The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  What set him apart even further from his peers was his time abroad in the United States. Even by the early 1940s, relatively few Japanese had ever traveled past the shores of the homeland. Tatsuguchi, however, had lived for a decade among the white barbarians across the sea. In a place that stressed conformity and obedience, he had a different manner and sensibilities. He wasn’t viewed as being fully Japanese.

  Though the military would not change its opinion of him, Tatsuguchi began to change his view of the Imperial Army. He began to feel a part of it. It would have been difficult not to. The Army was devoted to shaping every recruit’s body and mind. Physical training was much the same as in every elite military unit around the world. There were twenty-five-mile marches, multiday maneuvers, and challenging treks through the dark and cold.

  What set the Japanese Army apart, though, was the intensive campaign to mold every recruit’s thinking.

  The centerpiece of military indoctrination was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors. Tatsuguchi and all other recruits were required to meditate on the rescript at least ten minutes each morning, and recite parts of it by memory each evening before dinner. The rescript was so important to the core identity of soldiers that, when one officer bungled the words in front of his troops, the humiliation led him to commit suicide. “This Rescript, and the one on Education, are the true Holy Writ of Japan,” explained anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her landmark cultural history, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

  Issued in 1882 by the emperor—the ruler deemed “coeval with heaven” in the schoolchildren’s daily pledge—the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors ran several pages. “We [the Emperor] are the head and you are the body,” the rescript states. “We depend on you as Our arms and legs. Whether We shall be able to guard the Empire, and repay the benevolence of Our Ancestors, depends upon the faithful discharge of your duties as soldiers and sailors.”

  Again and again the message was hammered into conscripts: More than your wife, more than your children, more than your government, you must dedicate yourselves, no matter the cost, to the heavenly emperor.

  “Neither be led astray by current opinions, nor meddle in politics, but with single heart fulfill your essential duty of loyalty, and bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather,” the rescript stated. “Never by failing in moral principle fall into disgrace and bring dishonor upon your name.”

  War was noble and purifying, death a duty. Defeat equaled disgrace. Soldiers were obligated to fight to the end. When confronted with the chance of surrender, an honorable Imperial Army man instead must always choose suicide. In the service of the emperor, death was lighter than a feather.

  The indoctrination was daily, and relentless. It created a military culture that, in coming years, would launch a thousand banzai attacks.

  It also was a culture completely at odds with Nobuo’s religious faith. Seventh-day Adventists saw no honor in suicide. They put the highest possible priority on preserving the blessed life that God gave them. In the United States, these beliefs allowed Adventists to seek and receive conscientious objector status that allowed them to avoid going into battle. In Japan, there was no conscientious objection, only fealty to an emperor who demanded the ultimate sacrifice in his behalf.

  Fortunately, Nobuo was able to sidestep the whole faith vs. service conflict. The Imperial Army needed him as a physician, not a marksman. He could honor his religious beliefs by working to heal others. He became a military doctor. His first assignment, remarkably, was the First Imperial Guard Infantry Regiment, which protected the emperor, his family, and their network of palaces and properties. Though his exact duties remained shrouded in secrecy, Nobuo practiced medicine and was stationed in Tokyo, where he remained close enough to home to visit his family occasionally. Taeko was always grateful to see him, though she remained concerned over his failure to win the higher paycheck enjoyed by his peers in the officer ranks. At home, Nobuo loved to play hide-and-seek with Joy, who was starting to walk. He relaxed by playing classical music on any piano he could find.

  By the summer of 1941, relaxation and free time became scarce for Nobuo. Japan was plunging deeper into world crisis.

  While the United States and the West were preoccupied with Hitler’s drive through Europe, the reality was that Japan had been at war far longer. More than two years before Nazi boots marched through Poland, the Imperial Army of Japan had invaded China.

  For the prior decade, China was locked in a ferocious civil war between the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists of Mao Zedong. By 1937, the civil war had killed five million Chinese, but neither side held a clear advantage. Japan saw an opportunity.

  On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops on training exercises in China skirmished with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. The Japanese were spoiling for a fight. Six years earlier, in its voracious quest for coal, timber, and manpower, Japan had invaded Manchuria to the north, dominated its economy, and installed a puppet government. When Chinese troops were surprised by military maneuvers in the night across the Marco Polo Bridge, they fired. Japan had all the excuse it needed to turn a flare-up into all-out war.

  The confidence of Japanese military leaders bordered on arrogance. In a memo to the emperor, War Minister Hajime Sugiyama predicted that Japanese troops would vanquish China within a month or so. A prior war minister, Araki Sadao, had even boasted that “three million Japanese armed with bamboo spears can defend Japan against any enemy.”

  The military leaders were delusional. By the end of the year, Japan had been forced to dispatch 600,000 troops to China, a transport that turned out to be just a start. With a clear technological edge, Japan’s military controlled the sky and the sea, but China had men—waves and waves of men. The Battle of Shanghai spanned four months and resulted in 300,000 soldiers and civilians killed. That bloodshed was followed by the six-week Nanjing Massacre, which saw the deaths of as many as 300,000 Chinese, including the slaughter of 60,000 prisoners of war. Japanese troops gang-raped at least 20,000 and possibly 80,000 Chinese women.

  One infamous symbol of Japanese brutality was the two officers who held a contest to kill at least 100 Chinese with a sword. According to the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun newspaper, which promoted the killing contest with a series of breezy stories, the winner could not ultimately be determined because both men surpassed the milestone of 100 sword kills during the same battle. One officer complained that, as the contest progressed, his speed was handicapped by nicks and dents in his sword.

  Even deeper depravity curdled behind battle lines. In Manchuria, a physician named Shiro Ishii, trained at the prestigious Imperial University, was on track to become the Japanese match of the Nazis’ Josef Mengele. At his Unit 731 prison complex, euphemistically called the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau, Ishii and his cohorts turned thousands of Chinese adults and infants into human guinea pigs, infecting them with the plague, anthrax, and smallpox, then cutting them open alive, without anesthesia, to judge the results. Other prisoners, which Unit 731 referred to derisively as “maruta,” or logs, were subjected to excruciating experiments with frostbite and chemical weapons. Biological warfare armaments developed at Unit 731 and released in the field eventually killed tens of thousands of Chinese, with some estimates as high as 500,000. Years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military had proved that it could be a ruthless and depraved enemy.

  The Japanese invasion was so powerful, and so horrific, that the Chinese Nationalists and Communists declared a truce in their civil war to unite against the eastern invaders. The result was a war the Japanese could not win, and could not end. The Sino-Japanese War, the true beginning of World War II, eventually resulted in the death or wounding of 3 million Chinese troops and 17 million Chinese civilians. About 500,000 Japanese were killed, with another 1.5 million wounded or felled by disease. Deaths in the Sino-Japanese War exceeded
the combined death toll of every nation during World War I. In the history of the world, the number of deaths in the Sino-Japanese War was exceeded only by the Mongol conquests launched by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, and the civil wars in China in the third, eighth, and nineteenth centuries.

  The mounting death toll in China worried Nobuo and Taeko Tatsuguchi, who pored over local newspapers for details. On the battlefield, doctors were in high demand. Nobuo did not want to be sent away. Being shipped to a hostile land overseas, far from his wife and daughter—that was not why they had returned home from California.

  If the military quagmire in China made Japan increasingly desperate, it alarmed the United States. With its first push into Manchuria, and now an all-out war in China, Japan was upending the balance of power in the Far East. Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita justified his country’s imperialist push by claiming creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was described as a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers.” For the Japanese, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was a Monroe Doctrine for their own backyard, a policy that would, in the words of the official government slogan, keep Asia for the Asians. Japanese imperialism increasingly was described as a spiritual quest. The battle in China amounted to a holy war, and Japan was destined under its divine origin to achieve hakko ichiu, a phrase that came to mean “all the world under one roof.”

  In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt and others began to consider a very troubling question: Were the Japanese launching a kind of Third Reich in the Far East?

  In September 1940, the Japanese only confirmed those fears by uniting with Hitler and Mussolini to sign the Tri-Partite Pact. (Four years earlier, when Japan had signed an anti-Marxist agreement with Germany, Hitler had proclaimed the Japanese to be “honorary Aryans.”) The Tri-Partite Pact required Japan, Germany, and Italy to join in a mutual military defense if they came under attack by any nation not already involved in the war. The alliance was aimed directly at the United States, which had remained neutral in World War II even as the Nazis marched across Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

  Like most Americans, Roosevelt remained more concerned about Hitler in Europe than Japan in Asia. He believed the United States Navy was already short of ships in the Atlantic, and had none to spare for a confrontation with Japan in the Pacific. Nevertheless, in 1940, Roosevelt tried to show the Japanese what power he did have by transferring the Pacific Fleet 3,000 miles from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. When asked to describe his policy with Tokyo, President Roosevelt said he would “slip the noose around Japan’s neck, and give it a jerk from time to time.”

  The Japanese were willing to hold their breath. Hitler’s quick and easy victories across Europe inspired them. With colonial European powers gripped in a battle for survival thousands of miles away, the Japanese pounced on their weakness in the Pacific by dispatching troops to French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos). Japan’s publicly stated goal was to cut off military supplies from the Chinese, but invasion of Indochina also bolstered hakko ichiu and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, ideas made even easier to achieve now that France had been vanquished by Japan’s new friend, Nazi Germany. Japan swept into Hanoi and Saigon, taking control of roads, rails, and ports, while converting Indochina into a client state that was forced to grant the best business deals to Tokyo.

  Roosevelt was furious over the invasion. Almost half the raw rubber imported to the United States came from Indochina. With battles intensifying in both Europe and China, the United States could ill-afford to run short of a commodity so crucial to its economy and military. The White House also grew concerned that Japan’s expansionist military would cast an eye toward the Philippines, where the United States had spent considerable sums on military bases, harbors, and airstrips.

  With Japan unwilling to back down, the Roosevelt administration jerked the noose. After the Battle of Shanghai and the Nanjing Massacre, the White House announced a “moral embargo,” which put U.S. companies on notice that the president strongly opposed the sale of aircraft to Japan. As Japanese attacks on China intensified, Roosevelt extended the moral embargo to airplane parts and aviation fuel technology. When Japan invaded Indochina, Congress approved the Export Control Act, which converted the moral embargo into an enforceable embargo, banning the sale of U.S. aircraft, parts, chemicals, and minerals to Japan. Japan’s refusal to withdraw troops from Indochina was greeted with an extended ban on the sale of iron and steel scrap. Meanwhile, the U.S. adopted a Lend-Lease policy that, among other things, contributed $1.6 billion of wartime supplies to China. Roosevelt was trying to do everything he could short of military action, which had little public support. A Gallup poll found 88 percent of Americans opposed joining the rest of the world in war.

  In Japan, military and political leaders increasingly blamed their costly stalemate in China on meddling outside forces. The best scapegoat was the United States, which, in addition to the embargoes, refused to grant diplomatic recognition to Japan’s new dominion over Manchuria and Indochina.

  The United States and Japan were at loggerheads. The one crucial material held back from embargo by the United States was oil. About 80 percent of the petroleum consumed by Japan and its war machine came from the United States. Tokyo needed American oil to power both its war and peace, and the two nations knew it. Extending the embargo to oil would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

  By June 1941, Japanese companies had amassed licenses to import a nearly three-year supply of crude oil from U.S. companies. With Japan wreaking havoc in China—and dispatching 125,000 troops to Indochina—the Roosevelt administration knew the Japanese oil contracts amounted to, essentially, a license to kill. He could jerk the noose only so many times. On July 26, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8832, which froze all Japanese assets in the United States and effectively canceled the oil contracts. The net effect: The oil embargo of Japan was on.

  The two countries launched intensive negotiations. The U.S. demanded a full Japanese pullout from China and Indochina. Japan called for a six-month cooling-off period and promised to halt its expansions if the United States would restore the flow of oil. Cut off from all U.S. supplies, Japan now had oil reserves that would last perhaps a few months. The clock ticked. In Tokyo, the press described the nation as “a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually drained away.”

  While diplomats talked, Japanese leaders secretly pursued an alternative solution. To the south of the new Japanese client state of French Indochina stretched the world’s fourth-richest petroleum field. The Southern Resource Area of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) was controlled by the Netherlands, but the Dutch had been vanquished the prior year in Europe by the Nazis. A military strike on the Southern Resource Area could provide all the oil Japan needed for both its homeland and its war machine. The biggest complicating factor, once again, was the United States. Its Philippines military bases could thwart naval and troop movements from Japan to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies.

  In Tokyo, Nobuo and Taeko Tatsuguchi watched with dread as political and public opinion turned against the United States. More than almost all their countrymen, the Tatsuguchis had seen the great skyscrapers and factories that rose on the other side of the sea. Compared with Japan, the United States had nearly double the population, five times the steel production, seven times the coal, five times the ship-making capacity, six times the airplane-making capacity, and nearly ten times the gross domestic product. Japan’s mighty military was barely holding its own in the war against China. How could it expect to defeat the Chinese while battling the United States as well?

  For months, Nobuo Tatsuguchi had worried that he would be redeployed from his duty at the Imperial Guard to the war in China. Now Tatsuguchi feared he could be assigned to something worse—a war against his classmates from the United States.

  PART TWO

  LAIRD

 
6

  * * *

  Trapped

  Dick Laird was stuck. A half mile from daylight, in a crumbling crook of the Powhatan Coal Mine of southeastern Ohio, Laird had jammed his arm into a rock seam. The seam didn’t give back. He tugged and pulled and jerked. No luck.

  The air was dank and thick with dust. With every breath the beam from his headlamp bobbed on the mine wall. He tried to stop panting. He tried not to panic.

  In the dark behind him a work crew waited. Laird did not want to let them down. Before dawn he had gathered with dozens of these men—his neighbors, his buddies, his uncles—to begin the long trek underground. At the mine entrance, he could stand upright, but by the time he had snaked through a confusing maze of tunnels to the day’s work site, he was hunched on all-fours. His back throbbed. His mucus ran black. His knees were skinned raw.

  Laird was only sixteen years old. It was his second year working for the Powhatan mine.

  He was supposed to feel grateful for the work. It was November 1932, the depths of the Great Depression, and the unemployment rate for Ohio was 37 percent, or double the national average. In Laird’s neighborhood it felt even worse. Desperate families were fleeing the shuttered factories of Cleveland, Akron, and Pittsburgh for his Appalachian hills of Belmont County, Ohio. Jobs were scarce here, but a newcomer could still shoot rabbits and grow cabbage to survive. Old-timers and newcomers eyed each other warily. If Laird made one serious mistake in his mine job, there were dozens of men hungry for the chance to do it right.