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By Root 1099 0

postings,” in the words of Japanese historian Kazutoshi Hando. “Strategic decision-making was concentrated in the hands of perhaps twenty people, military and naval. Even if our intelligence services had gained access to important information, it would have remained unexploited if it ran against the convictions of the decision-makers. They would not have wanted to know.” MacArthur was sometimes accused of displaying a cavalier contempt for strategic deception, of the kind widely and often successfully practiced by the Allies in Europe. Yet such was the reluctance of Japanese commanders to heed evidence which did not fit their own convictions that the most tempting morsels of false intelligence would almost certainly have been wasted on them. The British launched some Byzantine schemes in Burma, such as planting dummy plans where the enemy must find them. The Japanese seemed not even to notice.

The gravest weakness of bushido, Captain Kouichi Ito believed, was that “no one was allowed to say what he really thought, so that we could not explore better ways to do things.” The Western Allies possessed advantages not only of better direction and resources, but also of language. English, properly used, is a clear and powerful medium of expression. Japanese, by contrast, is fraught with equivocation. Tokyo’s forces suffered chronic communications difficulties because signals were so vulnerable to misinterpretation.

THE MEN who fought for Japan displayed a courage and capacity for suffering which bewildered and sometimes terrified their opponents. The British general Sir William Slim called the Japanese soldier “the most formidable fighting insect71 in history,” a phrase characteristic of the mood of his period. A British officer who thought better of Japanese rankers than of their commanders called them “first-class soldiers72 in a third-class army,” which seems fair. Their virtues owed something to national culture, and even more to an ethos ruthlessly promoted from the top. Like the Waffen SS, many Japanese army officers were recruited from lower-middle-class backgrounds. They achieved in uniform a social status denied to them in civilian life, and paraded this in similar fashion.

From the day that a man joined the Japanese army or navy, he was subjected to conditioning more brutal even than that of the Russians. Physical punishment was fundamental. When Souhei Nakamura set off to report to his recruit depot in Manchuria, he carried a big flask of sake which his girlfriend had given him as a parting present. In a train otherwise crowded with Chinese, he fell into conversation with two Japanese soldiers. He told them about his sake. “You’d better not turn up at the barracks with that,” they said knowingly, “or you’ll be in real trouble.” The three of them drained the flask. The soldiers slumped into happy unconsciousness, the boy stumbled out to seek fresh air at a window. He returned to find his baggage stolen by Chinese passengers. Reporting to his barracks, he was foolish enough to relate his experience to an NCO, who thrashed him on the spot. From that day, Nakamura hated military life. His view is a useful corrective for those who suppose that every Japanese recruit was eager to die for the emperor. “I thought of joining the army73 simply as a one-way ticket to the Yasukuni Shrine,” he said laconically. Yasukuni is dedicated to those who fall in the service of the emperor.

The first year of military service was notoriously dreadful. “Personality ceased to exist74, there was only rank,” said Masaichi Kikuchi. “You became the lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers who fight hard, they must train hard. This was the system which made the Japanese army so formidable—each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the orders of his group leader—and then took over