Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso, who had replaced Tojo in July, privately expressed concern about the brittle morale of the Japanese people. There was talk in his cabinet of relaxing censorship measures in hopes of restoring the regime’s fading credibility. With great fanfare, the Board of Information announced a policy of “free speech” and the “enlightenment of public opinion” in the press and broadcast media.9 On October 13, 1944, an NHK radio commentator explained that the new measures would “open the way for the people to express publicly what they are thinking. . . . There is no necessity anymore to exchange their opinions secretly in low voices.” Frank and truthful war reporting was intended to lift the morale of the Japanese people, to make them “feel happy and jolly.”10

  The very next day brought the first reports of the phantasmal sea victory off Formosa. At the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, a press liaison officer burst into the press room with a bottle of sake in hand. “Here comes a torpedo,” he shouted, and held up the bottle to represent an aerial torpedo speeding toward the hull of an American ship: “The moment we’ve been waiting for has come! It’s the Divine Wind, the Kamikaze!”11 Reports were still coming in, he said, but the returning Japanese flyers were unanimous—they had scored a sensational victory, the greatest yet of the war. The bottle was opened and the reporters and officers shared a toast.

  The next morning, a headline in the Asahi Shinbun reported “Great Battle Results Rare in History.” The paper reported that the Americans had lost 500,000 tons of shipping and 26,000 sailors killed in action.12 The triumphant voices of NHK newscasters resounded through the streets and alleys of Tokyo’s densely packed neighborhoods. The estimated tally rose steadily throughout the day, until at 3:00 p.m. the IGHQ stated definitively that Japanese warplanes had sunk ten aircraft carriers, eleven battleships, three cruisers, and a destroyer; they had also damaged three aircraft carriers, a battleship, four cruisers, and eleven other warships of unknown type.13

  Even an unschooled civilian could understand that these were extraordinary claims, but the authorities seemed sure of themselves, and the reports were backed up by the quoted testimony of Japanese pilots who had fought in the battle. Formosa would go down as the greatest victory of the war, they said—greater even than Admiral Togo’s victory over the Russians at Tsushima, perhaps even the most annihilating naval victory of all time. Radio correspondents were sent out to collect the views of Japanese civilians in “man-on-the-street” interviews. Every few hours, official announcements added new and exciting details. Newspapers put out late-day “extras,” and citizens waited in long lines at every newsstand. Prime Minister Koiso intoned that the great victory vindicated the “drawing-in” strategy that had been discussed in public for more than a year. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz of Germany sent a congratulatory telegram on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The Showa emperor proclaimed a public holiday to commemorate the “glorious victory” and announced that a special ration of “celebration” sake would be distributed to every home in the country. The Japanese people were given license to relive some of the euphoria of the early war—to party like it was the spring of 1942 again, when news of electrifying victories had come once or twice a week.14

  Within less than twenty-four hours after the first Formosa victory reports, senior military leaders knew that the claims had been (at the very least) grossly exaggerated. They would not know the full truth—that two American warships had been torpedoed, but none sunk—until after the war, but air reconnaissance reports on October 14 confirmed that the Third Fleet was largely intact. Fukudome said he knew by the end of that day that “the damage done to the enemy was slight, and I was convinced that a major invasion of the Philippines would soon be launched.”15 Admiral Matome Ugaki commented in his diary: “There are occasions when exaggeration may be necessary to uplift morale, but those in a position to direct operations mustn’t kid themselves by exaggerating the results achieved.”16 At IGHQ, on October 18, naval planners openly admitted to their army counterparts that the Japanese fleet was unlikely to survive (let alone win) another pitched naval battle against the Americans—but they wanted to fight it anyway, so that the Combined Fleet could “die a glorious death.”17

  Insofar as the Japanese public was concerned, however, the cat was out of the bag. The government and news media had chosen their story, and now they were stuck with it. Hirohito had given his imprimatur to the victory announcements, and official communiqués issued over the man-god’s seal were sacrosanct. Moreover, the supposed wipeout of the hated U.S. fleet had fed the nation’s collective emotional need for any sort of good news. All concerned—military leaders, reporters, editors, the public at large—desperately wanted to believe the thrilling reports. For the moment, at least, the news alleviated potent and potentially toxic internal pressures, and allayed concerns about the state of public morale. Looking back on the episode from a postwar perspective, a journalist who had covered the IGHQ concluded: “Theirs weren’t intentional lies, but rather signs of the acute anxiety, the desire everyone felt for something good to happen.”18

  On October 20, Koiso led a celebratory rally in Hibiya Public Hall, a ten-story terracotta building in Hibiya Park, near the heart of Tokyo. A tremendous crowd, probably more than 100,000 people, filled the park and adjacent streets and signaled their approval with raised fists and hats tossed in the air. The prime minister’s speech was carried live over the radio. He delivered a long philippic against American military forces, citing the bombing and strafing of civilians by American warplanes and the mutilation of dead Japanese soldiers on the battlefield; he charged that the Americans had abandoned all pretense of civilized warfare, and were no better than “mere beastly murderers, and nothing else. . . . The gods certainly will deal upon them a crushing blow of punishment.”19

  Koiso, whose government was three months old, had previously served as the governor-general of Korea. He was bald, with a feline, martial bearing; his imposing looks had earned him the nickname “Tiger of Korea.” Because Koiso had not commanded troops in the field during the present war, there was no stain of defeat on his hands. Having been away from Tokyo for two years, he had taken no part in the political intrigue and factional struggles that had led to the ouster of his predecessor, General Hideki Tojo, the previous July. Koiso had been selected as prime minister by a coterie of senior statesmen, not because he was thought to be an especially promising leader, but because objections were raised against all of the other candidates. His premiership was the product of a fragile consensus; he was little more than a figurehead. Having retired from active duty in 1938, he was not eligible to hold the post of army minister and was largely excluded from discussions of military strategy. Later, Koiso maintained that he was not even privy to much of what was happening during his nine-month stint in office: “I didn’t know what was really going on inside the military.”20

  Getting rid of Tojo had not corrected the root deficiencies of Japan’s wartime political regime. The forms and protocols of the Meiji Constitution were outwardly maintained, but the parliamentary parties had been sidelined, and real power was apportioned among a few staffs and departments in the military and bureaucracy. Army and navy leaders distrusted one another, and often backed irreconcilable strategies. The cabinet and various liaison bodies met to exchange views, but no one possessed the authority to implement a coherent policy across the entire regime. Under Tojo, the supreme decision-making body had been called the “Imperial Headquarters-Government Liaison Conference.” With Koiso’s succession, that committee had been dissolved and replaced with a panel of six called the Supreme War Direction Council—the “SWDC”—including the prime minister, the foreign minister, the army and navy ministers, and the respective chiefs of the army and navy general staffs. Later, and subsequently in the historical literature, this inner cabinet was nicknamed “the Big Six”—and although there were changes in personnel, it was this panel that would render major decisions until the end of the war.

  Big policy
changes could be achieved only with the unanimous support of these six men—and even then, only so long as they had the backing of the court aristocracy, the imperial household staff, and the emperor himself. As always, decisions were achieved by the plodding and painstaking method of nemawashi, or “digging around the roots for a consensus.” In the event of a deadlock, nothing could be done. Often in such cases, the army and navy would pursue their own lines of action, but for the sake of appearances pretend that they were coordinated elements of a grand strategy. Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, a former prime minister who returned to government as navy minister and vice premier in Koiso’s government, explained that not even a vote of the council could break an impasse. “It isn’t a question of a majority vote,” he told interrogators after the war. “If they can’t obtain agreement on a question, it means there is a lack of unity.”21 When consensus did not exist, inertia prevailed. Whatever its prior direction had been, Japan would continue in that direction.

  Hirohito, the forty-three-year-old Showa emperor, had given his personal support to General Tojo, and had long resisted efforts to oust him from power. Toward the end of Tojo’s tenure, Prince Takamatsu, the sovereign’s younger brother, had begun to criticize Hirohito in imperial court circles, suggesting that he was allowing national affairs to drift out of control. The emperor’s role in government was limited by prevailing interpretations of the constitution, but he wielded great intangible authority even over those who knew he was not actually a god. The degree of his responsibility for the war and its miseries remains the subject of spirited debate among scholars and historians. Before December 1941, Hirohito had resisted the drift toward war, urging the maintenance of stability both at home and in international affairs. He had demanded that army hotheads and insurgents be suppressed and punished. But such exhortations did not carry any real constitutional weight, and were not binding except in the rare circumstance that a deadlocked cabinet sought a “sacred decision.” In finally acquiescing to the ouster of Tojo in July 1944, Hirohito pressed his new government to lay the groundwork for a diplomatic initiative to end the war. But he did not propose establishing direct contact with the Allied governments to seek an armistice. He believed that Japan must first score a smashing victory against the Americans, perhaps in the impending Philippine campaign, before the time would become ripe for diplomacy. In his postwar “Soliloquy,” Hirohito stated that he had wanted to pour all of Japan’s remaining military power into the defense of Leyte Island: “Then, with America staggering, we would have been able to find room for a compromise.”22

  No one in government dared talk of surrender, or even a treaty settlement that would require Japan to give up the overseas territories it had held before 1941. At a minimum, the Allies would have to abandon their demand for unconditional surrender and consent to sit down at a negotiating table. Still, the men who ruled Japan understood that diplomacy must play a role in the war’s final act, and Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu had several irons in the fire. Tentative peace feelers were sent out from Japanese embassies in neutral European countries, including Sweden, Portugal, and Switzerland. Hoping to end the war in China, Shigemitsu’s envoys had approached Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist regime in Nanjing, offering to withdraw Japanese forces from the country if Chiang Kai-shek would sever his relationship with the Allies and pledge a “benevolent neutrality.” This overture led nowhere, partly because the intermediaries approached by the Japanese government did not have much influence with Chiang, and partly because the Chinese could see that Japan was on its way to defeat in the Pacific.23

  The linchpin of plans for a diplomatic “off-ramp” involved enlisting the Soviet government to act as a mediator between Tokyo and Washington. This scheme, never especially realistic, had been discussed at length prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Shigemitsu now hoped to bring it to harvest. His ambassador to Moscow opened a dialogue with the Kremlin, offering to arrange peace talks between Russia and Germany. With peace restored on the eastern front in Europe, Moscow might then mediate a negotiated settlement of the Pacific War. But when the proposal was put before Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov in September 1944, he rejected it firmly. The idea would have been far-fetched at any point during the Nazi-Soviet War—but at that late date, when the Allies were advancing against Nazi Germany from east and west, it was a nonstarter. When the Japanese proposed extending the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact beyond its scheduled expiration in the spring of 1946, Molotov replied that the issue could be addressed in good time. Shigemitsu and his colleagues had no inkling that Josef Stalin had hinted broadly to FDR that he would turn his forces loose on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated, or that he would make that commitment explicit at the Yalta conference in February 1945. Japanese diplomats continued to nurture futile hopes of a Stalin-assisted armistice until the last week of the war, when the Soviets suddenly declared war on Japan and the Red Army charged into Manchuria.

  In truth, political conditions in Japan would not permit a concerted bid to end the war through diplomacy, and all the leading figures in and out of government knew it. Getting rid of Tojo had been a necessary first step toward a diplomatic exit, but a sudden turn toward peace in the fall of 1944 would arouse the fervent resistance of army hardliners. The military police (Kempetai) kept cabinet ministers and other leading figures under surveillance, vigilant to the prospect of a back-channel bid for peace talks. Tojo continued to exert influence over this state security apparatus even after leaving power, and many suspected that the deposed leader was preparing the ground for a coup d’etat. With good reason, the ruling group feared a return to the military factionalism, insurrectionary violence, and targeted assassinations of the 1930s. Civil war did not seem beyond possibility. According to Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, the last prewar ambassador to the United States, the regime’s habit of celebrating make-believe victories was self-defeating, because Japanese public opinion was never prepared for a negotiated settlement. “If we had stopped the war any earlier the people would not have understood. They had never been told the truth about the situation and there would have been civil war in Japan among the people . . . it seems to me that it was the destiny of our country to continue this very unwise war to the very end.”24

  From the start, Koiso’s public statements echoed those of his predecessor. There was no discernible shift in tone, certainly no hint that his cabinet might be exploring options to end the war. The new prime minister declared that the conflict was approaching a furious new stage, when the Japanese people must unite to resist the enemy with fanatical zeal. The week the new government took power, the Tokyo papers were full of references to American “beasts,” “butchers,” and “demons.” A photograph published in Life magazine, depicting an American woman admiring a Japanese skull collected as a battlefield souvenir, was given wide publicity. It was reported that the United States had emptied its prisons to fill the ranks of its army. “We cannot but feel shocked with disgust,” remarked an NHK radio commentator in August 1944. “Unless they take advantage of the brutal spirit of criminals, Americans cannot fight as normal brave fighters. This proves they are nothing but gangs of wild animals.”25 In a speech to the Diet (Japan’s national parliament) on September 8, 1944, Koiso warned: “We must do well to consider the possibility of the enemy landing on our home soil.”26 His home ministry announced plans for nationwide training of civilians in hand-to-hand combat. Women, children, and old men would join the ranks of a homeland defense force: they would resist the hated barbarian with homemade weapons and bamboo spears whenever he set his filthy barbarian’s boots on the divine shores of Japan.

  With the U.S. conquest of the Marianas, large-scale aerial bombing of the homeland was to be expected, and the government ordered new civil defense measures. On August 16, 1944, the transportation ministry announced a series of measures to “counteract the disrupted conditions resulting under air raids, naval bombardment, and other forms of enemy attacks,” which would include “firs
t aid, emergency commodity distribution, patrol, evacuation, prevention of epidemics, water supply, cleaning of debris, and emergency restoration to normalcy.”27 Long swaths of houses and buildings were razed to create urban firebreaks. Schoolchildren were put to work building the fantastical weapons known as “balloon bombs,” which would be launched into the jet stream to be carried some 5,000 miles across the North Pacific to strike random targets on the U.S. mainland. Speeches, newspaper articles, and radio broadcasts dwelled on overtly religious and mythological themes. Koiso, a devout Shinto practitioner, made a publicized visit to the Ise Grand Shrine shortly after taking office, declaring a new national slogan: “National Responsibility Must Be Returned to the Highest Commander.”28 This purposely ambiguous reference was best read as a prophecy: when the moment of supreme crisis arrived, the Showa emperor would summon the ancient gods to protect the homeland.

  The next major American offensive, whether it fell on the Philippines, Formosa, or the Ryukyus, would likely sever Japan’s economic lifeline to the oil fields and other natural resources of the East Indies. That could trigger a collapse of the Japanese economy at the same time that it immobilized the fleet and cut Japanese island garrisons off from seaborne support. More than two years of sedulous lying would be exposed for what it was. At the same time, Japan’s only real ally appeared to be losing the war in Europe. Any citizen with a rudimentary understanding of the global conflict knew that by launching its war in the Pacific, Japan had placed an enormous wager on the ascendency of Nazi Germany. If trends held, the great pile of chips would soon be swept from the table.