Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

2 Japan: Defying Gravity (#ulink_26d71353-23f4-5199-b787-94690a9b1057)

1 YAMATO SPIRIT

Thoughtful Japanese understood that the fall of the Marianas in the summer of 1944 represented a decisive step towards their country’s undoing. It brought the home islands within range of vastly more effective bombing. American submarines were already strangling the country’s supply lines. US ground forces would soon be assaulting Japan’s inner perimeter. Yet the Japanese people had been at war for seven years, since their invasion of China. Domestic life became harsh long before Pearl Harbor. To most, outright defeat was still unthinkable. When twenty-one-year-old Masaichi Kikuchi graduated from army officer school in the summer of 1944, he went home to his tiny village north of Tokyo bursting with pride to show off his new uniform. In a community where everyone inhabited thatched cottages shared with their plough horses, chickens and silkworms, he was the only one of five brothers in his family, and indeed in the whole village, to secure a commission. ‘We grew up in a world where everyone who was not Japanese was perceived as an enemy,’ said Kikuchi, ‘Chinese, British, American. We were schooled to regard them all as evil, devilish, animalistic. Conflict was a commonplace for our generation, from Manchuria onwards. Everyone took it for granted. Even in 1944 when we knew things were not going well, that Guadalcanal and Guam and other places had gone, it never occurred to any of us that the whole war might be lost.’

By contrast with the austerities of the home islands, throughout Japan’s mainland empire from Manchuria to Siam, the privileged status of millions of Japanese as occupiers and overlords remained apparently secure, their routines deceptively tranquil. Kikuchi was posted to an airfield defence unit in Malaya, where he found life extraordinarily pleasant. There was he, a peasant’s son, occupying a large British colonial house on Singapore’s Caton Road, attended by two servants, with a beach a few hundred yards away ‘where on clear evenings I could look out upon the most beautiful moon I had ever seen’. At the officers’ club, though movies were no longer available and they were forbidden to play mahjong, there were billiards, plenty of beer and sake, food and cheap Malacca cigarettes. ‘Even at that stage of the war, the life of an officer in the Japanese army in a place like that was incredibly privileged. I must confess that, when we knew so many others were out there fighting and dying in Burma and the Pacific, I often felt guilty about my own circumstances.’

Petty Officer Hachiro Miyashita had seen too much action with the fleet to feel embarrassment about his ‘cushy’ posting at Tenga airfield, also in Malaya, where his unit taught deck landing to trainee carrier pilots, because no fuel was available nearer home for such purposes. Miyashita revelled in the big bath with hot water at his billet in the old British officers’ quarters, the golf course (though none of them knew how to play), and the absence of enemy activity: ‘It seemed like heaven.’ Miyashita was the twenty-six-year-old son of the owner of a Tokyo fruit shop, now defunct because there was no more fruit to sell. He had volunteered for the navy back in 1941, and experienced its glory days. He and the rest of the flight crews stood cheering on the deck of the carrier Shokaku as their aircraft took off for Pearl Harbor, and joined the rapturous reception on their return: ‘What passions that day fired!’ Through the years which followed, however, their lives became incomparably more sober. After the 1942 Coral Sea battle, in which the ship was hit three times and 107 men died, each body was placed in a coffin weighted with a shell, and solemnly committed to the deep. The coffins broke open, however, and sprang to the surface again. The ship’s wake became strewn with bobbing corpses, a spectacle which upset the crew. Thereafter, they tipped their dead overboard with a shell carefully lashed to each man’s legs.

Miyashita lived through hours of frenzied fire-fighting when American bomb strikes tore open the flightdeck, and endured the harrowing experience of clearing casualties and body parts. He never shrugged off the memory of picking up a boot bearing the name ‘Ohara’, with a foot still inside it. In the Marianas battle of June 1944, aboard the carrier Zuikaku, he watched a pall of black smoke rise above the sea, marking the end of his old ship Shokaku, and of most of the shipmates he knew so well. He thought of close friends from the petty officers’ mess like Ino and Miyajima, now among the fishes, and muttered to himself: ‘My turn next.’ Zuikaku lost almost all its aircraft. ‘As long as we were fighting, there was no time to think. Afterwards, however, as we sailed home, seeing the hangar decks almost empty, sorting out the effects of all the crews who were gone, gave us a terrible feeling. From that stage of the war, my memories are only tragic ones.’ Hitherto, Miyashita had prided himself on his steadiness in action. After three years of Pacific combat, however, ‘I found that I jumped when a hatch cover clanged shut. My nerves were in a bad way.’

So were those of more exalted people than Petty Officer Miyashita, and it influenced them in strange ways. Thousands of Japanese civilians on Saipan chose to kill themselves, most by leaping from seashore cliffs, rather than submit to the American conquerors. Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki, later commander of the navy’s kamikaze units, wrote in his diary: ‘It’s only to be expected that fighting men should be killed, but for women, children and old men in such large numbers on a helpless, lonely island to prefer death to captivity…What a tragedy! None but the people of the Yamato nation could do such a thing…If one hundred million Japanese people could display the same resolution…it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way to victory.’

Here was a vivid example of the spirit prevalent among Japan’s leadership in 1944-45. Many shared a delusion that human sacrifice, the nation’s historic ‘Yamato spirit’, could compensate for a huge shortfall in military capability. In modern parlance, they committed themselves to asymmetric warfare. This was unconvincing in a death struggle between nations. In December 1941, Japan had launched a war against enemies vastly superior in resources and potential. Its leaders gambled on two assumptions: first, that the US would lack stomach for a long contest; second, that Germany would triumph in Europe. Both were confounded. Indeed, far from Japanese accession increasing the strength of the Axis, it served to ensure Hitler’s doom by making America his enemy. So dismayed were the Western Allies by their defeats in 1941-42 that they chose to perceive these as manifestations of their conquerors’ prowess. They were correct, insofar as the Japanese displayed an energy and effectiveness then lacking among the British and Americans. Japan’s early triumphs, however, reflected the local weakness of the vanquished, rather than the real might of the victors.

The Japanese people were far more enthusiastic about going to war in December 1941 than had been the Germans in 1939. Japan’s mission to expand territorially into Asia, and to defy any nation which objected, had enjoyed popular support since the beginning of the century. After their country’s 1941 intervention in French Indochina, many Japanese were bewildered, as well as embittered, by America’s imposition of a trade embargo. The US had swallowed Japanese colonisation of Formosa, Korea, Manchuria and eastern China. Washington acquiesced, albeit with distaste, in the huge British, French and Dutch empires in Asia. Why should Japanese imperialism be any less acceptable to American sensibilities? Although Japan’s experience of war in China was painful, it also seemed successful. Few Japanese knew that military victories on the mainland had not been matched by economic gains of anything like the necessary magnitude. They possessed no national memory of slaughter in the trenches, such as many Germans retained from World War I, to check their rejoicing at Pearl Harbor.

Cultural contempt for the West was widespread. ‘Money-making is the one aim in life [of Americans],’ asserted a Japanese army propaganda document. ‘The men make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much. Their lack of real culture is betrayed by their love of jazz music…Americans are still untamed since the wild pioneer days. Hold-ups, assassinations, kidnappings, gangs, bribery, corruption and lynching of Negroes are still practised. Graft in politics and commerce, labour and athletics is rampant. Sex relations have deteriorated with the development of motor cars; divorce is rife…America has its strong points, such as science, invention and other creative activities…[But while] outwardly civilized it is inwardly corrupt and decadent.’ If such descents into caricature of the enemy were often matched by Allied propaganda about the Japanese, they were unhelpful in assisting Tokyo’s commanders realistically to appraise their enemy.

To an extraordinary degree for a nation which chose to launch a war, Japan failed to equip itself for the struggle. Its leaders allowed relative economic success woefully to delude them about their ability to sustain a conflict with the US. Pre-war Japan was the world’s fourth largest exporter, and owned its third largest merchant fleet. The nation’s industrial production rose strongly through the thirties, when the rest of the world was striving to escape from the Depression, and amounted to double that of all the rest of Asia, excluding the Soviet Union. Japan’s consumption index for 1937 was 264 per cent of the 1930 figure. The country was still predominantly rural, with 40 per cent of the population working on the land, but the industrial labour force grew from 5.8 million in 1930 to 9.5 million by 1944, much of this increase achieved by a hesitant mobilisation of women and the exploitation of a million imported Koreans.

Between 1937 and 1944, Japan achieved a 24 per cent increase in manufacturing, and 46 per cent in steel production. But these achievements, which seemed substantial when viewed through a national prism, shrank into insignificance alongside those of the United States. Between 1942 and 1945, the US produced 2,154 million metric tons of coal, Japan 189.8; the US 6,661 million barrels of oil, Japan 29.6; the US 257,390 artillery pieces, Japan 7,000; the US 279,813 aircraft, Japan 64,800. Overall Japanese industrial capacity was around 10 per cent of that of the US. Though Japan possessed some of the trappings, and could boast some of the achievements, of a modern industrial society, in mindset and fundamental circumstances it was nothing of the kind. In an Asian context it seemed mighty, but from a global perspective it remained relatively primitive, as the Japanese army discovered when worsted by the Russians during the Mongolian border clash of August 1939 at Nomonhan.

Japan was a military dictatorship, insofar as the army dominated decision-making. Popular dissent was suppressed as the country entered its kurai tanima—‘dark valley’—from 1931 onwards, when the power of the nominally civilian elected government was progressively eclipsed by that of the military. The war minister, always a serving soldier, was the most influential cabinet member. Yet the direction of the Japanese war machine was feeble, fractious and inept. Rivalry between the army and navy, ‘star and anchor’, was arguably no more bitter than that which prevailed in the US armed forces. America, however, was rich enough to be able to afford this. Japan was not. Moreover, in the US the president and in Britain the prime minister arbitrated on matters of prime strategic importance—for instance, to impose the doctrine of ‘Germany First’. In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action.

Mamoru Shigemitsu, successively Japan’s wartime foreign minister and ambassador in China, was scornful of the army’s faith both in German victory and in Japan’s ability to induce Russia to remain neutral. Industry was never subject to the effective central control which prevailed in Britain, never mind the Soviet Union. In his analysis of Japanese and Western wartime attitudes to each other, John Dower has observed: ‘Whereas racism in the West was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves.’ In the early stages of the eastern war, many Asians were attracted by Japanese claims that they were liberating subject peoples from white imperial dominance. It soon became plain, however, that far from the conquerors purposing an Asian brotherhood, they simply envisaged a new world in which the hegemony of Westerners was replaced by that of another superior people—the Japanese. Japan had ambitious plans for colonising her newly-won and prospective possessions. By 1950, according to the projections of Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, 14 per cent of the nation’s population would be living abroad as settlers: 2.7 million in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian satellites, and two million in Australia and New Zealand.

None of these immigrants would be permitted to intermarry with local people, to avoid dilution of the superior Yamato race. The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour to their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists. Rigid segregation was sustained from all local people except ‘comfort women’. Stationed at Indochina’s great port of Haiphong, army engineer Captain Renichi Sugano ‘didn’t really feel that I was in a foreign country, because I lived entirely among Japanese people. Even when we left the port to go into the city, we ate at Japanese restaurants and cafés, or in the officers’ club.’ The nation’s leaders urged Japanese to think of themselves as ‘shido minzoku’—‘the world’s foremost people’. In 1940, Professor Chikao Fukisawa of Kyoto University wrote a booklet in which he asserted that the emperor embodied a cosmic life force, and that Japan was the true ancient cradle of civilisation. The government caused this thesis to be translated and distributed, for the enlightenment of Englishspeakers.

Here was a mirror image, no less ugly, of the Nazi vision for Hitler’s empire. Its worst implication for the Japanese themselves was that many were taught to believe that their own inherent superiority would ensure victory, dismissing objective assessment of economic factors. They allowed themselves to be deluded, as at first were the Allies, by the significance of their 1941-42 victories. Japan’s existence was dependent upon imported fuel and raw materials, most of which had to be transported thousands of miles by sea from South-East Asia. The country needed at least six million tons of petroleum a year, and produced only 250,000 in its home islands. The balance came from British Borneo, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. The navy, however, addressed neither mass-construction of escort vessels nor mastery of anti-submarine techniques, both indispensable to frustrating American blockade.

The convoy system was introduced late in 1943, and became universal only in March 1944. So desperate was the shortage of anti-submarine vessels that thirty-two ships once waited ninety-five days in Palau harbour for lack of a single escort, and this was not untypical. Winston Churchill recognised the Battle of the Atlantic, the maintenance of Britain’s supply lines, as vital to averting defeat, even if it could not secure victory. Japan’s senior naval officers, by contrast, were obsessed with confronting the US surface fleet. They treated the maintenance of their country’s merchant shipping routes as unworthy of the attention of samurai until it was far, far too late, and no higher authority gainsaid them. The training of pilots and ground crew, the development of new combat aircraft, languished disastrously. No attempt was made to organise an effective air-sea rescue service to retrieve ditched airmen. Even if Japanese admirals scorned humanitarian considerations, their fliers should have been valued for their skills. Instead, hundreds were simply left to perish in the Pacific.

Japan’s rival centres of power, army, navy, and great industrial combines—the zaibatsu—conducted separate wars in their own fashion, concealing the most basic information from each other as jealously as from the enemy. ‘To our distress, it became evident that our military and government leaders had never really understood the meaning of total war,’ wrote Masatake Okumiya, one of the foremost Japanese air aces. Allocation of materials was clumsy and arbitrary. Scientists and engineers addressing vital defence projects found themselves obliged to scavenge wherever they could get commodities, in the face of cumbersome and unsympathetic bureaucracies. When the group working on Japan’s primitive nuclear programme wanted the wherewithal for a heating experiment, their request was deemed unconvincing: ‘We would like to obtain an extra ration of sugar to build an atomic bomb.’ Even when the scientists did obtain a little sugar, the stock was constantly depleted by the sticky fingers of passers-by. Japan’s war effort was crippled by the amateurishness and inefficiency of its industrial and scientific direction.

In his post-war prison cell Gen. Hideki Tojo, prime minister until July 1944, identified a principal cause of defeat: ‘Basically, it was lack of coordination. When the prime minister, to whom is entrusted the destiny of the country, lacks the authority to participate in supreme decisions, it is not likely that the country will win a war.’ This was, of course, a self-serving half-truth. But it was indeed hard for a nation’s chief executive to control its destinies when, for instance, he was told nothing of the navy’s 1942 defeat at Midway until weeks after the event. Sixty years old in 1944, a short man even by Japanese standards, Tojo was the son of a famous general under the Meiji emperor. His notoriously sloppy personal appearance was at odds with his meticulous reputation as an administrator, which caused him to be nicknamed ‘Razor’. He made his reputation running the military police in Manchuria, then became commander of Japan’s mechanised forces in China. He served as deputy war minister in Prince Konoe’s 1938 cabinet, and thereafter as air force chief. A psychopathic personality, Tojo had supposed that a mere forceful military demonstration in China would persuade Chiang Kai-Shek to acquiesce in Japanese ambitions.

In October 1941, Tojo formed the government which led Japan to war with the West. He afterwards learned from painful experience how defective was his own country’s machinery of government. As prime minister he accurately identified many of Japan’s critical needs, but failed to induce colleagues to act effectively to meet them. Tojo, a supposed dictator, possessed far less authority in militarist Japan than did Winston Churchill in democratic Britain. When he sought to concentrate more power in his own hands, colleagues protested that many of Germany’s difficulties derived from Hitler’s relentless meddling in military detail. ‘Führer Hitler was an enlisted man,’ said Tojo dismissively. ‘I am a general.’ His superior qualifications proved insufficient, however, to reverse the tide of war. The loss of Saipan in July 1944 precipitated his fall from office, which was accomplished without much domestic upheaval. He was succeeded by Lt-Gen. Kuniaki Koiso, a former governor of Korea and chief of staff of the Guandong Army in Manchuria. Koiso lacked Tojo’s administrative abilities, and was notorious for his refusal to confront unpalatable realities. His only policy was to persevere, pursuing a fantasy of making terms for Japan through a bilateral deal with China.

If successive prime ministers were unable to wield effective authority, who could? The leaders of Nazi Germany existed in a gangster ethos. Most of the rulers of Japan, by contrast, were people of high birth, possessed of cultural and educational advantages which made the conduct of their wartime offices seem all the more deplorable, both practically and morally. At the lonely pinnacle stood the emperor, forty-three years old in 1944, denied by his throne the comfort of intimates, and by his choice any personal indulgences. A light sleeper, Hirohito rose at seven each morning in the Imperial Palace, breakfasted off black bread and oatmeal, then worked until a lunch of cooked vegetables and dumpling soup. He neither smoked nor drank. To an extraordinary degree, Hirohito’s role in the origins and course of Japan’s war remains shrouded in dispute, just as his precise powers in Japan’s constitutional system mystified most of his own subjects during his reign. Historians lament the fact that MacArthur in 1945 made no attempt to exploit circumstances to have the emperor interrogated. Tojo’s predecessor as Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, complained to an aide after his own fall from power in 1941: ‘When I told the emperor that it would be a mistake to go to war, he would agree with me, but then he would listen to others and afterwards say that I shouldn’t worry so much. He was slightly in favour of war and later on became more war-inclined…As prime minister I had no authority over the army and could appeal [only] to the emperor. But the emperor became so much influenced by the military that I couldn’t do anything about it.’

For several decades after World War II, a legend was sedulously promoted, chiefly by the Japanese, of Hirohito’s long-standing pacifism. This view is now discredited. The emperor shared many of the army’s ambitions for his country, even if instinctive caution rendered him nervous of the huge risks which his generals embraced. Never until August 1945 did he speak or act with conviction against the excesses of ‘his’ army. Hirohito indulged spasms of activism in vetoing appointments and initiatives. For the most part, however, he remained mute while successive governments pursued policies which not only brought his nation to disaster, but also earned it a reputation for barbarism quite at odds with the emperor’s own mild personality.

In a century of revolutions and falling monarchies, he was acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of his throne. During the interwar years the palace frequently trembled as military fanatics attempted coups, murdered ministers and promoted ever more strident nationalism. The army and navy were nominally subordinate to the emperor. But if Hirohito had attempted to defy the hard-liners during the years before and after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that the palace would have been physically attacked, as indeed it was in August 1945. He himself might well have been overthrown. Like most surviving monarchs of his time, Hirohito perceived the preservation of the imperial house as his foremost duty. A belief in the precariousness of his own position, in a society dominated by unyielding samurai, does much to explain his passivity.

If this merits some sympathy from posterity, however, it cannot command admiration. While he deeply desired to be a conscientious monarch, Hirohito proved a fatally weak one, who cannot be absolved from the crimes of both commission and omission carried out in his name. He allowed others to wield executive authority in a fashion which wrought untold death and suffering, and he cannot have been unaware of the military’s bloody excesses. Two of his brothers, for instance, attended screenings of an army film depicting Japan’s biological warfare experiments on human subjects at Unit 731 in Manchuria. By the summer of 1944 the emperor yearned for a path out of the war, if only because he realised that his country was losing it. He did nothing effective, however, to advance this purpose. Until June 1945 he continued to believe that negotiation with the Allies should be deferred until Japan’s hand was strengthened by battlefield success.

Most Japanese are reluctant to articulate unwelcome thoughts. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi described the difficulty which he suffered when discussing with his commander-in-chief an untenable battlefield situation in Burma: ‘The sentence “The time has come to give up the operation as soon as possible” got as far as my throat,’ he said, ‘but I could not force it out in words. I wanted him to understand it from my expression.’ Faced with embarrassment, Japanese often resort to silence—mokusatsu. Such habits of culture and convention represented a barrier to effective decision-making, which grew ever harder to overcome as the war situation deteriorated. Power was dissipated within the ranks of Japan’s officer corps, in a fashion which crippled effective executive action unless it was of an aggressive nature. Logical assessment of the nation’s predicament demanded that peace should be made on any terms. Since such a course was unacceptable to the Japanese army, the nation continued to march towards catastrophe.

It may be argued, however, that such a policy in the face of adversity was not unique to Hirohito’s people. Japan’s options in late 1944, a Japanese might say, were not dissimilar to those of Britain in 1940. Winston Churchill’s commitment to resist Nazi Germany after the fall of France was neither more nor less rational than that of Japan after losing the Marianas. Without allies, Britain possessed no better prospect of encompassing the defeat of Nazi Germany than did Japan of defeating the Americans. Britain’s salvation was achieved overwhelmingly through the actions of her enemies in forcing the Soviet Union and the US into the war, not by any military achievement of her own save that of defiance in the face of hopeless odds.

The leaders of Japan told their own people little less about the apparent hopelessness of their predicament in 1944 than Britain’s prime minister had told his own nation after the fall of France. Churchill, indeed, had something of the samurai about him—a belief that will alone could achieve great things. In April 1940 he tried to insist that British units cut off by the Germans in Norway fight to the death or take to the mountains as guerrillas, rather than withdraw or surrender. ‘Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops,’ he urged passionately in February 1942, as Singapore stood on the brink of collapse. ‘The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’ Unlike some other prominent Conservatives, when Britain stood alone he judged it better to accept the likelihood of her defeat than to make terms with Hitler. Japan’s leaders likewise believed that unconditional surrender would precipitate the loss of all they held dear. If the cause of Japanese militarism seems to posterity immeasurably less admirable than that of British democracy, it engaged its adherents with equal devotion.

Japan’s leaders, like Churchill in 1940, perceived themselves as ‘buggering on’, and their people seemed willing to accept the requirements of such a policy. Japanese captured in the Pacific in September 1944 asserted to US interrogators that morale back home remained high, that civilians were ‘tightening their belts in preparation for a hundred years’ war’. Two officer prisoners claimed that America’s public pronouncements caused Japanese people to believe that their society was doomed to extinction in the event of defeat. Only a few older captives admitted doubts about the civilian will to fight on.

In the last year of the war, some thoughtful and informed Japanese senior officers recognised that the defence of their country against economic blockade could not be sustained. In May 1944, for instance, Rear Admiral Sokichi Tagaki of the navy’s general staff reported: ‘Analysis of air, warship and merchant shipping losses, together with Japan’s inability to import raw materials essential to industrial production and the prospect of air attack on the home islands, show that Japan cannot achieve victory and should seek a compromise peace.’ In 1944, Japan consumed 19.4 million barrels of oil, yet was able to import only five million. This shortfall would worsen in 1945. The Japan Planning Board estimated a requirement of five million tons of shipping for essential movement of supplies, but the merchant fleet had shrunk to 2.1 million, only half of this tonnage serviceable. Tanker capacity, especially, was much depleted. In June 1944, the army general staff’s Conduct of War Section reported that there was ‘now no hope for Japan to reverse the unfavourable war situation…It is time for us to end the war.’

However, the phrase ‘end the war’ was fraught with equivocation. In the minds of almost every senior Japanese, it meant the pursuit of acceptable terms. At the very least, Japan must be permitted to retain hegemony over Manchuria, Korea and Formosa. Allied occupation of the home islands and war crimes trials of Japanese leaders were unacceptable, as was any Allied meddling with Japan’s system of governance. Many Japanese in the summer and autumn of 1944 were discussing the possibility of ending hostilities. Virtually none contemplated accepting the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. So sclerotic was the national decision-making process that nothing effective was done to act upon the knowledge available to the nation’s leaders.

There is little doubt that the death of Hitler before April 1945 would have precipitated a German military collapse. By contrast, it is hard to believe that the removal of any prominent Japanese, including Hirohito or his successive prime ministers, would have hastened his nation’s capitulation. The Japanese fought on, because no consensus could be mobilised to do anything else. A dramatic political initiative to offer surrender, even one supported by the emperor, would almost certainly have failed. Japanese strategy in the last phase of the war rested not upon seeking victory, but upon making each Allied advance so costly that America’s people, as well as her leadership, would deem it preferable to offer Japan acceptable terms rather than to endure a bloody struggle for the home islands. If this assessment was fanciful, and founded upon ignorance of the possibility that a weapon might be deployed which rendered void all conventional military calculations, it offered a germ of hope to desperate men.

By late 1944, many Japanese civilians had become desperate to see an end to the war, which was ruining their lives and threatened to destroy their society. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japan was divided by widespread poverty, and by tensions between city and countryside, peasants and landlords, soldiers and civilians. For all the government’s strident nationalist propaganda campaigns, conflict had deepened rather than healed domestic divisions. There was bitterness that the rich and the armed forces still ate heartily, while no one else did. The government’s Home Ministry was dismayed by the incidence of what in the West would be called defeatism, ‘statements, letters and wall-writing that are disrespectful, anti-war, anti-military or in other ways inflammatory’. There were reports of people making contemptuous references to the emperor as a baka, bakayaro or bocchan, ‘fool’, ‘stupid fool’ or ‘spoiled child’.

There was substantial support for Communism, reflected in graffiti and street talk. Police reports cited cases of alleged industrial sabotage, of drunken workers shouting ‘Stalin banzai!’ Industrial disputes and stoppages remained rare, but Japan’s leaders were always fearful of revolution, as privations increased. A story enjoyed wide circulation in Tokyo’s military and political circles of a Soviet attaché declaring jovially that when his country entered the eastern war and occupied Japan, the Red Army would need to undertake a serious anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Japan, however, never found it necessary to imprison dissenters in anything like the numbers detained in Germany or the Soviet Union. Arrests for ‘peace preservation law violations’—most of the accused being left-wingers, with a handful of religious zealots—peaked at 14,822 in 1933, then declined to 1,212 in 1941; 698 in 1942; 159 in 1943—of whom only fifty-two were prosecuted. While many Japanese were profoundly unhappy with their lot, they perceived no means of doing anything about it, save to maintain their personal struggles for existence.

For years, austerity had been a familiar companion. Inessential driving was banned eighteen months ahead of Pearl Harbor. Oil and iron ore were stockpiled, even plumbing fixtures were stripped from homes. Production of rubber-soled tabi shoes was halted to save raw material. There was no coffee. Neon lighting in Tokyo’s Ginza district was extinguished, and a monthly family fast day introduced. It was no longer permissible to polish rice, which diminished its bulk. From 1940 this was rationed, along with sugar, salt, matches and suchlike, to enable the government to build up stocks in anticipation of siege. Women were forbidden to style their hair or wear smart clothes. Food was a preoccupation of every urban Japanese, which soon became an obsession. In August 1944, one factory reported that 30 per cent of women and boys in its workforce were suffering from beriberi, brought on by malnutrition. ‘Observing a slice of funny little fish and two vegetable leaves which constitute a ration allowance,’ wrote Admiral Ugaki, ‘I contemplated the hardships of those who prepare a daily meal instead of the complaints of those who eat it.’ Absenteeism mounted, as factory workers spent more and more time searching for food for their families. Daily Japanese calorie intake, only 2,000 before Pearl Harbor, fell to 1,900 in 1944, and would descend to 1,680 in 1945. British calorie intake never fell below 2,800, even in the darkest days of 1940-41. An American GI in the Pacific received 4,758 calories.

Twenty-three-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto was the eldest daughter of a businessman living in the Sumida district on the eastern side of Tokyo. Her father owned a small textile firm employing fifteen people, struggling to survive because he had lost access to raw material imports and depended on synthetics. Mr Hashimoto had no son, so Yoshiko would inherit the business. To ensure that there would be a man around to run it, her father arranged her marriage to thirty-one-year-old Bunsaku Yazawa, whose family owned a shop opposite their house. ‘It would be nice to say that it was a love match,’ said Yoshiko, ‘but it wasn’t. It was my father’s choice.’ Yazawa had already spent much of his twenties as an unwilling draftee in Manchuria. Three months after his 1941 wedding to Yoshiko, he was shipped abroad again. On demobilisation from the army in 1944, he was posted to air-raid duties in Tokyo, based at a primary school not far from the Hashimoto home, where his squad was responsible for demolishing houses to make fire breaks. ‘He hated the war,’ said his wife tersely.

In addition to Yoshiko, three other daughters were living at home: Chieko, nineteen; Etsuko, seventeen; and Hisae, fourteen. In 1944 Yoshiko gave birth to a son, Hiroshi, who was now the apple of his grandfather’s as well as his mother’s eye. It was a hard time to rear a baby. Food was so short that Yoshiko, undernourished, found herself unable to breastfeed. In order to get a small ration of tinned milk, it was necessary to secure a certificate signed not only by a doctor, but by the neighbourhood committee. ‘It was always coupons, coupons, coupons and queues, queues, queues. Anyone who could afford extra food bought it on the black market. Everything hinged on who knew who.’ As in Germany, there was intense bitterness between town- and countrydwellers. City folk trekked to rural areas, to persuade farmers illegally to barter food for household possessions. Yoshiko’s mother was reduced to surrendering her most cherished kimono in exchange for rice. Such bargains also demanded a struggle for a place on a train to a farming district.

The most dreaded government communication which most young people received was either a ‘red paper’, consigning a man to the armed forces, or a ‘white paper’, which committed every male and many females over seventeen to industrial labour. However, Chieko Hashimoto thought herself lucky to have a job in an armaments factory, because this entitled her to a ration of otherwise unobtainable noodles. ‘By that time, we were thinking merely of survival, of how to find the next meal,’ said Yoshiko. ‘A baby could only cry about its hunger, but mothers like me had to try to do something about it. It’s really hard to bear your child’s sobs, when you have nothing to give him.’ In the Hashimoto household, as in most Japanese families, only men smoked. The women claimed to do so, however, in order to collect a cigarette ration. This was eked out by drying itadori weed, which was then rolled in scraps of dictionary paper. Gas and electricity were available only for a few hours a day. Soap and clothing were desperately short—an unwelcome consequence was that headlice became endemic. The local cinema near the Hashimoto home kept going, but since December 1941 its patrons had been deprived of Hollywood favourites like Shirley Temple. A few little music halls stayed open, featuring performances by local comedians. The young cherished irreplaceable jazz and tango records. Those wishing to amuse themselves of an evening were reduced to singing songs in the bosom of the family.

‘We never talked about the war at home, and we knew very little about what was happening,’ said Yoshiko Hashimoto. ‘Even in 1944, the papers and radio still said that we were winning.’ Desultory efforts had been made to evacuate children and their mothers from cities, but these largely foundered, for the same reason as in Britain. Town and country children, thrown together by circumstances, disliked each other. Yoshiko spent several months with her baby son at the home of a rural uncle in the Chiba district outside Tokyo. But she hated the lack of privacy in the home of near-strangers whose every word was audible through paper walls, and returned to the city.

Sixteen-year-old Ryoichi Sekine and his father lived together in the Edogawa district of eastern Tokyo, with a young rustic cousin named Takako Ohki helping with the housework. Ryoichi’s mother and one sister had died some time earlier. A younger sister had been sent to live with relatives in the country. The teenaged Ryoichi found little to enjoy about the war. First, his ambitions to train as an engineer were stifled as schools devoted diminishing attention to learning, ever more to military training. By late 1944 his class spent most of their days working on an anti-aircraft-gun production line at the Seiko factory. Study of the English language was banned, except for technical terms. Young Ryoichi, like so many of his generation, felt that he ‘missed a chance of the fling which every teenager wants to enjoy’. His father was an optical engineer who worked for Minolta and Fujifilm. Association with military technology caused Mr Sekine to be well-informed about the war, and very gloomy about it. The food shortage caused the family to spend hours haggling for beans and sweet potatoes with crusty farmers outside the city. Lacking soap, they scoured their dishes with ashes. One day, a large black object fell from an American plane overhead. They were frightened that it was a bomb, but it proved instead to be a drop tank jettisoned by a US fighter. When Ryoichi strolled curiously over to examine it, he found himself savouring the stench of aviation spirit as if it was perfume, for petrol had become rare and precious.

The war progressively penetrated every corner of the lives even of children. Schools emphasised the destiny of young Japanese to become warriors. Ten-year-old Yoichi Watanuki, son of a Tokyo small businessman, suffered an embarrassing tendency to feel airsick when lofted on a swing in the playground. A teacher said to him scornfully: ‘You won’t make much of a fighter pilot, will you?’ Pupils were shown caricatures of their American and British enemies, whose defining characteristics appeared to be that they were tall, ugly and noisy. There were shortages of the most commonplace commodities. Celluloid covers for exercise books vanished; rubber-covered balls were replaced by baked-flour ones, which melted when it rained. Everything metal was requisitioned by the armaments factories: even spinning tops were now made in ceramic. Art classes drew military aircraft, music classes played military music—Yoichi did his part on an accordion. School outings stopped.

Every community in Japan was organised into neighbourhood groups, each mustering perhaps fifteen families. Yoichi Watanuki’s father had always supported the war. His playmate Osamu Sato’s father, a former naval officer, belonged to the same neighbourhood group. Mr Sato was bold enough to declare from the outset: ‘Japan should not have started this war, because it is going to lose it.’ Now, Yoichi heard his own father say gravely: ‘Sato was right. Everything is turning out exactly as he predicted.’

In the summer of 1944, as the threat of large-scale American bombing became apparent, evacuations of city children were renewed. One morning at Yoichi’s school assembly, the headmaster demanded a show of hands from all those who lacked relatives in the country to offer them shelter. More than half fell into this category. They were informed that their education would thenceforward continue at a new school in Shizuoka Prefecture, south of Mount Fuji. A few days later, a bewildered and mostly sobbing crowd of children gathered at the station, while behind them on the platform stood their parents, likewise tearful, to bid farewell. Flags were waved, the train whistle blew, mothers cried ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ in circumstances utterly different from those in which Allied soldiers were accustomed to hear the word. The children departed for a new life.

It was not a happy one. They were billeted in a temple in densely wooded mountains, bitterly cold in winter. Water had to be carried from a nearby river, and the children were obliged to wash themselves and their clothes in the icy flow. Lice became endemic. Their teachers, all women or old men, were as unhappy as their charges. Yoichi and his companions discovered one day that a delivery of sweet cakes—by now a rare delicacy—had somehow reached the school. To the children’s disgust, teachers ate them all. They were constantly hungry, reduced to stealing corn or sweet potatoes from the fields. If they ventured into the nearby village, farmers’ children broke their schoolbags and mocked them with cries of ‘Sokai! Sokai!’ ‘Evacuees! Evacuees!’ When Yoichi took a hand helping with the rice harvest, he felt shamed by his clumsiness in wielding a sickle, his own uncut row of plants lagging many yards behind those of deft rural companions.

His father made occasional visits, sometimes bringing food. When Yoichi’s mother gave birth to a new baby, Mr Watanuki bought a cottage near the temple in which his elder son’s school was housed, where the family might be safer. This proved a sensible precaution. Soon afterwards their Tokyo house was burned out in an air raid, and the whole family adopted rural life. They were safe in the mountains, though shortages of food and fuel relentlessly worsened. For the people of Japan, apprehension represented wisdom. Worse, much worse, lay ahead.

2 WARRIORS

Japan’s career soldiers and sailors professed astonishment at the ‘amateurishness’ of other armies and navies, but themselves displayed reckless insouciance towards the technological development of warfare. The Japanese army was principally composed of infantry, poorly supported by armour and artillery. Japan built only light tanks. Soldiers carried a 1905 model rifle. In 1941-42 the navy and air arms were adequately equipped, but thereafter Allied weapons decisively outclassed Japanese ones. By late 1944, for instance, the legendary Zero fighter was at the mercy of the American Hellcat. As a young student at the Naval Technical Institute before the war, Haruki Iki gained a personal insight into his nation’s resistance to innovation. Senior officers flaunted their contempt for the radar development programme. They said: ‘Why do we need this? Men’s eyes see perfectly well.’ Japanese radar lagged far behind that of the Allies.

‘Before World War II, Japan’s experience of war had been gained entirely against the Chinese, who possessed scarcely any artillery or other heavy weapons,’ observes Japanese historian Professor Akira Nakamura. ‘Japan had not participated in a land campaign during World War I. The Japanese army entered World War II quite unequipped to fight a modern enemy. From 1941 onwards, front-line soldiers urged the importance of developing more advanced weapons. Unfortunately, their voices were not heeded at the top.’ Likewise staff officer Maj. Shigeru Funaki: ‘We were far too influenced by our experience in China. There, we had no need of modern equipment and tactics. Because we kept beating the Chinese, we became over-confident.’

Societies run by civilians proved vastly better able to organise themselves to fight the Second World War than those dominated by military men, of which Japan offered the most notable example. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Anglo-American wartime achievements were made possible by the talents of amateurs in uniform, fulfilling almost every responsible function save that of higher military command. Intelligence, for instance, was dominated by academics, many of startling brilliance. Montgomery’s intelligence chief in north-west Europe was an Oxford don masquerading in a brigadier’s uniform. In Japan, by contrast, authority and influence remained almost exclusively in the hands of career officers, who were reluctant to grant scope to outsiders even in such fields as scientific research. The Japanese army and navy never mobilised clever civilians in the fashion of the Western Allies. Intelligence was poor, because the Japanese mindset mitigated against energetic inquiry, frank analysis and expression.

By 1944, said Shigeru Funaki, ‘people understood that we were poorly prepared and equipped for a long war. I saw how important fuel was going to be to us. Because I had always enjoyed American movies, I knew what an advanced society America was. Yet we told each other that Americans were too democratic to be able to organise themselves for war. Many military men supposed that victory could be gained by fighting spirit alone. Our intelligence was never good, because few officers acknowledged its importance. Commanders understood the need for battlefield information, but not for strategic intelligence about the big picture.’

Maj. Shoji Takahashi was a staff officer in the intelligence department of South Asia Army HQ. ‘Only in 1944 did the war situation really begin to alarm us,’ he said. ‘The Japanese army did not take intelligence nearly seriously enough. At South Asia Army HQ, we had no proper system, no analytical section, no resources—that’s how bad it was. Perhaps our attitude reflected Japan’s historic isolation from the rest of the world. We had no tradition of being interested in other societies and what they were doing. It came as a shock to realise how powerful the Allies were becoming, and how much they knew about our actions and intentions.’