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By Root 897 0

the army and navy, “star and anchor,” was arguably no more bitter than that which prevailed in the U.S. armed forces. America, however, was rich enough to be able to afford this. Japan was not. Moreover, in the U.S. the president and in Britain the prime minister arbitrated on matters of prime strategic importance—for instance, to impose the doctrine of “Germany First.” In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services—each with its own air force—pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action.

Mamoru Shigemitsu, successively Japan’s wartime foreign minister and ambassador in China, was scornful of the army’s faith both in German victory and in Japan’s ability to induce Russia to remain neutral. Industry was never subject to the effective central control which prevailed in Britain, never mind the Soviet Union. In his analysis of Japanese and Western wartime attitudes towards each other, John Dower has observed: “Whereas racism in the West56 was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves.” In the early stages of the eastern war, many Asians were attracted by Japanese claims that they were liberating subject peoples from white imperial dominance. It soon became plain, however, that far from the conquerors purposing an Asian brotherhood, they simply envisaged a new world in which the hegemony of Westerners was replaced by that of another superior people—the Japanese. Japan had ambitious plans for colonising her newly won and prospective possessions. By 1950, according to the projections of Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare, 14 percent of the nation’s population would be living abroad as settlers: 2.7 million in Korea, 400,000 in Formosa, 3.1 million in Manchuria, 1.5 million in China, 2.38 million in other Asian satellites, and 2 million in Australia and New Zealand.

None of these immigrants would be permitted to intermarry with local people, to avoid dilution of the superior Yamato race. The British, French and Dutch had much to be ashamed of in their behaviour towards their own Asian subject peoples. Nothing they had done, however, remotely matched the extremes, or the murderous cruelty, of Japan’s imperialists. Rigid segregation was sustained from all local people except “comfort women.” Stationed at Indochina’s great port of Haiphong, army engineer Captain Renichi Sugano “didn’t really feel that I was in a foreign country57, because I lived entirely among Japanese people. Even when we left the port to go into the city, we ate at Japanese restaurants and cafés, or in the officers’ club.” The nation’s leaders urged Japanese to think of themselves as “shido minzoku”—“the world’s foremost people.” In 1940, Professor Chikao Fukisawa of Kyoto University wrote a booklet in which he asserted that the emperor embodied a cosmic life force, and that Japan was the true ancient cradle of civilisation. The government caused this thesis to be translated and distributed, for the enlightenment of English-speakers.

Here was a mirror image, no less ugly, of the Nazi vision for Hitler’s empire. Its worst implication for the Japanese themselves was that many were taught to believe that their own inherent superiority would ensure victory, dismissing objective assessment of economic factors. They allowed themselves to be deluded, as at first were the Allies, by the significance of their 1941–42 victories. Japan’s existence was dependent upon imported fuel and raw materials, most of which had to be transported thousands of miles by sea from South-East Asia. The country needed at least six million tons of petroleum a year, and produced only 250,000 in its home islands. The balance came from British Borneo, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. The navy,