The Rising

**Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters, 5 December 1941. In the third hour of the operational conference at which Japan's Combined Fleet will sail the next morning, a Foreign Minister speaks, quietly, a single sentence the conference has been waiting to hear: The neutrality, on the diplomatic instructions transmitted through Washington, holds. The Pacific war opens not on a Sunday at Pearl Harbor, but three days later, in the southwest, against the shrunken empires of Europe. The United States remains, for the time being, at peace.**

Across the twenty months that follow, a Japan free of American opposition takes Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Borneo, Java, Burma, and the Indian Ocean. A Britain without a European ally, and a Dutch government in exile, fight a war they cannot supply against a Japanese empire they cannot reach. An Asiatic Fleet officer at Manila reads signal traffic he is not supposed to be reading. A correspondent in Chungking sends dispatches no one in Washington will print. And in Lisbon, in a flat in the Bairro Alto, the quiet channel that the main sequence opened in 1933 is extended, by one additional wire, to a Japanese naval attaché who did not expect to be sitting at that table.

The Rising is the first volume of the Pacific Trilogy — the companion sequence to The Rapallo Line — and the story of the Anglo-Japanese war that ran for twenty months in the space the American neutrality had made for it. It closes in the first week of August 1943, at the hour in which a Japanese carrier strike reached the Lingayen Gulf, and the American neutrality ended.