Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (2 page)

The experience of Hans Kettle’s grandfather is not unique.
Virtually all of these Germans were well treated by their Japanese captors.
The death rate amongst the Germans was extremely low — 1.2 per cent.
And a wonderful collection of photographs of the German POWs in Bando camp survives, showing them fit, healthy and thriving — frolicking in the water and then drinking beer in their comfortable camp.
Their experience was more like a healthy weekend scouting exercise than the horrors of
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.
Such Japanese kindness was not just confined to treatment of prisoners in the First World War.
In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, F.A.
Mackenzie, special correspondent of the
Daily Mail
, wrote, ‘It is impossible to speak too highly of the great care and attention which the Japanese people show their stricken enemies.’

All of which leaves a history which is at once more intriguing and complex than the popular myth of the Japanese as universally cruel, and also begs the crucial question: When and how did this Japanese attitude of generosity in war change?

These European prisoners of war were benefiting from an imperial command of 1880 that called on the Japanese armed forces to treat captured prisoners with respect.
This imperial command, in turn, was influenced by the prevailing Japanese desire to act like a modern, Western nation and by a wish to emphasize the elements of compassion that had always existed in the Japanese warrior code.

It is common knowledge that Japan had been a country effectively isolated from the rest of the world until the second half of the nineteenth century.
Equally well known is Japan’s headlong desire in the years that followed to adopt Western inventions and industry.
But far less well known is the political revolution that was occurring at the same time — a revolution that would have far-reaching consequences.
Central to this revolution was the seismic change in the role of the emperor.
There had been an emperor on the throne of Japan for two thousand years — but for the last six hundred, under the dominance of the Shogun (the most powerful warlord in the country) and the warrior elite, the emperor had held little real power, considered too ‘special’ to be bothered with real governance.
It had been successive Shoguns who had dominated Japan.
The arrival of Commander Matthew Perry and his American warships in Tokyo Bay in 1853 on their mission to open Japan to international trade was the catalyst not just for the Japanese desire to learn Western technology, but also for profound political change.
In the argument and confusion that swept through the Japanese elite in the wake of Perry’s visit, power began to seep slowly back to the emperor as infighting grew between the rival clans that together had dominated the Shogunate.
In the midst of this conflict, Emperor Komei died in February 1867 and was succeeded by Meiji, his fifteen-year-old son.
It was to be a new beginning for the institution of the emperor.

After Emperor Meiji’s succession the Japanese did not just try to learn the industrial secrets of the West (whilst cleverly ensuring that their industrial base remained under Japanese ownership); they also began to examine the political processes of the foreigners — in particular studying the democratic systems of Britain and the USA.
During the 1880s Emperor Meiji and his advisers discussed what political shape the new Japan should have.
One of those whom they consulted was the former US President, Ulysses S.
Grant.
Ironically, given that the political solution which resulted was to help cause many of the subsequent problems that the USA encountered with Japan, Grant cautioned against allowing any new parliament too much power.
¹
Eventually, in February 1889, the Meiji constitution was unveiled.
The first elected parliament of Japan was created — the Imperial Diet.
But only property owners (less than 2 per cent of the population) were enfranchised.
The over-arching concern of the framers of the constitution was to consolidate the new powers of the emperor.
From the first, this was no British style constitutional monarchy.
No criticism of the emperor was to be permitted.
Only the emperor could declare war and only the emperor could make peace.
And since the emperor was, under the constitution, supreme commander of the armed forces, the heads of the army and navy swiftly claimed the right to report direct to him, bypassing the elected cabinet.
(A further consequence of the new political system established by the Meiji constitution was to give even more power and control to the armed forces.
The army and navy ministers who were members of the cabinet could only be appointed from the ranks of retired or serving generals or admirals.
This meant that if they resigned and no suitable general or admiral was willing to replace them, the government would fall.
It was as if the system had been designed to create a military that could not be controlled by the elected representatives of the people.)

As the nineteenth century came to a close the Japanese had adopted a new constitution, had introduced heavy industry to their country and were building a modern army.
Now they looked at the powerful Western nations and learnt there was one more attribute they needed in order to be considered a powerful, sophisticated nation — colonies.
Virtually all of Southeast Asia was under foreign domination — the British ruled Burma and Malaya, the Dutch the East Indies and the French today’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The lesson the Japanese took from this was clear; strong nations had the right — almost the obligation — to dominate weaker ones.
As soon as they felt powerful enough the Japanese moved on their neighbours Korea and Taiwan (then called Formosa).
In the hope of halting Japanese aggression on the Asian mainland, in 1894 the Chinese signed a treaty that gave Taiwan to Japan — an act that demonstrated to the Japanese how weak the once mighty empire of China, now torn apart by internal conflict, had become.
Similarly, the Russian Empire discovered the power of the imperial armed forces when, in 1904, Japanese ships sank the Tsar’s fleet in a surprise attack at Port Arthur.
Korea was also brought under Japanese control and formally made part of the Japanese ‘Empire’ in 1910.
During the First World War the Japanese, obliged to fight on the British side as the result of another treaty, gained further colonies, this time at the expense of Germany — Kiaochao in China and the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall islands in the Pacific.
Then, in 1915, with the West distracted by the war in Europe, the Japanese moved their army deeper into Manchuria, occupying key positions in order to ‘protect their interests’.The First World War ended with Japan’s position as the most modern, powerful, industrialized nation in Asia confirmed.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that during this period the Japanese treated European prisoners humanely — was Japan not effectively a European nation itself?

While their army triumphed over Japan’s neighbours abroad, at home in 192S the vote was given to every Japanese adult.
On the surface, democracy seemed entrenched.
Political parties argued with each other as Japanese women shopped for Western-style clothes and goods in the Ginza in Tokyo.
In the early 1920s Crown Prince Hirohito went on a much-publicized visit to Britain and played golf with the Prince of Wales.
It was as if all Japan had heeded the words of the popular slogan, first coined by an academic in 1885, ‘Abandon Asia — go for the West!’
But all this was only on the surface.
The most significant legacy of the Meiji constitution remained etched into this new Japanese society — the most decidedly non-Western power of the monarch.
And, most crucially of all, the emperor of Japan was, as a direct result of the Meiji restoration, now considered by his subjects to be more than a mere human being.
A few Japanese had always acted as if their emperor was divine, but to the majority of Japanese pre-Meiji the emperor had been a remote figure, with no control over their lives.
In the late nineteenth century all that had changed.
In a conscious attempt by the monarchists to make the position of the emperor inviolable, Shinto (the ancient animistic religion of Japan) was made the state religion and it was decreed that the emperor, as a descendant of the sun-goddess, should be worshipped as a god.
The importance of this conscious, political act cannot be over-estimated.
The subsequent Japanese perception of their emperor was to condition virtually all their actions.
‘The emperor at that time was called a “living god”,’ says Kenichiro Oonuki, a Japanese schoolboy during the 1920s.
‘We were taught that the emperor was a god in the form of a human being.
That was the education we received.
When you think about it realistically, it is strange, and it’s not possible, but that’s what we were taught.’
For Shigeaki Kinjou, growing up on the remote island of Tokashiki nearly 300 miles southeast of Tokyo, the pervasive belief that the emperor was a living god led to one simple conclusion: ‘The Japanese people belonged to the emperor.
We were his children.’

On Christmas Day 1926 the Emperor Meiji’s grandson, a new ‘living god’, ascended the Japanese throne.
He was a shy, bespectacled twenty-five-year-old, who would become known to the world as Emperor Hirohito.
His education had reflected the prevailing Japanese dichotomy.
On the one hand he had received the traditional schooling, at the hands of senior military officers and other retainers, that befitted a future emperor; on the other he had developed a taste for modern science, particularly marine biology.
He came to power in an era that had proved disastrous for monarchies around the world.
Seven years earlier, as the First World War ended, the Kaiser had been forced from Germany, and only a few years before that the Tsar had been toppled in Russia.
And now, throughout Europe in the aftermath of these revolutions, both intellectuals and labourers were becoming increasingly interested in the anti-religious, anti-monarchistic creed of communism.

In Japan, the years of strong leadership represented by the reign of the Emperor Meiji were far behind.
The country had recently endured the rule of the Emperor Taisho, an ineffectual monarch who had been so incapable that Hirohito, his son, had acted as his regent since 1921.
And in the wider world it appeared that the ruthless Darwinian ideals of the decades before the First World War, when all that mattered in the great land-grab race for colonies was who was stronger, were now out of fashion.
Japanese delegates travelled to the Versailles and Washington conferences convened after the war and committed their country to a raft of treaties based on ‘modern’ principles aimed at the elimination of aggressive war and the peaceful solution of international problems through discussion and compromise in new institutions like the League of Nations.

Therefore as Hirohito came to the throne the paradox of his education and interests — half ancient tradition, half modern technology — was replicated in the country he ruled — half headlong search to embrace the values of the West, half the institutionalization of archaic beliefs.
In such a situation the desire of the monarchists publicly to entrench the young emperor even more deeply in the minds of his subjects as a god is understandable.
Now was not the time to show weakness and allow any discussion about the role of the monarchy, now was the time to embrace the values of the Meiji constitution — still less than forty years old — and confirm Hirohito as an ancient-style ruler of an ultra-modern society.
This was the thinking behind the lengthy and elaborate series of ceremonies that marked Hirohito’s accession to the throne, beginning with a glittering procession from the modern capital, Tokyo, to the traditional home of the emperor and sacred ancient capital, Kyoto, in November 1928.
And it was no accident that only days after the elaborate religious (and often secret) ceremonies to confirm his divine right to rule, the young emperor attended a huge military review in Tokyo — the largest in the history of Japan.
As 35,000 troops saluted him, it must have been clear to Hirohito which Japanese institution kept him securely in power.
And, simultaneously, he must have taken comfort in the knowledge that the Meiji constitution allowed the commanders of the armed forces to report directly to him.

The immediate years after Hirohito’s enthronement were unsettled in Japan.
Just as in Germany, where the optimism of the Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s was crushed by the depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, so in Japan the ‘Western years’ following the end of the First World War were not to endure.
Many of the reasons for the subsequent unrest were shared by both countries.
First, both Germany and Japan suffered sudden economic depression.
Japan had already entered an agricultural slump before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 plunged the USA into financial catastrophe.
With their own problems at home the Americans were now less keen on purchasing imported luxuries like silk, and many Japanese farmers went bankrupt.
‘Here you couldn’t find work — unemployment was high,’ says Yoshio Tshuchiya who grew up in the north of Japan during the late 1920s.
He remembers ‘seven or eight’ girls from his school being sold into prostitution by their parents.
‘If they had money they didn’t have to go,’ he says.
‘But because that family was poor, well, they went.
I felt very sorry.
Yes, I sympathized.’

Simultaneously with economic depression, Japan faced another problem that the Germans — especially the fledgling Nazi party — would have understood: the search for Lebensraum (living space).
Many prominent Japanese felt there was simply not enough room in their country — the majority of which is mountainous and scarcely habitable — for the growing number of people.
‘At the time the problem was our population was increasing,’ says Masatake Okumiya, who held a senior position in the Imperial Navy during the Second World War, ‘and our natural resources couldn’t sustain the increase.
Ideally we hoped to receive cooperation from other countries to solve the problem, but back then the world was under the control of the West and a peaceful solution seemed impossible.’
Even more than in Germany, the perceived lack of living space dominated Japanese political discourse.
The population density in Japan was one of the highest in the world.
(Lack of space had for thousands of years conditioned Japanese culture.
A society so crammed together is less likely to tolerate the disruptive individualist, and more emphasis has, out of geographical necessity, to be placed on the need for consensus and ‘harmony’ within the group.)