The World at War (8 page)

TOSHIKAZU KASE

Japanese diplomat

We have an excellent book in Tokyo, by one who happened to be one of my very good friends, called
Government by Assassination –
assassination followed one after the other since the outbreak of the
Manchurian Incident in the autumn of 1931. This had the effect of intimidating the government leaders and they lost gradually the courage to speak up in the face of a military operation. A rather mysterious devotion was growing between the Army and the 'Young Turks' who were growing as an influence in the Army at home and together they tried to reform or reconstruct Japanese society. Most people were not told the truth of the situation because the large papers and periodicals, most of them, followed the lead of the reactionaries and military elements, and to the effect they did, public opinion ceased to function.

IAN MUTSU

Japanese–English journalist

There was always a sort of
censorship, from cradle to grave you might say, because there were certain things you couldn't say. This intensified, starting about the time of the Manchurian Incident. The bans of censorship as applied to the radio and the press came in those days from the Home Ministry. As often as several times a week editors would receive notices of what could and could not be mentioned, such as any references to the Imperial household. But they came to assume more and more of a military nature as the Japanese war on the continent progressed.

STAFF OFFICER AKIO DOI

Japanese Army General Staff

Politically, Japan wanted to join with China to check the attempt of the European powers to divide up China, and to prevent the advance of the Soviet Union into Manchuria and North Korea. But the Nationalist government of China thought it better to get the support of the United States and Britain than to join with Japan and so continued an anti-Japanese policy. Japan wanted to secure Manchuria and Korea and for this they had to use force.

LEWIS BUSH

English teacher in Japan

The Japanese Army had been in disrepute from about 1922 when Japan was in Siberia with the British and the Americans after World War One, but the Japanese were the last to go and there were various scandals connected with Army corruption. And it remained in disrepute for several years, I should say until about the beginning of the 1930s, and then they came back through the so-called
Patriotic Societies, many of them no more than gangsters who would commit any misdeed in the name of patriotism. There were several
assassinations of Prime Ministers and leaders in those days just because they had liberal views or because they favoured better relations with the United States, Britain or other democratically minded nations.

YOSHIO KODAMA

Nationalist politician

We, the Japanese people, were told that the situation with the United States had reached such a stage that they wanted Japan to get out of not only China, but also Taiwan. They wanted Japan to withdraw completely from all parts of Asia and we were told that only if we do so, if we were to withdraw from all these various places, then the United States would lift its economic blockade of Japan for the first time. Of course we wanted the economic blockade lifted but the hardest part of this condition was the demand that we get out of Manchuria. After all, Manchuria had been the prize that we had gained after two wars, the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese, in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been sacrificed. We, the Japanese people, felt that if Japan were forced to withdraw from Manchuria it would immediately fall prey to the Russians. And so it was felt that unless Manchuria was defended by Japan it would be completely dominated by Russia and that all the past precious lives that were sacrificed to make Manchuria safe would have been a complete waste.

TOSHIKAZU KASE

I had some sympathy with the idealism of the young officers, partly because of the depression, which was pretty bad, and the young officers in the Army and also in the Navy were reacting to a hostile policy adopted by the democratic powers of America and Britain.

LIEUTENANT TERUO OKADA

Intelligence Officer, Japanese Army

We have this
belly-band, which is the girls stand on the corner in the streets of, say, Tokyo and ask each passer-by woman to make a stitch and she must collect a thousand stitches. This is given to a soldier – I got one – and you wrap it round your belly. It's supposed to keep your stomach warm so that you don't catch cold or this or that, but also to ward off bullets. I used to think – I don't know whether I should say this – but I felt it was very unfair, especially when I got the order to go overseas, that the Japanese girls were giving me these thousand stitches. I'm going to the and I have not experienced a woman – why cannot they give me their body for me to enjoy and let me live, however short my life is, to enjoy the fullness of it. Because sleeping with me is not going to kill the girl, you know, maybe she likes it, I don't know. But I am going to the and all I get is a thousand stitches, which is a charm and it's very nice of her to give it to me, but after all it's just a piece of cloth with a thousand stitches.

TOMOHIKO USHIBA

Private Secretary to pre-war Prime Minister Konoye

There were so many causes in Japan those days – party politics very important and great division between the rich and the poor. In general public life was very hard and most young military officers came from low-class agricultural families, and agriculture was very, very hard position in those days.

LEWIS BUSH

The military came back to power because of the plight of the farmer classes, who did have a difficult time in the early Thirties, and you must remember that the military obtained its recruits mainly from the agricultural class, which before the war represented possibly seventy-five per cent of the Japanese working class.

STAFF OFFICER DOI

It was very bad, there were farmers' riots and many small and medium enterprises, and some big enterprises went bankrupt. Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi and others were assassinated too. The cause of all this was the economic situation. In mainland China there was an anti-Japanese movement; in the United States there was discrimination against Japanese immigrants; Japan was being opposed all over the world. And because of that Japan found itself in a very difficult economic situation.

EDISON UNO

Japanese–American teenager

As a child I remember going to school and having to fight my way home and having to argue and to justify my Americanism, my loyalty, to my classmates and my friends. My brothers and sisters all had trouble going to school and coming home from school, to the point where we pretty much felt we were no longer wanted in society and therefore we sort of kept to ourselves.

LEWIS BUSH

I remember my former wife, it must have been about 1938, coming from the hairdresser where she had her hair waved and being stopped by a policeman who told her this was a sign of Western decadence; even Western music, except classical music, which was mostly German, Beethoven and that sort of thing, was frowned upon and gradually all any kind of pleasure introduced from the West the military did their best to prohibit and rub it out altogether.

MARQUIS KOICHI KIDO

Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal

1930 was around the time Japan began to enter what might be called a convulsive period. The Army did not have such a strong power in 1930, but the growing influence of the ultra-nationalists and the 15th May young officers' insurrection and other incidents that occurred around this time placed Japan step by step under the influence of the Army
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The thing that helped the Army most was the fact that in selecting the War Minister it was necessary to have the agreement of the Chief of Staff and the Army Inspector General, and that the War Minister must be an active officer. This system gave the Army a chance to manipulate the Cabinet as it pleased.

HISATSUNE SAKOMIZU

Chief Cabinet Secretary

The constitution at the time, prerogative of the Emperor to use the Army and Navy, it belonged to Emperor himself, so the government could not control them. The Manchuria Army abused this Emperor's prerogative.

LEWIS BUSH

When I left Japan in early 1940 to join the Royal Navy there was rationing, prices were high, students of high school and the universities were doing military training practically every day. You had Army officers attached to every school to supervise such training. And so it was a nation preparing for war. By that time you must remember they'd already been in an undeclared war with China since the time of the so-called Manchurian Incident in 1931 and practically every day if you went near any railway station you'd see a crowd of people dressed in black – mothers, fathers, grandfathers, receiving the white boxes of ashes of their sons, which had been returned from the battle front in China.

LIEUTENANT OKADA

When I left for war I had to clip my nails and hair and write a last will and testament because from that moment our lives were in the
Emperor's hands. In other words my family will put that in the urn in case my body is not recovered. Our training is to die for the Emperor, beat the enemy and die for the Emperor so that death was nothing to be afraid of and in any attack we never even thought of dying. We only thought of this when perhaps we had a rearguard action and you are being shot from behind, that to die when shot in the back would be a shame,

TOSHIKAZU KASE

Japan wanted to pursue peace if possible, and that is why the government undertook the difficult negotiations with the United States. But on one hand the temper of the nation grew each day more militaristic, on the other because of the growing frictions with the democratic powers, which made it practically impossible to continue the negotiations.

LEWIS BUSH

Just before the war broke out Prime Minister Konoye tried very, very hard to settle affairs in China, but it didn't seem the military were very interested in ending the war: they wanted to go south, they were preaching the '
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' – the whole of Asia under the umbrella of Japan.

YOSHIO KODAMA

We knew it was impossible to stop Prince Konoye from going by ordinary means but we knew that in order for him to go to the United States he would have to take the train from Tokyo to Yokosuka, and then he would take a warship from Yokosuka to the United States. We knew of his route on the other side of the bay from Yokosuka beforehand so our plan was to blow up a bridge half-way between Tokyo and Kamagawa. Our plan was to blow up the train together with the bridge with the help of Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, later Chief of Staff to General Tomoyuki Yamashita in the lightning conquest of Malaya of the Japanese Army.

TOSHIKAZU KASE

The Soviet Union had always been thought a threat to Japanese security and the Army was itching for a showdown with the Soviet Union, if and when the latter suffered defeat in the European theatre, and the Army wanted to take the advantage of the Russian weakness. But in order to move north the climatic conditions come into play. After October the military operations against the north became rather more difficult, technically speaking. The Navy, on the other hand, wanted to advance further south because the resources our country lacked were largely in South Seas. And so Japan was pointing apart between the Army ambition and Naval design. But when the time for an attack against the north passed, the Army naturally joined the Navy.

MARQUIS KIDO

In 1941 there was still no proposal that Japan should advance southwards because Japan's hypothetical enemy was still Russia. I think the southward idea came somewhat later.

DR NOBLE FRANKLAND

Historian and post-war Director of the Imperial War Museum

The Japanese war was really a separate war to that against Hitler. The struggle between Hitler and the Western Alliance gave the Japanese the opportunity to secure what they believed was their right – an overseas empire which was based upon the view that they must have natural resources, as Japan is not a self-supporting country rather like Britain, and they sought an empire which would give them access to oil, rubber and all the commodities which great industrial nations need. And the Germany/ Britain/America struggle gave the Japanese the opportunity; it was the Japanese who projected the Americans into the war against Germany. But the opportunity was created for Japan by Hitler.

LEWIS BUSH

They were building up to the Rome – Tokyo – Berlin Axis and so quite naturally they did their best to sell their people on the merits of Hitler and Mussolini as opposed to the America of Roosevelt and the Britain of Chamberlain, two decadent, weak nations.
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IAN MUTSU

Even before Pearl Harbor, during the time of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy, you were asked to refer in certain ways to the
Axis Powers. I noticed that the Japanese press was quite willing to cooperate with this, to be unfree, to convert themselves into printing shops for what came down to them from the High Command.

COMMANDER YUZURU SANEMATSU

Naval Attaché at Japanese Embassy in Washington

The Army took Prussia, later Germany, as its teacher and the Navy learnt from Great Britain and the United States. So there was naturally a great gap of thinking between the
Army and the Navy. This was the biggest cause of the clash of interests. As a result of this the Navy wanted to maintain friendship as much as possible with Great Britain and the United States, while on the other hand the Army wanted to maintain friendship with Germany. This, then, was the biggest difference between the two.