Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  The shoguns quite understandably suspected that the Catholic missionaries might actually be advance scouts or spies for the colonizing Catholic powers of Europe. They remembered that after Spanish priests came to the Philippines with Ferdinand Magellan, they were followed by Spanish soldiers who made those islands the possessions of the king of Spain. An uprising of Kyushu Christians was put down with ferocious severity, and in 1617 a persecution of Christians was begun. All Christians, whether foreign or Japanese—Protestant or Catholic—were hunted down ruthlessly, and those who did not recant under torture were executed.

  Thereafter Japan sank back into isolation. No one could leave the country under pain of death, and no foreigner enter under the same grim penalty. Nor were oceangoing ships allowed to be built. Every Japanese family was required to register at a Buddhist temple, and interest in Buddhist studies was encouraged. Shinto, the naive nature-and-ancestor worship of ancient Japan, was also revived. Shinto, a Chinese word (significant of Chinese influence on Japanese culture), was based on a simple feeling of reverence for any surprising or awesome phenomenon of nature: a waterfall, a splendid cloud formation, a mountain, a magnificent tree, or even an oddly shaped stone. Places that stimulated such delight or awe became Shinto shrines. At the head of this basically shamanist religion stood a master medicine man: the divine emperor.

  Japanese tradition claimed that the imperial family was directly descended from the sun goddess. Actually, this family issued from the Yamato clan, which claimed the sun goddess as its progenitor. During the third and fourth centuries the Yamato clan’s priest-chiefs gained suzerainty and may be said to have unified the country, although without destroying the rights of the other clans. This ruling family, then, could claim an antiquity with which none of the other reigning families of the world could compare. It also could claim the allegiance of its subjects unto death itself. To fail or embarrass the emperor was a heinous, unforgivable crime for which there could be no penance or expiation other than self-destruction. This belief in the divinity of the emperor was cleverly and cynically exploited by the shoguns, who ruled the country through the emperor as figurehead.

  The shoguns came to power after the imperial armies in the eighth century suffered setbacks at the hands of Japan’s original inhabitants, the Ainu—an extremely hairy race thereafter exiled to the inhospitable North by the heartless and frequently hairless Japanese, and called in contempt “the hairy Ainu.” Scorning the imperial conscripts, the shoguns formed their own smaller but better trained and disciplined armies. These were commanded by a new class of officers drawn from the sons of local clan chiefs and called Samurai. They formed this new hereditary class of professional warriors serving the daimyos, or feudal lords.

  The Samurai were distinguished by their hair, shaven in front and top-knotted, and the clan badge worn on their kimonos. They lived Spartan lives and were rigidly drilled—from childhood to manhood—in self-control: a Samurai was taught to show “no joy or anger.” Nor was he ever to engage in trade or handle money. Like Christian seminarians, he had contempt for commerce as being infra dignitatem, beneath his dignity. He was also trained to excel in the martial arts. Indeed the two swords worn by the Samurai—one long and one short—were also badges of rank. Samurai were expected to become especially proficient with the long, two-handed sword, actually a thick, heavy, single-edged, and extremely sharp saber. The short one was for decapitating a fallen enemy or dispatching himself by seppuku, more commonly known as hara-kiri, literally, “stomach cutting.” To kill himself in atonement for failure or disgrace, a Samurai would squat on the floor and thrust his short sword into his stomach—turning it in a ceremonial disembowelment that, if it became unbearably painful, could be ended by a comrade standing by to strike his neck with a saber, severing the spinal column.

  A lifetime of cultivating indifference to pain, however, was part of a Samurai’s code of Bushido: “the way of the warrior.” With this inevitably arrogant warrior class, permitted to cut down any commoner “who has behaved to him in a manner other than he expected,” the shoguns ruled Japan. And their reign continued for more than two centuries after the extinction of Christianity. It ended only when Commodore Perry appeared in his steam-driven “black ships,” so terrifying to the insular Japanese when they saw these vessels without sails moving easily against the wind on Tokyo Bay. Very quickly a treaty opening two ports to the Americans was signed.

  This unprecedented deference (not to say obeisance) to a foreign power so enraged conservatives of all callings—the merchants, daimyos, the Samurai—that it provoked a revolution known as the Meiji Restoration ending the power of the shoguns and restoring it to the emperor. It also culminated the career of the Samurai. No ruler could feel entirely safe with such dangerous zealots at large within his borders, and so by imperial edict these fierce warriors accepted the lump-sum termination offered them to hang up their swords and become merchants, lawyers, doctors, or bureaucrats. But they did not remain long suppressed, for the Meiji Restoration, in perhaps the most astonishing national turnabout in history, had embraced in one swoop the entire apparatus of the once-despised Western civilization. Everything invented or developed by the “Round Eyes” since Greece, Rome, and the advent of the Christian Era—their science, industry, culture, political institutions, methods of education, business practices, economics, dress, and even sports—was swallowed whole by Nippon.

  Despite the undoubted exuberance of this nonviolent social revolution (sometimes comical to a Westerner at first sight of a smaller Japanese going to his daily workplace in a tuxedo hanging on him like a scarecrow’s suit and a top hat reaching down to his ears), the change was outward only; Japan, for all of its pretensions to democracy, remained a paternalistic, authoritarian state. The secret police organized in the 1600s may have been banned, but the new Japan replaced them with Thought Police, censors and spies sniffing out sedition and “suspicious” activity like tireless bloodhounds, and empowered like the Samurai of old to put to death anyone caught doing “anything different.” In classrooms and army barracks young Japanese were taught to glory in Nippon’s military traditions, to believe that dying on the battlefield for the emperor was the most sublime fate to which a man could aspire.

  Inevitably the spirit of the Samurai returned and their code of Bushido was revived. Soldiers of a mainly peasant army, both officers and men, were trained in the hard, selfless Samurai school, taught to think of themselves as heirs of that departed warrior class. Officers adopted a so-called Samurai saber, much like the two-handed long sword of old, as their badge of rank. Properly sharpened and even though wielded by diminutive Japanese, it could sever a prisoner’s head at a single stroke, and this summary execution of captives—usually after they had been tortured for information—became one of the least gruesome features of Japan’s new, Samurai-led army as it took the field in pursuit of territorial conquest and the raw materials and markets in which Nippon, for a modern industrial nation, was so deplorably deficient. Eventually the chief officers among them emerged as the War Lords of Japan. In collusion with the zaibatsu—leading politicians, bureaucrats, and industrialists such as the Mitsubishi and Mitsui families—the War Lords ruled the country through the figurehead of Hirohito.

  This career of territorial aggrandizement by an authoritarian coalition began in 1879 with Nippon’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa was the largest. Sixty-six years later three typical Samurai took charge of defending this last barrier between American armed forces and the Home Islands of Japan.

  Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima—commander of the Japanese Thirty-second Army—may be said to have been the Samurai beau ideal. Ramrod-straight and lean, sharp-featured with a graying military brush mustache, he was able to awe subordinates by his unshakable composure and iron self-control. Yet he was a considerate man whose staff not only respected but even revered him. Ushijima’s style was low-key. He abstained from the rough-and-tumble of staff discussions of policy, plans,
or operations; in which, as had happened during the Guadalcanal disaster, irate officers could actually come to blows. Rather, he let his aides make the decisions, which he would either approve or reject. But he always took responsibility for the results, good or bad. In their unreserved admiration of him, his idolizing staff compared him to Takamori Saigo, a celebrated hero of the Meiji Restoration.

  Early in the war Ushijima had distinguished himself as an infantry group commander during the conquest of Burma. There he met Isamu Cho, chief of staff of the Southern Army. They returned to Tokyo together, Ushijima to become commandant of the Japanese Military Academy, Cho to serve on the General Military Affairs Bureau. They also came to Okinawa together, Ushijima as the Thirty-second’s chief, Cho as his chief of staff—and no two men could differ more in character.

  Ushijima the serene was a man of presence, capable of inspiring his subordinates. He also possessed the rare gift of seeing his own incapacities, which he filled by choosing Major General Cho, a firebrand and a planner and organizer, strict but resourceful, aggressive, and so invincibly explosive in argument as to be unpopular. Deceptively scholarly-looking with thick wide spectacles that exaggerated his owlish features, he was actually—in contrast to the Spartan, abstemious Ushijima—a bon vivant. In his quarters, even toward the end of the battle for Okinawa, might be found unrivaled meals, the best Scotch whiskey, the finest sake, and the prettiest women. The burly Cho was also something of a bully, and the young officers who served him resented his hectoring tirades, even though they admitted that he could make them work harder than any other officer.

  Isamu Cho had risen at fifty-one to the rank of lieutenant general and was in line for another star. In 1930, while a captain, he had joined the Sakura-kai, or “Cherry Society,” whose hundred-odd members—all firebrands like Cho—were sworn to cleanse Japan of all Western influences that they considered inimical to the ancient virtues of the Samurai. Antidemocratic and anticapitalist, they sought to establish a military dictatorship and had chosen the cherry tree as their emblem because its brilliant though short-lived blossoms symbolized the warrior Samurai’s readiness to die for the emperor at any moment.

  A few generals eager to wear the dictatorial mantle courted the Cherry favor, and thus contributed to the society’s increasing influence and to Cho’s emergence as the leading hothead and strong-arm advocate. In January 1931, he helped plot a conspiracy to murder the prime minister and replace him with a leading general, but that distinguished officer declined to accept the honor, since he seems to have expected to gain that eminence by legal means. In October the Cherries tried again, with Cho once more the leader. The plan was to have revolutionaries fly over Tokyo to bomb selected targets, chief among them the prime minister’s residence. With him dead, Emperor Hirohito could be compelled to choose a general as his successor. However, Cho’s very exuberance foiled the plot. At one of the meetings, held in a geisha house in Tokyo’s red-light district, he declared that the conspiracy must succeed “even if it is necessary to threaten the emperor with a drawn dagger.” To one Cherry member this was treasonous talk indeed, and after he blew the whistle, Japanese military police raided a geisha house to arrest the ringleaders—Cho not included—and put an end to the notorious plot of “the Brocade Banner.”

  In any other army Cho’s activity would at least have led to his being court-martialed or even executed, but instead of being punished he was rewarded with a coveted assignment to the Kwantung Army, then engaged in ripping the province of Manchuria from the flabby big body of the Chinese giant. Nor was the public as outraged as it might have been by the Brocade Banner affair, for in those days a man who excused his misdeeds by wrapping himself in the flag of patriotism was forgiven almost anything. Gradually, however, as the militarists tightened their hold on Japan, any kind of opposition to the status quo, no matter how supposedly patriotic, was not so conveniently ignored.

  Nevertheless Cho did not—could not—restrain himself. In 1938 he nearly provoked a war between Japan and the Soviet Union when he and another officer ordered an unauthorized attack on Russian forces just over the Manchurian border. Three years later, as chief of staff of the army that had seized Thailand, he seems to have encouraged hostilities between Thai and Vichy French troops. Yet, he remained in the high command’s mystifyingly good graces, much to the dismay of generals senior to him who also sought the Okinawa assignment. Perhaps Imperial Headquarters believed that Cho’s very excess of zeal could now be helpful rather than detrimental to the army. If the fires burning in his breast could rekindle the ardor of the soldiers on Okinawa, then another kind of kamikaze might yet overwhelm superior American firepower and save Japan.

  Such a possibility might indeed have inhabited the minds of these mystical Japanese generals and admirals, men who actually did believe that the soul of a Samurai killed fighting for the emperor would dwell eternally in Yasakuni Shrine in Tokyo. But from the standpoint of reality, a more hopeful savior than either the traditionalist Ushijima or the fiery Cho existed in the person of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, chief planning officer of the Thirty-second Army.

  At forty-two Yahara was much younger than either Ushijima or Cho, although his record was almost as impressive. Graduated from the Japanese Military Academy in the class of 1923, Yahara had served in an infantry regiment, had attended the Japanese War College and spent ten months at Fort Moultrie in the United States as an exchange officer. He had also served with distinction during fighting in China, Thailand, Malaya, and Burma. Tall for a Japanese, poised, patrician, an intellectual, there was about him a kind of superciliousness—probably born of his contempt for those advocates of bamboo-spear tactics—that alienated many of his comrades. Especially Cho. Indeed, Cho and Yahara were as antithetical as two men could be. Where Cho was impetuous, Yahara was deliberate; where Cho was physical and aggressive, Yahara was thoughtful and careful; and where Cho was all heart, Yahara was all head. To Yahara war was not a contest but a science, to be won by superior tactics adjusted to terrain, weapons, and troops, not by those wretchedly bloody Banzai charges. In this intellectualism and the aloofness issuing from it, and in his unconcealed contempt for others who did not share his acumen, he again offended fellow officers on Ushijima’s staff.

  Nevertheless Hiromichi Yahara’s rationalism was the perfect complement to Ushijima’s magnetism and Cho’s fire, thus conferring on the Thirty-second Army a superb leadership, which—now devoted to the new tactic of defense in depth to be executed on the most compatible terrain imaginable—did not presage a quick and easy victory for the American invaders. This trio’s intention to give up no ground willingly and to whittle and weary the enemy was reflected in the Thirty-second Army’s slogan composed by Ushijima:One Plane for One Warship

  One Boat for One Ship

  One Man for Ten of the Enemy or One Tank

  Fulfillment of the first slogan was up to the kamikaze, for General Ushijima had little airpower based on Okinawa’s five airfields.

  “One Boat for One Ship” would be the objective by nautical Divine Winds of the Sea Raiding Squadrons. They were enlisted youths fresh out of high school, trained to ram explosive-stuffed motorboats into American ships. There were about 700 suicide boats hidden in the Ryukyus, and approximately 350 were only about fifteen miles west of southern Okinawa in the islets of the Kerama-retto.

  The third stricture was left to a force of about one hundred thousand men, of whom a fifth were conscripted from the Okinawan population. The bulk of these troops was concentrated in Okinawa’s southern third.

  Here Ushijima began to build a line facing north like a broad arrowhead. Its point rested on the heights surrounding Shuri and Shuri Castle, the city and citadel of Okinawa’s ancient kings. Its flanks swept back to the sea on either side, through a jungle of ridges to the chief city of Naha on the left (to the west), through similar hills back to Yonabaru Airfield on the right. It was the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. It held the bulk of Ushijima’s fighting men—the Sixty-second Div
ision, which had served in China, the Twenty-fourth Division, and the Forty-fourth Independent Mixed Brigade. To its left, on Oroku Peninsula jutting into the sea west of Naha, were about thirty-five hundred Japanese sailors and seven thousand Japanese civilians under Vice Admiral Minoru Ota. Roughly three thousand soldiers of the Second Infantry Unit under Colonel Takehiko Udo held the wild, uninhabited northern half of Okinawa—that part that Ushijima, at the urging of Yahara, had chosen not to defend. Nor would Ushijima attempt to contest the Hagushi Beaches in west-central Okinawa. He would defend the Minatoga Beaches to the south because they were in the rear of his Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, but he would protect almost nothing north of that line, except, of course, its approaches. He would not even defend Yontan and Kadena Airfields to the east of the Hagushi Beaches. These would be wrecked the moment the Americans appeared by a special force drawn from the Boeitai, the Home Guard of about twenty thousand men whom Ushijima had ruthlessly called up from among the Okinawan males between twenty and forty. The wrecking crew was called the Bimbo Butai, or “Poor Detachment,” by those Japanese soldiers whose loathing of Okinawa and all things Okinawan had already become a problem to General Ushijima.

  Conscription of the Boeitai had unwittingly led to one of the chief complaints among Ushijima’s soldiers: the lack of fresh vegetables. There hadn’t been enough adult males around to produce the normal vegetable crop that fall and winter, and Tokyo was shipping in bullets, not beans.