In his classic, The Second World War (1989/2005), military historian John Keegan observed that the Second World War was the “largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans.

It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body, and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.” The latest research on this deadliest military conflict in human history shows that the total number of people dead was much higher, ranging from 60 million to as many as 80 million people.

What caused this war? What inspired the elites of these countries to embark on this war, and mobilized the German, Italian, and Japanese masses. Thousands of articles and books have been written about the Second World War in the last seven decades. Nevertheless, there are large holes in the historiography. 

In the case of Nazism, it is easy to name the ideological leaders. The average educated American has heard of Adolf Hitler’s book, even knowing it by the German language title, Mein Kampf. As for Italian Fascism, the average American has heard of Benito Mussolini. 

Incredibly, however, there has been only one comprehensive history and analysis of the ideology that mobilized the Japanese masses and inspired the Japanese elite to embark on total war in Asia and the Pacific. What was the Japanese ideology that mobilized the masses to sacrifice their lives? The average American cannot answer this question.