Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ national decision-making process that nothing effective was done to act upon the knowledge available to the nation’s leaders.

      There is little doubt that the death of Hitler before April 1945 would have precipitated a German military collapse. By contrast, it is hard to believe that the removal of any prominent Japanese, including Hirohito or his successive prime ministers, would have hastened his nation’s capitulation. The Japanese fought on, because no consensus could be mobilised to do anything else. A dramatic political initiative to offer surrender, even one supported by the emperor, would almost certainly have failed. Japanese strategy in the last phase of the war rested not upon seeking victory, but upon making each Allied advance so costly that America’s people, as well as her leadership, would deem it preferable to offer Japan acceptable terms rather than to endure a bloody struggle for the home islands. If this assessment was fanciful, and founded upon ignorance of the possibility that a weapon might be deployed which rendered void all conventional military calculations, it offered a germ of hope to desperate men.

      By late 1944, many Japanese civilians had become desperate to see an end to the war, which was ruining their lives and threatened to destroy their society. Even before Pearl Harbor, Japan was divided by widespread poverty, and by tensions between city and countryside, peasants and landlords, soldiers and civilians. For all the government’s strident nationalist propaganda campaigns, conflict had deepened rather than healed domestic divisions. There was bitterness that the rich and the armed forces still ate heartily, while no one else did. The government’s Home Ministry was dismayed by the incidence of what in the West would be called defeatism, ‘statements, letters and wall-writing that are disrespectful, anti-war, anti-military or in other ways inflammatory’. There were reports of people making contemptuous references to the emperor as a baka, bakayaro or bocchan, ‘fool’, ‘stupid fool’ or ‘spoiled child’.

      There was substantial support for Communism, reflected in graffiti and street talk. Police reports cited cases of alleged industrial sabotage, of drunken workers shouting ‘Stalin banzai!’ Industrial disputes and stoppages remained rare, but Japan’s leaders were always fearful of revolution, as privations increased. A story enjoyed wide circulation in Tokyo’s military and political circles of a Soviet attaché declaring jovially that when his country entered the eastern war and occupied Japan, the Red Army would need to undertake a serious anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Japan, however, never found it necessary to imprison dissenters in anything like the numbers detained in Germany or the Soviet Union. Arrests for ‘peace preservation law violations’—most of the accused being left-wingers, with a handful of religious zealots—peaked at 14,822 in 1933, then declined to 1,212 in 1941; 698 in 1942; 159 in 1943—of whom only fifty-two were prosecuted. While many Japanese were profoundly unhappy with their lot, they perceived no means of doing anything about it, save to maintain their personal struggles for existence.

      For years, austerity had been a familiar companion. Inessential driving was banned eighteen months ahead of Pearl Harbor. Oil and iron ore were stockpiled, even plumbing fixtures were stripped from homes. Production of rubber-soled tabi shoes was halted to save raw material. There was no coffee. Neon lighting in Tokyo’s Ginza district was extinguished, and a monthly family fast day introduced. It was no longer permissible to polish rice, which diminished its bulk. From 1940 this was rationed, along with sugar, salt, matches and suchlike, to enable the government to build up stocks in anticipation of siege. Women were forbidden to style their hair or wear smart clothes. Food was a preoccupation of every urban Japanese, which soon became an obsession. In August 1944, one factory reported that 30 per cent of women and boys in its workforce were suffering from beriberi, brought on by malnutrition. ‘Observing a slice of funny little fish and two vegetable leaves which constitute a ration allowance,’ wrote Admiral Ugaki, ‘I contemplated the hardships of those who prepare a daily meal instead of the complaints of those who eat it.’ Absenteeism mounted, as factory workers spent more and more time searching for food for their families. Daily Japanese calorie intake, only 2,000 before Pearl Harbor, fell to 1,900 in 1944, and would descend to 1,680 in 1945. British calorie intake never fell below 2,800, even in the darkest days of 1940-41. An American GI in the Pacific received 4,758 calories.

      Twenty-three-year-old Yoshiko Hashimoto was the eldest daughter of a businessman living in the Sumida district on the eastern side of Tokyo. Her father owned a small textile firm employing fifteen people, struggling to survive because he had lost access to raw material imports and depended on synthetics. Mr Hashimoto had no son, so Yoshiko would inherit the business. To ensure that there would be a man around to run it, her father arranged her marriage to thirty-one-year-old Bunsaku Yazawa, whose family owned a shop opposite their house. ‘It would be nice to say that it was a love match,’ said Yoshiko, ‘but it wasn’t. It was my father’s choice.’ Yazawa had already spent much of his twenties as an unwilling draftee in Manchuria. Three months after his 1941 wedding to Yoshiko, he was shipped abroad again. On demobilisation from the army in 1944, he was posted to air-raid duties in Tokyo, based at a primary school not far from the Hashimoto home, where his squad was responsible for demolishing houses to make fire breaks. ‘He hated the war,’ said his wife tersely.

      In addition to Yoshiko, three other daughters were living at home: Chieko, nineteen; Etsuko, seventeen; and Hisae, fourteen. In 1944 Yoshiko gave birth to a son, Hiroshi, who was now the apple of his grandfather’s as well as his mother’s eye. It was a hard time to rear a baby. Food was so short that Yoshiko, undernourished, found herself unable to breastfeed. In order to get a small ration of tinned milk, it was necessary to secure a certificate signed not only by a doctor, but by the neighbourhood committee. ‘It was always coupons, coupons, coupons and queues, queues, queues. Anyone who could afford extra food bought it on the black market. Everything hinged on who knew who.’ As in Germany, there was intense bitterness between town- and countrydwellers. City folk trekked to rural areas, to persuade farmers illegally to barter food for household possessions. Yoshiko’s mother was reduced to surrendering her most cherished kimono in exchange for rice. Such bargains also demanded a struggle for a place on a train to a farming district.

      The most dreaded government communication which most young people received was either a ‘red paper’, consigning a man to the armed forces, or a ‘white paper’, which committed every male and many females over seventeen to industrial labour. However, Chieko Hashimoto thought herself lucky to have a job in an armaments factory, because this entitled her to a ration of otherwise unobtainable noodles. ‘By that time, we were thinking merely of survival, of how to find the next meal,’ said Yoshiko. ‘A baby could only cry about its hunger, but mothers like me had to try to do something about it. It’s really hard to bear your child’s sobs, when you have nothing to give him.’ In the Hashimoto household, as in most Japanese families, only men smoked. The women claimed to do so, however, in order to collect a cigarette ration. This was eked out by drying itadori weed, which was then rolled in scraps of dictionary paper. Gas and electricity were available only for a few hours a day. Soap and clothing were desperately short—an unwelcome consequence was that headlice became endemic. The local cinema near the Hashimoto home kept going, but since December 1941 its patrons had been deprived of Hollywood favourites like Shirley Temple. A few little music halls stayed open, featuring performances by local comedians. The young cherished irreplaceable jazz and tango records. Those wishing to amuse themselves of an evening were reduced to singing songs in the bosom of the family.

      ‘We never talked about the war at home, and we knew very little about what was happening,’ said Yoshiko Hashimoto. ‘Even in 1944, the papers and radio still said that we were winning.’ Desultory efforts had been made to evacuate children and their mothers from cities, but these largely foundered, for the same reason as in Britain. Town and country children, thrown together by circumstances, disliked each other. Yoshiko spent several months with her baby son at the home of a rural uncle in the Chiba district outside Tokyo. But she hated the lack of privacy in the home of near-strangers whose every word was audible through paper walls, and returned to the city.

      Sixteen-year-old Ryoichi Sekine and his father lived together in the Edogawa district of eastern Tokyo, СКАЧАТЬ