Review of "The Pacific War" by Saburo Ienaga

I first wrote this review for last year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest (this year’s due date is May 5). I have reposted it here unamended, with the exception of the star rating and this appendage.

Before I read through Ienaga’s The Pacific War, I understood fairly little as to the war between Japan and the U.S.-Chinese alliance, despite having a history knowledge that resulted in me easily getting all questions (except the troll question they throw in there) right on the Advanced Placement World History test. I thought of reviewing Toland’s Rising Sun, but, as it contained only one sentence on the China Incident -the direct cause of America’s sanctions on Japan (and, thus, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor)- I saw it better to review a Japanese book written for Japanese, from a man who personally saw how things went in the years of and leading up to Japan’s wars with the U.S., China, and many local resistances.

The author, Saburo Ienaga, is a sort of a Japanese Howard Zinn. Clearly favorable to Marxists and liberals, he condemns without distinction Japanese, Soviet, and American crimes against international law. The prewar Japan he describes, particularly in the thirties, was a true gangster’s paradise. Instead of American, British, or even Soviet style civilian control of the military, the principle used in the Land of the Rising Sun was military control of the military - “after 1900 the regulations were changed to specify that the army minister must be an active duty general or lieutenant general, and the navy minister must be an admiral or vice-admiral” -and even here, no one person was in charge. Major offensives were repeatedly ordered by military officers going against orders from above (e.g., attacking French forces in Indochina, attacking Soviets at Changkufeng in 1938 and at Tamusku in 1939). The military was able to dissolve cabinets at will (e.g., with the collapse of the Hirota cabinet in 1937). It even engaged in smuggling opium from South Manchuria to the rest of China as early as 1933, with the trade expanding after the seizure of Shanghai, as well as expropriation of factories from their Chinese owners in northern and central China (p. 165) and their transfer to Japanese managers.

If there is any major lesson in the book, it is that, contrary to Hanson, futarchy would not end gangsterism, but guarantee it. After all, every rogue commander who knew he would not be punished did what he did… because he knew he would not be punished. As Ienaga says, “No decision for war should have been made unless the navy was sure of a good chance of victory. The admirals never made such sanguine claims. Fukudome Shigeru, chief of the first division, navy general staff, bluntly told his colleagues at a meeting of army and navy division and bureau chiefs on October 6, 1941, that he “had no confidence that Japan could win the war.” And yet, Japan still attacked Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. 

Much in contrast to the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist revolutions “from below”, Ienaga speaks of a revolution “from above by the military and the bureaucrats” (p. 112) beginning with the seizure of Manchuria from Chang Hsueh-liang with a staged bombing incident that damaged the railroad so precisely that it had no impact on the ability of trains to pass through it. Precedent, of course, was set in military glory being commended in pre-1931 elementary schools -a natural result of the defeat of the People’s Rights movement in the 1880s. While in “1930 a cabinet headed by Hamaguchi Yuko overrode the stiff opposition of Katō Kanji, chief of the navy general staff, and obtained ratification of the London Naval Treaty” (p. 36) and Ienaga in April 1931 was “astounded at my classmates’ knowledge of Marxist dialectics” (p. 108), “in 1934, the student movement and political activities had completely disappeared”. 

As with any nationalist movement, Japan’s least obedient soldiers were those with the lowest (men with “little to no formal education”) and highest socioeconomic status (p. 30). The various means of censorship Japanese authorities (especially the feared Kempeitai, i.e. military police) used are extensively covered, particularly in the chapters Thought Control and Indoctrination, The War at Home: Democracy Destroyed, and Dissent and Resistance: Change from Within. As Ienaga points out, legal opposition being cornered to private magazines (which, despite legal harassment, consistently churned out issues throughout the war), the Japanese had no clue as to how the war was truly going on. Hideki Tojo, both General and Prime Minister, did not get any news from the Navy as to their defeat at Midway until a month after the battle had been lost, rendering him a figurehead. Japan, writes Ienaga, was “an intellectual insane asylum run by the demented”. Rallies (p. 151) were a common tool to propagandize pro-government slogans. Even the removal of Tojo as Prime Minister in 1944 did not change the government’s insistence on maintaining Korea and Taiwan as theirs.

A surprise of the book was the author’s extensive pro-Chinese communist sympathies. Ianaga frequently embraces the Chinese Communist opposition to Japanese rule, pointing out in 1945, before the Soviet intervention, they controlled nearly a quarter of China’s population, even controlling parts of southern Manchukuo (p. 95). Ienaga states “According to army directives distributed in North China, the key to discovering a Communist party member was to watch the prisoners at mealtime: “If someone willingly gives the good food to others and quietly takes the worst, generally he will be a Communist.”” -behavior reminiscent of the Hadza in Tanzania. The emphasis on the Communists’ good will and military capability against the Japanese is a strong contrast to many of today’s histories (e.g., Richard B. Frank’s Tower of Skulls), which tend to attach little importance to the Chinese communist war effort. Ienaga similarly condemns the U.S. war against communists in Vietnam as “brutal, aggressive”, and “illegal” (p. 244)

Unlike Chiang’s China’s preparations for gradually retreating to defensible high ground during the war (p. 86), the Japanese, surprisingly, while having extensive plans for war with the Soviet Union, had no plans on a full-on war with the Chiang government (p. 85), which had agreed with the communists to place the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army (p. 90) under Chinese nationalist control. Ultimately, the Japanese had just two major demands: recognition of Manchukuo and the stationing of troops in North China in an anticommunist fight (p. 72). Chiang refused to sell away China’s national sovereignty, instead siding with the communists in a struggle against foreign misrule which, with America’s help, ultimately succeeded.

In the end, more than 50 countries declared war on Japan (p. 139) and, with its attack on British and American ground forces, guaranteed its defeat in the Greater East Asian war. Okinawa, one of the most important battles in the war, became a bloodbath, with more civilians being casualties during the fighting than military (p. 199). In October 1944, the Japanese began using kamikaze units -but only 1 to 3 percent actually hit allied warships (p. 183). The leaderships of Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States all lacked any concern whatsoever for the wellbeing of civilians. “The agricultural settlers were only 14 percent of the Japanese in Manchuria; they suffered 50 percent of the casualties” (p. 233). Ultimately, postwar Japan became, as Ienaga writes, “virtually the same relationship with the United States that Manchukuo or the Wang Ching-wei regime used to have with Tokyo”.

Rating: four out of five stars