February | 2024 | Far Outliers

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was the first member of the Japanese imperial family to break ranks and say it publicly. On 27 February 1946 he told a journalist from the New York Times that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favour of his son and a regent be nominated until Crown Prince Akihito, then aged twelve, came of age. Higashikuni, the Emperor’s uncle by marriage, was one of the few members of Japan’s ruling circle in the 1930s to have opposed war in Asia and to have warned against embarking on a route bound to result in conflict with the United States. After Pearl Harbor he had continually sought ways to bring about peace. Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he became Prime Minister, charged with overseeing the cessation of hostilities and reassuring the people that the Japanese empire was secure, despite the defeat. After two months he retired voluntarily, but he remained one of the most influential members of the government. Now he admitted that in Tokyo court circles the idea of abdication had been discussed for months; just a few days earlier he had told the Emperor in a private audience that he should stand down. He had said the same thing at a Cabinet meeting. Hirohito, he declared, bore ‘moral responsibility’ for the nation’s defeat, ‘to the dead and to his bereaved subjects’.

These unprecedented comments caused a sensation. Japan was a strictly hierarchical society. The imperial family and leading aristocrats seldom spoke out of turn or manifested any sign of disloyalty. A few days later the Emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Misaka, declared that Hirohito should accept responsibility for defeat and graciously volunteered himself as the regent. Another brother, Takametsu [sic, Takamatsu], was also suggested. Despite hunger and extreme hardship being uppermost in most Japanese minds, much of the country was talking about the possible abdication. The censored press, however, barely mentioned the issue, although there was a huge stir when one of Japan’s foremost poets, Miyoshi Tatsuji, published an essay urging the Emperor to step down as he had been ‘extremely negligent in the performance of his duties…[and] was responsible for betraying the loyal soldiers who had laid down their lives for him in battle.’

But the most powerful man in the country had decided against abdication. General Douglas MacArthur, the proconsul in charge of America’s occupation of Japan, was insistent on Hirohito staying on the throne – and whatever MacArthur wanted in postwar Japan he got. America would remake Japan from the top down and turn it from semi-feudal despotism into a model twentieth-century democracy rooted in Western precepts of freedom. The Americans would impose democracy by fiat on Japan, whether the Japanese wanted and liked it or not, but they would do so using imperial institutions, including the existing civil service. They adopted as their principal ally and functionary in the task an Emperor who just weeks earlier had been regarded by his people, and by himself, as a descendant of the gods. Despite such obvious ironies, the creation of the new Japan was a remarkable achievement – practical, efficient, bloodless – and of lasting importance in re-ordering not just Japan but, by example, much of the Asian continent.

At the beginning of 1946 neither princes nor poets would have dared to question Emperor Hirohito’s right to rule, despite the humiliation of total defeat. But early in the New Year, the Emperor issued a statement proclaiming himself human. It was the first stage of a process that turned Hirohito from an absolute ruler, literally worshipped by his people, into a constitutional monarch.

This chapter is perhaps the weakest in the book. Many small typos indicate it was neither written nor proofread very carefully, or that he relied only on occupation-era English language reports. For instance, it spells Daiichi [第一 ‘No. 1’] Bank as ‘Daichi’ Bank, Prince Takamatsu [高松] as ‘Takematsu’; Atsugi [厚木] Naval Air Base as ‘Atsugii’.

But the most egregious error in his account of the war in northern China was relying on outdated (and false) Chinese Nationalist sources that blamed Japan for destroying the Yellow River dikes that flooded huge areas and killed millions of people, but allowed the Chinese Nationalists time to withdraw their armies and capital deeper into the interior.

Disasterhistory.org offers a more up-to-date corrective.

Many people drowned in the flooding; far more would succumb to illness or hunger in the difficult months and years that followed. To the east, however, the river’s diversion halted the invading Japanese, who abandoned their westward march. The vital railroad junction at Zhengzhou was held for the time. The city of Hankou, China’s provisional political center after the fall of Nanjing, won a temporary breathing spell.

Strategically, breaking the dikes may have bought the Nationalist army time to withdraw and regroup, bogging down Japanese tanks and mobile artillery in fields of mud as Chinese forces secured their defenses around Zhengzhou. By preventing the Japanese from taking the railway junction, some scholars argue, the river’s diversion postponed the seizure of Wuhan by several months, giving the Nationalist government time to relocate its capital to southwest China in the city of Chongqing. But the Japanese simply redirected their advance from a north–south land attack along the railways to an amphibious assault along the Yangzi River that combined naval and infantry forces. Wuhan fell in October 1938, after the Nationalist central government had withdrawn into China’s interior.

…

Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.

…

On shifting representations of the flood disaster see especially, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014), 447–469.

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 30-31:

Stalin had always been a patient man. While he rose gradually to absolute power over the Communist Party and the State, he was always calculating, waiting for the right time to act. But now he was often irascible, irritable and unpredictable. ‘In the last years, Stalin began to weaken,’ said Molotov, his obedient lackey for decades. ‘Sclerosis comes to all with age in various degrees, but in him it was noticeable.’ He lost his temper and became conceited, ‘which was not a good feature in a statesman.’ Another of his underlings, Nikita Khrushchev, agreed that after the war ‘he wasn’t quite right in the head…He was very jittery. His last years were the most dangerous. He swung to extremes.’ He could still charm and manipulate, but he now grew increasingly autocratic.

There was no longer any pretence of anything other than one-person rule. Even during the Great Purge of the 1930s and the early years of the war, there had been a nod to a more collegiate ruling style. Now Stalin simply issued instructions. ‘Sometimes he would listen to others if he liked what they were saying,’ recalled Khrushchev. ‘Or else he might growl at them and immediately, without consulting anyone, formulate the text of a Resolution of…the Council of Ministers and after that the document would be published. It was completely arbitrary rule.’

He took immense interest in the private lives of those close to him but, over time, as he grew ever more isolated from ordinary life and the Russian people, these numbered only the other members of the ruling elite. ‘He often appeared unannounced at their homes to try to establish what the hierarchy was within their families,’ recalled Lavrenti Beria’s son, Sergo Beria, who was often present at these visits. ‘He made sure the families of his underlings did not see too much of each other – he feared friendships would lead to coalitions against him. He did not allow them to be absent for even a few hours without knowing where they were. A conversation between them of any length aroused his suspicion. He did not like them to have evening parties at their own homes. Any meeting without his supervision was suspect in his eyes.’

Stalin’s social life was confined to these ‘business associates’. Several times a week, at his insistence, Kremlin power brokers and, occasionally, visitors from other, mostly Eastern European communist parties would dine with him, usually at Kuntsevo, his dacha about fifteen kilometres west of Moscow. Refusal to attend was unthinkable. Here, work and ‘relaxation’ blurred seamlessly in ‘Rule by dining room’, as one Stalin biographer put it. They were ghastly bacchanals at which Stalin’s cronies would be ritually humiliated in order to provide entertainment for the Red Tsar. But they could be deadly serious. Once, after one of these drinking bouts, Khrushchev was on his way back to his Moscow apartment with another Party chieftain, the planning supremo Georgi Malenkov. With visible relief, he sank back into the seat and whispered, ‘One never knows if one is going home or to prison.’

As he got older Stalin turned more vicious to his entourage, men who – after him – were the most powerful people in the Soviet Union, and who inspired fear amongst their own underlings.