by Bob Mackin

    Let's begin at the end: an underground bunker within the stone walls of the imperial palace in Tokyo on what would be the last night of Japan's unwinnable war—August 14, 1945. Inside the bunker, the air conditioner has stopped working. It is cramped, humid, hot, the mood solemn. The emperor of Japan meets with this top advisors and generals, their once resplendent uniforms soiled, collars unbuttoned. Gone are the early victories at Pearl Harbor, Wake, Bataan, Corregidor.  Japan's leaders have since known nothing but defeat after defeat at Midway, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa.

    Just days ago, atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In raid after raid, American B-29s have all but leveled and burned Tokyo to ashes.  And now the Soviet Union has entered the war against Japan. The emperor cannot help thinking about how the Soviets treat monarchs and their families.

    An American invasion of the home islands is believed to be but weeks away. It has been argued that Japan can still win a decisive victory in a desperate defensive battle, a defense depending on women trained to throw explosives under tanks and on the only effective weapon Japan has left—the suicidal kamikaze.

    The emperor, the son of heaven, begins to weep, and those in the bunker weep with him. Then the emperor pulls himself together and tells them he will accept the most recent offer of the new American president and surrender. At last, after some 15 years of going along with the military, he has made the decision to end the war.

    The story of how Japan got itself into a war it was bound to lose has Hirohito as its protagonist. Hirohito was no constitutional monarch, in the way we have come to know the term; Japan's constitution, promulgated by Hirohito's grandfather, the Emperor Meiji, in 1889, made that clear: "the empire of Japan shall be […] governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal. […] The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.[…]  The Emperor has supreme command of the Army and Navy. […] The Emperor declares war, makes peace and concludes treaties."

    However, Hirohito was an emperor who rarely led, at least openly, and often followed. At best, he was a consensus builder. Yet he had to contend with, on the one hand, an aggressive and arrogant military, free of civilian governmental control and dependent on a belief system more motivated by "esprit de corps" than by reality; on the other, with a system of government by committees and closed door conferences which diffused responsibility and accountability—a system where the buck never stopped; and most importantly, with a very real lack of resources to support Japan's manufacturing and war industries and its ambitions.

    Such issues were apparent only to a very few, however. The early 1920s were in many ways the best of times for Japan. On the Ginza in Tokyo, Paris and bohemian style cafés flourished. Not far away, Frank Lloyd Wright was building a new hotel, one of the few buildings to survive the massive Yokohama-Tokyo earthquake in September 1923. While other nations had lost lives and resources fighting WWI in Europe, Japan had built and sold ships, exported textiles, made heavy machinery and railroad rolling stock, and supplied Europe with bullets and guns. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo stood at the top of what seemed a strong industrial and commercial base. Japan had done strikingly well learning western ideas like assembly line production, but this success had created a need for raw materials like oil and iron for its industries and its military.

    Like the European powers, Japan saw colonialism as a way to meet this need. It had already applied the concept in the annexation of Korea in 1910 and to Formosa in a conflict with China at the end of the previous century. During the war, Japan had with minimal effort grabbed strategic German colonial islands like the Marshalls in the Central Pacific and controlled them under a League of Nations mandate. Japan's military had already proven itself by winning the Russo- Japanese war in 1905, the first victory of an Asian power over a European one in centuries, and much celebrated in Japanese theatre, pop culture, and classrooms.

    Japan had its legislature, its cabinet, and its prime ministers, but as was also true in some western countries, "democracy" was a relative term. Above all, it had one emperor. Sheltered from infancy, Hirohito was reticent and studious. Unlike his father, he rejected the idea of mistresses. He married and remained monogamous. Before his coronation and marriage, he had traveled to Europe, where his entourage noticed his insecurities; he even apparently expressed doubt about his heavenly ancestry. On his father's death in 1926, this shy, studious, and insecure son of heaven was placed at the pinnacle of government councils and committees, only a short time before Japan would face the worldwide depression and the geopolitical whirlwinds of the 1930s.

    Signs of internal discontent were evident in Hirohito's early reign. Japan had the trappings of a constitutional democracy, in the years after 1919 there was a turbulent struggle for power: 14 prime ministers, and increased tensions between advocates of civilian and military rule. 1931 marked the start of a series of incidents that revealed the weakness of the system.

    In the dead of the night on September 18th of that year, a Japanese army officer set off an explosion near railroad tracks south of Mukden, Manchuria.  The Japanese blamed soldiers from a nearby Chinese garrison and used the explosion as an excuse to advance into Manchuria, reinforced by Japanese troops garrisoned in Korea—a reinforcement was a fait accompli before anyone asked the government in Tokyo for the authority needed to dispatch troops from Korea to Manchuria. Hirohito first learned about it all from the newspapers.

     After some hand-wringing over the military's usurpation of authority, it was agreed that the emperor not speak on such matters unless the situation was out of control. Three days later the cabinet decided to treat the fighting in Manchuria as an "incident," thus avoiding a declaration of war, setting a precedent for the years ahead. At this point, the 31-year-old son of heaven could still have taken charge of his military. Hirohito knew the railway incident had been staged, knew who had planned it and who had ordered it and who had carried it out. He knew that several senior officers had violated the army's own penal law ordering troops into area outside their command's jurisdiction. Looking on the incident from the vantage point of more than 50 years, one Hirohito biographer wrote, "After that the emperor and those around him would never take a firm stand against the army over the course of Japan's conquest of Manchuria" (Bix 237).

     The case represents the start of a pattern that would show itself right up to Pearl Harbor. Hirohito would not oppose the army's efforts to expand his empire. If that involved a brief usurpation of his authority, so be it—as long as it succeeded.

    Now Japan struggled to find its direction. Two factions emerged: the Imperial Way faction and the Control faction.

    The Imperial Way faction thought in terms of total revolution and a new constitution. Its rebellious ranks were filled not with graduates of Japan's academies and military schools, but for the most part with farm boys from the poorer provinces that had not done well in the worldwide depression of the 1930s. The Control Faction, on the other hand, saw the future in war with the west. It believed in a strong industrial base built in cooperation with the existing government and the unions.
 
    In 1935, the rivalry turned violent. A top military Imperial Way man used his samurai sword to kill a troublesome Control faction bureaucrat at his desk.  Then, on the snow-filled night of February 26, 1936, junior officers of the Imperial Way faction assassinated Japan's finance minister in his bedroom. The lord of the privy seal met the same fate, and the prime minister escaped only because the rebels had killed his brother-in-law by mistake. Before long the imperial way rebels had stormed—but did not penetrate—the gates of the imperial palace.

    Tokyo residents were no doubt impressed as news spread. Also impressed was Hirohito, who saw that what was happening was a direct challenge to himself and those close to him. Allowing rebellious officers a free hand in far-off Manchuria was one thing, but insubordinate slaughter in the homes of his ministers was quite another. Soon forces loyal to the emperor had beaten back the uprising and, at the same time, all that was left of civilian influence on Japan's government. Japan had been saved from violent revolution, but the saving had its consequences. The military had its price for putting down the revolt, and that price was high. 

    Henceforth, Japan's army and navy would have approval power over new cabinet appointees. The military budget went up. In Manchuria, the ever feisty Japanese army looked south toward China and anticipated beating the boots off Chiang Kai-Shek, who had his hands full with Mao Tse-Tung and his armed and dangerous communist army.  And, as events would have it, opportunity beckoned.

     In the private shadows of the Marco Polo bridge near Beijng, a Japanese soldier sought privacy to relieve himself and wandered into a de-militarized zone. Soon he was presumed missing. After the Japanese commander turned down a Chinese proposal for a joint search, a bloody war had begun—another war that could be called an "incident."  It was a war that Hirohito's generals told him would last six weeks, but instead lasted eight years.

    Japan got the "incident" underway with the capture of Shanghai at a cost of 200,000 Chinese lives, but the worst was yet to come: the atrocity known as the Rape of Nanking. Japanese troops raped thousands of women of all ages; tethered Chinese boys together like cattle and shoved them into ditches; threw bloodied corpses into the Yangtze river; used civilians for bayonet practice; and in all killed about 300,000 Chinese. Diplomats who could hear screams of those being raped and murdered sent eyewitness reports to Tokyo in hope of stopping the atrocities, but they continued. More than likely the Japanese commanders and troops in the field were under standing orders to take no prisoners. After all was over, the emperor congratulated his generals in Nanking for a job well done.

    Japan won battle after battle, but somehow it never got close to winning the war. By 1940 the "six weeks" war in China was in its fourth year. The need for oil and gas, for Japan's tanks and planes, was more pressing than ever. And most of that came from the U.S. Then, opportunity beckoned again in the early days of WWII after most of continental Europe had fallen under German control. Natural resources were there for the taking in French Indochina (administered by a weak and distant government in Vichy, France), Malaya (rich in rubber and under control of Britain, then facing a possible German cross-channel invasion), and the Dutch East Indies (rich in oil and a possession of a Dutch government now in exile after the German conquest of Holland). Japan saw all of that as low-hanging fruit, an opportunity worth the risk of U.S. imposition of its neutrality act (which barred the export of strategic materials to warring countries), even worth the risk of a war with the U.S.  Japan moved troops into Indochina despite U.S. concerns.  

    Even while the war in China was dragging on, Japan was in a position of strength. It managed its conquered territories in China efficiently through the installation of puppet governments, which freed manpower for military use elsewhere. Japan had 2.5 million men in boots, battle hardened veterans, to fight yet another war.  Also, Japan and its taxpayers had already expanded its war industries, produced and stockpiled weapons for any coming war. Thus July 2, 1941, saw the drafting of a document, later approved by the emperor, that used the word "war" with reference to the U.S. and Britain. 

    On the same day, Washington, which had always been more than an interested spectator, made its views known in no uncertain terms. The president ordered the seizure of all Japanese assets in the U.S. and put them under the control of the U.S. government. The U.S. also embargoed oil and gas exports to Japan. Tensions between the U.S. and Japan heightened.

    Japan's war plans moved forward. Japan's military planners began to believe that if America received a decisive blow—a first round knock-out at very start of the war—Americans would have no stomach for a long war fought miles from home across the far reaches of the Pacific. Such thinking was not without foundation. Japanese military planners knew that Congress that summer had extended the 1940 draft act only by a single vote. They also knew of FDR's 1940 campaign promise not to let America's sons fight in any "foreign war."

    At the same time, Hirohito and his planners saw that the window of opportunity, wide open in the autumn of 1940, was closing fast by the fall of 1941. Germany had won no clear victory in Europe.   Britain was still fighting. America had begun to re-arm. For Hirohito, his generals, and admirals, it was now or never.

    Japanese Prime Minister Kanoe, however, knew that Japan's military planners could not promise victory in any impending war with America. Such temperance only angered the military. Exit Kanoe. Enter Hideki Tojo, a military leader in the control faction and a man long dedicated to the conquest of other nations. Tojo came to office convinced that troop withdrawal from China was not acceptable and that yielding to the Americans would only make them more high-handed than ever.

    On November 8, Hirohito got word on the Pearl Harbor attack, with a "complete" war plan following a few days thereafter. The key to the plan was the need for Japan to establish its economic self-sufficiency right after stage one of an initial overseas offensive, but it was far from complete--no real long-range war plan existed, no strategic concept, no stated goal—and there were doubters, important doubters. Admiral Yamamoto, who devised the plan, told the emperor that Japan could wage an effective war against the Americans for one year following a successful strike.  After that, no guarantees.

    Despite its obvious shortcomings, Hirohito approved the plan.

    For a cover-up, Hirohito sent envoys to Washington to assure Roosevelt that Japan still sought peace, knowing that those around him would consider any concession to Roosevelt as appeasement. A letter from U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull suggested an end to the embargo upon withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Indochina.  (The devil, as you all know, is the definitions or the lack thereof, and the letter contained no definition of what constituted China.) Tojo called Hull's letter an ultimatum.

    It is November 27. A Japan strike force consisting of six aircraft carriers, 400 war planes, two battleships, two cruisers, nine destroyers and a dozen other surface ships slips quietly away from its rendezvous point off the Kuril Islands just north of Japan's home islands. This formidable strike force can be called back and will attack only upon the affirmative coded order to "climb Mount Nitaka"—the highest mountain in Japan. (Gillon 46).

     On November 29 Japan's leaders meet at the Imperial Palace. No one opposes the attack. Hours later, Hirohito receives his brother, who urges him against the strike. It is too late. The strike force, 900 miles northeast of Hawaii, turns south.  Its commander has received its final go signal to "climb Mount Nitaka."

    It is now 6 a.m., December 7, in Honolulu.

    At the White House it has been a quiet— if watchful – Sunday. It has been decided that war comes to America only in response to an enemy strike. FDR and those around him want no blame for starting a war. And there is the distinct possibility that Japan will move only on the British and Dutch. Supporting that idea are intelligence reports and decoded messages that say a Japanese strike force is moving past the American held Philippines and heading further south. Other intelligence reports assure there is absolutely no chance of a full Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor.

    It is close to 8:05 a.m. in Hawaii. Mitsuo Fushida, leader of the first Japanese air strike, views Diamond Head, then peers down at Pearl Harbor.  He is disappointed because he sees no aircraft carriers. But battleship row is a line of sitting ducks. Fushida opens his cockpit and fires his smoke gun to signal the attack. Seconds later, a sailor on the U.S.S. Oklahoma shouts the following message into the ship's intercom: "Man your battle stations. This is no s**t" (Gillon 48).

    Meanwhile, in Tokyo, it was a moment of great joy.  The emperor dressed for the occasion in a white naval uniform and was later described as being in "a splendid mood." Americans were in a far different mood, angered as much by the sneaky nature and stealth of the attack as by the attack itself. Winston Churchill would later ask in his memoirs of WWII: "How could Japan's leaders not have realized that the nature of the attack would unite Americans as never before?"
 
    The lessons for today seem obvious.

• A government that cedes authority to its military is asking for trouble and, conversely, civilian control is absolutely crucial; and
  
• Holding both military and civilian leaders accountable is just as important.

But especially relevant now and in the years that have followed 9/11 and other senseless and tragic events is Churchill's observation that the attack on Pearl Harbor was an act of "madness" which "in war can carry with it the advantage of surprise."

Works Cited and Consulted

    A Fordham University graduate (BA and MA) who won three varsity letters in track, Bob Mackin is Founding Principal of Mackin & Casey LLC, a management and lobbying firm based in Albany, NY, and serving financial services clients with business in the U. S. and overseas.
  
    He and his business partner, Teresa Casey, joined the Albany Torch Club in 2010.

    He has published widely His recent novel, Jackhammer, a WW II espionage tale, won strong acclaim. He also authored Comply, a two-volume work on insurance investment laws, and articles in Newsweek, TV Guide, and Parade. 

    He presented a paper on the consequences of casino gambling to the Albany Torch Club in 2014 and led the club's discussion on the 1971 Attica Prison uprising, marking its 45th anniversary.

    "How Japan Blundered into an Unwinnable War" was presented at the Albany Torch Club on December 5, 2016