Akira Iriye is one of the most celebrated authors on American-East Asia Relations, having penned some twenty-one monographs and countless articles and presentations that redefined the field and historiography. His 1981 Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 represents the culmination of his research on the Age of Imperialism in East Asia to the beginning of the Cold War, arguing that despite appearances, Japanese and American strategic war aims aligned which facilitated post-war settlements. Iriye utilizes this relationship to investigate power and culture as the primary actors of international relations (vii). While his definition of power is acceptable, his operatives of culture reify nationalist mythologies of a monolithic, unitary identity which is never properly interrogated and repeatedly abused when making broad statements about how Japanese or American citizens felt at particular moments. This shortcoming becomes egregious as half of his work is dedicated to how culture influences the operation of power and personally feels like a shallow attempt to incorporate the Cultural Turn into traditional geo-political history. 

That being said, Iriye offers a number of unique positions that highlight how close the United States and Japan were at numerous junctions to avoiding war or ending it well before 1945. In doing so, Iriye rehabilitates Japanese state-craft from fanatic war-mongering militarism to a contextualized struggle for international power, stripped of the war-time racialized discourse. By comparing the objectives of the two states, Iriye astutely argues that, despite rhetorical window dressing, a seemingly impossible alignment of ideas occurs. While the two states diverged in the years leading to war as they “experiment(ed) with alternative solutions to global and domestic problems,” there was a rapprochement and return to the ideas of Wilsonian Internationalism (265). This independence and self-determination, Iriye argues, represents a strange unity of ideas between the Japanese and Americans who both saw themselves as liberators (76). 

Continued missed opportunities and ambiguity in policy among the Japanese and American statesmen, as well as a stubborn optimism in the Japanese camp, led to an unfortunate continuity of the war. Iriye’s interpretation at times is overly simplified and at times ignores the amount of internal leverage certain voices may or may not have had in affecting change in policies. Ironically, while he poses states and culture as monolithic, his argument is hinged on factions and contrasting views of actors who represent the “might have beens” of history, showcasing the complexity of power at the state and interstate level, the ambiguity of ideology, and how the war in Asia may have turned out differently. Situating Iriye’s work within its contemporary counterparts makes some of the issues forgivable, but not excusable. Yet, Power and Culture, almost 40 years later, still invites historians to debate the making and ending of the war in Asia.