DURING THE WAR, WHENEVER POSSIBLE, THE JAPANESE ARMY arranged to repatriate the cremated remains of fallen soldiers. Burial details dug a pit, filled it with brushwood, piled the bodies on top of the wood, poured gasoline onto the bodies, and set them on fire. Teishin Nohara, a soldier from Tochigi Prefecture who fought in China, recalled that the job had to be done quickly and was not always done well. “It was like baking sardines,” he recalled:
You just set fire to it and let the flames consume the wood. Then you took up bones from the parts that burned, put them in a bag, and filled out a tag with the dead man’s name. You said a silent prayer, sure, but there wasn’t any “ceremony.” It was war, so you couldn’t help it. When it rained you couldn’t even really burn them, so say the battalion commander had died, you’d burn just his body and distribute bits of his bones to the rest. You can’t tell this kind of truth to the families of the deceased! So you burn what you can quickly. You just do it, keep going. Ten. Twenty. You have to move fast.1
Transported to the homeland by ship, the bags were forwarded to regional distribution centers. Each man’s ashes were transferred into a small wooden box, and the box was wrapped carefully in clean white cotton cloth. The boxes were sorted according to the dead man’s home district and village, and loaded onto special funeral trains for delivery to the family. A local military affairs office was notified of the train’s scheduled arrival so that a ceremony to honor the “spirits of the returning war dead” could be duly performed.
As the train pulled up to the platform, a representative of the family stepped forward and bowed. A window was raised. A soldier wearing a mask lifted the box in white-gloved hands and offered it through the window. When it was accepted, he bowed and closed the window. Fumio Kimura, a soldier who performed this duty in Shiga Prefecture, recalled the familiar scene: “Elderly parents and young wives holding children’s hands or carrying babies clung to the box and wept. ‘This is your father.’ Thinking, This will be us tomorrow, we soldiers cried also and could only stand silently at the window.”2
The box was carried back to the village in a somber procession, with the family often accompanied by neighbors, friends, local officials, Buddhist priests, veterans, and representatives of local patriotic leagues. Schoolchildren were often led out of school to bow in unison as the procession passed.
When no remains were recovered, as in the case of sailors lost at sea, the family sometimes received an empty box. Hitoshi Anzai, a boy living in Tokyo, was curious to know why the box purportedly containing his brother’s remains rattled when he shook it. Since his brother’s ship had gone down at sea, what could be inside the box? He pried it open and found a small sliver of wood with his brother’s name written on it. It had been nailed loosely to the bottom of the box in such a way as to “make it sound like there actually was a piece of the dead man’s bone inside when the box was shaken.”3 The boy was offended at having been deceived. Worse, he noted that his brother’s name had been misspelled.
Toru Izumi, a soldier posted in Matsuyama, was charged with receiving and distributing the remains of several hundred soldiers who had perished in the South Pacific. Izumi and his fellow soldiers pitied the families who were to receive empty boxes. More than forty years later he offered a pained confession:
When we thought of the feelings of the members of the dead soldier’s family, we couldn’t bear to hand them an empty box. After discussion, we concluded that since the soldiers had died together, praying over another soldier’s remains should be the same thing. Unable to face the greater sadness of families with no remains inside the boxes and believing that the heroic war dead would rest in peace better, we decided to take a few fragments of remains from other boxes. All the while fearing that it was wrong to deceive the bereaved families, we divided the fragments of bones into different boxes, our hands trembling as we did this. I have yet to determine whether what we did was right. It has remained a hurt inside me that will never ease.4
Entire sections of Japanese newspapers were devoted to stories about the war dead. As soon as a military affairs office released the name of a man killed in action, local reporters and photographers rushed to the family’s home. Often it was the journalists who broke the news to the dead man’s next of kin. “You assumed that they knew, but often they hadn’t heard anything,” said Uichiro Kawachi of the Yomiuri Shinbun. “They’d wail and cry. It was awful.”5 The reporters always asked for a photograph of the fallen man—if they brought a photo back to the newsroom, said Kawachi, the story “always made the paper. . . . Every paper competed for a picture.”6
Editors and military censors frowned on stories that played up a family’s grief. Rather, the reporters should emphasize the dead man’s “laudable virtues” and the family’s pride in a son, husband, or father who had given his life for his country and his emperor. As the casualties mounted in the middle years of the Pacific War, reporters began recycling fixed phrases: “They spoke without shedding a tear.” (Kawachi said that he often used that phrase “no matter how much they’d cried.”) Over time, editors and reporters developed several story archetypes that could be recycled ad infinitum:
When a series of ten articles was planned for the paper, all the participating reporters would discuss themes and the style each would use. “I’ll use the ‘small mother’ voice.” “I’ll use the ‘struggling, yet gallant mother’ type.” Like this we’d establish a theme for the series. There were lots of styles. You could write the story any way you wanted. You’d have a mother who had been weeping, mourning for her son, crying so hard and long that her face was swollen and her voice was choked. Her dead son would appear before her and beg her, “Don’t cry, Ma. When you cry, it only hurts me to see you so sad.” Then she’d stop. That’s what we’d write. We couldn’t repeat the same thing every time, so we’d have to change it around.7
Censorship was practiced in all the major combatant nations of the Second World War, but in no other nation was the control of wartime reporting so Orwellian in its ambition and extent as in Japan. The morning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading editors were summoned to a meeting at the cabinet’s Board of Information. They were told that the cause of the war was “the enemy’s egotistic ambition to control the world,” and it was the duty of the Japanese press to “instill a deep hatred for America and Britain in the minds of the people.”8 Apart from the ordinary control of battlefield reporting, media representatives were to attend mandatory meetings in which they were instructed on how to shape the attitudes and perceptions of the Japanese people. The papers were to assist in promulgating official slogans: “We must advance to increased war power,”9 “We must carry out the responsibilities of the homefront,” “Luxury is the enemy,” “Be frugal and save,” “Serve the nation with one death.” Editors were required to participate in humiliating group sessions in which passages from their recent issues were read aloud and either praised or singled out for criticism. The distinction between reporting and editorial commentary faded. Stories that intoned solemnly about the kokutai—the “imperial way,” a political order founded on reverence for the Showa emperor—were lavished with praise and held up as examples to be imitated.
The administrative apparatus of censorship was never consolidated into any one agency of government. An article that did not offend the army might raise hackles in the Navy Ministry, and editors sometimes found themselves wedged helplessly between the opposing requirements of the two services. A ranking officer in a local police station might summon an offending editor or reporter to be upbraided and threatened with imprisonment. The army press section began holding regular monthly meetings at a Tokyo restaurant, to which all leading editors were “invited.” (Attendance was recorded.) Officers commented on each publication’s recent stories and made “requests” (issued orders) concerning the content and themes of upcoming editions.
Guidelines were often arbitrary and seemingly meaningless. A word or phrase might be declared out of bounds with no coherent justification provided. An independent writer who fell out of favor found that editors no longer took his calls or acknowledged his submissions. Recidivist offenders were hauled away to prison to be beaten, tortured, starved, and incarcerated indefinitely. A reporter whose byline appeared above an impertinent article might find himself drafted into the army and shipped to the front lines, without military training, the following day. A paper might be ordered to suspend publication for several days or weeks, long enough to drive it into bankruptcy. On occasion, an article would be “recalled,” requiring that drivers be sent out to tear the objectionable pages from copies still on the newsstands, and to affix a seal to the cover identifying it as a “Revised Edition.”
As commodities of every kind grew scarce, the junta discovered another useful lever to reward compliance and punish insubordination—raw newsprint. In December 1942, the vice chief of the Board of Information told editors in chief that the supply of newsprint would be “negligible” in the following year, and that allocations would be decided according to how closely their publications adhered to government direction. The editors were pressured to make their leading reporters available to “tour the provinces making speeches on the realization of the Holy War for the Information Board.”10
In Japan, where the literacy rate was among the highest in the world, newspapers were a large and lucrative business. Enterprising owners quickly grasped that the war and its pressures offered an opportunity to expand circulation at the expense of less jingoistic competitors. The prime beneficiary of the new regime was the ultranationalist Asahi Shinbun, the largest daily newspaper in Japan with a circulation exceeding two million. Asahi had the scale to build a sophisticated internal “inspection division,” an in-house layer of censorship that minimized the danger that any article would run afoul of the regime. The leading papers competed fiercely for readers—but not, as Asahi correspondent Shoryu Hata later admitted, “over the quality and accuracy of the reports that would be left to history, but rather over how most effectively to rouse the public. Because of this pressure and competition, there were reporters who wrote total lies.”11
Star reporters were assigned to cover the Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo. Being headquarters correspondent was one of the most prestigious postings in Japanese journalism—but the job, Uichiro Kawachi recalled, was little more than that of a glorified stenographer. All headquarters correspondents labored under the tyrannical eye of the Kempeitai (the domestic state security service). They were required to wear a plain army uniform without insignia. Correspondents regularly and falsely published under bylines placing them at the front, even though they had never left the Tokyo headquarters building. When an official announcement was released, the correspondents were required to copy down each word verbatim, taking care to avoid errors or typos. Any deviation from the exact wording of the announcement, however trivial, was grounds for revocation of press credentials. To guard against such errors, each correspondent first called his newsroom and read the statement over the phone, then delivered by hand a printed copy to a courier waiting outside on a motorbike. The courier sped to the newsroom and rushed the document into the hands of the editors, so that the text could be double- and triple-checked before it was published in the late edition.
Kawachi, who covered the headquarters for Yomiuri, explained that announcements from the Imperial General Headquarters held near-sacred status because they were issued in the name of the Showa emperor and were accompanied by the imperial seal. Any error in transcription was tantamount to blasphemy. Any reference to the emperor in the pages of a newspaper was required to comply with exacting guidelines. The kanji (characters) for “Showa Tenno” must be separated from the preceding and following kanji by an extra space. “Showa Tenno” must not appear at the bottom of a line of text—instead, a space was to be left blank and the name carried to the top of the next line. Reverence for the emperor, said Kawachi, was behind the tendency of the Imperial Headquarters to disseminate increasingly blatant falsehoods in the later stages of the war. Since the emperor was infallible, no past declaration could have been inaccurate. It logically followed that all new announcements must confirm the truth of what had been reported previously. “Back then it was inconceivable that the Emperor could make a mistake,” said Kawachi. “He was a god. You couldn’t change what he’d said and explain that it was in error.”12 Instead, new lies were offered to prop up past fabrications and errors, until the entire edifice of the regime’s authority and credibility began to buckle under the strain.
Among the losers in wartime Japan’s media industry were smaller weekly and monthly magazines with an audience of scholars and other intellectual elites. Many such publications had been associated with “liberal” or pro-democratic views in the years before the war, when a more indulgent political atmosphere had put up with some degree of dissent. Chuo Koran (The Central Review) had been published continuously since the nineteenth century, and was one of the nation’s most esteemed public affairs journals, with a long record of opposing militarist influence in domestic politics and imperialist adventures abroad. Its past was enough to place Chuo Koran and its staff under harsh scrutiny, but the magazine managed to remain in print, with a circulation of 100,000, by repositioning itself to the right. Shigeo Hatanaka, Chuo Koran’s editor in chief until he was forced out in 1943, hired military officers to write articles in line with favored themes. He called such contributors his “magic shields.” Meanwhile, said Hatanaka, the magazine did what it could to carry the torch of liberalism by writing “paradoxically”—that is, “sounding as if we were going along, but only on the surface in an editorial or in a style which might have appeared to be right-wing.”13
At regular monthly meetings with the army, the editors bravely declared that Chuo Koran’s mission was to persuade intellectuals to support the war. Their readers, they argued, were too sophisticated to be moved by unbridled jingoism and mechanical sloganeering. They needed reason and persuasion. But that line of argument found no purchase with the authorities. “At one meeting,” Hatanaka recalled, “we at Chuo Koran were practically told to slit our bellies open.”
They said our way of thinking was wrong. “Everyone must put their minds to war,” was their slogan. To them, that meant run up the flag, sing military songs, and cheer loudly! Even a nihilistic attitude toward war was wrong. They said they could tell if we were sincere just by looking at the color in our faces.14
If Hatanaka had hoped for support among his fellow editors, he hoped in vain. His colleagues watched in stony disapproval as Chuo Koran was chastised. He imagined that they were thinking, “It serves them right!”15 If the authorities wanted to knock a competitor out of print, so much the better. In any case, an editor who defended a rival might find his own publication singled out for added scrutiny. In March 1943, when all Japanese magazines were ordered to print the slogan “We’ll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be,” Chuo Koran printed it inside the magazine, following the editorial, rather than on the cover as specified. This small act of defiance sealed its fate. A shutdown order followed within days. Hatanaka was branded a communist and hauled off to prison, where he was beaten and tortured almost daily for nine months.
In November 1943, all new newspaper subscriptions were banned. Thereafter, only existing subscribers would receive deliveries. Smaller newspapers were merged into larger ones. The giants Asahi and Yomiuri, both militantly nationalistic, swallowed up many of their smaller competitors. By 1944, many more once-flourishing magazines and newspapers had suspended publication and shuttered their doors. With a handful of compliant titans dominating the news-gathering and -reporting business, official censorship was greatly simplified. Readers furtively complained that indistinguishable government-sanctioned piffle ran in every paper on the newsstand.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 20, 1944, as the defeated First Mobile Fleet retired north toward Japan, the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters had struggled to form a clear picture of Ozawa’s situation. Communications were fragmentary and confusing, but what little information got through was distressing. Two fleet carriers were definitely gone, and only a handful of planes had returned from the strikes of June 19. But there remained some hope that the enemy’s fleet had been bloodied in the previous day’s action, and that a proportion of Ozawa’s planes had flown on to Guam. An intercepted American radio transmission mentioned “survivors” of the Bunker Hill, raising hopes that the carrier had been sunk—but subsequent intercepts referred to downed aviators, not to the ship’s crew.16 When the American carrier planes attacked Ozawa on the evening of June 20, sinking a third Japanese carrier (the Hiyo), the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters could read the writing on the wall. If Spruance had chased Ozawa halfway across the Philippine Sea, his fleet must be intact. The scale of the naval defeat thus presented itself in unambiguous terms. On the same evening, messages from General Saito’s headquarters on Saipan indicated that the Americans had secured the southern half of the island. Without naval or air support, Saito’s position was tactically hopeless; it was only a matter of time before Saipan would fall to the Americans.
Senior military officers privately admitted, “We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success.”17 In Europe, the Allies were driving east from their Normandy beachhead while the Russians were advancing west into Poland. Hirohito’s military advisers privately told the emperor that the loss of Saipan was inevitable. But the emperor was in no mood to accept that verdict, and he pushed his chiefs to renew the fight by any means possible. “If we ever lose Saipan, repeated air attacks on Tokyo will follow,” Hirohito told Tojo. “No matter what it takes, we have to hold there.”18 In a late-afternoon meeting at the Imperial Palace on June 20, he directed Tojo and Shimada to muster all available naval and air forces for another desperate attack on the American fleet, to be followed by troop landings on the contested island.
Knowing full well that the sovereign’s proposal was tactically daft, the Naval General Staff worked through the night and circulated a draft plan on June 21. The Fifth Fleet, under Vice Admiral Kiyohide Shima, would be summoned from Ominato Naval Base in northern Honshu. Admiral Shima would rendezvous with two fleet oilers and a troopship carrying one regiment, then sortie from Yokosuka for the Marianas on July 2. Another army division would embark on transports totaling 80,000 tons and put to sea in the first week of July. The surviving elements of Ozawa’s fleet would be reinforced with the escort carriers Kaiyo, Taiyo, and Shinyo. Having lost nearly all of his aircraft in the recent battle, Ozawa would embark new air groups consisting of naval air-training squadrons and army fighters. Admiral Kurita’s Second Fleet, having previously been ordered to sail for the Singapore area, would refuel and rearm in the western part of the Inland Sea and then return directly to the Marianas. All available land-based aircraft would stage through Iwo Jima and renew the air battle against the American carrier force. The American fleet would be destroyed in time for the troop reinforcements to put ashore on Saipan.
Conceived at the man-god’s command and in the depths of despair, the plan to recapture Saipan was preposterous on its face. It was not even clear that enough fuel could be provided to put the various fleet elements into position to renew the battle. The American submarines would likely claim many more victims. American seaplanes would discover the incoming forces early. The army leadership was implacably opposed to putting their fighter squadrons aboard aircraft carriers, and it was not clear that the army airmen could even take off from the flight decks. The troopships would need a stroke of good fortune to get anywhere close to Saipan, and even if the troops could be landed, they would likely be wiped out on the beaches. But the Showa emperor had lost faith in his military leaders and did not want to hear their objections. For three days the services scrambled to launch an operation they knew to be suicidal. On June 24, Admiral Toyoda of the Combined Fleet weighed in with his formal opposition. That same day, Tojo and Shimada informed the emperor that there was no hope of recovering the island, and that they had cancelled the operation on their own authority. Even then, Hirohito refused to accept that judgment as final, and he convened a larger board of military advisers on June 25. When they confirmed that Saipan was a lost cause, Hirohito told them to put their conclusions in writing and left the room.
As usual, the Japanese people could only guess at the full truth. For several weeks in June and July, news reporting on the battle for Saipan was perplexing and contradictory. The Board of Information was evidently undecided. When and how should the public be informed that the island was to be yielded to the enemy? The July 1 issue of Toyo Keizai ventured to declare, “It can be acknowledged that this one island has such value that we will expend all our power to protect it.”19 Prior to the invasion, that opinion had been unimpeachable, but now it elicited an “advisory warning” from the police. Lacking clear guidance from the government, the newspapers generally resorted to hollow sloganeering in stories headlined “The Fighting Will of 100 Million Seethes” or “The Establishment of an Impenetrable Defense Cordon and Total Tenacity.”*20
Even without reliable news reports, ordinary Japanese could deduce that the loss of Saipan would open a desperate new phase of the war. Maps were unrolled and studied. Saipan was not far south. It had been Japanese territory for more than twenty years. It was home to a large population of Japanese civilians. If the Americans could land an invasion force on Saipan, within bombing range of the homeland, then the regime’s past claims of fantastic and annihilating victories must have been fabrications. Aiko Takahashi told her diary on July 18, 1944, that Japan had obviously suffered another crushing defeat, but “reports in newspapers and magazines boast that giving up these islands is a tactic for drawing in the enemy and the enemy is doing what we want.”21 She did not believe it, nor did many other ordinary Japanese. But it was not safe to air such opinions within earshot of others. Sachi Ariyama, a boy in Kawagoe, recalled that his father was arrested after expressing a casual opinion that the fall of Saipan meant “things were serious.” After many hours of interrogation he was released, but the entire family remained under surveillance until the end of the war.22
Disaster in the Marianas inevitably loosened Tojo’s grip on power. In February the general had fortified his control of the cabinet by adding the job of army chief of staff to his concurrent offices of prime minister and army minister, and by arranging for the malleable Admiral Shimada to serve simultaneously as navy minister and navy chief of staff. Controlling such an all-encompassing portfolio of political and military offices, Tojo could scarcely duck responsibility for the Saipan debacle. In late June he issued a public statement referring to his “great shame” before the emperor. He had never used such language in the past.
Since the fall of Guadalcanal in early 1943, an anti-Tojo coalition had been maneuvering behind the scenes to oust the general from power. The group included several former prime ministers, military leaders, diplomats, elected members of the Diet (parliament), and various members of the imperial family. The prime mover was Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who had twice served as prime minister in the prewar years and whom Tojo had pushed out of office six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Konoye worked with a navy group around Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, another former prime minister who had been Yamamoto’s chief ally in opposition to the Tripartite Pact. Konoye and Yonai built support among a working group of former prime ministers called the jushin (senior statesmen). Konoye expressed his views to Marquis Koichi Kido, lord keeper of the privy seal and chief adviser on the emperor’s personal staff.
Tojo did not go willingly. For several weeks in late June and early July 1944, the opposing factions grappled for ascendancy. According to rumors, Tojo wanted to have his adversaries arrested by the Kempeitai, but he could not turn up sufficient grounds to bring charges against figures as influential as Konoye and Yonai. He proposed another cabinet reshuffling in which he would retain at least one of his accumulated jobs, perhaps that of army minister. The Combined Fleet chief, Admiral Toyoda, threatened to resign if Shimada was permitted to remain simultaneously as the head of the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff. The jushin collectively declined to accept any offices in a cabinet that retained Tojo.
Konoye feared that the war and its disruptions would prompt a socialist upheaval, as in Russia during the Great War. His greatest concern was the survival of the kokutai. In the 1930s, the army’s kodo (imperial way) faction had often advocated collectivist values in the guise of right-wing ideology—for example, by urging a “restoration” of all industry and private property to the throne, or threatening to rectify economic inequality by direct force of arms. Konoye reportedly went so far as to tell his fellow jushin that he feared revolution more than defeat: “Even if defeated, we could maintain the national structure and the imperial family, but in case of a leftist revolution, we could not.”23 The mayhem prompted by aerial bombing and foreign invasion might bring another breakdown in army discipline, a return of factionalism and assassinations, and a complete disintegration of Japan’s fragile political order.
The jushin were determined to be rid of Tojo, and Kido was persuaded to throw his considerable influence behind the cause. But who would take Tojo’s place? Existing power-sharing arrangements could not be easily unscrambled. For all his manifest flaws, Tojo had managed to unify the army. He had brought the kodo faction to heel, and neutralized many of its leading figures by sending them to forward posts. During his premiership, the rebellious young officers had not broken out in open defiance, as they so often had in the past. The struggle for primacy and influence between the army and the navy remained as bitter as ever, but Tojo had kept the rivalry from boiling over into open conflict. For two and a half years, he had maintained a brittle consensus within the ruling circle. It was not clear that a successor could prolong the intricate balancing act.
Konoye urged Yonai to serve again as prime minister, but the admiral declined, insisting that the army would only accept one of its own. On the same grounds, the jushin agreed that no civilian should be proposed for the post. A general was needed. Several names were considered and rejected. The man selected by default was Kuniaki Koiso, a retired general who had served throughout the war years as governor of Korea. He was to be little more than a figurehead, chosen only to mollify the army. Yonai would serve as vice premier as well as navy minister, and the new cabinet would be presented to the nation as a unity government with power to be shared by the army and navy.
Tojo’s position became untenable on July 15, when Shimada was ousted from his dual posts. Tojo’s last hope of a reconstituted cabinet was defeated on July 17, when the jushin signed a joint memorandum stating that “a partial shuffling of the cabinet will not do.”24 He resigned on July 18. In a nationwide radio address that evening, Tojo told his countrymen that “Japan has come to face an unprecedented great national crisis. Our enemies, the United States and Britain, have gradually increased the intensity of their counter-offensive and have at last advanced into the Marianas.” In the same breath he prophesied the elusive triumph that would save Japan: “The situation now approaches when opportunity will occur to crack the enemy and to win victory.”25
That same day, the Japanese public learned of the previous week’s mass civilian suicides on Saipan. The Asahi Shinbun printed a translated New York Times story on the deaths. Accompanying commentary in Asahi and other papers commixed sorrow with pride. The suicides were lauded as a beacon of hope and inspiration. The mothers who had killed their children and themselves were “the pride of Japanese women.” Kiyosawa collected other such examples of overwrought and lachrymose sentiments: “Courage springs forth a hundred, a thousand-fold more, a blaze of glory, for the first time in history. . . . The essence of a great race shines brightly at the last moment. . . . And thus we are strengthened by this, the true form of Japan.”26 Admiral Ugaki felt a deep sense of “shame,” but also thought the civilians had set a good example for their countrymen: “No people but the Yamato nation could do a thing like this. I think that if one hundred million Japanese people could have the same resolution as these facing this crisis, it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way to victory.”27 Like Kiyosawa, the Tokyo diarist Aiko Takahashi was disgusted by the harrowing account and refused even to call it bravery: “We should have the courage, come hell or high water, to give up the fight.”28
The “imperial mandate” was conferred upon Koiso and Yonai on July 22, 1944. Together, they released statements emphasizing their determination to foster close cooperation between the army and the navy. Behind closed doors, they had discussed the need to take steps toward peace, but in their public communications they steadfastly resolved to carry on the war with undiminished intensity. “The Government will firmly adhere to the nation’s established foreign policy,” said Koiso on taking office, “and work for a thorough-going realization of the principles of the Greater East Asia, thereby carrying the Holy War to a complete victory and thus setting the Imperial mind at ease.”29
The Koiso government was hobbled from the beginning. Its every move was carefully calibrated to reassure army hardliners. Insiders would compare the Koiso cabinet to a “charcoal-burning car”—like the retrofitted vehicles on the streets of wartime Tokyo, it moved haltingly and often broke down.30 Koiso was refused a seat on the Supreme Council, and thus was denied a voice in war strategy. Admiral Yonai found himself marginalized. Tojo’s allies retained control of the Kempeitai and manipulated politics through the mechanisms of internal repression. Koiso dutifully mouthed the same bellicose avowals and victory forecasts that had been Tojo’s trademark. On September 16, the new leader assured a national radio audience: “Japan is preparing to launch a great offensive in the near future to crush Britain and America.”31
Many senior figures in the ruling circle (including Konoye, Kido, Yonai, and perhaps the emperor) evidently regarded the Koiso cabinet as a transitional government. Getting rid of Tojo was a first step toward peace, but no further maneuvers in that direction could be safely attempted until conditions had ripened. What was needed, according to various opinions, was either a smashing victory or a catastrophic defeat. In late June, Kido had asked Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu to prepare a plan to seek a diplomatic settlement with the United States. The most likely route was to ask Stalin’s government to act as a mediator. To this end, Kido warned Koiso to be scrupulous in avoiding any action likely to antagonize Russia. But all the senior government figures agreed that the rank and file of the army would not countenance a peace initiative until it was obvious that Japan was utterly defeated. When and if such a moment came, the emperor must be persuaded to end the war on the strength of an outright imperial decree.32
Hirohito clearly wanted to find a way out of the war, but he remained convinced that an acceptable peace could be negotiated only in the aftermath of a major victory. “I wanted to grasp the chance to quickly conclude a negotiated peace after striking a crushing blow on the enemy someplace,” he said in his postwar Soliloquy. “Then, with America staggering, we would have been able to find room for a compromise.”33 Steeped in the history of the Russo-Japanese War, determined at all costs to win his Battle of Tsushima, the emperor could not bring himself to admit that his nation was already defeated.
Critics have faulted Hirohito for failing to intervene sooner to stop the war, but there was never any realistic prospect of a negotiated peace. Terms short of unconditional surrender would not have enticed the Allies, while even the most dovish Japanese leaders assumed a diplomatic settlement must maintain some version of Japan’s Asian empire. As for the militarist junta, terms of “peace” had been offered by two military “experts” in a broadcast by Domei News Service three weeks before the invasion of Saipan:
Complete destruction of American naval power and maritime trade; abolition of private banking institutions and trade unions; restriction of American steel and oil production; destruction of all shipyards except those building river and coastal vessels; creation of a political authority, free from “influences wielded by economic interests” and modeled after the “pure sovereignty of Japan,” to maintain strict surveillance over the United States for ten or more years, or perhaps indefinitely.34
That offer was evidently tongue in cheek. It had not been presented by the foreign ministry or any other qualified representative of the Japanese government. But Kido’s more earnest diary musings on the subject suggest that he had yet to face up to his country’s dire predicament. He imagined that Japan might cling to some portion of its Asian empire by pitting the Allies against one another. In a March 31 entry, he surmised that Japan might approach the government of Great Britain and offer to mediate a truce with the Nazis. With peace restored in Europe, London might then be willing to assist Japan in negotiating a settlement with the United States. The British leadership, Kido presumed, would maneuver to prevent the Americans from becoming the supreme power in the Pacific. In the same vein, the Russians might choose to bolster Japan’s regional standing as a bulwark against the Anglo-American nations.35
In early 1944, with the defeat of Germany and Japan already foreseeable, Kido sketched out terms of peace that would involve “considerable concessions.” He envisioned a five-nation commission involving the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. All other independent nations in the region would be made “permanent neutral powers, similar to Switzerland.” Japan would undertake not to fortify its occupied territories and islands. The five powers would agree to guarantee freedom of trade throughout the region. Japan would remain sovereign in Manchuria and Korea.
Such a proposal would have been rejected by the Allies at any time after December 7, 1941. By 1944, the United States and Britain were implacably committed to forcing Japan’s unconditional surrender. Even so, Kido worried that his plan “may, at a glance, be considered too conciliatory and weak-kneed” by Japanese hardliners.36
Insofar as the Japanese people were permitted to know, a truce was unthinkable. Right-wing scholars took to the airwaves to extol the virtues of an ancient suicide cult, embodied in the legend of the 47 Ronin who resolved to take their lives in obeisance to a slain master. For the first time the public heard talk of “body crashing” and “sure hit” weapons—the early euphemisms for suicide tactics to be employed by aircraft, submarines, and speedboats. A new slogan, “One hundred million smashed jewels,” carried the implication that the entire nation was to share the fate of Saipan’s civilians. In the July issue of Daijo Zen, a Buddhist priest authored an article entitled “Be Prepared, One Hundred Million, for Death with Honor!”37 Historians lectured on the quasi-religious kamikaze (“divine wind”) that had defeated a Mongol invasion fleet seven and a half centuries earlier. One of the Koiso government’s early initiatives was to arm and train civilians, including women, in the use of bamboo spears against enemy invaders.
In the mass media, Americans were increasingly depicted as “beasts,” “devils,” or “butchers.” It was categorically reported that they intended to slaughter every last Japanese man, woman, and child. The authorities warned that the enemy had already amassed thousands of canisters of poison gas to be released over the homeland. The newspapers were filled with descriptions of American battlefield atrocities and the mutilation or desecration of Japanese corpses. (Not all such reports were fabrications. A Life magazine photograph depicting an American woman admiring a Japanese skull was seen by millions of Japanese that summer.) When the Diet convened in September, Hirohito issued a rescript: “Today our imperial state is indeed challenged to reach powerfully for a decisive victory. You who are the leaders of our people must now renew your tenacity and, uniting in your resolve, smash our enemies’ evil purposes, thereby furthering forever our imperial destiny.”38
The samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had written about the challenge posed by an adversary who “while appearing to be beaten still inwardly refuses to acknowledge defeat.” In such cases, a swordsman must adopt a tactic called “knocking the heart out.”
This means that you suddenly change your attitude to stop the enemy from entertaining any such ideas, so the main thing is to see enemies feel defeated from the bottom of their hearts.
You can knock the heart out of people with weapons, or with your body, or with your mind. It is not to be understood in just one way. When your enemies have completely lost heart, you don’t have to pay attention to them anymore. Otherwise, you remain mindful. If enemies still have ambitions, they will hardly collapse.39
The Pacific War had entered its endgame. But another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians would die before the heart was knocked out of the men who ruled Japan.
AS OVERSEAS SHIPPING FELL PREY to American air attacks and submarines, the Japanese economy fell to pieces. Rationing grew more stringent; skyrocketing inflation led to price controls and a burgeoning underground economy; shortages of food and household goods grew critical. Everyone went hungry except farmers, who prospered by selling food on the black market. White rice was the immemorial emblem of Japanese prosperity and bliss, but now urbanites could rarely get any of it, and had to make do with unhulled brown rice or other inferior substitutes such as sweet potatoes and barley. Women bartered their wedding kimonos for food and wore the rustic khaki trousers called monpe. Trees were cut down on streets and public parks; streetlamps and iron railings were removed for scrap metal; bells were taken away from temples and shrines. The public water supply was often interrupted, and the public bathhouses were usually closed. Ordinary Japanese, who had always valued their personal cleanliness, now bathed just two or three times per month. People despaired of getting rid of lice, and tried to ignore it. Outbreaks of tuberculosis claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
People were expected to work harder while eating less. Malnourishment and exhaustion comprised a nationwide syndrome, but the regime’s answer—always the same answer—was that the people must arouse themselves to greater efforts and sacrifices. If tired, people should practice group calisthenics; the exercise would help lift their spirits, and never mind if it burned scarce calories. Military authority insinuated itself into commonplace domestic routines, as when an army colonel delivered a five-part radio lecture entitled “While You Are Eating Breakfast.” Every problem, deficiency, or impasse was put down to an “inadequacy of regulations”—but as new regulations proliferated, they took on an inflexible logic of their own. Kiyosawa, who read widely and kept detailed notes of the drift of official propaganda, detected an increasing tendency to blame civilians for Japan’s production shortfalls: “Gradually there are emerging from the government arguments that attribute war responsibility to the productive inadequacy of the homefront.”40
Open dissent was seldom heard in wartime Japan. But undercurrents of resentment and unrest grew steadily more conspicuous as the conflict wore on. Local officials and representatives of community councils often behaved like petty tyrants, and ordinary citizens suspected that they were diverting extra quantities of rationed food to their own kin. Aiko Takahashi told her diary that she was fed up with the endless mandatory civil defense meetings: “The community council big shots put on their pompous clothes and their pompous faces and strutted about with a pompous number of people.”41 Officers of the Kempeitai, looking for evidence of foreign influences or leftist sympathies, barged into private homes in the dead of night. They pulled books off shelves, upended desk drawers, tore down pictures, and did not even deign to remove their shoes before entering a tatami room. One often-heard wartime rumor referred to an old man who was determined to obey all rules and regulations. He ate only his official rations, refusing all food obtained by his relatives on the black market. For his scruples he starved to death.
Ordinary people were prepared to suffer hardships and deprivations, but they expected their fellow citizens to bear the same load. Many commented bitterly on wealthy families whose domestic servants were engaged in work that did not advance the war effort. Affluent women escaped participation in the despised air-defense drills by sending maids in their place. Class antagonisms were channeled into acts of vandalism. Tires of private automobiles were slashed; rocks were thrown through windows; intruders broke into upscale homes and wantonly destroyed the furniture and housewares. Rumors of official corruption or special privileges for the wealthy and well-connected evoked a cold fury. It was widely known that the military was active behind the scenes in running the black market. Policemen and military authorities penalized ordinary citizens who traded illegally for food and other goods, but protected malefactors in their own ranks. Law courts and prosecutors were intimidated into backing off. Expensive restaurants were shut down by decree, ostensibly because of food shortages, but then reopened as military “clubs” where officers ate and drank heartily while being entertained by geishas. Hiroyo Arakawa, whose family ran a bakery in Tokyo’s Fukagawa district, recalled that soldiers and policemen often helped themselves to goods from the local shops and refused to pay.42 This saying circulated in wartime Japan: “In this society there is nothing but the army, the navy, the big shots, and the black market. It is only fools who stand in line.”43
Anonymous gestures of defiance triggered paroxysms of repression. Sumio Ishida, a local policeman in Shizuoka Prefecture, recalled that someone in his district began mailing unsigned letters to prominent political figures. The letters were filled with sentiments such as “Please stop this war as soon as possible. . . . Japan will lose this war for certain. . . . Aren’t you aware of how difficult the lives of the Japanese people have become?”44 Ishida’s entire precinct was mobilized to catch the perpetrator. Plainclothesmen staked out mailboxes twenty-four hours per day. The police took handwriting samples from hundreds of citizens. A months-long investigation finally led to an arrest. The perpetrator was a fifty-three-year-old woman whose son had died in the South Pacific. The war ended before she was brought to trial.
To many, the war seemed to tear at the seams of an ancient and sacred social contract. Whatever super-familial bonds had once held Japan together threatened to rupture. The nation had always taken justifiable pride in a low crime rate, but the war brought a sharp increase in petty property theft. Handbags and briefcases were snatched on overcrowded trains. Shoes left in the entrance halls of restaurants or the vestibules of private homes disappeared. Thieves reached in through kitchen windows and took food off the stove as it was cooking. “Foremost Thief Nation of the Whole World,” complained an April 1944 headline in the Mainichi Shinbun.45 Authorities wrung their hands about juvenile delinquency, diminishing respect for elders, and a breakdown in Confucian ideals of filial piety. Farmers, observed Aiko Takahashi in January 1944, seemed to take malicious pleasure in their new power over the city dwellers—they “hold the key to our lives—food—and sit in the kingly position of lords of production. By selling on the black market, they are enjoying extraordinary prosperity.”46 Urban evacuees were treated harshly by rural families. Children from the cities were forced to live in sheds and survive on scraps from the host family’s table. After observing these patterns of behavior, a young girl in Niigata “became disillusioned with the disgraceful qualities in our people. They had become a herd whose humanity had been shorn from them by war.”47
Direct defiance of authority was impossible. Spies were everywhere, and the Kempeitai was quick to arrest anyone suspected of holding left-wing or “anti-kokutai” views. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents and teachers. Libraries were compelled to produce lists of titles loaned to every patron, and the police combed those lists for clues of who might harbor foreign sympathies or unacceptably liberal tendencies. The regime created an atmosphere of omnipresent paranoia. Traitors and infiltrators were said to be everywhere. “During those years everything happened behind heavy doors, out of our sight,” wrote the novelist Michio Takeyama (author of Harp of Burma) after the war. “What’s become clear now was wholly unclear then. Day after day we simply trembled in fear, struck dumb with astonishment at incomprehensible developments.”48 Malnourished and overworked, driven like a herd of beasts, instructed how to act and what to think, deprived of any sound basis for rational judgment, threatened with torture and prison at the first divergence from enforced norms, the Japanese people were powerless to alter the doomed course chosen by their leaders. Having long since surrendered whatever rights and freedoms they had once possessed, they were fated to share in the coming Götterdämmerung of 1945.
* Wartime propaganda often referred to the Japanese people as the “ 100 Million.” The figure was overstated by about 30 million.