by Craig Nelson
Aboard one of those torpedo boats attacking the Russian fleet in the fogs of Tsushima was a twenty-one-year-old, five-foot-three-inch-tall ensign who would in years to come be the most studied Japanese man in American history. Isoroku, which means “5-10-6,” was the son of schoolteacher Teikichi Takano, who was fifty-six years old at the time of his sixth son’s birth. As was tradition in Japan for the lucky, the child was in time adopted by a wealthy family and grew to become the great military visionary Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who would remember the triumph of Tsushima for the rest of his life, as his abdomen was scarred with its shrapnel, and the second and third fingers of his left hand had to be amputated, leading Tokyo geishas to nickname him Eighty Sen (a manicure then cost one hundred sen). They knew him well, for the admiral had a decade-long love affair with the remarkable temptress Plum Dragon, to whom he wrote letters of transforming passion. Yamamoto would call his attack on Pearl Harbor Operation Z and would order Togo’s Z flag raised at the time of battle to remind his men of their victorious heritage. Like Roosevelt decades later, Yamamoto was determined to never let his handicap hold him back. He insisted on no special treatment in the service, trained himself to play catch with his son using the three-fingered hand, and perhaps, like Roosevelt, his difference from others inspired him to new ideas.
When Emperor Meiji died in 1912—the same year that Tokyo’s mayor gave America’s capital city her Tidal Basin’s voluptuous cherry trees, their petals so quick to fall—his rule had lasted forty-five years, longer than even that of Queen Elizabeth I. As a child, his country was feudal and backward; now, it had all the hallmarks of a modern nation: universities; rail transit; even a national post office. But his greatest achievement, Mutsuhito believed, was his modernization of the country’s armed forces.
After her victory over Russia at Tsushima, Japan expected a treasure of concessions. Instead, the peace treaty arbitrated by Theodore Roosevelt (who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts) offended the winners when they didn’t get the reparations payments or Manchurian territory they’d expected. This was followed by the post–Great War Washington Naval Conference of 1922, a treaty which forced Tokyo to accept a 10:10:6 ratio of US:UK:Japan tonnage for battleships and aircraft carriers. Many Japanese officials considered this concession proof that their country would never be considered an equal by Britain and America, whom they called the Anglo-Saxons. With the treaty’s conclusion, chief naval adviser Kanji Kato was seen sobbing and shouting, “As far as I am concerned, war with America starts now. We’ll get our revenge over this, by God!” The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan’s home minister, Admiral Nobumasa Suetsugu, said the carnage in Hawaii had been birthed in 1922: “Ever since the ten:six ratio was imposed by the Washington treaty, we have endured unspeakable drills for over twenty years, and today we must say these drills produced a wonderful result. Furthermore we may say that these drills and pent-up resentment exploded today to produce this success.” One of the attack’s architects, Minoru Genda, explained that 1922’s limitations produced the technological innovations that would make December 7 a triumph: “Throughout the history of Japanese naval aviation, the prevailing philosophy was to emphasize attack, particularly by torpedoes. . . . We introduced dive-bombing and found it to be highly destructive and superior as a method of surprise attack. It also enabled us to put more stress than previously on the offensive potential of carrier planes.”
In 1922, the US Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants could not become American citizens and, the following year, held as constitutional a ban against Japanese owning American real estate—at a time when Japanese immigrant farmers were producing 10 percent of California’s produce on 1 percent of its farmland. In 1924, after Congress imposed national immigration quotas, with a quota for Japan of zero, fifteen Tokyo newspapers attacked the Americans’ insulting behavior, and soon after, the Japanese Army and Navy General Staff’s Imperial National Defense Policy appointed the United States as enemy number one.
At the same time that Japan felt disrespected by Americans and Europeans, she saw herself encircled by their colonies. Hong Kong, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, and a part of Shanghai were British; China’s Shantung Province was German; another district of Shanghai was French; the Dutch had their vast East Indies holdings; Hawaii, Midway, Guam, and the Philippines were American; and even the Russians were moving into Manchuria and the Liaotung Peninsula. In the years before Pearl Harbor, Japan’s leaders would continue to complain of this foreign encirclement, even though after victory in the Great War, Tokyo was awarded the German possessions of Tsingtao, the Marianas, the Carolinas, and the Marshall Islands, while her own military successes brought her Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Ryukyus, the Bonins, the Pescadores, and the Kuril Islands; as well as parts of Manchuria. Long before 1931’s start of the Great East Asia War (what the Japanese call World War II), she was on her way to empire.
In 1925, London Daily Telegraph naval correspondent Hector C. Bywater published The Great Pacific War, reviewed by the New York Times Book Review on its front page with the headline “If War Comes in the Pacific.” Bywater’s novel described a Japanese surprise attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, with simultaneous assaults on Guam, and on the Philippines at Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay. Though no paper trail ties this novel to Japanese military strategy, it predicted exactly what would happen in the closing weeks of 1941. An additional quirk of the Bywater coincidence is that one of the architects of the Pearl Harbor attack, Isoroku Yamamoto, was serving as a naval attaché in the United States when The Great Pacific War was published.
Until that moment, Yamamoto’s life had paralleled in lockstep that of another historic Japanese figure of the era, General Hideki Tojo. In World War II American eyes, Yamamoto and Tojo would become Asian Adolf Hitlers. Time magazine’s cover of December 22, 1941, called Yamamoto “Japan’s Aggressor,” portraying the admiral as sinister and treacherous, with slitted eyes and yellowed skin, while highlighting his boast to “dictate the terms of peace in the White House.” That boast was, in fact, made to try to talk the Japanese out of going to war with the United States, as Yamamoto was so in favor of Tokyo’s remaining friendly with Washington that he would repeatedly be targeted for assassination by ultranationalist fascists.
Both Yamamoto and Tojo were born in 1884 in their country’s northern provinces to families descended from samurai, and both were rewarded for their hard work and dedication in the armed forces with foreign postings, the army flying Tojo to Berlin, and the navy sailing Yamamoto to Washington. With those foreign educations, however, the similarities ended. The admiral was confident, charismatic, fun loving, with a nearly childlike enthusiasm about the world, and utterly inspirational to his subordinates, breaking the formalities of Japanese tradition with games of shogi, poker, and bridge. He did not drink, but loved women and gambling, the latter for high stakes. He was rumored to have won so much playing roulette in Monte Carlo that he was forbidden from ever returning to its great casino, and one of his closest staff officers remembered, “In all games Yamamoto loved to take chances just as he did in naval strategy. He had a gambler’s heart.”
During his years in America, the young officer traveled the country on his naval stipend, staying in fleabag hotels and skipping meals, becoming such a devotee of Abraham Lincoln that he struggled with his rough command of English through presidential biographies to further understand someone who rose from rural poverty to become Yamamoto’s highest ideal—“a champion [of] human freedom.” As commander, Yamamoto regularly urged his staff to read Carl Sandburg’s life of Lincoln to improve their English.
At this time, both Japanese and American military chiefs were wholly convinced that their nations’ great Pacific conflict would be waged according to the groundbreaking turn-of-the-century battle theories of an American Civil War lieutenant who had avoided as much naval duty as possible, since he found steamships unpleasant. To write The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, Alfre
d Thayer Mahan had extensively studied the nineteenth-century navies of Britain and France and decided that a navy was the most important engine of both national defense and global stature for any country, with “command of the sea . . . attained by the defeat of the enemy’s fleet in a decisive battle, after which the enemy’s coast and ports would be subject to blockade and perhaps invasion.” Mahan urged America to acquire Hawaii to curb Japanese territorial aggression.
American leaders so believed in a decisive battle won by state-of-the-art battleships that Theodore Roosevelt gave The Influence of Sea Power upon History to his navy-loving cousin Franklin for the lad’s fifteenth birthday in 1897. As Japan had won her wars against Russia and China with decisive Mahanian battles, her admirals became his biggest acolytes, with more of his works translated into Japanese than any other language. After the forced reduction in their capital ships from 1922, the Japanese dramatically improved their carrier and submarine technologies and created a Mahan-inspired war plan—the Kantai Kessen—the decisive battle. If the United States tried to sail a great fleet in the Pacific, Tokyo’s submarines would decimate it as it traveled west, and planes from her bases on her League of Nations mandate islands would attack it from the air. Finally, her main naval warships would utterly defeat it in Japan’s home waters.
During his eight years (1919–27) as an attaché in America, however, Isoroku Yamamoto came under the spell of the gospel of air power as taught by the great visionary Brigadier General William Mitchell. A decorated commander of America’s pilots defending the skies of France in the Great War, General Mitchell convinced Congress to let him run tests against a flotilla of targets captured from the kaiser, including submarine U-117, destroyer G-102, light cruiser Frankfurt, and battleship Ostfriesland. After Mitchell’s air crews struck the battleship with six two-thousand-pound bombs, it was sunk in a mere twenty minutes.
While America’s generals and admirals sputtered about how this test didn’t reflect real-world battle conditions, Mitchell biographer Alfred Hurley noted a “basic fact which deeply impressed itself on the public’s mind. Mitchell had sunk a battleship, as he claimed he could.” When Congress then asked why the Department of War was still pursing expensive battleships instead of inexpensive planes, the Joint Army Navy Board, created to squelch the constant interservice rivalries of American defense forces, issued a report signed by General Pershing that concluded: “The Battleship is still the backbone of the fleet and the nation’s defenses.” Three years later, Mitchell testified before the House Select Committee of Inquiry into Operations for the United States Air Service, “It is a very serious question whether airpower is auxiliary to the army and the navy, or whether armies and navies are not actually auxiliary to airpower.” These outspoken declarations enraged his superiors, and in March 1925, he was demoted. But Mitchell would not be deterred from his great dream; when the end of that year brought two naval air disasters, he returned to the newspapers, claiming the Navy and War Departments were suffering from “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.” In October 1925, the War Department court-martialed Billy Mitchell, and he resigned from the service.
Regardless of this turn of events, Yamamoto and his colleague at Japan’s naval air command Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue became proselytizers of such Mitchell nostrums as “with the advent of aircraft, the battleship has become window dressing, [for] he who commands the air commands the sea.” They essentially came to believe that the navy should turn itself into a floating air force, with Inoue predicting that if Japan controlled the skies of the Pacific, the United States could not attack it, and that a naval contest between the two nations would focus on the islands stretching from Hawaii to Malaysia that were big enough for airstrips. His predictions came true, for after Pearl Harbor, Japan didn’t control her airways, the United States attacked, and World War II’s Pacific theater focused on islands big enough for airstrips stretching from Hawaii to Malaysia.
On his return to Tokyo from Washington in 1927, Yamamoto tried to warn his nation’s militant fascists that they were underestimating the United States: “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.” After being promoted to admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto would publicly belittle his superiors’ prized superdreadnoughts Yamato and Musashi, calling them “as useful as a samurai sword,” and relentlessly criticize his superiors’ beloved strategy of Kantai Kessen. When Yamamoto was then promoted to vice minster of the navy, it became publicly known he was a member of the service’s moderate “treaty faction,” which considered war a last instead of a first resort. Called an Anglo-Saxon “running dog” by the fascists, Yamamoto was threatened with punishment “on heaven’s behalf.” A bounty was offered for his murder, and a terrorist scheme to blow up a bridge as he crossed it was uncovered. During the whole of his tenure in the ministry, Yamamoto’s residence had to be patrolled by armed guards.
One of the great architects of Pearl Harbor was thus the Japanese leader least enthusiastic about war with America. His position stood out, for across the first decades of the twentieth century the two countries’ armed forces had regularly planned to attack each other. Along with the Panama Canal Zone, Oahu became America’s most significant post–Great War foreign military base. The navy spent about $75 million a year in Hawaii, and the army more than $150 million, eventually making the Oahu garrison its largest and, for the most part, its best equipped.
In 1936, the Japanese Navy War College published “Study of Strategy and Tactics in Operations against the United States,” which noted, “In case the enemy’s main fleet is berthed at Pearl Harbor, the idea should be to open hostilities by surprise attacks from the air.” From February 1 to 14, 1932, the Americans’ Grand Joint Exercise Number Four war games simulated the US navy attacking Hawaii with the islands defended by the army, notably her Air Corps. With an assault beginning at dawn on Sunday, February 7, the navy achieved complete surprise and won the game easily. Admiral Arthur Radford remembered, “The general nature of the exercise was pretty well publicized [and] apparently, the Japanese read all this publicity in great detail. Their attack on Pearl Harbor, which came within two months of being exactly ten years later, was almost a perfect duplicate.”
On January 10, 1938, Colonel Edward Markham completed his survey of Hawaiian military strength for the War Department that concluded, “War with Japan will be precipitated without notice. One of the most obvious and vital lessons of history is that Japan will pick her own time for conflict. The very form of its government lends itself to such action in that its military and naval forces can, under the pretext of an emergency, initiate and prosecute military and naval operations independently of civil control. . . . If and when hostilities develop between the United States and Japan, there can be little doubt that the Hawaiian Islands will be the initial scene of action, and that Japan will apply her available man-power and resources in powerful and determined attacks against these islands.”
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How could nations with such long traditions of culture and civility as Japan and Germany fall under the sway of fascist thugs? Is civilization so light and so precarious that it can be tossed off like an old sweater? The stories of both nations’ fall began in social chaos. When the Great Depression surged, and with it many countries’ shortsighted fix of stringent import tariffs, Japan found itself in an especially sorry state. She couldn’t sell her products, notably silk, to other nations, and she soon enough couldn’t afford to buy anything, either—notably petroleum. By 1932, as around 20 million Germans faced starvation, four-fifths of Japan’s college graduates were unemployed, and its rural population suffered such constant crop failure that rice—the signature foodstuff of the nation—had to be rationed and could only be bought with coupons, leading to such endemic poverty that daughters were sold into brothels, and sons believed, like the samurai shishi from the great era of Meij
i, that their nation required revolutionary political change. The most successful of those rural sons ended up in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, where exactly that revolution could be wrought. As historian Donald Goldstein commented, “In the 1920s and 30s, the best and brightest in America didn’t go into the military. But in Japan, to be in the military was the best that one could do.”
Just as Meiji’s father had fallen to revolutionaries, so would his grandson Hirohito be beset by radical militarists who wanted to forge a new nation, Dai Nippon Teikoku—the Great Empire of Japan. In October 1921, four officers known as “the pillars of the army” met in the Black Forest resort of Baden-Baden to secretly engineer a pact. This group, which would be known as the ruthlessly pragmatic Control Faction, would radically reorganize the management and personnel of the Imperial Japanese Army. In their great dream, Japan would be purged of corrupt politicians and business interests, and its people would be led by the divine presence, the emperor, wholly supported by a vast army without rules, a fighting force whose generals would be key figures in the nation’s political life, and whose troops were always ready for total war. One founding father of the Control Faction was a main backer of the ultranationalistic terrorist group Imperial Way, and another was the man who would one day lead his country into World War II: Hideki Tojo.
On June 4, 1928, Manchurian warlord Marshal Chang Tso-lin was traveling by rail through the Kwantung Peninsula, a sliver of Chinese land won by Japan after its 1905 victory over Russia as negotiated by Teddy Roosevelt. A bomb exploded on the train, and the warlord was assassinated. On September 18, 1931, another explosion struck the same Japanese railway. Blaming these attacks on Chinese rebels, troops of Japan’s Kwantung Army—a regiment that defended the protectorate’s bureaucrats, expatriates, and businesses—invaded the town of Mukden. They were ordered to withdraw by their Tokyo commanders, but instead, under “insubordination in service to the nation,” within five months they took over all of Manchuria, turning it into a colony, providing Japan with such key commodities as iron, coal, and rice, as well as serving as a buffer against Russia.