Why Not Mahan? Path Dependence in Modern Japanese Geostrategic Thinking of the Pacific.

This article examines why Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s embraced German Geopolitik—a land power theory—despite Japan’s geographic reality and national identity as a maritime state. It identifies political scientist Onozuka Kiheiji’s early 20th-century choice to adopt Friedrich Ratzel’s geographical ideas over Alfred Thayer Mahan’s naval strategy as the origin of this intellectual path dependence, which influenced subsequent generations to follow the German tradition of geopolitics, including the works of Rudolf Kjellén and Karl Haushofer. The article traces how this tradition shaped Japanese geopolitical thought through World War II and concludes by outlining the postwar shift toward a maritime national identity, notably advanced by scholars who critiqued earlier land-based theories and reasserted the strategic importance of sea power for Japan.