An Inoffensive Rearmament

by Frank Kowalski

  “Your soldiers fought well and you won the war, but we do not understand democracy like you do. Our soldiers need something more to fight for,” answered General Hayashi.

  I wondered, could there be something greater than democracy to inspire a people? I was puzzled. Nevertheless, I left General Hayashi with a sense of good feeling. It was apparent that the Japanese leaders of the NPR were as deeply concerned as we were with the development of the moral fiber of their fighting force.

  There were others, too, who were thinking about seishin kyōiku. Newsman Frank Robertson, writing about the new security force, had also recognized the uncertain spiritual vacuum. “But something is missing,” he wrote one time,

  and if it escapes the attention of the American instructors, it is noted with some foreboding by thoughtful Japanese, who ask what is to replace Emperor worship as a source of discipline. Far from being impassive Orientals, the Japanese are highly emotional people, the men particularly. This emotion channeled by Emperor worship made them fight as frantically as they did in World War II. Emperor Hirohito still holds tremendous sway over the Japanese people, but for the time being at least the NPR is not the Emperor’s Army.

  No, the NPR was not yet the emperor’s army. We hoped it would never become his army. But we wanted a viable fighting force, a force that could take its place on the firing line, among American units, if the Korean War ever came to Japan. One thing was certain, if the Japanese needed seishin kyōiku to become good soldiers, then we all wanted to know more about it.

  My interpreter, Mr. Kitamura, was a veritable encyclopedia on Japanese history, religion, and mores, so I began to question him about seishin kyōiku. “Seishin kyōiku was very important to Japanese soldier,” he began. “Americans say it is ‘emperor worship.’ True, but it’s more. Did you ever hear about bushidō, Colonel?” he asked. “Bushidō,” Kitamura began to explain,

  is what made seishin kyōiku work in the Imperial Japanese Army. You have heard about the samurai—the warriors of old Japan? Well you know the samurai were like your knights of King Arthur. Bushidō was their way of life. It was a code of ethics, a set of moral principles which guided the life and behavior of the samurai. It was a mixture of chivalry, Buddhism, ancient Chinese philosophy, and Shintōism. Like your chivalry, it flourished in the soil of feudalism. As a code of behavior for life and battle, it was passed on by word of mouth from father to son. Little boys learned about bushidō on their mother’s knees listening to stories about the samurai. Bushidō was born with the samurai and lived on to inspire the Imperial soldier of Japan. The samurai offered his life to the sun goddess Amaterasu. Our “heitai,” the simple soldier of the last war, dedicated his life to the emperor whom he worshipped as “the son of heaven.”1

  “Do you think, Kitamura-san,” I interrupted, “that our yobitai have seishin kyōiku?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered with some confusion. “But all Japanese have bushidō in them and the yobitai are Japanese.”

  I had the same feeling about our yobitai. Kitamura went on to explain that from Buddhism, bushidō passed on to the Japanese serenity, calmness, peaceful contemplation, indifference to pain, a disdain of life, and hopeful anticipation of death. Bushidō cooled the hot brow of the warrior and gave him poise and dignity, harmonizing his life with the Universal Being.

  From the ancient Chinese philosophies, bushidō distilled the politico-ethics of Confucius. It helped to cement the relationship between master and servant and sovereign and subject. It argued the infallibility of conscience and emphasized cleavage between right and wrong.

  The native religion of Shintō, or Way of the Gods, gave bushidō its special Japanese twist, a filial piety and reverence for ancestors that has no equal in any other creed in the world. It glorified man who indeed was believed to be part god. It taught that the soil of Japan was sacred, the abode of gods where the spirits of the ancestors continued to live and watch over the living. Shintō gave bushidō a uniquely Japanese love of race and country. It anchored the warrior to the twin pillars of patriotism and loyalty.

  With the flow of generations, these simple precepts became a way of life for the common folk. There was stamped upon the people and the whole nation a deep sense of moral goodness and rigid conformance to strict ethical principles. Japan became a nation of stoics who placed high moral value on endurance, fortitude, and perseverance. It glorified suffering and enshrined those who sacrificed. There is, for example, a story of a little prince who bravely proclaims, “For a samurai, when his stomach is empty, it is a disgrace to be hungry.” And a young mother in a nursery tale reproaches her first born with, “What a coward to cry for a trifling pain! What will you do when an arm is cut off?” This was the bushidō of the samurai and of the common man. It helps us understand the banzai charge, the kamikaze, and the Japanese soldier fighting onto death. “All Japanese have bushidō in them.”

  Unfortunately for Japan and also for the rest of the world, bushidō was susceptible to easy perversion. In the hands of superpatriots, it became a powerful tool of the militarists. While it could inspire a simple peasant soldier to a hero’s death, bushidō could also be used indoctrinate a people into believing that they were the chosen of the gods.

  Playing on the emotional strings of patriotism, loyalty, and racial superiority, militarists seized the imagination of the Japanese people. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), they kindled in the breasts of the humble farmer and the factory worker a fiery zeal not unlike that which burned in the hearts of the Crusaders. Whereas the Crusaders banded together in the name of Christianity, the people of Japan bowed as one to the tennō. A nation of little gods became convinced its number one god, the emperor, would lead the Japanese to world domination.

  Probably the question that puzzled Americans during the occupation more than any other was, “How could the nips ever believe that they could whip the United States? Why did they ever get sucked into the war?” I used to ponder this question because during my four and a half years’ stay in Japan, I grew to like the people very much. I found them extremely intelligent, practical, and hardworking. I could not understand why these sensible people permitted themselves to get into the war.

  The best explanation for their involvement that I heard came from a senior officer of the Japanese Imperial Navy. “It was the stupid army,” he said, “that got us into the war. The navy had better sense. We were better informed. Between the First and Second World Wars our navy visited many countries. So did our diplomats and businessmen. We knew the world. We knew the United States. We were very much aware of the economic capabilities of your country and the potential of your people. We in the navy did not believe we had any business fighting you.” Continuing, he said, “But the army was stupid. Its senior officers were fooled by their own success in China and Manchuria. They knew only the limited capabilities of the backward Chinese people. They were uneducated men and uninformed about the rest of the world. Because they were able to whip the Chinese, they thought they could whip the Americans. The army generals got us into the war because they were ignorant.”

  Maybe so, but I often wondered the role of tennō, the divine emperor of Japan, and the appointed destiny of a mesmerized people. It is hard to believe today that just prior to World War II, General Senjurō Hayashi (no relative of my friend), then minister of war, could frantically declare to the effect that not only the Imperial Army but the entire nation regarded the emperor as a living god, and that for Japanese it was not a question of historical or scientific accuracy but an article of national faith.

  This, mind you, was a public statement made by a minister of a modern nation in the twentieth century. How could anyone believe in a “living god”? I could not understand it, until one day I had an unusual opportunity to get a feeling of how deeply the Japanese felt about their emperor. We were on an inspection tour of camps on the northern island of Hokkaidō, traveling comfortably in a special railroad car. In the group were four Japanese officers of Gen
eral Group Headquarters, General Hayashi, and myself. Before dinner, we sat down to have some traditional saké. I broke out a bottle of scotch and a bottle of bourbon. Before long we all deserted the saké, and my friends’ faces began to glow with the warm relaxed flush that American whiskey always brought to Japanese faces.

  General Hayashi, before his appointment as chief of the General Group, in his capacity as steward to the Imperial household, was very close to the Imperial family and especially Emperor Hirohito. As the evening wore on, I finally found the courage to ask him about his life and experiences at the Imperial Palace. The subject was not taboo, but I noted a reluctance in the Japanese to talk about the emperor. General Hayashi put his glass down and looked at me sternly. Then he began to talk in a low whisper. When he mentioned the emperor, he bowed his head in reverence and the four aides drew in their breaths audibly. They leaned forward as one, listening intently. “Colonel,” concluded Hayashi, his face aglow with a beautiful light that only complete faith can bring, “you cannot realize what it is for a Japanese to be in the presence of the emperor. It is like something out of this world. It is beautiful. In his presence, you are overcome with calm and serenity.”

  The general’s face was burning with fever, and his eyes were glazed. His aides sat in a trance, staring into the infinite. Time had stopped for them.

  I didn’t find out much that evening about life in the Imperial household, but I think I learned something about the Japanese people and their emotional attachment to their emperor. General Hayashi was no ignorant peasant, nor were his officers. They were all intelligent, highly sophisticated men. Nor can I believe that General Hayashi was taken in by any false concepts of race superiority. He was simply a Japanese person reared in the quasi-religious climate of bushidō who acquired a heavy dose of seishin kyōiku from his military father, and his conditioning was showing that evening. His devotion and that of his officers to the sacred emperor may be fantastic for the Western mind, but it is deeply rooted in the Japanese. It is beyond reason or scientific analysis.

  We were indeed well-advised at the time of our victory over Japan in refraining from attacking the institution of the emperor. Our acceptance and retention of the emperor made the task of occupying and governing the country infinitely easier. For belief in the divinity of the emperor was so deeply ingrained in the people of Japan that even in the blackest days of national defeat the son of heaven was able to order his people to surrender to the Western barbarians, and his most fanatical subjects accepted his will without a murmur.

  Even Sanzō Nosaka, the oracle of the Japan Communist Party, never once directly attacked the institution of the emperor. It makes one wonder whether Nosaka and the communist leadership could have visualized a communist Japan with an emperor behind the moat in the Imperial Palace at Tōkyō. Some believe that’s the kind of communism Japan could accept.

  Legend records that the sun goddess, Amaterasu Ōmikami, ordered her grandson, Ninigi no Mikoto, to the Islands of Japan, the Divine Land, to govern the people living there. The warlike tribes that Ninigi found were themselves descendants of lesser gods. According to Kojiki, a manuscript written about AD 700–800, Jimmu Tennō, the great great grandson of Ninigi no Mikoto, and, of course, a direct descendant of the sun goddess, finally subdued the warring tribes and established the Imperial throne of Japan. Starting with Jimmu, so the Imperial manuscripts record, his descendants have ruled the Divine Land without interruption for more than 2,600 years.

  In time, legend became a national faith, and finally in the nineteenth century, the Meiji constitution transcribed national faith into legal reality. Article 3 of the prewar constitution declared, “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”

  In their dedication to the emperor god, the Japanese people took their cue from the army. The Imperial soldier, or heitai, became the natural successor of the samurai. At the completion of his tour of military services, he returned home to breathe fire and inspiration into the hearts of his family and friends. The sacred emperor remained his commander for life, for the Japanese soldier had a very personal relationship with his emperor. That relationship was clearly defined in the Imperial Rescript of Emperor Meiji, and its simple precepts became the soldier’s bible. It told the soldier and the nation how to live, how to fight, and how to die. Because the Imperial Rescript had such profound influence on the Japanese fighting force and the nation, I read the document very carefully.

  Emperor Meiji begins his rescript with the declarations, “The forces of our Empire are in all ages under the command of the Emperor. . . . The supreme command of our forces is in our hands, and although we may entrust subordinate commands to our subjects, yet the ultimate authority we ourselves shall hold and never delegate to any subjects. . . . Soldiers and Sailors, we are your supreme commander-in-chief.”

  This left not the slightest question in the mind of the simplest heitai as to his relationship with his emperor. The Imperial Rescript as the Holy Writ of the Imperial Forces enunciated five basic virtues. The first was loyalty:

  The soldier and sailor should consider loyalty their essential duty. A soldier or sailor in whom this spirit is not strong however skilled in art or proficient in science, is a mere puppet, and a body of soldiers and sailors wanting in loyalty . . . is in an emergency no better than rabble . . . neither be led astray by current opinions or meddle in politics, but . . . fulfill your essential duty of loyalty, and bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.

  This virtue, like the other four, was basically a sound military precept, but in practice the officers and the noncommissioned officers who explained the Imperial Rescript to their soldiers perverted its meaning to serve their own purpose. For the militarists, loyalty demanded unbelievable self-sacrifice in the name of the emperor, the ancestors, and the divine land. It often inspired behavior repugnant to the Western minds. In the Pacific War, loyalty became so disoriented it drove Japanese soldiers, writhing in pain, to stab at the helping hand of an American medic who tried to offer assistance. Horrible, inhuman “slaughter battles” were fought in unhappy China in the name of loyalty. And it was loyalty that required officers to fall on their swords and soldiers to blow themselves to bits with hand grenades clutched to their breasts. It was a cruel, savage, senseless, destructive loyalty, but a loyalty nonetheless, that made “good soldiers” of simple, ignorant peasants and workers.

  The second virtue prescribed by Emperor Meiji ensured complete and direct control over all members of the armed forces. This virtue enunciated the sanctity of rank and importance of obedience. It enjoined the subordinate to obey the superior: “The soldier and the sailors should be strict in observing propriety . . . juniors should submit to their seniors. . . . Inferiors should regard the orders of their superiors as issuing directly from us.”

  This last statement enabled Japanese commanders to move squads, companies, and divisions unflinchingly into the face of certain death, for the orders of the superior were in fact as binding on the inferiors as though they were issued by the son of heaven himself. No one could question the orders of a “living god.”

  There are classic examples in which commanders ordered their men to march without water in maneuvers under such severe conditions that some died from sheer exhaustion. Examination later of their canteens would reveal that they were full but untouched. Bushidō and the Imperial Rescript taught the Japanese to prefer death to disobedience.

  Yet in other situations, direct disobedience of orders became a virtue. This contradiction resulted from the policy of assigning staff officers to field commanders directly by the Imperial General Staff in Tōkyō with implicit instructions to the staff officers to obey orders from Tōkyō only. Under this policy, an Imperial staff officer on a division commander’s staff in the field could and often deliberately defied the orders of his commander on the theory that those in the Imperial General Staff expressed the desires of the emperor. Commanders in the field were frustrated time
and again by this senseless interpretation of the emperor’s desires, and there are many historical instances of battles being “snafued” by officers of the Imperial General Staff.

  This theory was so strongly ingrained in the Imperial Army that when the NPR became the National Safety Force, and later the Self-Defense Forces (Jieitai), and previously purged officers of the Imperial Japanese Army were integrated into the new military establishment, our American advisers had a most difficult time in trying to prevent the re-establishment of this discredited policy in the new force. The Japanese G-3, the officer responsible for operations and training of the defense force, who had been a member of the Imperial Japanese Staff, was especially adamant in his views. He insisted that defense force staff officers be assigned directly to positions in the field with control over them from General Group Headquarters in Tōkyō. When Colonel Albergotti, our G-3 adviser, could not convince him to do otherwise, I finally decided to talk to General Hayashi. After about two hours of discussion, General Hayashi finally accepted our point of view with, “You won the war. We’ll try it your way.”

  I often found that General Hayashi resolved differences in position between his officers and the American advisers with this practical approach. How long they’ll try it our way, I’m not sure.

  Under the concept of the Imperial Rescript, top military leaders had direct access to the emperor as their supreme commander in chief. This permitted the top generals and admirals to circumvent political leadership and undermine uncooperative ministers and governments. This close association of the emperor and the military ensured that no one would rise in opposition to the army or navy budgets or military policies the militarists supported. They could always lean on a directive “issuing directly from us.” But, after all, power is relative, and the power of those who govern is directly proportional to the indifference of the people. Some believe that in the United States, a catastrophic war can be launched by the president without the aid of an Imperial Rescript. As Congress has permitted its constitutional powers to erode, the president has acquired frightening authority. Today, many believe that the president has greater and more immediate power than the Japanese emperor-god to plunge the nation into a nuclear holocaust.