By the time GEACPS was announced, more than 850,000 Japanese soldiers were active in mainland China, chasing Chiang Kai-shek from one provisional capital to another. Britain was looking like falling to Nazi Germany, with whom Konoe’s army minister Tōjō Hideki managed to persuade reluctant naval colleagues to ally themselves in the autumn of 1940, in a Tripartite Pact with Italy. Japanese diplomats, meanwhile, had negotiated their country’s occupation of northern French Indochina.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 briefly tempted Japanese strategists with a prospect long dreamed of: the Soviets too preoccupied with problems to their west to prevent Japanese forces surging through their eastern territories. But the Kwantung Army had in fact already started – and, to all intents and purposes, lost – a short war against the Soviets, near Nomonhan village on the Manchukuo–Mongolia border back in 1939. The memory of the humiliating truce that they had been compelled to accept helped to persuade Japanese leaders now to avoid renewed conflict with the USSR. A long-running ‘northward/southward?’ argument was won instead by those favouring a push down into South East Asia. Recent American embargoes on scrap iron and fuel exports to Japan – an attempt to rein in Japanese aggression and to punish the country for its choice of friends in Europe – were starting to bite. Tōjō worried that unless resources could be found elsewhere by the end of 1941, Japan would lose the opportunity to make GEACPS a reality.
So Japanese forces were sent into the southern portion of French Indochina in July 1941, further raising the temperature with President Roosevelt, who now froze all Japanese assets in the United States, banned all exports of oil (of which Japan’s navy alone was said to be using 400 tons per hour at this point), and signed the Atlantic Charter with Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Konoe’s suggestion of one-to-one talks with Roosevelt was rebuffed, and Tōjō, who soon replaced him as Prime Minister, found the going equally tough. The US wanted something the Japanese could no longer afford even to contemplate: Japan’s full withdrawal from China.
It began to look as though the army ideologue Ishiwara Kanji’s lecture-hall fantasies about an apocalyptic war with the United States might just be about to come true. If so, it made sense for Japan to throw the first punch: cripple American power in the Asia-Pacific region, and then strike a favourable deal. An attack scenario dreamt up a few months before, initially scoffed at, but then war-gamed with increasing seriousness, seemed now to be a desperate Japan’s best – and perhaps last – hope.
*
Out of nowhere, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, fierce fighting suddenly broke out. Kikugawa Ayako’s family had grown from two children to four, and a favourite pastime now was playing samurai using wooden swords carved and polished by their father, Shitoku. Most of the rest of his time was spent ferrying American officers to and fro between the central Oahu town of Wahiawa, where the Kikugawas lived, and Schofield Barracks a few kilometres away. Shitoku knew very little English, so his little son Akimi would sit next to him in the car, reading the road signs for him.
Lots of first generation (issei) Japanese migrants in Hawaii drove taxis. So the sight of another, John Yoshige Mikami, taking a Japanese consular assistant on a tour around Oahu in 1941 was not unusual. His passenger, Morimura Tadashi, was not terribly popular with his colleagues at the consulate. They regarded him as completely useless at his job – which he was, because his expertise lay elsewhere.
Morimura’s real name was Yoshikawa Takeo, and he was an intelligence officer in the Japanese Navy. At twenty-nine years of age, he had no prior experience as a field agent, but was gaining it rapidly from the back of Mikami’s cab. Yoshikawa became especially fond of looking down on Pearl Harbor and Ford Island from nearby heights, noting that on Saturdays and Sundays large parts of the US fleet were at home in port. As he expanded his sightseeing to the central and northern parts of Oahu, he was struck by how thinly patrolled were the waters to the north of the island.
Yoshikawa became a fan of boat and plane rides too. One Sunday, he showed a couple of the maids from the Japanese consulate his version of a good time: taking them out to test the depth of the coastal waters off Kaneohe, on the eastern side of the island. He made the most, too, of a ‘Gala Day’ for the general public at Wheeler Army Airfield, just next to Schofield Barracks, noting details of hangars, runway lengths and widths, and the number of aircraft capable of taking off at once. He even knocked on the door at Schofield Barracks, on the off-chance that they would let him in (they didn’t). Later, Yoshikawa joined yet another lady friend aboard a half-hour pleasure flight across the island, with beautiful and informative views across Wheeler and Hickam airfields. Straining in his seat, he caught a glimpse of Pearl Harbor to the south, an area about which Naval Intelligence was beginning to press him for detailed information.
The Americans knew that the Japanese must be conducting espionage in Hawaii, probably from the consulate in Honolulu. But there was little they could do about it. Basic restrictions were put in place – Yoshikawa hadn’t been allowed to take a camera along to Wheeler’s Gala Day – but you couldn’t keep an eye on 160,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans around the clock. And as tensions with Japan continued to rise, American leaders didn’t want to do anything that might provide a pretext for war.
The next best thing was to know how much the Japanese knew. At the eventual cost of a nervous breakdown, Colonel William F. Friedman cracked a code used between Tokyo’s Foreign Ministry and its embassies around the world. Soon, the resulting ‘MAGIC’ decrypting machines were doing intensive service, their wiring rarely given a chance to cool down. But there was a problem: the most devastating plans presently afoot in Japan were unknown to the Foreign Ministry. They were being put together by the Navy. And the Americans failed to break those codes in time.
Early in the morning of Sunday, 7 December 1941, aircraft incoming from the north were picked up by US radar. An officer, just days into his new job, insisted that all was well. A group of American B-17 Flying Fortresses were expected in from California, on roughly this trajectory. And local radio was playing Hawaiian music through the night, which it did when US aircraft were expected – a way of helping to guide them in. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he responded to his colleagues up at the radar station – who had failed to mention to him just how many aircraft they had spotted.
The people of Wahiawa awoke a little while later to the sound of all hell breaking loose. Japanese bombers and Zero fighters were emerging from the clouds in endless streams, diving downwards and destroying everything they could find at Wheeler Airfield, where American planes sat in convenient rows outside their hangars – close enough together that when one was struck it set off a chain of further explosions.
Wheeler had no anti-aircraft guns, and none of its planes were armed for immediate combat. Ammunition belts were removed each night and stacked in hangars, where they were now feeding a spectacular, deafening firework display. The best that the Americans could do was to get together to push undamaged aircraft out of the way of the Japanese planes, which were flying in so low that they rustled the sugar cane on their approach. Wheeler’s commander later swore he saw the glint of gold teeth, as one Japanese pilot leaned out of his window, grinning at him as he swept past.
Well might he have smiled. Six Japanese carriers had made it undetected to within 200 miles of Oahu’s northern coast, launching 183 aircraft in the space of fifteen minutes: a combination of fighters, high-level bombers, dive bombers and torpedo aircraft, forming a steadily expanding and intensifying arc of light in the sky, before heading south once everyone was airborne and ready to go. By the time US radar operators detected them and decided they were friendlies, a second wave had been lifted to the surface of the carriers and sent skyward to join them.
Even when the first bomb dropped, US military personnel still thought it must be their own side – a stupid error by some rookie pilot. Then the red discs on the sides of the aircraft came into view. One by one
, visits were paid to the targets scouted by Yoshikawa: Wheeler Airfield, followed by various facilities around Pearl Harbor. All in all, a total of 350 Japanese aircraft sank five American battleships, destroyed around 200 planes, and damaged or destroyed a dozen or so additional vessels. More than 2,000 Americans lost their lives, compared with just sixty-four Japanese killed in action.
7 December 1941: Wheeler Airfield under attack (above) and the USS Shaw exploding in Pearl Harbor (below) Precisely how much real influence the Shōwa Emperor had in any of this would be argued over ever after. Certainly, great efforts were made by civilian and military officials to keep him informed, the better to give imperial weight to their actions. The Army and Navy sent separate daily briefings, with the effect that Hirohito as Supreme Commander represented the only level of command at which a full picture of the war was available. Apparently not quite trusting these briefings, Hirohito tasked his own personal army and navy aides, including his brothers, with collecting information independently of official channels.
One area in which the Emperor clearly did have influence, and for which he drew on his tutoring at the hands of his Tokyo Imperial University professor Kakehi Katsuhiko and others, was in the editing of an imperial rescript declaring war on the United States and the British Empire. Work on the document had begun in October 1941, and it was ready to go by the time news came in of the successful attack on Pearl Harbor. The Emperor donned his naval uniform that morning in tribute and celebration, and the rescript was promulgated at 11 a.m. Japan-time, on 8 December. At midday, a morning of patriotic music on NHK radio was brought to a close by a full reading of the document, and an address from Prime Minister Tōjō.
Blame was once again heaped upon the reckless Chinese for spurning Japanese neighbourliness, as well as on the Americans and the British for conspiring to dominate Asia. The rescript concluded:
Patiently have We waited and long have We endured, in the hope that Our Government might retrieve the situation in peace. But our adversaries, showing not the least spirit of conciliation, have unduly delayed a settlement; and in the meantime, they have intensified the economic and political pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission.
This trend of affairs would, if left unchecked, not only nullify Our Empire’s efforts of many years for the sake of the stabilization of East Asia, but also endanger the very existence of Our nation. The situation being such as it is, Our Empire for its existence and self-defence has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.
The hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors guarding Us from above, We rely upon the loyalty and courage of Our subjects in Our confident expectation that the task bequeathed by Our Forefathers will be carried forward, and that the sources of evil will be speedily eradicated and an enduring peace immutably established in East Asia, preserving thereby the glory of Our Empire.
*
Part of the problem for the United States at Pearl Harbor had been that its defenders were fat, drunk, cowardly and spectacularly inept. Such, in any case, was the version of events offered to young Japanese cinema-goers early in 1943. An animated feature called Momotarō no Umiwashi (‘Momotarō’s Sea Eagles’) showed an American marine, based on a particularly portly Bluto from the Popeye films, guzzling from a bottle and then flopping around ineffectually on the deck of his ship as wave after wave of rabbits, monkeys and assorted other animals sporting rising sun bandanas piloted attack planes in the direction of his fleet.
In command of this surprise offensive was a young boy by the name of Momotarō – ‘Peach Boy’. Everyone in the cinema would have known immediately who he was: the hero of an old Japanese folktale, who is born from a peach and later embarks on a quest to fight a band of ogres who are terrorizing the local population.
The Momotarō legend was a staple of Japanese literary life by this point, not just children’s entertainment, but a source of insight into a primordial Japanese imagination. For Yanagita Kunio, just one of a legion of commentators on Momotarō, the tale revealed a profound but understated awareness in Japan of how the divine (the peach) gives rise to the human (Momotarō). The story also provided the perfect Pan-Asian allegory: a peace-loving country is menaced by ogres from far-off lands, a son of heaven strikes out to find and defeat them, and on the way he acquires a diverse and biddable set of comrades who come alive to his concerns and values.
As ever, Western culture was doing triple duty in Japan: inspiration, convenient foil and idiom of attack. A few years earlier, Japanese animators had scored a hit by pitting Momotarō against Mickey Mouse, the latter’s face redrawn to reveal deeply malicious American intent. Now, Momotarō no Umiwashi opened by proudly announcing its sponsor: the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Momotarō no Umiwashi was a ground-breaking piece of animation for its day. It was also one of increasingly few options left available to Japanese in search of entertainment by this point in the war. Dance halls and jazz venues had been shut down and neon shop signs switched off, to save electricity. Japan’s newspaper industry had shrunk from 454 titles to just fifty-four – including one per prefecture – while journalists and publishers alike lived in fear of reporting the wrong thing. Staff at Chuō Kōron (‘Central Review’) were arrested by the Special Higher Police, resulting in the rape of at least one woman, the deaths in custody of two male employees, and eventually the closure of one of Japan’s most respected journals. One of its offences had been to serialize Tanizaki Junichirō’s novel The Makioka Sisters, which was judged to contain too much irrelevant content about ‘bourgeois family life’.
Scenes from Momotarō’s Sea Eagles (MSE) (1943), showing Momotarō and some of his lieutenants, an American ship under attack, and a Bluto-like Marine, and from Momotarō vs Mickey Mouse (MMM) (1934) Proof that the wartime co-opting of cartoons was a game that two could play: Popeye enlisted for a US war stamp campaign For people in search of something to do, there was still the officially encouraged shrine visit, or the enticement of an officially approved ballet entitled ‘Decisive Aerial Warfare Suite’. From 1942, there was also an annual Imperial Edict Day, during which a stars-and-stripes flag was drawn on the pavement in Tokyo and people were encouraged to step on it – much as former Christians in Tokugawa Japan had once been required to tread on images of Jesus Christ and Mary to show their disdain and thus prove their loyalty.
In the words of Prime Minister Tōjō: ‘the masses are foolish … if we tell them the facts, morale will collapse.’ By the time Momotarō no Umiwashi hit the cinemas, the facts had become distinctly unfavourable. The war with the West had, in its first few months, been a spectacular success. Pearl Harbor had been followed within hours by a similar attack on grounded aircraft in the Philippines. Great colonial cities – Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon – had toppled like dominoes. In places like Burma and the Dutch East Indies, local nationalists welcomed the Japanese as liberators, before finding out what it meant to be Momotarō’s pet helpers: their food and resources taken, their currency exploited to the benefit of the Japanese yen.
But just as the Japanese Empire reached its greatest geographical extent, the tide began to turn. In the summer of 1942, Japan lost a crucial naval engagement at Midway in the northern Pacific (‘mid-way’ between the Asian and American continents), rationing began at home, and American planners set to work on a post-war occupation.
Rhetorical appeal to ‘national emergency’ had been an almost constant feature of Japanese public life since the 1850s, with statesmen and military men barely letting a year pass by without seeking to persuade people of an imminent threat to the country’s survival. The power of this idea to mobilize people, and to get money flowing in the right direction, was just too tempting. Now, however, Japan really was facing an emergency, to which the authorities responded with a combination of strictures designed to squeeze every last drop out of the country’s natural, technological and human resources.
The definitions of extravagant spending, dress
and personal grooming became steadily more encompassing. Boys and adult men could until recently be found sporting kimono whose colourful designs celebrated the country’s military. One depicted men charging into battle, another showed biplanes soaring above the clouds, bearing the distinctive rising sun motif. But this fashion began to shift to the wearing of a national civilian uniform, while women sported ostentatiously unostentatious peasant pantaloons, or monpe. Young girls, meanwhile, were asked to send letters of encouragement to soldiers at the front – risking, in reply, a variety of coarse suggestions about how they might help the war effort, were they closer at hand.
An idea that dated back to the Tokugawa era was now tasked with helping to save the modern nation: groups of households collaborating as units. These neighbourhood associations – 1.3 million of them by the time of Midway, in groups of ten to fifteen homes – passed noticeboards between them, each providing a red stamp to confirm that they had read the latest instructions. They cooperated on everything from counter-espionage and crime prevention to fire defences and the sharing out of a growing list of rationed commodities.
The authorities fretted constantly over the reliability of the population. The Tokkō (Special Higher Police) were kept busy by disturbing evidence of sedition. ‘Dear Stupid Emperor,’ began one Japanese boy’s missive, posted to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and signed off – for the sake of clarity – ‘Your Enemy’. It ended up in police files bursting at the seams with postcards, letters and transcripts of everything from eavesdropped conversations to toilet graffiti. His Imperial Majesty was, at turns, baka (stupid), baka-yarō (stupid bastard), and ō-baka-yarō (immensely stupid bastard). A few people threatened him with death – one offered 2,000 yen to anyone who ‘lops off his head’ – while many more asked what the point was of a man who sucked up a huge proportion of the country’s wealth for doing no more than pandering to militarists.
Japan Story Page 22
