“4. Laying Blame for Japan’s War Responsibility” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 4 Laying Blame for Japan’s War Responsibility
Early postwar East Asia was chaotic, and within weeks of Japan’s surrender most areas had fallen into social and economic turmoil. The United States orchestrated the occupation of Japan with spasmodic assistance from the other Allies. The KMT claimed it would send troops but was unable to because of its own fight for survival on the Chinese mainland. The rest of the former empire was confused and anxious. The UK and Australia sent some troops to specific regions in Japan but were limited by the United States. The USSR, eager to gain a foothold, was kept completely at arm’s length except for elite positions on committees. Fearful of Japan’s potential to remilitarize, the US military took over Okinawa and did not return it to Japan until decades later.
Americans had been drafting plans for years before Japan’s surrender concerning how to deal with the envisioned defeat. The term “postimperial” was not employed, because no decision had officially been forthcoming regarding the imperial institution itself. Rumors abounded. Many Japanese were stupefied when they heard Emperor Hirohito’s radio appeal that they should lay down their arms. Few fully understood the broadcast, and most had to wait for the explanation that followed since it was crafted in archaic speech. In certain parts of the empire where defeat was not predicted, like Beijing, many Japanese swore they heard that the Japanese government was going to dispatch ships to pick them up and help them repatriate. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, the Japanese MOFA drafted initial plans not to protect Japanese colonials stranded abroad as “helpless victims” but to leave the imperial settlers alone. The war had brought the Japanese empire to its financial, economic, and political knees. The government initially judged it too much of a logistical and psychological burden on the home islands to accept the millions who would return and require assistance.
We should not forget that on the morning of August 9, 1945, Japanese newspapers spoke of the American “new bomb,” which the media labeled as “inhumane.” This prepped the scene for the victimization of Japan. Some articles discussed the bomb dropped on the 6th on Hiroshima even though news companies and the government did not acknowledge either the nature of the new weapon or its exact damage. The Asahi Newspaper criticized that the “enemy espouses ‘justice and humanity’ but it bombs innocent civilians.”1
Other Japanese, depending on their locale, took the defeat more to heart. Although most high-ranking imperial military officers did not commit suicide, an interesting omission since they had long been instructed that surrender was not an option, several tried. General Tōjō Hideki, wartime prime minister and promoter of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, orchestrated one of the less successful attempts. On the day US military police arrested him as a Class A war criminal suspect in September 1945, he tried to shoot himself in the heart but failed. The population initially mocked him for his carelessness to carry out this final mission. Japanese imperial army general Anami Korechika had been resolute until the end that Japan should not surrender as he believed his men were fighting a holy war to defend the land of the gods. He disputed Emperor Hirohito’s recommendation to accept the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration even though Anami still accepted the decision with the rest of the cabinet. On the morning of August 15, Anami took his own life by ritually stabbing himself in the gut. In a more traditional seppuku ceremony, the offender would plunge the dagger in or merely draw blood and then be decapitated by his second, who would be standing behind with a long sword at the ready. In Anami’s case, he suffered for several hours before he finally succumbed.2 Some high-ranking Japanese officers, such as Adachi Hatazō in Rabaul (then New Guinea), took responsibility for the failings of those they had commanded and the crimes their soldiers had committed. Adachi waited to commit suicide until his trial under Australian management was over and he had received his sentence of life in prison. Some saw this decision as a form of atonement. Others perceived his choice as the means to avoid responsibility.3
The end of war involved not just military men in Tokyo but children of the crumbling empire as well. Norimura Kaneko grew up as a colonial Japanese girl in a family residing in what was then the small town of Andong, China (now the city of Dandong), on the border with North Korea along the Yalu River. She had been born in China and never set foot in Japan until 1958, when she finally repatriated. When the war ended, she was young and not too cognizant of what was happening. Her mother was quite aware, however, and had heard rumors that the Americans would soon be landing nearby. In preparation for such doom, Kaneko’s mother showed her children a kitchen knife and said, “I will kill you with this, then hopefully kill one or two of the enemy, and I plan on using it on myself in the end.”4 As the bell tolled for the end of Japan’s might in Asia, former colonists were now fearful of any number of enemies: the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army, the Chinese Nationalists, the Soviets who had declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945, or the American marines who were streaming into China as well.
Death plays a feature role in many first-person accounts of the disorder following Japan’s imperial collapse but so do descriptions of willful disregard for others. With millions of people in transit—dislocated families, small children, young wives and boyfriends, even soldiers—bedding down each night in a secure location created difficulties. Relieving oneself the following morning proved a monumental task of hygiene. With little to no preparation for defeat, this meant that tens of thousands of people on the move were not too particular about where and when they evacuated their bowels.5 The sudden collapse of empire meant that imperial migration was dirty, dangerous, and very poorly managed at the initial stages. In particular, in the early months a lack of certitude about anything on the Chinese mainland caused great anguish among those suddenly thrust to the lower rungs of the world order.
Japan’s surrender also symbolized the rudderlessness of the European imperial powers’ efforts to regain control of East and Southeast Asian colonies they had lost years before. “Japan’s defeat would ignite a scramble for control of the areas formerly held by imperial troops.”6 British leaders believed that a strong France was key for a return to security in Europe, and Britain’s first postwar prime minister, Clement Atlee, went so far as to try to stabilize the situation in Indochina until the French could properly muster their military there after Japanese surrender. This move ignored the fact that the Marshal Philippe Pétain-led collaborationist Vichy French regime had colluded with the Nazis and the Vichy authority actually ruled under the Japanese in Indochina from the autumn of 1940 to March 1945. British soldiers essentially “held” Vietnam for France’s return and were deployed from the SEAC military command, which was lampooned during the war as the “Supreme Example of Allied Confusion.”7 In actuality, the term signified South East Asian Command. The situation was more complex as Britain did not have enough soldiers on hand, so the Chinese Nationalists accepted the proposal to maintain order north of Vietnam’s 16th parallel, while the UK organized the southern region.8 In total, close to one hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were used as key police and troops to maintain order in areas where Allied troop presence was initially low. These Japanese prisoners were labeled with a new term, “surrendered personnel,” in a bid to avoid granting them status as POWs under the Geneva Convention, which would have forbade their use as guardians of postwar law and order.9
European imperial leaders attempted to resume the prewar status quo as if neither a war nor their previous defeat mattered. Just after September 2, 1945, the day Tokyo signed the formal surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, British lieutenant general Arthur Percival returned to Singapore to accept surrender from Japanese general Yamashita Tomoyuki. Four years earlier Yamashita had faced the battered British military leader across the table in a humiliating defeat for the British. Under European management, a “whole series of events was carefully choreographed to impress on the peoples of Asia that Japan had been defeated by force of arms, and to erase the memory of the earlier Allied capitulations.”10 British major general Eric Hayes had rushed from Chongqing, China, the moment the defeat was announced to witness Japan’s surrender in Nanjing on September 9, 1945. Soon after, he cajoled his way onto a train to Shanghai. There he dined and chatted with seventy prominent members of the British community. Astonishingly, he “found a remarkable lack of realization of the implications of the abolition of extra-territoriality and of the fact that from now on Shanghai will be essentially a Chinese city.” He felt he had to be frank with them in order to disabuse them of their “unjustifiable illusions.”11
The Allied goals of de-Nazification and stabilizing a Europe that was in social and economic freefall greatly diverged from the same international reordering of political power in East Asia. From the outset, stemming postwar violence in East Asia and aiding the growing alliances were galvanized by two Allied motivations: (1) to corral Japan out of power in the region and de-imperialize it and (2) to reestablish European dominance and prevent decolonization.
Within Japan a dizzying array of domestic attitudes reflected the hierarchy and duplicity of wartime Japanese society and authority. Because Japanese held competing views of the war—as “just” against encroachment from the West or as the “liberation” of Asia from white colonial rule—they did not always see American attempts to democratize the former Axis nation as positive. Officially, Japan did not conceive of surrender as defeat but lexically as shūsen, literally the “end of war.” This was an ambiguous label, as was the emperor’s verbal mastery to not actually use the word “surrender” in his famous broadcast. The term “surrender,” of course, was used in the West and in other Asian countries but not among officials in Japan. Consequently, in Japan the war (and empire over which it had seemingly been fought) suddenly became a nontopic because it was over. The new focus of discussion quickly turned to how to rebuild the stricken nation. Examining the damage Japan caused was a subject left relatively untouched at first. Meting out responsibility in oblique discussions was more the norm. Part of this was a legacy of how the US-led occupation shaped Japan, not charging the emperor with war crimes and allowing him to remain as a “symbol” of a reconstructed Japan. Continual media censorship, now managed by the American overlords, also further impeded new discussions on responsibility from arising. Moreover, those who retained power in Japan, including many former wartime bureaucrats and politicians, were mostly the same as before, with the exception of the reemergence of the Japanese communists.
FIGURE 4.1. US pamphlet for GIs, “What shall be done about Japan after victory?” American Historical Association. Historical Service Board (1945). What shall be done about Japan after victory? This pamphlet was part of a series produced by the War Department under the title GI Roundtable.
Japan Creates the War Responsibility Council
Once Japan lost the war, all layers of society, the political world, and the military had to come to terms with it. The ensuing national discussion in the parliament but also in the editing rooms of newspapers and among officials was, “What happened and who was responsible?” Various conflicting trauma narratives vied for superiority within the complex landscape of cultural memory in postwar Japan. These emotions derived from how the Japanese conceived of their human failures or in how they depicted the moral character of their heroes and victims. In short, they pivoted on the moral interpretations of defeat and the course they charted for national recovery. The notion of “just war” is a very prevalent idea in the West. For Japan it was a “sacred war”—a propaganda slogan to be sure but one that also thoroughly resounded among certain strata of society. War crimes trials, both the development of their implementation and then their lived legacies, combine, in many ways, all these narratives.
These steps were not seamless and often in contradiction.12 Even months after the defeat, speculation abounded about how the transition to peace would develop. One Japanese POW in the Philippines, Komatsu Shinichi, recalled that many believed the rumor following General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s execution by the Americans. Yamashita had returned alive, was taken to the United States, and was working with the Americans on military strategy against the Soviets. This was part of Japan’s “heroes never die” mythology.13
Disputes about the causes of the war and Japan’s ultimate defeat reflect long-standing imperial-era loggerheads within Japan itself. Deep political divisions and a lack of trust between the people and the nation’s leaders had existed since the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The imperial army and navy held each other in mutual contempt and competed for a share of the national budget, pressuring the already hard-pressed populace to accept what each saw as good for the nation.14 The end of war almost seemed up for grabs—an albeit short-lived military coup saw an attempt to steal the recorded radio broadcast of the emperor communicating the fact of surrender to his people. This act reflected, in part, a lack of consensus about responsibility for the war. In Japanese, the term “war responsibility” (sensō sekinin) is vague, and few were talking about justice at this point.15 Did responsibility mean the decisions for launching the war in general, against China in the 1930s, or later against the Western Allies; for continuing the war when it was clearly already bringing the country to ruin; or for losing the war? At times various postwar Japanese agencies, including MOFA and the imperial army and navy, postured to monopolize control, and at other times they shared authority. However, more often than not these groups did not cooperate and chose instead to protect themselves and their ruling cliques from whatever backlash the imperial defeat would create.
It may be worth noting the gap in ability of the Allied leadership assigned to the West and East. For the Nuremberg Trial, US planners dispatched eminent lawyer Robert Jackson, while Joseph Keenan was pushed on Tokyo. The difference was stark. In early June 1946, at which point the Tokyo Trial would have already begun, the British prosecutors at the Canadian Legation hosted a party. The lead prosecutor for the Tokyo Trial, Joseph Keenan, showed up unexpectedly just before dinner. “He was exceedingly drunk, dressed in sports clothes and only in the mood for flying his arms around the necks of those present, and boasting, in a quite disgusting way, about his intimacy with President Truman and other great men.” Things quieted down and they found a seat for him at dinner. But, as Macmahon Ball, the Australian representative to the Allied Council of Japan, recalled, “Soon after dinner it became clear he was losing control of his limbs and he was half helped and half carried off to his car.” The hosts were angry and humiliated. This was not the first time such a situation had arisen. Two weeks prior, Keenan had joined Lord Wright (head of the UNWCC) for dinner and “arrived so drunk that he was unable to go in to dinner at all, but had to be first taken to the lavatory and then carried to a spare bedroom and put to bed.” Ball was incredulous that Keenan could have been chosen for such an important task as the Tokyo Trial.16 Japanese, in response, must have been somewhat confused concerning how the pursuit of war criminals would turn out.
We know that there was no one Japanese response to the sudden dissolution of empire and the war crimes trials that most people knew defeat would bring in its wake. A spectrum of attitudes reflected and reproduced the hierarchy and duplicity of wartime Japanese society and authority. Fundamentally, Japan’s reactions break down into six layers of stakeholders: (1) the civilian government, (2) the emperor, (3) the imperial army, (4) the imperial navy (both army and navy had their own ministries and demobilization bureaus, which pursued separate, if not competing, goals), (5) the Japanese media, and (6) the Japanese Communist Party. Each group, with the exception of the communists, had managed elements of wartime Japanese society and held their own ideologies concerning how to deal with or respond to the Allied calls for war crimes trials. These divisions demonstrate the fractured nature of authority and rule in both wartime and immediate postwar Japan. This “deeply divided leadership, replete with rivalry, factionalism, and competition,” was a dilemma for the Tokyo Trial because the charge of conspiracy “was accepted by the majority judges even though their judgment implicitly reveals just the division and conflicts alluded to by [Chief Prosecutor Joseph] Keenan.”17
Space does not permit a full illumination of each layer, but it is clear that each Japanese institution wished to mitigate its own losses, lessen the responsibility that it would be seen to hold for the war, and press for continued privileges. In many ways, postwar Japan reflected the same disparate notion of state and authority that had plagued it prewar. In fact, what was apparent in the cacophony of voices surrounding the surrender was how little agreement existed within Japan concerning the issue of responsibility—both responsibility for launching the war and then for losing it. The two issues were essentially rolled up in the same public and private debates.
Exactly who was responsible for the resounding defeat that saw the majority of Japan’s urban areas flattened with bombs in the last year of the war? The question was an important one because it was linked to the fate and future of the nation. The Japanese government had calibrated that “the war in its entirety destroyed one quarter of the nation’s wealth.”18 This does not take into account the loss of Japanese lives as well as those of non-Japanese who inhabited the empire. Chinese estimates were of millions killed and tens of millions left as refugees as a result of Japan’s war of aggression. Further, the significance of the defeat depended almost entirely on the subgroup to which one belonged. The imperial army might feel able to bask in the self-deluding satisfaction of unshackling East Asian and Southeast Asian countries from the bonds of European colonialism. But at what cost? The imperial navy found false pride in the illusion that its sailors had at least conducted themselves better than their supposedly crueler and intractable army brethren. But neither group really managed to come to terms with the destruction that their imperial “liberation” had wrought, either domestically or internationally.
The announcement of Japan’s defeat left many people dazed with shock, even highly educated elites.19 The cabinet had a plan, but it did not always have access to international intelligence. MOFA knew what was going on in Europe with the Nazis and others because it retained access to the outside world and was served by incoming intelligence reporting. Extraordinarily, MOFA had already prepared a dossier for the 87th Imperial parliament (June 1945) on the question of how the Allies were pursuing war criminals and what was happening within the UNWCC.20
How Japan dealt with the Allied push for war crimes adjudication is significant because within this process lies the key for understanding how Japan defined the war and its own imperial behavior. If the nation could remove the stain of war guilt, then wartime propaganda and claims of keeping “Asia for the Asiatics,” and removing the shackles of colonialism from Asia could shine that much brighter for the exhausted and impoverished Japanese, brought to their knees by their own war. If war crimes trials proved otherwise, then the war would have been fought in vain and the nation might collapse, give in to its own humiliation, or, worse yet, be taken over by the expanding forces of communism, it was believed. While smoke was still rising from the ashes, Japanese officialdom was busily trying to shore up its positions. Before they were disbanded in December 1945 to form two bureaus for demobilization, the army and navy ministries moved with the greatest alacrity, wanting to ensure that the Allied occupation did not take a stance that contradicted Japan’s own interests or the military’s. That meant defining the terms of what the war had meant, that it had been “inevitable” and necessary to push back against Western colonialism. Such military efforts show that the Japanese civilian government was still not in control of the country, because it did not fully manage the immediate postwar period. One major reason that Japan ended up in the position it is in today, reluctant to engage fully with the legacy of the war, is that divided civilian and military opinion about the war competed with vested interests concerning discussions about war responsibility.
On the hot and cloudy day of September 5, 1945, in the 88th session of the lower house of the imperial parliament, representative Ashida Hitoshi put forth a proposal “to make clear the reasons and locus of responsibility which led to the disadvantageous results of the Greater East Asian War.” Ashida had been a long-serving member of the Foreign Ministry in the early part of the twentieth century and was elected to parliament eleven times, at one point briefly serving as prime minister in 1948. In parliament he laid out a multipoint set of questions to the government concerning war responsibility. Why had it gone to war with more than forty countries when it knew it lacked the manpower, technical ability, and political structures to carry it out? These are complex matters, he reasoned, and “therefore, it goes without saying that responsibility for the defeat is not something that can merely be placed on the shoulders of two or three war leaders.”21 Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko agreed and said there “was value in looking into” Ashida’s query. While agreeing with Ashida’s aims superficially, the prime minister’s response was also a paragon of vacillation and pretty verbiage. Higashikuni thanked other countries in the Greater East Asian League—never specifically named—for their efforts, but now a historic time in Japan’s three-thousand-year history had arrived with the US occupation on Japan’s shores. Japan will move forward and will have open and free discussions based on freedom of speech, which is the basis of liberty, he said. The Diet erupted in applause.22
Lower House Delegate Tōgō Minoru then took the floor and spoke. He assessed that Japan needed to be honest with the aims of the occupation and the analysis of what happened during the war to properly rebuild for the future and for peace. He concluded that the occupation authorities were also on trial for their actions if they were to judge Japan on the scales of international justice. Thus, it was only fair that Japan at the same time talk about the dropping of the atomic bomb by the United States and its ramifications.23 In his memoirs, the country’s first postwar prime minister, Higashikuni, noted, “We need to deeply consider the circumstances that brought our country to this defeat.” If Japan did not do this, he cautioned, then the country was doomed. However, rather than telling the Japanese people to admit defeat, the emperor called on the Japanese to “pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”24 Society at the upper levels looked at war responsibility as a means of figuring out how Japan lost and renovating quickly with an eye toward the future. Little attention was paid to identifying the significance of the defeat or crimes committed during the war, a specific focus for the Allies.
In its September 11, 1945, report “Research on problems related to punishing war criminals,” the Treaty Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed surprise at the jumble of responsibility and authority within the higher levels of the Japanese government and officialdom. A MOFA report ventured into a discussion of war crimes trials and suggested that they would probably be implemented not only against those who abused POWs but also against those who bore political responsibility for the war. Japanese officials were aware of how their leadership structure differed from that of Nazi Germany, and the document lucidly contrasted how the Nazis had clearly delineated layers of authority while the Japanese did not. This made the full pursuit of responsibility difficult, to say the least. Structurally, Japanese civilian government was not designed to allow for individuals to be seen as “responsible” for decisions.25
On September 12, 1945, Prime Minister Higashikuni, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, Minister of the Army Shimomura Sadamu, Minister of the Navy Yonai Mitsumasa, Chief of the Army General Staff Umezu Yoshijirō, Chief of the Navy General Staff Admiral Toyoda Soemu, Minister of State Konoe Fumimaro, and Minister of Justice Iwata Chūzō met at the Council for Dealing with the End of the War (established on August 22) to discuss putting together investigation boards to examine Japanese war crimes. The group announced that in accordance with Allied demands and legal jurisprudence Japan would try those who had been listed by the occupiers as criminals or those who had committed war crimes.26 A postwar Japanese government summary of Japan’s early policies toward war crimes trials states that at the September 12 meeting the group decided that even if the Allies were to put Japanese in the dock, Japan should move first to investigate war crimes and conduct trials of major individuals and of those responsible. This policy was taken as the means to “clarify the merits of the cases the report noted.27 Japanese officials wanted to take these countermeasures so that the Allies could not conduct adjudications unilaterally. After making their decision, Kido Kōichi, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, presented the council’s argument to Emperor Hirohito. The emperor responded: “While these individuals have been designated as war criminals by the Allied Nations, from the imperial [my royal] point of view these are loyal subjects, and furthermore include some, I believe, who have achieved great success for the nation. It is very difficult to accept that they will be criminally punished for having fought in my name.” Kido brought the imperial utterance back to the council and they re-debated it, given the emperor’s hesitation. But the group was adamant about what it had decided in the morning and believed that such a decision was appropriate. The summary added that the prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, and minister of justice all went to see the emperor again.28 Kido and the group received imperial dispensation to push forward on domestic war crimes trials with the rationale that this could guarantee the trials were kept “proper” or “just.” The summary also cautioned that handing over those who had been named as war crimes suspects unconditionally would “go against the traditional precepts of bushidō.”29
The final move, on September 18, was Higashikuni’s press conference with foreign correspondents, held in the afternoon with approximately one hundred journalists in attendance. This was an epic moment since Japan had been essentially closed off to foreign media for years. Most of the journalists asked about the executions of downed pilots who had flown in the 1942 Doolittle raids or the mistreatment of Allied POWs. One directly asked if the emperor had war responsibility, and Higashikuni replied emphatically “absolutely not.”30 According to some sources, a few trials did indeed take place on the Japanese side; others list only one. Tanaka Hiromi suggests that because records of these trials cannot be found, they are “phantom trials.”31 The draft English text of the cabinet decision to mete out domestic justice was never officially released even though it had been recorded.32
The Japanese government and army pursued and investigated a selection of war crimes, but eventually in March 1946 SCAP ordered such investigations to be dropped, according to one source.33 In the end, Japan was only permitted to collect data for trials, and the only confirmed case of someone being brought to trial was that of General Honma Masaharu.34 Honma was deemed responsible for atrocities such as the Bataan Death March in 1942; as punishment, his pay was docked. During this forced march in the Philippines, thousands of US and Filipino soldiers were mistreated and many died. By this point, Prime Minister Higashikuni had already made an announcement that the entire Japanese nation regretted the war—“ichioku sō zange”—a public and collective admission of guilt or at least national contrition. Such a statement neatly avoided any mention of individual responsibility and thus conveniently sidestepped the issue of apology.
It is telling that no mention was made of atrocities or issues regarding the abusive and exploitative manner in which Japan’s empire was managed in these early domestic discussions. Plans were seemingly organized with a view to countering war crimes trials. The Japanese were concerned about the causes of the war in general and about the failure of the empire. But then they immediately turned to how to rebuild and the need to strengthen people’s relationship with the emperor. Most officials aimed to implement new education programs and to build transport while providing jobs for veterans to the extent possible. Japanese leaders of all colors were seemingly already thinking about the future, even as the nation suffered in its new predicament. Unfortunately, pausing to reflect on the harm that Japan caused at the fringes of the empire did not arise in the same manner. The intersection of Japan’s concern for itself and the destruction it caused abroad remains a nonexistent feature of Japan’s official policies toward war crimes trials to this day.35
Japan’s military also had to very quickly deal with the potential for further violence within its own ranks due to nihilism. Suddenly facing defeat, many soldiers questioned the very meaning of their existence and pondered what purpose their sacrifices had served. For example, naval captain Okino Matao noted in his diary that he was deeply ashamed of repatriating after being a POW.36 Okino’s plane en route over China had run into problems and crash landed. Initially taken prisoner by the Chinese Nationalist forces, he suffered a leg wound that turned gangrenous and he underwent a partial amputation. He was one of the few high-level Japanese POWs, so the Americans took a keen interest and eventually he was clandestinely flown to Washington, DC, during the war. There he divulged much about Japan’s imperial military structure and ideology to his interrogators at a secret intelligence camp, Fort Hunt.37 How could he return to Japan? he wondered. Luckily, just after the end of the war, the emperor released former soldiers taken as POWs from their state of mental anguish. Imperial Army Order No. 1385 on August 18, 1945, announced: “Imperial military armed forces or those belonging to the army who are under the authority of the enemy’s military are not considered prisoners of war upon the implementation of this imperial edict. To quickly caution against rash acts at all levels of subordinates and with the aim to assist our imperial country’s prosperous future, we must very thoroughly implement this order with patience and prudence.” The navy released an order of similar magnitude the following day.38 This sort of military order was initially drafted by the Imperial General Headquarters. The chief of staff submitted it as a memorial to the throne, and once it gained imperial acquiescence it was transmitted to the armed forces as an imperial edict with all of that weight behind it. While it might appear cosmetic to outsiders, it held tremendous force. Okino and others believed the imperial order relieved soldiers of the undue guilt of having become a prisoner. The aim was to avoid any further problems in the postwar period, either where the soldiers were stationed or when they eventually repatriated.
Pressure to investigate the reasons behind Japan’s defeat was also emerging from former high-level military officials. Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant general Ishiwara Kanji, one of the masterminds behind the 1931 Manchurian Incident, which led Japan further into aggression in China, initially wrote about the reasons for Japan’s loss toward the end of August 1945 in the Mainichi Newspaper. This involved, “prior to being embarrassingly exposed naked before others, the need for Japan to remove the cloak under which it hoodwinked itself, peel off its skin and squeeze out the cancer of defeat.”39 Ishiwara believed one of the main reasons for defeat was the “moral decay” of the people. He later held rallies and demonstrated that Japan lost the war “because our false leaders took us into a war for which we were not ready. They betrayed the emperor, as they betrayed the land.” Ishiwara expounded that Japan needed to rebuild a new Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere and ensure its future by making friends, not by using force. Mark Gayn, a Russian-born US journalist who had covered Asia for years, was less taken with the message and wrote that “Japan was getting more than a new Messiah. She was also receiving a happy explanation of the causes of defeat.”40
As the military moved to ease the psychological pressure on its soldiers who only weeks before would have been shamed as POWs, the government moved forward regarding how to deal with the further fallout from defeat and all that surrender would entail. On October 23, 1945, the Council for Dealing with the End of the War laid out more of its policy for proceeding with potential war crimes trials. The pursuit of justice appeared secondary to the aim of mitigating any blemish on the imperial prestige of Japan—seemingly unsullied even with the unconditional surrender. The goal was to minimize to the extent possible damage to both individuals and “the empire” as it was termed in the Japanese plan. In some ways this move mirrored the imperial government and military’s goal to protect that vaguely defined “national polity,” or kokutai. The primary argument hinged on the claim that on the level of international law the pursuit of so-called war criminals was irrational. Second, officials insisted that the emperor was an entity, separate from the evolution of the war, and that he stood above the imperial constitution. The third element of the report argued that the pressures of the international situation during the 1930s had forced the nation into a corner and that Japan had no choice other than to wage war or face annihilation.41 There was another plan that never saw the light of day, entitled “Urgent Imperial Decree to Stabilize the People’s Mind and Establish the Independent Popular Morality Necessary to Maintain National Order.”42 This strategy depicted the war as a “tragic perversion” of the emperor’s trust. “Loser’s justice, like victor’s justice, ultimately would have entailed arguing that Japan had been led into ‘aggressive militarism’ by a small cabal of irresponsible militaristic leaders.”43 A postwar summary examining the problem with A-class war criminals had three aims:
- Do not touch on anything related to the emperor’s responsibility
- Protect the nation
- Within the framework of the first two points and to the extent possible, defend individuals44
Shidehara Kijūrō had taken over as prime minister on October 9, 1945, and he wanted to examine precisely what had brought Japan to its knees. Only by building on this knowledge, he explained, could they rebuild Japan. On October 30, 1945, a cabinet decision discussed the reasons for defeat and the establishment of an investigation body to examine the issues. The decision read as follows: “To clarify the real facts and reasons for defeat in the Greater East Asian War and to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated in the future, it is believed to be necessary to establish an investigation office in the Cabinet that will thoroughly investigate these issues across the broad range of political, military, economic, thought and cultural fields.”45 The five sections were chaired by a host of key politicians, elite journalists, philosophy professors, industrialists, and military officers, among others.46
On November 20 this body became an official government agency.47 Initially the bureau was known as the Greater East Asia War Investigation Council (Daitōa sensō chōsakai), but in January 1946 it changed its name to simply the War Investigation Council (Sensō chōsakai). Shidehara Kijūrō headed the organ, after he took over as prime minister in October 1945, but the Allies were suspicious that it was a group designed to aid the rise of Japan’s military again, and the council did not last long before being ordered to dissolve.48 Aoki Tokuzō, who was made chief secretary of the council, recalled that the emperor had spoken with Higashikuni about needing to look into the war and its origins so that Japan did not make the same mistake twice. It was eventually disbanded on September 30, 1946, after completing an initial set of investigations that recorded early postwar Japanese attitudes about defeat and responsibility.49 The picture was confused, to say the least.
In discussions in the upper house of parliament concerning the investigation council, Prime Minister Shidehara provided rather vague responses regarding what exactly was meant by war responsibility (sensō sekinin). From a December 2, 1945, record, Shidehara responded to a question from Matsumura Giichi. Matsumura had been a onetime official in the Home Ministry, but as a politician he was now calling for pursuit of those who had war responsibility. Shidehara answered that Japan was precisely in its current predicament because of its loss in the Greater East Asian War. There was some “public sentiment” toward those who started this war, he averred, but many also wanted to pursue them. In this vein, Shidehara admitted, he could not help but agree in part with Matsumura. But if Japan put those individuals on trial, there were many things the country needed to consider, Shidehara cautioned, underscoring the seriousness of these matters. In addition, those responsible for the war may have committed mistakes, but they did not sell out the country or commit action with that in mind, he said. Plus, Shidehara concluded, could Japan create a law now and make it retroactive to prosecute those men? If Japan followed such a path it would do so at its own peril because the nation would become quite unstable, Shidehara articulated. Moreover, pursuing this line against those Japan deemed as responsible had the potential to set up a tendency to allow difficulties to occur in the political realm where the winner could pursue the loser in future elections. Shidehara said that punishing those responsible for the war would only occur so rarely that it would not prove to be any impediment, but creating retroactive laws also contravened the spirit of democracy. It is interesting to see how the idea or shield of democracy was now employed by Japanese leaders to avoid war crimes tribunals. In response to Matsumura’s query, Shidehara said that Japan must in some measure wait for public opinion. The country should use its own commission to suss out the truth of the war and then naturally the Japanese themselves will find those responsible, Shidehara opined.50
On December 4, Shidehara stated that Japan needed to assess the reasons for and truth about the war, determining whether the result of the Pacific War was the outgrowth of militarism. On December 6, he explained that if Japan conducted this investigation on its own, it would be able to find, once the efforts were complete, where the locus of responsibility was and mete out either political or criminal judgments. On that same day, in a budget meeting, the prime minister remarked that he did not accept the Allied basis for choosing who was responsible for the war and that only the Japanese could ascertain who or what had caused their loss. On the 12th, Shidehara said in a lower house meeting that the investigation was to make sure that the Japanese understood the reasons behind the war and did not make the same mistakes again. Public opinion was already posing difficult questions about war responsibility, he said, and reprimands from the media were growing harsh.51
It was apparent that momentum had begun to build for the Japanese public to question the nature of itself and what had led it down the road to war. A popular column in the Asahi Newspaper on January 9, 1946, clarified: “It is indeed irritating that the Government has not the will to punish war criminals by itself, but it also may be that it is unable to do so because there is no proper law in Japan which covers the situation. It is very natural for criminal law to have no provisions for the punishment of war criminals because no one thought of such a thing when the law code was made. The Government should enact a new law for this purpose. The people will never oppose it. It is deplorable that the officials were proud of their desk plans during the war and are now too cowardly to manage the new state of affairs.”52
A few months later at the second all-hands meeting for the investigation council on April 4, 1946, held in the prime minister’s residence, Shidehara laid out the goals and methods. In the discussion the prime minister said that the leaders had a duty to tell the people what happened. They could not hold back on the investigation, he implored. Shidehara told those gathered that the goal was not the pursuit of war responsibility but rather to look internally at Japan and find blame to pursue. While the pursuit of war responsibility might not be a goal, he said, the council should still find out where it lay, with its expansive investigation. The council would examine memos and question the government, but it would also need to query the military, especially the army. This was all necessary to understand the internal conditions and ideas behind what happened. At one point Shidehara intoned, “We are being watched by the Allies and the world so choose your words carefully because they are paying attention and these comments will impact back on Japan. These proceedings are not a courtroom where we judge; we will analyze and look at problems.”53
In response to Shidehara, Baba Tsunego, CEO of the Yomiuri Newspaper and member of the upper house of the Diet, spoke up. Baba said that if council members were going to talk about the aims of this council and look first into the reasons for the nation’s defeat, they should also keep in mind the future constitution and outlawing war in it. If members truly investigated the defeat, was it, he asked, because Japan began a war it should not have started? It was lost from the outset, he remarked. Baba informed members that a better goal would be to start with a new draft of the constitution, outlawing war and weapons. In this way the council would not be pursuing individual responsibility but looking at how the act of war itself was a mistake. It was wrong for Japan to have initiated that war. The council could arrive at the conclusion that war itself should be outlawed, and promote such ideas in a new constitution. What Japan should be examining, Baba suggested, is whether war has value. Shidehara retorted that the council was investigating the issue of how Japan arrived at its defeat so that it could paint an accurate picture for future generations. War was exceedingly difficult to eradicate, and if one looked at what foreigners had written, they have discussed this a bit, he added. Their conclusion, Shidehara said, was that war pulls against the middle, meaning that in the end it does not pay for the victors or the losers.54
These discussions were pregnant with great potential for a national conversation about war responsibility. Sadly, such moves only faced retrenchment of opinions from most quarters.55 It was not only the Americans who ultimately stopped the council’s investigation; pushback emerged from the Soviet Union as well. Lieutenant General Kuzma Nikolaevich Derevyanko, who had signed for the Soviet Union on the USS Missouri at the surrender ceremony, was adamant about the nefarious nature of the investigation council. General Douglas MacArthur did not respect the Russians and supposedly treated Derevyanko “like a piece of furniture,” ignoring him completely.56 At the 11th Far Eastern Commission (FEC) meeting on August 7, 1946, Derevyanko spoke up concerning the war investigation council. He believed the research group aimed to collect experience from all angles—political, economic, military, technical—and this contravened the demilitarization of Japan. “We should thus disband it,” he suggested, as one could see there were many military men listed in its rosters and that was evidence enough for him.57 Derevyanko continued to voice his displeasure. At the 16th FEC meeting on October 10, 1946, he claimed the use of so many military officers and examination of their experiences in battle was obviously to prepare effectively for Japan’s next military misadventure. At the meeting Derevyanko said he now heard that the council had been disbanded, and he wanted to emphasize that it had been illegal in the first place.58
We can sense the push for answers about war responsibility coming from various directions within Japan’s civilian leadership. One diplomat, Nakamura Toyoichi, early on believed it important to think about Japan’s strategy toward the war crimes trials. On November 20, 1945, Nakamura proposed a strategy for Japan’s response to the war crimes trial process. Nakamura’s proposal was rejected out of hand, in part because the Japanese government wanted a unity of opinion to show its opposition to the Allied pursuit of its own justice and to demonstrate government unanimity.59 Eventually, however, this goal was abandoned, and each agency mostly pursued policies to the greater benefit of its own members.
Yoshida Shigeru, as foreign minister in the Shidehara cabinet (he had already taken over from Shigemitsu Mamoru in mid-September 1945 because SCAP pursued Shigemitsu as a Class A war criminal), was not a fan of his own government’s attempt to unify its stance on war crimes. Yoshida believed that twisting the truth and hiding facts to get individuals absolved was not in Japan’s long-term interest (and it seems Yoshida might have won that argument for the government side of things but could not convince the military). But then MOFA could not sit by and do nothing. So, in a sense both sides compromised as a way not to directly guide defense lawyers but to assist them. Yoshida, together with University of Tokyo professor of law Takayanagi Kenzō, formed the Judicial Affairs Deliberation Office (Hōmu shinsa-shitsu). This office was similar in effect to what Nakamura Toyoichi had proposed, and it was established in December 1945, under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry, providing materials to the court. Sone Eki was put in charge, and on December 14 the heads of various ministries were called to the prime minister’s residence for a colloquium in which Okazaki Katsuo, who was working directly for the foreign minister, informed them that the plan to take a unified stance on Allied war crimes trials was being scrapped and that the emperor bore no war responsibility. In effect, this meant that Japan would follow orders from the American occupation authorities when dealing with the war crimes trials but that officials should not think about blaming the emperor.60
Shimoda Takezsō, a Japanese diplomat and later ambassador to the United States, reported that Yoshida Shigeru had opined to MOFA officials when he returned to political power in the immediate postwar period that this was the first time in Japan’s history that the country had been vanquished. It was a defeated nation. Consequently, Japan was now “on the chopping board like a dead fish,” he said. This meant that Japan faced a hopeless situation and needed to buck up and deal with it. By pushing a strategy for rebuilding Japan, using the Allied trials as the means to purge Japanese society of those who had brought it to defeat, Yoshida tried to craft a new postwar orientation. In fact, Yoshida refused to sign a petition in support of wartime Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori because Tōgō had been minister at the start of the Pacific War and Yoshida believed he should have taken responsibility and stepped down after negotiations with the United States failed.61
While the Japanese government did not issue a unified official directive toward war crimes trials, unofficially each agency or administrative unit did internally. MOFA did not oppose the indictments publicly but subjected them to analysis and was not at all conciliatory. The office within MOFA that managed war crimes issues was the End of War Liaison Bureau War Crimes Office First Section (Shūren daiichibu no senpan jimushitsu). It took care of all war criminal administrative matters, including providing assistance, offering documents, and answering lawyers’ questions. There was also an organ called the Domestic and Foreign Legal and Political Study Group (Naigai hōsei kenkyūkai, more commonly known as the Hōsei), which was like a prep team for the trials. On the heels of a push from Nakamura, and with some support from the financial world, this organization was established. Officially appearing in February 1946, it was a private entity not linked with the government and was set up to offer assistance and analysis for war crimes trial defense. It was staffed by the very best of Japan’s legal minds. These men produced high-level legal scholarship on questions of war responsibility.62
What is fascinating is the extent to which the Japanese government kept veterans far away from the investigations. Not that all former Japanese soldiers would have been swayed communist, or antigovernment, but it is striking to examine soldiers’ diaries for their opinions. The men on the ground who supposedly knew what they were fighting for do not make much of an appearance in high-level government commissions, where deliberations seemingly tried to analyze what Japan’s war had been about. Komatsu Shinichi had been an officer in the war in the Philippines and witnessed it all—the success, then the encroaching failure, lack of supplies, the cruelty to Allied POWs, the cannibalism, and being taken as a POW at the end. In his diary he listed twenty-one reasons for Japan’s loss in the war. Obviously, supply lines and poor military strategic decision making were nagging problems. The lack of scientific knowledge, training, and materiel, in particular, when compared with that of the United States, which is always how the loss is portrayed, was also itemized. Most of the other reasons can be imagined, but Komatsu underscored that “Japanese conviction in their own greatness meant they had little empathy with others,” that “they have a tendency to not think plans through to the end,” and that “people got tired of the fighting.” He also noted, as other contemporary Japanese military historians have remarked, “Japanese treated life without much care; Americans treated life as sacrosanct.”63 Komatsu reasoned that these reasons inexorably lead one to conclude that “the Japanese did not have the power or a culture suited to politically manage East Asia.”64
It is possible that Komatsu was also influenced by Japanese general Yamashita Tomoyuki and his reflections before his February 1946 execution in the Philippines, as told to a Buddhist cleric at the prison:
In a free society, you should nurture your own ability to make moral judgments in order to carry out your duties. Duties can only be carried out correctly by a socially mature person with an independent mind and with culture and dignity. The fundamental reason why the world has lost confidence in our nation, and why we have so many war-crime suspects who left ugly scars on our history, was this lack of morals. I would like you to cultivate and accept the common moral judgment of the world, and become a people who fulfill duties on your own responsibility. You are expected to be independent and carve out your own future. No one can avoid this responsibility and choose an easy way. Only through that path can eternal peace be attained in the world.65
And yet at the same time, even given all this elite analysis above, we should heed the evaluation of historian Duan Ruicong. Duan notes, “Generally speaking in the postwar, the biggest problem within the war investigation council, ministry of foreign affairs, and army and navy ministries was the absence of the point of view of those who suffered from the war. In other words, all of these groups reflected on the causes of Japan’s loss, but lacked introspection toward the invasive war itself.”66
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