Japan's imperial hubris holds a dire warning for a violent century

As new empires pursue old ambitions and borders become bargaining chips, this anti-war treatise reminds us how history repeats itself through humanity's amnesia

Japan's War: Hirohito’s Holy War Against the West

by Stewart Binns

Published by Wildfire

336 pages ₹899

 

“Oh, how I’d like to forget the world! Mine is the utter humiliation. I’m just unlucky! Enemy planes, come! Kill me! Then I’d forget this world!” writes Tsuenjirō Tamura, a man in his 70s, in his diary on December 9, 1944.

 

What is it worth, all of it? The invasions and the ideologies, the holy wars and the chosen nations, the flags planted in soil already soaked with someone else’s blood? History repeats itself through humanity’s amnesia. We act, we suffer, we understand, we forget, we repeat. Today, as new empires draft old ambitions and borders become bargaining chips once more, as wars are created for the benefit of a few, to the detriment of everyone else, one need not look far to understand the futility of it all, for it’s been less than a century since nations massacred themselves for the petty, pretty visions of a few.

 

Japan’s War: Hirohito’s Holy War Against the West by Stewart Binns is the story of one such vision. It’s the story of a nation at the height of its powers and the depth of its delusions simultaneously. A nation that had defeated Russia, humbled Britain, swallowed China whole, and dreamed of ruling Asia. It is also the story of a dream shattered, the story of the 20th century.

 

Mr Binn builds his account from the ground up, drawing on “letters, diaries, autobiographies and oral evidence” from across Japanese society. He tells history through private voices, in the confessions of ordinary people swept into extraordinary violence. At its centre is an emperor who was considered divine, and a nation that would follow that god into ruin.

 

But what did it actually mean for an emperor to be divine? Mr Binns gives an example: “In November 1934, a motorcycle policeman leading the imperial motorcade through Kiryū City, Gumma prefecture, was supposed to take a left turn at an intersection. Instead, he led the procession straight on, upsetting the itinerary of the tour. Seven days later, the erring policeman committed suicide, the governor of Gumma and all the top officials involved in staging the tour were reprimanded, police officials in Gumma had their salaries docked for two months, and the home minister was questioned and severely criticised in the Imperial Diet.”

 

A divine emperor required a divine mission. Japan was to be a civilisational force, Asia’s liberator and a sovereign simultaneously. Ikki Kita, the ideological father of Japanese fascism, is quoted thus: “After destroying England [in Asia] and restoring Turkey, after making India independent and China autonomous, the Rising Sun Flag of Japan shall offer the light of that sun to all mankind. The second coming of Christ, prophesied in every country on earth, actually signifies the scripture and sword of Japan [as a new] Mohammed.”

 

Japan’s early campaigns across China and the Pacific fed the myth of unstoppability. So, in December 1941, when it attacked Pearl Harbour, the logic was the logic of all overextended empires — that their momentum was destiny, that audacity was the best strategy. And yet, it was the beginning of the end. “‘Armageddon’ is perhaps an overused word for catastrophic events. After all, there is only one battle that ends the world. Even so, what Japan endured from the beginning of 1945 for the next eight months came very close to a national Armageddon,” Mr Binns writes.

 

And defeat, when it came, was absolute. He notes, “Japan had to face not only fearsome attacks on its land, infrastructure and people, but also the devastation of a cultural heritage and beliefs. The divine emperor would become mortal, its warrior tradition would be destroyed, its invincibility made myth. In short, two millennia of history came to an end, leaving the nation with an uncertain future during which they would have to live with the conflicting traumas of guilt, humiliation and anger. For an extraordinary period of three and a half years, Japan had conducted a merciless war of aggression and brutality, then, as 1945 dawned, its enemies were about to respond in kind: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’”

 

Mr Binns writes that “human nature, its propensity for both good and evil, becomes most visible” in times of war. Captain Shosaku Kameyama writes in his diary, “It is the war which forces human beings into such a dreadful environment; an environment that turns human beings evil.”

 

The story of the 20th century has never been more relevant. As we forget the graveyards of history and dig new burial sites, the questions remain the same. What is history? What is humanity? Although its pages contain much violence, grief, and despair, Japan’s War is, like the best of war literature, a fundamentally anti-war treatise. Its voices, collected and preserved, in unison, say that war, across decades, is this: Remember.

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. ©aroomofwords