I would have to disagree on that. Though he played a minor role, most of the policies were shaped by the Tojo cabinet, which was pretty much, the Army.
For example, the Manshuria incident was mostly coordinated by Officers but not exactly approved by the Emperor, started the Sino-Japanese War.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
No disrespect to you, but I think you’re wrong in swallowing the widely promulgated and widely accepted line that Hirohito was a minor player, a mere captive puppet of the military.
It is a misconception to see the Emperor as a captive of the army. The navy also had a minister in Cabinet, who pushed the IJN view. The IJA and IJN were separate fiefdoms under the Emperor and ran their own affairs, often more in competition than co-operation with each other. Usually these competing views were thrashed out at the Liaison Conference between the IJA and IJN, which was the level below Imperial Conference where the Emperor presided, and presented to the Emperor for decision or discussion, as in this example http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-P-Strategy/Strategy-B.html
Imperial Conference was, on one view, the Emperor as just a rubber stamp for decisions made at Liaison Conferences between the army and navy or, on another view, where he approved such decisions after a lot of behind the scenes work by him and or his advisers… http://books.google.com.au/books?id=BWqEkwH1KRMC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=wetzler+hirohito+imperial+conference&source=bl&ots=VlDn_KSkPH&sig=Fu5SQL5ZFoKMPH1C-1dhMVPZ6E0&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
I think that on all the evidence of Imperial Conferences and other documents and recollections which survived the war the best which can be said in Hirohito’s favour is that he might have been reluctant to start the war, but he was right up the front of the bandwagon and playing furiously after Japan’s stunning early victories. As he was, at the other end of the war, equally enthusiastic in jumping off the bandwagon and surrendering, primarily to ensure the survival of the Imperial line rather than the nation he had allowed to be destroyed around him for the past couple of years, when he knew Japan was beaten.
In fairness to the Emperor he was in a potentially, but never actually, awkward position where he knew that some of his predecessors had been assassinated or held captive by earlier ‘militarists’ over many centuries and that he might have been unable to control the army if the generals used it against him. In reality, the militarists’ re-creation and elevation during the 1920s and 1930s of the Emperor from just the constitutional head under the 1890 Meiji Constitution to the spiritual fount of Japanese life and the imperial being to which all servicemen dedicated their lives made it impossible for the militarists to assassinate, depose or control him, so it is fanciful to argue that he was at real risk of being killed or toppled. I think he had to know that himself.
The Emperor’s successful intervention in the 26 February 1936 attempted armed coup d’etat by ultranationalist army elements demonstrated that he had control over the IJA and IJN, as illustrated by army troops abandoning the positions they had seized in Tokyo after being presented with copies of the Emperor’s order to the IJA and IJN to suppress the rebellion. His success over ultranationalists on that occasion is hardly consistent with him being a captive of the Tojo nationalist clique a few years later, regardless of the extra power which the militarists might have gained in the interim.
Hirohito’s true war conduct was conveniently reconstructed and minimized by the Allies – primarily MacArthur – after the war for purposes related to making the occupation of Japan manageable and, later, America’s anti-communist stance and wars where Japan became a crucial base and bulwark against both Chinese and Russian communist expansion into Asia and the Pacific. It was contrary to American interests to hold the Emperor responsible for Japan’s WWII conduct as that war faded into the past and when any attempt to do so could only alienate large sections of the Japanese populace to America’s contemporary and future disadvantage in a bigger confrontation with the communist powers of much greater importance to America, and more generally to the Western powers which were more or less aligned with America’s anti-communist stance.
Herbert Bix http://www.binghamton.edu/history/faculty/bix.htm has long studied Hirohito and he rejects the ‘Hirohito as puppet’ view.
The Emperor, Modern Japan and the U.S.-Japan Relationship: an Interview with Herbert Bix
[i]The foremost Western authority on the life and times of Emperor Hirohito – known posthumously as the Emperor Showa – talked to The Japan Times about the role of Japan’s former “living god” and his place in history in comparison with other powerful twentieth century leaders including Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt and George W. Bush.
In 2000, historian Herbert P. Bix shattered the image of Emperor Hirohito as a mere figurehead who was detached from Japan’s imperialist warmongering in the first half of the 20th century.
Bix argued in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, which won him the Pulitzer Prize, that the emperor was intimately involved in the decision-making behind his military’s ruthless campaigns. Hence Bix contends, the Emperor bore heavy moral, legal and political responsibility.
Bix explains why Japan will be unable to realize its full democratic potential without re-evaluating Emperor Showa. Bix also explores what lessons today’s world leaders can learn from a study of this enigmatic figure.
At the postwar Tokyo war crimes tribunal, the Allies indicted 28 Japanese war leaders for “crimes against peace,” “violations against the laws and customs of war” and “crimes against humanity,” including the Nanjing atrocities in 1937-38 and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Seven were hanged.
Bix maintains that Emperor Showa was shielded from trial by Allied commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his staff, who feared communists and wanted to harness the Emperor’s domestic popularity to hasten Japan’s recovery, and so suppressed damning evidence of his war involvement.
In this interview, Bix ranges widely from wartime Japan and the U.S. at war to Washington’s contemporary policies in Iraq. [/i]
How did you come to write “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan?”
I wanted to write a history of modern Japan. I was interested in the Emperor and I wanted to situate the Emperor and the imperial institution in the entire modernization process.
I wanted to show the development of the Emperor’s personality, his ways of thinking and his involvement in public life.
Did you set out to determine whether he was a dictator who should be held accountable for Japan’s role in World War II?I knew from the very outset that he wasn’t a dictator, and that dictatorship was not in the Japanese historical experience. The Emperor was a participant in a pluralistic decision-making system. Yet no one had questioned his responsibility for the war in light of the central position he played in political and military affairs.
- Crown Prince Hirohito on July 20, 1923
The Emperor died in January 1989, just when the Cold War order was collapsing and the new era of instability was setting in. That’s when some important material started to become available. I got a copy of Kinoshita Michio’s diary of the wartime imperial entourage published by Bungei Shunju in 1990. I was also sent a copy of the Showa Emperor’s monologue that he dictated for the Occupation authorities early in 1946 that Bungei Shunju published at the end of 1990.
When I read those, I said, Aha! Here is a human being like the rest of us, and . . . with this new material I could return to the study of the institution, having previously written about the emperor system very schematically and abstractly – as most people did.
This new evidence made me want to revise outdated and erroneous views. Japanese people – and the world – had been told only about the Emperor’s innocence in starting the Pacific War and his heroism in ending it. It now became possible to look seriously into the question of Hirohito’s war responsibility.
In other words, I started off in search of the real Hirohito because I had doubts about the official view. And . . . I found that none of the claims about him could stand careful scrutiny.
continued …
How would you contrast Hirohito’s responsibility with that of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini? In other words, did Hirohito bear responsibility for the onset of fascism in the same way as those European dictators?
I argue that he bore moral, legal and political responsibility of the highest degree for the war – and that responsibility extended also to war atrocities.
- Emperor Hirohito at a military parade in May 1937
Hirohito stood at the center of a system of power that disciplined the Japanese people to be loyal subjects of the imperial state.
What distinguished him from a Hitler or a Mussolini, or for that matter, a Churchill or a Roosevelt or any other Western leader, is that he stood at the head of a state and was considered to be a living deity. What other modern state at that time was headed by a living deity?Hirohito received an education in idealized Confucian norms and in Bushido. He was taught above all to be a benevolent monarch and he wanted to live up to those ideals. As a result, he was not only very active behind the scenes, but also sharper than most historians and political observers recognized.
Hirohito was Imperial Japan’s hereditary head of state; he was the supreme commander of Japanese forces. He was also a religious leader and the nation’s chief pedagogue. Because he lived in a world of high politics, naturally he engaged in politics. made choices. His choices had consequences.
Here is a man who bore enormous responsibility for the consequences of his actions in each of his many roles. Yet, he never assumed responsibility for what happened to the Japanese and Asian peoples whose lives were destroyed or harmed by his rule.
Hirohito often gave orders without issuing commands. This isn’t unique to Japan. It is the “voiceless order” technique that high officials in countries around the world routinely employ. It’s acting by not acting – we see this in American history as well.
I gave the examples of the Nanjing Massacre, which I believe Hirohito had to know about. And I talked about his roles in helping to undermine political parties and the rule of Cabinet government, and in delaying surrender. In every period, he plays a role in politics and military decision-making – but he came to military decision-making gradually.For example, regarding the delayed surrender. At the end, in 1945, the army and the navy and the Supreme War Leadership Council and the Cabinet, all had reasons to bring the lost war to an end short of Japan’s further destruction and unconditional capitulation to the Anglo-Americans. But only the Emperor had the sovereign power to resolve the issue, and he was more concerned about preserving an empowered monarchy – with himself on the throne – than he was about saving the lives of his people.
At the end, during June and into July, when the American terror bombing of Japanese civilian targets reached its peak, Hirohito showed no determination to bring the war to an end. This needs to be assessed against the dominant American and Japanese view that credits him with making the heroic decision to end the war.
He never took responsibility for the war that was carried out in his name. Japanese people, the young men of whom 2.6 million would die, went to war believing that they were defending their country, showing their loyalty to him. The war was a tragedy both for Asian people who Japan conquered and for the Japanese people, both military and civilians
In the end, with Japan in ruins, following the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet entry into the war in Manchuria, Japan negotiated surrender terms that preserved Hirohito on the throne.
Through all this, the emperor never acknowledged loyalty to his subjects, still less to other war victims. The only responsibility he acknowledged was to his ancestors.
In the book, you portray a coterie of officials raising Hirohito to be the hands-on, authoritarian leader that his own father, Emperor Taisho, never was. Should Hirohito’s upbringing, in which he appears to have been the product of intense indoctrination, not absolve him to some degree from responsibility for the militarist departure from the “Taisho democracy” movement and for Japan’s wartime atrocities?
I never said that he was groomed to be an authoritarian leader. I wrote that he was socialized to be a benevolent monarch.
“Authoritarianism” was assumed in the Japanese political context. Emperor Meiji was his model, not his father, and he was the product of an intense socialization and indoctrination process. I don’t think this absolves him, to any serious degree, from responsibility for the destruction of Taisho democracy.Why not? Surely, many liberal thinkers today would argue that someone who grows up in an authoritarian environment, and later becomes authoritarian himself, cannot be held entirely to blame, due to the experience of their upbringing.
Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but that didn’t absolve him from political, or moral, or legal responsibility. Particularly in the case of his sanctioning wars of aggression.
I imagine that many Japanese nationalists reading your book would say, “What right have you to tell us we shouldn’t have done this, when we were living in an era of violent, global Western imperialism? This was the only way for the Emperor to defend his nation.”
This was an age of imperialism, but Japan like other nations had options. Japan could have pursued different foreign policy choices in late Meiji [1868-1912], in Taisho [1912-26] and in early Showa [1926-89] – a different foreign policy vis-a-vis Korea, China and the Western countries. But Japan’s leaders in each period chose not to do so.
In Meiji and most of Taisho, the so-called realist decision-makers of Imperial Japan acted prudently. The problem was that at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the '30s they lost their bearings and made one error after another. But there were always options. Japan always had options; it didn’t have to become a rogue state that brought disaster not only to Asian countries but to the Japanese people as well.
continued …
Do you see any similarities between the way Hirohito and his key advisers went about their business and the conduct of today’s world leaders?
Today Japan confronts a world shaped by a new militarism that has arisen in the United States, a new face of empire, a government in Washington that has not hesitated to launch and justify wars of aggression.
The United States after 9/11 launched a war against Afghanistan and then a few years later, ignoring the Security Council, the Bush administration launched an illegal war against Iraq.
You might say that the Americans’ preventive war against Iraq was in many ways far worse, than Japan’s attack on an American military base, in an American colony, in December 1941.
Stop and think about it: Pearl Harbor was an act of aggression directed against a naval base in the Pacific that belonged to the most powerful nation in the world, an act that initiated the Pacific War. By contrast, the Iraq war was launched by the world’s only hyperpower against a defenseless country that has already resulted in more than 100,000 civilian Iraqi deaths. In this respect a better comparison might be with Japan’s Manchurian Incident of 1931 in which the military used a pretext to seize Manchuria and create Manchukuo, leading Japan on the road to war that would take more than ten million Chinese deaths over fifteen years.
Oil, military bases, and revenge were important factors in the decision of the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq. That war had nothing to do with either Bush administration claims linking the war to 9/11 or to Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. In both Manchuria and Iraq, the reasons for going to war were fabricated.
Do you think Hirohito should have been tried and punished, and if so, how?
I never said he should. What I did say was that the Japanese people should have been allowed to freely discuss his role, and he should have been allowed to abdicate. Indeed, he should have been encouraged to abdicate, and the Japanese people should have been encouraged to freely debate the Emperor’s role and the role of the Imperial institution. But Gen. MacArthur and the Truman administration shielded the Emperor. Not only was he protected from prosecution, but he was never even called to testify at the Tokyo Trials, and the documents concerning his war responsibility were placed off limits.
I think the joint efforts of Americans and Japanese to preserve the Imperial institution, each for different reasons in what I call a de-facto partnership, had disastrous consequences whose impact continues to be felt in Japanese politics and in the U.S.-Japan relationship.
Do you believe a segment of the Japanese conservative leadership wants to wage war again?
Well, they want to be able to wage war without restriction. They call it being a “normal” state. Of course this is highly regressive, because Japan remains a leader precisely because it has the non-nuclear principles and it’s not a major exporter of arms to other countries.
But many conservatives are dissatisfied with Japan’s long subordination to the United States. Japan has a sort of satellite, or client, relationship with Washington. A person like the governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, attracts that wing of the party that is quite dissatisfied, and he transfers his frustration to China. I think this only adds to complications in East Asia.
You see the conservatives using every opportunity to exploit fear – fear of North Korea, fear that Japan might be invaded. Japan has a pretty strong military that is perfectly capable of defending itself. It’s inconceivable that any foreign country would invade Japan.
But we’re seeing politics here. We’re seeing an effort on the part of the conservatives, the LDP, to revise the Constitution, particularly to eliminate Article 9 that restricts Japanese capacity to fight overseas wars.
What significance do you see in Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s long-held insistence on visiting Yasukuni Shrine?
That question really goes back to how we define the era in which we’re living, because, not only is the Asia-Pacific War “history,” but the Occupation is history, and the postwar period is history. The Cold War is over. The political situation is one of searching for a new threat so as to impose discipline and reorder things.
In this new environment, the Japanese people remain divided on the meaning of the war and postwar experiences. Memories of the Asia-Pacific War have evolved: a younger generation with no experience of war has come on the scene, and a minority of influential elites – overrepresented, of course, in the LDP – have asserted publicly an affirmative view of the war.
I think the actions of the prime minister and likeminded conservatives in his Cabinet in visiting Yasukuni Shrine and seeking to eliminate Article 9 of the Constitution have to be set against this lack of national consensus as well as against the new international configuration of powers offers to change Japan.
It’s demonstrably untrue that the Japanese people have never changed their views of the last, lost war. But Koizumi’s actions allow many Chinese and Korean people, and other peoples in Asia, to have that false view.
Germany seems to have fared better than Japan in grappling with its wartime past. What must Japan do to put World War II behind it once and for all, and normalize relations with Asian neighbors?
German elites found it in their national interest to gain the trust of their European neighbors, and to quickly reintegrate into western Europe. Over the last quarter century, they’ve done rather well in grappling with their legacy of their war criminality and overcoming the past.
But the circumstances for Japan were entirely different.
During the early years of the Occupation, Japanese intellectuals went much further than their German counterparts in grappling with issues of war responsibility. This has not been sufficiently appreciated.
At the same time, however, there is no unified “Japan” that hews to erroneous views of the past. Divisions remain deep. Every generation of Japanese has revisited World War II, and will continue to do so.
This is a revised and abbreviated version of an interview by Eric Prideaux that appeared in The Japan Times: August 9, 2005. Eric Prideaux is a staff writer for The Japan Times. This article appeared in Japan Focus on August 26, 2005.
http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/1871
The Emperor’s successful intervention in the 26 February 1936 attempted armed coup d’etat by ultranationalist army elements demonstrated that he had control over the IJA and IJN, as illustrated by army troops abandoning the positions they had seized in Tokyo after being presented with copies of the Emperor’s order to the IJA and IJN to suppress the rebellion. His success over ultranationalists on that occasion is hardly consistent with him being a captive of the Tojo nationalist clique a few years later, regardless of the extra power which the militarists might have gained in the interim.
Actually that one was only in the name of the Emperor… the 2/26 incident was not supported or co-ordinated by the Emperor.
Yes, but my point was that although elements of the army rebelled the Emperor’s authority was still sufficient to persuade them to abandon their rebellion, which demonstrates that he was not a mere figurehead and had real power over the army if he chose to exercise it.
Here is an example, from a book I am currently reading, of the Emperor’s active involvement in pursuing Japan’s war aims at the decisive moment following Japan’s defeat at the Battle of Midway.
On 8 June in Tokyo, the chief of the Navy General Staff, Admiral Nagano, appeared before Emperor Hirohito to explain events at Midway. Hirohito’s chief aide, the Marquis Koichi Kido, lord keeper of the privy seal, was present: ‘I had supposed that the news of the terrible damage would have caused him untold anxieties, but his countenance did not show the least bit of change. He said that the setback was severe and regrettable, yet nothwithstanding that, he told Nagano to make certain that the morale of the navy did not deteriorate and the the future policy of the navy did not become inactive and passive.’.
Bob Wurth, 1942:Australia’s Greatest Peril, Macmillan, Sydney, 2008 (1st ed.), pp. 258-9
Those were the actions and comments of a man directing events, not a prisoner of them.
While vigorous discussion is welcome, and while it is accepted that there are still strong feelings about things which happened in the war, pointless and inflammatory comments such as your quoted one are not acceptable. Please refrain from such comments in future.
I think I’ve referred to this paper elsewhere on the forum some time ago, but it’s worth reproducing in this thread to balance the notion that only Japanese lacked humanity towards their enemy and that only they committed war crimes. The paper is at http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/ajrp2.nsf/research-print/68D938D4A9B54EE7CA256BE40006F329?OpenDocument
[b]Australia–Japan Research Project at the Australian War Memorial
Seminar paper
“Yet they’re human just as we are”; Australian attitudes towards the Japanese in the South-West Pacific, 1942-1945, by Dr Mark Johnston[/b]
[Note: More detailed explanations and evidence for the contentions in this talk can be found in my books, Fighting the enemy (CUP 2000) and At the front line (CUP 1996).]
In December 1942, an Australian private – a veteran of recent fighting at Sanananda and of the Libyan and Greek campaigns – wrote some thoughts about the enemies he had faced. “My regard for Tony [the Italian] was always impersonal and for Fritz … tinged with admiration, but none of us know anything but vindictive hatred for the Jap.”[1]
Australian soldiers felt an animosity towards the Japanese that they generally didn’t have towards their European enemies.In action the hostility expressed itself in Australians’ greater enthusiasm for killing Japanese. “If an Italian or German were running away, one might let him go,” wrote Jo Gullett, “but never a Japanese.”[2] Whereas in the Middle East, Australian commanders had struggled to awaken fully a “killing instinct” in their men, the Japanese brought out that instinct.
Thus the following extract from a diarist’s account of action against Japanese in 1943, is scarcely imaginable against the Germans or Italians:Japs are running out of the jungle everywhere and we start some very good shooting. Got on to one with the Bren gun trying to crawl away in the grass…Saw one with his pack on his back walking up the track and soon everyone was stuck into him. He soon hit terra firma. Later in the day we saw his body and pushed it over the cliff into the sea.[3]
An official wartime publication described how, at Wau, fifty Japanese were “hunted down and exterminated.”[4] The concepts of “hunting” and “exterminating” capture the mood of the time, which was not one of trying to bring an essentially like-minded foe to accept defeat by the rules of war, but one of seeking to annihilate an alien enemy.
The killing of unarmed, sleeping, sick or wounded Japanese was common. Although official pressure was put on troops to take prisoners, the Australian front-line soldiers – like their American counterparts – had little desire to do so.Japanese dead were not considered in the same light as German or Italian dead. Frank Legg, who had been a member of the 2/48th Battalion at Alamein and become a war correspondent in the Pacific, noted while first reporting 9th Division fighting against the Japanese that, whereas the common practice had been to bury each other’s dead in North Africa, here there was a “strange callousness”.[5] For example, a Japanese who lay dead on a track on the Huon Peninsula had a bullet hole between his eyes and a note pinned to him which read: “Don’t bury this bastard, it’s the best shot you’ll ever see.”[6]
I want now to examine briefly the sources of this contempt and hatred. Most obvious was that the Japanese were a far more pressing threat to Australia itself than were the European enemies.
In January 1942, a signaller in the Middle East wrote to his fiancée of his concern about the “yellow horde”. He wrote, “my thoughts are full of smashing them, before they reach what they desire.”[7]
Tied to this awareness of the threat the war now posed to their homeland was a hatred for those who menaced it. Early in 1943, General Blamey tried to stir up hatred of the Japanese in veterans of the recent campaign by emphasising that the Australians were fighting to prevent both the deaths of their families and the end of civilisation.[8] The Japanese forces which advanced along the Kokoda Trail were described by the historian and second in command of the 2/14th Battalion as “cocksure hordes” seeking “to glut their lust and savagery in the blood of a conquered white nation”.[9]
Australians had perceived a Japanese threat to their white outpost since at least the beginning of the century. As talk of threats to “civilization” and to a “white nation” suggest, Australian soldiers’ hatred of their Japanese foe was racist. If fear of invasion was one source of hatred, racial animosity was a second.
The Australians who fought in the Second World War had grown up in an era when assertions of racial superiority were far more acceptable than today. In 1941, Prime Minister Curtin had justified Australia’s entry into the war against Japan in terms of the nation’s commitment to maintaining the “principle of a White Australia”[10].
Australians considered the Japanese racially inferior. The commander of the 7th Brigade at Milne Bay reported after the battle that destroying the enemy was “a most effective way of demonstrating the superiority of the white race.”[11]
White superiority had been challenged by the outcome of other campaigns earlier in the year. The racism of Australians who had scoffed at the Japanese in 1941 had to be refined in the light of defeats in Malaya, Singapore, Java, Timor, Ambon, and New Britain. These Japanese successes added a hysterical edge to the racial hatred against them. An image of the Japanese as a “superman” or “super soldier” grew up. This conception was fairly persistent, but not the majority view after 1942. The feeble physical condition of many Japanese encountered in campaigns after 1942 heightened racial contempt for them.
continued
A far more common image than that of superman was that of a creature less than a man. “Jo” Gullett concludes from his experience in the 2/6th Battalion: “[The Japanese] were like clever animals with certain human characteristics, but by no means the full range, and that is how we thought of them – as animals.”[12] Australian soldiers, like Americans, often compared Japanese to animals, especially rats or vermin. Senior officers encouraged this attitude. General Blamey told troops at Port Moresby in 1942 that the Japanese was “a subhuman beast”; at the beginning of the following year he informed soldiers that the Japanese was “a curious race – a cross between the human being and the ape.”[13]
This idea helped Australians to account for Japanese success in the early campaigns, for it explained Japanese adaptability to primitive conditions. It also excused murderous treatment of them. A normally very humane veteran of the desert, Private John Butler, wrote of his first brush with the Japanese: “Out foraging this morning I came across the head of a good Jap – for he was dead – like a damned baboon he was; this is not murder killing such repulsive looking animals.”[14]
Some of the language used by Australians is disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi race propaganda. In most respects, Nazism was repugnant to Butler and his comrades. However, the same racist disdain appears in American writings of the time, and there is no doubt that on this issue many otherwise compassionate western soldiers maintained attitudes towards the Japanese which today seem insupportable. As I’ve said, this was a racist age: the Japanese themselves harboured racist attitudes towards whites.
Moreover, we mustn’t exaggerate the importance of racism in wartime Australian hatred for the Japanese. When in Australia the government launched an intense hate campaign in March–April 1942, the Sydney Morning Herald argued that Australians needed no stimulus to fight the Japanese aggressor, and certainly not “a torrent of cheap abuse and futile efforts in emulation of … Goebbels”. The propaganda campaign was opposed by 54 per cent of Australians surveyed in a Gallup Poll on the issue.[15]
Moreover, the peculiar circumstances in which Australian front-line soldiers served gave them reasons to temper their racism, or at least to suppress it occasionally. Realism was important. While Australian training staff did not want their soldiers to feel inferior to the Japanese – a real danger in the early years – they did want them to be level-headed about his strengths. Propagandist notions are dangerous when formulating tactics. On the battlefield, being realistic about the enemy’s capacities was a matter of life and death.
The life-and-death realities that Australian soldiers faced in their confrontation with the Japanese may have softened racism towards them in action. However, these realities also largely determined the character and intensity of their hatred for the Japanese. Among soldiers, the racist language of the pre-war era was a convenient means of expressing feelings that owed their existence to the unique circumstances of the front line. For it seems to me that the intensity of Australian soldiers’ hatred of the Japanese derived from the reality of the fighting more than the prejudices of civilian life.
I believe that observation and experience heightened the hatred that Australian front-line soldiers felt for the Japanese. Racist prejudgements, and even the threat to Australia, did not goad Australian soldiers in the same way as personal experiences or personal expectations based on reports from other front-line soldiers. Many Australians who campaigned against the Japanese considered their opponent evil, detestable, underhanded and frightening in his methods.
At the jungle training school at Canungra, recruits were told that the Japanese was “a cunning little rat”, who was “full of little ruses and tricks.”[16] Australians were unwilling to take Japanese prisoners largely because of distrust born of bad experiences, with Japanese offering surrender and then acting as human bombs by detonating concealed explosive. The thousands of Australian soldiers who passed through Canungra were advised to shoot any Japanese surrendering with their hands closed. Frank Rolleston recalls that an apparently defenceless Japanese carrying a white cloth at Milne Bay was shot down on the grounds that “we were not prepared to take the slightest risk with an enemy that had proved to be the limit in deception and treachery.”[17] The fact that Australian wounded, and the stretcher bearers who carried them, could expect no immunity from enemy fire was a major source of criticism, as was Japanese bombing of medical facilities. Thus a medical officer wrote about a tent “ward” attacked by enemy aircraft in Papua: “When the smoke cleared the twelve [patients] were still in the tents, but each one was dead – killed by the deliberate sub-human fury of Tojo’s men.”[18]
Japanese callousness and brutality towards helpless men caused fierce animosity in Australians. While unchivalrous and callous behaviour was encountered against the Germans, the Japanese lifted brutality to a higher level. Brutal acts were committed more often by Japanese than by any other enemy. I’m sure you are all aware of Japanese massacres of Australian prisoners in Malaya, Singapore, Timor, New Britain, Ambon.
It’s hard to know how much Australians in New Guinea knew of the atrocities against their compatriots in the early 1942 campaigns, but my impression is that it wasn’t much and that such information did not inform their hatred as much as it might have. Stories about New Britain became widely distributed, and well-informed Australians knew of Japanese excesses against the Chinese. However, the Australian wartime government, like the British and American, was unwilling to publicise material about atrocities for fear of worsening the conditions of prisoners.
Australians in New Guinea had the pressing relevance of the issue of brutality brought home to them by the many Japanese atrocities at Milne Bay. Unlike the men engaged in the early 1942 campaigns, most Australians who fought there were able to pass on their stories of Japanese atrocities. I’ll give one example of the impact of these atrocities.At the sight of men who had been bayoneted to a slow death at Milne Bay, a Tobruk veteran who had been sceptical of stories of Japanese atrocities said his “hatred rose to boiling point and I cursed those cruel, yellow cowardly curs of hell”.[19]
The atrocities continued throughout the war. In March 1945, for example, a signalman on Bougainville reported that Australian provosts caught in a jeep by Japanese had been tied to their vehicle, then set alight. During the Aitape-Wewak campaign, the corpse of a member of the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion was found “badly mutilated, disembowelled, the left leg was missing from the hip, as well as portions of the right leg, and the hips had all flesh removed.”[20] This was an atrocity of a type that horrified Australians and occurred also in the Papuan campaign: namely cannibalism.
Of course such sights created intense hostility to the perpetrators. For example, a lieutenant of the 2/1st Battalion recalls that during their advance on the Kokoda Trail, the sight of a dead young Australian soldier with one of his thighs stripped of flesh “incensed all our party and feeling against the enemy was explosive”.[21] An officer whose battalion had suffered such casualties in the Aitape-Wewak area in 1945 argued:
The frequent evidence of Japanese atrocities had a remarkable effect on the troops. It developed a feeling of disgust that caused men to enter battle with a greater determination to eliminate the enemy.[22]
An astute regimental historian says that not propaganda stories, but the physical evidence of Japanese atrocities was crucial in making Australians hate the Japanese in a way they had not hated Italians and Germans. This is a crucial point in understanding Australian attitudes towards the Japanese.
The “feeling of disgust” about atrocities also explains much of the unusually murderous behaviour of Australians. As early as the Milne Bay battle, Brigadier Field wrote in his diary, “[t]he yellow devils show no mercy and have since had none from us.”[23]
The lack of prisoners taken by Australians owed much to resentment of atrocities. Cam Bennett, of the 2/5th Battalion, argues that Japanese attitudes to their captives “divorced them from any consideration whatever” whenever his Australian comrades had a chance to kill them.
The circumstances of jungle warfare also militated against the taking of Japanese prisoners. The fact that in the Kokoda campaign both sides took virtually no prisoners partly reflects the problems of getting POWs back over extraordinarily difficult terrain. Because enemies were hidden and ambush was a constant possibility in the jungle, there were few opportunities for the niceties of asking for surrender: one had to shoot first and ask questions later. This logic of jungle warfare was conducive to hatred of the enemy, who like oneself, could not afford to treat one chivalrously as a potential prisoner.
The mud, the decomposing vegetation, the pouring rain, the humidity and the eerie sounds of the jungle also contributed to the hatred of the enemy with whom this place was identified. It was a place where soldiers fought in small groups, in isolation. The frightening enemy, with his apparent enthusiasm for death, and the menacing environment in which he was encountered made for a personal hatred for the Japanese that was peculiar to the soldiers who faced him.
continued
I want to turn now to a discussion of how Australian soldiers evaluated Japanese as fighters. Australians were often impressed by certain martial abilities of Japanese soldiers. They respected their field craft, their ability to ambush, and their resilience and tenacity. As an Australian at Sanananda put it, “[h]e is a tough nut to crack, this so often despised little yellow chap.”[24]
Australians frequently wrote with grudging admiration of the defensive positions created by their enemy. The 22nd Battalion history for example says of ground near Finschhafen:
It was obvious that this was Jap country. Along both sides of the track were many weapon pits cleverly sited and expertly dug. They were exactly circular, as if marked out by compass with the sides plumb vertical. And they were finished to perfection with clever camouflage to an extent that they were quite unnoticeable until one had come abreast of them.[25]
Notes used in training Australians for jungle warfare conceded the “remarkable” ability of Japanese to dig or burrow into the side of hills.
I’ve mentioned the idea of the Japanese super soldier, which was quite prevalent in the months after Japan’s entry into the war. Defeat of the Japanese at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Trail damaged this image, but the super soldier conception was a resilient one. Even in 1945, the Canungra Training Syllabus laid down that on Day 2, recruits should be told that the concept of the Japanese “super soldier” was a myth.[26]
Like all armies, the Japanese had units of varying strength, experience and ability, but the differences in quality between its soldiers were perhaps more striking than those in any other army faced by the Australians. Particularly apparent was the difference in quality between the Japanese faced by Australians in 1942, on the one hand, and those faced afterwards.
Many Australians who served in the campaigns from 1943 on wrote disparagingly of the Japanese. For example, Private Keys of the 2/15th Battalion wrote proudly to his sister in October 1943:
When we came up here we were told how bad the conditions were – what a wonderful fighter the Jap is. Well, Min, the conditions here are 100 per cent better than in the desert. … [The Japanese] has had everything in his favour, such as high ground, etc. … every time we’ve met him we have belted him … he has run.[27]
By the last year of the war, Japanese forces were generally being defeated with greater ease than in earlier campaigns. In circumstances where casualty rates were running at more than ten-to-one against the Japanese, a sense of contempt had much to feed on.
In March 1945, a lieutenant of the 2/3rd Battalion pointed out that the soldiers they were facing this time were not in the same class as the men they had faced in the Owen Stanleys: and for good reason, as this enemy was out of communication with Tokyo and had little or no food.[28]
Aspects of the Japanese performance that were criticised in New Guinea included: their poor marksmanship; poor weapons; their tendency to be incautious, especially by chattering or laughing loudly near the front; their naivety in attack; their tactical inflexibility; and their tendency towards needless self-sacrifice.
For even the do-or-die courage of Japanese soldiers did not necessarily raise the military prowess of Japanese in Australian eyes. The Japanese willingness to die appeared bizarre to many Australians. Let me give you one example. A Japanese prisoner near Aitape “wept with frustration and humiliation” when his Australian captors would not shoot him, even though he bared his chest to them hopefully. Instead the Australians said, “[w]ake up to yourself you stupid bastard, you don’t know when you’re well off!”[29] To the Australians, only a “stupid bastard” would want death, and to be alive was to be “well off”. The Japanese attitude was incomprehensible. Their bravery in action often seemed like fanaticism or madness rather than traditional military heroism.
Naturally, many veterans of the Middle East compared the Japanese with their European enemies. “As a fighter the Jap might be a little better than the Italian,” a 9th Division infantryman conceded in October 1943, “but he can’t compare with the Jerry.”[30] On the other hand, an Australian who had been with the 6th Division in Greece said after fighting at Kokoda and Sanananda that, “I think Nip a better fighter than Fritz”, and this may have been a common attitude among 6th and 7th Division veterans of the Middle East who fought the Japanese in 1942.[31] At Canungra, recruits were told that “the Jap is NOT like the German whom we have become accustomed to fighting. He is NOT as good a soldier.”[32]
Most 9th Division veterans, who generally faced stiffer opposition from the Germans at Tobruk and Alamein than from the Japanese in their later campaigns, would have agreed with this judgement. Correspondent Allan Dawes reported that after the amphibious landings at Finschhafen, he heard many Western Desert veterans say:
If they’d been Germans, they’d never have let us on that beach – never. … No Jap would ever have got this place, if we had been where they were, and they had been the invaders.[33]
That conclusion is significant, for of course, at the top of the Australians’ hierarchy of armies was their own.
Contemptuous poses were readily adopted from 1943–1945. Australian victory was certain, and the odds were greatly against the Japanese, who were suffering from life-threatening shortages of food and other supplies. A superior attitude had been more difficult to maintain through most of 1942, with all its military disasters. Yet in this period, too, many Australians had clung to a belief that, man for man, they were better soldiers than the enemy. Even as they lay down their arms in Singapore, they felt that they were yielding to “a force which they counted as less than their equals”.[34]
When Australians discussed their defeats at Japanese hands in 1942, they complained about numerical inferiority and lack of air support. Their defeats were explained by factors external to their soldiering ability. Paradoxically, Australian victories later in the war tended to be explained by their own soldiering abilities, while external factors such as their numerical preponderance, aerial superiority and the lack of supplies available to the Japanese tended to be forgotten.
Even when Australians felt contempt for the Japanese, in battle he was treated with great caution. There was a terrible grimness about the campaigns against him in New Guinea. The fear of falling, dead or alive into Japanese hands ensured this.
I want to finish by discussing the issue raised by the quotation I used in the title of this talk. In March 1945 an artilleryman in action on New Britain wrote in a letter home:
[W]hen you stop to think war is a pretty rotten business, here we are throwing shells at the Japs … hoping they blow them to bits and although we call them little yellow [expletive] yet they’re human just as we are.[35]
It was unusual for Australians to write in such a detached manner about the Japanese. However, detachment and even sympathy were occasionally evident. Dower’s suggestion that Allied soldiers had images of Japanese as superhuman, subhuman and inhuman, but not as humans like themselves is not entirely accurate. Sometimes Australians showed empathy with the enemy: saying they knew what it was like to have dysentery as the Japanese did; imagining his discomfort under Australian gunfire; picturing his reaction as an amphibious invading force came towards him; or saying in the Aitape-Wewak region that living there for three years as the Japanese had done would be “pure hell”.
While Japanese who survived to become prisoners never aroused Australian sympathy like those captured in the Middle East, sometimes they did touch emotions other than anger or contempt: the appearance of starved men could draw forth comments like “poor devils”, and even gestures such as the provision of food, water or covering.
Moreover, the murderous treatment meted out to Japanese prisoners was not morally acceptable to all. Here’s an example: Captain J.J. May was responsible for the loading of wounded men on air transports from the Wau airfield during the heavy fighting there in January 1943. He was approached one day to make room for six Japanese prisoners who would soon arrive, bound together, and who were to be taken to Port Moresby for questioning. The Japanese did not come at the expected time, but eventually:
A soldier appeared with his rifle slung over his shoulder and looking at the ground told me that they would not be coming. I blew off what the bloody hell do you mean you ask us to make room for you and now you don’t want it. One could sense something was wrong and it very shamefacedly came out, they had been killed, a soldier had opened up on them with a Tommy gun and shot the lot. The boys and I were pretty aghast at this and we said they had been tied up; the poor messenger was also rather stricken and tried to explain how it happened. A soldier that opened up had his mate killed alongside him during the night. It somehow cast a dark shadow over us including the poor B who had to tell us.[36]
continued
So, some conceived of Japanese as fellow men, and believed that killing them was at times immoral.
Those who did the killing also had their emotions tested. An Australian who had just killed a walking Japanese skeleton at Sanananda described him as a “rather poor specimen of humanity”.[37] Even such grudging admissions did acknowledge the humanity of this enemy, and soldiers who killed Japanese tended to think more than usual about this point. Thus an Australian who had ambushed and killed two Japanese soldiers elsewhere at Sanananda reflected that “it was pure murder”.[38] Captain May reported a conversation with a wounded sergeant who had been on patrol near Wau when confronted by a Japanese officer wielding a sword. In a tone that made clear his regret, the sergeant told May, “I think he must have been an M.O. or something and I had to shoot the poor bastard”.[39]
Occasionally, when Australians examined corpses, they saw evidence of the civilian side of their enemy. Fearnside writes of an incident in New Guinea in 1945 where his platoon ambushed and killed a lone, emaciated Japanese soldier. He says that although they were immune to compunction about such homicidal acts, searching the body brought a haunting emotional impact. They found two objects: one was a rudimentary map of Australia. The other was a faded photograph of a beautiful Japanese girl: such images brought home the fact that the enemy too had a civilian, peaceful background.[40]
However, such fellow feeling could vanish under the pressure of events. Thus one day in January 1945, a 6th Division infantryman wrote in his diary about how his unit had fed prisoners and protected them from angry natives. The day after, and immediately after an ambush of his unit, he wrote, “[w]hat little pity one had for the animal cravens we had here as prisoners yesterday has now vanished”.[41] In jungle warfare, there was not much scope for compassion.
In preparing this talk, one particular story has often come back to me. It concerns an Australian NCO, Steve Sullivan, who took some men to look around the battlefield of Slater’s Knoll, Bougainville, during the fighting there in March 1945. They found a wounded Japanese and several of the men suggested to Sullivan that they kill him. Sullivan objected. “I knew all about the Japs and their treatment of prisoners,” he recalls, “but to my mind that is not good enough reason to kill a man in cold blood. We are not Japs.”[42] He couldn’t do what he identified as a Japanese thing to do: that is, kill a defenceless human being. Yet it was also an Australian thing to do against Japanese in this war. The fact that we were not Japs prevented Sullivan from killing the man; for other Australians, this difference was precisely what justified killing them: they’re not like us in their behaviour and their appearance, so we can kill them. Ironically, in their brutal treatment of each other, Australians and Japanese had something in common.
As this anecdote suggests, it’s difficult to generalise about Australian soldiers’ attitudes. However, one cannot help but make grim conclusions as to their feelings about their Japanese counterpart. Their evaluations of his martial prowess varied, but they usually feared him and almost invariably hated him. They were passionate in their willingness to kill him.
Notes
This paper was delivered an international symposium for the Remembering the war in New Guinea project held on 19-21 October 2000 at the Australian National University, Canberra.
- Pte R. Robertson, 2/2 Bn, Letter 15/12/42.
- Gullett, Not as a Duty Only, p. 127.
- Cpl J. Craig, 2/13 Bn, Diary 28/12/43.
- Battle of Wau, p. 50.
- Legg, War Correspondent, p. 54.
- Wells, “B” Company Second Seventeenth Infantry, p. 159.
- Sig T. Neeman, 17 Bde Sigs, Letter 16/1/42.
- G. Johnston, Toughest Fighting in the World, p. 228.
- Russell, Second Fourteenth Battalion, p. 123.
- “Japanese Threat”, Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, p. 323.
- In report: “Operations Milne Bay 24 Aug-8 Sep 42, Lessons from Operations”, p. 11.
- Not as a Duty Only, p. 127.
- Johnston, Toughest Fighting in the World, p. 207. Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 53, 71.
- Diary 20/9/43.
- Charlton, War Against Japan 1941-1942, p. 34. McKernan, All In, p. 141. “Japanese Threat”, Oxford Companion, p. 324.
- AWM 3DRL 6599, “Aus. Trg. Centre Jungle Warfare Canungra Training Syllabus Precis & Instructions”, Serial No. 29.
- Not a Conquering Hero, p. 83.
- Robinson, Record of Service, p. 99.
- O’Brien, “A Rat of Tobruk”, p. 21.
- Australian Archives (Vic): MP742/1, File No. 336/1/285.
- Givney, First at War, p. 288.
- Long, Final Campaigns, p. 342.
- Brig J. Field, 7 Bde, Diary 31/12/43.
- Tpr B. Love, 2/7 Cav Regt, Diary 12/1/43.
- Macfarlan, Etched in Green, p. 123.
- AWM: Canungra Training Instructions, Serial No. 62.
- 4/10/43.
- Lt B.H. MacDougal, 2/3 Bn, Letter 20/3/45.
- Bentley, The Second Eighth, p. 186.
- Pte Keys, Letter 4/10/43.
- Robertson, Letter 15/12/42.
- AWM: Canungra Training Instructions, Serial No. 19. The lecture continued: “but is, as has often been described, ‘a cunning little rat’.”
- Dawes, “Soldier Superb”, p. 44. My emphasis.
- Walker, Middle East and Far East, p. 520.
- Gnr.G. Chapman, 2/14 Fd Regt, Letter 10/3/45.
- Diary 30/1/43.
- Love, Diary 14/1/43.
- Quoted in ibid, 31/12/42.
- Diary 4/2/43. M.O.- Medical Officer.
- Half to Remember, p. 195.
- Pte Wallin, 2/5 Bn, Diary 20/1/45.
- Shaw, Brother Digger, p.136
It is good to have these views.
Most of us in the West have little knowledge of the experiences of non-Westerners under Japan as our focus is usually upon Japanese treatment of our prisoners of war rather than what Japan did in its occupied territories. So that, for example, there is much written about the Allied prisoners on the Burma Railway whose casualties were, by number and rate, probably much less than that of Asian labourers but, significantly, nobody has exact figures for the Asian labourers.
There is a great deal of Western popular writing on German occupation of European territories but virtually nothing on Japanese occupation of Asian and Pacific territories. I think this reflects an unconscious - or more probably conscious - racism that fails to accord to Asian and Pacific peoples the standing that Westerners accord to themselves.
Hi guys,
Going off on a very-related tangent; hope nobody minds: Anybody here read enough Japanese to test if a site that came up in the Photo Section ( http://www.ww2incolor.com/japan/fde.html ) is revisionist or objective?
If you read my recent post at the above link, you’ll understand what my thoughts on the subject are. But I was also working with a Google translation, which we all know is oh-sooo-reliable. :rolleyes: If you want to go directly to the site in question, the link is:
http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~kokumin-shinbun/H11/1101/110101nankin.html
The difference was probably that European nations weren’t colonies, where the Asian nations Japan occupied were colonies of European nations.
Japan disrupted European rule in Asian colonies and also showed that Asians could stand against and militarily defeat Europeans. After that it was hard and, ultimately, impossible for European nations to reassert control of their former colonies in the face of strong nationalist movements as in, for example, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam.
The biggest, and probably only, gift Japan gave to the world in WWII was creating the circumstances which eventually rid Asia of European colonialism, as a by-product of trying to make European colonies Japanese colonies, which in turn flowed on to other European colonies outside Asia.
While Japanese occupation was often initially brutal in the extreme and rarely benevolent as it continued, when matters settled down under Japanese administration there were significant attempts made by Japan to give effect, in form if not in substance, to promises of independence (within the Japanese conception of that under its Japan-centred Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and upon terms of independence dictated by Japan for Japan’s sole benefit), such as granting “independence” to the Philippines.
Really!!..My god!..Them dam Ruskkies!..hang em all I tell Ya. I never knew that. Thanks!
What is the source for that?
To what extent were these POWs kept for labour as war reparations to the USSR?
Well, if as with the German POWs, they were held after the war as part of reparations to the USSR, then it has everything to do with war reparations as otherwise they would probably have been repatriated much earlier and the death toll would have been much lower.
The figures are also of dubious value without knowing the death rates initially from wounds and disease and later from the circumstances of their treatment by the Soviets.
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with that comment, but on a scale of brutality, inhumanity and general bastardry the Soviets don’t come near the Japanese for the way each of them treated POWs. That is demonstrated by the fact that, even if your 10% death figure for Japanese POWs in Soviet hands is correct, it’s still only about a third of the death rate of Allied POWs in Japanese hands.