Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (120 page)

While the Battle of Okinawa intensified, Hirohito cautioned Umezu about the army's plans to contract its defense lines in China and redeploy troops northward to defend Manchuria and Korea, but more particularly the home islands. On April 14, he warned Umezu: “Be cautious…of the enemy's propaganda. Destroying railroad lines and villages in enemy areas at this time might have a bad effect on the minds of the people.” But his principal concern was that “we not hurt ourselves” by pulling out and allowing Americans to develop new air bases there.
¹²⁹

As late as May 5 the emperor was still hoping for a victory on Okinawa and radioing the Thirty-second Army, via radio messages, that “We really want this attack to succeed.”
¹³⁰
The battle for Okinawa had begun on April 1. It lasted until mid-June and cost an estimated 94,000 to 120,000 Japanese combatants and 150,000 to 170,000 noncombatants, including more than seven hundred Okinawans whom the Japanese army forced to commit collective suicide. American combat losses were approximately 12,500 killed and more than 33,000 wounded; among these casualties were more than 7,000 sailors, reflecting the toll taken by kamikaze attacks. The war was lost, and had been for more than a year, but defeated Japan stubbornly fought on.

At this critical pass Hirohito's personality and his approach to life and his office served him badly. He could see many things
sooner than his chiefs of staff could, but was always prone to rigid procedures rather than flexible solutions. All his life he had been excessively earnest, preoccupied with detail. Now, confronting endless defeats, he carried his earnestness, his inflexibility, and his absorption with detail to extremes. The final, most destructive stage of the war was about to begin, with Hirohito, the helmsman, spurning rational judgments and refusing to see, let alone forestall, the catastrophe.

I
n February 1945, just before Iwo Jima was assaulted by U.S. Marines and less than six weeks before Okinawa was invaded, Hirohito consulted his seven senior statesmen concerning the war. They were the six former prime ministers—Hiranuma, Hirota, Wakatsuki, Okada, Konoe, and T
j
—and former lord keeper of the privy seal Makino. The meetings, though interrupted by air raids, revealed an overwhelming consensus to go on with the struggle.

In Europe, Germany and its Nazi regime were heading toward defeat. Just how soon the Third Reich would collapse was not yet clear, but that its demise was fast approaching seemed certain. As for Japan's situation, it was equally grim. The army in Burma had been destroyed. The armies in China proper had fared better. Their “Ichig
” offensive of 1944 had opened a land corridor along the main trunk railway from Peking in the north to Wuhan, and from there to Canton in the southernmost province of Kwangtung.
¹
But in all the occupied provinces the tide had turned against Japanese forces. They were stretched thin and fighting a costly guerrilla war that in 1944 alone had absorbed 64 percent of Japan's emergency military expenditures.
²

Now, in 1945, the armies in China anticipated, and therefore had to prepare for, both a Soviet invasion from the north and an American landing in the Shanghai area. Neither in China nor Manchuria could the continental armies be drawn down further to
supply veteran troops for the defense of the home islands.
³
Nor could the navy, which had suffered crippling losses, do much to transport them anywhere.
⁴

On the other hand the kamikaze tactics that had been evolving since before Leyte were a potentially powerful resource. The high command was also strengthening army air power, stockpiling weapons, and organizing twenty-nine new divisions, fifty-one infantry regiments, and many artillery and tank regiments in preparation for defending the homeland. During 1945, 43 percent of the army would be stationed in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Given these factors, and the emperor's wildly optimistic belief that they could affect the outcome, this did not seem to him and Kido an auspicious moment to think of negotiating peace.
⁵

The enemy must first be made to see “the disadvantages of continuing the war,” Wakatsuki advised. Makino declared that “the ultimate priority is to develop an advantageous war situation.” Okada said Japan should wait for “a moment favorable for us,” then make peace. Hiranuma and Hirota advised the emperor to fight on until the end.
⁶

Prince Konoe alone of the senior statesmen did not concur.
⁷
Distinctly unawed by the haze of emotion and reverence that surrounded the emperor, he had tried for more than eighteen months to convey a complex message of dire threat to the emperor if the war continued.
⁸
Many months earlier he had told the emperor's brother Prince Takamatsu that the army was plagued by “a cancer” in the form of the Control faction, but “Kido and others” did not see matters the same way he [Konoe] did, while “his majesty is relatively unconcerned with ideological questions.” For the past four years, he went on, the emperor had been told and still believed that “the extremists are the Imperial Way faction.” The real danger to the
kokutai
, however, came from the Control faction. Konoe added that, should the war worsen, they would try to change the
kokutai
. Whether the threat was from communists within the country—by
which he meant mainly the left-wing radicals within the Control faction—or from the “Anglo-American enemy,” Konoe surmised that both enemies would want to retain the emperor while communizing the country.
⁹

Now, in his written report to the emperor, presented on February 14 with Kido in the room listening, Konoe elaborated on this conspiracy theory.
¹⁰
The Soviet Union, he declared, saw Japan as its biggest threat in East Asia; it had linked up with the Chinese Communists, the largest and strongest Communist party in Asia and was cooperating with the United States and Britain to expel Japan from China. It would enter the war when it saw the chance. Defeat, he told the emperor, was inevitable if the war continued, but more to be feared than defeat was the destruction of the
kokutai
. For the war was also eroding the domestic status quo, releasing forces that threatened Japan and its imperial house from within as much as from without. The danger lay in the emperor and Kido's trust in the generals of the Control faction who were unintentionally advancing the communization of Japan. Sue quickly for peace, Konoe pleaded, before a Communist revolution occurred that would make preservation of the
kokutai
impossible.
¹¹

Hirohito, sympathetic to Konoe's fears about the army, conceded that something had to be done. But he was taken aback by Konoe's view of Moscow's intentions, for he shared the wishful thinking of his high command that the Soviet Union would need Japan in its looming confrontation with the Anglo-Americans, and would not want to destroy Japanese power in East Asia. Thus he firmly rejected Konoe's recommendation that he act immediately and directly to end the war.
¹²
Hirohito agreed rather with his senior statesmen: To end the war would be “very difficult unless we make one more military gain.” Konoe allegedly replied, “Is that possible? It must happen soon. If we have to wait much longer,…[a mere battle victory] will mean nothing.”
¹³

Nevertheless Hirohito stuck to his position. That same day he
reportedly said, “If we hold out long enough in this war, we may be able to win, but what worries me is whether the nation will be able to endure it until then.”
¹⁴
In a sense this was what Konoe was concerned about, too. In another sense, however, the emperor was invoking the age-old tradition of the power of Japanese spirit over material odds: My people are capable of superhuman efforts and sacrifice. Therefore, though we have lost our sources of oil and are suffering bombing every day, we still may triumph. The outlook for a negotiated peace could be improved if Japan fought and won one last, decisive battle.

Nor did Hirohito budge after his intelligence forecasters warned him, at a meeting of the Supreme War Leadership Council on February 15, that the Soviet Union intended “to secure a voice in the future of East Asia” and was therefore likely to abrogate its Neutrality Pact with Japan by spring, joining the war whenever thereafter it judged Japan's power to have weakened sufficiently.
¹⁵
The next day Foreign Minister Shigemitsu reiterated that warning. The Nazi Germans had entered their last stage, he declared in a private audience, and the “Three-Power [Yalta] Conference” had clarified the “unity of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union.” Shigemitsu warned Hirohito not to count on the Neutrality Treaty; and just as Konoe had done, he too stressed the internal danger from Communism. But Hirohito refused to see the absurdity of his assumptions about the Soviet Union. At the end of the hour-long audience, he ignored Yalta and asked Shigemitsu a question about the “mood in the German Embassy.”
¹⁶
And Hirohito's mind remained unchanged ten days later when T
j
conceded, during his formal interview at the palace on February 26, that there was a “fifty-fifty” chance that the Soviet Union would turn against Japan.

The chances that the Japanese people could hold out long enough looked slimmer and slimmer as the spring of 1945 passed. On March 9–10, the U.S. Pacific Air Force launched 334 B–29s in the first night incendiary air raid over densely populated Tokyo,
turning about 40 percent of the capital into ash and burning to death an estimated eighty to one hundred thousand people. So hot was the firestorm that water boiled in canals, glass melted, and heat from the updrafts destroyed some of the bombers.
¹⁷
Nine days later, on the eighteenth, the emperor, accompanied by his doctor and a chamberlain, inspected the capital by car. Aide Yoshihashi, who rode behind them in a separate vehicle, later commented that the victims were