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Contents
LIST OF MAPS
Preface
The Rise of Japan
Introduction
US errs
Japan strikes
Pearl Harbor
Philippines
Guam
Wake Island
British battleships sunk
PART I
COLLISION COURSE
Chapter 1
The View from the East
Japan expands
German alliance
Japanese militarism
Hirohito
the Navy
Manchuria
the Army revolts
"China Incident"
clashes with Russia
autarky and reform
US reacts
Japan takes the southern option
Yamamoto
US overreacts
the junta goes to war
Chapter 2
The View from the West
Origins of World War II
US neutrality
Washington Conference
US isolationism
Roosevelt
US lntelligence
"Purple"
hunt for scapegoats
"Magic" and "Ultra"
who knew?
the Maryknoll mission
last talks
US war warning
war
PART II
JAPAN RAMPANT
Chapter 3
Japan Attacks
Churchill on the rack
British trounced in Malaya
Singapore falls
US Navy stretched
uncommon front from Burma to Australia
Japan's strategy
the "Zero" fighter
ABDA command
Dutch East Indies
Indian Ocean
Bataan and the "Death March"
Chapter 4
The Giant Awakes
US Admirals Kimmel
King
Nimitz
Halsey
US Navy hits back
Doolittle bombs Tokyo
US submarines
and dud torpedoes
Japan goes too far
General MacArthur, USA
Chapter 5
The Turn of the Tide
Junta dazed by its own success
what next?
Battle of the Coral Sea
Japan halted
Rochefort's intelligence
Battle of Midway
Admiral Spruance
Japan thrashed
US Aleutians seized
Chapter 6
Papua and Guadalcanal
US goes for Rabaul
gallant little Australia
General Sir Thomas Blamey
MacArthur takes over
Papua campaign
target southern Solomons
Marines land
Japanese counter
US disaster at Savo Island
US raid on Makin
"Tokyo Express"
Henderson Field
carriers clash
Japan reinforces
Chapter 7
At Sea in the Solomons
US reinforces
submarine I19
"Bloody Ridge"
battles in the Slot
Halsey takes over
Sergeant Basilone, USMC
US carriers hit
US admirals and cruisers lost
"L" for language
"Tenacious Tanaka"
know throe enemy
Japan withdraws from Guadalcanal and Papua
US torpedo debacle
PART III
AMERICA RESURGENT
Chapter 8
Intelligence Applied
Casablanca
Operation Cartwheel
crisis in Japan
Bismarck Sea battle
blood in the water
Yamamoto's last flight
code-breaking chaos
Japanese intelligence
a German view
Japan's substandard subs
Chapter 9
Birth of the Leapfrog
Aleutians regained
death of a pilot
Lae and Salamaua, New Guinea
up the Solomons ladder
bypass and leapfrog-Bougainville
New Britain
Japan trims
soldiers' gripes
conferences
Chapter 10
Hitting the Beaches
The Gilberts
shock of Tarawa
divided US command
the Marshalls invaded
Truk battered
Rabaul bypassed
sitting out the war
MacArthur leapfrogs
western New Guinea
Morotai
Chapter 11
The Marianas and the Great Turkey Shoot
US prepares
the B-29 bomber
Saipan
Philippine Sea battle
"Turkey Shoot"
Spruance blamed for winning
US Marines versus US Army
Nagumo's last stand
human lemmings
Tinian
Guam recovered
Tojo à gogo
US submarine heyday
wolfpacks and convoys
Japanese interservice rivalry
MacArthur shall return
Chapter 12
THE Philippines and Leyte Gulf
British return
Mindanao bypassed
"hitting 'em where they ain't"
more Morotai
Palau
Formosa
Leyte invaded
Mac back
kamikaze
Battle of Leyte Gulf
"The world wonders"
struggles ashore
Halsey's typhoon
Luzon
Chapter 13
"...Not Necessarily to Japan's Advantage..."
Bombing Japan
junta blames people
subs strangle Japan
Iwo Jima
flag up (twice)
Okinawa
supership Yamato sunk
US mighty, slow
Prime Minister Suzuki
death of FDR
Truman-the Bomb
USS Indianapolis
Potsdam Declaration
Hiroshima
enter the USSR
Nagasaki
surrender
the final score
MacArthur' s last word
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
INDEX
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THE VIEW FROM THE EAST
Japan's southward advance, even though it was in the opposite direction from all its previous expansion, derived directly from its military adventures, political scheming and economic ambitions on the Asian mainland. This is not to say that the move south was immutable fate, either for Japan or for its victims: the Japanese were and are as responsible for their own actions and choices as everyone else, regardless of foreign provocations and errors. Nevertheless, the short but brutish and nasty story of Japanese imperial expansion has features only too familiar to the students of past empires, whether the ancient Roman or the modern Russian. A power on the make begins to expand by "absorbing" its immediate neighbor (in Japan's case, Korea in 1910); to protect its acquisition, it conquers its neighbor's neighbor (Manchuria), sets up a buffer state (Manchukuo), creates another buffer (northern China), and uses that as a base to move against its next victim (China), and possibly its most deadly rival (the Soviet Union). We see imperialism imitating scientific principles such as Newton's first law of motion whereby movement continues unless halted (imperial inertia); the abhorrence of nature for a vacuum is parodied by imperialist opportunism, which drew Japan first into China, then down upon the Asiatic empires of the European powers involved in the war with Hitler's Germany.
It is not customary to refer, in the context of the Second World War, to "Tojo's Japan," or even Hirohito's; nor do we equate the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, formed in 1940 to absorb all Japanese political parties, with the National Socialist party, the only legal one in Hitler's Germany, even though the former was in some respects a conscious imitation of the latter. The truth is that the Japan which took on the world at war and lost was run by a military junta of no fixed composition -- a shifting, authoritarian oligarchy rather than a totalitarian dictatorship.
It came to the fore in Manchuria in 1928, when the "Kwantung Army," as the Japanese garrison was called, killed an intractable local warlord by causing an explosion on the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway (SMR). The junta won the support of most Japanese admirals in 1930, after the perceived "humiliation" of Japan at the London Naval Conference, about which more later. Japan was easily humiliated: rejection of any of its demands was enough. Aggravated by Japan's severe suffering in the Slump, which helped to undermine moderate, civilian influence in government, the rising junta's Kwantung branch staged another explosion on the SMR at Mukden in September 1931 as an excuse for conquering the rest of Manchuria in a few months. This euphemistically named "Manchuria Incident" led to the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo under the "Emperor" Pu-yi, scion of the deposed Manchu dynasty, which had ruled China until 1911. Encouraged by this cheap success and undeterred by international condemnation, which merely provoked Japan to flounce out of the tottering League of Nations in 1933, the junta ran off the rails altogether in 1937. At the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, the Japanese "China Garrison Force," in place since the international suppression of the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion of 1900, engineered a clash with a Chinese Army patrol. This was then used as an excuse to attack northern China -- all without consulting civilian or military superiors in Tokyo. The latter managed, however, to do what was expected of them: they sent reinforcements. The ensuing war, unwinnable for either side, spread across China; to the Japanese it always remained simply "the China Incident." It is not unreasonable to see in the manufactured clash of July 7, 1937, so similar to Hitler's ploy against Poland two years later, the true start of the Second World War, because these two participants fought each other continuously from then until 1945.
In its bid to become the USA of the western Pacific (a strictly economic ambition), Japan classed itself as a "have-not" nation with a legitimate grievance. What it really "had not," like Germany and Italy among the larger powers, was territorial acquisitions to exploit -- the only contemporary yardstick of greatness, even more important than a big navy. The rest of the world soon came to see Japan as an acquisitive aggressor, inordinately ambitious and completely ruthless. Japan came late -- indeed, last -- to old-style colonialism, but chose to learn nothing from its predecessors in this pursuit. Like them, it cared little for the feelings of the colonized; unlike them, it was never deterred by the views of the other powers, which it either ignored or used as grounds for more aggression while it built up its own empire. In this outlook it was very similar to Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and even more under Hitler: unable or unwilling to distinguish between its needs and its wants, Japan helped itself to what it fancied and was quite often genuinely perplexed by the hostile reaction. Like Germany, where almost everyone who could walk and talk hated the Treaty of Versailles, Japan had an almighty bone to pick with the rest of the world. Most Japanese people regarded anyone who questioned their country's ambition as hostile and did not try to understand any other party's point of view. Where the rest of the world went wrong was in foolishly underestimating the unique capacity for self-sacrifice with which ordinary Japanese supported their country's aim to be a first-rate power.
There was much less disagreement among the Japanese (or in Germany) on the end than on the means of achieving the fulfillment of their country's "just demands." Hitler came to power on the back of the German national sense of grievance, and was as conscious as the Japanese military of the lessons of 1918. Like the Japanese, he thought his country was overcrowded and needed more territory, a rationalization of imperial ambition throughout the ages. The Nazis, like the Italian fascists, were a mass movement that rose to power from the grass roots under a populist leader, whereas the Japanese junta manipulated a complaisant emperor to impose its will from the top. But each Axis regime drew the same conclusion from Germany's defeat in 1918: the next war would be long, and therefore autarky, economic self-sufficiency, was the key to national security, military success and world domination. That was the only way to avoid a repetition of the blockade by sea and land which defeated Germany in 1918.
So, while Hitler schemed to acquireLebensraumand Mussolini concentrated on empire-building in northeastern Africa, the Japanese were busy inventing the "New Order in East Asia" (1938) and the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" (1940), both designed to subordinate the region to the perpetual benefit and glory of a self-sustaining, greater Japan. Tokyo had some success at first in presenting this as a crusade against Euro-American domination of Asia. It won over many indigenous nationalists in British, French and Dutch colonies -- at least until the Japanese Army arrived and lent new vigor to the old military customs of rape and pillage. The Germans made exactly the same error in the Soviet Union: each army behaved as the master race in arms; each used the stratagem of surprise attack without declaration of war, and thenBlitzkriegtactics, to get its way. But whereas Hitler dominated his generals and admirals the Japanese general staffs dominated Japan. The consequences for their victims were remarkably similar. There was, for example, not much to choose, except in such matters as climate and language, for the doubly unfortunate Dutch between life in the Netherlands under Nazi rule and in the East Indies under the Japanese.
Small wonder that Reich and Empire were to become allies regardless of reciprocal racial disdain. The first concrete sign of things to come was Japan's decision to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936 (the Comintern -- Communist International -- was the Soviet mechanism for controlling foreign communist parties). A secret provision required each signatory not to help the Soviet Union if the other went to war against it; the published text was a vague commitment to oppose communism and all its works wherever they might be found. The future Axis partners had identified their overwhelming common interest: the Soviet Union, principal potential enemy of each.
For Japan this was just one of many fateful decisions that led to its disastrous war with the United States. The Slump became a time for taking tough measures at home -- and taking sides abroad. The Pacific Campaign cannot be properly understood unless it is seen in the context of Japan's prewar domestic and foreign policies and the links between the two, as summarized below.
Foreigners had (and have) great difficulty in understanding how Japan worked as a state and who was really in charge. The Japanese had gone so far as to imitate the West in having a symbolic head of state and an executive, a legislature, a judiciary, an army, and a navy all formally answerable to him. The fact that the Army and the Navy were, as centers of power in the state, at least equal to the civilian organs of government rather than subject to their authority was not outside Western experience. In making this ultimately disastrous arrangement in the constitutional changes of 1889, the Japanese were only copying the Prussians who dominated Europe as the world's strongest military power for more than half a century, until 1918, on just such a basis (the Japanese chose to copy the British in establishing a House of Lords and a battle fleet and imitated the French in such areas as law and education). The independence of the military dated from the creation, in 1878, of general staffs for Army and Navy directly under the emperor and outside the control of the Diet (parliament) or even the Cabinet. The paradox was that the emperor, unlike the Kaiser, did not feel free to intervene in government. He exercised his influence through his personal advisers or in private meetings with those, such as key ministers and chiefs of staff, who had the right of access to the throne. Thus his divine status was protected by noninvolvement in day-to-day policy with all its disputes, errors, and corruption; by the same token, those with real power could hide behind the façade of imperial rule whenever convenient, an excellent incentive for irresponsibility on all sides.
This gave very broad latitude indeed to leaders whose actions were rendered immune from challenge by the simple device of being declared as done "in the name of the emperor." A general could tell Hirohito, with the customary groveling and outward respect, what he was planning; the emperor had no power to stop him, so the general could then inform the Cabinet of what he was about to do, overriding any objections by laying claim to imperial sanction. From the turn of the century, the ministers responsible for the Army and the Navy had to be officers from the relevant service. After 1936 they had to be on the active list, to prevent the appointment of men from the retired list as a means of getting round the wishes of the serving generals and admirals. This gave the general staffs not only the decisive say (or veto) on individual appointments to these posts but also the power to prevent the formation of a new government, simply by refusing to supply serving officers to fill them. If they did not like a prime-ministerial nominee, they would decline to provide a general (as the Army did in 1940, for example) or an admiral as Army or Navy minister -- even if the would-be premier had found favor with palace advisers and been recommended by them to the emperor. The three key men in each service -- minister, chief of staff, and inspector-general of education and training -- were thus free to pick their own successors without consulting any outsider, whether emperor, prime minister or the rival service.
The two armed forces were not required to inform the Cabinet of their strength and dispositions, in peace or even in wartime. Thus the claims by such as ex-Prime Minister Tojo and ex-Foreign Minister Togo at the Tokyo war-crimes trial that they were not told in advance of the Pearl Harbor plan (or of the great American victory at Midway for weeks after the event) are not as ludicrous as they seemed when they were first made. With this kind of contemptuous conduct as the norm in the highest ranks, it is hardly surprising that the Japanese forces were more Prussian than the Prussians, not to say medieval, in their approach to discipline. Brutality was institutionalized to a degree probably unparalleled anywhere in the modern world. Boy officer-candidates were put in harsh premilitary academies and cadet schools with narrow curricula, hard physical routines and very little intellectual training (something the Germans did not neglect). Free discussion and intelligent questioning were forbidden on pain of severe punishment, ensuring that the Japanese military elite was unimaginative, rigid, undemocratic, inflexible and totally lacking in initiative. This goes a long way toward explaining the sheer, all-embracing inadequacy of the Japanese leadership, overwhelmingly military in background as it was, before and during the war.
Training was aimed at producing in all ranks total, unquestioning obedience to orders, including standing prohibitions against retreat, surrender, and being taken alive. If captured wounded or unconscious, the Japanese officer or enlisted man was expected to kill himself for shame when he was able to, even if he had managed to return to his own side. Such was the "Japanese spirit" inculcated at all levels, the mind-over-matter approach which persuaded hundreds of thousands to fight on beyond reason and throw their lives away. This, the unimportance of the individual in Japanese society at large and the psychic and physical explosion which took place when the constraint of total obedience was lifted from victorious troops licensed to rape and pillage after a victory, goes a long way toward explaining the peculiar horrors inflicted by the Japanese upon the troops, civilians and even the children of the enemy. Life was cheap in Japan; those in its services were as unlikely as anyone else to place greater value on an enemy than they did on themselves.
Japanese military leaders chose to believe that Germany's 1918 defeat was overwhelmingly caused by lack of raw materials. The idea that constitutional flaws such as overexaltation of the Kaiser or the assignment of undue weight to the opinions of the general staff might have contributed to driving Germany into an avoidable war did not occur to them. It was one of those errors Japanese officers were not intellectually trained to identify. Officers accepted no blame for their actions because they were obeying orders or executing the emperor's will (theoretically the same thing). There was nobody in a position to correct them, even if the emperor occasionally would not conceal his displeasure over military mistakes. But failure, if identified and made public, meant shame, and shame entailed ritual suicide in the samurai's Bushido code. Further, generals and admirals, exhausted in late middle age by a lifetime of repression and out of touch with the lower orders, fell under the influence of the younger, more vigorous middle-rankers. The captains, majors and colonels commanded the individual ships, battalions and squadrons or did all the work on the staff; they often came from rural backgrounds and were in touch with the peasants in uniform who constituted the majority of their men. These officers too were unable to act on their own, and drew courage from combining in various right-wing societies and clubs to impose their collective will on their flagging superiors. It was these middling commanders who increasingly saw the force at their immediate disposal as the instant solution to Japan's growing problems between the wars. Senior commanders, clinging to office to avoid sinking into obscurity on a poor pension, not only encouraged them but were also prepared to use them in furtherance of disputes with rivals among their own contemporaries.
Internal pressures had more to do with Japan's drift into the Second World War than external factors. Between the revolution of 1868, which formally restored rule by the Emperor, and 1930, the population of the Home Islands rose from thirty to sixty-five million; by the end of 1941 it was about seventy million. Small wonder that Japan became an importer of food for the first time at about the turn of the century and felt insecure as a result. It had never been dependent on the outside world before, yet became even more so when its new industries demanded fuel and raw materials from abroad. Japanese interest in expansion on the Asian mainland was based as much on a desire to ease its population problem by emigration as on colonialist emulation of the West.
By the time of the "incident" at Mukden in 1931, therefore, at least one million Japanese had migrated to Manchuria (ex-servicemen were preferred, on the ancient Roman colonial model). This substantial figure was, however, dwarfed by the huge migration from China proper into the region. According to Japanese sources, in the quarter-century from 1907 to 1931 the population very nearly doubled, from seventeen to thirty-three million. Even after allowing for incoming Japanese and natural increase, this represents a massive influx -- one of the great migrations of the century -- which contemporary Japanese officials naturally attributed to the orderly conditions and flourishing economy of the southern part of the region, under their control since 1905. In 1937, as Japan went to war with China, Tokyo planned to settle one million Japanese households -- five million people -- in Manchuria and northern China in the twenty years until 1957: some five hundred thousand actually emigrated in a couple of years; of these, half were farmers and one-fifth teenagers. Whether the Japanese (today 125 million) actually neededLebensraumis debatable; but they certainly did their bestex post factoto justify their claim to it.
In Japan itself, the decade that followed the end of the First World War was relatively stable, especially when compared with the thirties, despite increasing diplomatic and economic difficulties. Nominally at least, and a strongly authoritarian social structure notwithstanding, the civilians were in charge under a two-party system: they even defeated the Navy in forcing acceptance of the Washington Treaties of 1922 and managed to impose cuts in military and naval budgets. There was not much to choose philosophically between the Minseito party, financed mainly by the Mitsubishi corporation, and the Seiyukai, backed by the Mitsui concern; both were middle-of-the-road and by and large took turns governing in the broad interests of their backers and the new urban middle class. The absence of a parliamentary tradition only served to encourage generalized corruption on a huge scale. This bred a general contempt for politicians, their big-business backers in the Zaibatsu (the cartel of the leading conglomerates) and the political process in a country only recently emerged from feudalism and still strongly agricultural. Indeed, the level of tension between the traditional Japanese way of life and the swift spread of many aspects of western civilization -- economic problems, jazz, modern clothes, rapid urbanization, women office workers, mass media, political ferment on left and (especially) right, trade-unionism, an incipient youth culture, class conflict, cocktail parties and even potatoes -- had no parallel in any other society. It was a powerful and dangerous social brew, and it soon went to people's heads -- especially when Japan was forced to import the effects of the "Wall Street Crash."
As Crown Prince, Hirohito caused one sensation after another in 1921 with his unprecedented overseas tour by battleship to various parts of the British Empire, Britain itself, France and Belgium (including the First World War battlefields), the Netherlands, Italy and the Vatican -- and the tastes he brought back with him. These included the great British breakfast of eggs and bacon, to which he remained loyal, except in wartime as a gesture to austerity, for the rest of his life. He also learned to like horse-racing, nightclubs and golf, all Japanese passions to the present day. When he came back, he was cheered to the echo by huge crowds which had been following his travels through the press, newsreels and radio: it was an all too brief suspension of the xenophobia and intolerance endemic in contemporary Japan. His taste for Western dress was made harder to satisfy by his divine status, which prevented tailors from measuring him except by the unreliable eyeball, applied fleetingly and at a suitably respectful distance. Hence the famous baggy clothes of so many early photographs. But his best attempts to dilute the stifling formality of palace life failed. He was wont to say in later years that his visit to England, especially his time in Oxford, gave him the happiest days of his life. He envied the informality (strictly relative) of the British House of Windsor, of which he was reminded when the Prince of Wales (later briefly King Edward VIII) returned his visit in 1922: they played a lot of golf together.
Hirohito was born on April 29, 1901, the eldest son of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Princess Sadako, and was, inevitably, brought up at the court of the Emperor Meiji. Considering the stuffiness associated with the imperial court, Meiji was a surprisingly convivial, uninhibitedly bibulous man: Hirohito is said to have been put off alcohol for life when he was made drunk by his father, and given an appalling hangover, before he was of school age. He was placed under the tutelage of General Nogi Maresuke, the intellectual war hero who defeated the Russians in 1905. Nogi saw to it that the always frail-looking Hirohito became a competent all-round sportsman as well as a conscientious student at the special school for the offspring of the Japanese peerage. The general was an ascetic and instilled the virtues of austerity into his pupil: displaying these qualities became the youth's way of rebelling against the licentious example set by his grandfather and even more so by his father. Meiji died of cancer in 1912, whereupon Yoshihito became the Emperor Taisho, Hirohito became Crown Prince -- and Nogi committed ritual suicide. The general thus kept the promise he made when he lost both his sons in the bloody struggle with the Russians for Port Arthur in 1905, a commitment deferred on Meiji's order. It was a terrible, pointless example for such a gifted man to give to lesser mortals; it was also a trauma for the reflective Hirohito.
The new chief tutor was the other superhero of the Russo-Japanese War, Admiral Togo Heihachiro, victor in the Battle of Tsushima. But as a teacher the admiral was as disappointing as the general had been inspiring. Because his science tutors were better than his arts teachers, and probably also because he had an inquiring mind, Hirohito took most interest in the natural sciences. He eventually became an amateur marine biologist of repute -- largely on the strength of discovering a hitherto unrecorded species of prawn at the age of seventeen. His strongest academic interest proved to be history, especially military; his heroes were Napoleon, Lincoln and Darwin, whose portraits were always to be seen on the walls of his study.
The year 1921 proved to be the most traumatic in the peacetime experience of the earnest Crown Prince. He became engaged to Princess Nagako -- his own choice -- after a convoluted dispute at court, ostensibly over the hereditary color-blindness in her family but actually between two powerful aristrocratic clans for domination of the imperial household. A leading extreme-nationalist group (Japan had hundreds) was used to mobilize public opinion in favor of Nagako. As soon as the row was settled, Hirohito was almost bundled out of the country on the foreign tour already mentioned, disconcerting his British hosts by starting a week early and staying longer then originally planned. Nonetheless, he always remembered the warmth of his welcome abroad at all levels, especially in Britain. He was nothing if not sentimental.
While he was still away, a right-wing extremist assassinated the prime minister, Hara Takashi, the first untitled occupant of the post, in protest against Japan's participation in the Washington Conference, negotiating the relative strengths of the world's leading navies. This was just one instance, and not the most dramatic, of the extraordinary fanaticism evoked by the stresses and strains of Japan's struggle to excel in a world dominated by the West and its values. Society's readiness to understand if not condone such extreme reaction was symbolized by the assassin's sentence of twelve years on a capital charge, as if his had been a sexual rather than a politicalcrime passionel.
On the right, the most radical (a large and growing element) took the view that all "eight corners of the world" should be united under Japanese domination. To the left, liberal, socialist and communist groups also existed. But they were having an increasingly hard time making themselves heard, let alone exercising the basic freedoms taken for granted in democratic societies but increasingly hard to come by in an instinctively authoritarian Japan. Hirohito had glimpsed such social and political freedoms being enjoyed during his grand tour. Though there was not much he could do about politics when he got home, he did what he could to ease the social atmosphere by getting rid of as much palace protocol as he dared.
His wishes soon carried rather more weight among the nebulous groups of courtiers whose self-appointed role was to "protect" the throne (mainly from scandal, as they chose to define the term). On November 25, 1921, Hirohito, still not twenty-one years old, became regent when the eccentricities of his father merged into madness. The Crown Prince's taste for informality was allowed to run to one fairly rowdy palace party in December. After that it was back to the old ritual, with one major if superficial change: Western dress now effectively became compulsory except on the stuffiest ceremonial occasions. But it was Western attire of the most sober kind. Even so, for a few years, until Hirohito's marriage in 1924, the palace became the venue for an open-ended association of high-flying younger officers, bureaucrats, and other "junior leaders," who would gather at the Regent's behest to debate the issues of the day or listen to lectures from leaders in the academic, administrative, and military fields. This was a uniquely elitist club-cum-secret-society of the kind to which so many Japanese, with their strongly developed sense of "family," loved to belong.
But life in Japan was becoming no easier. At lunchtime on September 1, 1923, the worst earthquake in Japanese history, which is saying a great deal, laid waste the Tokyo-Yokohama region, causing huge fires and deaths in six figures. Millions were made homeless, and Hirohito's wedding was postponed. The superstitious saw this disaster as punishment for Japanese flirtation with Western decadence. They took out their feelings on left-wingers, with their foreign ideas, and on Korean immigrants, who did the most menial jobs; thousands were massacred. On his way to open the new Diet on December 27, Hirohito narrowly escaped being shot by another of Japan's plentiful supply of extremists. This one, who was executed, was officially said to be a left-wing revolutionary, but he had more obvious links with the court faction that had lost the battle over Hirohito's fiancee. Unwilling to face another postponement, and undeterred by his brush with the violence never far from the surface of his simmering nation, Hirohito married his princess thirty days later, on January 26, 1924.
The omens notwithstanding, it proved to be a happy marriage. Its first three years were also a period of unusual calm, despite the death of Taisho in December 1926. Thereupon Hirohito, now the 124th emperor, followed ancient custom by choosing "Showa" as the name by which he was to be officially remembered. The word means "enlightened peace": hindsight enables us to savor the irony in full. The underlying, authoritarian social trend, however, continued unabated. It was fostered by a frustrated military which felt its marginal role in the First World War had caused it to fall behind, both in the international league and in the estimation of the nation. From 1926 onward, education was militarized, even at the elementary level, a reversion to past strictness after an unconvincing dabble with well-diluted liberal ideas. Emperor worship, aimed at the institution as the source of all legitimacy rather than the person, was nurtured; small boys put on uniforms and drilled with wooden "rifles." Discipline among adults was fostered by the foundation in 1928 -- twenty years before George Orwell made the term famous -- of the "Thought Police," whose role was to stamp out Western ideas such as communism, socialism, liberalism, materialism and individual rights.
But if the authorities automatically assumed that the really dangerous ideas came from the left, the most dangerous people, as so often in history, were to be found at the other end of the political spectrum. The wild men in the Kwantung Army killed Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the Manchurian warlord who obstructed Japanese domination of the region, by blowing up his train on the Southern Manchurian Railway in June 1928. The civilian government of the Seiyukai party, led by retired General Tanaka Giichi as prime minister, had wanted to use Chang as a counterweight to Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalists in the Kuomintang, in a divide-and-rule strategy for northern China. The fire-eating colonels and majors were not interested in such subtleties. Their stupidity was made manifest when Chang's son, the "Young Marshal," took over, had two Manchurian officers shot for collaborating with the Japanese and then declared for the Kuomintang. Few assassinations can have proved quite so counterproductive quite so quickly.
The middle-rankers were unfazed by such setbacks; as will soon become clear, their invariable remedy for the failure of violence was more violence. They were also unable to appreciate the prudence which led Tokyo to give diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, their "enemy number one," five years before Washington did so. The Chang murder was ascribed to "bandits" and two officers were suspended for failing to guard the railroad adequately. The scapegoat for the cover-up, which held until after the war, was Premier Tanaka, who lost his nerve in the behind-the-scenes political row about high-level indiscipline in the Army. He resigned early in 1929, once the elaborate and protracted ceremonies attending the formal enthronement of Hirohito at the turn of the year were out of the way.
It was Minseito party's turn to form a government, and the task, a bed of nails as usual but also a poisoned chalice on this occasion, was awarded to Hamaguchi Osachi, a notably moderate civilian; his foreign minister, Baron Shidehara Kijuro, had a reputation for flexibility on China policy. Overseas observers of the increasing ferment in Japan were commensurately relieved, but the issue that was to
Excerpted from Pacific Campaign: The U. S.-Japanese Naval War, 1941-1945 by Dan Van der Vat
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