The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  The most potent transformation outside Japan, however, came in the realm of politics. When Japan shut itself to foreign ideas in the early 1600s, the Ottoman Empire of Constantinople was the world’s greatest multinational and multilingual power, controlling much of southeast Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa. Absolute monarchs, such as Louis XIV of France, Peter the Great of Russia, and Frederick the Great of Prussia, built up strong central governments and vast armies. While Japan was locked down, China surrendered in the First Opium War to Britain, losing control of Hong Kong in the process.

  In the meantime, Napoleon waged the greatest war campaign in the history of Europe. The subsequent French Revolution upended the entire continent, beheading monarchs and buffeting churches while promoting radical ideas like democracy and meritocracy. All this tumult, all this upheaval—because of Sakoku, Japan missed it all. Amazingly, the country knew little about most of the political revolutions to the west. The bigger threat, however, rose from the east.

  On July 8, 1853, Japanese residents along the Uraga Channel awoke to a terrifying sight: four black warships, barreling toward the nation’s feudal capital, all under star-spangled banners and a cloud of black smoke.

  The nation that hated immigrants was about to meet the nation made of immigrants.

  Sakoku was over.

  Despite two centuries of self-imposed isolation, elites in Japan knew a few things about that startling political invention called the United States of America. In 1841, a fourteen-year-old fisherman named Nakahama Manjiro had been shipwrecked in a storm on the uninhabited island of Torishima and rescued by an American whaling ship. When the whalers completed their mission in Hawaii, the Japanese teenager was offered the chance to leave and return home. Instead, he opted to continue to the ship’s home port in Massachusetts, where he enrolled in school in Fairhaven, became fluent in English, and became known as John Mung. After a series of whaling trips—and months of lucrative work in the California 49er Gold Rush—he had saved enough money to buy his own whaling ship and return home to Japan. On February 2, 1851, he reached Okinawa, where he was promptly arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned in a series of jails for eighteen months. Though the death penalty was mandated for all Japanese who left the country, Manjiro won a reprieve from his captors by regaling them with incredible stories of the strange new land across the ocean.

  Americans, Manjiro said, were “upright and generous, and do no evil.” They had weird customs—such as kissing in public, reading books on the toilet, and cluttering homes with furniture—but their different way of thinking had produced some fantastic results. In war, they had defeated the British, French, and Mexicans. In peace, they had produced a delicious food called bread, and transformed their clothes with handy things called pockets and buttons. Even more oddly, the Americans elected their leaders. And, of course, they also produced awe-inspiring coal-fired machines that powered locomotives across a vast landscape—and ships across oceans.

  When those four black American ships churned into Uraga Channel near Edo (Tokyo) in 1853, some panicked Japanese thought they were being attacked by giant puffing dragons. Others called them “burning ships,” though the official term came to be “black ships of evil mien.” When the squadron approached, the Japanese immediately surrounded the warships with guard boats and hoisted a large sign in French: “Depart Immediately and Dare Not Anchor!” The Americans anchored anyway. Japanese sailors tried to scramble aboard up the anchor chains, but the American sailors pushed them backward with cutlasses and spikes. Worse, the Japanese saw what pointed behind the American spears—cannons larger and more numerous than had ever been seen in local waters. The Japanese city at the head of the bay bustled with a population of more than one million, but the nation itself had no navy. Realizing they could not repel the Americans with force, the Japanese desperately tried to sidetrack the invaders with the lure of local women. As historian Ian Buruma explained, “The Americans had guns, the Japanese lifted their skirts.”

  But the commander of the American squadron, Matthew Perry, would not be distracted. A veteran of the War of 1812, a fighter of pirates in the Caribbean, and a commodore during the Mexican-American War, Perry was a stern and imposing man whose crews called him Old Bruin. Buffeted by the winds of Manifest Destiny, Perry was dispatched across the Pacific Ocean with a brief letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor of Japan.

  “Great and Good Friend,” the letter began, “I have directed Commodore Perry to assure your imperial majesty that I entertain the kindest feelings toward your majesty’s person and government, and that I have no other object in sending him to Japan but to propose to your imperial majesty that the United States and Japan should live in friendship and have commercial intercourse with each other.”

  What America proposed were three specific things: a new era of business trade; permission for U.S. steamships to refuel with coal in a local port; and protection for shipwrecked American whalers. None of these wishes were immediately granted. After three days of talks and meetings, Commodore Perry and his squadron departed. He vowed to return shortly for an answer from Japan.

  As soon as the foreigners steamed away, the shogunate was desperate to learn anything about these frightening intruders. They summoned Manjiro, the former teenage castaway, who was abruptly transformed from crackpot traitor to sage traveler with unique wisdom. Manjiro was, after all, about the only man in Japan who had experience with America. He warned the shogunate that America was content in peace, but ferocious in war. He advised Japan to cooperate.

  Seven months later, Commodore Perry returned with American reinforcements. This time he filled the bay with ten ships, or one-fourth of the U.S. Navy, including more than 100 mounted guns and 1,600 men. Yet he also wanted to do more than scare the Japanese. He wanted to impress them with gifts carefully selected to show the superiority of American society. The presents included a quarter-sized steam locomotive, with 370 yards of track; two sets of the communications device recently perfected by Samuel Morse, the telegraph; the nation’s first telescope and camera; a complete Double-Elephant Portfolio of John James Audubon’s Birds of North America; more than a hundred gallons of whiskey; and “8 baskets of Irish potatoes.”

  Whether it was the display of military might or just the exotic spuds, the Japanese realized they were outmatched. On March 31, 1854, they boarded the sidewheel steam frigate USS Powhatan and agreed to the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened two Japanese ports to U.S. trade and guaranteed the safety of shipwrecked U.S. sailors. It was the first time Japan had been forced to submit to the same ignominious fate as other Asian countries—an “unequal treaty” with the West. Four years later, the Powhatan returned with an even more unequal deal, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, which opened four more Japanese ports to trade and allowed the reestablishment of Christian churches in the country.

  Japan recoiled. The unequal treaties may have opened the nation to new thinking and advancement, but they also deeply ingrained the belief among Japanese that an arrogant United States wanted to destroy their way of life. Soon after Commodore Perry sailed away, a backlash against the West swept Japan, and the dominant political saying became Sonno joi, or “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.”

  Only half of that slogan came true. Humiliated in front of the world, Japan girded itself internally with a powerful wave of nationalism. Though the country had been organized for centuries along feudal lines—the shoguns ruled the daimyo, who in turn ruled the tenant farmers, or serfs—the post-Perry Japan became far more centralized. Political power consolidated in the hands of the emperor, who became the embodiment of all things good, noble, and sacred. A new emperor, Meiji, was installed on February 3, 1867. He was fourteen years old.

  To make sure all Japanese understood the new order, even if it was lorded over by a teenager, rulers issued a general proclamation:

  Our country is known as the land of the gods, and of all the nations in th
e world, none is superior to our nation in morals and customs. . . . [Japanese] must be grateful for having been born in the land of the gods, and repay the national obligation. . . . In antiquity the heavenly descendants opened up the land and established the moral order. Since then the imperial line has remained unchanged. Succeeding generations of the honorable personages profoundly loved the people, and the people reverently served every honorable personage. . . . All things in this land belong to the Emperor. When a person is born he is bathed in the Emperor’s water, when he dies he is buried in the Emperor’s land. . . . However, during the past 300 years the imperial way had not prevailed. . . . Corruption was rampant, virtuous persons were punished, evil men enjoyed good fortune. . . . Now finally imperial rule has been restored, and fairness and justice prevail in all things. . . . If we repay even a smidgen of the honorable benevolence we will be doing our duty as the subject of the land of the gods.

  Though the emperor was a living icon to venerate and rally behind, he did not possess the power to “expel the barbarians.” In fact, the barbarians prospered, flooding the Japanese market with foreign goods that were cheaper and often better. Most other countries with fledgling industries would have reacted with a wave of economic protectionism, but Japan was banned by the unequal treaties from slapping tariffs of more than 5 percent on foreign goods. Local business suffered. Resentment built against the West in general and the United States in particular.

  If the barbarians could not be defeated, they could be mimicked. Japanese leaders came to embrace the promise of capitalism and wealth. By the 1870s, Japan had agreed on a more practical and attainable national motto: fukoku kyohei, or “enrich the country, strengthen the military.”

  Enriching the country, Japanese-style, meant mixing the government with business in the hope of catching up with the West. The government launched the chemical, glass, and cement industries, and then turned everything over to private business when they became profitable. There were government banks, iron foundries, mines, factories, cotton mills, and telegraph services. Several other private industries, such as shipbuilding and munitions, were heavily subsidized. It was the birth of the public and private partnership that, a century later, turned into the industrial juggernaut known as Japan Inc.

  As business burgeoned, the Japanese military surged, too. One of the biggest government mandates was to develop the country’s first navy. For this monumental task the leadership turned to the old whaling castaway Manjiro, who completed the first Japanese translation of the age’s key maritime reference text, Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator. He also taught naval tactics at a government academy; helped launch the modern Japanese whaling industry; and served as translator for the first Japanese ship to cross the Pacific Ocean and visit the United States. By the 1920s, the Imperial Japanese Navy was the third-largest in the world. By the 1930s, it was the most powerful in the region and among the most modern in the world.

  The most far-reaching military change, however, came on land. In 1873, Japan enacted universal conscription. Most men age seventeen to forty were generally required to serve three years. Based on the model of the Prussian Army, which had just won the Franco-Prussian War, the Imperial Army became a unifying force in a Japanese culture that had been riven with feudal rivalries. Mandatory military service helped erase the distinctions between the old samurai class and peasant class; for the first time in centuries the poor were allowed to bear firearms. Three years in the Imperial Army left conscripts brimming with nationalism, patriotism, and undying loyalty to the emperor, all concepts that spilled over into everyday civilian life. Insular Japan transformed into a muscular Japan.

  But an unused war machine grows restless. As the Imperial Army and Navy swelled with power, Japan scanned the seas and saw vulnerable neighbors. The new military was anxious to test itself, and so it did. In one stunning victory after another, Japan booted China from Korea and Taiwan, then crushed the Russian army and fleet in Manchuria and the Yellow Sea. It all took less than ten years. (In a prescient warning of what was to come years later at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had won the Russo-Japanese War with a sneak attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, Manchuria. It marked the first time an Asian power had taken on Europeans in modern war and won, convincingly.) Japan’s conquests were significant: Manchuria alone was the size of Germany, France, and Italy combined. By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan had established itself as the preeminent Asian military power. The nation that denounced the foreign interloper had become one.

  The easy conquests proved seductive. When the colonial powers of Europe plunged into World War I, Japan seized the opportunity to expand its own reach across the Far East. In the first week of war, Japan cut a deal with the United Kingdom to side with the British, but only if Japan were allowed to take control of Germany’s colonial territory in the Pacific. The Japanese easily won the German possessions of the Marshall, Mariana, and Caroline Islands. They also launched the world’s first naval-based air raids to help take the German port of Tsingtao in China. At the same time, Japanese industry profited handsomely, both in money and know-how, by selling war goods to combatants.

  Japan emerged from World War I with new territories, fewer than 1,500 casualties, and even more self-confidence. Most importantly, though, it won a seat at the Paris Peace Conference. For the first time in an international negotiation, the major powers of the world included Japan.

  However, with the new recognition also came humiliation. To prevent another world war, the United States and the United Kingdom advanced the idea of a League of Nations, which would resolve international disputes through negotiation instead of militarization. During the drafting of the organizing principles of the League of Nations, Japan advanced a racial equality proposal, calling for the new organization to grant “equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” Japan’s racial equality clause was either amazingly shrewd or fantastically naive. In the United States, Congress had just passed the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which banned most Japanese immigration at the same time the gates at Ellis Island were being thrown open to white Europeans. Japan’s equality clause also was political poison for the racist Southern Democrats whom President Woodrow Wilson would ultimately ask to approve the League of Nations. On top of that, racial equality was anathema to the fledgling British federation that had just embraced the anti-Asian immigration policy called White Australia.

  Ultimately the United States rejected the racial equality clause (as well as, eventually, the whole idea of the League of Nations). Japan seethed. After being subjected to the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry, and the enactment of a series of unequal treaties, the Japanese had plenty of reason to feel alienated from the United States. Did even the modern descendants of the white barbarians believe they were racially superior to the Japanese?

  By the time Paul and Taeko Tatsuguchi had returned to Tokyo in 1939, Japan had spent decades feeling as though the world was aligned against it. Japan was clearly the region’s preeminent power, both in military and business, but it still had something to prove.

  5

  * * *

  Conscripted

  She was small, and she fussed and cried and blurted through the night. Paul and Taeko could not be more thrilled.

  In September 1940, the Tatsuguchis’ new baby daughter changed the world for them. They felt so blessed. They named her Misako, but, to commemorate the couple’s love for America, they added a Western name, Joy, which fit perfectly with the ebullient mood of the new family. The Tatsuguchis reveled in the Japanese parenthood traditions—the first kimono, the first slippers, the first chopsticks. In their neighborhood, Taeko gravitated toward other mothers with new babies. As the family provider, Paul labored at the sanitarium with new purpose and direction. The couple’s regular nature walks turned into regular baby walks. They could imagine no happier existence.

  And then came the letter from
the Imperial Army.

  Paul had always known he might be drafted. Military service had been compulsory for Japanese men since 1873. Exemptions could be negotiated for students and the sons of the rich, but the changed circumstances of Paul’s family meant he had no possibility for a release from serving. He had told his medical school classmates back in California that his return home to Japan could result in his conscription. He dreaded the idea. As a devout Seventh-day Adventist, he was a pacifist who opposed war on religious grounds. As a former California college student who had seen firsthand the economic might of the United States, he also was a realist who believed Japan would be doomed in a war against America.

  Now the day had arrived. On January 10, 1941, Paul Tatsuguchi was inducted into the Imperial Army of Japan.

  No longer would he be called Paul. In the eyes of the Japanese government, his name from this day on was Nobuo Tatsuguchi.

  The military enlistment split his heart with a twisted mix of pain and pride. He felt terrible leaving behind his wife and baby girl, especially when the family had not yet fully settled into their new home. How could Taeko and Joy survive on Nobuo’s meager Army salary? Taeko longed for the life of a surgeon’s wife, not someone who scrimped on checks from an absentee Army man.

  Yet Nobuo could not turn his back on patriotism. His country had called, and he had answered. Japan needed him and wanted him. He did not want his loyalty to ever be in doubt.

  Alas, he learned, it could. As far as Nobuo knew, he was the only physician in the Imperial Army who was not awarded the rank, and, especially, the extra pay, of an officer. He had asked time and again for officer training, and even spent the extra 400 yen to buy his own officer’s uniform. No matter how hard he tried, he remained stuck as an enlisted man. He was never given a firm reason why, but he didn’t have to ask. He was seen as an outsider. Almost everyone else in the Imperial Army had had some form of military training over the years. Nobuo didn’t know the Imperial Army routine, and it showed.