The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

by John Toland

I have done my utmost to let the events speak for themselves, and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.

The two officers felt that Manchuria was the only answer to poverty in Japan. It could be transformed from a wilderness into a civilized, prosperous area, alleviating unemployment at home and providing an outlet for the overpopulated homeland, where more than two thirds of all farms were smaller than two and a quarter acres. Manchuria could also supply Japan with what she so desperately needed to remain an industrial state—a guaranteed source of raw materials and a market for finished goods.

On June 4, 1928, a Kwantung Army staff officer commanding men from an Engineer regiment dynamited Chang’s special train and he was fatally injured. From then on, and despite numerous warnings from Tokyo, Ishihara and Itagaki used the Kwantung Army as if it were their private legion.

The abortive Brocade Flag Revolution did achieve one of its purposes: in the next few years it assured the success of the Manchurian adventure. It also convinced many Japanese that politics and business were so corrupt that a military-led reform had to be supported. At the same time it engendered such bitterness that the two wings of the reform movement began to split. One, nicknamed “the Control” clique by newsmen, believed it was not enough to take Manchuria, since security against a possible attack by the Soviet Union could be forestalled only by control of China itself. The Kita followers, known as “the Imperial Way” clique, were convinced this new expansion would be folly; an industrialized Manchuria would be a sturdy enough fortress against Communism.

The coup itself—named the 5/15 (May 15) Incident—had fizzled out, but it brought forth even more sensational trials. There were three in all—one for civilians, one each for Army and Navy personnel. As usual a large segment of the public sympathized with the assassins, and there was general applause when one defendant declared that he and his comrades only wanted to sound an alarm to awaken the nation. The people had heard so much about “corruption” that little sympathy was shown the memory of gallant little Inukai. His death was a warning to politicians.

At his trial Aizawa was treated gingerly by the five judges and was allowed to use the witness stand to attack statesmen, politicians and the zaibatsu (family business combines such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi) for corruption. Pleading guilty to the charge of murder, he claimed he had only done his duty as an honorable soldier of the Emperor. “The country was in a deplorable state: the farmers were impoverished, officials were involved in scandals, diplomacy was weak, and the prerogative of the Supreme Command had been violated by the naval-limitation agreements,” he declared in the stilted prose of reform.c “I came to realize that the senior statesmen, those close to the Throne, powerful financiers and bureaucrats, were attempting gradually to corrupt the government and the Army for their own selfish interests.” These conditions had inspired him to murder—to commit gekokujo.

Since childhood Hirohito had been trained for this role principally by Prince Saionji, who himself had been influenced by the French Revolution and English liberalism. Time and again the last genro would tell the young man that Japan needed a father figure, not a despot, and that he should therefore assume a position of responsibility in all affairs of state, yet never issue any positive order on his own volition. He should be objective and selfless. Theoretically the Emperor had plenary power; all state decisions needed his sanction. But according to tradition, once the Cabinet and military leaders had agreed on a policy, he could not withhold his approval. He was to remain above politics and transcend party considerations and feuds, for he represented the entire nation.

This was only the first of a series of conciliatory moves, climaxed by the new Prime Minister’s acceptance of a demand that all future war ministers be approved by the Big Three of the Army. Apparently an innocent move, this return to the old system meant that the policies of the country were now at the mercy of the Army. If the military disapproved of a cabinet, the war minister could resign and the Big Three would simply refuse to approve anyone else, thereby bringing about the fall of the cabinet. The Army could then refuse to provide a minister until a cabinet to their liking was selected. It meant the voluntary abandonment of one of the last civilian controls over the affairs of state.

Ishihara opened with a question: Why risk war with China when the most dangerous enemy was their traditional foe, Russia? Two wars at once would be suicidal to a Japan weak in heavy industries, he continued. Instead the nation should concentrate all its energies on expanding its productive power until it could compete with that of the Soviet Union. To attain self-sufficiency in heavy industry, Japan would have to develop the resources of Manchuria in a series of five-year programs, avoiding all conflicts with Russia and China. When Japanese industry reached its peak in 1952, then an all-out war could be waged with Russia—and won.

the expansionists argued that more troops should be sent into China to teach Chiang a lesson, otherwise he might use this incident as an excuse to retake Manchuria; this would endanger Japanese-controlled Korea and eventually put Japan at the mercy of Russian and Chinese Communists. They promised to make the military action brief and come to a quick agreement with Chiang. Then all Japanese troops would be withdrawn into North China, which would be used purely as a buffer against Russia.

“Crush the Chinese in three months and they will sue for peace,” War Minister Sugiyama predicted. As city after city fell, patriotic fervor swept through Japan, but almost the entire Western world condemned Japan’s aggression, and even Germany (because she feared for her interests in China) was critical. China appealed to the League of Nations, and while the world awaited its report, a bold attack came from another quarter. On October 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a forceful speech in Chicago condemning all aggressors and equating the Japanese, by inference, with the Nazis and Fascists.a “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community,” he said and explained that war was a contagion, whether declared or undeclared. “We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down.” There was no mistaking Roosevelt’s meaning when on the following day, after the League of Nations had censured Japan, the United States, although not a member, quickly concurred.

“Japan is expanding,” retorted Yosuke Matsuoka, a diplomat whose sharp tongue and ready wit was winning him many followers. “And what country in its expansion era has ever failed to be trying to its neighbors? Ask the American Indian or the Mexican how excruciatingly trying the young United States used to be once upon a time.” Japan’s expansion, like that of America’s, was as natural as the growth of a child. “Only one thing stops a child from growing—death.” He declared that Japan was fighting for two goals: to prevent Asia from falling completely under the white man’s domination, as in Africa, and to save China from Communism.

Only once did he seriously scold any of his five children, this in a stern letter to Fumitaka at Princeton chastising him for drinking and neglecting his studies. Fumitaka replied that he was just following the American way of life and the subject was closed.

In the name of national defense the Army proposed a national mobilization law, designed to take away the Diet’s last vestiges of control over war measures and direct every aspect of national life toward an efficient war economy. Army spokesmen argued persuasively and not unreasonably that Japan was a small, overpopulated country with almost no natural resources; surrounded as it was by enemies—Russians, Chinese, Americans and British—total mobilization of the nation’s strength was the sole solution. The law was passed in March 1938—the Diet, in effect, voting for its own capitulation to the Army. “Liberties lost to the Japanese Army,” commented Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador in Tokyo, “were lost for good.”

Both kokutai and kodo underlined the father relationship of the Emperor to the people as well as his divinity and were already rousing millions with ardor for a holy war to free Asia from both colonialism and Communism.

With the seizure of Manchuria and the invasion of North China, the gulf widened as America denounced Japanese aggression with increasingly forceful words. This moral denunciation only hardened the resolve of the average Japanese. Why should there be a Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and an Open Door principle in Asia? The Japanese takeover in bandit-infested Manchuria was no different from American armed intervention in the Caribbean.† Moreover, how could a vast country like the United States even begin to understand the problems that had beset Japan since World War I? Why was it perfectly acceptable for England and Holland to occupy India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the East Indies, but a crime for Japan to follow their example? Why should America, which had grabbed its lands from Indians by trickery, liquor and massacre, be so outraged when Japan did the same in China?

The Japanese military leaders, intoxicated by Hitler’s easy victories, changed their minds about the war in China and adopted the slogan “Don’t miss the bus!” With France defeated and Britain fighting for survival, the time had come to strike into Southeast Asia for oil and other sorely needed resources.

Nevertheless, he refused to give up and went pleading from ministry to ministry. But his words had no more effect than “hitting a nail into rice bran.” During the last week in August he attended a liaison conference, where he contrasted the alarming differences between American and Japanese war potential. In steel, he said, the ratio was 20 to 1; oil more than 100 to 1; coal 10 to 1; planes 5 to 1; shipping 2 to 1; labor force 5 to 1. The overall potential was 10 to 1. At such odds, Japan could not possibly win, despite Yamato damashii—the spirit of Japan. For once his listeners were impressed and Tojo ordered Iwakuro to make a written report of everything he had just said.

These words brought the Army to the point of panic, and Chief of Staff Gen Sugiyama introduced a new element—a deadline. “We must try to achieve our diplomatic objectives by October 10,” he said. “If this fails we must dash forward. Things cannot be allowed to drag out.”

Kido advised the Emperor to remain silent at first and leave the questions to Privy Council President Hara; he had already instructed Hara what these should be. But once the discussion was over, the Emperor should break precedence. He should cease to reign, that is, and momentarily rule: “Instruct the Chiefs of Staff to co-operate with the government in making the negotiations successful.” Only through such a dramatic break in tradition could the disastrous deadline policy be reversed.

He could summon both Chiefs of Staff and tell them he’d decided against war. The Emperor could not do this—it was against custom and Constitution. But a prince of the royal family could, and his wishes would have to be followed by the military. Thus peace could come without civil disorder.

What particularly infuriated every man in the room was the categoric demand to quit all of China. Manchuria had been won at the cost of considerable sweat and blood. Its loss would mean economic disaster. What right did the wealthy Americans have to make such a demand? What nation with any honor would submit?

Finally, America made a grave diplomatic blunder by allowing an issue not vital to her basic interests—the welfare of China—to become, at the last moment, the keystone of her foreign policy. Until that summer America had had two limited aims in the Far East: to drive a wedge between Japan and Hitler, and to thwart Japan’s southward thrust. She could easily have attained both these objectives but instead made an issue out of no issue at all, the Tripartite Pact, and insisted on the liberation of China.

Nor were Stimson and Hull villains, though the latter, with his all-or-nothing attitude, had committed one of the most fatal mistakes a diplomat could make—driven his opponents into a corner with no chance to save face and given them no option to capitulation but war.

A war that need not have been fought was about to be fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language difficulties, and mistranslations as well as Japanese opportunism, gekokujo, irrationality, honor, pride and fear—and American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the Orient, rigidity, self-righteousness, honor, national pride and fear.

On the quarterdeck of Nagato, hands behind his back, Yamamoto paced back and forth, stopping every so often to stare at the dim shape of the departing carrier. Confident as he was of Operation Z, he still dreaded war with America. “What a strange position I find myself in now,” he had recently written an Academy classmate, “having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my personal opinion, with no choice but to push full speed in pursuance of that decision. Is that, too, fate? And what a bad start we’ve made.…”

About the time Force Z turned back toward Singapore, Adolf Hitler finally arrived in Berlin from the eastern front. He was doubly concerned—by a mammoth Soviet counteroffensive in front of Moscow and the news from the Pacific. In a flash Pearl Harbor had freed his chief adversary from worry over attack from the east; Stalin could now transfer almost all his strength in Asia against Germany. For months the Führer had been urging Japan to fight Russia and avoid war with America; at the same time Tokyo pressed Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima to get written assurances that Hitler would attack America if war started, while withholding any promise to assault Russia in return.

Once a Japanese officer rushed up to an American tank commander and embraced him. They had been classmates at UCLA.

The succession of brilliant and unexpectedly easy victories in the Pacific had brought dissension rather than unity to the Japanese Supreme Command. The original war plan called for the seizure of raw materials in Southeast Asia; the conquered territory would be fortified into a strategic web of bases for long-range naval operations. The Army still felt the only sensible course was to make the web so strong that America would be forced eventually to make some sort of peace. But the Navy had experienced such exhilarating triumphs that it was no longer willing to accept such a limited, defensive role. Why not operations against Australia, Hawaii and India? These would generate great naval battles, and as in the Battle of the Java Sea, the enemy would be destroyed.

Critically ill from malaria, Nasu remained near the front, more afraid of dying from the disease than of the explosions around him.

His words left no doubt that the Pacific was closest to the hearts of Americans. The names Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Guadalcanal stirred them more than Rome, Paris and Berlin.

The war in Europe was “just a nuisance that kept him from waging his Pacific War undisturbed.”

This crippling lack of raw materials was compounded by controls that often overlapped and were inconsistent. Economic mobilization in the United States, on the other hand, was accelerating. While the output in Japan under the stimulus of war had risen one-fourth, that in America had gone up about two-thirds, and Japan’s manufacturing efficiency was but 35 percent that of her enemy’s. More significant, Japan’s gross national product (using 1940 as an index basis of 100) had gone up a meager 2 points by the beginning of 1943, while America’s had climbed to 136. Moreover, it was a well-planned expansion on all levels. The Japanese had failed to diversify. Their output of munitions had soared—but at the expense of nonmilitary items. The ten years before Pearl Harbor had seen such growth in production that the leaders had assumed they could carry on a major war without any substantial enlargement.

The central instrument of Japan’s political aims was still the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and if Japan was losing the battle of production, she was winning the battle of propaganda throughout a large part of the continent. It was a policy that envisaged an Asia united “in the spirit of universal brotherhood” under the leadership of Japan, with each nation allotted its “proper place” by the Emperor; it would lead to peace and prosperity. Established in November 1938 by the first Konoye government, it had already induced millions of Asians to co-operate in the war against the West.

Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic demand for the self-determination of nations after World War I seemed to apply to Asians as well as Europeans. But the promised democracy never came to the East, where colonies remained colonies; the West had two standards of freedom, one for itself and one for those east of Suez. With each year the gap between East and West widened as the Western masters, particularly the British, offered mere patchwork reforms.

A similar plan to relocate German and Italian aliens aroused such protest that the government canceled it, explaining that it would affect the nation’s economic structure and lower morale among citizens of those nationalities. But there was no one to speak for the Nisei, who were citizens but usually referred to as “aliens”—their skin was a different color. Almost 110,000 loyal Americans, whose sole crime was their ancestry, were uprooted from their homes, which they were forced to sell for a pittance. They were interned behind barbed wire in “relocation centers” along the coast which were little better than concentration camps; many were even deprived of their life savings.

“It is an incontrovertible fact,” said Tojo in his concise manner, “that the nations of Greater East Asia are bound in every respect by ties of an inseparable relationship. I firmly believe that such being the case, it is their common mission to secure the stability of Greater East Asia and to construct a new order of common prosperity and well-being.”

The Joint Declaration, unanimously adopted by the conferees, called for an order of common prosperity and well-being based on justice, respect for each other’s independence, sovereignty and traditions, efforts to accelerate economic development on a basis of reciprocity, and an end to all racial discrimination.e It was the Pacific version of the Atlantic Charter, a promise of the dream long held by Asians. Those who came to Tokyo may have been puppets but, born in servitude, they now felt free and had jointly proclaimed for the first time a Brave New World for Asia.

Churchill was equal to this: “I drink to the proletarian masses!” “I drink to the Conservative party,” said Stalin.

There were even those in the military working for peace, but for different reasons. The most important was Rear Admiral Sokichi Takagi, a brilliant research expert who had been ordered by Admiral Shimada to conduct a thorough study of the mistakes made in the war as reflected in top-secret files. His analysis of air and shipping losses led him to the inevitable conclusion that Japan could not win the war. Appalled by the extent of the collapse in the Pacific, he saw as the only solution Tojo’s dismissal and an immediate quest for peace no matter what the consequences.

Kurusu remarked, “It is easier to start a war than end one.”

By the end of the first year since Pearl Harbor, U. S. submarines had sunk 139 cargo vessels, 560,000 gross tons in all, and at last Imperial Headquarters realized that the war was being lost through an oversight. At home there were pleas for more gasoline, bauxite and other vital production materials. At the front, commanders were begging for food, ammunition and reinforcements. But there weren’t enough merchant ships to satisfy anyone’s needs, and every week more were going down.

Admiral Togo’s epic victory at Tsushima had left future Japanese admirals with an unenviable heritage: the concept of the Decisive Battle, wherein all issues would be settled at one stroke.

A more ominous admonition came from a graduate of UCLA, an American girl of Japanese descent who had been visiting a sick aunt in Japan when the war broke out. Nicknamed “Tokyo Rose” by the Americans, she first went on the air as “Ann,” short for “announcer,” and currently called herself “Orphan Annie, your favorite enemy.” “I’ve got some swell recordings for you,” she was broadcasting, “just in from the States. You’d better enjoy them while you can, because tomorrow at oh-six-hundred you’re hitting Saipan … and we’re ready for you. So, while you’re still alive, let’s listen to

At home, production levels were still maintained, but at the expense of extraordinary sacrifices by the people. Not only had many civilian enterprises been converted to war production and more women brought into industry, but teen-agers had been added to the labor force. Classroom time was reduced to a minimum and school buildings transformed into military supply depots. A seven-day workweek was established, with the Sundays so cherished by Japanese “abolished.” Trains had become crowded to such an extent that a number of infants were suffocated; trips of more than 100 kilometers required a police permit; diners and sleepers were discontinued. The people’s aggression turned on the trains when they were late, now a common occurrence; they stole seat covers and broke windows to get in and out. Consumer goods of every description were drastically curtailed. Food was rationed, clothing was at a premium, coffins had to be used over and over, and there was little gas or charcoal for heating homes. Newspapers were reduced in size, and publication of afternoon editions was suspended; about ten thousand amusement places—including geisha houses—were shut down. Life in Japan, in short, had become drab and onerous. “What kind of a Tokyo has this turned out to be!” lamented comedian Roppa Furukawa in his diary. “Ah, it’s no fun being alive any more!”

Hunger gnawed at them more than fear,

Kuomintang forces were more than paying for Lend-Lease assistance by tying up almost a million Japanese troops who might otherwise be used against MacArthur and Nimitz.

Another superstition originated when a couple who miraculously survived a close bomb hit found two dead goldfish nearby. They thought the goldfish had died for them, so they put the fish in their family Buddhist shrine and worshiped them. When word of what had happened spread and people found it difficult to obtain live goldfish, porcelain goldfish were manufactured in quantity and sold at exorbitant prices.

Suzuki’s greatest strength was a conviction that he was best qualified to end the war, but he had not yet made up his mind how to go about it. If he announced such a “defeatist” policy, even to his cabinet, he would be forced out of office or assassinated. For a while he would have to play haragei (the “stomach game”), that is, to dissemble, to support the war while seeking peace.

Their findings revealed that the situation was more critical than anyone had realized. Every aspect of Japanese life, civilian as well as military, was affected by the lack of basic raw materials. Steel production was less than 100,000 tons per month, two thirds below the official estimate. Similarly, aircraft production had dropped to a third of its quota because of shortages in aluminum and bauxite, and lack of coal had curtailed munitions production by 50 percent. Shipping was down to 1,000,000 tons, and the entire transportation system was crippled by fuel shortages and lack of manpower to handle cargo. The Sakomizu report predicted that in weeks there would be no rail transportation between cities, construction of steel ships would end and the chemical industry would collapse.