An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945) Read online

Morishima Morito, a diplomat stationed with the General Consulate at Mukden in 1931, recounts in his memoirs how the Fifteen Years’ War started and the course it followed.77 In the earliest stages of the war Morishima tried to explain to Colonel Itagaki Seishirō that the policy laid down by the Foreign Minister called for peaceful settlement, and received the reply, This matter has already been decided by the Supreme Command. Is it the intention of the General Consulate to ignore the Supreme Command?’ A younger staff officer, Major Hanaya Tadashi, drew his sword, saying, ‘I'll allow no one, no matter who, to interfere with the Supreme Command.’ These were the very men who, together with Ishiwara, had begun the Manchurian Incident on their own initiative, and thus forced the Supreme Command in Tokyo to support and follow up their action. The Prime Minister and Cabinet were then in turn forced to accept the decisions of the Supreme Command. Thus Japan was propelled into confrontation with militarily superior powers due to the actions of a few young officers of the expeditionary army.

  Although Ishiwara had been one of the instigators of the Manchurian Incident, in 1936 he began to urge restraint on the younger officers, and after 1937 he firmly opposed the continuation of war with China. He was ousted from the central group and finally transferred to the reserves during the war with the United States and Britain. The war drifted on without any mastermind, with only a group of coordinators who patched together plans in response to the various wishes of the professional soldier body. Although their power came from the right of Supreme Command laid down by the constitution, from the start they acted without orders from the Emperor or Chief-of-Staff. This arrangement initially seemed effective because of the swift passage of events, but was doomed to eventual disaster by its lack of a master-plan.

  Even before the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Army had been modelled on the Prussian and had relied on German military techniques. After the rise of Nazism, the Japanese military leadership was eager to link Japan with Germany. From a military point of view there was some cause for this: military historians of World War II point out that Japan had a chance of victory only in its alliance with Germany. However, B. H. Liddell Hart, in his History of the Second World War (1970), argues that this chance of victory was lost with Hitler's attack on Russia after the fall of France. He states that after Poland and France had fallen and Britain remained the only military power standing against Germany (for the United States and Russia had not yet entered the war), Hitler could have conquered Britain by decisive landing operations or some other strongly aggressive action.

  Had Hitler concentrated on defeating Britain, her doom would have been almost certain. For although he had missed the best chance of conquering her by invasion, he could have developed such a stronghold, by combined air and submarine pressure, as to ensure her gradual starvation and ultimate collapse.

  Hitler, however, felt that he could not venture to concentrate his resources on that sea and air effort while the Russian Army stood poised on his eastern border, as a threat to Germany on land. So he argued that the only way to make Germany's rear secure was to attack and defeat Russia. His suspicion of Russia's intention was all the more intense because hatred of Rusian-style communism had so long been his deepest emotion.

  The psychological reason for the fatal move against Russia which Liddell Hart suggests here is arguable, but it is certainly the case that it was a strategic over-extension. According to Liddell Hart, even Japan's entry into the war did not aid Hitler, because it drew in the force of the United States.

  The Japanese Navy, in contrast to the Japanese Army, was modelled on the British. The Navy stubbornly opposed the Army over the conclusion of a military pact with Germany and Italy. In 1938, the Minister of the Navy, Yonai Mitsumasa, clearly stated at an Inner Cabinet meeting that the combined naval forces of Japan, Germany, and Italy had absolutely no chance of victory against the combined naval forces of Britain, the U.S.A., France, and Soviet Russia. The fact of the matter was that the Japanese Navy had not been built to resist the power of the U.S.A. and Britain, and the German and Italian navies were of negligible force. This plain statement was based on a firm grasp of reality, and the Navy had still not lost this realism at the time of the declaration of war against the United States and Great Britain in 1941. At that time the Commander-in-Chief of the combined fleet, Yamamoto Isoroku, predicted that Japan would have spectacular success in the initial stage of the war, but would soon fail. But the Army's obsession with the absolute supremacy of the Japanese spirit and national structure prevailed over the realistic self-assessment of the Navy, and Japan concluded a military alliance with Germany and Italy.

  On 6 September 1941, at the supreme conference which decided on a declaration of war, the Emperor asked Army Chief-of-Staff Sugiyama how long it would take the Army to conclude a victory in the event of a war with the U.S.A. Sugiyama replied that operations in the South Pacific could be concluded in three months. The Emperor retorted that when the Japan-China Incident had broken out in 1937 Sugiyama, then Minister of War, had said that the war would be ended in a month, but four years had gone by with no conclusion. Sugiyama protested that the interior of China was huge, to which the Emperor replied, ‘If the interior of China is huge, is not the Pacific Ocean even bigger? How can you be sure that the war will end in three months?’ The Emperor asked if the Supreme Command was attempting a diplomatic solution, and Navy Chief-of-Staff Nagano came to Sugiyama's rescue and replied that that was the case. However, despite this assurance, the fact that a time limit had been placed on the decision in favour of war or peace, and that in the meantime the armed forces were to prepare for hostilities, tipped the balance in favour of war, just as the Emperor had feared.78

  The date for the declaration of war, in the event of a failure of negotiations with the U.S.A., was set tentatively for early October. This was partly due to the enormous consumption of oil - 400 tons per hour by the Navy alone - during intensive manoeuvres. It was felt that if a war was to be waged the sooner it was begun the better. In addition to this, the U.S.A. demanded the evacuation of Japanese troops from China and Japan's break with Germany and Italy as prerequisites for the normalization of trade relations with United States Oil Companies. These circumstances precipitated Japan into a war which there was no prospect of winning. Inferior in natural resources and industrial power, Japan could only trust in the belief in a ‘Japanese spirit’ and ‘national structure’ which the Government had inculcated in the people during the seventy years since the Meiji Restoration.

  From December 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, defeat was already assured. On 5 June 1942, the Japanese Navy suffered its first defeat, despite its numerical superiority, in the battle off Midway Island in the Central Pacific. Although Admiral Yamamoto had 200 ships under his command and Admiral Nimitz only seventy-six, Japan lost four fleet carriers, 330 aircraft, and one heavy cruiser, whereas the U.S.A. lost only one carrier and 150 aircraft. The spectacular success which Yamamoto had promised for the first stage of the war was now over. From this time on, the defence of the many outposts taken in the initial stage of the war became difficult. Japanese troops evacuated the island of Guadalcanal on 7 February 1943, announcing that they were advancing elsewhere.

  The island outposts fell one after another. With the exception of Kiska Island in the Aleutians, where the U.S. forces were tricked into three days of heavy bombardment of the island and a landing operation only to find that the island had already been evacuated, the Japanese military leadership did not make any serious attempt to rescue the isolated Japanese forces. As a result, each island became a miniature Japanese ‘closed country’, with a population of soldiers who, in accordance with the Army's Field Service Code, chose glorious self-destruction rather than allow themselves to be taken prisoner. When, for example, the Japanese garrison on the Aleutian island of Attu was defeated by a U.S. force on 29 May 1943, of the 2,500 Japanese soldiers only twenty-nine were taken prisoner. The occupation forces of Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands of the South
Pacific, and Iwojima near Japan all acted according to the same pattern, and in Saipan in the Marianas of the Central Pacific, which fell on 7 July 1944, the majority of the 25,000 Japanese civilians, including women and children, committed suicide.

  This action was seen by the Japanese on the main islands as a proper model for their own behaviour should the U.S.A. prove victorious and land in Japan. The Government declared that loyal subjects of the Emperor must prepare themselves for glorious self-destruction for the sake of preserving the national structure. The tenet was that even when all the Japanese, including the Emperor himself, had perished this structure would remain. This was the necessary logical conclusion to the precepts of the Imperial Edicts, as they were interpreted by the Army, which had ruled Japan for more than fifteen years. Very few people in Japan doubted this line of reasoning, and virtually no one, not even social scientists or members of the various religious sects, ventured to criticize it. But the military and political leaders had failed to warn the Japanese people, when they made the decision of 1941, that they were choosing a path to self-destruction.

  The Navy was initially reluctant to adopt this suicidal method of warfare. Its officers were trained in a mentality suitable for the operation of machines rather than in irrational fervour. They had also been trained to associate with the naval officers of other countries when they cruised the world in peace-time, and so they retained an international style of thinking. For this reason, the Navy formed more rational plans, and avoided operations in which the participants had no chance of returning alive. Even the special two-man submarines that attacked the U.S. warships in Pearl Harbor were theoretically permitted to return to their carriers after the torpedo attack. Nevertheless, the Navy finally succumbed to the mass mania for glorious self-destruction. Lieutenant Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō, then Commander-in-Chief of the First Air Squadron, gave orders for the mobilization of the Kamikaze (Divine Wind) Special Attack Corps on 29 October 1944. The training for these suicide attacks, which had started at the beginning of that year, and the planes designed and built for the purpose were put into action. Burdened with the responsibility of having given such an order, Ōnishi committed suicide in the samurai style after Japan's surrender.

  Only volunteers were used in the suicide squads, but the atmosphere of the period put an intense pressure on young men to volunteer. Japanese newspapers lauded the bravery of the soldiers, and reproduced the letters, wills, and poems they had left in parting. The Corps was described only up to the point of its departure, and newsreels also showed the soldiers only as heroes before the actual battle.

  It was only after the war that a new generation saw the Corps with different eyes. Oda Makoto (1932- ), a novelist of this later generation, had been among the tens of thousands of people who had fled the bombed city of Osaka. To him the war meant crowds of homeless people wandering aimlessly about. He equated the experience of the kamikaze pilot with this experience of his boyhood, and in his essay ‘Death as an Accident’ (1965) Oda tried to reconstruct the thoughts of a kamikaze pilot after his ‘heroic’ departure from the airfield. He imaginatively depicted what the older generation had refused to face, and contributed to the postwar demystification of the deaths of the kamikaze pilots. This was important in the opposition by young people to the Government's collaboration with the United States in the Vietnam War, a war of burning cities and wandering crowds of victims.

  In his documentary novel The Last of the Battleship Musashi, published in 1971, Watanabe Kiyoshi (1925-1981) records his experiences in the Navy during the war. At the age of seventeen he was serving on the battleship Musashi, then the biggest warship in the world. When it went down, many of the young sailors clung to the mast and wept, calling their mothers’ names, instead of ‘Long live the Emperor’, the mythical last words of soldiers. Watanabe is now the secretary-general of a non-political society devoted to preserving the memory of the war. This ‘Sea Society’ made its initial task the collection and compilation of the letters left by student soldiers who died in the war.79 These letters have been published in a book called Listen to the Voice of the Sea.

  One of the kamikaze pilots, Hayashi Tadao (1925-1945), continued to read Lenin's State and Revolution, which had been secretly given to him by his older brother, up to his last day. He read it in the lavatory, tearing out and swallowing the pages as he read. He came to the conclusion that he was going to die for a meaningless cause. He realized that this was an imperialist war, and that Japan would be defeated by the superior military force of the United States, Britain, Soviet Russia and China. He could envisage the society which would come after his death, but could see no way in which he himself could work for it. Hayashi recorded his thoughts in a notebook which he sent secretly to his brother, who published it, together with his letters, after the war, in a book entitled My Life Burns in the Moonlight (1967).80

  Yoshida Mitsuru (1923-1979) recorded his experience as an ensign during the war in a documentary poem The Last of Battleship Yamato’. The battleship was employed in a suicide attack against the U.S. Navy and left port without fuel for a return trip. As it set sail, it was suddenly possible for the officers to speak freely to each other, and all the stifling bans to self-expression were lifted. The officers engaged in a heated discussion about the purpose of their deaths, and a gunnery officer, Lieutenant Usubuchi, cried, This journey of ours is meaningless from the point of view of military strategy, and will cause no damage to the enemy. Our purpose is to prove the meaningless of such an action, and for this we are going to die.’

  Yoshida Mitsuru was one of the few survivors of the expedition and recorded these words immediately after the surrender in his poem. The poem is written in the wartime style of a soldier, without any trace of the way of thinking forced upon the Japanese under the U.S. Occupation. For this reason, the U.S. censors did not allow its full publication during the Occupation, and it came to light in its original form only in 1952. It will remain a classic of Japanese literature because it is the unadulterated product of a soldier of the war period, without any influence of post-war style. Thus it still has the power to convey its message to the reader of a different age. Its appeal is universal.81

  Yoshida later rose to the rank of inspector in the Bank of Japan but continued to swim against the tide of public opinion. He asserted publicly that all those who had played a role in the war should record this, an unpopular view in an era of economic prosperity when the Japanese were attempting to leave the war behind them.

  Most of those involved in suicide attacks, however, were convinced of the value of their action. Hayashi and Yoshida were exceptional in their doubt, and did not have the power to pierce the extreme insularity of the last stage of the war. But their lonely voices are now heard, and each was like the ear of wheat falling to the ground: ‘but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’

  On 23 June Okinawa fell, with 100,000 Okinawan civilians and 90,000 Japanese troops dead. Then came defeat on the Indian border of Burma and in the Philippines. On 6 August, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. On 9 August, Soviet Russia declared war and launched an attack on Japanese troops in northern China. On the same day, the United States dropped a different type of atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. On 15 August, Japan surrendered.

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  * The term ‘Gyokusai’ is usually translated as ‘honourable death’, but it does not in fact contain the Japanese word for ‘honour’. ‘Gyoku’ means ‘jewel’, and as a prefix is used metaphorically to mean ‘splendid’, ‘magnificent’, or ‘glorious’. ‘Sai’ means ‘crush’, ‘smash’, or ‘pulverize’. Here the term will be rendered ‘Glorious Self-Destruction’.

  10 Everyday Life during the War

  Norman Longmate's book How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War (1971) is a record of wartime Britain, which, as Liddell Hart has noted, for some time faced the possibility of defeat. In some ways the situation in Japan paralleled that of
Britain. Both were highly industrialized islands, without an abundant supply of food to support a large population, and both suffered food shortages. But there were important differences.

  One notable difference lies in the organization of rationing. Norman Longmate says of Britain,

  Charges were often made about the existence of a widespread Black Market but the opinion of one farmer that ‘there was more talk than do about this’ was also held by the then Minister of Food. The Ministry was also remarkably successful in keeping down prices. In the First World War food prices had risen by 130 percent, in the second, which was half as long again, they rose by only 20 percent, and even without government subsidies the increase would have been only 50 percent.

  The most outstanding achievement of all was surely that at the end of six years of war the British people were far healthier than they had been at the beginning. In 1939 the average housewife hardly knew a calorie from a protein; by the end of the war, to the delight, if embarrassment, of the Minister of Food she was angrily writing to complain if her corner shop was failing to provide her family's share of bodybuilding, energy-giving and protective foods.

  In Japan, rationing of the staple food product, rice, began in April 1941 and was soon extended to subsidiary foods, including spices. The Department of Welfare stated in 1941 that a male adult engaged in normal work would need 2,400 calories per day, an amount which the Government would guarantee. After 1942, the minimum standard was lowered to 2,000 calories. In 1945, it was further lowered to 1,793 calories. As a natural result, the health of the nation deteriorated. Up till 1938, deaths from tuberculosis numbered 140,000 per year, already a high figure, but in 1942 the figure was 160,000, and in 1943 it exceeded 170,000. After 1944, the Government stopped announcing the figure.

  Officially the rationing system operated smoothly, but in fact a black market immediately grew up. Until the Meiji Restoration, Japan had been almost completely an agricultural nation, and in the Meiji era city dwellers still tended to have some relations or acquaintances who lived in the country. During the war, each family developed a private avenue, via friends, neighbours, relatives, or acquaintances, for obtaining rice and vegetables. City-dwellers also travelled regularly to the country to visit new acquaintances made through a complex network of contacts. They exchanged old clothes and valuables for food, in a simple barter arrangement. Those who failed to set up such private black markets were in danger of starvation.