The Conquering Tide (94 page)

That same day, the Japanese public learned of the previous week's mass
civilian suicides on Saipan. The
Asahi Shinbun
printed a translated
New York Times
story on the deaths. Accompanying commentary in
Asahi
and other papers commixed sorrow with pride. The suicides were lauded as a beacon of hope and inspiration. The mothers who had killed their children and themselves were “the pride of Japanese women.” Kiyosawa collected other such examples of overwrought and lachrymose sentiments: “Courage springs forth a hundred, a thousand-fold more, a blaze of glory, for the first time in history. . . . The essence of a great race shines brightly at the last moment. . . . And thus we are strengthened by this, the true form of Japan.”
²⁶
Admiral Ugaki felt a deep sense of “shame,” but also thought the civilians had set a good example for their countrymen: “No people but the Yamato nation could do a thing like this. I think that if one hundred million Japanese people could have the same resolution as these facing this crisis, it wouldn't be difficult to find a way to victory.”
²⁷
Like Kiyosawa, the Tokyo diarist Aiko Takahashi was disgusted by the harrowing account and refused even to call it bravery: “We should have the courage, come hell or high water, to give up the fight.”
²⁸

The “imperial mandate” was conferred upon Koiso and Yonai on July 22, 1944. Together, they released statements emphasizing their determination to foster close cooperation between the army and the navy. Behind closed doors, they had discussed the need to take steps toward peace, but in their public communications they steadfastly resolved to carry on the war with undiminished intensity. “The Government will firmly adhere to the nation's established foreign policy,” said Koiso on taking office, “and work for a thorough-going realization of the principles of the Greater East Asia, thereby carrying the Holy War to a complete victory and thus setting the Imperial mind at ease.”
²⁹

The Koiso government was hobbled from the beginning. Its every move was carefully calibrated to reassure army hardliners. Insiders would compare the Koiso cabinet to a “charcoal-burning car”—like the retrofitted vehicles on the streets of wartime Tokyo, it moved haltingly and often broke down.
³⁰
Koiso was refused a seat on the Supreme Council, and thus was denied a voice in war strategy. Admiral Yonai found himself marginalized. Tojo's allies retained control of the
Kempeitai
and manipulated politics through the mechanisms of internal repression. Koiso dutifully mouthed the same bellicose avowals and victory forecasts that had been Tojo's trademark. On September 16, the new leader assured a national radio audience:
“Japan is preparing to launch a great offensive in the near future to crush Britain and America.”
³¹

Many senior figures in the ruling circle (including Konoye, Kido, Yonai, and perhaps the emperor) evidently regarded the Koiso cabinet as a transitional government. Getting rid of Tojo was a first step toward peace, but no further maneuvers in that direction could be safely attempted until conditions had ripened. What was needed, according to various opinions, was either a smashing victory or a catastrophic defeat. In late June, Kido had asked Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu to prepare a plan to seek a diplomatic settlement with the United States. The most likely route was to ask Stalin's government to act as a mediator. To this end, Kido warned Koiso to be scrupulous in avoiding any action likely to antagonize Russia. But all the senior government figures agreed that the rank and file of the army would not countenance a peace initiative until it was obvious that Japan was utterly defeated. When and if such a moment came, the emperor must be persuaded to end the war on the strength of an outright imperial decree.
³²

Hirohito clearly wanted to find a way out of the war, but he remained convinced that an acceptable peace could be negotiated only in the aftermath of a major victory. “I wanted to grasp the chance to quickly conclude a negotiated peace after striking a crushing blow on the enemy someplace,” he said in his postwar
Soliloquy
. “Then, with America staggering, we would have been able to find room for a compromise.”
³³
Steeped in the history of the Russo-Japanese War, determined at all costs to win his Battle of Tsushima, the emperor could not bring himself to admit that his nation was already defeated.

Critics have faulted Hirohito for failing to intervene sooner to stop the war, but there was never any realistic prospect of a negotiated peace. Terms short of unconditional surrender would not have enticed the Allies, while even the most dovish Japanese leaders assumed a diplomatic settlement must maintain some version of Japan's Asian empire. As for the militarist junta, terms of “peace” had been offered by two military “experts” in a broadcast by
Domei
News Service three weeks before the invasion of Saipan:

Complete destruction of American naval power and maritime trade; abolition of private banking institutions and trade unions; restriction of American steel and oil production; destruction of all shipyards except those building river and coastal vessels; creation of a political
authority, free from “influences wielded by economic interests” and modeled after the “pure sovereignty of Japan,” to maintain strict surveillance over the United States for ten or more years, or perhaps indefinitely.
³⁴

That offer was evidently tongue in cheek. It had not been presented by the foreign ministry or any other qualified representative of the Japanese government. But Kido's more earnest diary musings on the subject suggest that he had yet to face up to his country's dire predicament. He imagined that Japan might cling to some portion of its Asian empire by pitting the Allies against one another. In a March 31 entry, he surmised that Japan might approach the government of Great Britain and offer to mediate a truce with the Nazis. With peace restored in Europe, London might then be willing to assist Japan in negotiating a settlement with the United States. The British leadership, Kido presumed, would maneuver to prevent the Americans from becoming the supreme power in the Pacific. In the same vein, the Russians might choose to bolster Japan's regional standing as a bulwark against the Anglo-American nations.
³⁵

In early 1944, with the defeat of Germany and Japan already foreseeable, Kido sketched out terms of peace that would involve “considerable concessions.” He envisioned a five-nation commission involving the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. All other independent nations in the region would be made “permanent neutral powers, similar to Switzerland.” Japan would undertake not to fortify its occupied territories and islands. The five powers would agree to guarantee freedom of trade throughout the region. Japan would remain sovereign in Manchuria and Korea.

Such a proposal would have been rejected by the Allies at any time after December 7, 1941. By 1944, the United States and Britain were implacably committed to forcing Japan's unconditional surrender. Even so, Kido worried that his plan “may, at a glance, be considered too conciliatory and weak-kneed” by Japanese hardliners.
³⁶

Insofar as the Japanese people were permitted to know, a truce was unthinkable. Right-wing scholars took to the airwaves to extol the virtues of an ancient suicide cult, embodied in the legend of the 47 Ronin who resolved to take their lives in obeisance to a slain master. For the first time the public heard talk of “body crashing” and “sure hit” weapons—the
early euphemisms for suicide tactics to be employed by aircraft, submarines, and speedboats. A new slogan, “One hundred million smashed jewels,” carried the implication that the entire nation was to share the fate of Saipan's civilians. In the July issue of
Daijo Zen
, a Buddhist priest authored an article entitled “Be Prepared, One Hundred Million, for Death with Honor!”
³⁷
Historians lectured on the quasi-religious
kamikaze
(“divine wind”) that had defeated a Mongol invasion fleet seven and a half centuries earlier. One of the Koiso government's early initiatives was to arm and train civilians, including women, in the use of bamboo spears against enemy invaders.

In the mass media, Americans were increasingly depicted as “beasts,” “devils,” or “butchers.” It was categorically reported that they intended to slaughter every last Japanese man, woman, and child. The authorities warned that the enemy had already amassed thousands of canisters of poison gas to be released over the homeland. The newspapers were filled with descriptions of American battlefield atrocities and the mutilation or desecration of Japanese corpses. (Not all such reports were fabrications. A
Life
magazine photograph depicting an American woman admiring a Japanese skull was seen by millions of Japanese that summer.) When the Diet convened in September, Hirohito issued a rescript: “Today our imperial state is indeed challenged to reach powerfully for a decisive victory. You who are the leaders of our people must now renew your tenacity and, uniting in your resolve, smash our enemies' evil purposes, thereby furthering forever our imperial destiny.”
³⁸

The samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi had written about the challenge posed by an adversary who “while appearing to be beaten still inwardly refuses to acknowledge defeat.” In such cases, a swordsman must adopt a tactic called “knocking the heart out.”

This means that you suddenly change your attitude to stop the enemy from entertaining any such ideas, so the main thing is to see enemies feel defeated from the bottom of their hearts.

You can knock the heart out of people with weapons, or with your body, or with your mind. It is not to be understood in just one way. When your enemies have completely lost heart, you don't have to pay attention to them anymore. Otherwise, you remain mindful. If enemies still have ambitions, they will hardly collapse.
³⁹

The Pacific War had entered its endgame. But another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians would die before the heart was knocked out of the men who ruled Japan.

A
S OVERSEAS SHIPPING FELL PREY
to American air attacks and submarines, the Japanese economy fell to pieces. Rationing grew more stringent; skyrocketing inflation led to price controls and a burgeoning underground economy; shortages of food and household goods grew critical. Everyone went hungry except farmers, who prospered by selling food on the black market. White rice was the immemorial emblem of Japanese prosperity and bliss, but now urbanites could rarely get any of it, and had to make do with unhulled brown rice or other inferior substitutes such as sweet potatoes and barley. Women bartered their wedding kimonos for food and wore the rustic khaki trousers called
monpe
. Trees were cut down on streets and public parks; streetlamps and iron railings were removed for scrap metal; bells were taken away from temples and shrines. The public water supply was often interrupted, and the public bathhouses were usually closed. Ordinary Japanese, who had always valued their personal cleanliness, now bathed just two or three times per month. People despaired of getting rid of lice, and tried to ignore it. Outbreaks of tuberculosis claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

People were expected to work harder while eating less. Malnourishment and exhaustion comprised a nationwide syndrome, but the regime's answer—always the same answer—was that the people must arouse themselves to greater efforts and sacrifices. If tired, people should practice group calisthenics; the exercise would help lift their spirits, and never mind if it burned scarce calories. Military authority insinuated itself into commonplace domestic routines, as when an army colonel delivered a five-part radio lecture entitled “While You Are Eating Breakfast.” Every problem, deficiency, or impasse was put down to an “inadequacy of regulations”—but as new regulations proliferated, they took on an inflexible logic of their own. Kiyosawa, who read widely and kept detailed notes of the drift of official propaganda, detected an increasing tendency to blame civilians for Japan's production shortfalls: “Gradually there are emerging from the government arguments that attribute war responsibility to the productive inadequacy of the homefront.”
⁴⁰

Open dissent was seldom heard in wartime Japan. But undercurrents of
resentment and unrest grew steadily more conspicuous as the conflict wore on. Local officials and representatives of community councils often behaved like petty tyrants, and ordinary citizens suspected that they were diverting extra quantities of rationed food to their own kin. Aiko Takahashi told her diary that she was fed up with the endless mandatory civil defense meetings: “The community council big shots put on their pompous clothes and their pompous faces and strutted about with a pompous number of people.”
⁴¹
Officers of the
Kempeitai
, looking for evidence of foreign influences or leftist sympathies, barged into private homes in the dead of night. They pulled books off shelves, upended desk drawers, tore down pictures, and did not even deign to remove their shoes before entering a
tatami
room. One often-heard wartime rumor referred to an old man who was determined to obey all rules and regulations. He ate only his official rations, refusing all food obtained by his relatives on the black market. For his scruples he starved to death.

Ordinary people were prepared to suffer hardships and deprivations, but they expected their fellow citizens to bear the same load. Many commented bitterly on wealthy families whose domestic servants were engaged in work that did not advance the war effort. Affluent women escaped participation in the despised air-defense drills by sending maids in their place. Class antagonisms were channeled into acts of vandalism. Tires of private automobiles were slashed; rocks were thrown through windows; intruders broke into upscale homes and wantonly destroyed the furniture and housewares. Rumors of official corruption or special privileges for the wealthy and well-connected evoked a cold fury. It was widely known that the military was active behind the scenes in running the black market. Policemen and military authorities penalized ordinary citizens who traded illegally for food and other goods, but protected malefactors in their own ranks. Law courts and prosecutors were intimidated into backing off. Expensive restaurants were shut down by decree, ostensibly because of food shortages, but then reopened as military “clubs” where officers ate and drank heartily while being entertained by geishas. Hiroyo Arakawa, whose family ran a bakery in Tokyo's Fukagawa district, recalled that soldiers and policemen often helped themselves to goods from the local shops and refused to pay.
⁴²
This saying circulated in wartime Japan: “In this society there is nothing but the army, the navy, the big shots, and the black market. It is only fools who stand in line.”
⁴³