Books by Akira Iriye

The relationship between China and Japan remains among the most significant of all the world's bilateral affairs-yet it is also the most tortured and the least understood. Akira Iriye adds brilliant clarity to the past century of Chinese-Japanese interactions in this masterful interpretive survey.

Professor Iriye analyses the origins of the 1941 conflict against the background of international relations in the preceding decade in order to answer the key question: Why did Japan, which had not been able to defeat the isolated and divided forces of China, decide to go to war against so formidable a combination of powers?

Akira Iriye assesses Japan's international relations, from a Japanese perspective, in the century and a half since she ended her self-imposed isolation and resumed her place in the international community.