An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  In 1936, Goto Ryūnosuke (1898- ) organized the Showa Research Association under the auspices of Prince Konoye, a former classmate who was to become Prime Minister of Japan in 1937.32 The chief organizer's intent was to build a bulwark against the growth of militarism. Goto was prepared to use whatever school of scholarship might be effective for that purpose. Now that the Japan Communist Party no longer existed except for those of its members in prison, he was not afraid of including any ex-Marxist and liberal scholars who took a firm and resilient stand against military dictatorship in Japan.

  The Showa Research Association was joined by Ozaki Hozumi (1901-1944) in 1937. He became coordinator of the twelve independent groups within the association, and chairman of one of these, the China Question Research Group. This was under Ozaki's chairmanship for three and a half years, until the entire organization was absorbed into that semi-official organ, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. During this period Ozaki also served as an influential member of the Brains Trust of Prime Minister Konoye. When Konoye became Prime Minister in 1937, a breakfast meeting was established for policy makers to gather and brief the Prime Minister before official conferences. Ozaki was not always present at Konoye's breakfast meetings, but he selected those who should attend them.

  During these years, Ozaki worked in close connection with Richard Sorge, a German newspaperman who elicited secret information from the German Ambassador. Then Sorge was arrested by the Japanese police as a Soviet spy, and Ozaki as his accomplice. In late 1944 both were hanged. Ozaki wrote in prison that he had failed to discriminate between loyalty and treason,33 and that he would have better served the cause of ending the war with Nationalist China had he concentrated on a combination of open journalistic writing on Chinese policy and backstage activity as a leading member of the Prime Minister's Brains Trust, instead of involving himself with Sorge.

  As a specialist on the China problem, he published in January 1939, in the leading magazine Chūō Kōron, an article entitled The Concept of an East-Asia Commonwealth and the Objective Basis for its Establishment’. In this he openly concluded, ‘Whether or not the ideal of the East-Asia Commonwealth is actually fulfilled depends upon the power balance in the China war and upon international relations, but the greatest problem is the formation at home of the forces by which to propel it.’ He was hinting here at complications with Japanese domestic capital.

  It is not unreasonable to conjecture that the Sorge group's information that Japan would not make an initial strike on Russia relieved Stalin of the burden of preparing for an operation on two fronts. However, Ozaki's role as an exponent of Greater Asia should not be underestimated because of his connection with the Sorge group. The presiding judge at the final trial, who sentenced Ozaki to death by hanging, told Kazami Akira, a former Minister of Justice who lost his position because of his association with Ozaki, ‘Ozaki was a man who commanded veneration. He acted for his beliefs. For this I respect him.’ Ozaki had received no remuneration of any kind for working with Sorge; he risked his life for his beliefs alone. He had no connection with either the Japan Communist Party or with the Commintern. He was an independent communist, a communist very close to being a nationalist, who was in full sympathy with Chinese nationalism and Chinese communism. He believed that the best protection for the Japanese was to join forces with the Chinese people in their effort to liberate themselves from the yoke of imperialism, both Western and Japanese.

  The development of Ozaki's way of thinking testifies to the authenticity of his conception of Greater Asia. Ozaki was the son of the editor of a Japanese newspaper in Taiwan, and was raised in that country. He personally witnessed the discrimination against the natives of Taiwan by the Japanese, and this lies at the root of the later activities which were in the end to cost him his life. He went to Tokyo to study at the First High School, and then in the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University. During this period of his life Ozaki was not yet attracted to the ideas of Minobe Tatsukichi, but rather to those of Minobe's opponent, Uesugi Shinkichi, who was a leading exponent of the rightist movement in the university. It is significant that Ozaki retained a lifelong affection for Uesugi, and his last letters from prison contain some warm recollections of the Professor.

  Ozaki was not associated with the New Men or the Marxists at the First High School or Tokyo Imperial University, and remained unattached to any group for a long time after he came under the influence of Marxism. He entered the Asahi Newspapers, and was sent to Shanghai, where he made the acquaintance of Agnes Smedley, the leftist U.S. journalist. It was through Agnes Smedley that he was introduced to Richard Sorge. They worked together in exchanging information, unnoticed by the Japanese Thought Police, whose vigilance did not extend beyond the border. In 1934, after the Japan Communist Party had dissolved as a result of mass tenkō, Ozaki came back to Japan to work in the main branch of the Asahi Newspapers. He then entered on a spectacular career as a commentator on Chinese problems, about which he had exceptional foresight due to his understanding of the Chinese communist movement. Together with this open activity, he was secretly active in behind-the-scenes politics as an adviser to the Prime Minister. When his old friend Sorge came to Tokyo as a journalist, Ozaki became involved in a different line of clandestine activity which was eventually to prove fatal. It is important to note, however, that Ozaki kept, even after his arrest and conviction, the affection of many decided rightists: his chief supporter, Takeuchi Kintarō, was well known for being a die-hard nationalist, but defended Ozaki to the end, believing him to be a true patriot. Ozaki, who was independent of Soviet ideology, did not accept the Soviet-based International Communist Party's characterization of the Japanese situation, but argued that the major target for attack should be the Japanese capitalist and military structure and that the emperor system was a superficiality of secondary importance. In sum, his communism bordered on nationalism.

  The concept of Greater Asia was incorporated into Government policy. The result was a series of proclamations, rituals, and conferences centring on the concept. When the Government finally declared the unnamed, undeclared war which had been waged continuously for ten years, it named it the ‘Greater East Asia War’, a name which identified China as the real focus of the war. After the ignominy of defeat by China, which the Japanese had long believed to be militarily inferior to themselves, the tendency was to see the war as primarily against the United States and to ignore the central role of China.

  I have named this war the ‘Fifteen Years’ War’. For the first ten years of its duration, the Japanese Government preserved the impression that this was not a continuous war begun with the Manchurian Incident in 1931 but a series of disconnected events. A separate statement was issued on the occasion of each battle, and to the people of the time the stages of the war appeared to be isolated incidents - ‘The Manchurian Incident’, ‘The Shanghai Incident’, ‘The China Incident’, and so on. It is necessary to counteract this impression here by linking the incidents under one title.

  The train of circumstances which constituted this war was set in motion by General Ishiwara Kanji when he initiated the Manchurian Incident in pursuit of his own plan to build a bulwark against Soviet Russia and Western imperialism. But Ishiwara was ousted from power at an early stage of the war, and from 1937 he actually opposed it, and the war progressed without any mastermind or plan simply because it could not be stopped. This was a consequence of the trait of insularity in Japanese culture.

  After he became Prime Minister, General Tōjō Hideki presided over Government conferences. He had no master plan of his own, but he had a superb ability to coordinate high officials. He called the Greater East Asia Congress, for which he invited leaders from the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Siam, India, China, and Manchukuo to Tokyo. Some of these leaders were realistic in their assessment of Japan's war aims and used the war as an opportunity to strengthen the independence movement at home. Ba Maw, who had been the first Prime Minister of Burma in 1937 and had
organized the Freedom Bloc for Burmese independence from British rule in 1939, became head of the Government of independent Burma in 1943 and worked in close association with Japanese leadership. After Japan's defeat, he went into hiding in a country town in Japan until he was caught by the Occupation Authorities. Although he was General Tōjō’s best Asian supporter, and a participant in the Congress of 1943, in Breakthrough in Burma written in 1968, he comments:

  As for the Japanese militarists, few people were mentally so racebound, so one-dimensional in their thinking, and in consequence so totally incapable either of understanding others, or of making themselves understood by others. That was why so much of what they did during the war in South-East Asia, whether it was right or wrong, always appeared to be wrong to the people there. The militarists saw everything only from the Japanese perspective and, even worse, they insisted that all others dealing with them should do the same. For them there was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many Manchukuos or Koreas tied forever to Japan. The racial impositions - they were just that - made any real understanding between the Japanese militarists and the peoples of our region virtually impossible.34

  He adds, with some sympathy for the Japanese:

  The case of Japan is indeed tragic. Looking at it historically, no nation has done so much to liberate Asia from white domination, yet no nation has been so misunderstood by the very peoples whom it has helped either by liberating or by setting an example to in many things.

  In the Philippines, the leaders of the bureaucracy made a definite commitment to the United States to fight against Japan in case of aggression. However, many of the ruling elites collaborated with the Japanese occupation, under the pretext of working for the people by defending them from unreasonable demands by the Japanese military. Others, like Thomas Confessa, believed that they should not break their promise even though the Americans appeared to be the losing side.35 Confessa believed that soldiers might surrender to a stronger enemy but morality denied civilian officials such freedom. Filipino officials should not, therefore, collaborate with the victorious Japanese Army. Others of this opinion took the side of the guerrillas against the Japanese. But when General MacArthur returned to the Philippines he concentrated exclusively on gaining victory over the Japanese and showed little concern for the lives of Filipinos. The Japanese Army had by then lost its strength and could have been left to collapse from internal weakness, but the U.S. Armed Forces continued bombing and thus destroyed the livelihood of the Filipinos. It was at this time that many of those engaged in the resistance against the Japanese concluded that the United States was no friend of the poor people of the Philippines.

  It is difficult for military organizations engaged in warfare to be conscious of where and among whom they are fighting. The Japanese, after the defeat, estimated that 630,000 Japanese soldiers had been sent to the Philippines and that 480,000 lost their lives there. They did not take into consideration the almost one million Filipinos who died. Although Japan lost half a million, its soldiers, along with the Americans, killed more than one million Filipinos, but this fact was not remembered.

  oka Shōhei was an ordinary soldier sent to the Philippines in the last stage of the war. He was captured by the U.S. Army and wrote, after the war, the documentary novel Prisoner of War and the novel Fire on the Plains. According to Japanese literary tradition, the sole aim of the novelist is to give his experience an aesthetic form. Öoka broke with this tradition and strove beyond aesthetic aims. His aim was to analyse the elements and details of his own experience in the war. In writing the longer War in Leyte, he discovered much that had been invisible to him as a soldier. For instance, he writes about the damage to the inhabitants of Leyte Island wrought by the Japanese Army in the two years of their occupation. He gives statistics for the numbers of certain animals on the island both before and after the war:

  Jan. 1939

  Jan. 1945

  Buffaloes

  163,398

  72,200

  Cows

  14,694

  5,070

  Horses

  11,699

  6,660

  Pigs

  342,251

  134,220

  Goats

  10,186

  5,130

  Sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys are also enumerated. Öoka also portrays how the Japanese Army, by killing the buffaloes, destroyed the livelihood of the Filipinos. A tenant farmer had to pay 60 per cent of his harvest to the landlord, and the loss of his buffalo made this impossible, so that he was f o reed to join the guerrillas. Öoka includes an extensive list of books and pamphlets on the war in the Philippines, and calls this the most valuable part of his book, an unheard-of attitude for a Japanese novelist. Here we encounter a new element in the intellectual and literary history of Japan.

  ‘Greater East Asia’ was an expression coined in response to the military needs of the Japanese Government in the 1940s. Towards the end of the war, when it became apparent that victory was impossible, the Japanese Government decided to give indepen-dence to the Asian nations, an action which cost them nothing because they took no measures to change the reality of situation. In August 1943, Burma was granted independence. In October 1943 the Provisional Government of Free India was set up in Singapore. On 14 October 1943 freedom was proclaimed in the Philippines. After armistice on 15 August 1945, the Japanese Navy assisted the Dutch East Indian leaders in resisting reoccupation by the Dutch and proclaiming their independence. None of these measures was carried out as long as Japan was able to retain military control of these areas. We should not conclude from the granting of independence, therefore, that the Japanese Government worked for the liberation of the people in Asia from Western imperialism. In spite of this, the result was in fact liberation and independence, gained not through the intention of the Japanese Government but through the efforts of the people of Asia.

  In the intellectual sphere there existed a stream of writing on the subject of Greater Asia which opposed the military domination of Asia by Japan. Okakura Tenshin and Miyazaki Tōten were precursors of this movement. They were followed by Kita Ikki and ōkawa Shūmei, whose close connection with the military coup d’état suggests that their ideas may have been influential. Takeuchi Yoshimi was a long-standing critic of the undeclared war against China, and in protest adopted the Chinese word for ‘China’ - ‘Chugoku’, The Central Country’ - in preference to the Japanese ‘Shina’ in the title of his Association for the Study of Chinese Literature, organized in the 1930s. This group produced a publication in which Takeuchi printed a manifesto declaring his support for the war against the United States and Britain.37 In this manifesto he urged the Japanese to change their own nation and transform their own state, if necessary, in the effort to free the nations of Asia. His proposal was based upon his recognition of the need to destroy the existing framework of the Japanese government, which, in its present form, would attempt to dominate other Asian nations.

  Following Takeuchi, a young modern critic, Kan Takayuki, sees the post-war Japanese government as a more efficient form of the pre-war machine.38 Another critic of a still younger generation, Matsumoto Kenichi, sees modern Japan's economic relations with south-east Asia as the efficient and stable realization of the wartime aim of the Japanese Government - the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.39 As all these critics have pointed out, the pattern of wartime Japan is followed in contemporary economic relations with south-east Asia, in which Japan is the dominant partner.

  6 Patterns of Immobility

  Religion in Japan takes on a different form from religion in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. When a Japanese is asked his religion he may, for the sake of simplicity, follow the scheme of Western classification and answer ‘Buddhism’. In reality, however, his religion defies such a classification. He goes to a Buddhist temple only for a close relativ
e's funeral or for his own, since most Japanese graveyards are under the supervision of Buddhist temples. Aside from this, the creed of the particular sect of Buddhism to which the individual's family belongs seldom crosses his mind. In Western books on religion, Buddhism and Shinto are classified separately as different religions, but the distinction is seldom made by the Japanese. The ‘two’ religions are mingled in the Japanese mind, and to this synthesis other religions are added and assimilated. Christmas, for example, is a familiar ritual in urban Japan, and commercial advertising, with the aim of increasing department store sales, has spread the custom throughout the country and made it part of the popular environment, one in the cycle of seasonal festivals. In celebrating Christmas, the Japanese become Christian for one day of the year, not merely exchanging presents and drinking, but learning Christian legends and rituals and developing an understanding of the Christian way of life.

  All these religions, named here according to their Western categories, are absorbed into the common Japanese religion of coexistence in the same narrow space of land since time immemorial. This was formed into a state religion by the post-Meiji Government and used as a manipulative tool to induce obedience to the authorities. This is not, however, the only use to which this common faith might be put.