Subject to Change
I talk to the world's best historians and let them tell the stories. And the stories are wonderful! (And occasionally I change the subject and talk about films, philosophy or whatever!).
Subject to Change
Shattered Jewels - Japan's Path to War (3 and final)
What makes a nation launch an attack it cannot hope to win? Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, warned Japan's leadership they would have only six months before America would mobilize its entire continent to destroy them. He was right, but his warning was ignored.
The episode starts with a discussion about the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and museum, where we gain insight into how Japan's military establishment viewed their expansionist ambitions. This museum is not just a collection of artifacts, but a repository of the attitudes that drove a nation to catastrophe.
From the initial stunning successes across Asia to the turning point at Midway, we trace how Japan's military philosophy of "better to be a shattered jewel than an intact roof tile" led to extraordinary casualties. The Japanese leadership's desperate hope that inflicting maximum casualties would force America and its allies to accept a negotiated peace collapsed under the weight of industrial warfare and, ultimately, atomic devastation.
We asked when the bitter feelings resulting from the conflicts that made up Japan's wars in the Pacific might fade. Jonathan suggest the following might help in trying to answer this. "Everyone periodizes history in their mind into three different categories: everything from Adam and Eve to my grandfather, what happened from my grandfather to me, and what happened in my own lifetime."
Join us for this conversation about the decisions that led to war, the mindsets that prolonged it, and the complex legacy that continues to influence international relations in East Asia today.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, russell Hogg. My guest today is Jonathan Clements. Jonathan and I have been talking about the wars that followed in the wake of Japan's Meiji Restoration and today we've reached the end, which is to say we're going to talk about the war that Japan launched against America, britain and their allies and that started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, famously on 7th December 1941. So welcome, jonathan, to the podcast. Thank you for having me back. I just wanted to start by asking about something.
Speaker 1:I was in Tokyo a few years ago and I visited the Yasukuni Shrine and that's quite famous and controversial because various war criminals are enshrined there. But the thing that interested me more than the shrine was the museum that they've put right next to it. And, for the listeners, if you are ever in Tokyo and you definitely should go to Tokyo this is one of the things I'd really recommend that you go and see. The reason I found it so interesting is that, so far as I could tell, it was telling me the story of Japan's wars very much from the point of view of Japan's establishment at the time. So in the early halls of the museum there's a really enthusiastic telling of the story. It's all about Japan's victories against China and Russia, and there's also some explanation later on about why Japan felt the need to attack America and while, as you get to the end, there are also many stories of the poor, doomed Japanese soldiers very poignant stories, but you don't get any real sense of acknowledgement that Japan itself was in any way responsible for what had happened. And just to give you an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, one of the bitterest memories of the war, for the British at least, was the forced labour of their prisoners of war on the Burma railway, and many, many allied prisoners, and I should say also countless local forced labourers, were basically worked to death in the building of that railway, and that bitterness endured long after the war had ended.
Speaker 1:Well, when you come into the entrance hall of the museum, the first thing you see well, actually you see two things, because you have hanging from the roof is this really rather beautiful zero fighter plane. But below the fighter plane there's this railway engine and beside the railway engine there's sort of a photograph of some men standing behind it, and the engine is in the jungle in Thailand, covered in vegetation, and they're sort of standing beside it, looking extremely happy. They've tracked down this engine in the jungle and they've brought it back to Japan. They've restored the engine and they put it in the Yasukuni Museum and as a British visitor it just came as quite a shock to see this sort of celebration of the Burma Railway.
Speaker 1:But regardless, it is a splendid museum and, as I say, not least of what I liked about it. I'm not sure liked is the right word, but what I really appreciated is that it wasn't just a museum of things but it was also a museum of attitudes and I felt I got a glimpse of how the military and the nationalists in Japan back in the 1930s, how they were seeing the world, because normally the story I hear is purely from the point of view of Britain and America. So I thought that was really valuable. So again, sorry for the long introduction, but I wondered, before we start talking about the war, I'd be interested to hear something about the Yasukuni Shrine and the.
Speaker 2:That has been ridiculously controversial over the years for all kinds of different reasons, and today it is most infamous for being the site that enshrines a bunch of Class A war criminals and we'll get to what a Class A war criminal is later on. And so you know, very controversially, hirohito refused to go after a while, after the war, because he realized that it was causing trouble. I don't think the emperors have shown up there since the 70s and when a new prime minister is elected in Japan it's always like will they go to Yasukuni or not? And quite often they do visit Yasukuni because it appeals to those on the right wing In terms of wings. You know, the right wing dominated the Japanese education system right up to 1945. And the left wing took it over thereafter. So there's this huge kind of swing in kind of attitudes and the way stories are told. You know, within Japan, the story the japanese tell about themselves, for example. But yasukuni has always been there and I mean to give you a bit of context.
Speaker 2:When it started out it was controversial for who wasn't enshrined there, not who was, because it began as the shokon shah, the, the shrine to summon the spirits, and it was built in 1869 to enshrine the spirits of those people who died in the service of the emperor during the Meiji Restoration.
Speaker 2:So the people who fought for the emperor in the Meiji Restoration got to be buried well, not buried, but got to have their symbolic souls enshrined at the Shokon-sha. And the people who fought against the emperor, the people who fought for the shogun, didn't get in. So the idea was, this shrine was a, was a place that you know, that valued your patriotism. 10 years later it got rebranded. Over the years yatakuni has become a place that enshrines everyone who dies in the patriotic service of the japanese nation. But that became a controversial issue after 1877, because Saigo Takamori, one of the samurai who led the Meiji Restoration, who kind of fought in the Battle of Ueno, led a rebellion. He felt he'd been swindled. This wasn't what he fought for, and so he led the very famously the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which was roundly put down by the new conscript army.
Speaker 1:Hang on. You say he didn't get what he'd signed up for, what had gone wrong?
Speaker 2:Well, we talked about this in the first podcast. See, when the major restoration happened, a whole bunch of people thought that they were going to keep the foreigners out and that the whole thing was like an anti-immigration stance and that the samurai would stay in charge and there'd be a new competent shogun or something like that. And what Saigo Takamori got was a constitutional monarchy with a democracy slowly creeping in, and he had to cut his hair and he wasn't allowed to wear his swords anymore, and he didn't get anything that he thought he was fighting for. And he was the inspiration for the character played by Ken Watanabe in the Last Samurai, if that puts things in movie context, and he was a grand failure. But his nobility of purpose is something the Japanese have always admired, and his most famous saying was a quote from an ancient Chinese book. He said it's better to be a shattered jewel than an intact roof tile, and what he meant by that is that he didn't want to be another brick in the wall of a modern state. He wanted to go out with a blaze of glory, which indeed he did.
Speaker 2:Now, very controversially, he wasn't enshrined in in the shokonsha shrine. The emperor changed the name of the shrine to yasukuni, which means pacifying the nation after the satsuma rebellion. And uh, if you go to ueno park, there's a statue of Saeko Takamori there and, very famously, he's not in armor, because they wouldn't authorize putting him in armor. He looks like he's wearing a dressing gown actually, but anyway. So Saeko Takamori became an incredibly popular figure. His doomed rebellion was something that was greatly admired and the stance that he took was something that was greatly admired, and the stance that he took was something that was taken up by his colleagues, his former countrymen from Satsuma and Choshu, in the army, in the navy. By the 1890s, the quote die as a shattered jewel had made its way into the navy battle hymn, which meant that every day someone was singing it somewhere on the navy and indeed it was being played on the radio on the day that Chewitchin Nagamore's fleet was steaming towards Pearl Harbour.
Speaker 1:So that's the shrine, but what do you know about the museum itself? Because, as I say, it just struck me that this felt like this is a place where the nationalists are still very much in charge of the narrative.
Speaker 2:Yes, they are, and there have been numerous protests about it in Japan. There have been at least two bombing attacks on the Yasukuni Shrine, if I remember rightly, by people protesting about the story that it tells. But it's a very difficult line to walk if you want to talk realistically about the, the feelings of the japanese nation um during the 1920s and the 1930s. Modern historians say we can't assume that everyone was in lockstep behind the generals. There's lots of people kind of bullied into it and pretending that the whole nation was of one heart and one mind is very unfair. But nevertheless, when you are celebrating a nation's wartime achievements and it's a nation that lost and it's a nation that then, during the occupation period, very publicly and repeatedly was told you were led into this by the samurai and the nobles, you were deluded by fake news it's a very difficult story to tell because at a certain at a certain level, everyone in japan was colluding in the war effort. That's exactly what uh koi so kuniaki's plan was for total war by the end of the war. There were teenagers working in the factories and you know children were expected to wave the navy flag and you know everyone was expected to be part of the war there were teenagers working in the factories and children were expected to wave the Navy flag and everyone was expected to be part of the war effort.
Speaker 2:And one of the problems that the Americans had, the Allies had when they took over in the occupation was that they started trying to kind of hunt down war criminals, and in the end it was very difficult not to say that everyone in Japan was supporting the war effort in some way. And so I mean it's been a long time since I've been to the Imperial War Museum in London, for example, and I think the narrative there is slightly different. It kind of acknowledges that imperialism and colonialism might be something that we might not necessarily want to be proud of now, but nevertheless you want to report the way that the imperialists and the colonists felt happy about it 100 years earlier, while perhaps acknowledging the people that they were oppressing. And I think that's the problem of the Yasukuni Shrine is that it does tell you very reasonably the story of the Japanese, but does it really tell you the story of the Filipinos and the Chinese and the Koreans and the Allied soldiers that fought against them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. Well, look, let's get to Pearl Harbor. 7th December 1941, which Roosevelt famously says is a date that will live in infamy. So the obvious question is I mean, what on earth were the Japanese thinking? Why were they launching an attack on the Americans and why were they doing it then?
Speaker 2:The Japanese had been aiming for 20 years or more. At autarky they wanted to have not just the home islands but an area around the home islands that would provide them with resources and materials that would allow them to basically wall off the rest of the world. There was a certain group, within the army and certainly, which said we kind of want to be an isolationist power again, like we were during the sakoku period, but we just want to be a bit bigger. We want to kind of incorporate manchuria and korea as well, because that way we won't have to worry about the amer cutting off our trade or losing the sea routes or anything like that. And the Navy had a different angle. They wanted to move south to kind of take over the Dutch East Indies, maybe to enjoy this vast Pacific island network that the Japanese had sort of slowly put together. In both cases they were being threatened by the cutting off of their oil supply and by the running out of their money. It was.
Speaker 2:It was put to the generals and the admirals that we had to do something about this, and admiral yamamoto isoroku, the famous reluctant admiral, was the guy who gave him the advice. And we talked about this last time. Is that? Um, what I did mention is is that he had real form with the americans. He'd studied in america, he was an accomplished poker player. He traveled all over america with his winnings at poker. He knew a lot about america from having been there in person, and he'd also been repeatedly threatened by ultra nationalists for behaving as in in their eyes, in a conciliatory way, towards the americans.
Speaker 2:And he said no, no, the. The way you can do this is you. You can buy yourself some time to have your, your material supply, your oil supply, online by taking over the dutch east indies. But to do that, you've got to take out the americans. You've got to deliver a knockout blow to their fleet at pearl harbor that keeps them out of your way for six months. And then you've got six months to do what you need to do uh, rationalizing your forces, getting everything together in in southeast asia. But but he warned them. He said after six months they're coming at you with everything they've got and it is an entire continent that will be retooled to destroy you. So you've really got to do a good job of this.
Speaker 2:And so the pearl harbour itself was a fantastically bold tactical move. I mean, it stretched the Japanese fleet to its very limits in fuel. They had to launch their fighters from way, way far away. It was a surprise attack that did immense damage to American forces and did indeed shut them out of the Western Pacificific for six months. So in that regard, it did what it was supposed to do, but the young immortal's warning was largely unheeded. His entire quote, which added the bit at the end about how then it'll all be over when they come for you, was normally gently cut out from whenever anyone talked about it. So the fact that this was a real Hail Mary was something that not a lot of people appreciated.
Speaker 1:Well, I'd like to sort of push back a little bit on the fact that it achieved what it set out to do. It seems that Pearl Harbor is actually quite shallow, so when they sank the battleships they sort of gently subsided beneath the waves by about eight feet or whatever it was, and then they sort of rested there and in due course the Americans were able to patch them up and I think out of the battleships that were sunk, I think all but one of them they managed eventually to refloat, and they didn't have time for some reason, or they missed out hitting the repair yards and the fuel dumps. So Pearl Harbor remains a facility that can still be used. And then, finally, the worst of their luck, if you like, is that the three aircraft carriers that America has at this stage in the Pacific, they'd all been sent off somewhere else, so they missed the aircraft carriers.
Speaker 2:That's all true. I don't disagree with any of that. I've been to Pearl Harbor and the Arizona is still there underwater with this kind of monument over the top of it, and it's a very moving place to go. The curators there, as your boat kind of chugs over to the Arizona, they give this long speech about how this is a war grave and you know, can we not have any stupid selfies? And each day they tell a different story about one of the men who died on the Arizona and they kind of get and there were many of them, so he gets them through the year.
Speaker 2:So, yes, the ships were sunk in shallow water, but they were out of commission for six months. You're absolutely right about the fuel dumps and the repair facilities. Admiral Nagamore, who was in charge of the attack, didn't want to come back for another strike. He didn't want to risk his planes anymore. His ships were already very, very far out of range and so he didn't order a return. The Japanese did actually attempt to make a second attack on pearl harbor some months later. Uh, with seaplanes. They, they flew these seaplanes out to these, uh, a reef a long way away from from hawaii, and they refuel. And then the idea was they're going to refuel there and then they're going to take off and and bomb pearl harbor, but I didn't, and and the whole point of that was to destroy the repair facilities as well. And yes, the business with the aircraft carriers is one of those remarkable and suspicious coincidences. They just happened to be out, you know, on a cruise at the time that the surprise attack came, and the Americans were very lucky there.
Speaker 2:However, I think the attack on Pearl Harbor did what it was supposed to do. Maybe they were a few weeks earlier in in striking back, and then they would have been if those facilities hadn't been destroyed and there's some, there's some discussion about that if pearl harbour had been, if they got all three carriers as well and destroy the repair facilities, would that have made the americans say, oh well, we're going to stay out of the pacific now, which I think is quite naive? I don't think americans behave like that when you bomb them. I think 9-1-1 tells you how americans behave when you bomb them, and I think that the japanese, if they thought it was going to be like a newspaper on the nose for for a dog and it would kind of run away, that was never going to happen. That's why I say it was an immense tactical victory. Strategically, the things that a fleet didn't achieve on that attack would eventually return to bite the Japanese absolutely.
Speaker 1:Okay, so flipping it slightly on its head and going with a counterfactual I think counterfactuals are good fun, but most historians sort of look at them slightly jaundiced eye. But supposing the Japanese had tried a different strategy, which was to say, okay, we need the supplies in the Dutch East Indies, let's attack the Dutch East Indies, let's leave the Americans alone, let's not attack the Philippines, let's not attack Pearl Harbor, let's just ignore them completely. Attack the British and Singapore, attack the Dutch. So my thought is I'm sure that President Roosevelt would have wanted to fight, but at the time Congress is very isolationist. So do you think there's a chance that they could have achieved what they wanted and gained more time, or maybe even kept the Americans out altogether, just by leaving them alone?
Speaker 2:No, I don't think so. I think America was drifting towards the fight anyway. There would have been some other incident that would have dragged America in if it wasn't for Pearl Harbor. That would have dragged America in if it wasn't for Pearl Harbor. If they had gone straight for the Dutch East Indies, the Americans would have been behind them at the Philippines. Because you say, counterfactuals are disliked by historians. They're part of military policy and have been for 100 years.
Speaker 2:So the Americans had a plan for what to do if they were attacked by Japan throughout the 20th century and up until 1940, I think the plan was anytime there's trouble in the east, we get the whole fleet from Pearl Harbor and we head straight for the Philippines.
Speaker 2:And that was changed just around the time, just about a year before Pearl Harbor. I think that an attack on the Dutch East Indies would have stretched the Japanese fleet even further Don't forget they're running out of fuel and their expectation was that the British and the Dutch would have destroyed their oil refineries at the first sign of an attack, that there would have been a sabotage and, as a result, that would have made life much more difficult for them. Also, I think it's worth bearing in mind that Pearl Harbor was not the only place that was attacked. There were many other places that were also attacked on the day of infamy, including the Philippines, including Singapore, and so, in some ways, those attacks did happen. We remember Pearl Harbor because it was such a success, but so too was the fall of Singapore, as far as the Japanese were concerned, and the other places they attacked. So is it a counterfactual, or are we just not noticing that it already happened?
Speaker 1:Well, my point was counterfactual in the sense that you hope that the American Congress will be so isolationist that at least it'll take time for them to engage in the war.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think it's very interesting to see what Roosevelt's position was. Sarah Payne I was watching an interview with her only last week and her position was Sarah Payne, I was watching an interview with her only last week and her position was Roosevelt was terrified that the Japanese would attack Russia and if they attacked Russia it would drag Russian forces away from the European front and make life so much more difficult for Europe. She suggested that he might actually be relieved by an attack on Pearl Harbor, because that would save American lives in Europe, even if it cost them in the Pacific. And it's very interesting to know what the reaction was among the Allies.
Speaker 2:Chiang Kai-shek very famously danced for joy when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor because it meant the Americans were coming to help him in China in a much greater way than they had been before. And Winston Churchill went off for a very peaceful and restful sleep, happy that this meant the Americans were coming. Whereas in Japan you've got people like Matsuoka, who had advised joining an alliance with the Germans and the Italians to keep Japan out of the war, saying, oh my God, this is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to happen. So yeah, there's very, very. You know mixed reactions to it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you know you mentioned there were attacks, not just on Pearl Harbor but attacks all over the East, and one of the problems the Japanese have is that they're too successful in a way because they take huge numbers of prisoners. In my introduction I think one of the things that sort of stays in the memory for the Western powers was how their prisoners were treated. Do you want to say a bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and this is a very emotive issue as well which never left my grandparents and their generation. So the Japanese were incredibly successful in Singapore and Hong Kong, in the Philippines and Dutch East Indies. Their period of running wild, as Yamamoto called it, did indeed last for six months, and they acquired tens of thousands of prisoners of war and non-competent prisoners as well, with no idea what to do with them, with no facilities or logistics for processing that many people, so a lot of them ended up in camps used as slave labor. The position of the japanese had always been that you have to shatter like a jewel, you don't surrender, you go out on a blaze of glory, and so the fact that all of these people from the other side had surrendered was not something that they were prepared for in any way. Japan had signed the 1929 geneva convention about the treatment of prisoners, which related to the treatment of prisoners, but they'd never ratified it, because in 1934, the army minister protested. He said we can't sign this because if we sign this, we are agreeing to treat our prisoners better than our soldiers, which tells you something really important about life in the Japanese army that, if you kept to the provisions of the Geneva Convention, you'd be treating someone better than a Japanese soldier.
Speaker 2:There have been numerous discussions of the way that the samurai ethic dragged its way into the Japanese military. There have been numerous discussions of the way that the samurai ethic dragged its way into the Japanese military. There have been numerous excuses about how, you know, you take a country that has been pretending it lives in the Middle Ages for 250 years and you drag them into the modern world, but nothing has really changed for them in terms of their attitude towards the prisoners, for example. I think that's simplistic, but it certainly explains a lot about the way the Japanese behaved. So, as far as they were concerned, their own soldier's manual, which eventually infected the education system as a whole, and the common people said that it was better to die than to surrender, and so their attitude towards the people who had surrendered was that they were less than human.
Speaker 2:You know, the Japanese were awful to everybody, and the number of atrocities was so huge that the various war crimes trials couldn't process them all. I mean we might get there later on in the podcast, but the famous Tokyo trials were only one of them. There were also trials in Australia. There were trials in Hong Kong. There were trials in China. They went on until the 50s and in some cases they kind of reached a sort of time there and said okay, well, the rest of you can go, because we've run out of interpreters or we've run out of, you know, legal time. Even so, 900 people were executed as war criminals at the end of the war, and and that doesn't include the ones who were imprisoned- and what's morale like back on the home islands, because this is presumably, you know, seen as a massive success.
Speaker 1:Is it? Is it greeted with joy? Are there doubts? Can anyone even express a doubt at this time in history?
Speaker 2:There's not a lot of expressions of doubt going on. There's been some very good work recently by historians saying that there were some Japanese dissenters who found a way to be negative about the war by pretending to be positive, and that you have to read between the lines sometimes. I mean there was a was a newspaper, for example, that reported about the glorious return home of our soldiers but had a picture of a bunch of coffins and got away with it because of the way the caption was positioned on the page and the fact you'd need to be looking really carefully to work out what it referred to, and so on. Basically, the population were told this was a fantastic victory. They were told that this was what yamamoto had everybody to do and it was a part of a great plan. And for six months this was true.
Speaker 2:For six months the Japanese were scoring incredible successes, right up until was it July 42, when they landed on Attu, when they landed on an island that's part of Alaska, so technically they landed on American island, that's part of Alaska, so technically they landed on American territory and planted the Japanese flag, and this was like a huge, huge series of celebrations. No one dared stand up to them. We talked last podcast about Saito, the politician who stood up in the Diet and said you know what is this for? Well, the army and the navy said what this is for is that we, you know, once we've defeated the Americans in the Pacific, we get everything we want in Southeast Asia. We are done. And the big controversy, on both right and left in Japan, I feel, is that Japan here's another counterfactual for you.
Speaker 2:It's possible that if Japan had called a halt to its activities at a certain point, they might have been able to retain bits of their empire. It's possible that they could have offered a deal in, say, 1942, and said look, okay, sorry about this, we'll stop, we'll concede, we'll give back Attu, just let's keep Manchuria, and sorry about the whole thing, and we will do something. But by that point, because of Pearl Harbor, they didn't think the Americans were going to turn back in their counterattack and the Army and the Navy had doubled down constantly on the risks. I mean, you know, pearl Harbor itself was such a gamble. But after that point it became readily apparent that the Army and the Navy were fighting for their lives, you know, as an institution and as people who were going to get hanged in the event of a surrender. They kept on saying how great things were going, even when the tide started to turn at Midway.
Speaker 1:Things did go well, and this is something you know. It's too big a subject, I suppose, for the podcast, but you know, there's this ignominious defeat of the British at Singapore. There's the sinking of these two huge ships. I can't remember the name, is it the Repulse and the Prince of Wales? Prince of Wales, yeah, hong Kong is taken Well, it's maybe not so hard, but the Philippines at least. The Americans put up a bit of a fight for the Philippines, much more so perhaps than the British did, and to get the Dutch East Indies, to me at least. I don't know as much about this subject as I should, but it just strikes me as to why the British and the Dutch in particular, why they're so weak, because presumably they know the terrain. They've had years, they've had decades and decades and decades to fortify their positions, and it's not as though they won't have been aware that Japan is, at least in terms of military planning, they're the obvious enemy, and yet they just fall over almost immediately.
Speaker 2:There was the fact it was a surprise attack, and I suspect as well that we're looking at a military complex that is much more concentrated on the european theater than it is in east asia. Yeah, and, and when it comes, I mean you, you, you dismiss the defense of hong kong out of hand, which I only out of ignorance, oh no, well, uh, of being informed, let me tell you, you're absolutely right. Um, a couple of months ago I was at the liam on battery, which was the main kind of gun emplacement on the approach to victoria harbour, and there's this big kind of I think they're Armstrong cannons that are kind of pointed out across the water, and they were there for 20 years before someone realised that the elevation was wrong and the only thing they could hit was Kowloon. So if you were a ship flying in, they were coming in through the water, they'd just go right over your head in through the water.
Speaker 1:they just go right over your head hong kong is famously indefensible.
Speaker 2:It's a wonderful harbor but you can't wall it off. My old cantonese lecturer used to be in the raf auxiliary in hong kong and they had, I think, three planes and their plan was, if hong kong's attack, get in the planes and run, because there was very little chance of defending it. Of course there were some fantastically brave efforts by the local people to fight after Hong Kong fell, linking up with the East River column across the border in China, but nevertheless Hong Kong was indefensible and I'm not sure Singapore could have stood, particularly when the Japanese came at it the way they did through the jungle. The big tragedy with Singapore was that the fall of Singapore lost the British most of their interpreters. So there was back in England. There was this huge scramble to teach people how to speak Japanese and Chinese because they'd lost them all. So SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, had this fantastic program that kicked off immediately, where they were recruiting people all over the British Isles saying are you good at French, are you good at German? Are you good at chess? What kind of music do you like? Okay, report here. And then they had this intensive program to teach Japanese, which Peter Kornitsky has written a fantastic book about.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I think the British were taken by surprise.
Speaker 2:They were overextended, they were concentrating more on Europe, and the Japanese move was so bold that I don't think anyone thought they would do it.
Speaker 2:The idea that Pearl Harbor could be attacked as part of a Japanese assault had been part of American military thinking for 30 or 40 years.
Speaker 2:Assault have been part of american military thinking for 30 or 40 years, but the idea that they would actually do it right, um, in order to protect themselves for six months, doing what that's the thing yamamoto said to them. You know, this is a really, really risky thing to do, and what exactly do you hope to achieve in these six months? That's going to make this work. And the top brass, particularly general tojo, really thought that they could behave the way that they behaved in previous wars grab a bunch of territory, give a little bit of it back as a sort of deal and then hold on to it. You know it's how they behaved in the sino-japanese war, is how they behaved in the russo-japanese war. They were hoping that this time they could just get a bigger chunk, and and I think that's the thing we think of World War II today, with 2020 hindsight, as a quest by the Allies for unconditional surrender, whereas I think Tojo was thinking it as a deal that he made with guns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we mentioned the Japanese taking over. Is it Atulu? Did you say Atu, atu, and in, I think, june or July of 42. But even before that, the Americans have started to strike back because they have this famous bombing raid on Tokyo, that's the Doolittle bombing raid. So what's all that about?
Speaker 2:Ah, the Doolittle raid is one of my favourite bits of World War II history. I absolutely love it because it's so crazy. And if you see the film Pearl Harbour, alec Baldwin plays Jimmy Doolittle and you can see him thinking throughout the film. Why is this film not about me? I'm the story here. So what happened was you know?
Speaker 2:Pearl Harbour is attacked, roosevelt takes America into the war that he's promised that he wouldn't take them into, and to build american morale and to really kick the japanese in the nuts, he wants to do something show-offy. And there's this harebrained scheme to get a bunch of bombers and to put them on aircraft carriers, sail them as close as they can possibly get to to asia, and then the bombers would take off from on aircraft carriers, sail them as close as they can possibly get to Asia, and then the bombers would take off from the aircraft carriers, bomb Japan and they wouldn't have enough fuel to get back. I mean, ironically, for everyone who was shocked at the kamikazes, this was a one-way mission and the idea was that the bombers would then continue on to China and either link up with Chinese forces or ditch in China. So they had to, you know, rip everything out of these planes so that they would fly and put in extra fuel tanks and get them all ready. Fine pilots were prepared to volunteer for a one-way mission in the vague hope they could jump out with a parachute somewhere over China. And off they went and they turned up in the sky over Tokyo and Kobe and Osaka and dropped their bombs.
Speaker 2:And the Japanese were totally not ready for this.
Speaker 2:Remember, the news in Japan is saying we're winning, we're doing great, we show those Americans who's boss. And in fact I have the diary of Mochinaga Tadahito, who was one of the animators working on Japanese propaganda films, one of the animators working on Japanese propaganda films. And they were working on Momotaro's Sea Eagles in 42, which was all about how great the Japanese were and how they'd really shown everyone in Pearl Harbor who was boss. And they were on the roof having a fag halfway through their work for the day, and they saw these American bombers come over Tokyo Bay and start bombing the city and they were like this message that we're sending, that we're winning, is probably corrupt in some way, isn't it? And so it was a huge shock to the Japanese and, to deal firstly with the impact of the bombs, it was purely a propaganda exercise about the Americans. It didn't do lasting damage to Japanese industry. At least one of the bombs hit a school, which led to the execution of the captured airmen as war criminals. I think Tojo was arguing for that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I was a bit shocked by that because when you imagine what the Japanese had been doing in their period of attacks and what they'd been doing in Manchuria and in China, you know since the 1930s, to turn around and say, oh my God, you know, a bomb has hit a school. This is an unthinkable crime that must be punished by execution. I mean, come on.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, I mean bullies can dish it out, but they can't take it. I think would be the would be the succinct version of that. The japanese in the home islands were often, I think, unaware of of what their soldiers were doing. This has been a question that's often been revisited by historians because, for example, there was a famous case during the walkheims trial, of two soldiers who had a competition to see who could behead the most people in nanjing I think it was that first 200 or something and they were put on trial and eventually executed as war criminals and they were saying, oh, that didn't really happen. And they're like well, we have the press reports from the Japanese news saying what the score is. So in some cases the actions of Japanese soldiers abroad were being reported, were known to the media. But I think when you divide the world into us and them, and and them are non-human, yeah, then when, when the other turns up and and strikes back, um, it's a shock.
Speaker 2:And tojo himself said in his, in his defense, uh, in his, in his rather haphazard and unlikely defense, that he's war crimes. So you have to understand how people felt at that time. It's like, yes, we do so. Yes, it's a remarkable double standard. But you know, war makes monsters of everybody. I mean, that's true, you know. Ask someone in Dresden how they feel about the RAF. Or there's a terrifying Danish film, which I think is very unimaginatively called the Bombing, on Netflix which is about a very daring and much celebrated RAF raid on Denmark which hit a school and it's told from the point of view of the teachers and the students in the school and it's absolutely harrowing.
Speaker 2:And that's the problem with Total War, once you out, into the 19th century into the 20th century, when everyone is a participant, suddenly everybody is at risk and what happens? I mean, I suppose one way of looking at which it used to be what happened on the battlefield stays on the battlefield, but suddenly everywhere is the battlefield yes, yes, total war and, in particular, bombing of cities. Yes, the bombing of civilian targets, which technically is a war crime, I think as one of the arguments that has been made, since I think under one of the Geneva Conventions you're not supposed to bomb civilians.
Speaker 1:Oh well, let's move on swiftly from that. And the record of the RAF in the war then. So from 1942 onwards, I mean nothing goes right. And the sea battles they lose pretty much every sea battle from there on. In. And on the land battles as the Americans start to take the islands, the Japanese, well, they're outgunned, they're outsupplied, but even then their tactical sense feels like they're fighting the wrong war. Their tactics just don't work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and many of them are literally in the wrong place as well. So to start with Midway, it's technically part of the Hawaiian island chain, but it's like hundreds of miles away from the rest of it and it's just this little atom in the middle of nowhere. By the time of Midway, the Americans had cracked the code the Japanese used to communicate, and it's been suggested that maybe that's why they knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen. I think the trouble is the command to attack Pearl Harbor was climb Mount Nittaka, which, even if you could crack that as a code, you wouldn't know what it meant. However, when it came to Midway, the Japanese had a plan to lure the American carriers to Midway on the grounds that Midway was out of fighter range of Pearl Harbor. So Pearl Harbor could not support a surprise attack on carriers in Midway, and this was a great idea. Unfortunately, the Americans had cracked the code, so they sent a message about some I think some broken boiler parts or something on Midway, and then the next day they heard the Japanese saying oh yeah, we need some boiler repair parts for the next mission. So they knew it was going to be midway, and so the japanese showed up just with with what they thought would be a surprise attack, but actually they were surprised back and it was a terrible disaster for them, because not only did they lose a lot of men and machinery, they lost their best pilots. They lost was it? Four aircraft carriers? Um, with the ground crew? I mean, that's the thing you you think in terms of planes. But it's not just the planes that they've lost, it's the pilots, who take much longer to replace, and the ground crews. And so after, after midway, the navy has been eviscerated, it's been flinched of its best people, and you get planes that have been badly made in factories, by people who don't know what they're doing, who are too tired to really get a good handle on it, being flown by people who haven't really learned how to fly properly and serviced by ground crews who've forgotten which widget goes where, and this only adds to the kind of rolling damage that's done.
Speaker 2:And, as you say, we have these various sea battles which are reported in the Japanese press as victories, victories that get successfully closer to Japan each time they happen, and some people are saying that sounds a bit weird. And then you have the army being told we need to defend these islands. We realize that the Americans are island hopping and they're seizing these bases and Midway strategically to give you another counterfactual't that big a deal. It didn't really achieve anything. If the japanese had won at midway, the americans would have been a few weeks later in their eventual return. But by that point american factories are turning out so many ships and so many planes. A loss of midway would not have drastically affected the war effort, it just would have made it longer.
Speaker 2:After Midway you start to get on islands that are closer and closer to Japan. If you take Saipan, if you take Tinian, then you are in bombing range of Japanese targets. And of course, very famously, if you take Iwo Jima, then you're in bombing range of Tokyo. And technically Iwo Jima is part of Tokyo. I don't know if you know this, even though it's like 1,500 miles away by some kind of weird zoning rule, it's actually the outskirts of Tokyo.
Speaker 2:And so the Navy, the Japanese Navy, was very well aware that if they lost Saipan, Tinian, then the Allied forces would have ground-based opportunities to send bombers after them. They wouldn't be clinging on to a um, putting a hokey bomber onto a, onto an aircraft carrier on a one-way mission. They would be within range and that would cause trouble. So so the army is told you have to defend these places, and the army is used to fighting battles or has been trained to fight battles. It hasn't been trained to fight defense. And there's one case of a Japanese officer who said the way to win this battle is for us to hold off the Americans for as long as possible. But a bunch of us can go and hide in the caves and then, when the Americans are on there, we can come out and fight them. But that meant a bunch of soldiers had to retreat and no one would do it.
Speaker 1:They're like no, no, no, we're here to fight.
Speaker 2:We're here to fight. We had a fight, but you know it goes against the manual for us to run away and it's like no, no, I want you to run away, I want you to hide in the forest for a bit. And so you know it caused all kinds of trouble. They're kind of convincing them that's what they were supposed to do and eventually you have the uh, the army and the navy saying we need to establish an absolute defensive line. This is how Tojo spins it in the end. He knows that he's losing. He knows that these islands are falling one by one.
Speaker 2:The issue is, if we just hold these islands, each island, for as long as we can, we shatter like a jewel, and the first use of the term shatter jewel in military dispatches is actually at Attu, when the Americans take back Attu in Alaska. After. After that, you see the term shattered jewel turning up more and more and tojo starts using it in his speeches. He's like what we want is a shattered jewel victory on each island, because we'll lose the island anyway. But when we lose that island the americans have lost so many men and so many machines and so much time they'll be demoralized, and the more we can demoralize them, the more we can convince them that every single place they take is going to be like this, better the chances we can hold our absolute defensive line and at some point they'll stop fighting and they'll say okay, fine, let's just. Let's just stick with things the way they are and and sign a conditional.
Speaker 2:What what tojo was off was a surrender which he thought he could win by fighting this absolutely offensive line. And of course, what that meant is they were just throwing thousands and thousands of men to their deaths and they were celebrating and lionizing this idea of being a shattered jewel to the point that it became an order Okay, lads, it's time for the shattered jewel. Let's throw a grenade into the infirmary, because we don't want anyone left alive. And that's when you get these suicide charges, these so-called banzai charges, for example, in this island combat which, for the Allied forces, is a terrible shock because they're not ready for that.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean, I think, the refusal of the Japanese to give up. I think it just revolts the Americans because they're risking their lives to beat an enemy that is already beaten. Yes, I was reading an extraordinary statistic that amongst these island garrisons, typically between about 1% and 3% survive to surrender. I think I read on the Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands, I think it was 17 out of 3,600 are captured alive, and that's not untypical. And so I think, to some extent, the savagery with which the war is fought by the Americans and it was pretty savage is partly due to that.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think it's also worth mentioning that. You say they were revolted by the Japanese resolve to just hang on to this territory at no cost. I think in a certain military sense, they were probably quite impressed by that. I think what revolted them was fake surrenders. That became. One of the huge issues with the Iron in combat is that there were some occasions when a Japanese soldier would come out waving a white flag and actually be a human bomb, for example, and that started to tax their patience quite considerably. Also, I think this is probably a good time to talk about the trophy issue, which is something that's widely underreported in the history books, which was that after Guadalcanal.
Speaker 2:After Guadalcanal, there was an effort among the Americans to suppress reporting of trophy taking by American soldiers. It's worth bearing in mind that one in four of the men who were in the American army were hunters, were either farm boys or people who fished and hunted for fun and were well used to going out into the forest and shooting at people. And some of the propaganda the American propaganda was basically selling the chance to join up and fight as a chance to shoot Japanese to hunt monkeys, as they once said. God, horrible, and this attitude it turned out and people are mentioning in dispatches after Guadalcanal. There are guys sending Japanese teeth back to their girlfriends or cutting an ear off and keeping one as a trophy. One man even presented Roosevelt with a paper knife that he'd made out of someone's ribcage and Roosevelt's like get this out of the Oval Office, for God's sake, what are you doing? We need to maintain the moral high ground here, and these trophies are still an issue stretching right into the 21st century.
Speaker 2:There are some absolutely fantastic stories that I'm totally sure should be an episode of an American crime show one day. There's a guy in 2001,. They found a skull in a lake in Lake Columbia somewhere in America. So the police get called. There's a human skull. It turns out that there was a war veteran who had become a biology teacher and who had kept it on his desk throughout his career and that when he died, his grandson had inherited it, painted it gold and put it in a bandana and had it in his bedroom for a while until when he realized it was a bit creepy, he threw it in the lake to get rid of it, and this is the human remains of a Japanese soldier.
Speaker 2:And there are loads of cases like this. In my book Japan at War in the Pacific, I actually talk about a production of Hamlet I was in where we had a real Japanese skull playing Yorick. Oh my God, I was in Portobello road with my dad and we were looking for skulls and then there was one, uh, you know, in a glass case and and the woman selling it said, oh, very interesting story about this. It was a japanese soldier. And my dad said I don't care what he, we just need a skull, thank you. And it took a while to kind of register that. You know you're you're dealing with. You know how did that skull get to london, right, you know, this sort of uh thing was something that was. They tried to keep quiet, um, and tried to encourage the americans not to do. The skull I found in london, I suspect, came from a british soldier. So let's not just pretend it was just the americans doing this.
Speaker 1:There was uh, it's quite interesting, you mentioned the trophy taking. One of the moving parts of the yasakuni museum is that they have these, what is is called the Hinomaru flags, and I guess these were also taken as trophies, because I think many times the Japanese soldiers would have a flag prepared for them by their relatives, so to sort of take with them into combat and it's going to sign by all the neighbors and by the family, and so these were taken off the soldiers and I think there's quite moving returns of these flags which take place even to this day. I think there's even, maybe, a society which makes it its business to track down these flags and to bring them back to Japan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they've got the Hinomaru flags, they've got the thousand-stitch belts, which are these belts which everyone in the neighborhood is asked to add a stitch to which, at the beginning of the war, was something that was discouraged, um, by the authorities, and by the end, they were trying to get everyone involved and so that became more of a thing. I have to say, actually, I went to um, I went to nagasaki, to the, the bond park there, and there's actually a very moving exhibit there, which is basically, you know how they have those city maps in Japanese districts, next to the police station where they tell you where everyone lives. There's one of those for Nagasaki with all the family names of all the people who were living in the bomb radius, and it's beautifully done. It's very, very subtle. It's just like if this had not been bombed, these are the people who you know mrs matsumoto would live here and you know, and the tsurajima family are here as just people's names.
Speaker 1:It's very simple so so now the war is. Everybody can see the war is going badly. So what? What's morale like on the home front? How are they? There's a sense of desperation.
Speaker 2:Everything is becoming more drab and austere. I mean in much the same way that wartime London, you know, had to deal with rationing and so on. But in Japan we're dealing with not only bombers appearing in the sky, not only with constant reports of people dying, but squeezes on food and resources. Teenagers are being co-opted into factories, the cin teenagers are being co-opted into factories. The cinemas are being closed, the kids are being evacuated. These are all signs that things are not going well.
Speaker 2:There's this desperate scrabble for materials, you know. You know destroying public artworks because they need the metal for stuff. Do they not melt down, poor old Hachiko? They melted down Hachiko. So Hachiko, the loyal little dog who had become this kind of symbol of the Greyfriars Bobby of Japan, as it were, yes, they carted away his statue and they made a big deal of it as well. They said oh, you know, hachiko is doing his bit for the war effort. So we have this very moving ceremony where we all salute him as we kind of rip his statue off his pedestal and chuck it into a vat because we're trying to make more guns. So, yeah, it's looking very badly.
Speaker 2:There's terrible restrictions on food. The Americans then commence Operation Starvation, which is the bombing of sea lanes and the mining of sea lanes which is doing incredible damage to Japan and hitting the population where it hurts. So one of the other counterfactuals, of course, is about what would happen if there were ever an Allied landing on Japan and there's substantial evidence that there wouldn't be any food left by. You know the late 1945. You know the fishing fleet had been sunk, couldn't go out and get any more fish. The fields were falling apart because there were so many people being conscripted. Manchuria had a very good food output, had good agriculture still going on, because Manchuria was basically safe until the Russians showed up. So that was great. But if you couldn't move Manchurian food across the Strait of Tsushima because it was being bombed or it was being mined, then that restricted everything as well.
Speaker 2:So yeah, things are looking very bad and the desperation shows up in popular culture. You do hear rumblings from people saying this ought to stop, stop. Very controversially, abe Shinzo, the late Japanese prime minister from you know, who was prime minister only a few years ago, who was a grandson of a wartime minister he said we should have recognized by 1943 that it was over. We should have recognized that If we'd have made a decision, then we could have possibly salvaged something. But we kept fighting because we didn't want to admit. You know we doubled down so many times. We kept fighting and then we were being dragged down with everybody else. And after he said that, someone sued the government and said well, if you knew that, why did my grandparents get killed in the war? Right, yeah, it was looking desperate and the army and the navy couldn't admit that Yamamoto was right, because many of them didn't know what Yamamoto had said in the entirety of his predictions.
Speaker 1:I know you're keen to look at popular music as a way to try and understand people's feelings and it's quite interesting to me. In your book you say that Western popular music is sort of abolished. I think it's made illegal to even listen to foreign songs, and some songs they don't even realize are foreign because it's become such a part of Japanese culture, that's right.
Speaker 2:Foreign songs are illegal. I mean happy songs are illegal. After a while, basically, the radio is turning into nothing but war songs, these terrible dirges like if we go to sea the waters will cover our corpses. That's like the big toe tapper. So they're playing lots of military songs, lots of excitable kind of gung-ho songs, and it becomes illegal to play foreign music. And so the works of Stephen Foster, terribly pernicious propaganda songs like Alexander's Ragtime Band, these are all banned. And as you say that the real shock, even for General Tojo.
Speaker 2:Because Auld Lang Syne is such an old song in Japan I think it was translated to the Japanese in the 1880s. They call it the Firefly's Light and it's such a well-known song it's the last thing they play at a dance hall to signal that it's the end of the light, and it's such a well-known song. It's the last thing they play at a dance hall to signal that it's the end of the night. But it's also played at kind of navy functions and someone says to tojo we can't play that anymore, it's a foreign song, it's a foreign song.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah, yeah, it's old lang syne, it's not, uh, not one of ours, mate. So yeah, and also, of course, since I think 37 foreign films have been banned in Japan, the Japanese aren't getting any foreign popular culture at all and they're having to deal with whatever the local industry is churning out. And what it's churning out is these increasingly low-budget wartime elegies. And at one point by I think this is once again, I think this is 43, masako Kenzo made a film called the Spider and the Tulip, which is this cartoon, sort of a 20-minute cartoon, which was kind of evocative of Al Jolson and was about insects, you know, having a dance, and he was pilloried for it because it didn't have a martial message. Every film has to have a martial purpose. Even films are part of the war effort.
Speaker 1:And your thing about spiders is no good to us. So I guess we should move on to the end of the war, and it's famously brought to an end by the dropping of the bombs at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki. Why do the Americans drop the bomb? Because I think there's a common view which you hear expressed on the internet a lot oh, the Japanese were ready to surrender. It would just been a matter of days before they would have surrendered, and this was a fantastically violent act. And I did see somewhere that the emperor himself had been saying to his war cabinet look, it's time to sue for peace. So what do you think?
Speaker 2:about that People had been wishing that Japan could surrender and it could all be over for literally years, I think by this point, in various different parts of Japan. They were just not voicing it. I think what makes it shocking is the emperor voicing it, but the army and the navy are the ones who are going to carry the can for this if it ends. And they are still insisting that there's a chance they can hold the absolute defensive line. There's a chance that we can still shatter these jewels.
Speaker 2:Tojo puts out a radio message where he calls for 100 million shattered jewels, which is 70 million people in the population of Japan, 30 million people in the population of the Japanese Empire. Tojo is saying we just have to make it so, so difficult for them that they give up and sue for a conditional surrender, draw the line somewhere. And the thing that really hammered that message home, I think, was Okinawa. In the Battle of Okinawa the Americans faced such tough resistance from the locals, and those locals that were left alive then threw themselves off a cliff and killed themselves. But also, you know, they'd find a dead body and they'd pick it up and there'd be a hand grenade underneath and they'd lose somebody else. You know, the estimates for what it would cost to land allied forces on japan vary widely, because they asked macarthur how many he thought it would take and I think he gave them a figure like I know 1.4 million casualties if we, if we attack japan and the home islands and and then they go.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's too much, let's not do it and he goes no, no, no, actually just say 1.4, maybe less. But the experience of okinawa, on top of the march across the pacific from island to island, had, uh, convinced the um we keep saying the americans but the allies are part of this too um, that if they landed on japan it would make Vietnam look like a tea party, because Vietnam hadn't happened yet. The Japanese were being told you know, everyone, get a sharpened bamboo stick, everyone, take an American soldier with them. There's 70 million of us and there's only 5 million of them, or whatever. It was this brutal, and they were indeed starving, and that is an issue to bear in mind. And the Potsdam Declaration had called for an unconditional surrender. So the army and the navy knew there was nowhere they were getting out of this alive, basically. So they kept doubling down.
Speaker 2:And when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, I think there's several things to bear in mind. Certainly, I think the Americans are hoping well, that's it. The Japanese are bound to surrender now. They're not counting on fake news saying it wasn't that big a deal. They're not counting on the army not listening and they're not counting on the usual bluster of the army and navy saying maybe they've only got one. I mean literally. Maybe they've only got one bomb. These things are hard to make. We were trying to make one ourselves at one point. Maybe they've only got one. So you know, maybe they're bluffing. There's this message to America oh well, we will consider your demands and everyone's like. What does consider mean, you know, is the check in the mail. What does that mean? And then Nagasaki comes next.
Speaker 2:There are two issues to consider, or, I think, one combined issue to consider with this. One of them is let's just assume the main narrative, the common narrative we will save american lives if we drop a bomb that is so catastrophic. The japanese have no choice but to surrender only an insane person wouldn't surrender after they got that and we will save millions of lives by doing that, and probably millions of Japanese lives too. That's the common narrative about dropping the bomb. However, if you want to be more cynical about it, you can say America is already looking at the Soviet Union as the next enemy and nuclear conflict as the next possible means of combat. Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima is a way of speeding the end of the war, to stop the Soviet Union entering the war and invading mainland Japan. We already know that the Soviet Union are coming in. They've entered the war at long last. They've taken Manchuria. They've taken Sakhaluria. They're they're taking sakhalin. They're heading for hokkaido. If they don't get the japanese to surrender quickly, japan will be cut into like korea. So possibly the escalation of these bombs is a means of really speeding the japanese up if they want to be part of a democracy rather than a communist dictatorship.
Speaker 2:The second thing to bear in mind is the way that the Allies behaved about the bomb after it was dropped. There were researchers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki gathering data, walking around with Geiger counters, filming victims with keloid scars, and all this information was suppressed very famously. And it wasn't until the 50s that the japan passed the atomic bomb victims medical care law that acknowledged there was such a thing as, like subsidiary damage from radiation. So from 1945 to, I think maybe 1958, no one in japan was ready to admit, or allowed to admit, that if you were hit by an atomic bomb, it didn't just kill people, it also gave you cancer five years down the line, or it mutated your children or it made you infertile.
Speaker 2:The idea that there were long-term impacts from an atomic weapon that was not recognized as something, that was suppressed until 58. And you could argue, if you wanted to be cynical about this, that this was all an experiment, that we've got this power, we've got this technology. It would really help us if we got to use it before the end of the war. So, in much the same way that all of the World War I technology was tested in the Russo-Japanese War, this is World War III technology we're going to test in World War II. I don't think.
Speaker 1:I am as cynical as that. I read I think it's quite famous Paul Fussell's book, or I guess it's an essay, which is called Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and he makes basically two points, which is that he's waiting, he's being organized, he's being sent to wherever to prepare to invade the main islands and he's just profoundly grateful that the war ends before he has to land on the beaches. So that's one point he makes. And the other point he makes is that people are dying every day in the war. You know, ships are being sunk, people are starving to death in Asia. This is taking the lives of thousands and thousands of people every single day. So, yes, maybe they would surrender two months later, but how many will have died in these two months? It's not like nothing is going to happen during these two months. And I found it was a pretty vigorous essay, pretty powerful rhetoric.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's brutal, but I don't see anything to disagree with that. I'm sure I would feel very different about the bomb if my grandfather had been killed in the Battle of Osaka, should the Battle of Osaka ever taken place. And if you look at the plans for Operation Downfall, which is the landings in Japan, you can see that millions more people would have died. But there is something particularly distasteful about nuclear weapons which is very difficult to reconcile with. I think were I American top brass in 1945, I would have totally gone with it. But I would also have been someone sitting there thinking of the Japanese as non-people.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's so hard to get back in the minds, you know, this is why I found the Yasukuni Museum so useful is I felt it helped to sort of get me back into the minds of the people at the time. And it's so difficult to put yourselves into the minds of the people at the time and their attitudes, which just aren't our attitudes anymore. You know, things have changed. Look, let's sort of bring it towards the end now. There's sort of two subjects I want to talk about. The first is the surrender itself. So do you also want to tell us about how the surrender, you know, once the bombs are dropped, how do they finally bring themselves to surrender and what happens?
Speaker 2:Well, here is the terrifying thing, which in some way goes towards our previous conversation about using the bomb. Hirohito, you know, says I think we're going to surrender now, you know. And the army and the navy are like no, no, no, there's still, there's still things. And he's like no, I think I've heard enough of this, we are, we we've got to surrender. And, uh, he records the dual voice broadcast, which is a uh, an announcement to the people of japan to say it's all over. We must endure the unendurable. The progress of the war has proceeded, not necessarily to our advantage, was one of the most amazingly Japanese things he said and it was recorded. They took two goes to record it because he wasn't really used to speaking in public and he kept stammering and so on, but eventually they got it down and they got it etched onto a gramophone disc and it was ready to be recorded.
Speaker 2:That night a bunch of soldiers broke into the palace, attempting to steal it, to stop it from being broadcast. And so you know, even as Hiroshima and Nagasaki are flattened by these bombs, even as the emperor himself has said and let's not forget, we're all supposed to be the lord of the emperor the emperor said okay, that's enough. I'm making a decision and I'm telling you to your face we are surrendering. Still there are sold, there's a gunfight at the palace to try and seize control of this record, which is hidden in a safe room with the chamberlains and no one knows where it is. And and the guy who leads the um the attack ends up running through the streets. He gets on a motorbike, he's throwing leaflets through the streets. You know, as he goes he runs into a record station, into a radio station, points a gun at the announcer and says I want to make a statement and they kind of wrestle him to the ground and he shoots himself. And this is on the night before the surrender. You know there were still soldiers in japan who were planning on running into the mountains and fighting. There were still. I mean even after the surrender.
Speaker 2:There were quite controversial. There were Japanese. I think. There were Navy planes that attacked American planes even though the place had surrendered. And so on the day of the broadcast they put the record on and the people of Japan hear Hirohito's voice for the first time and some of them the Japanese he speaks is so arcane and so archaic. Some of them don't even know what he said, but a lot of them realize that it really is all over. And then you get a number of suicides, of people who kind of give up. But also you get a number of people who are afraid to admit just how relieved they are. They're terrified of what's going to happen when the Allies show it up. They're terrified of how they're going to be treated and they are really often not quite ready for the behavior of the Allies when they do take over. Japan, of course, is occupied for six, seven years afterwards?
Speaker 1:And what is the behavior then of the Allied troops when they land?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, the big issue is that they round up the leaders and they start putting them on trial. One of the things that Tojo wanted to do was to run his own war trials, which is one of the reasons it was an unconditional surrender, because no one was going to let him do that. The message that the Americans give them is we are turning your country into a democracy, we are rebuilding your country. You have been lied to for 30 or 40 years by these people. We ban all talk of the samurai. We ban all references to swords. Very famously, there's a. There's a one of the occupation personnel saved kabuki by saying it's okay, it's not military, and we can, okay, we'll keep on doing it. Then, even though many Kabuki performances were in fact, reenactments of recent battles, they rewrite the Japanese constitution. Me saying that is quite controversial, because the Japanese like to say they rewrote it themselves. They had a lot of very heavy pressure as to how it was going to look. You know, you have, for example, a clause that gives women the right to vote. You have a clause that renounces war, which is they abolish the army, they abolish the navy. Japan instead today has self-defense forces which look very army-like and navy-like but are in fact supposedly not endowed with any offensive capability.
Speaker 2:And they put the criminals on trial and very famously they say okay, if you watched a war crime happen and did nothing, you're C class. If you committed the war crime, you're B class. If you incited someone to commit it, you're A class. And they created this new kind of category, the incitement towards warfare, this idea that there was a certain bracket of the Japanese population who had lied and cajoled and threatened and forced the Japanese into fighting in the war, into believing all this fake news. And those were the people who were Class A war criminals. You know, we're talking about the Yasukuni Shrine there's I'm sure you've seen it. I mean, actually I don't know how obvious it is, but there's a, I'm sure you've seen it. I mean I actually I don't know how, how obvious it is, but there's a memorial there to one of the judges at the war crimes trial, a man from what is now bangladesh called uh radhabinod pal.
Speaker 2:And in the war crimes trial, you know, after they executed 900 people, uh, and put a load more in prison, ostensibly for life, he issued a dissenting judgment which ran to about 1200 pages and he said I'm not denying the Japanese were atrocious during the war. I'm not denying these savage war crimes. What concerns me is the notion of victor's justice. What concerns me is that you are putting some of these people on trial for a crime that did not exist before you invented it.
Speaker 2:After it had happened, let's talk about bombing. I mean, he mentions bombing civilian sites, he goes. So if we're talking about bombing civilian sites and we're calling that a war crime, why are we not also prosecuting our own people? This is victor's justice. You are inventing up this new concept and then you're imposing it on these people. He said, as far as I can see, much as it pains me to say this, if a Japanese soldier pulls out a gun and shoots an American soldier on a battlefield, he is doing his job. We understand that war is a bad thing, but once you're committed to it, you're going to be killing people. That war is a bad thing, but once you're committed to it, you're going to be killing people.
Speaker 2:And that's a very brief summary of the 1,200-page dissentient judgment. You know, for years this was I don't want to say suppressed, it was more like ignored. It came to light, really, with the age of the internet because someone could scan the whole thing into a PDF and you can actually find it online very quickly now. But up until the 1990s no one really knew about this and the Japanese loved the fact that someone could mount this argument in their defense. Actually, rathabinod Powell was not defending the Japanese at all. He was ready to send a whole bunch of them to death. He did not approve in any way of the atrocities that the Japanese committed, but because of the way his reasoning sounds.
Speaker 2:In summary, it was something that was widely respected by the Japanese and so they built this little memorial to him, which quotes very selectively from the dissentient judgment in the carving in front of it, quite controversially, he finished with a quote from Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederates in the American Civil War, along the lines of you know, history will judge, but Radhabinob Powell was part of a new development. He was part of the beginning of the Cold War. He was part of the dismantling of colonial powers. You know, this is a man who'd come from British India, as it were, who very much understood that the whole arguments that we've been having for three podcasts now about this alien game were coming to an end, not just for the Japanese but for the Indians and for the Filipinos and everybody else.
Speaker 1:Yes, his whole judgment must be informed by the fact that India, you know it's a British colony and it's had enough of being a British colony and had enough for some years.
Speaker 2:Indians. He didn't turn it into a message for Indian independence. He was a much better judge than that. But if anyone is interested, it's called the Dissentient Judgment of Radhabinod Powell and if you Google it you'll find it in seconds on the internet and it's a massive PDF, typewritten pages. I mean it was, you know, almost difficult to lift, but it's fascinating to see someone making such kind of postmodern arguments in 1945, 46.
Speaker 1:Now, when I go to Japan, you know I don't see anything about the war there, but I do still see. You know, I've seen the museum at Yasukuni. And you have these buses that occasionally you see driving around the streets of Tokyo, absolutely deafening loudspeakers blasting out and I'm not really quite sure what they're saying. But when I ask my friends about them they sort of say, oh no, we haven't really seen them or heard these, and I'm thinking you must have done. They are ear-splitting and I can only assume that these are these mad Japanese nationalists. So I guess it's all gone now and yet there's still these little embers remaining, these little memories.
Speaker 2:Sure there are. Sure there are. And, let's face it, every country's got its wackos. Japan is no exception. The idea of assassination as a tool of political argument has not gone away, as Abe Shinzo discovered to his cost only recently.
Speaker 2:And you say that you know you don't see the war in Japan unless you're in a museum. I would disagree with that quite strongly. I see the war in Japan everywhere I go. It's true that many of the wartime statues have been removed from their plinths and replaced by other things. There's a fascinating book about lost statues of Japan that tells you what used to be on that particular plinth at a particular time. And you know, you can be in the weirdest of places and and and walk past a war memorial, and unless you can read what's on the war memorial, you don't necessarily see it's there. I was in oh god, it was in saporo, and I was just about to get a bus and as I got on the bus I saw that there was a memorial to the Siberian expedition. I was like, oh God, I need a photograph for that. But the bus was already leaving and I kind of missed my chance.
Speaker 2:The Patriot Party, as we call them, are a big issue and you do see them making demands for the return of Taiwan. For example, there was a big map on a poster I saw when I was a student in Japan that you know had colored in Sakhalin the same color as Hokkaido and demanded it back. And, of course, controversially, there are four islands on the tip of Hokkaido that Russia is still occupying, which the Japanese say oh, no, no, no, no, those are the Kuril Islands. They belong to us from before the war started, so technically they should be ours and the Russians go go, well, they're not, because we've got a submarine base there, so you can't have them, and so you know.
Speaker 2:So, technically, there's still this argument about that, and every time putin's in a good mood, he suggests that maybe we'll give two of them back and the japanese go no, we want all of them back. Um, so, so there's, there's that kind of argument that no one talks about anymore. And, yes, there are indeed far right wing agitators who will stand in the street with a microphone, blaring out these martial songs about shattered jewels and calling for various agendas. I was a student in Kyoto and I was walking down the street minding my own business and I came across a little truck blaring the Myriad Enem enemies, which is the Navy anthem about shattered jewels, and a man with a microphone saying we want the Kuril Islands back, we want Taiwan back and we want all of the immigrants out of Japan. And, much to his embarrassment, I was the only person that stopped to listen.
Speaker 1:That's frightful gaijin. One thought that I had when I was preparing for this podcast is this frightful Gaijin, Because, you know, when I look back at these catastrophes of history like Genghis Khan or the fall of Constantinople, they're just interesting to me. There's no bitterness there at all and I just wonder at what stage will the history of the wars with Japan, when will they just fade away like that?
Speaker 2:I think it depends who you ask. There's a very long memory in Asia about what the Japanese did, particularly in mainland China, but also in Thailand and Vietnam and so on, which is often stirred up by demagogues. The Chinese attitude towards the Japanese is really just the Communist Party trying to create a new bogeyman rather than, I think, a deep-seated anger about it. Nevertheless, if you ask someone who has a war veteran in their family in Britain, in Canada, in America, in Korea, in Korea, yeah Well, korea is a special case because the Koreans didn't just have the war to deal with, they had 35 years of occupation to deal with as well, which they are not only bitter about but aggressively bitter about. You know, japan has a vast soft power, outreach um, which has done a lot of good with the very young um. And to answer your question about these people in history, this, this is a question that I have to face very often.
Speaker 2:On my book Island, the sensitivity reader objected to an endorsement that we had from an academic who said that the book was entertaining, and she said you can't call a book about the oppression of indigenous peoples entertaining. I said well, as a popular historian, it's my job to entertain. We're not going to say on the cover of the book. This is thoroughly depressing, um. Nevertheless, that endorsement wasn't used, and you know, I can see where she was going with it as well. And and you're quite right that sometimes, when we use history as an entertainment, we forget that we're talking about the lives and deaths of real people. I actually do get quite empathetic and quite tearful about events that happened 2,000 years ago.
Speaker 2:I mean once I was in the Royal Academy of Art with my mother and there was an exhibition of Japanese prints and I was showing it around and talking through the stories attached to them and I got to the Battle of Danauura and I started crying, because I always get very emotional about it and unfortunately we'd attracted a crocodile of people who thought I was a guide and they just didn't understand why I was kind of weeping in front of this picture.
Speaker 2:I think that there is a historian who's provided an answer to this, or certainly a way of thinking about it that I think is very valuable, and that's a man called Semyon Frank, and he suggested that everybody periodizes history in their mind into three different categories. There's everything that happened from adam and eve to my grandfather, and then there's what happened from my grandfather to me, and then there's what happened in my own life, and I think you can see, even in your own reaction to jinkis khan versus world war ii, yeah, that that second category is still something that affects us and affects people that we know. We can still think ourselves into those people's lives in a way that possibly we can't for someone two, three, four hundred years ago I think that's an excellent way of looking at it.
Speaker 1:What's happened to my parents and to my grandparents I still think about emotionally, but before that it's still possible to be emotional, but it's a different thing.
Speaker 2:And I also think to throw one more thing in, something that my grandfather once said about the Berlin Wall. He said it'll be up until we're dead, and what he meant by that was that whatever the fixes are at the end of World War II, they're things that have to be kept kind of alive until the people who care about them have gone. And I think that's something you can also see happening in Taiwan. So that could also be an issue as well is that some of these echoes of World War II are things that are dying with the dying of that generation. And then you see efforts at outreach, particularly in Germany, for example about educating people about the past, and the Yasukuni Shrine is an attempt to educate people about the past, but it doesn't necessarily tell the story that certain war veterans on the Allied side would like to hear.
Speaker 1:So, yes, there are always different ways to tell the same story and I do think that's one of the great strengths of your writing, actually, is that you often give these multiple perspectives. Anyway, that's it, I think. I think we've reached the end of our Mammoth three-parter and it's such a massive subject, but unless we're going to go on for another 10 episodes, I think we can end it there and feel we did it. We did it justice. But just before we close, could you just remind everyone of the name of your book about the wars?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's called Japan at War in the Pacific, a source of great annoyance to me because that's not what I wanted to call it. What did you want to call it? I wanted to call it Shattered Jewel. I wanted to call it Shattered Jewel. I wanted to call it Shattered Jewel because I thought that was. You know, it's a really powerful image and it's really evocative for me. But my publishers at Tuttle are very good at selling books and they understand that quite often these days you are not necessarily appealing to readers anymore, but to the algorithm that pushes the reader your way. And so they wanted the book to be called japan at war in the pacific the rise and fall of the japanese empire in asia 1868 to 1945. Because, although that's not poetic at all and is very declaratory and and blunt, it's basically hashtag war, hashtag japan. Pick this one first, mr, mr AI, and if that sells me more copies of my book, then I have to defer to them.
Speaker 1:Oh well, we'll call the podcast this podcast. We'll call that one Shattered Jewel. Excellent, that's what I've always wanted. Okay, well, that's it for today and that's it for our series on Japan's wars. So, once again, Jonathan Clements, thank you very much indeed, Thank you.