The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War) Read online

  2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1970 and copyright renewed 1998 by John Toland

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in hardcover in 1970 by Random House, Inc.

  ISBN 0-8129-6858-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-8095-5

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Maps

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE—The Roots of War

  1. GEKOKUJO

  2. TO THE MARCO POLO BRIDGE

  3. “THEN THE WAR WILL BE A DESPERATE ONE”

  PART TWO—The Lowering Clouds

  4. “GO BACK TO BLANK PAPER”

  5. THE FATAL NOTE

  6. OPERATION Z

  7. “THIS WAR MAY COME QUICKER THAN ANYONE DREAMS”

  PART THREE—Banzai!

  8. “I SHALL NEVER LOOK BACK”

  9. “THE FORMIDABLE YEARS THAT LIE BEFORE US”

  10. “FOR A WASTED HOPE AND SURE DEFEAT”

  11. “TO SHOW THEM MERCY IS TO PROLONG THE WAR”

  12. “BUT NOT IN SHAME”

  13. THE TIDE TURNS

  PART FOUR—Isle of Death

  14. OPERATION SHOESTRING

  15. GREEN HELL

  16. “I DESERVE TEN THOUSAND DEATHS”

  17. THE END

  PART FIVE—The Gathering Forces

  18. OF MICE AND MEN

  19. TO THE MARIANAS

  20. “SEVEN LIVES TO REPAY OUR COUNTRY!”

  PART SIX—The Decisive Battle

  21. “LET NO HEART BE FAINT”

  22. THE BATTLE OF LEYTE GULF

  23. THE BATTLE OF BREAKNECK RIDGE

  24. DEBACLE

  PART SEVEN—Beyond the Bitter End

  25. “OUR GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY”

  26. “LIKE HELL WITH THE FIRE OUT”

  27. THE FLOWERS OF EDO

  28. THE LAST SORTIE

  29. THE IRON TYPHOON

  30. THE STRAGGLERS

  PART EIGHT—“One Hundred Million Die Together”

  31. IN QUEST OF PEACE

  32. “THAT WAS NOT ANY DECISION THAT YOU HAD TO WORRY ABOUT”

  33. HIROSHIMA

  34. … AND NAGASAKI

  35. “TO BEAR THE UNBEARABLE”

  36. THE PALACE REVOLT

  37. THE VOICE OF THE CRANE

  EPILOGUE

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SOURCES

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  MAPS

  THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC

  THE JAPANESE CONQUEST OF LUZON

  THE SLOT/GUADALCANAL

  SAIPAN

  THE BATTLE OF LEYTE GULF

  THE BATTLE FOR LEYTE

  IWO JIMA

  OKINAWA

  FOREWORD

  After World War II most Westerners felt that General Tojo and other Japanese leaders—indeed the mass of Japanese—were no better than Hitler and his Nazi cohorts, and deserved whatever punishment and misfortune that befell them.

  Twenty-five years have passed and Japan has recovered from almost total moral and economic disaster to resume a respected place among nations of the world. Still, the question remains: How could we have come to admire and respect a people who often acted like barbarians during the war?

  This book, which is largely seen from the Japanese point of view, is an attempt to answer that question as well as others about the war that changed the face of Asia. Why did a country the size of California launch the suicidal attack on Pearl Harbor which involved it in a death struggle with an enemy ten times stronger? Was war between the two nations, which today find so much in common, inevitable and essential? Did the winning of that war perpetuate American involvement in Asian affairs?

  I would not have attempted to write this book—even with the assistance of a Japanese wife and her family—but for two things: a drastic change in Japanese attitudes toward their own immediate past and the appearance of significant new documents. In addition to the mountain of material already available in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Military History Archives of the Japan Defense Agency, valuable documents that had been hidden or lost were recently discovered, such as records of the imperial and liaison conferences, the supposedly burned portions of the Konoye Diary, and the thousand-page “Notes” of Field Marshal Gen Sugiyama, Chief of the Army General Staff from 1940 to February 21, 1944.

  Even more important has been the willingness of Japan’s former military and civilian leaders—including Marquis Koichi Kido, the Emperor’s chief adviser; Prince Mikasa, the Emperor’s youngest brother; Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, de facto commander at Pearl Harbor and Midway; and General Kenryo Sato, perhaps Tojo’s most trusted confidant—to talk freely and at length about the unhappy past. Gone is the reluctance, apparent only a few years ago during research for But Not in Shame, to discuss certain sensitive subjects. Moreover, they are convinced that Westerners, after their postwar experiences in Asia, will have more understanding of the blunders they made in Manchuria and China. Those who fought the war, from generals to privates, have also been more willing to talk of their mistakes, and speak of the unspeakable: cowardice, murder, cannibalism, surrender—and desertion.

  In the interest of accuracy these men, as well as everyone else interviewed whose story is included in the book, read the passages about themselves and often added illuminating comments. The dialogue in the book is not fictional. It comes from transcripts, records and stenographic notes, and the memory of the participants. The extensive debates during the various imperial and liaison conferences, for example, are based on the Sugiyama “Notes”; the recently assembled official records; diaries; and interviews with Marquis Kido, who was given an immediate report of each conference the Emperor attended, and participants including General Teiichi Suzuki, Naoki Hoshino and Okinori Kaya. The Notes (at the end of the book) list sources for all material used, chapter by chapter.

  America’s greatest mistake in World War II, I believe, was in failing to recognize that she was fighting two different kinds of war simultaneously: one in Europe against another Western people and philosophy, Nazism, and one in Asia which was not only a struggle against an aggressive nation fighting for survival as a modern power but an ideological contest against an entire continent. Millions of Orientals saw Japan’s battle as their own, as a confrontation of race and color; they also saw in Japan’s victories their own liberation from Western domination.

  “Each nation, the United States not excepted, has made its contribution to the welter of evil which now comprises the Far East question.” Tyler Dennett, an authority on the Far East, wrote in 1922: “We shall all do well to drop for all time the pose of self-righteousness and injured innocence and penitently face the facts.”

  If we had done so, it is very probable that our negotiations with Japan in 1941 would have ended in peace, not war, and America would not have been forced to become the moral policeman of Asia for
many years. And a moral policeman’s lot is not a happy one, particularly when his own morality is in question.

  What follows is a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of contradiction and paradox. I have done my utmost to let the events speak for themselves, and if any conclusion was reached, it was that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history. We often learn more about the past from the present, in fact, than the reverse. The lessons of our own brutalities in postwar Asia, for example, have undoubtedly given Americans insight into the actions of the Japanese a generation ago.

  J.T.

  PART ONE

  The Roots of War

  1

  Gekokujo

  1.

  The sky over Tokyo on the afternoon of February 25, 1936, was dark and foreboding. A thick blanket of snow already covered the city and there was threat of more to come. Three nights earlier more than a foot had fallen, breaking a record of fifty-four years, and causing such a traffic snarl that some theaters had to be turned into temporary hotels for audiences unable to get home.

  Even under its white cloak of snow, Tokyo looked almost as Western as Oriental. Japan had left much of its feudal past behind to become by far the most progressive, westernized nation of Asia. A few hundred yards from the Imperial Palace with its traditional tile roof was a modern four-story concrete building, the Imperial Household Ministry, where all court business was conducted and the Emperor’s offices were located. Just outside the ancient stone walls and moat surrounding the spacious Palace grounds was the same mélange of East and West: a long line of modern structures, including the Imperial Theater and the Dai Ichi Building, as Occidental as the skyline of Chicago, while a few blocks away, in narrow cobblestone streets, were row upon row of geisha houses, sushi stands and kimono stores, and assorted little ramshackle shops, gay even on that cloudy day with their flapping doorway curtains and colorful lanterns.

  Next to the Palace on a small hill was the not quite completed Diet Building, constructed mainly of stone from Okinawa and looking quasi-Egyptian. Behind this commanding edifice was a cluster of spacious houses, the official residence of government leaders. The largest was that of the Prime Minister. It was two buildings in one, the business part Western in the early Frank Lloyd Wright style, the living quarters Japanese with paper-thin walls, tatami floors and sliding doors.

  But beneath the peaceful exterior of Tokyo seethed an unrest which would soon spill violently into the snow-covered streets. At one end of the Palace grounds were the barracks of the 1st (Gem) Division. Here authorities were already prepared for trouble after a tip about a military insurrection from a major in the War Ministry: he had learned from a young officer that a group of radicals planned to assassinate several advisers to the Emperor that day. Suspects had been put under surveillance, and important public figures were given emergency bodyguards. The doors of the Prime Minister’s official residence were reinforced with steel, iron bars installed in the windows, and a warning system connected directly to police headquarters. But the kempeitai (military police organization)* and the regular police felt they could easily handle the situation. After all, what real damage could a handful of rebels do, however strongly motivated? And by now they were wondering how reliable the information was that the uprising was at hand. The day was almost over.

  It seems strange that they were so complacent, since the spirit of rebellion was high among elite troops charged with defense of the Palace grounds. Their defiance was so apparent that they were on orders to be shipped out to Manchuria in a few days, and their contempt for authority so open that one unit, ostensibly on maneuvers, had urinated in cadence at metropolitan police headquarters. Fourteen hundred of these unruly officers and men were preparing to revolt. Just before dawn the next morning, attack groups would strike simultaneously at six Tokyo targets: the homes of several government leaders, as well as metropolitan police headquarters.

  While intricate preparations for these attacks were proceeding, pleasure seekers roamed the darkening streets in search of entertainment. Already the Ginza, Tokyo’s Broadway–Fifth Avenue, was teeming. To young Japanese it had long been a romantic symbol of the outside world, a fairyland of neon lights, boutiques, coffee shops, American and European movies, Western-style dance halls and restaurants. A few blocks away, in the Akasaka section, where the kimono was common for both men and women, the old Japan also anticipated a night of pleasure. Geishas looking like something out of antiquity in their theatrical make-up and resplendent costumes were pulled in rickshaws through the winding, willow-lined streets. Here the lights were more muted, and the traditional red lanterns carried by the police gave off a soft, nostalgic glow. It was a charming woodcut come alive.

  These insurrectionists were not motivated by personal ambition. Like half a dozen groups before them—all of which had failed—they were about to try once again to redress the social injustices in Japan through force and assassination. Tradition had legitimized such criminal action, and the Japanese had given it a special name, gekokujo (insubordination), a term first used in the fifteenth century when rebellion was rampant on every level, with provincial lords refusing to obey the shogun,† who in turn ignored the orders of the emperor.

  The crumbling of autocracy in Europe after World War I, followed by the tide of democracy, socialism and Communism, had had dramatic impact on the young people of Japan, and they too set up a cry for change. Political parties emerged and a universal manhood suffrage bill was enacted in 1924. But it all happened too fast. Too many Japanese looked upon politics as a game or a source of easy money and there was a series of exposés—the Matsushima Red-Light District Scandal, the Railway Scandal, the Korean Scandal. Charges of bribery and corruption resulted in mob brawls on the floor of the Diet.

  The population explosion which accompanied Japan’s westernization added to the confusion. Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku (her four main islands, comprising an area scarcely the size of California) already burst with eighty million people. The national economy could not absorb a population increase of almost one million a year; farmers who were close to starvation following the plunge of produce prices began to organize in protest for the first time in Japanese history; hundreds of thousands of city workers were thrown out of work. Out of all this came a wave of left-wing parties and unions.

  These movements were counteracted by nationalist organizations, whose most popular leader was Ikki Kita,‡ a nationalist as well as a fiery revolutionary who managed to combine a program of socialism with imperialism. His tract on reform, “A General Outline of Measures for the Reconstruction of Japan,” was devoured by radicals and worshipers of the Emperor alike. His words appealed to all who yearned for reform. “The Japanese are following the destructive examples of the Western nations,” he wrote. “The possessors of financial, political and military power are striving to maintain their unjust interests under cover of the imperial power.…

  “Seven hundred million brethren in India and China cannot gain their independence without our protection and leadership.

  “The history of East and West is a record of the unification of feudal states after an era of civil wars. The only possible international peace, which will come after the present age of international wars, must be a feudal peace. This will be achieved through the emergence of the strongest country, which will dominate all other nations of the world.”

  He called for the “removal of the barriers between nation and Emperor” —that is, the Diet and the Cabinet. Voting should be restricted to heads of families and no one would be allowed to accumulate more than 1,000,000 yen (about $500,000 at the time). Important industries should be nationalized, a dictatorship established, and women restricted to activities in the home “cultivating the ancient Japanese arts of flower arrangement and the tea ceremony.”

  It was no wonder that milli
ons of impressionable, idealistic young men, already disgusted by corruption in government and business and poverty at home, were enthralled.§ They could battle all these wicked forces as well as Communism, free the Orient of Occidental domination and make Japan the leading country in the world.

  In the West these young men could have found an outlet for action as unionists or political agitators, but in Japan many, particularly those from small landowning and shopkeeping families, found they could serve best as Army and Navy officers. Once in the service, they gained an even more profound understanding of poverty from their men, who would be weeping over letters from home—with their sons away, the families were on the verge of starvation. The young officers blamed their own superiors, politicians, court officials. They joined secret organizations of which some, like Tenkento, called for direct action and assassination, while others, like Sakurakai (the Cherry Society), demanded territorial expansion as well as internal reforms.

  By 1928 this ferment came to a head, but it took two extraordinary men operating within the military framework to put it into action. One was a lieutenant colonel, Kanji Ishihara, and the other a colonel, Seishiro Itagaki. The first was brilliant, inspired, flamboyant, a fountain of ideas; the second was cool, thoughtful, a master organizer. They made a perfect team. What Ishihara envisioned, Itagaki could bring to pass. Both were staff officers in the Kwantung Army, which had originally, in 1905, been sent to Manchuria to guard Japanese interests in a wild territory larger than California, Oregon and Washington combined.

  The two officers felt that Manchuria was the only answer to poverty in Japan. It could be transformed from a wilderness into a civilized, prosperous area, alleviating unemployment at home and providing an outlet for the overpopulated homeland, where more than two thirds of all farms were smaller than two and a quarter acres. Manchuria could also supply Japan with what she so desperately needed to remain an industrial state—a guaranteed source of raw materials and a market for finished goods. But all this could not come about, Ishihara and Itagaki reasoned, until the Japanese gained complete control of Manchuria, which was loosely governed by a Chinese war lord, Marshal Chang Tso-lin. At the time, Japan had only the right to station troops along railroads and to engage in mining, farming and business activities.