Japan's War

As with other books like this, I will only point out some of the most interesting information.

The book discusses Japanese history from about the mid-1800's. In talking about the Sino-Japanese war, the book notes that Emperor Meiji decided Japan would attack the Soviet fleet without warning, so the attack on Pearl Harbor was not the first time the Japanese had used this strategy. The attack was carried out, and then war was declared, in that order.

The anti-Japanese prejudice in California is discussed, especially in relation to newspaper articles of the time like “Japanese a Menace to American Women” and “Brown Asiatics Steal Brains of Whites.” The California legislature voted to exclude all Japanese. This upset the Japanese in Japan, of course, since they thought their culture was superior to the barbaric culture of the US and how dare the US try and keep them out of the country.

There was a thing called the “Peace Preservation Law” in Japan since 1887. It was used to quell riots, put down labor demonstrations and control political activity. The police network was used to control the population. The Ministry of Education helped try and mold the minds of the young, so both the young and the adults were targets of attempts at thought-control on the part of the Japanese government.

The Army was effectively in control of the politics of Japan by 1931. One of their goals was to get all the civilians to think the way they wanted, which was that it would be a privilege to die for the Emperor.

The training of the soldiers was strong in courage but lacking in common sense.

Part of the rationale Japan had for its expansionist policy was that they were just doing the same thing that had been done by Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the United States in the past. (They had a good point here; why was it ok for a white culture to pursue a policy of taking over other countries but an asian race couldn't do the same thing?)

The Army in Manchuria and China was not really under anyone's full control. The leaders in the field tended to do pretty much what they wanted to and didn't tend to pay a whole lot of attention to orders from those higher up.

The military basically deluded themselves into believing that Manchuria really belonged to Japan, and that they could take any steps to keep control of that area.

In relation to life at home in Japan, “No one could question any government decision without running the danger of immediate jailing either by the police or the Kempeitai. Even foreigners were no loner immune.”

(This type of thing helps to explain why the Japanese people worked so hard for the military and endured so much suffering without question; they had been effectively exposed to propaganda from the earliest age that Japanese were superior beings and that it was Japan's destiny to rule the world. If you dared speak out against that, you ran a good chance of disappearing forever.)

The author says that the US and Britain could have, if they really wanted to, forced Japan to withdraw from China but neither country was willing to. The US had turned isolationist, and England was concerned with her own empire, so neither country was willing to apply the necessary pressure to get Japan to back down from her Asian expansion.

In relation to the Rape of Nanking, the author says 500 Chinese were killed in front of the city's walls because the Japanese thought they might be soldiers. 13,000 prisoners were killed by one regiment in the next few days alone. “So Nanking was looted, the women were raped and murdered, and children were shot or bayoneted if they annoyed the Japanese. The disciplined Japanese soldiers, who would not move without an order, became a horde reminiscent of the Mongols.”

The number of deaths at Nanking is unknown. The Allied war crimes prosecutors put the toll at 200,000. Japanese revisionist historians put the toll at a tenth of that in the 1980's. Other Japanese and Chinese historians agreed with the original 200,000 toll of civilians killed.There are records of a minimum of 150,000 killed, and that very likely does not include every single person murdered.

This book, as others, notes that the Japanese government refused to face up to the reality that, in a war with the US, they stood little chance in the long run due to the ability of the US to produce war goods, an ability far beyond that of what Japan could do. No matter how strong a soldier's spirit is, it can't defeat groups of well-armed and well-trained soldiers, especially if that soldier is starving and has little if any ammunition.

At the end of 1941 the Japanese took Hong Kong. Troops entered St. Stephen's College and bayoneted to death all the prisoners in the hospital beds. The nurses were raped.

The leaders of the military units were not fully in control of their own soldiers, and thus the soldiers tended to engage in rape and murder. “The reason was largely that the militarists had been encouraging a hatred for foreigners, and particularly for white foreigners, for a long time. It did not take much encouragement. Foreigners had been maligned and mistreated in Japan from time immemorial. The natural attitude of the Japanese toward outsiders had always been jingoistic and hostile.”

This was not the same way at all that the Japanese soldiers acted during the Sino-Soviet war, though. In that they were much more under control.

General Tojo devised a policy to put prisoners of war to work. (Remember that Japan had not signed the Geneva Convention.) This program resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Allied and Asian prisoners.

What complicated things with the civilians was that, not only were they constantly exposed to the military propaganda of the militaristic government, but they were often lied to by the military. People were not told about some things, and were told bald-faced lies about others. The longer the war went on the more losses were reported as victories.

One example of this was Midway, which Radio Tokyo reported as a “great victory” even though they lost four aircraft carriers, various other ships, and were driven back from Midway. Their radio reported 1 carrier of theirs was sunk and 1 damaged. Japan had also lost 322 planes and valuable pilots, but this was overlooked by the radio reports.

Things had gotten so bad in the tell-no-truth department that General Tojo, the Prime Minister of Japan, was not told the truth about Midway for a month.

All of this fell apart, of course, when the B-29s started to bomb Japanese cities. The civilians had been told by the military that US bombers would never bomb Japan (despite Dolittle's raid), so when the skies became full of allied bombers it came as quite a shock to the civilians.

Then the public was told about the kamikaze attackers, the “human bullets”, and the various forces that killed themselves rather than surrender, and they began to get an idea that the war was not going at all like they were being told.

In the summer of 1944, along with the promotion of the idea of kamikaze squads, new efforts were being made to keep the civilians under control. “...one immediate instrument was a fright campaign to instill in the Japanese people a new fear and hatred of the enemy.”

Unfortunately, this campaign was helped along by some American soldiers who sent back home to the states skulls of Japanese soldiers as souvenirs. This was picked up by the US press and thus by the Japanese press, and the people did not react well to this “desecration” of the remains of Japanese soldiers.

”The thought of a Japanese soldier's skull becoming an American ashtray was as horrifying in Tokyo as the thought of an American prisoner used for bayonet practice was in New York.”

The Japanese papers responded, saying the Americans were “morally inferior” to them.

The term “unconditional surrender” meant, to the Japanese, that their country would be under the control of foreigners which was something that had never happened to them before.

The Tai-atari was a ramming attack in which a Japanese plane would ram itself into a B-29 on purpose.

An argument in the US military developed over precision bombing vs. area bombing. The precision bombers felt that we should concentrate on targets related to the military, especially factories. The area bombers took the attitude of “destroy everything.” The area bombing group won, and the decision was made to concentrate on killing civilians and destroying as much of everything as they could.

US plane losses ran about 5% on into the bombing, whereas in Germany than ran around 25%.

The use of kamikzes was effective, but it couldn't offset the ability of the US to produce more and more military planes, ships, etc. They could be produced as fast as they were lost; even faster.

In relation to war atrocities, the book notes that the Chinese would have said the Rape of Nanking, among other things; the Americans would have said the Bataan Death march and the execution of captured US airmen, and the Japanese could easily claim the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population.

”Beginning with the great Tokyo fire raid... that murderous bombing continued, almost without regard for military targets.”

The book holds that the Japanese military believed that the atomic bomb was just another weapon designed to kill civilians, and that the war should keep going on.

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