The Japanese set up a puppet regime in North China, and in March 1940 they persuaded Wang Ching-wei, once a major leader among the Nationalists, to head a new, subservient national government in Nanking. But the Chinese masses accorded it nothing more than sullen acquiescence, and the military resistance continued. There seemed to be no end to the war. Chinese nationalism would not bow, and even the great Japanese war machine could not break it. Japan, frustrated by guerrilla tactics in a backward country, thus became the first of the modern military powers to find itself sinking into what was later called the quagmire of Asian nationalism.
The situation was made worse for the Japanese and better for the Chinese by the growing storm clouds of war throughout the world. While the Japanese navy had long regarded the United States as its chief potential enemy, the army expected to fight mainly with the Soviet Union. For this latter reason, Tokyo entered into an Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany in November 1936, which Italy joined the next year. In the summer of 1938 a large-scale, twelve-day battle did take place with the Soviets on the eastern border of Manchukuo, and beginning the next spring there was a still larger five-month battle on its western frontiers. The Japanese, defeated in both contests, saw that they needed to mechanize their forces a great deal more.
The outbreak of the war in Europe in the summer of 1939 seemed at first a godsend to the Japanese. It helped draw world attention away from East Asia, as had happened in World War I to Japan’s economic and military benefit. The collapse of France permitted the Japanese in September 1940 to extend military control over northern Vietnam, or French Indochina as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were then known, in order to block the railway line from there into southwest China. At the same time, they were emboldened to form a full Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy in an effort to discourage American interference. In July 1941 they extended military control over the rest of Indochina to secure its potential naval bases. Japan’s New Order in East Asia, which had been announced in November 1938 as embracing Japan, China, and Manchukuo, was expanded to accommodate Japan’s dream of hegemony over the whole of East Asia. The concept was cloaked by a euphemism—the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”—and eventually found administrative expression in 1942 in a Greater East Asia Ministry.
The Japanese government failed to realize that the war in Europe and Japan’s Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy would arouse the American government and people to the potential danger of a world in which a hostile Germany held sway over Western Europe and a hostile Japan over East Asia. Washington had hitherto limited itself to a policy of verbal protests and the doctrine of nonrecognition of the results of Japanese aggression. Now it began to take more substantive countermeasures while building up its own military strength. In July 1939, just before the European war broke out, the American government denounced its commercial treaty with Japan, thus freeing its hand for further economic moves. In July 1940 it adopted a policy of licensing scrap iron and oil shipments to Japan in order to cut down on the flow of these materials, which were essential to the Japanese war machine, and when Japan seized southern Vietnam in July 1941, Washington, together with the British and the Dutch, adopted a total oil embargo.
Japan was now caught on the horns of a dilemma. Both the army and navy were dependent on imported oil and had only about a two-year supply on hand. Victory in China must come soon, or the armed forces would grind to a halt. Japan had to act quickly and decisively. Two choices were open. One was to bring an end to the war in China by generous concessions, withdraw the Japanese troops as the United States demanded, and settle back to profit economically from the war in Europe, as it had done during World War I with such splendid results. This was clearly the course of economic self-interest. With the factory power of Europe temporarily cut off from Asia and threatened with destruction, Japan could take another great step forward in establishing an economic empire in Asia without the attendant costs of conquest, if it could but disentangle itself from the war in China.
But economic self-interest was not to carry the day. To the military, withdrawal from China seemed a national loss of face that could not be tolerated. It would have been interpreted by the Japanese public as an open admission that the military’s program of economic security through conquest had failed, and the inevitable public disapproval would have endangered the military’s hold on the government. The United States, moreover, was unrealistically insistent that no settlement could be discussed until Japan had relinquished the fruits of its aggressions since 1931. Japan would have to yield first and discover what the terms were later.
The alternative was to sail south, break the tightening economic blockade by seizing the resources of Southeast Asia, particularly the oil of the Dutch East Indies—that is, Indonesia—and thus achieve at one great stroke the much-vaunted Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In preparation for such a move, Tokyo had secured its rear by signing a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in April 1941. The Japanese had been terribly embarrassed when their German allies, who had a similar agreement with the Soviets, invaded Russia in June, but early Nazi successes seemed to put the Soviets even further out of the picture. The one great danger in the policy of southern conquest was the war that it would undoubtedly precipitate not just with Britain and the Netherlands, which had little military strength in East Asia and were desperately fighting to survive in Europe, but with the United States, which was an incomparably bigger economic power than Japan. But so long as Germany remained undefeated, the United States, it was felt, would not dare to concentrate much of its military might in the Pacific. Germany would be the first line of Japan’s defense. If it won, Japan was safe. If it lost, the Germans would at least have fought a rear-guard action in Japan’s behalf by tiring their mutual enemies and giving Japan time to bring China to its knees and to build an invulnerable economic and military empire, protected by the vast expanses of the Pacific and Indian oceans and containing enormous natural resources and hundreds of millions of industrious people.
Japan faced an agonizing, fateful decision. As the result of small initial wagers in 1931 and 1937, it had now been forced into the position of either ignominiously withdrawing from the game and losing what had already been won, or else making a win-all, lose-all play. Konoe and other civilians in the government desperately tried to find some compromise with Washington but ran into a rigidly moralistic American stance. The emperor made his disapproval of the war policy clear. But to the military, in the summer and autumn of 1941, the chances for success seemed good, and with victory would come the creation of the most populous and perhaps the richest empire the world had ever seen. The Japanese military miscalculated not so much on military, geographic, or economic factors as on the human equation. They counted heavily on their own moral superiority, the much-vaunted “Japanese spirit,” and the supposed degeneracy and pacifism of the Western democracies, particularly America, which they believed to be corrupted by too much luxury. They were convinced that Americans did not have the will to fight a long war, especially if early Japanese successes showed how great the costs would be.
Repeating the strategy used against Russia in 1904, the Japanese started the war with a brilliantly successful surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii at dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941. They crippled the American navy with this single, sharp blow, virtually eliminating its battleship fleet. However, they missed the aircraft carriers, which were to prove far more important weapons in the ensuing war. The attack on Pearl Harbor cleared the way for an easy conquest of Southeast Asia and the islands north of Australia. It was indeed an unqualified military success for Japan, but it was also a psychological blunder. It united an outraged American people, who had been bitterly divided over the question of participating in the wars in Europe and Asia. The Americans took up arms, grimly determined to crush both Japan and Germany.
Japanese planes sank Britain’s two major naval vessels in Ea
st Asia off Malaya early in the war, and the Japanese then invaded Singapore from the land and captured this great bastion of the British Empire on February 15. By March 1942 the Dutch East Indies were for the most part under their control. Resistance by the combined American and Filipino forces ended in the Philippines in May, and that same month the conquest of Burma was largely completed. Meanwhile Thailand, the only independent nation in the area, had bowed to prevailing military winds and joined Japan as a passive ally.
The United States, however, threw itself into rebuilding its naval strength and dispatched what forces it could to the Pacific to try to hold the line against Japan. In May American and Australian naval units fought the Japanese to a draw in the Coral Sea northeast of Australia, and the next month the American navy, aided by having broken the Japanese naval communication code, administered a sharp defeat to a Japanese fleet preparing to seize Midway Island west of Hawaii. In September a Japanese effort to cross the island of New Guinea to its south coast was stopped, and in a bitter jungle campaign between August and February, the Americans turned the Japanese back at Guadalcanal northeast of Australia. Japanese forces had thus reached the limit of their conquests within the first year of the war, but it was a long time before the Americans could make serious inroads into the vast empire they had seized.
Japan had entered the war with the United States after four years of war with China, and its economy was already in high gear with its resources fully mobilized. The great conquests in Southeast Asia and the Pacific put a heavy strain on it. Now the United States, with twice the population and more than ten times the economic power of Japan, started to build up overwhelming superiority. The “Japanese spirit” did indeed prove strong, and Japan’s forces fought ferociously and often to the last man, but bit by bit they were outclassed on land, on the sea, and in the air. American submarines and aerial mines laid in harbors cut slowly but deeply into Japanese shipping, until by the end of 1944 the overseas armies and garrisons were virtually isolated and could be picked off by the Americans one at a time. The drastic decline in shipping tonnage also reduced the flow of raw materials to Japan. As a result, Japan’s industry, already suffering from years of overwork and inadequate replacement of machinery, began to decline in production.
The Americans had already started to move across the Pacific toward Japan in a two-pronged drive. In November 1943 the navy began an island-hopping advance straight across the Pacific with a costly attack on the atoll of Tarawa in the Marshall Islands in mid-Pacific, and by June 1944 it had reached the much larger island of Saipan in the western Pacific. From there American planes could start a systematic destruction of the cities of Japan, largely by firebomb raids. By destroying urban dwellings, they drove the workers away from the cities, further crippling Japanese production. The firebomb raids culminated in two great attacks on Tokyo in the spring of 1945, which together took well over 100,000 lives and wiped out the greater part of the capital. Most of the other cities were dealt with in a similar manner; of the larger cities only Kyoto escaped destruction, along with a handful of lesser cities. The costly American seizure of Iwo Jima north of Saipan in February and March of 1945 secured a refuge for disabled bombers returning from these raids on Japan.
The American army, under General Douglas MacArthur, had meanwhile been pushing westward along the north coast of New Guinea and nearby islands, and in October 1944 went ashore on Leyte Island in the Philippines. A desperate sortie by the remainder of the Japanese fleet failed to turn the tide, and after a long and arduous campaign, Manila was taken in February 1945. The two prongs of the American offensive then converged in April on Okinawa, slated to be the staging area for an invasion of the main islands of Japan. The Japanese fought back desperately, flinging their remaining planes at the American ships in remarkably effective suicide attacks. Looking back to the “divine wind” that had saved Japan from the Mongols in 1281, they called these attackers the kamikaze. But the vastly superior military weight of the Americans triumphed: The island was completely overrun by June, with a staggering loss of life—some 110,000 Japanese military men and 75,000 Okinawans, about an eighth of the island’s civilian population.
Germany had surrendered on May 8, and Japan had clearly lost the war as well. Its cities lay largely in ruins; industrial production was grinding to a halt because of shortages of raw materials from abroad and an insufficient labor force to operate it; the nation faced starvation; and the bulk of its forces were abroad, cut off from the homeland because of lack of transportation. But there was no serious breakdown in civilian morale. The people stoically faced starvation and the mounting war disasters. They appeared resigned to fighting to the end. Moreover, it seemed doubtful to anyone that the Japanese army and navy would ever surrender.
Some high civilian leaders around the emperor, however, had seen the hopelessness of Japan’s position as early as 1944 and had started to maneuver toward ending the war. In July of that year General Tojo had been persuaded to pass the prime ministership on to another more moderate general, and a few days after the invasion of Okinawa, the latter was replaced by the aged Admiral Suzuki, who had almost died at the hands of the extremists in the February 26 Incident in 1936. In June the emperor, seizing the initiative, called on the Supreme Council in Tokyo to find a way to end the war, and it attempted to persuade the Soviet Union to mediate. The United States had repeatedly spoken in terms of “unconditional surrender” for Japan as well as Germany, but together with Britain and China, it issued the so-called Potsdam Proclamation on July 26, in which the conditions for Japan’s “unconditional surrender” were wisely elaborated. Japan was to be stripped of its empire and occupied until it had remade itself into a peaceful demilitarized nation, but it would retain its national identity, and the people would be free to decide themselves on their future form of government.
The Japanese government probably assumed that it had until mid-autumn to work out a surrender, because the Americans were unlikely to attempt an invasion of the home islands before the typhoon season had ended. But the Americans, uncertain that the Japanese military would ever yield, dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9 two atom bombs they had long been constructing. The bombs wiped out the two large cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing close to 200,000 people and ushering in the horrors of the nuclear age. The world would never be the same again. In historical retrospect the argument can be made that the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima was necessary to convince the Japanese military that Japan must surrender and also to contribute to the subsequent worldwide realization of the terrible realities of nuclear warfare. But no such justification can be made for the second bomb.
Meanwhile the Soviet Union had invaded Manchuria on August 8 and found the vaunted Kwantung Army of the Japanese little more than a hollow shell. At the Yalta Conference in February, Joseph Stalin had promised his allies to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender, and he was eager to enter the fray before it ended in order to have a say in the postwar settlement with Japan.
UPI
American soldier looking at the building above which the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
In the midst of all these disasters, the leaders around the emperor remained deeply concerned about the old concept of “imperial rule.” On August 10 they accepted the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation, but only on the understanding that it did not prejudice the emperor’s position as a “sovereign ruler.” The American reply to this condition was ambiguous, and the Supreme Council split three to three over it. The emperor then made the decision to surrender, the first important political decision a Japanese emperor had been called upon to make since ancient times, and he himself broadcast the surrender announcement to his people on August 14. The war was over. An imperial prince was made prime minister to help ensure the acceptance of the decision by the military. Everywhere the army and navy accepted Tokyo’s decision and did not continue to fight on t
heir own, as many foreign observers had feared they would. On September 2 Japan formally surrendered to General MacArthur on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos
A member of the Japanese surrender delegation signing the document on board the American battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945. MacArthur stands in front of the microphones at the right, backed by representatives of the allied armies and navies.
PART THREE
POSTWAR JAPAN
13
THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION
In the late summer of 1945 Japan lay in ruins. Some 3 million of its people had died in the war, a third of them civilians; 40 percent of the aggregate area of the cities had been destroyed, and urban population had dropped by over 50 percent; industry was at a standstill; even agriculture, short of equipment, fertilizer, and workers, had declined. The people had poured all their energies into war, blindly trusting their leaders and confident that the “Japanese spirit” would prevail. Now they were physically and spiritually exhausted. Many were homeless and half-starved, and all were bewildered and mentally numbed. The “divine wind” had failed. For the first time in history, Japan was a conquered nation. The Japanese faced the prospect with trepidation, but as the emperor had put it, they had no choice but to “bear the unbearable.”
The period that followed, however, has turned out to be the most glorious in Japan’s long history. No one could have imagined such an outcome. It makes the labeling of the whole period simply as “postwar” seem somewhat incongruous. The term did apply fully for a few years, but ever since Japan regained its independence in 1952 people have repeatedly announced that some event or development marked the real end of the postwar period. Meanwhile, however, a new meaning has crept into the term, altering its original reference simply to World War II. The Japanese people ever since 1945 have been strongly antimilitarist and thoroughly pacifistic. Postwar in this broader sense may well apply to Japan for the remainder of its history, because it is doubtful that the nation could survive the type of war mankind can now wage.
Japan Page 20