The Moral Vision
An Economic Pearl Harbour
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AN ECONOMIC PEARL HARBOUR
In December 1941, during the Second World War,
the U.S.A.’s top naval base, Pearl Harbour, on the
Pacific island of Hawaii, was attacked without prior
warning by the Japanese. So severe was the
bombardment that, of the hundred odd naval
vessels anchored there, only a handful survived.
This had the immediate effect of bringing America
into the war as one of the Allied Powers. Up till that
point, the U.S.A. had had no direct involvement in
hostilities save as a supplier of armaments to the
enemies of Japan. The Japanese attack had been
uncalled-for and ill-considered, but they did not
realize the magnitude of their error until 1945, when
America finally took its revenge by dropping the
first ever atom bombs on two of Japan’s major
industrial centres, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus
annihilating Japan as a military power. The
Americans then kept a tight military and political
hold over Japan. But the latter country,
astonishingly, recuperated from the horror of large-
scale atomic devastation, and proceeded to adapt
itself to an entirely new set of circumstances. Before
the Second World War, it had relied on the power
