Monthly Archives: May 2004

by | 17 May 2004 · 8:37 pm

Adachi Hatazo: War Hero or War Criminal?

Chapter 7 of Edward J. Drea’s book, In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army (U. Nebraska Press, 1998), is a biography entitled “Adachi Hatazo: A Soldier of His Emperor” (pp. 91-109). In his preface Drea describes Adachi thus:

A fascinating character, Adachi had long perplexed me. As commander of Eighteenth Army on New Guinea, he lost at least 110,000 of the 130,000 soldiers and sailors under his command. Yet today’s Ground Self Defense Forces regard Adachi with awe and reverence.

The chapter begins with a question.

Why talk about a general who is relatively obscure in Japan and virtually unknown elsewhere? … Perhaps by discussing a general officer who was neither a genius, such as Napoleon or MacArthur, nor a fool, such as McClellan or Mutaguchi[*], we gain a keener sense of what it meant to be an officer, a commander, and a leader in a major army. Moreover a preeminent Japanese military historian [Hata Ikuhiko] regards Adachi as one of only three general officers commanding troops who upheld Japan’s military tradition by not disgracing the uniform…. (The others were Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, defender of Iwo Jima, and Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru, defender of Okinawa.)

(*Lt. Gen. Mutaguchi Renya, in command of the Fifteenth Army in Burma, launched an overland attack in 1944 on Imphal, on the Indian frontier. Lacking air cover, he chose the most rugged route through the Burmese jungle, but took along 20,000 head of cattle to feed his 85,000 troops, emulating Genghis Khan, whom he admired. Mutaguchi lost 60,000 men and 20,000 head of cattle, most of the latter before they could feed his men.)

Born into a large family of samurai stock, but unable to afford middle school (as required for a naval career), Adachi instead tested into the army’s fiercely competitive Tokyo Cadet Academy, which aimed to produce graduates who were both tough officers and refined gentlemen. Adachi “became a skilled writer of short verse (tanka) and indeed would spend some of his darkest moments in the New Guinea jungles writing poetry” (p. 92). He then entered the Military Academy, where the subject matter was all military and the discipline was harsh, especially since many of the faculty were veterans of the recent, extraordinarily brutal Russo-Japanese War.

As one of the top graduates, he was posted to the First Guards Regiment, Imperial Guards Division, in Tokyo, and then went on to the Army War College, a sure sign he was destined for high rank. “Tokyo in the 1930s was a hotbed of Army factionalism” (p. 96), but Adachi steered clear of domestic politics, and “unlike many Japanese officers at that time, was monogamous…. He was deeply devoted to his wife and family despite the enforced separations that were a soldier’s lot” (pp. 96-97).

Also unusual for officers in his day, Adachi was devoted to the welfare of his troops. “Adachi led by example and understood his officers and men at an emotional level” (p. 95). After being posted to the Kwantung Army headquarters in Manchuria as the railway control officer, he “ordered all heating in the headquarters’ building turned off” whenever troops had to be transported in unheated trains (p. 97). He was famous for drinking large quantities of sake with his subordinates, creating an atmosphere where they could speak frankly and he could correct their errors without embarrassing them unduly.

Then war erupted with China in July 1937, and Adachi discovered his calling–he was a combat commander who led from the front, always appearing where the bullets were thickest. In the street-fighting meat grinder of Shanghai where head-on assaults into fortified positions became the accepted tactics, this was no small feat. [p. 98]

He was severely wounded in a mortar barrage that September, but was back in command of his regiment in December. His right leg was permanently weakened and bent, but he refused to use a cane. In recognition of his courage and leadership, he was promoted to major general in 1938, then lieutenant general in 1940, assigned to north China, where he conducted a series of bloody but successful pacification campaigns.

In 6 November 1942, on the same day that he heard of his wife’s death after a long illness, he received orders for New Guinea.

In January 1943 Adachi flew from Rabaul to Lae, Northeast New Guinea, a major Japanese stronghold, air base, and port, where he met the survivors of Buna. For the first time in his career he saw Japanese soldiers in defeat, uniforms in tatters, some propping themselves upright on crudely fashioned bamboo crutches, others being carried by exhausted comrades. Shocked by the sight, Adachi discarded his inspection schedule and instead talked to each man, encouraging and praising them for their efforts and telling them they looked like soldiers….Tokyo ordered Adachi to buy time for the Army to consolidate an in-depth defense in western New Guinea and the Philippines…. As the pace of the Allied offensive intensified, Adachi confronted a classic dilemma. If he garrisoned every possible landing site with small numbers of troops, he risked them being overwhelmed piecemeal. If he concentrated his forces, he risked them being bypassed.

So in June 1943, Adachi decided to fight the main battle at Salamaua, because loss of that base would render Lae untenable. His decision played into the Allied plan to fix the Japanese at Salamaua while executing an air-sea envelopement at Lae…. Yet what alternatives did Adachi have open to him? [pp. 103-104]

By 22 April 1944, MacArthur had circled around the north coast of New Guinea and taken the Eighteenth Army’s largest rear area bases at Hollandia and Aitape. Adachi was cut off in eastern New Guinea, but “managed to move his 60,000 troops overland through terrible jungle and swamp terrain” (p. 107) and mount a surprise counterattack on Aitape on 10 July 1944.

His defeat at Aitape cost 10,000 Japanese lives. Now Adachi had to hold together a broken, isolated force, thousands of miles from home, and without any hope of relief. His impartiality and common sense became the glue of the defeated army. So too did his October 1944 Emergency Punishment Order that gave his officers the power of summary field execution….Again Adachi led by example. He shared the hardships and short rations, losing nearly 80 pounds and all his teeth. Disdaining a painful hernia, he insisted on making daily visits to his front-line, no matter how far distant from headquarters. [pp. 107-108]

By August 1945, he could muster only 10,000 men, illustrating the then current saying that “Heaven is Java; hell is Burma; but no one returns alive from New Guinea” (p. 108). “Preparations for a final suicide attack were underway when Japan surrendered” (p. 108).

After the war, Adachi was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, including the summary executions he had authorized, although he was not personally involved in any such executions himself. After also testifying at the defense of every one of his indicted subordinates, “in the early morning hours of 10 September 1947 … Adachi used a paring knife to commit suicide” (pp. 108-109).

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by | 16 May 2004 · 10:16 pm

Korea’s Occupier-in-Chief, Gen. Hodge (Podge)

Compare the general in charge of U.S. occupation policy in Japan with his hapless counterpart in Korea.

Lt. Gen. John Reed Hodge was one of the most important people in recent Korean history. He served as the commander of the U.S. military occupation of southern Korea from September 1945 to August 1948, although he was far from being a prominent U.S. Army officer during World War II. His personal and professional background had a direct and negative impact on his implementation of instructions and his dealings with the Korean people and their political leaders. This article provides evidence that President Harry S. Truman’s decision to appoint Hodge as occupation commander was a serious mistake. His narrow experience and lesser command responsibilities caused him to make decisions that greatly increased political polarization in the divided country, creating the circumstances that would result in the outbreak of the Korean War.

SOURCE: James I. Matray, “Hodge Podge: American Occupation Policy in Korea, 1945-1948,” Korean Studies 19: 17-38

More on KimSoft and in Army Magazine. To quote the latter:

Japanese forces in Korea formally surrendered to Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, the American corps commander, on September 9, 1945. Hodge was then appointed the commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Korea and tasked with the restoration of Korean independence.

In hopes of maintaining civil order, Gen. Hodge kept Japanese officials in charge of Korean civilian affairs. It was a mistake, and his statements and actions led to rioting in the south. To restore peace, Syngman Rhee, the exiled leader of Korea’s independence movement, was asked to return to his home country. Rhee, a nationalist since his days as a student in Seoul, had been jailed and tortured for his views. He escaped from Japanese-occupied Korea to Shanghai and set up the Korean Provisional Government. He was eventually elected president of the Republic of Korea.

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by | 15 May 2004 · 1:05 pm

Buruma on Japan’s Occupier-in-Chief

Ian Buruma’s chapter on the U.S. Occupation period in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003), begins thus:

General Douglas MacArthur arrived at Atsugi naval airdrome, near Yokohama, on August 30, 1945. Having emerged from his aircraft, the supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP) paused at the top of the steps, stuck one hand in his hip pocket, tightened his jaws around his corncob pipe, and surveyed the conquered land through his aviator sunglasses. This trademark pose, casually imperious, had been well rehearsed. It was repeated several times from different angles, so all the press photographers could get a decent shot.

We cannot know exactly what went through SCAP’s mind at that moment, but reports of his monologues on the long flight from Australia suggest that he felt like a man with a mission. MacArthur was no expert on Japan; in fact, he knew very little about the place. But guided, in his own account, by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ, he would deliver this benighted Oriental nation from slavery and feudalism and transform its people into pacific democrats. It was to be the most radical overhaul since the Meiji Restoration, another new dawn to the West. But this time America, and not Germany, would be the model, the only model. Officially, the occupation of Japan was to be shared by the other Allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In fact, it was an American show from the start.

SCAP’s mission began almost one hundred years after Commodore Perry arrived with his black ships. Then, too, “the universal Yankee nation” had come (in Perry’s mind, at any rate) to bring light to Japanese darkness. The guns on the deck of his flagship, Powhatan, made sure the Japanese got the message. This earlier mission was not forgotten at the hour of Japan’s official surrender. Perry’s flag, carefully preserved at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, was flown to Japan for the ceremony on the battleship Missouri. After the old flag was hoisted and MacArthur spoke grandiloquently, like the ham actor he was, of freedom, tolerance, and justice, fifteen hundred U.S. Navy fighter planes and four hundred B-29 bombers roared overhead in tight formation.

The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were disbanded. Leftover stockpiles and materiel were either destroyed or disappeared into the black markets, thus setting up the careers of well-connected Japanese gangsters, political fixers, and right-wing politicians. Destroying Japan’s military was only the beginning, however. Political institutions had to be reformed and the zaibatsu tackled. The Japanese bureaucracy, on the other hand, was left largely in place to carry out SCAP’s reforms for him. Unlike Germany, Japan was to be administered by the Japanese themselves, with SCAP and his staff as puppet masters, frequently moving in the dark. There was a general election in 1946, and occupied Japan continued to be run officially by Japanese governments under the autocratic gaze of SCAP. Thus, an important link between prewar, wartime, and postwar Japan was preserved. The effect was not all to the good.

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by | 15 May 2004 · 12:10 pm

Buruma on the Kamikaze Spirit

Here’s a selection from Ian Buruma’s chapter on Japan’s “War Against the West” in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003).

Suicide was the sacrifice demanded of all Japanese soldiers who were captured by the enemy. But it was demanded of civilians, too. By 1944, Japanese leaders knew that the war could not be won by conventional means, but diehards maintained that even if all Japanese had to die, the kokutai [‘national polity’] would survive forever. There could be no surrender. Thus an ancient privilege of the samurai caste became a national duty. When the Americans landed on Saipan, women and children were made to jump off the cliffs. Up to 170,000 civilians died in Okinawa. Thousands were driven into American machine-gun fire as cover for Japanese troops. Others were forced to make room in hiding places for soldiers by killing themselves and their families with razors, knives, or, if necessary, their bare hands. Hundreds of thousands more perished in the man-made firestorms of Tokyo, Osaka, or Fukuoka, and still Japan’s Götterdämmerung was being blamed by the ruling elite on the insufficient spirit and loyalty of ordinary citizens.

Schoolchildren were ordered to write letters to Japanese soldiers at the front, telling them to “die gloriously.” In 1945, military suicide tactics actually became national policy. The Divine Wind Special Attack Units were the brainchild of Admiral Onishi Takijiro, who committed suicide himself after Japan’s defeat. Young men, often from the best universities, were pressured into volunteering for this last show of Japanese spirit. Submarines and fighter planes were constructed especially for the suicide missions. In fact, even though only one in three suicide fighters actually hit an American target, the tactic was damaging to U.S. ships and cost many lives. But even Admiral Onishi cannot have seriously thought it would win the war. He may have hoped that such tactics would, in the words of one elder statesman, develop a more “advantageous war situation,” forcing the enemy to come to terms. The desired effect was certainly deadly, but it was also theatrical: A peculiar idea of Japaneseness, whose seeds were sown in the late Edo period but which became a national pathology in the late 1930s, had turned from outward aggression to pure self-destruction.

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by | 15 May 2004 · 11:37 am

Buruma on Japan’s Northern Front

Ian Buruma slaps the title “Ah, Our Manchuria” on his chapter about Japan during the 1930s in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003). Here’s how the chapter ends.

Even as the emperor’s troops got bogged down in China, skirmishes on the borders of Manchukuo and the Soviet Union were threatening to get out of control. Officers of the Kwantung army, such as Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a maniacal soldier responsible for all manner of outrages before the war was over, were itching to attack the Soviet army. Tsuji was a proponent of the Strike North faction, as were most members of the Imperial Way [faction; or Kodoha]. They wanted to contain the Soviet Union by taking control of eastern Siberia. General Araki Sadao, who was, rather absurdly, Prince Konoe’s education minister, once said that if the Soviets did not cease to annoy japan, he would “have to purge Siberia as one cleans a room of flies.”

The Strike North faction was largely army based and attracted many junior officers. Those who wished to avoid a war with the Soviet Union and head south instead, where control of the rich natural resources of Southeast Asia would allow the navy to build up strength for an eventual war in the Pacific, were mostly admirals, generals, and high-ranking officers of the Control faction [Toseiha]. The emperor had no desire to go to war with the Soviets and was on the whole more sympathetic to the navy. There was, however, no consensus at all about what to do next: cut a deal with Chiang Kai-shek and retreat from China proper; patch things up with the West; prepare for an all-out war with the West; prop up a Chinese puppet regime in Nanking; get even closer to Nazi Germany; strengthen the army, strengthen the navy; strike north, strike south. But as so often happened, Tokyo’s dog was wagged by its military tail, once more in Manchuria.

Fighting broke out in the summer of 1938 on the wet and misty borderlands of Korea, Manchukuo, and the Soviet Union. Soviet troops were building a fortification on the Manchukuo side of the Tumen River, and the Japanese decided to test them. The Soviets had bombers and tanks. The Japanese had none, but they set great store on their superior “spirit.” After battling for a fortnight, there were many dead on both sides, more on the Japanese than the Russian, but nothing much was gained or lost. The emperor told his general staff to stop the war. Colonel Tsuji ordered his men to go on regardless. Spirit would see them through. Less than a year later, at Nomonhan [Khalkhin-Gol], on the border with Outer Mongolia, the Japanese, armed with Molotov cocktails, sabers, field guns, and some light tanks, attacked General Zhukov’s Soviet tank brigades. The fighting on ghastly, mosquito-infested terrain went on for months and ended in a slaughter. The flatlands were filled with Japanese corpses, feasted on by black desert vultures. More than twenty thousand Japanese died of hunger, thirst, and disease, as well as from Russian bombardments. Colonel Tsuji was duly promoted. But the plan to strike north was abandoned. From then on all the action would be to the south.

UPDATE: In the comments, Danny Yee questions whether a determined Japanese effort against the Soviets might have achieved victory and possibly even allowed the Nazis to best the Soviets in the West. It’s an interesting question of alternative history. But, judging from the book In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army, by Edward J. Drea (U. Nebraska Press, 1998), reviewed here and here, the IJA’s serious deficiencies in logistics and heavy weaponry would have made a decisive northern victory very unlikely. Plus, they were fighting against Marshal Zhukov (although the IJA might have kept him away from Stalingrad, and even Zhukov wasn’t invincible). I think the IJA would have suffered the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia.

Drea’s lead-off chapter, “Tradition and Circumstances: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tactical Response to Khalkhin-Gol [Jp. Nomonhan], 1939,” concludes thus:

It seems commonplace that military defeat can be salutary in nature, because it forces out incompetents and promotes innovative reforms. The popular historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Whereas defeat in war galvanizes military development, nothing contributes to military desuetude like total victory.” Like most generalizations it overstates the case. The way an army interprets defeat in relation to its military tradition, and not the defeat itself, will determine, in large measure, the impact an unsuccessful military campaign will have on that armed institution.

More specifically, Drea finds that the IJA blamed the defeat more on lack of training and insufficient “fighting spirit” on the part of the newly activated Twenty-third Division, which bore the brunt of the defeat. When a blunt Lt. Col. Konuma suggested that “the IJA hereafter would need equal or superior weaponry to fight foreign armies,” Maj. Gen. Endo called him an imbecile and accused him of insulting the Imperial Army.

NOTE: Gads. The new Blogger interface is at its most buggy when you try to update and republish a post already published. The first thing it does is unpublish the earlier version. Then it gets worse.

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by | 15 May 2004 · 10:15 am

Korean Cosmetic "Imperialism" in Mongolia

Here‘s an interesting, if disjointed, blogpost with comments on “Korean imperialism in Mongolia” that I found while trying to figure out why someone came to my site by googling “korean+hairdos”?! (This site currently turns up at the bottom of the first page of search results by virtue of my two recent posts on the 1932 Aso Coal Strike and Japan’s era of Ero Guro Nansensu in the 1920s, thereby putting “Korean[-Japanese]” and “[bobbed] hairdos” in fairly close sequence. Now I suppose I’ve raised my google rank for “korean+hairdos”!)

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by | 14 May 2004 · 9:52 pm

Zabutons Fly as Asashoryu Streak Ends at 35

Zabutons sailed toward the dohyo after the #1 maegashira Hokutoriki earned a gold star and ended the 35-bout winning streak of Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu. The other Mongolians are not doing so well this tournament, but the up-and-coming Georgian Kokkai now stands at 5-1, no worse than the yokozuna at this point in the Natsu Basho. As always, more and better detail can be found at That’s News To Me.

(Hey, purists: It took me a while to get used to attaching the English plural to words like zabuton, zori, and musubi, but those nouns–and many more–have long since been borrowed into the English spoken in Hawai‘i.)

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by | 14 May 2004 · 4:56 pm

Rushdie’s Two Wishes for India’s New Era

In a Washington Post column headed “India’s New Era,” Salman Rushdie articulates two wishes for India under the Congress Party after the latter’s upset victory in the latest elections.

I have two immediate wishes for the new era. The first is that the debates about “foreignness” can be laid to rest. Those of us who are part of the Indian diaspora, and who have fought for years to have Indians recognized as full citizens of the societies in which we have settled and in which our children have been born and raised, have found the attack on the Italian origins of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party’s leader and widow of the slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, to be highly unpleasant. Even more unpleasant were the BJP’s suggestions that her children, the children of Rajiv Gandhi, were also somehow aliens. You can’t have it both ways. If Indians outside India are to be seen as “belonging” to their new homelands, then those who make India their home, as Sonia Gandhi has done for 40 years or so, must be given the same respect. Gratifyingly, the electorate has shown it just doesn’t care about the “foreignness” issue. A BJP leader foolishly said in the immediate aftermath of his party’s rejection that he thought it “shameful” that India might be led by a foreigner. Such slurs are part of the reason for the BJP defeat. They are essentially racist, and must cease.

My second wish is that the study of India’s history can now be rescued from the extremists and ideologues. The outgoing government’s politicization of historical scholarship — its determination to impose textbooks peddling a narrow, revisionist, Hindu-nationalist vision of India’s past on the country’s schools and colleges, and its deriding of the work of the greatest Indian historians, such as Professor Romila Thapar — was one of its most alarming initiatives. The BJP has often seemed to want to inflame our perceptions of the past in order to inflame the passions of the present. Congress and its allies have it in their power to restore the atmosphere of cool objectivity that true learning requires.

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by | 13 May 2004 · 8:20 pm

Jose Ramos-Horta on Military Intervention

Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1996 and now East Timor’s senior minister for foreign affairs and cooperation, editorializes in the Wall Street Journal:

As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I’ve never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That’s why I supported Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot’s regime, and Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval–and in both cases they were right to do so.

Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early ’80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed ‘Emperor’ Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened–without a U.N. mandate–to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world’s most barbaric regimes….

In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate, but I stand ready to face my critics. It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad. And that is what those who would cut and run from Iraq risk doing.

Considering how badly things are going in West Papua, it seems only a matter of time before the question of international military intervention arises there–that is, unless the global media continue largely to ignore it. I hope I’m being too pessimistic. Much will depend on the upcoming Indonesian presidential elections in July.

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by | 13 May 2004 · 2:31 pm

1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Relations

The 20-day-long Korean strike against the Aso coal mines in 1932 was the only sustained strike by a large number of Korean miners in prewar Japan and the largest strike of the year in Chikuho, Japan’s most important coal field. The 400 strikers demonstrated courage and cohesion but won at best a partial victory that left most of them without jobs. This article draws on union documents and a contemporary report by the Kyochokai, a semiprivate organization devoted to labor-capital harmony, to explore the background of the strike, the tactics employed by the male strikers and their wives, and the many obstacles they faced in their fight for better wages and working conditions. The author argues that there was little the workers could do to overcome the harsh antiunion environment of prewar Japan or the surpluses in both coal and labor brought on by the Great Depression, but that the strike might have been more successful if rank-and-file Japanese miners had shown even a hint of solidarity. While a Japanese mining union provided organizational support, the failure of even one Japanese miner to join the strike suggests that Japanese working-class racism severely limited the potential for joint Korean-Japanese action.

SOURCE: W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Solidarity and Conflict,” Korean Studies 20 (1996): 94-122

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