Housewives and old people—everyone all over Japan practicing war with bamboo spears; wind-carried balloons with a small incendiary device hanging below; surely the military significance of these measures was more symbolic than practical. Kamikaze attacks on Allied warships and troop transports were an entirely different threat, however, a real and dangerous one.118 They were a kind of weapon Americans, Australians, and Britons simply could not understand, and for that reason found all the more disturbing. Hirohito, however, clearly understood the rhetoric of sacrifice, and he may have hoped that the kamikaze tactic would prove militarily effective. On New Year’s Day 1945, while the Japanese capital was under air attack, the emperor and empress inspected the special last-meal rations being provided to the departing members of the suicide units. Thereafter Hirohito continued to show gratitude for these “special attack forces” whose operations he had followed in the newspapers and watched on film since the summer of 1944, when he saw the first newsreel on the kamikaze (“The Divine Wind Special Attack Force Flies Off”).119
Sometime after January 9, 1945, when the United States began retaking Luzon, and the self-destruction of kamikaze pilots and “human torpedoes” increased, the emperor’s military aide Yoshihashi Kaiz was delivering a briefing on the battles near Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. He had just mentioned the suicide attack of one of the “special pilots” when:
suddenly the emperor stood up and made a deep, silent bow. I was pointing at the map and his majesty’s hair touched my head, causing me to feel as though an electric current had run through my body. On a later occasion, I informed the emperor about a corporal who had made a suicide attack on a B–29 in the sky over Nagoya, and the emperor did the same thing: rose and bowed deeply. Both times only the emperor and I were in the room.120
Enthralled like the rest of the nation by the rhetoric of sacrifice, the emperor began the most fateful year of his life by honoring the “Yamato spirit” in its supreme manifestation.
During the first half of 1945, American forces recaptured most of Luzon, though the fighting in the Philippines continued until virtually the end of the war. They also invaded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Everywhere they encountered desperate and increasingly effective ground resistance and more and more kamikaze attacks, which, however, became gradually less deadly as American countermeasures were developed. On tropical Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, where, after three days of fierce naval bombardment, two marine divisions landed on February 19, outnumbered Japanese defenders for the first time did not try to stop the invaders at the beaches or resort to mass charges. Instead, they pursued a “dug-in” defense from caves and bunkers. When the battle there entered its final stage, the emperor said, on March 7, “I am fully satisfied that naval units have taken charge of defense and are cooperating very well with the army. Even after the enemy landed, they fought ferociously against much greater forces and contributed to the entire operation.”121
American journalism made Iwo Jima symbolic of U.S. superiority in everything from technology, firepower, and tactics to raw courage. The image, partly falsified, of U.S. Marines triumphantly raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi glorified the bravery of Marines in single-minded pursuit of victory. In his bombproof command center in Tokyo, Hirohito too viewed Iwo Jima in terms of the courage of his forces there and their willingness to fight to the death. He had ordered all garrisons on islands forming the outer moat of defense to buy time during which the home islands could prepare for the final battle. Their mission was to make the enemy bleed as much as possible. General Kuribayashi, the Iwo Jima commander, had done exactly that. Virtually the entire Japanese garrison of twenty thousand men had fought to the death but the Americans had also died, nearly seven thousand of them, with more than nineteen thousand wounded.122 Thus Hirohito took comfort in the proportionately greater losses that his doomed defenders had inflicted on the invading marines. As Guadalcanal had been, Iwo Jima had become a test of character. And Hirohito had abetted the killing by his bullheaded refusal to accept and deal with Japan’s defeat.
In the defense of Okinawa, another island he had defined as an expendable moat area, the emperor intervened early and often for he believed—as he told Chief of Staff Umezu—“If this battle turns out badly, the army and navy will lose the trust of the nation. We have to think about the impact it could have on the future war situation.” He seemed unable to comprehend just what was happening: “Why doesn’t the field army go on the offensive? If there are insufficient troops, why don’t you do a counterlanding?”123 “Is it because we failed to sink enemy transports that we’ve let the enemy get ashore? Isn’t there any way to defend Okinawa from the landing enemy forces?”124 So spoke Supreme Commander Hirohito on the second day of the American invasion. And later that same day he told Prime Minister Koiso: “Nothing is going the way it was supposed to.”125
On the third day Hirohito pressed Umezu to order the Thirty-second Army on Okinawa, under Lt. Gen. Ushijima Mitsuru, to either go on the offensive or launch a counter-landing.126 Ushijima, having learned from the mistakes of his predecessors in the Central Pacific, was following a strategy of tactically retreating, digging in, and fighting a war of attrition from well-concealed bunkers. After Hirohito’s intervention the Tenth Area Army, which was the upper echelon of command over the Thirty-second, ordered Ushijima to “launch an offensive against the northern and central airfields.”127 Ushijima could only comply, radioing back to Imperial Headquarters, “All of our troops will attempt to rush forward and wipe out the ugly enemy.” The charge was made—but the “ugly enemy” survived it. Hirohito also urged the navy to counterattack in support of the defenders on Okinawa with every possible resource.128
While the Battle of Okinawa intensified, Hirohito cautioned Umezu about the army’s plans to contract its defense lines in China and redeploy troops northward to defend Manchuria and Korea, but more particularly the home islands. On April 14, he warned Umezu: “Be cautious…of the enemy’s propaganda. Destroying railroad lines and villages in enemy areas at this time might have a bad effect on the minds of the people.” But his principal concern was that “we not hurt ourselves” by pulling out and allowing Americans to develop new air bases there.129
As late as May 5 the emperor was still hoping for a victory on Okinawa and radioing the Thirty-second Army, via radio messages, that “We really want this attack to succeed.”130 The battle for Okinawa had begun on April 1. It lasted until mid-June and cost an estimated 94,000 to 120,000 Japanese combatants and 150,000 to 170,000 noncombatants, including more than seven hundred Okinawans whom the Japanese army forced to commit collective suicide. American combat losses were approximately 12,500 killed and more than 33,000 wounded; among these casualties were more than 7,000 sailors, reflecting the toll taken by kamikaze attacks. The war was lost, and had been for more than a year, but defeated Japan stubbornly fought on.
At this critical pass Hirohito’s personality and his approach to life and his office served him badly. He could see many things sooner than his chiefs of staff could, but was always prone to rigid procedures rather than flexible solutions. All his life he had been excessively earnest, preoccupied with detail. Now, confronting endless defeats, he carried his earnestness, his inflexibility, and his absorption with detail to extremes. The final, most destructive stage of the war was about to begin, with Hirohito, the helmsman, spurning rational judgments and refusing to see, let alone forestall, the catastrophe.
13
DELAYED SURRENDER
In February 1945, just before Iwo Jima was assaulted by U.S. Marines and less than six weeks before Okinawa was invaded, Hirohito consulted his seven senior statesmen concerning the war. They were the six former prime ministers—Hiranuma, Hirota, Wakatsuki, Okada, Konoe, and Tj—and former lord keeper of the privy seal Makino. The meetings, though interrupted by air raids, revealed an overwhelming consensus to go on with the struggle.
In Europe, Germany and its Nazi regime were heading toward defeat. Just how soon
the Third Reich would collapse was not yet clear, but that its demise was fast approaching seemed certain. As for Japan’s situation, it was equally grim. The army in Burma had been destroyed. The armies in China proper had fared better. Their “Ichig” offensive of 1944 had opened a land corridor along the main trunk railway from Peking in the north to Wuhan, and from there to Canton in the southernmost province of Kwangtung.1 But in all the occupied provinces the tide had turned against Japanese forces. They were stretched thin and fighting a costly guerrilla war that in 1944 alone had absorbed 64 percent of Japan’s emergency military expenditures.2
Now, in 1945, the armies in China anticipated, and therefore had to prepare for, both a Soviet invasion from the north and an American landing in the Shanghai area. Neither in China nor Manchuria could the continental armies be drawn down further to supply veteran troops for the defense of the home islands.3 Nor could the navy, which had suffered crippling losses, do much to transport them anywhere.4
On the other hand the kamikaze tactics that had been evolving since before Leyte were a potentially powerful resource. The high command was also strengthening army air power, stockpiling weapons, and organizing twenty-nine new divisions, fifty-one infantry regiments, and many artillery and tank regiments in preparation for defending the homeland. During 1945, 43 percent of the army would be stationed in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Given these factors, and the emperor’s wildly optimistic belief that they could affect the outcome, this did not seem to him and Kido an auspicious moment to think of negotiating peace.5
The enemy must first be made to see “the disadvantages of continuing the war,” Wakatsuki advised. Makino declared that “the ultimate priority is to develop an advantageous war situation.” Okada said Japan should wait for “a moment favorable for us,” then make peace. Hiranuma and Hirota advised the emperor to fight on until the end.6
Prince Konoe alone of the senior statesmen did not concur.7 Distinctly unawed by the haze of emotion and reverence that surrounded the emperor, he had tried for more than eighteen months to convey a complex message of dire threat to the emperor if the war continued.8 Many months earlier he had told the emperor’s brother Prince Takamatsu that the army was plagued by “a cancer” in the form of the Control faction, but “Kido and others” did not see matters the same way he [Konoe] did, while “his majesty is relatively unconcerned with ideological questions.” For the past four years, he went on, the emperor had been told and still believed that “the extremists are the Imperial Way faction.” The real danger to the kokutai, however, came from the Control faction. Konoe added that, should the war worsen, they would try to change the kokutai. Whether the threat was from communists within the country—by which he meant mainly the left-wing radicals within the Control faction—or from the “Anglo-American enemy,” Konoe surmised that both enemies would want to retain the emperor while communizing the country.9
Now, in his written report to the emperor, presented on February 14 with Kido in the room listening, Konoe elaborated on this conspiracy theory.10 The Soviet Union, he declared, saw Japan as its biggest threat in East Asia; it had linked up with the Chinese Communists, the largest and strongest Communist party in Asia and was cooperating with the United States and Britain to expel Japan from China. It would enter the war when it saw the chance. Defeat, he told the emperor, was inevitable if the war continued, but more to be feared than defeat was the destruction of the kokutai. For the war was also eroding the domestic status quo, releasing forces that threatened Japan and its imperial house from within as much as from without. The danger lay in the emperor and Kido’s trust in the generals of the Control faction who were unintentionally advancing the communization of Japan. Sue quickly for peace, Konoe pleaded, before a Communist revolution occurred that would make preservation of the kokutai impossible.11
Hirohito, sympathetic to Konoe’s fears about the army, conceded that something had to be done. But he was taken aback by Konoe’s view of Moscow’s intentions, for he shared the wishful thinking of his high command that the Soviet Union would need Japan in its looming confrontation with the Anglo-Americans, and would not want to destroy Japanese power in East Asia. Thus he firmly rejected Konoe’s recommendation that he act immediately and directly to end the war.12 Hirohito agreed rather with his senior statesmen: To end the war would be “very difficult unless we make one more military gain.” Konoe allegedly replied, “Is that possible? It must happen soon. If we have to wait much longer,…[a mere battle victory] will mean nothing.”13
Nevertheless Hirohito stuck to his position. That same day he reportedly said, “If we hold out long enough in this war, we may be able to win, but what worries me is whether the nation will be able to endure it until then.”14 In a sense this was what Konoe was concerned about, too. In another sense, however, the emperor was invoking the age-old tradition of the power of Japanese spirit over material odds: My people are capable of superhuman efforts and sacrifice. Therefore, though we have lost our sources of oil and are suffering bombing every day, we still may triumph. The outlook for a negotiated peace could be improved if Japan fought and won one last, decisive battle.
Nor did Hirohito budge after his intelligence forecasters warned him, at a meeting of the Supreme War Leadership Council on February 15, that the Soviet Union intended “to secure a voice in the future of East Asia” and was therefore likely to abrogate its Neutrality Pact with Japan by spring, joining the war whenever thereafter it judged Japan’s power to have weakened sufficiently.15 The next day Foreign Minister Shigemitsu reiterated that warning. The Nazi Germans had entered their last stage, he declared in a private audience, and the “Three-Power [Yalta] Conference” had clarified the “unity of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union.” Shigemitsu warned Hirohito not to count on the Neutrality Treaty; and just as Konoe had done, he too stressed the internal danger from Communism. But Hirohito refused to see the absurdity of his assumptions about the Soviet Union. At the end of the hour-long audience, he ignored Yalta and asked Shigemitsu a question about the “mood in the German Embassy.”16 And Hirohito’s mind remained unchanged ten days later when Tj conceded, during his formal interview at the palace on February 26, that there was a “fifty-fifty” chance that the Soviet Union would turn against Japan.
The chances that the Japanese people could hold out long enough looked slimmer and slimmer as the spring of 1945 passed. On March 9–10, the U.S. Pacific Air Force launched 334 B–29s in the first night incendiary air raid over densely populated Tokyo, turning about 40 percent of the capital into ash and burning to death an estimated eighty to one hundred thousand people. So hot was the firestorm that water boiled in canals, glass melted, and heat from the updrafts destroyed some of the bombers.17 Nine days later, on the eighteenth, the emperor, accompanied by his doctor and a chamberlain, inspected the capital by car. Aide Yoshihashi, who rode behind them in a separate vehicle, later commented that the victims were
digging through the rubble with empty expressions on their faces that became reproachful as the imperial motorcade went by. Although we did not make the usual prior announcement, I felt that they should have known that his was a “blessed visitation” (gyk) just the same, for after all, three to four automobiles bearing the chrysanthemum crest were passing. Were they resentful of the emperor because they had lost their relatives, their houses and belongings? Or were they in a state of utter exhaustion and bewilderment (kyodatsu jtai)? I sympathized with how his majesty must have felt upon approaching these unfortunate victims.18
Yoshihashi’s observation of “exhaustion and bewilderment” on the part of the people is worth noting. By March factory production had started to fall; absenteeism was on the rise; so too were instances of lèse majesté—always of keen concern for the Imperial Household Ministry. Over the next five months, members of the militarized imperial family as well as the senior statesmen would speak of a crisis of the kokutai. The threat from within that Konoe had warned of seemed more and more palpable. Yet until the ve
ry end, most Japanese people, whether living in the country or large urban areas, remained steadfast in their resolve to obey their leaders and to work and sacrifice for the victory that they were constantly told was coming.
Two days after Hirohito’s inspection of bomb damage in the capital, no less a person than retired foreign minister Shidehara Kijr, once the very symbol of cooperation with Britain and the United States, gave expression to a feeling that was widely held by Japan’s ruling elites at this time: namely, Japan had to be patient and resist surrender no matter what. Shidehara had earlier advised Foreign Minister Shigemitsu that the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily. In time their unity and resolve would grow stronger, and this would allow the diplomats “room to devise plans for saving the country in this time of unprecedented crisis.”19
Now, on March 20, 1945, Shidehara wrote to his close friend daira Komatsuchi, the former vice president of the South Manchurian Railway Company, that, “[i]f we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured, or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned,” there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan. With the country facing imminent absolute defeat, Shidehara still saw advantages in turning all of Japan into a battlefield, for then the enemy’s lines of supply would become longer, making it more difficult for them to continue the war and giving diplomats room to maneuver.20 This was the mind-set of the moderate Shidehara; it was probably shared by Hirohito.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 50