0.
Japan at War is an oral history of Japan between 1930 and 1945, a period that begins with Japanese imperialist ambitions in China, and concludes with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. It is the culmination of years of journalism conducted by a married couple who traveled Japan in the 1990s interviewing survivors of the war years. The result is a curated selection of about seventy stories told by Japanese people in their own words, interspersed with brief summaries of the broader historical context those stories occurred in. It is a staggering book that provides dozens of moving and surprising insights into the history of the conflict and compact illustrations of human character in times of intense stress.
1.
Though American narratives naturally date the beginning of the war with Japan at the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese memory of it begins with the invasion and colonization of Manchuria in 1931. This conflict, seen as a sideshow or prologue in American memory, was, for the Japanese, the beginning of a ten year period of constant war. This was not a sideshow–it was a brutal and destructive campaign against China that occupied 400,000 troops up until the end of the war, and saw hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers move into captured territories.
We see, in the opening accounts of the book, themes and patterns that persist throughout the whole experience. The Japanese military fights ferociously, with almost a disregard for the lives of their own soldiers: one commander describes human wave attacks against entrenched Chinese positions that left 95% of the participating forces wounded, dead, or psychologically broken. Supply problems are common: Japanese soldiers are quickly reduced to stealing whatever they can to survive, at times robbing friendly units. And, massacres of civilians, abysmal treatment of prisoners, and human experimentation on the Chinese were common.
The scope and industrialization of Japanese war crimes is shocking. However, many of the people interviewed (especially those who were highly ranked) minimize, gloss over, or deny them. An exchange with a lieutenant general over photographs he took in the aftermath of the capture of Nanking (a period in which it is likely over 200,000 Chinese civilians were killed) illustrates the intensity of some Japanese’s denial:
You don’t see any dead bodies, although the gate is damaged. [He jabs his finger at the photo.] This is the spot in the other sides’ books where they claim ten thousand bodies lay. Right here. You don’t see any bodies, do you?
Tanida-san, on this page opposite, right here, you’ve written “About one thousand confirmed bodies, 4 p.m.,” haven’t you?
We started about three o’clock. It must have been about 4 o’clock when we got here. This is in front of the gate. It’s still burning. Smoke is still rising. Here I wrote “more than one thousand,” but actually two or three thousand dead were probably there. If you move toward the river-bank, about three hundred meters from this gate, you come to this location. [Turns to next picture]
Are the white things in the picture bodies?
I wonder what those white ones are? Something white must be spread out there.
Other former soldiers are not as evasive. Bayonetting or beheading captured POWs was a common occurrence, and served as a rite of passage for new soldiers or officers. One soldier describes this process:
Second Lieutenant Tanaka took us to the detention center. Pointing at the people in a room, all Chinese, he announced, ‘These are the raw materials for your trial of courage.’...On the final day, we were taken out to the site of our trial. Twenty-four prisoners were squatting there with their hands tied behind their backs…Tanaka turned towards us and looked into each of our faces in turn. “Heads should be cut off like this,” he said, unsheathing his army sword. He scooped water from a bucket with a dipper, then poured it over both sides of the blade. Swishing off the water, he raised his sword in a long arc. Standing behind the prisoner, Tanaka steadied himself, legs spread apart, and cut off the man’s head with a shout, “Yo!” The head flew more than a meter away. Blood spurted up in two fountains from the body and sprayed into the hole…
The neophyte officers’ executions do not go as smoothly:
Some of the officer candidates slashed the head by mistake. One prisoner ran around crazily, his blindfold hanging down, his head gashed. “Stab him!” Tanaka ordered. The candidate officer swung and missed again. “You fool!” Tanaka scolded. This time Tanaka swung his sword. All of us did. Everyone got covered with blood as we butchered him.
Tominaga, though disgusted by these actions, feels they were effective. He says that, when he beheaded a prisoner, he “gained strength somewhere within [his] gut.” Once frightened by the “tiger eyes” of the combat veterans under his command, he was able to face them without fear. He claims this sort of training was a natural extension of Japanese thinking that “men were able to fight courageously only when their human instincts were suppressed.”
In some sense, he seems to have been correct. Japanese soldiers were ferociously effective, even towards the end of the war, when they were stranded on island garrisons without food or ammunition. But they still lost, defeated by American forces that managed to best them without suppressing their humanity. And, when the war ended, and those “demons” had to become men again, they were shattered by their experiences, able to cope only with the help of religion or alcohol.
Perhaps the most horrific of these sorts of accounts are from a pair of men who participated in human experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The first describes how humans were vivisected to teach doctors how to perform operations like limb amputations or appendix removals. Blindfolded prisoners were shot in the stomach in order to provide doctors with opportunities to practice removing shrapnel. Organs were harvested and sent back to Japan.[1] Tools were not sterilized, because the prisoners were expected to die during the process, or be executed when the operation was finished.
The second describes his role as a technician in “Unit 731,” a bacteriological warfare unit. His job involved infecting human prisoners with deadly bacteria, then harvesting their organs at the moment just before their death.[2]
It is difficult to summarize or find extended quotes that convey the sense of horror that these chapters generate. The disgust and sadness is created by the accretion of minute, banal details that ground the stories and bring them to life: interns chuckling about a senior doctor sewing up a patient backwards, or the long, complicated process involved in breeding diseased fleas. In abstract, atrocities rarely generate emotional responses. They are unimaginable. But the individual nature of the accounts allows the reader to see the human reality on both sides of the equation.
Seeing that humanity leads one to question how a person could participate in such acts. Each interviewer offers different explanations. Some describe an intense sense of peer pressure–a desire to avoid disgracing oneself by not participating. Some were simply motivated by the promise of a good paying job, and an ability to look the other way. Some seem fundamentally insecure, enjoying the status and sense of power their roles brought them, and willing to do anything to protect and reinforce that status. One man comes across as a true sociopath, describing his actions without remorse, and, after recounting many, many cold-blooded murders, complains that the Japanese were not treated in a “gentlemanly fashion” by the Americans during the occupation.
Cultural factors were at play, too. The Japanese had an intense sense of racial superiority, which they used to justify their actions towards the Chinese, Koreans, and other colonized peoples. And there was a deeply ingrained belief that surrender or captivity were fates worse than death–anyone dishonored by capture deserved whatever treatment they were given.
2.
The brutal war narratives stand in contrast to the almost idyllic descriptions of civilian life in Japan and its colonies in the early 1930s. Colonial expansion had brought material wealth. One woman describes the joy of working as a kindergarten teacher in Manchuria, seduced by the sun setting on “red sorghum fields [stretching] on for eternity.” Other stories from the early 1930s linger on /static/images/acx/images38_67 of ballroom dancers, or variety shows at the Moulin Rouge.
But those good times were to be short lived. Imperialist expansion began a chain of events that led Japan, inexorably, to war with America. Japanese imperialism and brutal treatment of the Chinese led to American embargoes against Japan, which crippled their ability to continue their campaign, even as Chinese forces were supplied by the West through European colonial holdings in India, Burma, and French Indochina. Rather than accept defeat and withdraw, the Japanese government doubled down and attacked America.
This was, in hindsight, a disastrous decision, and one that seems to be more of a consequence of Japanese overconfidence than a calculated move. Though interviews with high level decision makers are scarce, one former naval intelligence official recalls the typical Japanese military thinking:
Leaders looked only at pluses and paid no attention to minuses… “Advance, advance,” therefore became the only objective. But what would happen when you advanced? What situation would arise? These things were not in their minds.
In this fashion, strategy was replaced by dogma:
“If we go to Indonesia, everyone will tremble in fear and awe and bow down before us.” All we have to do is say “This is necessary for Japan. Moreover, this will make you happy, too.”
This arrogance led decision makers to take the disastrous step of attacking America and Great Britain.
Curiously, ordinary Japanese citizens, at least in retrospect, seemed to harbor doubts about this decision. Though nationalist zealotry was not in short supply, citizens who had contact with the US described misgivings. A machinist, though grateful for the work war brought, fretted about the sagacity of attacking a country that supplied most of the plans Japan used to manufacture goods. Others wondered why Japan would start a war against such a large country, especially given Japan’s lack of mobility and material disadvantages. It is hard to know how much these opinions are colored by hindsight, but they, at least, seem to indicate that the strategic implications of the decision were foreseeable, though unconsidered.
3.
Though Japan’s initial assaults and invasions were full of striking military victories and massive territorial gains, stories about them are largely absent from collective Japanese memory. Only one account is a recognizable example of the sort of glorified war story common in American retellings: that of fighter pilot Sakai Saburo. Saburo begins his tale by comparing aerial dogfighting to combat between samurais, and lives up to the metaphor’s grandiosity. As a new pilot, he trains himself to spot enemy aircraft by constantly staring at the sky, and, once in combat, performs exceptionally and becomes an ace.
However, in the battle for Guadalcanel, gunfire shatters his cockpit, sending shards of glass across his face. His right eye is destroyed instantly, and his left is severely damaged. Undeterred, he fashions a makeshift bandage from a strip of silk cloth, and flies his damaged Zero four hours back to the airfield, at times passing out or flying upside down. Once landed, he refuses medical care until his wounds become so infected that his eyes are full of maggots. After treatment, he is nearly blind, and slated to be reassigned and trained as a masseur, but he escapes the hospital and hitches a ride back to his unit, then talks his commanding officer into allowing him to fly again. In his first mission back, he fights in the largest air battle of the Pacific theater, shooting down five enemy planes and becoming a “one eyed ace.”
His story does not end there. Late in the war, he is tapped for a kamikaze mission, but the target ships fail to appear at the designated location. To conclude the story in his words:
We reversed course–not simple on the open ocean with nothing to guide us. We were a one-way attack force, so we hadn’t done any navigation. We’d never thought of fuel consumption…All I had to rely on was my experience of many years... I calculated distance from what I thought was that cloud we’d seen before, though it had already changed shape. Soon it was ink black. There was no sense of speed. When I looked left and right I could see purple exhaust coming from the two Zeros on my wings. I could tell the pilots were there because of the ultraviolet light on their faces. One hour passed. Two hours passed.
…All five of my fuel gauges showed empty… I thought, “So this is the day I die. Here. Now.” In front of me, before the cowling of my engine, my mother appeared. “This way, this way,” she said. I had been awakened once before by my mother’s voice when I passed out after my wounds over Guadalcanal. Now there she was again…
I was ready to die. I thought I would plunge into the sea with my companions when the time came. But if my calculations weren’t wrong, we should be approaching Iwo Jima. In the cockpit, even on a pitch-dark night, there is some starlight, and that light can be reflected from the sea. If there’s no reflection, if there’s a dark spot, specialists like me could tell that an island was there. I was watching my clock. Soon our engines would simply stop. “Show yourself!” I cried out to the island…According to my calculations, it was time. I was searching the ocean, looking over the leading edge of my wing, when I saw that something black, like a tadpole, seemed to be running across the surface of the sea…There it was, again, the dark spot had traveled under the wing. ‘That’s Iwo Jima!’”
Unsurprisingly, Saburo now works as a motivational speaker.
4.
His story, though, is the exception. Most of the war narratives describe the confusion and desperation of Japan’s defeat: suicide charges and endless scattered retreats through desolate jungles. Stories from the home front paint a picture of a country slowly eating itself. A bakery renowned for kasutera, a sort of sponge cake, is forced by supply shortages to switch to making ham sandwiches, then sliced bread, then nothing. An imperial army recruiter conscripts man after man from his village, until he is the only one remaining.
The lack of material and workers forced children into the war effort. A young boy is strafed by American planes on expeditions to harvest wood for alcohol fuel. A 16 year old girl works 12 hour shifts on starvation rations to manufacture “balloon bombs”: explosives attached to hydrogen balloons intended to float across the Pacific and hit American cities on the coast. She is horrified to learn, many years later, that out of the 9300 launched, the only “success” achieved was the death of a picnicking American family.
5.
Despite these sacrifices, in 1943 or 1944 the war became unwinnable. Japanese supply lines had been obliterated by the American Navy. Though their colonial ambitions had succeeded in expanding access to raw materials, the superiority of American air and naval power meant those materials could not be transported to where they were needed. For example, though in 1943 Japan had successfully doubled oil imports from their levels immediately following the American Embargo, they were half of what they were pre-embargo, and needs had dramatically increased–they needed to fight not just in China, but across the entire Pacific, contesting the most powerful navy and air force in the world.
There was no way, at this point, for Japan to win the war. Their army was scattered on isolated island garrisons. Resources were scarce, and many soldiers and civilians were starving. But again, faced with a choice between surrender or death, Japan chose death, making fruitless self-sacrifice the national policy.
This choice was nearly inevitable. Japanese decision makers had been selected for aggressiveness and confidence, and early successes had rewarded those traits. The civilian population had had obedience and loyalty literally beaten into them from childhood by an authoritarian school system and brutally hierarchical military. Combine that with a national obsession with honor, a veneration of the emperor as a living god, and an idea that surrender was a fate worse than death, and you have a culture driven towards mass industrialized suicide. Japanese strategy became unhinged from reality: the “miracle-to-come, which would sweep all enemy fleets away from the sacred shores of Japan, was by 1945 a constant refrain in what was left of the Empire… Imperial high command was preparing to stake virtually all remaining Japanese air and sea power on desperate mass attacks.”
This new glorification of suicide, and the policies that followed, scarred those forced to carry them out. The book features four interviews from people who were affected by the “Divine Wind Special Attack Forces,” usually abbreviated in Japanese as the “Tokko.” Kamikaze fighters have entered popular consciousness, but Japan developed a wide variety of suicide weapons. One of these was the Kaiten, a torpedo coffin guided and detonated by human pilots. The book features two interviews with surviving Kaiten pilots, and, though the way they tell their stories is quite different, neither seems to have been able to move on from his experiences.
One was a volunteer driven by fanaticism. He describes his fear that he might not be chosen to kill himself for his country:
I was afraid that if I only wrote double circles I might not be chosen, even though I had one of the very best records in our squad and was very strong in judo. Underneath my circles I added, “Without reservation, I request that you select me. Yokota Kan.” I wrote it in big letters and handed it in.
I was picked first.
Unnervingly, Yokota looks back on his time with nostalgia, commenting on the glory and pride he felt as a Kaiten pilot, and the brotherhood he experienced in his unit. He speaks of his experiences in a childlike way, and one gets the sense that he, all these years later, remains the 18 year old boy that volunteered to give his life for his country.
The other, conscripted into the Tokko as a college student, looks back with much more understandable revulsion, and a deep sense of betrayal.
But both men glamorize the Kaiten pilots, associating them with a “bushido spirit.” And both are unwilling to accept the statistics that show the tragic ineffectiveness of the weapon (only one ship was ever sunk by a Kaiten). In order to make sense of it, they must believe it was a noble act, a sacrifice with meaning, instead of a strategy that resulted in the waste and destruction of dozens of young lives.
That destruction radiated out into the lives of those who were close to Tokko members. A woman who married a Kamikaze pilot the day before his deployment speaks of how he haunted her dreams for years after. A Kaiten pilot's sister replays the last day she spent with him over and over, reluctant and ashamed she could not somehow do more with him before his death. These emotions in these stories will be familiar to someone who has lost a loved one to suicide, but they are complicated and exacerbated by the fact that these young men did not want to die, and contemporary propaganda that glorified them as the ultimate expression of Japanese patriotism.
Though the Tokko was the most formal expression of this national insanity, it expressed itself all over the country. Multiple individuals describe refugee women being ordered to murder their crying babies so invading forces would not hear them. A schoolgirl recounts her joy at being pressed into service as an emergency nurse during the invasion of Okinawa, then her and her classmates being given hand grenades and told to sacrifice themselves to kill American soldiers overrunning their position. Many did.
Most chilling are the stories of Okinawan villagers who were encouraged to commit group suicide in the face of the American invasion. Their stories contain scenes of a type I had previously encountered only in lurid horror fiction:
One of the village leaders, a middle aged man, snapped off a sapling… Once he had that stick in his hands, he turned into a madman. Striking his wife and children over and over again, bludgeoning them to death. That was the beginning of the tragedy I saw.
As if a chain reaction, it spread from one family to the next. We all must die that way. Everyone seemed to think so. People began to raise their hands against their loved ones. I had just turned sixteen…
The first one we laid hands on was Mother. Those who had blades, or scythes, cut their wrists or severed arteries in their necks. But we didn’t do it that way. We might have used a string. When we raised our hands against the mother who bore us, we wailed in our grief. I remember that. In the end we must have used stones. To the head. We took care of Mother that way. Then my brother and I turned against our younger brother and younger sister. Hell engulfed us there.
6.
There is no indication that these acts weakened national commitment to the war. Indeed, they may have deepened it, as each act of self-sacrifice buttressed the national delusion that Japan could repel the invading Americans with ferocity and force of will. One survivor describes the construction of elaborate tunnel systems designed to house the emperor and military command, and a disturbing image of a horrible alternate history comes to mind: Japan in ruins, leveled by American bombers, full of starving women and children who rush landing soldiers with sharpened sticks (as they had trained to do) and being gunned down by horrified young men who would remember their faces for the rest of their lives.
Compared to this possibility, the stories of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are almost a relief. Though still full of death and tragedy, the accounts of Hiroshima survivors largely convey a sense of shock and confusion–an inability to comprehend the magnitude and totality of the devastation. Conventional military force and firebombings could be fought against; if one citizen in 10 could kill an American soldier in a suicide charge, if enough buildings could be demolished to make firebreaks, then victory was imaginable, even if it was practically impossible. But there could be no counter to a bomb that vaporized cities in an instant.
Though devastating, the atomic bomb seems to have shocked citizens and leadership out of the national death spiral, and brought the country to accept defeat. When the Emperor’s edict announcing Japan’s surrender was announced, some of the most fanatical had to be convinced to lay down their arms, but the dominant sensibility was one of relief. Finally, it was all over.
7.
The book is magnificent. Many of the individual stories hold more pathos and significance than entire novels, and they are deftly melded with the historical context. There are many, many more stories than I have included in this already overlong summary, and almost all are incredibly gripping reads.
The richness of the book presents a great deal of material to analyze, but there are two points I’d like to make before I conclude: One on America, and one on the book's illustration of morality in times of great duress.
As an American, I was perhaps egotistically surprised by the rarity of American appearances in the book, and happy that, when they did appear, they were overwhelmingly positive. Much is made of American material wealth. Several Japanese describe instantly believing the war was unwinnable after seeing standard American army rations, which included luxuries like butter and cigarettes–amazing to someone who has been surviving on two sweet potatoes a day.
Additionally, those captured by Americans describe being treated with generosity and respect, which shocks Japanese accustomed to brutal treatment of captives, and provides the reader with a sort of mental balm: a reminder that war need not be fought without losing one’s humanity entirely.
These few appearances imply a reality consistent with the “Greatest Generation” myth about the American fighting man: that of a citizen soldier who approaches his task with determination, but does not compromise the ideals he is fighting for. The lack of detailed descriptions of Americans in the book means that such an implication cannot really be robustly supported by the text, but reading Japanese accounts of their country at war made me realize that there does seem to be something commendable about how the United States conducted itself during the war.
America is not blameless. Mutilation of Japanese corpses and trophy taking were common in the Pacific theater; American forces raped many women in occupied territories; and execution of captured POWs, especially in the field, was not nonexistent.
Still, with the exception of “strategic bombing” campaigns, American atrocities were not institutionalized in the same way they were in Axis or Soviet nations. America did not stage mass executions or massacres in captured territories, and America did not conduct the same sort of inhuman experimentation that the Nazis and Japanese did.[3] American POWs survived at rates 4 to 50 times better than POWs captured by other nations did, and, unlike the USSR, America did not conduct postwar retributive campaigns in captured territories.
It is perhaps tempting to claim that this is a result of America’s limited involvement–perhaps material wealth and a war fought far away from home insulated it from being “forced” into taking such actions. This may be, but the similar lack of depravity from American soldiers in the Korean War a decade later under severely deficient material conditions, implies that really was something particular about American culture at the time that prevented such excess[4], though I am not informed enough about the historical context to feel comfortable speculating on it.
8.
Perhaps what is most interesting to me about the book is that it is a collection of stories from a wide variety of people coping with stress, cultural pressure, and deprivation. I’ve spent enough time talking about the worst aspects of humanity on display in the stories, so I’d like to close by noting that the vast majority of individuals in the book come across as fundamentally decent people trying to make their way through a difficult situation. Their focus, especially during the war years, was on close friends and family, and trying to live lives that honored the values of the time.
That latter bit is important, and illustrates the power of broad societal narratives about what is just and moral. In Japan at this time, the cultural narratives of honor, self sacrifice, and “Yamato spirit” inspired the country. People describe not wanting to dishonor themselves or their families by acting cravenly, and being motivated to extraordinary acts to pull themselves and their country through the trials they were experiencing.
Critically, this seemed to be a largely organic process. Though propaganda and press censorship was pervasive, and the Japanese secret police pressured people to act and think “correctly,” much of the culture was formed by self-censorship and social pressure exerted by neighbors or family members. This meant it was genuine, as well. When reflecting upon an especially strange or objectionable former belief, the most common refrain offered by interviewees is something along the lines of: “It seems crazy, but that’s really how we thought back then.” People mostly accepted the values society presented, and made efforts to live their lives accordingly.
This, to me, speaks to the importance of national morals that motivate people to act in ways that benefit themselves and others. I worry that popular, just narratives that have served or could serve as frameworks for American culture have become co-opted by one side or the other of the exhausting, fruitless culture wars, causing more and more Americans to retreat from ideals entirely, unwilling to be drawn into yet another contentious debate, and weakening our ability to push ourselves to new heights.
The answer, perhaps, may lie in some new set of values, or new presentations of old ones that are simple and uncontroversial enough to cut across social divisions, and serve as a foundation upon which more complex growth can, someday, occur.
But the end of a five thousand word book review is not the place to begin proposing ideals around which to restructure America, so I’ll simply close with this: books like Japan at War: An Oral History provide the reader with the sort of raw material that such ideals could be constructed from. It is four hundred and sixty pages of humanity: heartbreaking, exhilarating, tedious, confusing, noble, amusing and flawed, but always recognizable, and, like your coworker, neighbor, or distant relative, worth taking the time to consider, empathize with, and understand.