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degree of wider political idealism involved. One of the slogans of the supporters of scheme was ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ and there was, to a modest extent, a genuine ambition to destroy European and American colonialist power throughout South Asia, though in reality this was largely a matter of seeking to replace European hegemony with Japanese political and economic domination. To some extent the development of the Co-Prosperity Sphere policy was areaction to racialist policies among the Western powers. In 1919 the Japanese delegation to the Versailles treaty negotiations had proposed a declaration of universal racial equality. This was vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson – though he had no right to do so – because it would undermine the position of the colonial powers which had emerged victorious from the First World War and which had extensive interests in Asia, South America and Africa. It might have also caused him considerable political difficulty at home, given the strong tradition of racialist policies and practices in many American states; this was, after all, a time when the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan could still be received formally at the White House.
    Naturally, some people in the nations conquered by Japan in 1941–42 saw the removal of British and Dutch colonial governments as a step toward national independence, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere concept as a possible route to economic development that would benefit their own communities rather than corporations in Britain and the Netherlands. Any such hopes were quickly undermined by the nature of the Japanese occupations and it rapidly became all too clear that the removal of one set of colonial masters meant nothing more than the installation of a different foreign power. However, in some locations in Malaya and a little more widely in the Dutch East Indies the Japanese were not, initially, regarded with total suspicion and some Japanese soldiers genuinely thought they were engaged in a war to liberate their fellow Asians from European and American imperialism.
    The German conquest of France and the Netherlands in 1940 and the continuing troubles of the British through early 1941 presented Japan with an opportunity to remove European influence from Asia and to become the undisputed major power in the East. This could only be achieved if the United States could be neutralised. In late 1941 America was not yet prepared for a major war, but was certainly moving in that direction. The British were starting to make a modest degree of recovery in their campaigns against Germany and Italy, but were still struggling to maintain imports across the Atlantic from America and, after thesummer of 1941, had the added burden of making a contribution to the Russian front as well. If a victory was to be gained, Japan had to make a move before the American military could be put on a real war footing and before the British improved sufficiently on their current situation to give serious attention to matters in the Far East. If the blow was to be struck at all, it had to be struck quickly and at all of the opposing powers at the same time to prevent one coming to the aid of the other. The Japanese offensive of December 1941 delivered just such a blow; it was incredibly audacious and an absolute masterpiece of planning and military ingenuity; for a while it achieved the political objective of Japanese primacy throughout the Far East. The seaborne landings mounted in Malaya and south Thailand were only part of a much wider picture and although the strike against Pearl Harbor inflicted a grave injury on the American Pacific Fleet, the blow was far from fatal. When the Japanese attack hit Pearl Harbor there were no American aircraft carriers in port. This would turn out to be a matter of huge consequence, but that was not altogether clear at the time.
    There were other, less dramatic factors in leading Japan to adopt a war policy. The conflict in China had not been as swift or as