by Ian W. Toll
He was a short man even by contemporary Japanese standards, standing just five feet three inches tall, and in his later years, having lived an admiral’s sumptuous, sedentary life, his waistline expanded and he could be called portly. But he carried the extra weight well for a man of his small stature: he was bull-necked and broad-shouldered, and in his confident, easy stride there was the mark of a born athlete. In a posed photograph, circa 1940, he sits upright with perfect military posture and yet appears wholly relaxed. He looks at least ten years younger than his fifty-six years. He stares back at the camera with large, placid eyes; his skin is dark and smooth; his hair is close-cropped, emphasizing the noble shape of his head. His shoulders and chest are intricately festooned with gold braid and rows of medals.
He had been born Isoroku Takano, in the city of Nagaoka, in the prefecture of Niigata, on the coast of the Sea of Japan. His father was an impoverished former samurai of a defeated clan, but in 1916, at age thirty-two, Isoroku was adopted into the Yamamoto family and took that name. Such arrangements were traditional and unexceptional in Japan. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima in 1904—one year before his opposite number, Chester Nimitz, graduated from Annapolis. He served with Togo’s fleet at the Battle of Tsushima, and was wounded when a cannon under his command on the cruiser Nisshin burst. Some 120 separate pieces of shrapnel were removed from his midsection and legs, leaving them badly pockmarked and scarred; he also lost the index and middle fingers of his left hand.
Yamamoto ascended quickly through the ranks, completed the Naval Staff College course, and was twice posted to the United States, where he studied English at Harvard University for two years (1919–21) and later served as naval attaché in the Japanese Embassy in Washington (1926–27). At a young age he was marked as an officer destined for high rank. He was respected for his powerful intellect and his close attention to technical details, and in naval policy debates he had a talent for persuading both peers and superiors with well-reasoned arguments that cut against the grain of conventional thinking. He possessed the “un-Japanese” quality of being singularly independent-minded and never shrinking from controversy. Sadao Asada, a historian of the Japanese navy, writes that Yamamoto’s “pronounced individuality was so rare among Japanese navy men that one former officer remarked that he was almost a ‘product of mutation.’ He was bold and original, never compromised his principles, farsighted, and known for charismatic leadership.”
At a time when gunnery and battleships were still the safest route to promotion, Yamamoto was early to cast his lot with aviation. As a captain in the mid-1920s, he had asked for and received an appointment as second in command of the Kasumigaura Naval Air Training Corps, and thereafter had held several important jobs in the aviation branch of the service. He more than any other man erected the apparatus for recruiting and training Japan’s crackerjack airmen, and he personally oversaw the development of an independent, self-sufficient, and highly advanced military aircraft industry. For fifteen years he was recognized as the Japanese navy’s chief advocate of airpower, and was one of the first admirals to voice the heretical view that battleships were “white elephants.”
He was an internationalist who traveled widely overseas and often represented the navy at disarmament talks. He learned enough English to carry on rudimentary conversations and to read with ease: he claimed to have often skimmed the headlines of forty American newspapers per day. While at Harvard, Yamamoto spent little time in classes but actually stretched his modest budget to travel widely throughout the country, often skipping meals to save funds. He deliberately isolated himself from other Japanese to force himself to master the language. He saw enough of the United States to develop a healthy respect for the size and military potential of its industrial base. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he once remarked, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.” He loved gambling and games of chance. He won large sums at the poker, blackjack, and craps tables, and joked that Japan could balance its national budget by staking him and sending him to Monte Carlo.
Yamamoto’s travels gave him perspective to observe his country from a distance, to judge its strengths and weaknesses dispassionately. It was a capacity that many of his colleagues in the navy (and even more so in the army) not only lacked but actually rejected as a kind of spiritual corruption. Perhaps the most important part of his legacy was not his naval career at all, but the part he played in the unruly politics of prewar Japan. Yamamoto was convinced that the Japanese army was run by half-wits and lunatics, and he treated the generals with good-natured contempt until it became clear, in the mid-1930s, that the army was taking over the country. As civilian statesmen and elected officials were pushed to the margins of power, and militarist cliques gained ascendancy in every aspect of Japanese politics and society, Yamamoto emerged as one of Japan’s leading advocates of a moderate foreign policy. He carried the torch for the “Treaty faction” of the navy, which supported the deeply unpopular disarmament treaties that would restrain the growth of the fleet. He campaigned persistently and at great personal risk to scuttle the alliance with Nazi Germany and to push Japan off its disastrous path toward war with the United States. Once the war was joined against his wishes, he continuously urged the government to seek a peace settlement. But he also did his duty, led the navy in many electrifying victories, and died well, like a samurai. When Japan lay in ruins after 1945, the memory of Yamamoto’s dogged efforts before 1941 to stop the slide toward war would enhance his historical standing. In a sense he was vindicated by Japan’s defeat.
JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR are often explained in terms of tatemae and honne. Tatemae, meaning “front” or “facade,” refers to the face one shows the world, the opinions one expresses in public, or the role one is obligated to play based on one’s rank or position. Honne describes “the truth” or “honest feelings,” shared only within a trusted circle of family and friends. To let slip the mask, revealing honne to another, is a signal of intimacy or trust; it is tantamount to an offer of friendship. These ideas are hardly unique to Japan, and versions of tatemae and honne are alive and well in the West. But in the Japanese way of thinking, it is perfectly natural that tatemae and honne should be at odds, and no one need agonize over the discrepancy, or go out of his way to put them to rights.
Like any correctly functioning Japanese, Admiral Yamamoto took great care to fulfill his obligatory public role. Newsreel footage depicts him stepping onto the deck of his flagship, immaculately turned out in white uniform, chrysanthemum-crested epaulettes on his shoulders, acknowledging his crew with a meaty right hand held to the visor of his uniform cap; or standing on a balcony in Tokyo, acknowledging a cheering crowd in the Japanese fashion, by waving his cap in small circles. On those occasions his face remained hard-set, rigid and expressionless. Even those who knew him well emphasized that he could be “taciturn and extremely uncommunicative” or that he had “a muscularly austere, almost forbidding side.” Upon his appointment to the fleet in 1939, a Tokyo headline proclaimed: “Yamamoto, the Stern, Silent Admiral.”
On his flagship he lived as a fleet commander was expected to live—in ostentatious luxury, eating multi-course meals at a lavishly set table in a cavernous wardroom, entertained by a forty-piece band that played for his pleasure on the afterdeck. “Yamamoto was every inch the perfect military figure,” an officer remarked, “and conducted himself on all occasions with military reserve and aplomb. Even at Rabaul or Truk, he suffered the intense heat of the tropical sun impeccably attired in the pure white Navy officer uniform. This figure of the commander in chief, oblivious to heat, tropical humidity, and insects, never failed to impress every officer and enlisted man. Yamamoto was not merely an admiral, he was the personification of the navy.”
But Yamamoto also seemed to take an almost impish delight in letting the mask slip. He had a penchant for disarming candor. A Zen priest from his hom
e district of Nagaoka said that “when one was seated opposite him at a table, one had the feeling that he was laying all his inner workings in front of you and saying, ‘Here, take what you want.’” He was a favorite of the Tokyo newspapers, not only because he was willing to provide off-the-record glimpses of what was happening behind the scenes, but because he invited reporters into his house and plied them with whiskey and cigars. One newspaperman said he was one of the few men in high office “who would tell you straight out what he was thinking without mincing matters,” and that he was “forthright to the point of seeming rather eccentric.” (Naturally, those sessions did no harm to his public image—like Nelson, Yamamoto appreciated the usefulness of popular fame.) The admiral’s candor was evident even to foreigners. “I viewed him as a very human, very real, and very sincere man,” said Edwin Layton, who served as a naval attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo before the war. “Many Japanese are hard to ‘get to.’ They are quite reserved, sometimes to the point of being aloof. One sometimes has the impression that they are like actors in a drama, wearing false faces or masks to suit their roles. With Yamamoto, I got to feel that on social occasions he did not wear his false face.” The admiral eschewed tatemae; he let his honne shine.
He was a free spirit who took pleasure in sloughing off the obligatory formalities of his rank. He had a boyish streak and a wicked, deadpan sense of humor—an admiral senior to Yamamoto called him a “mischievous devil.” It was a side of his personality most likely to emerge ashore, especially when he was out of uniform and showing off for geishas, with whom he was very popular. He would buy a bag of toasted beans from a street vendor and eat them as he walked, tossing them high into the air and catching them in his upturned mouth. Without warning or explanation, he would do a handstand. He would hail a taxi by holding up a single gloved hand, a gesture the driver interpreted as an offer of 50 sen, a generous fare. At the end of the ride the admiral would pay only 30 sen, and in reply to the driver’s complaint exclaim, “Don’t be silly—look!” and hold up his now-ungloved hand with its two missing fingers. He had a vaudevillian’s comic instincts for high silliness and physical comedy. In early 1941, when the fleet was anchored in Sasebo Harbor, Yamamoto dined in a restaurant ashore with one of his geisha girlfriends. Afterward he amused her by impersonating the bowlegged, pigeon-toed, clenched-buttocks, cane-twirling saunter of Charlie Chaplin. He walked in that manner for several hundred yards on a public thoroughfare swarming with the officers and sailors of the fleet. The geisha overheard an exchange between two incredulous sailors. “Hey, that’s the C-in-C!” exclaimed the first. “Come off it,” his mate replied: “You don’t think the C-in-C would go around like that, do you?”
Yamamoto did not drink at all. Gambling and women were his vices. Mitsuharu Noda recalled that the admiral, when playing cards or other games of chance, “sometimes lost his whole uniform at the table,” but he seems to have won more often than he lost. He was a master at shogi (Japanese chess), and sought out opponents who could play up to his level. He scrutinized the face of his opponent, and if he saw any sign of hesitation, he launched an all-out attack, sacrificing many of his pieces in pursuit of a quick victory. While in Europe and the United States, he studied bridge and poker and became highly skilled at both. He haunted the casinos of the nations he visited, using a high-low betting system that he believed could beat the house odds. He seems to have done well enough that he even spoke of quitting the navy and moving abroad to become a professional gambler. He bet on anything and everything. As navy vice-minister, he bet that he could push a lighted match through the hole of a 10-sen coin. During gunnery exercises with the fleet, he once wagered 3,000 yen, a prodigious sum, that a target vessel would not be sunk. He lost that one, and years later he was still paying installments on the debt. Historians have often connected Yamamoto’s passion for gambling to the risky operations he championed as a fleet commander, and indeed, the admiral himself drew analogies to shogi when he discussed the merits of proposed operations.
Yamamoto had married at age thirty-four, but it seems he never loved his wife; he had chosen her, he said, because she was “strong as a horse” and seemed capable of putting up with hardships. She and their four children lived in the Akasaka district of Tokyo, but while ashore Yamamoto spent much of his time with the geishas of the Shinbashi district, who nicknamed him “Eighty Sen.” (The price of a manicure was 1 yen, equivalent to 100 sen; since he had only eight fingers he demanded a discount.) He grew personally close to several geishas without necessarily taking them as lovers; indeed, in his later years he seems to have regarded them almost as a kind of surrogate family.
Geishas had no counterparts in the West. Perhaps it is necessary to call them prostitutes, inasmuch as every geisha’s body was sooner or later sold to a client; but sex was only one of the services a geisha provided, and once she had achieved a certain status, she was largely free to choose whether she would provide it, and to whom. Whatever else they were, geishas were paragons of beauty and grace: they had been trained through long apprenticeships and at great expense as artists, performers, musicians, fashionistas, and conversationalists. They did not live in the shadows, and the most successful became celebrities, their photos adorning posters and magazine covers. Like modern pop stars, they were known by a single name. They were paid chiefly for their company, by the hour. They poured sake, told stories, flirted, danced, and sang to groups of men at teahouses or private residences. Through their connections to powerful men, and by controlling the livelihoods of younger apprentices, some geishas became very wealthy, and were probably the most influential Japanese women of their time.
As a military officer, Yamamoto did not have the financial means to compete with the aristocrats and business elites who usually monopolized the services of the leading geishas. But the women seem to have liked him and lavished attention on him nonetheless. When traveling abroad he bought perfume, cosmetics, and clothing to bring them as gifts. Yamamoto was permitted to make himself at home in the geisha houses even in off-hours: on a weekday afternoon the admiral sometimes showed up at a house in Shinbashi, dressed in uniform, and napped in a spare room, his face smashed against the tatami mat. The geishas looked after him, darning his socks and laundering his underwear. As his biographer speculates, “presumably it stimulated their motherly instincts.”
In the mid-1930s, Yamamoto fell in love with a famous beauty named Chiyoko Kawai, who worked under the professional name of Umeryu (“Plum-dragon”). Her colleagues at the Nojima-ya geisha house in Shinbashi were amazed that she would make so much time for a man who obviously could not afford her. Their relationship had begun in a platonic friendship: he often referred to her as a “younger sister.” Only after a lengthy courtship did she ask Yamamoto (using an old turn of phrase) to “take her hair down with his own hands.” By 1935, she was his closest confidante. He would call her and sing over the phone to her. He would sometimes meet her at a country inn, checking in under a false name. He poured his heart out to her in letters, declaring that he felt a sense of “misery” and “worthlessness” when he reflected that he was “an object of your affection. The more I see of you, so beautiful and beguiling, the more miserable I feel. Please don’t think too badly of me. . . . In theory, it was I who wanted to be of help to you and to relieve your loneliness, and as a man I feel ashamed to find myself, on the contrary, weakly wanting to cry on your bosom. . . . This is the first time I’ve told anyone about these feelings of mine.”
After Yamamoto was given command of the Combined Fleet, a party of geishas including Chiyoko visited the flagship Nagato, moored off Yokosuka Naval Base in Tokyo Bay. The women seemed to feel “oppressed” by the strict military formalities of the ship, by the phalanxes of officers and men who snapped to attention in the presence of the C-in-C. But the admiral remained perfectly at ease. They ate a multi-course lunch in the wardroom while the band played popular folk dances for their amusement. “If the army had ever seen that, it would have caus
ed quite an incident!” remarked his yeoman, Mitsuharu Noda, who added that the scene left him with the impression that the admiral was “really a worldly man, flexible, and approachable.”
Yamamoto shrugged off concerns of a public scandal. When warned by a group of younger officers that his dalliances were unseemly, he replied, “If any of you doesn’t fart and shit, and has never screwed a woman, I’ll willingly hear what he has to say!” During his time in America Yamamoto had read several biographies of Abraham Lincoln, whom he admired as a man born into poverty who became a champion of “human freedom.” In 1927, he told a fellow naval officer, Yoshitake Miwa, that Lincoln’s flaws only enhanced his appeal:
A man of real purpose puts his faith in himself always. Sometimes he refuses even to put his faith in the gods. So from time to time he falls into error. This was often true of Lincoln, but that doesn’t detract from his greatness. A man isn’t a god. Committing errors is part of his attraction as a human being; it inspires a feeling of warmth toward him, and so admiration and devotion are aroused.