Category Archives: war

by | 16 October 2026 · 6:36 am

Japan’s Homeland Disasters in 1944-45

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397:

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They were usually put up in extremely rudimentary and overcrowded rooms of Buddhist temples or traditional inns. In all, about eight hundred thousand city children experienced this collective evacuation, characterized by perpetual hunger, homesickness, and spartan living. It would form a major part of their generational memory.

Newspapers and magazines saw the evacuation program through rose-colored glasses; they reported that the children were enjoying fresh country air and featured photos of their smiling—though clearly undernourished—faces. One photo showed a group of small boys squatting on the bathroom floor in a big circle, each scrubbing the back of the boy in front of him. They look to be having fun, but their astonishingly skinny naked bodies make one wonder how they had any energy left for smiling, let alone back scrubbing.

Without access to food other than whatever little was given them, the evacuated children suffered from hunger first and foremost. The greatest pastime for them was to draw food. “Sponge cakes, dumplings, pastries, shortcakes, caramels, rice crackers … we drew them all—absolutely every snack in this world one could remember,” one woman recalled. “Then we showed them to one another and enjoyed discussing how wonderful they would taste if we really were to eat them.” Complaining, unhappy letters home were systematically discouraged, and their teachers checked all mail before it was sent out. State censorship and confiscation of correspondence, legalized in October 1941, were exercised even at this level voluntarily.

This haphazard evacuation program was a direct response to the threat of a U.S. landing on the Japanese mainland, which seemed especially likely after the United States captured Saipan, fifteen hundred miles south. The island fell on July 7, 1944, and more than 55,000 Japanese, including civilians, died there. (Made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, Saipan had a Japanese population, including colonial Taiwanese and Koreans classified as Japanese, of 29,348 in 1943.) Vice Admiral Nagumo and other navy commanders ordered their soldiers to “die a hero’s death” and to become the “Pacific seawall” against the United States. Nagumo set a precedent by committing suicide on July 6, before the island’s conquest. The same “ultimate sacrifice” was also expected of civilians in the absence of any protection offered by the military. Too many chose death over surrender, sometimes coaxed by the remaining Japanese soldiers, who made sure that nobody was to suffer the shame of being taken captive.

The haunting proof of patriotic allegiance was captured on film by the U.S. Marines. Civilians, many of them women and some with babies and children, stumbled toward the edge of volcanic cliffs to make their final leaps. One can feel their slight hesitation and momentary fear as they looked down into the abyss of black seawater. But by sheer force of determination, they overcame their fear and jumped. “Banzai!” (“Live forever!”—or, more accurately in this case, “Long live the emperor!”) was often the last word of those loyal subjects of the empire. More civilians would commit suicide on the islands of Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa in the face of the U.S. advance. Japanese losses in the Pacific were so great that they could not be kept a secret any longer. The Saipan calamity was reported to the Japanese nation on July 18, 1944, along with the resignation of the Tojo cabinet. Two days after Tojo’s fall, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie, the most nearly successful of all the assassination attempts on Hitler, was carried out. With renewed fanaticism, the Führer would continue to lead Germany until his suicide.

…

Meanwhile, life had to carry on, and children continued to be evacuated. On August 22, 1944, about seven hundred children, in transit from Okinawa to Kagoshima, perished at sea. The U.S. submarines were already that close. The ill-orchestrated evacuation program ended in March 1945, and city families were urged to make individual arrangements to ensure the safety of their children. Family reunions were often brutally short-lived. Many children from Tokyo were sent back home just in time to experience the worst (but not the last) air raid unleashed on the city: the one in the early-morning hours of March 10, …

With the destruction of almost every Japanese city and the constant announcements of soldiers’ deaths, Japanese morale could not have been lower. Surviving death—from disease, hunger, or the incendiary bombs that grilled alive newborns and old people alike—had become the utmost national priority. A distraught mother who embraced her baby to the point of suffocation while seeking shelter during a bombing raid, a schoolgirl trying to float her way to safety down a river filled with dying people clinging to her, people navigating heaps of charred bodies as they looked for their missing family members—stories like these were becoming all too common. The Meiji Palace, where the imperial conferences had taken place, was burned down in May 1945, forcing the leaders to hold the final two imperial conferences before Japan’s unconditional surrender in an air-raid shelter.

Life in the countryside was less pressed, though things were scarce. Toddlers innocently competed with one another to collect plant roots, a substitute staple for rice, and grasshoppers, an invaluable available source of protein and calcium for growing children. Students were sent into the forests for pine sap to make gasoline (which never quite worked), and all households were ordered to turn in their metal, including buckets and ladles, to make airplanes. “We must be losing the war,” said one farm boy at the time, deducing that the government wouldn’t otherwise sink so low as to take utensils from poor people’s kitchens. But uncomplaining, and with a degree of fatalism, the nation endured the horrid times as if it were dealing with a series of relentless natural disasters rather than man-made ones.

In the midst of all this, a very select group of Japanese, mainly military officers but also some filmmakers, university students, and other civilians, had a rare chance to see films that the British had left behind in Southeast Asia. One of them was Gone with the Wind. The Japanese were amazed by the quality, technical superiority, and glamour of the nearly four-hour-long saga. They wondered how they could possibly defeat a country that had managed to produce such an astonishing film. (Another film left behind was Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose quality far surpassed that of Japanese animation technology.)

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Filed under food, Japan, Korea, Micronesia, migration, military, nationalism, Taiwan, U.S., war

by | 15 October 2026 · 5:00 am

Japan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange, 1942

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387:

On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home. Some of the notable faces among the Japanese group were Nomura and Kurusu. On the day of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the two men endured the most unnerving public humiliation imaginable for any diplomat. To ensure the success of the military operations in Hawaii and Malaya, the Japanese government kept the two ambassadors completely in the dark about its decision to go to war. They were notified of Tokyo’s intention to terminate diplomatic relations only hours before the attack.

The Japanese embassy’s inability to cope with the last-minute nature of Tokyo’s instructions did not help Nomura and Kurusu in their final mission of communicating to the White House the end of diplomacy, either. Tokyo had ordered Nomura and Kurusu to see Hull at 1:00 p.m., shortly before the first bomb was to be dropped on Pearl Harbor. Because the diplomatic communication, consisting of fourteen parts, was late in being typed up for delivery, the two Japanese diplomats were shown into Hull’s office at 2:20 p.m., utterly unaware that their country had already attacked the United States.

…

IN THE MONTHS that followed the opening of the war in the Pacific, Nomura, Kurusu, and other Japanese nationals awaited deportation in cramped resort hotels that had been turned into temporary detention camps (luxurious lodgings compared with the internment camps that many Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in). In Hot Springs, Virginia, and then in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Kurusu had ample time to reflect on what had gone wrong in his last-minute quest to secure peace between the two countries.

…

It was not until the summer of 1942 that Kurusu learned what had really been going on during those last ten days before Japan’s attack. In Japanese-occupied Singapore, where the Gripsholm made a brief stop, Kurusu heard army officers recount how difficult it was for them to prepare for attacks in the run-up to the war since the military leaders in Tokyo had not decided to go to war until November 26.

ON JULY 20, 1942, the Gripsholm, having picked up and crammed aboard even more detained Japanese in Rio de Janeiro, entered the port of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) in Portuguese Mozambique. Two days later, the Asama Maru and the Conte Verde, flying Japan’s Rising Sun flag, anchored at the same port in the Indian Ocean. It was there that the actual citizen exchange between the warring parties took place. The Japanese from North and South America quietly organized themselves and resettled on the two ships coming from Japan. There was no direct contact between the people from the Allied and Axis camps. But while waiting at the port, Nomura and Kurusu both spotted the tall figure of Ambassador Grew in the other group. He recognized them, too. Kurusu immediately recalled his interview with Grew the night before his departure for Washington in early November of the previous year. The uneasy physical distance between them was ample proof of the peace that had eluded them. The three men took their hats off in silent acknowledgment of one another.

The ships carrying the Japanese nationals reached Yokohama, Kurusu’s hometown, on August 20, 1942. By then, Japan’s preponderance at sea was declining precipitously. The balance of power had been tipped. From June 4 to 7, the Imperial Japanese Navy fought one of the most devastating naval battles in modern history, the Battle of Midway. The same men who planned the Pearl Harbor attack conceived of the Midway strategy, hoping to eliminate the United States from the Pacific once and for all. The operation ended in disaster for Japan. By this time, the Japanese military code had been broken by the United States (whereas at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, only the diplomatic code had been broken). The Japanese navy was dragged down from its glorious pinnacle only six months after it had reached it.

All this was unknown to most Japanese.

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by | 14 October 2026 · 5:59 am

Ambassador Kurusu Profile

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 337-340:

DESPITE HIS UNQUESTIONED INTELLECT and experience, Kurusu was an unfortunate choice in a public relations sense. To the outside world, Kurusu was known only as the man who signed the Tripartite Pact, having been photographed next to Hitler at the height of German-Japanese friendship. He was actually strongly opposed to the pact but was obliged to sign it as Japan’s ambassador to Germany in the autumn of 1940. Kurusu never wanted the Berlin job and had turned it down several times. He was ready to retire after his tenure in Belgium, where he was posted from 1936 to 1939. His time in Brussels coincided with the outbreak and intensification of the China War under the first Konoe government. He tried in his capacity as ambassador to initiate a settlement of the China conflict through the mediation of the Belgian and French governments. He knew that Japan lacked any coherent plans for that war and, more damningly, an effective leader. The escalation, in his words, came about because “the government always allowed itself to be dragged along by the faits accomplis in the field without any prospects of long-term solution.” Worse, there was “no coordination within and between the army and the navy” and everyone was “preoccupied with saving face and evading responsibilities.”

Kurusu could not have envisioned that things would get so bad so fast when he and his family, along with a crowd of enthused spectators, welcomed the record-setting Kamikaze aviators at the Brussels airport in April 1937. Kurusu accepted the ambassadorship to Berlin in 1939 only in the hope that he might prevent Japan’s diplomatic course from going further astray. Once in Berlin, he continued to seek ways to settle the China War through the third-party intervention of Germany. But just as things seemed to be moving in the right direction, Konoe, in his second premiership, recognized Wang Jingwei’s China, thereby alienating Chiang Kai-shek forever.

Kurusu was soon left out of all key communications between German and Japanese officials. Hitler’s government judged that Japan could not be wooed sufficiently through Kurusu, and the agreement on the Tripartite Pact was hastily reached between Matsuoka and a German envoy visiting Tokyo. Nonetheless, because Kurusu was photographed standing side by side with Hitler, his reputation became forever tainted.

Kurusu was so disgusted by that and other experiences in Germany that he requested to be relieved of his post and was allowed to leave Berlin in February 1941. Back in Japan, he led the life of a recluse, turning down government appointments, including a position in Tojo’s cabinet. Kurusu, however, could not reject the emergency call to Washington. A peaceful settlement of U.S.-Japanese differences was something he truly desired. He was pro-Anglo-American at heart. Perhaps as the son of the successful industrialist who had developed the cosmopolitan port of Yokohama, he had the appreciation of mercantile liberalism in his blood. The port town served as the window to the world during Japan’s rapid modernization and was known for its unsentimental, practical people like Kurusu.

Kurusu also had a personal stake in the future of the United States and Japan. He was married to an American from New York City born to British parents (her father was an Anglican clergyman). Kurusu wanted to do everything in his power to avoid a war between the two countries that meant the most to his family. It was to be a perilous mission. There were some on the Army General Staff who openly said they wished Kurusu’s plane would crash. With such ill wishes behind him, he departed for Taiwan in the early morning of November 7.

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by | 13 October 2026 · 6:41 am

PM Tojo & FM Togo, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 299-300:

Upon leaving the palace, Tojo directed his car first to the Meiji Shrine, then to the Togo Shrine (built in honor of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Togo Heihachiro, who defeated the czar’s Baltic Fleet), and finally to the Yasukuni Shrine (where the souls of soldiers who died in the empire’s past wars were enshrined). After an hour or so of hopping between shrines in central Tokyo, Tojo returned to the army minister’s official residence. The news of his appointment had already reached the members of his staff, who congratulated him. But Japan’s new prime minister was in no mood to celebrate. He realized the enormity of the task he now faced. That evening, in his absurdly principled way, he ordered that no one from the army should enter his office, which he now declared to be purely civilian territory. He made telephone calls in an effort to fill ministerial positions. He appointed himself army minister and home minister. Then he tapped Togo Shigenori, the veteran diplomat who had served as the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to be his foreign minister.

Togo, a sixty-year-old dandy with copious graying hair, was married to a German woman and had once wished to become a German literature scholar. He was averse to Nazism; his brief tenure as an ambassador to Germany from 1937 to 1938 was terminated partly because of his frosty relationship with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Neither pro-Anglo-American nor pro-Axis, Togo was a genuine Japanese patriot. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve perhaps because he felt that no matter how successful he was in his professional career, he was vulnerable to being labeled an outsider. Born as Park [= Boku] Shigenori in Kagoshima, a southwestern city on the southern island of Kyushu, he came from a long line of Korean potters who were forcibly brought to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century and had remarkably preserved their language and culture over many generations. His father, a successful businessman, bought the Japanese family name Togo when Shigenori was five. (Contrary to popular belief, Togo was no relation to Admiral Togo, the Nelson of the East.)

On the whole, Togo was a much more reasonable and sensible choice than [Admiral] Toyoda, the departing foreign minister, had been. He was an experienced diplomat whose skills could be put to good use. Togo had his reservations. Before midnight, he went to see Tojo and asked whether the would-be premier was ready to make difficult concessions to avoid war. The stiff army man responded to the suave diplomat that things were very different now. “I do not have any problem reexamining the issue once again,” Tojo said. The reexamination implied extracting concessions from the army, including the withdrawal of already mobilized troops, in order to give the new foreign minister more room for diplomatic maneuver with the United States. Upon this pledge of honor, the unlikely Tojo-Togo team was born.

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Filed under Japan, Korea, military, U.S., religion, war, nationalism, USSR, Germany

by | 12 October 2026 · 5:07 am

Japan’s Wartime Censorship, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 286-287:

On January 11, 1941, the government issued, as a supplement to the National Mobilization Law, a set of regulations concerning newspapers and other media. Sensitive matters of military, diplomatic, and fiscal policies could no longer be officially written or spoken about, and there were detailed instructions regarding the coverage of resource shortages, weather forecasts (because of their potential strategic sensitivity), family problems (such as adultery committed by wives of soldiers fighting in China), and many other social topics that might obstruct successful mobilization on the home front. Though these rules certainly restricted newspaper reporting, freedom of the press in Japan was, and had been, nonexistent for some time.

As noted earlier, from the Manchurian Incident onward, major newspapers had been especially blatant in their support of state policies, appealing to patriotic fervor to compete in a fierce circulation war. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria, military men and journalists actively cultivated one another, drawing closer as more and more journalists were dispatched to the battlefront. Objective reporting was abandoned. The policy of selective reporting, concentrating on Japanese victories, continued after the outbreak of the China War, and by 1941, it had become impossible for the Japanese media to disentangle themselves from their dangerous liaison with the military.

The national radio monopoly NHK had always surpassed the newspapers in its self-conscious role as the mouthpiece of official policy. One day in May 1938, it aired what it touted as the first-ever live broadcast of a battle, from an unnamed site in Xuzhou in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu in China. The announcer’s excited voice echoed all over Japan, describing what was developing in front of him as “the hell of victory.” In reality, the enemy forces had quickly retreated, and there had been little combat. But that was not what the listeners were told. “The fall of Xuzhou! The fall of Xuzhou! Dear listeners on the home front, it is, however, premature to hear your joyous cheers. The joy of victory still awaits us. Our greatest search-and-destroy mission goes on as I speak. So please, everyone back home, stay up all night tonight and pray for Japan’s greatest victory!” Under the spell of this adrenaline-filled call, many gathered at the Yasukuni Shrine, forming a long line to say midnight prayers. This was a dress rehearsal for the greater radio announcement of the morning of December 8, 1941.

Not all media had been as overtly uncritical as NHK or the major newspapers. The so-called general magazines, appealing to middlebrow and highbrow audiences and usually published monthly, featured political commentaries as well as literary pieces. They now were especially vulnerable. Their publishers were given the names of banned liberal contributors and were made to submit a list of subscribers, in addition to the detailed outlines of upcoming issues, to be approved by the Information Division of the government. Magazines for children were no exception. Japan’s young audience was dispirited in the fall of 1941 when a hugely successful ten-year-old cartoon serialized in a boys’ magazine came to an abrupt end; the tales of the adventures and exploits of the stray-dog soldier Norakuro were deemed disrespectful to the military not so much because they were critical of Japanese militarism but because the soldiers were all animals.

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by | 9 October 2026 · 7:52 am

Japan’s Bakuryo Decision Makers

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 178-180:

[Foreign Minister] Matsuoka … was wrongly convinced of a swift German victory over the Soviet Union (as were many others, including some in Britain and the United States), but he was now rightly worried about the risk of a severe Anglo-American retaliation should Japan decide to occupy even more of France’s colonial territory. That would unduly advertise Japan’s greater ambition in the region, sending up a flare in Washington. The question of whether to strike north (the Soviet Union) or go south became the focus of Tokyo’s policy deliberations in late June 1941. The institutional forces and mechanisms that enabled such a debate would have a lasting impact on Tokyo’s policy formulation in the following months.

Broadly, Japan’s strategic outline was set by the Imperial General Headquarters, the highest organ of the high command of the Army and Navy General Staffs. The general staffs initiated strategic proposals, but so did the Army and Navy Ministries, which were part of the cabinet. In both these ministries, ministers resided at the top of the institutional hierarchy, followed by vice ministers, chiefs of various bureaus (including military affairs, personnel, legal affairs, and supply and accounts), and then chiefs of sections (subgroups within the bureaus). The general staffs had a similar chain of command, with the chiefs of staff at the top, followed by vice chiefs of staff, chiefs of divisions (including operations, information, and mobilization), and, finally, various section chiefs. Strategic proposals were rarely formulated at the top levels; they were usually initiated at the bureau and section levels of the ministries and at the division and section levels of the general staffs. With many specialist groups trying to advance their interests, arriving at a new policy was a very complicated business.

…

This sort of painstaking institutional groundwork was carried out by middle-ranking military planners, most of whom did not even attend the liaison meetings of the top leaders. They were aptly called bakuryo, which literally means “officers behind the curtains.” In the olden days, the word baku (curtains) had a double meaning in explaining concentration of power. One was political, synonymous with the government, as in bakufu (shogunate), meaning “a regime behind the curtains.” The other was strategic, alluding to the makeshift curtains used in encampments during field combat to identify the headquarters, where strategies were secretly debated among the select few. In prewar Japan, bakuryo had come to assume both the political task of negotiating and liaising with different sources of power and the more practical task of planning strategies. Because of the pivotal role bakuryo would come to assume in directing Japan’s policy after July, the term evoked the image of war planners furtively creating bellicose policies in the name of assisting and advising their superiors.

In the early summer of 1941, Japan’s three most influential bakuryo, all about fifty years old, were the chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Division, Tanaka Shin’ichi; the chief of the Army Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau, Muto Akira; and the aforementioned chief of the Navy Ministry’s Naval Affairs Bureau, Oka Takazumi. Muto and Oka had the crucial role of working together to create an interservice agreement. Tanaka, on the other hand, often worked alone, driven by a hostile worldview that made him the doomsday oracle of the Army General Staff. His division was the most aggressive. Tanaka consistently promoted a hard-line stance in China. For him, total victory was the only option, and the willingness Japanese leaders had been showing of late to negotiate with the United States was a disgrace. Refraining from war equated to cowardly surrender and was worse than losing everything after having fought a proper war. Because of the strength of his convictions and his forceful personality, and even though he was only third in the chain of command, he would come to have a greater influence on policy than anyone else on the Army General Staff.

…

The navy, too, had its middle-ranking hawks. The primary example was Ishikawa Shingo, a section chief in the Navy Ministry’s Military Affairs Bureau, also in his midforties. In 1931, around the time of the Manchurian Incident, he wrote a controversial book, Japan’s Crisis, under a pseudonym (and without permission from the navy, grounds enough for dismissal from the service). In it, he warned that the United States had entertained ambitions to control the East since the middle of the previous century, and he urged Japan to embark on a “great national march to ensure its right to survival” in the face of impending American threats. He thought the conferences on naval reduction that had been held in Washington and London were part of a Western conspiracy to obstruct Japan’s rise to prominence. Like the army’s Ishiwara Kanji, who had conceived of the Manchurian takeover, Ishikawa greatly influenced younger officers with his polemical book, turning many in what had traditionally been the pro-British navy into Nazi sympathizers. His fanatical personality had long alarmed the top brass. Nicknamed Wild Shot, he had been consistently passed over for influential positions for much of his career. Now, in the fall of 1940, Oka, chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau and a strong advocate of Japan’s Axis alliance, appointed Ishikawa leader of its Arms Division, overriding objections from the Personnel Bureau.

Ishikawa, along with other like-minded associates, formed the First Naval Defense Policy Committee (the so-called First Committee), which would shape the navy’s prowar position on the eve of Pearl Harbor. He believed, like Tanaka, that war with the United States was something not to be avoided but to be faced heroically. In his thinking, Japan’s military occupation of French Indochina was about preparing for an inevitable war rather than a possible one. Ishikawa, in fact, favored a forceful military advance beyond Indochinese borders and advocated the conquest of British Malaya within 1941. Ishikawa would later boast, “I am the one who brought Japan to the war course.”

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Filed under Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, military, nationalism, Southeast Asia, U.S., USSR, war

by | 8 October 2026 · 9:13 am

Unwinnable War Inevitable, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 231-234:

On the morning of August 27, 1941, a group of graduate students at the Total War Research Institute [総力戦研究所, Sōryokusen Kenkyūjo] gathered at the official residence of the prime minister of Japan. The atmosphere was subdued, even gloomy, a mood made even more so by the on-and-off late-summer rain. In a grand chandelier-lit hall, the researchers, whose average age was a mere thirty-three, came face-to-face with the cabinet. From nine o’clock in the morning until six in the evening, and then again the following day, they presented a lengthy report. After careful consideration of an array of ministerial data, and having simulated various diplomatic and strategic situations over the previous six weeks, the group concluded that should Japan go to war with the United States and its allies, Japan would necessarily lose. If such a war occurred, Japan might very well prevail in a few initial battles, but it would then be forced into a prolonged war that would see its resources dwindle and eventually run out.

The researchers making the predictions had had approximately ten years of professional experience before joining the Total War Research Institute. The institute was opened in April 1941 and was loosely modeled on Britain’s Imperial Defence College, where officers and leaders were trained in an intensive one-year program. It was meant to be an elite educational institution that would prepare Japan’s future leaders, both military and civilian, for greatness.

The high aspirations of its founders were never realized. Each ministry sent its top candidate, so the students were the crème de la crème of Japan’s midcareer civil servants. But despite the institute’s prime location in central Tokyo, the building itself was enough to make the hearts of the newly arriving students sink. It was a two-story shanty that looked especially incongruous surrounded by the imposing redbrick buildings of the government district. Many recruits felt they had been dragged down to a lowly student existence.

The researchers liked the institute’s first dean, Lieutenant General Iimura Jo. An amiable man and a formidable linguist fluent in French and Russian, he had lectured at an army academy in Turkey and had translated many strategic documents into Japanese. His magnetic personality attracted some interesting people to give special talks at the institute, including one by Ozaki Hotsumi, [Richard] Sorge’s fellow spy. Still, most students were dissatisfied with the life that had been suddenly forced upon them. They had expected to do high-level research but were instead reduced to attending basic physical education and other unoriginal and often ill-prepared classes.

So a trip to Japan’s central region, starting on June 20, 1941, came as a much-needed breather. The group visited the navy’s flagship, the Nagato, at Ise Bay, where Yamamoto Isoroku was headquartered. Aboard the Nagato and another warship, the Hyuga, both equipped with the navy’s latest technologies, the researchers had special permission to observe maneuvers. Everything seemed to go beautifully. But the visitors were most impressed by the capacity of the ships to simulate torpedo attacks in total darkness with astonishing precision, guided by a lighting system embedded in the torpedo itself.

After the maneuvers, Yamamoto was eager to hear what the visitors thought of his fleet. He called on Higasa Hiroo, who’d come to the institute from the governor-general’s office in Korea. He responded with due deference: “I was impressed with your defense system against submarines, sir. The same goes for your bombing strategies. But I sensed a certain vulnerability to aerial attacks.”

Higasa was quite right. A lesser military man might have been irritated by the young civilian’s impertinence, but Yamamoto instead rewarded Higasa with a bottle of whiskey, by then a prized commodity in Japan. Yamamoto was pleased that Higasa had looked beyond the obvious and spoken frankly, something he felt Japan’s elites were generally incapable of. Yes, those impressive naval ships were not as unassailable as they appeared, and Yamamoto would have been the first to admit it.

The researchers remained with the fleet until it reached Shibushi Bay in southern Japan. (Adjacent to this bay was Kinko Bay, which is shaped remarkably like Pearl Harbor.) It was then that the radio informed them of Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union. That, and the resultant decision to occupy southern Indochina, suddenly made the researchers’ work far more urgent.

Shortly after their return to Tokyo, the researchers were assigned a war game exercise. Each member was given a cabinet role to play in a hypothetical government of a hypothetical country (modeled on Japan). From their respective cabinet positions, they were to participate in a hypothetical war with a hypothetical enemy (the United States) and its allies. The exercise started on July 12; not so far away, Foreign Minister Matsuoka was attending his final liaison conference.

For this total war, the cabinet needed to develop policies covering all areas of military strategy, diplomacy, ideology, and economics. The guidelines presented to the researchers by their instructors noted that “the various plans need to correspond to the changes in both domestic and external situations anticipated in the coming two years.… Your policies need to be devised on a specific monthly basis or on a few-monthly basis.” The researchers were meant to simulate real-world developments as accurately as possible, consulting actual data brought in by various ministers from their home ministries. In the end, this war seemed to be more real than imaginary.

At the start of the war game, Japan was on the cusp of declaring war on the United States. The U.S. and British governments having placed embargos against it, Japan was now completely isolated economically. Therefore, it would have to go farther into Southeast Asia to procure resources by force.

The researchers were uneasy with the premise provided by their instructors. They felt that going into Southeast Asia—most likely the Dutch East Indies—made war with the West inevitable, without giving diplomacy a chance to prevent it. Most cabinet members projected that the country would probably be able to secure the Indonesian oil fields but that the enemy fleet stationed in the Philippines would soon launch an all-out attack on Japanese ships, making the transport of resources impossible and defeating the whole purpose of accessing Indonesian oil. As a result, Japan would be provoked into a larger-scale war with the United States, which the country could ill afford. Most ministers had determined even before the simulation started that such a war would be unwinnable and should not be waged.

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by | 7 October 2026 · 6:57 am

Manchukuo Quagmire Spreads, 1930s

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 75-78:

By February 1932, the three Manchurian provinces of Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin were all under the control of the Japanese army. That garrison forces could occupy portions of China without formal approval sent a dangerous signal. Young and frustrated soldiers, willing to blame those in power for various social and economic difficulties facing Japan, had been wanting to force radical change for some time. Now inaction in Tokyo and the absence of clear instructions from the top invited further violent actions. The ancient samurai would have called this a retainer supplanting his lord. In modern military terms, it was simple insubordination. Yet no army leader was willing to put his foot down.

Japan’s actions in Manchuria marked a major step toward political isolation, even though very few Japanese recognized it as such. The Kwantung Army’s establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo—comprising the captured provinces—was proclaimed on March 1, 1932. International condemnation followed. On May 15, a group of young naval officers and army cadets burst into the prime minister’s official residence and shot Inukai; he died that evening. The killers were alarmed that Inukai was becoming soft on China, possibly yielding Japanese control of Manchukuo. Japan had been an exemplary member of the League of Nations throughout most of its existence, but the country renounced its membership in March 1933 on account of Manchukuo.

Sino-Japanese relations did not break down entirely, however, because of the confluence of pragmatic interests on both sides. Through the mid-1930s Tokyo oscillated between a more cautious, even friendly, China policy and a hardline approach backed by military pressure. Chiang, preoccupied by the problem of consolidating his control over the rest of China, and especially by fighting the Communists who had established independent “Soviet Republics” in the hinterland of southern and central China, seemed willing to overlook the sticky question of Manchukuo for the time being. He certainly did his best to avoid major clashes with Japan in the north. Recognizing a window of opportunity, the Kwantung Army expanded Japan’s sphere of influence first toward Rehe (Jehol) Province, west of Manchuria, which became part of Manchukuo in 1933, and then toward the nearby areas of Hebei and Chahar (Inner Mongolia). In a series of Sino-Japanese agreements reached in 1933 and 1935, the Guomindang accepted humiliating terms that included partial demilitarization of North China, the withdrawal of the Guomindang organizations from Manchukuo’s vicinity, and the establishment of autonomous, pro-Japanese governments in East Hebei and Chahar.

At home, as Japanese society struggled to recover from the economic slump caused by, among other things, the worldwide depression, fear and unrest were growing. In this dismal atmosphere, on February 26, 1936, a nearly successful coup was launched in Tokyo by young army officers. The officers assassinated several key government figures before surrendering. Prince Saionji, the principal target of the assassins, escaped. Prime Minister Hirota Koki’s cabinet was formed on March 9, but only after Prince Konoe had declined to assume the post, claiming poor health. (He may well have not wanted to purge elements sympathetic to the rebel officers, as he himself wished to remain on good terms with them. His later attempt to pardon the indicted officers only corroborates this view.)

Hirota’s government now adopted a tougher foreign policy as a way to divert domestic discontent. It called for a military buildup in preparation for a possible war with China, the Soviet Union, and the Western powers, all the while making plans for advancing into Southeast Asia. The Japanese policy shift was immediately felt in China, which explains the volatile atmosphere at the Marco Polo Bridge. The number of Japanese troops had tripled in 1936, to almost six thousand, without prior consultation with the Chinese.

China’s domestic situation had substantially changed by then. Japanese expansionism and Chiang’s ambition of leading a strong, unified China could only cohabit for so long. Because of his earlier concessions to Japan, Chiang had become increasingly vulnerable to Communist propaganda, which painted him as a traitor to the nation who gave into Japanese imperialist pressure and who was willing to sacrifice fellow Chinese. The decisive turning point happened in December 1936, when Chiang was kidnapped by the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, the son of Zhang Zuolin, a Manchurian warlord assassinated by the Japanese in 1928; Zhang wanted Chiang to join a united front against Japan together with the Communists. To preserve his legitimacy as China’s national leader, Chiang decided he could no longer afford to look conciliatory toward Japan. This meant that he and the Japanese army stopped sharing the same priority of defeating the Communists, be they Chinese or Soviet. This development, in turn, persuaded the Japanese military hardliners to push for a more aggressive policy, especially in the north, to sustain and maximize its existing interests.

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Filed under China, industry, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, U.N., USSR, war

by | 5 October 2026 · 5:47 am

1940 Olympics & 1937 Kamikaze

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 80-83:

The China War cost Japan the chance to recover the international respectability it had lost with its incursion into Manchuria. In July 1936, exactly one year before the outbreak of the war, Tokyo had won its bid to host the Olympic Games in 1940. The Japanese had lobbied tirelessly for the honor. It was to be one of the most important national projects for modern Japan, the first non-Western country to host the games. Construction of stadiums began swiftly. By 1938, though, international pressure on Japan to give up the games had been mounting. Some countries, including the United States, hinted at a boycott. With no end to the China War in sight, the military, worried about its resource requirements, suggested that only lumber and stone be used for projects related to the games. Major newspapers that had been the biggest cheerleaders for the Tokyo Olympics became conspicuously silent on the issue. In late June 1938, Konoe’s cabinet placed quotas on the use of industrial materials meant for projects other than war. This effectively put an end to Japan’s Olympic dream. Tokyo would have to wait another two dozen years for its moment of Olympic glory.

Ironically, the hardening of international opinion against Japan took place just as the country was experiencing a surge in self-confidence apart from its military might. At the 1937 Paris Exposition, the thirty-six-year-old architect Sakakura Junzo, a disciple of Le Corbusier, won the top prize for his Japanese Pavilion. In August, Tokyo proudly hosted the World Federation of Education Associations’ seventh biennial conference, the first to be held in Asia, which was attended by three thousand participants from forty-eight countries. And then there was the flight of the Kamikaze. When the two-seater left Tokyo on April 6, 1937, nobody in Europe seemed to have taken any notice of the great challenge that its twenty-four-year-old pilot, Iinuma Masaaki, and thirty-six-year-old flight engineer, Tsukagoshi Kenji, had undertaken. Japan was a completely unknown quantity in the glamorous but highly dangerous world of record-setting long-distance air races dominated by European and North American pilots. The Japanese flight was ostensibly planned to celebrate the coronation of King George VI, to be held on May 12, and to make goodwill visits to various European capitals. It was, in fact, a great publicity stunt for the Asahi, which followed in the footsteps of European newspapers by employing its own pilots to promote itself (and to gather news, of course).

The Kamikaze vogue became much more than a corporate advertisement as the whole nation became engrossed in the exploits of the two fliers. The aircraft, a test plane manufactured by Mitsubishi in Nagoya for military reconnaissance, was touted as “purely” Japanese-made, adding to the patriotic fervor. (Actually, the metals to construct it had come from somewhere else, as did the gasoline to fly it. And Tsukagoshi was half English.) The name of the plane was chosen from approximately five hundred thousand entries from Asahi readers. The naming ceremony on April 1 was presided over by Imperial Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, the emperor’s uncle by marriage, making the flight’s success all the more a matter of national pride.

The Western media, indifferent at first, became enthralled. By the time the plane left Karachi and entered Mediterranean airspace on April 8, Europe began to hold its breath. On April 9, the plane appeared in the sky over the southern London neighborhood of Croydon. The aircraft circled around a few times, as if to please the cheering crowd of four thousand, including three hundred Japanese filled with joy and pride. The plane made an impeccable landing at half past three. The two aviators had established a long-distance world record, flying between Tokyo and London in fifty-one hours, nineteen minutes, and twenty-three seconds, with an average speed of 185.9 miles (299.2 kilometers) per hour. The Times of London reported: “As the airmen struggled to the ground from Divine Wind, they were greeted with cheers and cries of ‘Banzai’ (‘live forever’), were decked with garlands of flowers and were submitted to an ordeal of handshaking and congratulation.” The two continued to receive an enthusiastic welcome, winning great accolades, including the Legion of Honor accorded by the French government. In Brussels, on April 16, they were presented with flowers by Suwa Nejiko, a former child prodigy about to launch her career as a concert violinist in Europe, along with the family of the Japanese ambassador to Belgium, Kurusu Saburo.

Not unlike the Kamikaze aviators, the violinist Suwa had known something of the weight of enormous national expectations. Her success on the international stage had been a great source of Japanese pride for most of her young life. Still, she was like any other awestruck seventeen-year-old when she met the pilots. “How dreamy they are, both of them! Mr. Iinuma particularly is so very handsome … and I could just stare and admire him as much as I liked! Such a happy day it’s been!” she recorded in her diary. This brief encounter in a Brussels airport presented a snapshot of the youthful beauty and exuberance that would soon elude Japan, like an ever-fleeting mirage. It was an image of Japan that could have been.

To celebrate the success of the Kamikaze flight, the proud sponsor published a message to the British nation in the pages of The Times on April 10, 1937. The flight, it said, would foster “an atmosphere of peace and cordiality in the midst of the storms and thunder which rage over international relations today and threaten the world peace of tomorrow.” If only that had been true. Alas, Konoe’s leadership did not live up to the feats of the Kamikaze.

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Filed under Britain, China, France, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, science, travel, war

by | 4 October 2026 · 6:05 am

Tojo’s Pessimism, 1941

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 29-30, 35:

Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

There had been no clear-cut, overwhelming consensus among the Japanese leaders to take preemptive actions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Many remained hopelessly uncertain and ambivalent about their decision. True, Tojo is famous for having said, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu,” and these words, referencing a Buddhist temple in Kyoto known for a veranda that juts out over a cliff, are often cited as a sign of his rash adventurism. But even Tojo, vilified as a military dictator who blindly pushed Japan into war, felt torn, especially in the two months preceding the attack. Throughout the course of the government’s final discussions over going to war, Tojo was acutely aware of the small possibility of Japanese victory. As a result, at the last minute, he tried to conciliate those who argued for immediate war. When he became prime minister on October 18, 1941, the first task he set himself was to attempt to resurrect diplomatic options with the United States.

Some leaders were misguidedly hopeful, but none were confident of Japan’s eventual victory. Tojo’s predecessor, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a civilian politician, was prime minister on and off for nearly three of the four years immediately prior to Pearl Harbor. His flirtations with a totalitarian style of leadership did incalculable damage to Japan’s international standing and helped to maximize the military voice in the government. But at the same time, Konoe was unmistakably against a war with the West. According to his aide and son-in-law, Hosokawa Morisada, upon hearing the news of Japan’s entry into war, Konoe barely managed to say, “What on earth! I really feel a miserable defeat coming. This [favorable situation for Japan] will only last two or three months.”

…

One should not, of course, underestimate the enormous pressure these leaders faced on the eve of Pearl Harbor. They felt they had to choose between waging a reckless war and giving up all of Japan’s imperialistic conquests of many years in order to stave off war. They tended to ignore that such extreme choices grew directly out of their own recent decisions and actions. As they made more diplomatic missteps and committed themselves to an impracticable war, claiming all the while to be more prepared than they ever were, their range of policy options both at home and with the outside world narrowed considerably. It was as if Tokyo had gotten stuck in the thin end of a funnel. The war option, it must have seemed to those leaders, provided the quickest and surest way of breaking free of that constricting situation. That they didn’t think about what would happen afterward was a tragic act of negligence.

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Filed under Japan, military, nationalism, Pacific, Southeast Asia, U.S., war