Abstract
The Imperial Japanese Navy asked in 1934 for a drastic revision of the Washington system of naval arms control, eventually leading Japan to withdraw from the system in late 1936. Given the arms race and the tensions that ensued with the United States, the rejection of arms control was a decisive step on Japan’s road to the Pacific War. Why did the Japanese government embrace the navy’s strategic requirements and take such a risky decision? The present article first shows that to disengage from arms control was strategically rational for the navy as an institution. It was its duty to oppose arms control if the latter jeopardized national security, which was the case in the mid-1930s. If the navy perfectly played its role, it should not have been able to impose its view about arms control on the government. Japanese leaders should have prioritized diplomacy, not power politics. This undue political influence of the navy came from dysfunctions in civil-military relations dating back to the early Meiji era.
