Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (325 page)

4.
Ibid., p. 218.

5.
Ibid., p. 235. This entry, for Jan. 28, 1943, refers to a secular, not a religious, ceremony that dates from Jan. 24, 1869, the second year of the Meiji restoration, when the “tradition” was first introduced of using the ancient lyric poetry to tie the modern monarchy firmly to the past, and to the emperor's subjects. It also serves as a reminder that the commander in chief was expected to be a poet.

6.
Ibid., p. 293. June 30 and Dec. 31 were “Grand Purification” days, when Hirohito donned special garments made of white silk and flax in order to perform rites that wiped away the crimes “committed unintentionally by the nation.” See Ihara Yoriaki,
Hoz
, k
shitsu jiten
(Toyamab
, 1938), p. 194.

7.
Abe, “Dai T
'A sens
no keisuteki bunseki,” p. 839.

8.
As of late Sept. 1943, the Imperial Army had only five of its seventy divisions in the Pacific—almost all of them in the south and southwest, where it had deployed about two hundred thousand light infantry troops. Until the last year of the war, despite the overwhelming fire-
power that Allied forces concentrated against them, the army failed to abandon the doctrine of hand-to-hand combat. It neither drew new lessons from defeat nor restructured itself to cope with the kind of war it was actually fighting. Instead, as the war dragged on, the army reduced the size of its divisions while failing to increase either their fire-power or mobility; and it continued to underestimate American and British fighting capability. Thus everywhere the Japanese army fought, it dispersed rather than concentrated its forces, and threw in troops only as they were needed. See Abe, “Dai T
'A sens
no keisuteki bunseki,” pp. 830, 845, and chart 41 on p. 850; Yamada,
Gunbi kakuch
no kindaishi: Nihongun no kakuch
to h
kai
, pp. 209, 221.

9.
Nakao Y
ji, “Dai T
'A sens
ni okeru b
sei teni chien no y
in,” in Gunjishi Gakkai, ed.,
Dainiji sekai taisen (3), Gunji shigaku
31, nos. 1 & 2 (Sept. 1995), p. 110.