Like many Westerners, I suspect, I was surprised to read in Hisahiko Okazaki's Feb. 24 column, "Telling the truth at Yasukuni," that "It is a historical fact Roosevelt induced Japan to carry out a first strike" against Pearl Harbor. I first dismissed this as historical revisionism along with the recent denials of wartime atrocities in China and Korea, but Okazaki's piece inspired me to research this further.
I now concede that there would indeed seem to be a very strong case that the U.S. government did all it could to induce an attack, in order to bring the United States into the war. Furthermore there is a strong argument that the commanders at Pearl Harbor were deliberately kept in the dark.
This prompts a further question: How far is a government prepared to go in terms of sacrificing its own people in order to win the long-term, geopolitical game?