The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The last Japanese straggler on Guam was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, a native of Aichi Prefecture, who lived in a remote section of the Talofofo river valley until 1972. This latter-day Robinson Crusoe survived in the jungle for almost twenty-eight years by eating fruit, nuts, snails, rats, pigeons, shrimp, eels, and native plants. His story remains an extraordinary example of what can be achieved with advanced wilderness survival skills. Yokoi built traps of wild reeds and wove clothing of pago fibers. He avoided disease by bathing frequently and boiling water before drinking it. He dug an underground shelter and installed bamboo walls and floors. Until 1964, he had remained in occasional contact with other Japanese holdouts, but for the last eight years of his ordeal he was alone. When captured by two Chamorro natives in January 1972, Yokoi accurately identified the month and year. Doctors judged the fifty-six-year-old man to be in excellent health and in full possession of his mental faculties.

  His return to Japan caused a national sensation. Yokoi said that he had known the war was over since 1952, but had dreaded the disgrace of surrender. “I am ashamed that I have returned alive,” he told reporters. In a visit to the grounds of the Imperial Palace, he addressed himself to the emperor and empress: “Your Majesties, I have returned home. I deeply regret that I could not serve you well. The world has certainly changed, but my determination to serve you will never change.”114

  Such sentiments could not fail to ignite the Japanese imagination. Many of his countrymen hailed Yokoi as an authentic samurai, a paragon of bushido and chukin (“zealous devotion”). Others found his story as tragic as it was poignant. Only a fanatic chooses to live alone in a jungle for twenty years after he knows his war is lost. And was it not precisely that sort of fanaticism that had dragged Japan down to a calamitous defeat in 1945?

  Epilogue

  DURING THE WAR, WHENEVER POSSIBLE, THE JAPANESE ARMY arranged to repatriate the cremated remains of fallen soldiers. Burial details dug a pit, filled it with brushwood, piled the bodies on top of the wood, poured gasoline onto the bodies, and set them on fire. Teishin Nohara, a soldier from Tochigi Prefecture who fought in China, recalled that the job had to be done quickly and was not always done well. “It was like baking sardines,” he recalled:

  You just set fire to it and let the flames consume the wood. Then you took up bones from the parts that burned, put them in a bag, and filled out a tag with the dead man’s name. You said a silent prayer, sure, but there wasn’t any “ceremony.” It was war, so you couldn’t help it. When it rained you couldn’t even really burn them, so say the battalion commander had died, you’d burn just his body and distribute bits of his bones to the rest. You can’t tell this kind of truth to the families of the deceased! So you burn what you can quickly. You just do it, keep going. Ten. Twenty. You have to move fast.1

  Transported to the homeland by ship, the bags were forwarded to regional distribution centers. Each man’s ashes were transferred into a small wooden box, and the box was wrapped carefully in clean white cotton cloth. The boxes were sorted according to the dead man’s home district and village, and loaded onto special funeral trains for delivery to the family. A local military affairs office was notified of the train’s scheduled arrival so that a ceremony to honor the “spirits of the returning war dead” could be duly performed.

  As the train pulled up to the platform, a representative of the family stepped forward and bowed. A window was raised. A soldier wearing a mask lifted the box in white-gloved hands and offered it through the window. When it was accepted, he bowed and closed the window. Fumio Kimura, a soldier who performed this duty in Shiga Prefecture, recalled the familiar scene: “Elderly parents and young wives holding children’s hands or carrying babies clung to the box and wept. ‘This is your father.’ Thinking, This will be us tomorrow, we soldiers cried also and could only stand silently at the window.”2

  The box was carried back to the village in a somber procession, with the family often accompanied by neighbors, friends, local officials, Buddhist priests, veterans, and representatives of local patriotic leagues. Schoolchildren were often led out of school to bow in unison as the procession passed.

  When no remains were recovered, as in the case of sailors lost at sea, the family sometimes received an empty box. Hitoshi Anzai, a boy living in Tokyo, was curious to know why the box purportedly containing his brother’s remains rattled when he shook it. Since his brother’s ship had gone down at sea, what could be inside the box? He pried it open and found a small sliver of wood with his brother’s name written on it. It had been nailed loosely to the bottom of the box in such a way as to “make it sound like there actually was a piece of the dead man’s bone inside when the box was shaken.”3 The boy was offended at having been deceived. Worse, he noted that his brother’s name had been misspelled.

  Toru Izumi, a soldier posted in Matsuyama, was charged with receiving and distributing the remains of several hundred soldiers who had perished in the South Pacific. Izumi and his fellow soldiers pitied the families who were to receive empty boxes. More than forty years later he offered a pained confession:

  When we thought of the feelings of the members of the dead soldier’s family, we couldn’t bear to hand them an empty box. After discussion, we concluded that since the soldiers had died together, praying over another soldier’s remains should be the same thing. Unable to face the greater sadness of families with no remains inside the boxes and believing that the heroic war dead would rest in peace better, we decided to take a few fragments of remains from other boxes. All the while fearing that it was wrong to deceive the bereaved families, we divided the fragments of bones into different boxes, our hands trembling as we did this. I have yet to determine whether what we did was right. It has remained a hurt inside me that will never ease.4

  Entire sections of Japanese newspapers were devoted to stories about the war dead. As soon as a military affairs office released the name of a man killed in action, local reporters and photographers rushed to the family’s home. Often it was the journalists who broke the news to the dead man’s next of kin. “You assumed that they knew, but often they hadn’t heard anything,” said Uichiro Kawachi of the Yomiuri Shinbun. “They’d wail and cry. It was awful.”5 The reporters always asked for a photograph of the fallen man—if they brought a photo back to the newsroom, said Kawachi, the story “always made the paper. . . . Every paper competed for a picture.”6

  Editors and military censors frowned on stories that played up a family’s grief. Rather, the reporters should emphasize the dead man’s “laudable virtues” and the family’s pride in a son, husband, or father who had given his life for his country and his emperor. As the casualties mounted in the middle years of the Pacific War, reporters began recycling fixed phrases: “They spoke without shedding a tear.” (Kawachi said that he often used that phrase “no matter how much they’d cried.”) Over time, editors and reporters developed several story archetypes that could be recycled ad infinitum:

  When a series of ten articles was planned for the paper, all the participating reporters would discuss themes and the style each would use. “I’ll use the ‘small mother’ voice.” “I’ll use the ‘struggling, yet gallant mother’ type.” Like this we’d establish a theme for the series. There were lots of styles. You could write the story any way you wanted. You’d have a mother who had been weeping, mourning for her son, crying so hard and long that her face was swollen and her voice was choked. Her dead son would appear before her and beg her, “Don’t cry, Ma. When you cry, it only hurts me to see you so sad.” Then she’d stop. That’s what we’d write. We couldn’t repeat the same thing every time, so we’d have to change it around.7

  Censorship was practiced in all the major combatant nations of the Second World War, but in no other nation was the control of wartime reporting so Orwellian in its ambition and extent as in Japan. The morning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading editors were summoned to a meeting at the cabinet’s Board of Information. They were told that the ca
use of the war was “the enemy’s egotistic ambition to control the world,” and it was the duty of the Japanese press to “instill a deep hatred for America and Britain in the minds of the people.”8 Apart from the ordinary control of battlefield reporting, media representatives were to attend mandatory meetings in which they were instructed on how to shape the attitudes and perceptions of the Japanese people. The papers were to assist in promulgating official slogans: “We must advance to increased war power,”9 “We must carry out the responsibilities of the homefront,” “Luxury is the enemy,” “Be frugal and save,” “Serve the nation with one death.” Editors were required to participate in humiliating group sessions in which passages from their recent issues were read aloud and either praised or singled out for criticism. The distinction between reporting and editorial commentary faded. Stories that intoned solemnly about the kokutai—the “imperial way,” a political order founded on reverence for the Showa emperor—were lavished with praise and held up as examples to be imitated.

  The administrative apparatus of censorship was never consolidated into any one agency of government. An article that did not offend the army might raise hackles in the Navy Ministry, and editors sometimes found themselves wedged helplessly between the opposing requirements of the two services. A ranking officer in a local police station might summon an offending editor or reporter to be upbraided and threatened with imprisonment. The army press section began holding regular monthly meetings at a Tokyo restaurant, to which all leading editors were “invited.” (Attendance was recorded.) Officers commented on each publication’s recent stories and made “requests” (issued orders) concerning the content and themes of upcoming editions.

  Guidelines were often arbitrary and seemingly meaningless. A word or phrase might be declared out of bounds with no coherent justification provided. An independent writer who fell out of favor found that editors no longer took his calls or acknowledged his submissions. Recidivist offenders were hauled away to prison to be beaten, tortured, starved, and incarcerated indefinitely. A reporter whose byline appeared above an impertinent article might find himself drafted into the army and shipped to the front lines, without military training, the following day. A paper might be ordered to suspend publication for several days or weeks, long enough to drive it into bankruptcy. On occasion, an article would be “recalled,” requiring that drivers be sent out to tear the objectionable pages from copies still on the newsstands, and to affix a seal to the cover identifying it as a “Revised Edition.”

  As commodities of every kind grew scarce, the junta discovered another useful lever to reward compliance and punish insubordination—raw newsprint. In December 1942, the vice chief of the Board of Information told editors in chief that the supply of newsprint would be “negligible” in the following year, and that allocations would be decided according to how closely their publications adhered to government direction. The editors were pressured to make their leading reporters available to “tour the provinces making speeches on the realization of the Holy War for the Information Board.”10

  In Japan, where the literacy rate was among the highest in the world, newspapers were a large and lucrative business. Enterprising owners quickly grasped that the war and its pressures offered an opportunity to expand circulation at the expense of less jingoistic competitors. The prime beneficiary of the new regime was the ultranationalist Asahi Shinbun, the largest daily newspaper in Japan with a circulation exceeding two million. Asahi had the scale to build a sophisticated internal “inspection division,” an in-house layer of censorship that minimized the danger that any article would run afoul of the regime. The leading papers competed fiercely for readers—but not, as Asahi correspondent Shoryu Hata later admitted, “over the quality and accuracy of the reports that would be left to history, but rather over how most effectively to rouse the public. Because of this pressure and competition, there were reporters who wrote total lies.”11

  Star reporters were assigned to cover the Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo. Being headquarters correspondent was one of the most prestigious postings in Japanese journalism—but the job, Uichiro Kawachi recalled, was little more than that of a glorified stenographer. All headquarters correspondents labored under the tyrannical eye of the Kempeitai (the domestic state security service). They were required to wear a plain army uniform without insignia. Correspondents regularly and falsely published under bylines placing them at the front, even though they had never left the Tokyo headquarters building. When an official announcement was released, the correspondents were required to copy down each word verbatim, taking care to avoid errors or typos. Any deviation from the exact wording of the announcement, however trivial, was grounds for revocation of press credentials. To guard against such errors, each correspondent first called his newsroom and read the statement over the phone, then delivered by hand a printed copy to a courier waiting outside on a motorbike. The courier sped to the newsroom and rushed the document into the hands of the editors, so that the text could be double- and triple-checked before it was published in the late edition.

  Kawachi, who covered the headquarters for Yomiuri, explained that announcements from the Imperial General Headquarters held near-sacred status because they were issued in the name of the Showa emperor and were accompanied by the imperial seal. Any error in transcription was tantamount to blasphemy. Any reference to the emperor in the pages of a newspaper was required to comply with exacting guidelines. The kanji (characters) for “Showa Tenno” must be separated from the preceding and following kanji by an extra space. “Showa Tenno” must not appear at the bottom of a line of text—instead, a space was to be left blank and the name carried to the top of the next line. Reverence for the emperor, said Kawachi, was behind the tendency of the Imperial Headquarters to disseminate increasingly blatant falsehoods in the later stages of the war. Since the emperor was infallible, no past declaration could have been inaccurate. It logically followed that all new announcements must confirm the truth of what had been reported previously. “Back then it was inconceivable that the Emperor could make a mistake,” said Kawachi. “He was a god. You couldn’t change what he’d said and explain that it was in error.”12 Instead, new lies were offered to prop up past fabrications and errors, until the entire edifice of the regime’s authority and credibility began to buckle under the strain.

  Among the losers in wartime Japan’s media industry were smaller weekly and monthly magazines with an audience of scholars and other intellectual elites. Many such publications had been associated with “liberal” or pro-democratic views in the years before the war, when a more indulgent political atmosphere had put up with some degree of dissent. Chuo Koran (The Central Review) had been published continuously since the nineteenth century, and was one of the nation’s most esteemed public affairs journals, with a long record of opposing militarist influence in domestic politics and imperialist adventures abroad. Its past was enough to place Chuo Koran and its staff under harsh scrutiny, but the magazine managed to remain in print, with a circulation of 100,000, by repositioning itself to the right. Shigeo Hatanaka, Chuo Koran’s editor in chief until he was forced out in 1943, hired military officers to write articles in line with favored themes. He called such contributors his “magic shields.” Meanwhile, said Hatanaka, the magazine did what it could to carry the torch of liberalism by writing “paradoxically”—that is, “sounding as if we were going along, but only on the surface in an editorial or in a style which might have appeared to be right-wing.”13

  At regular monthly meetings with the army, the editors bravely declared that Chuo Koran’s mission was to persuade intellectuals to support the war. Their readers, they argued, were too sophisticated to be moved by unbridled jingoism and mechanical sloganeering. They needed reason and persuasion. But that line of argument found no purchase with the authorities. “At one meeting,” Hatanaka recalled, “we at Chuo Koran were practically told to slit our bellies open.”

  They said our way of thinkin
g was wrong. “Everyone must put their minds to war,” was their slogan. To them, that meant run up the flag, sing military songs, and cheer loudly! Even a nihilistic attitude toward war was wrong. They said they could tell if we were sincere just by looking at the color in our faces.14

  If Hatanaka had hoped for support among his fellow editors, he hoped in vain. His colleagues watched in stony disapproval as Chuo Koran was chastised. He imagined that they were thinking, “It serves them right!”15 If the authorities wanted to knock a competitor out of print, so much the better. In any case, an editor who defended a rival might find his own publication singled out for added scrutiny. In March 1943, when all Japanese magazines were ordered to print the slogan “We’ll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be,” Chuo Koran printed it inside the magazine, following the editorial, rather than on the cover as specified. This small act of defiance sealed its fate. A shutdown order followed within days. Hatanaka was branded a communist and hauled off to prison, where he was beaten and tortured almost daily for nine months.

  In November 1943, all new newspaper subscriptions were banned. Thereafter, only existing subscribers would receive deliveries. Smaller newspapers were merged into larger ones. The giants Asahi and Yomiuri, both militantly nationalistic, swallowed up many of their smaller competitors. By 1944, many more once-flourishing magazines and newspapers had suspended publication and shuttered their doors. With a handful of compliant titans dominating the news-gathering and -reporting business, official censorship was greatly simplified. Readers furtively complained that indistinguishable government-sanctioned piffle ran in every paper on the newsstand.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 20, 1944, as the defeated First Mobile Fleet retired north toward Japan, the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters had struggled to form a clear picture of Ozawa’s situation. Communications were fragmentary and confusing, but what little information got through was distressing. Two fleet carriers were definitely gone, and only a handful of planes had returned from the strikes of June 19. But there remained some hope that the enemy’s fleet had been bloodied in the previous day’s action, and that a proportion of Ozawa’s planes had flown on to Guam. An intercepted American radio transmission mentioned “survivors” of the Bunker Hill, raising hopes that the carrier had been sunk—but subsequent intercepts referred to downed aviators, not to the ship’s crew.16 When the American carrier planes attacked Ozawa on the evening of June 20, sinking a third Japanese carrier (the Hiyo), the staff at the Imperial General Headquarters could read the writing on the wall. If Spruance had chased Ozawa halfway across the Philippine Sea, his fleet must be intact. The scale of the naval defeat thus presented itself in unambiguous terms. On the same evening, messages from General Saito’s headquarters on Saipan indicated that the Americans had secured the southern half of the island. Without naval or air support, Saito’s position was tactically hopeless; it was only a matter of time before Saipan would fall to the Americans.