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Pearl Harbor Dbq Essay

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Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor seems unwise, ill-judged, and senseless. The attack was meant to keep the U.S. out of the war, but had the opposite effect and instead made them want to fight and join it. Japan, at this time, was not a major power and having them attack one of the biggest major powers by bombing the U.S. naval base in Hawaii didn’t appear like an appropriate idea for them. Then why did they do it? Japan’s reasons for attacking Pearl Harbor was their plan for a ‘new’ world order, the U.S. oil embargo, and the relocation and expansion of the U.S. naval fleet.
Many Japanese leaders and citizens believed that the way the world was functioning was quickly crumbling. In an excerpt from The Way of the Subjects by the Japanese Ministry of Education they refer to this as ‘An old order’ and believed that Japan could rebuild this as the ‘New order’ with the world under Japan’s rule (Doc A). What this is talking about is how major world powers such as England, the U.S., and France seemed to control the world’s trading and how …show more content…

As seen in Document D, 80% of all Japan’s oil was imported from the U.S. However, when Japan started to fight against China and occupied Manchuria, the U.S. began to decrease how much they would export to Japan. Because they were getting less and less oil from the U.S., they needed another way to get it. They began to expand down to the Dutch East Indies, which had plenty of oil, which created more conflict with the U.S. since she occupied the Philippines and the Philippines were in between Japan and the Indies as seen in Document B. In Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War it reveals that it wasn’t until August of 1941 that the U.S. puts an embargo on oil for Japan. An embargo is when you stop trade. It wasn’t until 4 months later that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. With limited supplies, they had to find a way to keep their military

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