January 28, 1943: The outakai began. I attended in the Hoonoma [room] and was deeply moved by the poems of the emperor and empress.5
June 30, 1943: Today the emperor, at court, performed the yoori no gi purification ritual. I understand that he told Chief Aide-de-Camp [Hasunuma] that he had purified the stagnant war situation.6
Although Hirohito’s position required him to perform Shinto rituals and annual court ceremonies, he voluntarily embraced fixed routines and traditional practices because rigid order suited his temperament and furnished outlets for his frustrations. Always, however, the chief demands on his time came from his role as supreme commander.
I
World War II in the Pacific was officially termed by the Tj government the “War of Greater East Asia” (Dai T’A sens). It lasted for three years and nine months. The main theaters of battle were the South and Southwest Pacific, where the Imperial Navy and its naval air force had never anticipated decisive battles. Instead the navy had assumed, and Hirohito had believed, that the Combined Fleet would go fleet to fleet, ship to ship against the American enemy only in the Central Pacific. What developed was an unplanned, unprepared-for, and escalating war of attrition in the south. The army and navy made piecemeal responses to unexpected attack, reinforced slowly and inadequately, suffered more and more defeats, lost more and more aircraft and trained pilots, troop and supply transports, fighting ships, and whole ground units.
There, in the southern ocean, during the first twenty-six months of the war, the naval air force lost 26,006 warplanes—nearly a third of its total power—and thousands of experienced pilots.7 Many hundreds of thousands of tons of fighting ships went down. The loss of merchant and naval transport was especially crippling. When, toward the end of 1943, American forces under Adm. Chester Nimitz, commanding Pacific Ocean Areas, finally began their full-scale counter offensives in the Central Pacific, Japan was desperately trying to contract its defense perimeter and rebuild the naval air and sea power that had been destroyed in the brutal and barbaric South Pacific campaigns.
From the outset Hirohito shared his admirals’ mistaken strategic assumptions, and he also held his generals’ misperception of the primary enemy. The Army General Staff focused on the Soviet Union; kept most of Japan’s ground forces in Korea, Manchuria, and China; and neither researched nor prepared for combat on the remote jungle islands of the Pacific even after that area had become the main theater. Hirohito too was fixated on the Soviet Union, though not to the same extent as the army, and not for so long.8 Moreover, he grasped the shortcomings of the army’s approach before the high command did, and thereafter worked to redirect it.
During the first two months of the war, from December 8, 1941, through late January l942, Japan’s offensive against the weak, unprepared colonial armies in Southeast Asia unfolded almost exactly on schedule, and in accordance with the pre–Pearl Harbor war guidance plan, on which Hirohito based his initial interrogations. During this period the Imperial Army and Navy scored continuous victories. After destroying or crippling a large part of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and sinking the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse on December 10 off Singapore, Japanese pilots inaugurated the conquest of the Philippines by wiping out most of MacArthur’s just-reinforced air force on the ground. Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong fell in succession. Joint navy-army task forces seized the Celebes and the Dutch oil fields in Borneo on December 16, and landed troops and planes in the northern, southern, and eastern parts of the Philippines during late December. On January 3 they occupied Manila, which MacArthur had declared an open city, ostensibly to protect its civilian population but also because his forces were too weak to defend it.
The Japanese blitzkrieg attack gave the Allies no time to recover. Capturing already-built British and American airstrips in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, the naval air force advanced step by step, providing air cover for the sea and ground advance. Pushing farther into the Southwest Pacific with the aim of capturing Java in the Dutch Indies, a task force seized the Australian naval and air base at Rabaul in New Britain on January 22–23. Most of the operational goals in the South Pacific that had been set prior to Pearl Harbor had now been achieved. Key strategic resource areas of the south were in Japanese hands; the war’s first stage as initially calculated had ended.9
Sustained by the momentum of its success, determined to keep the enemy in retreat, and lacking any carefully thought-out plan for ending the war, Imperial Headquarters did not, at that point, stop its “drive to the south” and shift to a more flexible strategy. Instead, on January 29, it ordered the Combined Fleet to capture the strategic points of Lae, Salamaua, and Port Moresby in the British (eastern) part of the island of New Guinea, thereby implementing the first step of a plan to isolate and ultimately attack Australia.10 On February 7, the emperor placed his seal on Daikairei Number 14, ordering the Combined Fleet to attack the island of Timor in southeastern Indonesia.11 Hirohito was now as intoxicated by victory as his senior commanders. The joint navy-army task force captured the Portuguese and Dutch territories on Timor on February 20, Batavia on Java on March 5, and shortly afterward occupied Bougainville, the largest island in the Solomons chain, threatening American and British supply lanes to Australia.
On March 7 the liaison conference formalized the rapidly expanding Pacific offensive in a new policy document, whose first article declared: “In order to force Britain to submit and the United States to lose its will to fight, we shall continue expanding from the areas we have already gained,” and while “working long-term to establish an impregnable strategic position, we shall actively seize whatever opportunities for attack may occur.”12 The next day Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea were occupied. By April 1942 the Japanese had captured strategic points in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, territory belonging to British India and running from the Malacca Straits all the way to the mouth of the Indian Ocean, thereby forcing the small British fleet in the Indian Ocean to remove to the coast of East Africa.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Japanese army troops had earlier captured British Singapore on February 15. They had massed in Thailand and from there pushed into the British territory of Burma, capturing Rangoon (Burma’s main port) on March 8, Lashio (the starting point of the Burma Road) on April 28, and Mandalay on May 1. In the South Pacific, at the start of May, the army and navy moved into the southern Solomons (Guadalcanal and Tulagi), and around July 21 they took Buna, on the extreme eastern end of New Guinea, having earlier occupied Hollandia. Finally, on June 7, they pushed their vast Pacific defense perimeter north toward Alaska by placing garrisons on Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians.
While operations in the South Pacific were unfolding victoriously, the ground advance in the Philippines, despite initial, very quick successes, had soon slowed. American and Filipino troops withdrew to prepared positions in the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay; and there they remained. Right around this time Hirohito made his first major intervention in an ongoing Pacific front operation. Worried about the stalled offensive on Luzon, he pressed Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama twice, on January 13 and 21, to increase troop strength and launch a quick knockout of Bataan. Sugiyama, though prone to underestimate his enemy’s powers of resistance, in this instance correctly observed that the Americans holed up on Bataan constituted no threat whatsoever to Japan’s operations far to the south.13 But no chief of staff could ignore the emperor’s repeated “request.” On January 22, despite shortages of food, munitions, and manpower, the Japanese renewed their attacks on the Bataan Peninsula, while the high command set about finding adequate reinforcements should they be necessary.
In the battles that followed, the besieged American and Philippine forces—numbering approximately eighty thousand—inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese. On February 9 and 26 Hirohito again pressed Sugiyama about the operation on Bataan. Finally, on April 9, weeks after General MacArthur had escaped by PT boat
and B-17 bomber to Melbourne, Australia, the holdouts in Bataan surrendered. Those on Corregidor capitulated a month later.14 The prolonged American-Filipino defense of Bataan-Corregidor had set the stage for the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway that followed by allowing American intelligence analysts to intercept, decode, and analyze Japanese radio transmissions.
It is impossible to say whether Hirohito was notified of the Imperial Army’s gratuitous mistreatment of some 78,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war in the infamous “death march” out of Bataan. He was confronted by a prisoner-of-war issue soon after Bataan fell, however. Sixteen U.S. B-25 bombers, launched “no return” (with just enough fuel to land on friendly Chinese airfields) from the carrier Hornet, bombed Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagoya. This event occurred on April 18, nine days after the fall of Bataan. Eight of the fliers, commanded by Col. James Doolittle, were later captured when their planes went down over Japanese-occupied territory in Kiangsi Province, China. Sentenced under the “military regulations” of the theater commander to be executed “because of their act against humanity,” the Americans were soon transported to Tokyo, where their cases were referred to the Army Ministry.15
Tj initially opposed death sentences for the American prisoners, fearing (rightly) American retaliation against Japanese living in the United States. Sugiyama and the entire Army General Staff, however, insisted on executing all eight so as to teach Americans (whose bombing had killed about fifty civilians) an object lesson and thereby decrease the likelihood of further air attacks. The executions would be authorized by an ex post facto military regulation specially drafted by the Army Ministry.16 Hirohito, however, chose to intervene and commute the punishments of five. Why he allowed the others to die in violation of international law cannot be answered; at the end of the war the Japanese destroyed all records and documents pertaining to prisoners of war. Perhaps Hirohito wished to demonstrate his “benevolence,” but not an excess of that quality. Or perhaps, having sanctioned by this time so many violations of international laws, he was simply untroubled by breaching yet another one.
In addition to prodding the Bataan offensive and intervening in the case of the “Doolittle fliers,” the emperor kept closely in touch with operations in Burma and China, still believing these would be the main battle fronts. On at least three occasions during 1942—February 9, March 19, and May 29—Hirohito pressed Sugiyama to examine the possibilities for an eventual attack on Chungking.17 “Can’t you figure some way somehow to put an end to the China Incident?” he asked Sugiyama during an audience on May 29. At his urging Sugiyama set in motion the drafting of plans for a major offensive with fifteen divisions to wipe out Chiang’s main forces in Szechuan Province and capture Chungking (Operation Gog).18
While these plans were being considered, the navy sustained two successive defeats, and the Pacific suddenly emerged as the critical front in the war, though more than a year would pass before Imperial Headquarters recognized it as such. On May 7–8, as new victories in the Philippines were being reported to the emperor, the Battle of the Coral Sea was fought, giving Japan a tactical victory (in terms of American ship losses) but a strategic defeat in that the Imperial Navy lost a large aircraft carrier and 104 skilled pilots, and had to postpone its planned attack by sea on the Allied stronghold of Port Moresby in New Guinea.19
One month later, on June 5–6, the navy suffered another setback, losing four large aircraft carriers, one heavy cruiser, and approximately three thousand men, including 121 skilled pilots, in battles near Midway Island in the Central Pacific.20 American morale soared; in Tokyo the profound significance of the defeat was overlooked. On June 10 the navy conveyed to the liaison conference an incomplete picture of the results of the battle, on the ground that the real extent of damage was a military secret not to be entrusted to all members.21 Only the emperor was accurately informed of the carrier and pilot losses, and he chose not to inform the army immediately. Army planners, inaccurately briefed on the real significance of the Coral Sea and Midway defeats, continued for a short time to believe that the Combined Fleet was healthy and secure. Did Hirohito himself fail to grasp the import of the twin defeats? Kido, who discussed the naval battle of Midway with Hirohito on June 8, wrote that day:
I had presumed the news of the terrible losses sustained by the naval air force would have caused him untold anxiety, yet when I saw him he was as calm as usual and his countenance showed not the least change. He said he told the navy chief of staff that the loss was regrettable but to take care that the navy not lose its fighting spirit. He ordered him to ensure that future operations continue bold and aggressive. When I witness the courage and wisdom of the emperor, I am very thankful that our imperial country Japan is blessed with such a sovereign.22
The navy conducted no post-mortem analysis on the influence its Midway losses might have on future operations.23 But later Hirohito and the high command cancelled plans to seize Fiji and Samoa and to begin establishing control of the Indian Ocean. Midway did not cause them to end the South Pacific offensive. The Combined Fleet, however, was forced to conduct its operations around the central and southern Solomons without adequate air cover.
II
A naval officer who assisted Hirohito through many difficult moments of the war was Lt. Comm. J Eiichir. A skilled pilot who, late in 1937, had helped plan and direct the first air offensive against China’s cities from the aircraft carrier Kaga, he was also an amateur scientist with an interest in meteorology. On returning to Japan, he served on the Navy General Staff and taught at the Navy and Army War Colleges. He then went back to China as vice commander of the Thirteenth Naval Air Force, charged with bombing operations deep within China. After a year in China, J was assigned to the palace. His duties there required him to make daily war situation reports and convey top-secret navy materials and orders to the emperor. He also transmitted the replies of the navy chief of staff and navy minister to the emperor’s questions and assisted the emperor as envoy and information collector.
J was descended from the Kyushu warrior Kikuchi Takefusa, and his samurai background embodied one of the fundamental vindicating events in the history of Japanese national defense. Kikuchi (according to commentator Nomura Minoru) had participated in saving Japan from the Mongol fleet in the thirteenth century, when fortuitous “divine winds” (kamikaze) arose to destroy the would-be invaders.24 This background surely figured in Jo’s later determination to save Japan from the American fleet by drawing up the first detailed plan for a “kamikaze” Special Attack Corps in June 1943.25 Jo’s idea of recruiting and training young pilots willing to smash their Zero fighters, armed with 550-pound bombs, into the decks of American ships was later adopted and put into practice in the Philippines by his friend, Vice Adm. nishi Takijir.
Hirohito clearly liked J, for they shared interests in science and the environment.26 During his tour of duty at the palace, J kept a detailed diary that again and again provides a very human view of Hirohito. For example, he suggests that Hirohito had an insatiable appetite for Japanese and German newsreels. (Even after Japan had lost air and sea control in the Pacific, Japanese cameramen at the fronts often managed to supply fresh footage.)27 Jo describes Hirohito relaxing, celebrating, and performing various public duties. On February 18, 1942, the emperor conducted the first celebration of Pacific war victories by appearing for ten minutes on his white horse on Nijubashi, the famous bridge leading into the palace, where he waved to crowds assembled on the Imperial Plaza. On the evening of February 20, he spent nearly two hours relaxing in the aide-de-camp’s duty office.28
Watching movies, playing cards and chess with his military aides, or lecturing to them on his entomological collections were Hirohito’s regular evening activities throughout the war. For example, on May 20, 1942, J wrote that in the evening:
when the emperor joined us in our duty office, the subject changed from insects in general to special ladybugs called tamamushi zushi. He had a chamberlain bring his illustrated book of
insects from his study and began explaining them to us. Later, after dinner, he summoned a chamberlain to bring his box containing three rare ladybugs that he had collected in the palace (one of them was black.) He let Mitsui and me study them. I am deeply touched.29
These were the days of champagne victories, and in the daytime Hirohito often went horseback riding, worked in his laboratory, or attended palace lectures whenever his official duties permitted. On February 24, J noted that the emperor viewed a newsreel; the next day he “enjoyed [cross-country] skiing in the inner garden” of the palace.30
On February 26 and 28, the naval vice chief of staff briefed Hirohito on the war situation and the role of the “special submarine attack force.” The vice chief also showed him “pictures related to the special attack force as well as writings [by the suicide volunteers] prior to their departure. After examining these photographs and writings, the emperor seemed very pleased.”31 The notion of “body smashing” (taiatari), or riding a device intended solely to crash into and destroy an enemy, was already well developed by this time, though it was still two years away from being applied to warplanes.
On March 9, 1942, while the army and navy were advancing in the islands of the Central and South Pacific, Privy Seal Kido noted in his diary that the emperor:
was in a more pleasant mood than usual and smilingly said to me, “We are winning too quickly.” The enemy at Bandung on the Java front, he continued, had announced surrender on the seventh, and we are about to force total collapse in the entire Dutch Indies. The enemy forces at Surabaya have also surrendered. Rangoon on the Burma front has fallen. The emperor was obviously delighted. I could only express congratulations.32
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 46