The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  a Ever since his school days at Groton, Roosevelt had been convinced of Japan’s long-range plans of conquest. He pored over Admiral Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History until, according to his mother, he had “practically memorized the book.” Later he corresponded with Mahan and learned that the admiral shared with him a strong concern over Japan as a major threat in the Pacific.

  At Harvard, in 1920, a Japanese student told Roosevelt in confidence about his nation’s hundred-year plan for conquest, drafted in 1889. It allegedly covered the annexation of Manchuria, the establishment of a protectorate in North China, the acquisition of American and British possessions in the Pacific, including Hawaii, as well as bases in Mexico and Peru. In 1934 Roosevelt informed his Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, of this “plot,” pointing out to him that many of its particulars had already been verified.

  b In interviews in 1966–67 a number of former Japanese leaders, including Generals Teiichi Suzuki, Sadao Araki and Kenryo Sato, pointed to this and similar speeches regarding Japan’s increasing involvement in China as parallels to America’s accelerating war in Vietnam. Both countries, they agreed, were fighting a sacrificial war despite the world’s censure—and both had gone about wiping out Communism the wrong way.

  c Roosevelt was still intent on his quarantine. He sent Captain Royal Ingersoll, chief of the Navy’s War Plans Division, to London with instructions to explore the implementation of a long-range naval blockade of Japan. The proposal that had “horrified” Ambassador Lindsay found approval in the British Admiralty. They told Ingersoll that they were “prepared to stop all Japanese traffic crossing a line roughly from Singapore through the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, New Hebrides and around to the east of Australia and New Zealand.” They considered “that the United States could prevent all westbound trade to Japan by controlling by embargo or ships the entire Pacific coast from Alaska to Cape Horn.” But eight days later, on January 13, 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain abruptly rejected another proposal of Roosevelt’s calling for Britain to join an international conference to discuss essential principles of international law that would, incidentally, awaken American public opinion to the true nature of the “bandit nations,” as Roosevelt was privately calling them. At first the President did not grasp the full implication of Chamberlain’s unanticipated rejection, but within a week it was clear that the Prime Minister’s refusal to join an international conference meant that his government would take no part in a quarantine of the aggressor, either in the Orient or in Europe.

  The above information (much of it based on notes of the Ingersoll talks recently uncovered in the archives of the United States Navy) indicates beyond argument that as early as 1938, President Roosevelt was prepared to do more than assail the “bandit nations” by words. If Chamberlain had joined him in the naval quarantine, further aggression in both Asia and Europe might have been stemmed. But Chamberlain’s rebuff forced Roosevelt to abandon his vigorous foreign policy and allow his country to revert to isolation. Within two months it was too late. On March 12 Hitler’s seizure of Austria started the world on the road to its most devastating war.

  3

  “Then the War Will Be a Desperate One”

  1.

  The Japanese continued to win. They took Hankow and Canton, forcing Chiang Kai-shek to move his government far inland to Chungking. But they were conquering territory, not people, and by the beginning of 1939 were still far from final victory. They had lost thousands of men, millions of yen and incurred the wrath of the Western world, and Americans in particular.

  The relations between the two countries had begun precariously the day Commodore Perry’s ships steamed into Tokyo Bay with a letter from President Millard Fillmore inviting Japan to open doors long closed to the outside world. The Americans were inspired by three motives: a desire to trade, spread the Gospel to the yellow pagans and export the ideals of 1776. The Japanese reluctantly, resentfully complied, but the ensuing years brought improved relations as American officials and private citizens materially helped Japan make the transition from feudalism to modern times in the fields of education, science, medicine and production. American obtrusion into the Pacific late in the nineteenth century with acquisitions of Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island and the Philippines perturbed the Japanese, but in 1900 the Boxer Rebellion brought the two nations together again in a common cause.

  These fraternal bonds were strengthened four years later by Japan’s war with Czarist Russia. American sympathies were overwhelmingly for the underdog. The New York Journal of Commerce declared that Japan stood as “the champion uncommercial rights,” and cartoonists pictured the Japanese soldier as a heroic figure—a noble samurai confronting the Russian Bear. Jacob Schiff, president of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, distressed by reports of Russian anti-Semitism, felt that the effort of Japan was “not only her own cause, but the cause of the entire civilized world.” Practicing what he preached, he made the resources of his company available to the Japanese war effort. Despite spectacular victories, Japan could not terminate the war and turned to President Theodore Roosevelt for help. He accomplished this with the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905, achieving for Japan the best possible terms. In one of the perverse twists of history, this act of friendship ended the good will between the two nations: the Japanese, who were unaware that their country was close to bankruptcy, were incensed at a treaty which gave them no indemnity. Anti-American riots erupted throughout the land, and martial law had to be established in Tokyo. Still not a word came from the Japanese government explaining that Roosevelt had saved the empire from embarrassment, perhaps disaster.

  The next year the situation deteriorated. This time America was to blame. An unreasonable fear that a resurgent Asia under Japanese leadership would engulf Western civilization gained force in the United States, particularly on the Pacific coast. The San Francisco Chronicle averred that it was “a pressing world-wide issue as to whether the high-standard Caucasian races or the low-standard Oriental races would dominate the world.” Caught up in the “yellow peril”* hysteria, the San Francisco school board ordered all Nisei children to attend a school in Chinatown.

  The Japanese government responded hotly that this was “an act of discrimination carrying with it a stigma and odium which is impossible to overlook.” There was talk of war, and Roosevelt secretly warned his commander in the Philippines to prepare for a Japanese attack.

  The crisis passed, but not the resentment, and antagonism reached a climax during World War I, even though the two countries were allies. Already President Woodrow Wilson was calling for “territorial integrity and political independence throughout the world” and a return to China of land and rights lost to conquerors. This idealistic stance was a direct threat to the empire Japan had won in the past few decades and it seemed inevitable to her military leaders that they were destined to fight America for supremacy of the western Pacific and Asia. They gained popular support in 1924 when Congress passed the Exclusion Act barring Japanese from immigration to the United States. It seemed like a deliberate challenge to the proud, sensitive Japanese, and even those with pro-American sympathies were discomposed. “Japan felt as if her best friend had, of a sudden and without provocation, slapped her on the cheek,” wrote a well-known Japanese scholar. “Each year that passes without amendment or abrogation only strengthens our sense of injury, which is destined to show itself, in one form or another, in personal and public intercourse.”

  With the seizure of Manchuria and the invasion of North China, the gulf widened as America denounced Japanese aggression with increasingly forceful words. This moral denunciation only hardened the resolve of the average Japanese. Why should there be a Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and an Open Door principle in Asia? The Japanese takeover in bandit-infested Manchuria was no different from American armed intervention in the Caribbean.† Moreover, how could a vast country like the United States even begin to understand the problems that had beset Japan s
ince World War I? Why was it perfectly acceptable for England and Holland to occupy India, Hong Kong, Singapore and the East Indies, but a crime for Japan to follow their example? Why should America, which had grabbed its lands from Indians by trickery, liquor and massacre, be so outraged when Japan did the same in China?‡

  Superpatriots plotted to assassinate pro-Western leaders and blow up the American and British embassies. Mass meetings were held denouncing both countries for giving help to China, and calling for acceptance of Hitler’s invitation to join Germany and Italy in a tripartite pact. Westerners were refused rooms in some hotels, insulted publicly and occasionally beaten in sight of police.

  All this emotional turmoil was worsened by marked differences between East and West in morality, religion and even patterns of thinking. Western logic was precise, with axioms, definitions, and proofs leading to a logical conclusion. Born dialecticians, the Japanese held that any existence was a contradiction. In everyday life they instinctively practiced the concept of the contradiction of opposites, and the means of harmonizing them. Right and wrong, spirit and matter, God and man—all these opposing elements were harmoniously united. That was why a thing could be good and bad at the same time.

  Unlike Westerners, who tended to think in terms of black and white, the Japanese had vaguer distinctions, which in international relations often resulted in “policies” and not “principles,” and seemed to Westerners to be conscienceless. Western logic was like a suitcase, defined and limited. Eastern logic was like the furoshiki, the cloth Japanese carry for wrapping objects. It could be large or small according to circumstances and could be folded and put in the pocket when not needed.

  To Westerners, the Japanese were an incomprehensible contradiction: polite and barbarous, honest and treacherous, brave and cowardly, industrious and lazy—all at the same time. To the Japanese, these were not anomalies at all but one united whole, and they could not understand why Westerners didn’t comprehend it. To the Japanese, a man without contradictions could not be respected; he was just a simple person. The more numerous the contradictions in a man, the deeper he was. His existence was richer the more acutely he struggled with himself.

  This philosophy was derived mainly from Buddhism, a doctrine wherein all is absorbed in the spaceless, timeless abyss of nondifference.§ All is vanity and nothing can be differentiated because nothing has entity or identity. “I” has no entity and is an illusion appearing transitorily and momentarily on constantly floating relations of fallacious phenomena which come and go as the Almighty Wheel of Causality moves on. Nobody knows or is responsible for the movements of change, since there is no Creator or Heavenly Father or Fate.

  Among the reasons for Japan’s plunge into military adventures in Manchuria and China, this Wheel of Causality loomed significantly. Out of cowardice, or in some cases out of self-interest or simple indecision, a number of military and political leaders failed to curb the fanatic group of young officers who engineered these aggressions. But many on all levels just moved along with the tide, caught up in the Wheel of Causality. They lay down obediently and quietly, as it were, on the road of Blind Change, following the Buddhist belief that the Wheel of Causality went on eternally and absolutely nonteleologically. With characteristic flexibility, some sects believed that everyone could become a Buddha, or “blessed one,” after death; others that the individual was nothing and salvation lay only in the negation of self, that man was a bubble on the Ocean of Nothingness who would eventually vanish in the boundless water where there was no birth, no death, no beginning, no end. Buddha himself was nothing more than a finger pointing at the moon.

  This was all expressed in the word sayonara (sayo—so, nara—if), that is, “So be it.” The Japanese said sayonara every moment to everything, for he felt each moment was a dream. Life was sayonara. Empires could rise or fall, the greatest heroes and philosophers crumble to dust, planets come and go, but Change never changed, including Change itself.

  This strong recognition of death gave the Japanese not only the strength to face disaster stoically but an intense appreciation of each moment, which could be the last. This was not pessimism but a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint or elate, to accept the inevitable. The most admirable fish was the carp. He swam gallantly upstream, leaping the sheerest falls, but once caught and put on the cutting board, lay quiet, accepting serenely what must be. So be it. Sayonara.

  Understanding little or nothing of either the Wheel of Causality or the power wielded by the dedicated young rebels, informed Americans mistakenly assumed that the takeover in Manchuria and the foray into China were steps plotted by military leaders who, like Hitler, wished to seize the world for themselves.

  Within the Japanese, metaphysical intuition and animalistic, instinctive urges lay side by side. Thus philosophy was brutalized and brutality was philosophized. The assassinations and other bloody acts committed by the rebels were inspired by idealism; and the soldiers who sailed to China to save the Orient for the Orient ended by slaughtering thousands of fellow Orientals in Nanking.

  There was no buffer zone in their thinking between the transcendental and the empirical—between the chrysanthemum and the sword. They were religious but had no God in the Western sense—that is, a single Divine Being. They were sincere but had no concept of sin; they had sympathy but little humanity; they had clans but no society; they had a rigid family system which gave security but took away individuality. They were, in short, a great and energetic people often driven by opposing forces and often trying to go in opposite directions at the same time.

  There were also numerous petty differences between East and West that needlessly aggravated matters. If a Westerner asked, “This isn’t the road to Tokyo, is it?” the Japanese would reply yes, meaning, “What you say is correct; it is not the road to Tokyo.” Confusion also resulted when the Japanese agreed with the Westerner just to be agreeable or to avoid embarrassment, or gave wrong information rather than admit his ignorance.

  To most Westerners, the Japanese was utterly inscrutable. The way he handled his tools was all wrong: he squatted at an anvil; he pulled rather than pushed a saw or plane; he built his house from the roof down. To open a lock, he turned a key to the left, the wrong direction. Everything the Japanese did was backwards. He spoke backwards, read backwards, wrote backwards. He sat on the floor instead of in chairs; ate raw fish and live, wriggling shrimp. He would tell of the most tragic personal events and then laugh; fall in the mud in his best suit and come up with a grin; convey ideas by misdirection; discuss matters in a devious, tortuous manner; treat you with exaggerated politeness in his home and rudely shove you aside in a train; even assassinate a man and apologize to the servants for messing up the house.

  What Westerners did not realize was that underneath the veneer of modernity and westernization, Japan was still Oriental and that her plunge from feudalism to imperialism had come so precipitously that her leaders, who were interested solely in Western methods, not Western values, had neither the time nor inclination to develop liberalism and humanitarianism.

  2.

  Hostility between the Russians and the Japanese also continued, but this was less a misunderstanding of cultures than a struggle for territory. In the summer of 1938 their troops battled for possession of a barren hill on the Manchurian-Soviet border, and the Red Army and air force gave the Japanese such a drubbing that within two weeks they agreed to a settlement. Some ten months later another squabble started near Nomonhan on the Manchurian–Outer Mongolian border, relatively close to Peking. In a few weeks it turned into full-fledged warfare, with the first large-scale tank battles in history. Once again the Russians crushed the Japanese, who suffered more than fifty thousand casualties. This embarrassing rehearsal for war not only caused a revolution in Japanese weaponry and military tactics but drove Japan closer to an alliance with Germany and Italy, since she felt that the Soviet Union, England, China and America might combine against her at any moment.ǁ


  Before this border war could be settled, Stalin threw both the Chinese and the Japanese into turmoil by signing, on August 23, 1939, a pact with his bitterest enemy, Hitler. Prime Minister Kiichiro Hiranuma, who had succeeded Prince Konoye in January, and whose cabinet had held more than seventy meetings in a futile effort to reach agreement on a Tripartite Pact, was so embarrassed and dismayed that he announced, “The Cabinet herewith resigns because of complicated and inscrutable situations recently arising in Europe.”

  Both Hitler and Stalin trumpeted to the world the clauses of their historic treaty—except for a secret protocol dividing up eastern Europe—and nine days later, on September 1, one and a half million German troops invaded Poland. World War II had begun. Though Poland, crushed between two massive forces, disintegrated in a few weeks, the western front remained so quiet that newsmen sardonically labeled the conflict “the phony war.”

  As the fighting in China dragged on into 1940, the Japanese Army General Staff decided in secret that unless total victory was achieved within the year, forces would be gradually withdrawn, leaving only troops in the northern part of China as defense against Communism. However, six weeks later, on May 10, Hitler again changed the course of Japan by launching a blitzkrieg against the western front. At dusk, four days later, the Dutch commander surrendered. The next morning at seven-thirty Britain’s brand-new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was wakened by a phone call from Paris. “We have been defeated!” exclaimed Premier Paul Reynaud. “We are beaten!” Two weeks later King Leopold III surrendered, ignoring the advice of his government, and refused to seek refuge in England. “I have decided to stay,” he said. “The cause of the Allies is lost.” Within a month France capitulated and England herself appeared doomed.