Customer Reviews

Pacific War, 1931-1945

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Americans may be startled to pick up a 256-page book about the Pacific War and discover that Pearl Harbor isn't mentioned until page 135. That's a consequence of Ienaga's belief that the war actually began with the Japanese army's 1931 coup in Manchuria, which led inevitably to war with China, which in turn led to the wider war agaisnt the western Allies. Despite Japan's claims about liberating Asians from colonialism, its purpose in going to war was to obtain the raw materials with which to defeat China. That was one reason the Japanese treated the "liberated" peoples so badly--as badly as they treated their white PWs.

Part of the blame goes to the Japanese military tradition, in which the officers were an elite and the troops were conscripted from the younger sons of tenant farmers. Brutality was the norm, and the enlisted men who stayed in the army and became sergeants were precisely those who would most brutalize the next batch of recruits. Draftees were called issen gorin--roughly, "penny postcards," because that was the cost and the method of obtaining one. Why husband the life of a soldier when he could be replaced for a penny? Ienaga explains that the enlisted soldiers were the bottom of the food chain, that they had no on upon whom to vent their brutality in return.

During WWII, it was fashionable in the U.S. to show General Tojo as the Japanese dictator, making a trio with Germany's Hitler and Italy's Mussolini. But of course that was very far from true, as even American propaganda recognized, since sometimes the emperor Hirohito filled the same role. Ienaga is especially good at explaining this mystery, in which a dictator was imposed by a group of elder statesmen--then deposed when his usefulness was over. Tojo ruled the government and the army, but he never managed to rule the navy--he didn't even learn about the defeat at Midway until a month after four aircraft carriers and a major portion of the navy's fighter planes had gone to the bottom.

This is a valuable book, one of only a half-dozen serious studies by Japanese scholars of World War II available in English. We didn't know our enemy in 1941; we hardly know him any better today.

When I grew up in Communist Eastern Europe in the 1980s, I learned the official Party line about World War II as dictated by Soviet Marxists in Moscow. Imagine my surprise when I found the very same Soviet propaganda parroted almost verbatim in this 1960s booklet by a Japanese history professor.

In the Soviet version of the story, "reactionary" Japanese "imperialists" did not really want to attack the US at Pearl Harbor. Their sights were always set on invading the Soviet Union. The war did not end because of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ended because heroic Red Army invaded Manchuria. Never mind the breathtaking gaps in the logic, this was the party line and that was it. Every year on the anniversary of the end of the war, a radio broadcast by the Ministry for Telling You What You Should Think repeated the message to make sure we got it.

Saburo Ienaga regurgitates the very same party line with the gusto of a committed Communist hack that he is. Just to give you a taste, here is his take on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that triggered the joint German-Russian invasion of Poland (as well as Russian occupation of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and invasion of Finland): "The Moscow Pact with Germany was a desperate bid by the USSR to protect itself at a time when England and France were appeasing Hitler" (p. 82). The mind boggles.

Ienaga expends major effort on minimizing the role of Britain and United States in the war, and praising the Soviet Union wherever he can. Thus, the Soviet Union "had been fighting almost singlehandedly against Germany" (p. 145). It also defeated Japan, really. "The Red Army was smashing through Manchuria before the United States could reach Japan, a situation not to the liking of the American military. The sensational atomic attacks diverted attention from the Russian successes" (p. 201). And anyway, Americans are Nazis: "the decision to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki closely resembled the orders issued by German leaders brought to trial as war criminals at Nuremberg" (p. 201). Later, Ienaga complains about "American aggression in Korea" (p.244). The context suggests that he is referring to Korean War... "In its post-1945 reincarnation Japan has virtually the same relationship with the United States that Manchukuo or the Wang Ching-wei regime used to have with Tokyo. Now Washington pulls the strings and Japan dances" (p. 244).

Ienaga's shrillness presents us with some funny moments, such as his contortions while describing the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army: "Never in the earlier wars against the Manchus, tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany, Chinese warlords, or Chiang Kai-shek had the Imperial Army come up against troops like those of the Eighth Route Army" (p. 91). Really? Never? Why didn't the Communists win, then? "[The Eighth Route Army], of course, made no stupid frontal attacks on superior Japanese forces" (p. 92). Aha! How clever! You see, "the Eighth Route Army was one of the most democratic armies in the history of military organizations. ... Democratic methods were used right on the battlefield" (p. 93). Yeah, right. To Ienaga's bewilderment, "[Japanese] veterans of the China campaign wrote only about the fighting against the Nationalists" (p. 95). To a fair minded person, that would suggest that the Nationalists bore the brunt of the war, but not to Ienaga. "The Japanese public do not seem to have a correct understanding of the role of the Communist military forces" (p. 95). Well, comrades, grab your pens and scribble away to reeducate the Japanese public!

A throwaway remark in one of the middle chapters can serve as a fitting summary of the book's attitude. Only "the Communist analysis of [the Japanese war in China] deserves the highest marks for understanding it as an imperialist war" (p. 118).

Now that Soviet Union is no more and the only remaining Communist regimes are butts of jokes rather than threats to human liberty, Ienaga's book preserves for future generations the hatefully distorted mindset of Communist historiography. I have to admit, though, that I am amazed that there is enough interest in obscure 1960s Communist propaganda to keep the book in print. The alternative, that people read this book to get answers about World War II history, is too horrible to contemplate...

In Japan this was an important book, one of the first radical reviews of the Pacific War, written from a point of view repudiating the aggression of Japanese imperialism, but not totally excusing the conduct of the United States and Britain. Alas, the writer is apparently an adherent of the Maoist brand of Stalinism and gives much more weight to the role of the Chinese Communist Party than they deserve.

Nevertheless, this book gives a good picture from the inside of the growth of conflict in East Asia between Japan and Britain and the United States, as well as a picture of the shifts inside Japan that led to first the expansion of their penetration in China to full scale war, and then how Japan's needs in that war and Western economic and diplomatic hostility to Japan led to Pearl Harbor. It gives a brief but useful description of the collapse of Japanese society as Japan was defeated.

This book might be a big difficult for someone not familiar with the ins and outs of Japanese life as it was written in Japanese for Japanese readers. However, it will has a strength for giving which points were important from the Japanese point of view, particularly to those within Japan who are critical of Japan's course during and since WWII.

If you want to try to understand Japanese interpretations of thier involvement in World War II, then this is a book you must read!

This book is from a Japanese perspective (there are many different interpretations among Japanese scholars as he mentions in this book, and which he is railing against). He uses the term 15-year-war because of his belief that Japan was in a continuous state of aggression from 1931 onward. He agrues that this aggression was a mind set of most people at the time, and lists in great numbers the atrocities commited during the war (from the oppression in the conquered territories to oppression in the army and the home).

Ienaga was a high school teacher during the war and was dismayed at the way in which his governemnt and many people embraced militarism and violent aggression overseas. His frustration with his own people is evident throughout the entire book as he complains about the lack of freedoms that people should have had to oppose the war (and those that protested it anyway were severely punished by the government).

Some of the other reviewers complained of his bias, but to be fair this book is an analysis of events. This is NOT intended to be a text book. It is intended to present a method to understand the facts and events which a textbook would give you. He presents it very carefully and thoughtfully, and after reading the book you can judge the whether the conclusion was justified or not.

I am encouraging you to read this book because I believe that his arguments are well thought out, and you can get a feeling for how deeply World War II effected this man's thought process.

-ATR

P.S. In regards to the Nanking massacre, the numbers on that incident have varied from time to time because of the cover up of it. I don't know for certain, but I would suspect that since Ienaga wrote this book in the 60's, the information on real numbers of dead might not have been available. Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking, was printed relatively recently and really helped bring to light the level of horror committed there.

I lived in Japan for three years, my initial reaction to the Japanese telling me that they were different to everybody esle was to simply say "you are human, like everybody else on this planet". While that was true, I came to realise that the Japanese are indeed different and that conformity - "the nail that sticks out will get hammered flat" is deeply embeded. While books such as Nicholas Bornoff's Pink Samurai ISBN 0-586-20576-4 and a study of Shintoism, Amaterasu reveal layers. Saburu Ienaga as professor Emeritus at Tokyo University, attempted to write a true version of events for school text books. However, the true version is still not taught in Japan to this day as it would dishonour those who misguidedly fought bravely in the name of a puppet emperor ruled by an evil military government. What surprised me about the book was not the widely known consumate brutality of the Japanese soldiers (who lived in constant fear of death, if complience, belief and conformity were not 100%), but how the Americans and the other allies behaved after Japan surrendered. This is the untold story, as far as the West is concerned and will most likely remain so, as it is not pretty.

Anyone going to, or doing business with Japan, must read this book, as it reveals much of why Japanese society is as it is today.

Another reviewer states that the author is communist. That is probably true and may be the reason Ienaga is so anti-Japanese and anti-American. I respect the author because he writes with passion and fought long and hard to get his book published.

This is a reasonably fair analysis of the Pacific war itself, particularly when compared with the mine run of Japanese histories. Unfortunately, Ienaga's basic anti-Americanism is such that he regards the supposed abuse of the Japanese population by American occupation forces as comparable to acts of occupying Japanese forces elsewhere in Asia during the war.

"[General Akamatsu] ordered local inhabitants to turn over all food supplies to the army and commit suicide before U.S. troops landed. The obedient islanders, 329 all together, killed each other at the Onna River with razors, hatchets, and sickles. U.S. forces occupied nearby Iejima and used some of the local people to take surrender appeals to [the garrison].... Akamatsu's men killed the emissaries."

It's bad enough when you read this stuff written by an American, but when it comes from a Japanese writer it's really unsettling. Saburo Ienaga was a high-school teacher during the war and a university professor afterward; he got into trouble with the authorities for trying to bring some balance to the high-school history texts in the 1950 and 1960s, when the Cold War and the end of the U.S. occupation allowed the schools to gloss Japan's role in World War II. I read this book when I was researching the Flying Tigers, but to sit down and read it on its own merits was a revelation.

Americans may be startled to pick up a 256-page book about the Pacific War and discover that Pearl Harbor isn't mentioned until page 135, more than halfway through. That's a consequence of Ienaga's belief that the war began with the Japanese army's 1931 coup in Manchuria, which led inevitably to war with China, which in turn led to the wider war that began in December 1941. Despite Japan's claims about liberating Asians from white colonialism, its purpose in going to war with the Americans, British, and Dutch was to obtain the raw materials with which to prosecute the war in China. That was one reason the Japanese treated the "liberated" people so badly--as badly as their treated their prisoners of war, which was as bad as anything east of the German death camps.

Part of the blame goes to the Japanese military tradition, in which the officers were an elite and the troops were conscripted from the younger sons of tenant farmers. Brutality was the norm, and the enlisted men who stayed in the army and became sergeants were precisely those who would most brutalize the next batch of recruits. Draftees were called <i>issen gorin</i>--roughly, "penny postcards," because that was the cost and the method of obtaining one. Why husband the life of a soldier when he could be replaced for a penny? Ienaga explains that the enlisted soldiers were the bottom of the food chain, that they had no on upon whom to vent their brutality in return. (He was wrong, of course: the Korean labor guards were lower, and the prisoners and captive peoples were lower still, and it was they who suffered the lash for every indignity visited upon the common soldiers.)

Yet the same army was notably humane during the Russo-Japanese War. Why the difference? The Imperial Japanese Army lost its humanity in China, where national pride became the ugliest kind of racism. "Chinka, Chinka, Chinka," as the translator renders a poem that appeared in Japanese schools in the 1930s: "they're ugly and they stinka." A grade-school boys would be told that his duty and his privilege when he grew up would be to kill "hundreds of Chinese." (Military training began in elementary school, and each middle school had a military cadre to lead the boys in drill.)

During World War II, it was fashionable in the U.S. to show General Tojo as the Japanese dictator, making a trio with Germany's Hitler and Italy's Mussolini. But of course that was very far from true, as even American propaganda recognized, since sometimes the emperor Hirohito filled the same role. Ienaga is especially good at explaining this mystery, in which a dictator could be imposed by a group of elder statesmen--and then deposed when his usefulness was over. Tojo ruled the government and the army, but he never managed to rule the navy--he didn't even learn about the defeat at Midway until a month after four aircraft carriers and a major portion of the navy's fighter planes had gone to the bottom.

In fact, the army and navy controlled the government (including Tojo), with occasional input from the emperor and the elder statesmen (basically, everyone who had ever served as prime minister). It was an intricate web, and often enough the real power was exercised not by the generals but by colonels and majors in the field.

Ienaga wasn't disloyal, nor was he one of those who curried favor with the Occupation by writing what the Americans wanted to hear. He savages the United States for using the atomic bomb on Japanese cities--an atrocity that he ranks with Germany's death camps and Japan's Rape of Nanjing. More sobering, in a book written in 1968, he accuses the U.S. of acting as the new Imperial Japanese Army. We were the brutal overlords in Vietnam, as Japan had been in China--while Japan itself played the ignominious role of the Manchukou puppet state of the 1930s and 1940s, dutifully supporting the aggressor. It is an uncomfortable comparison.

This is a valuable book, and one of only a half-dozen serious studies by Japanese scholars of World War II that are available in English. We didn't know our enemy in 1941; we hardly know him any better today.

He who wins, writes history is an old adage. Americans have a bad habit of not wanting to hear the other side of the story - we're not perfect, we made mistakes and sovereign nations will do what is in their best interest.

That does not mean that the Rape of Nanking, the horrible treatment of Allied POWs should be condoned or overlooked. You can make an argument that this author glosses over Japanese atrocities. However, that doesn't mean this book can't shed light on the Pacific War from the enemies viewpoint.

In Aug 1941, the US cut off shipments of oil and steel to the Japanese as protest of their war in China. We knew the Japanese would not leave China, that would mean loosing face. We knew that it would force Japan into war to get the resources it wanted to continue to build ships and planes. We predicted they would go to war within six months, and so they did.

The main point to be taken from reading this book is that different people have a different perspective on events. Had the US somehow lost the war, is it conceiveable that Curtis LeMay would have been tried for the fire raids on Tokoyo? The A bombs we used are "weapons of mass destruction". We are the first and only country to ever have used them in war. I agree with that decision, but there are different views.

The point of history is to study what happened and draw conclusions from that. To do so, the more information you have, the better and more accurate that conclusion is. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to explore the other side of the argument. You don't have to agree with the author, but you'll learn that every story has two sides.

The historical curiousity review is quite sound and interesting. However, this little book does have some redeeming qualities, especially when it limits itself to the militarization of Japanese society. The sections on the education system are good. The communists bunk is there. Reading Chang's biography of MAO gives a more realistic historical assessment of the shared interests and, at times, complicity between Chinese communists and the Japanese invaders - a legacy left out of China's government mandated "protests" against Japan's atrocious war record (one the communists in China shared and continued for decades after Japan's defeat)