SJR State history professor Dr. Greg Shealy will speak at the Orange Park Public Library on Wednesday, December 7, at 6 p.m. The title of his talk is “The Road to Pearl Harbor: Japanese Imperialism and the Bushido Code.”
The historically important question on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor is why the Japanese Empire decided to bomb Pearl Harbor. Why did a country that was roughly 4% of the World’s GDP decide to start a war with a country that amounted to roughly 40% of the World’s GDP and simultaneously start a war with Great Britain, who at the time was the largest empire in the world.
This is the fundamental question this lecture seeks to explore. To answer this decisive question, we must obviously go into Japanese history stretching to the 15th century. This lecture will not be so much concerned with battle tactics of the attack itself, rather the cultural and socio-economic conditions that made Japan choose this disastrous decision. It is a decision that Japan has arguably not recovered from until this very day and a decision that has characterized the Japanese nation for the last 60 years.
This lecture will be concerned with Pearl Harbor, but will attempt to contextualize it within its historical moment.
Original source can be found here.
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