I leaned forward, pulling away from the seat’s backrest. “So the commanding officers that always had to react to unpredictable situations were chosen on the basis of written exams.”
“It might have had something to do with the Imperial Navy’s fragility.”
I nodded deeply. “What about the Americans?”
“I haven’t really done much in-depth research yet, but in terms of one’s career, it was the same in America. Naval Academy graduation rankings had a lot to do with it. But that was only true during peacetime. During wars, the best combat commanders were given exceptional promotions. Pacific Fleet Commander-in-Chief Nimitz leapfrogged over dozens of men. Of course, they had to take responsibility for failures, too. Admiral Kimmel, who had held that position, was relieved of his command and demoted to rear admiral after the attack on Pearl Harbor wiped out the fleet there. It’s difficult to say whether Kimmel was to blame for the thrashing they took at Pearl Harbor, but apparently the U.S. military was very clear about assigning responsibility. Also, there seems to have been few, if any, timid commanders in the American Navy. They were all surprisingly aggressive.”
Just how much research have you done? I wondered. She had always been the type to become engrossed in a subject that snagged her attention, but even so, she seemed especially intent on digging up info for this project. She’d always been pretty smart.
“I see. So that could be the key to America’s strength.”
“I was talking about the Imperial Navy just now, but it seems to have been the same with the Imperial Army. Apparently, the prewar Army and Navy War Colleges were harder to get into than Tokyo University in some ways. Just being selected from among the officers to take the entrance exam earned you a listing in the official gazette, so it must have been incredibly difficult. I’m bothering to tell you all this because the more research I do on Japan’s former military, the more it seems to have in common with our current bureaucratic system.”
I looked at my sister again. Maybe I’d failed to get what she was about for the longest time. “I’ve been doing some research into the military back then, too, and realized something myself,” I offered.
“Oh?”
“You touched on this—how the senior officers in the Imperial Navy skirted accountability. Even if an operation ended in failure, they weren’t penalized for it. Take Fleet Commander Nagumo, who made a serious judgment error at Midway and lost four aircraft carriers. Or General Staff Chief Fukutome, who allowed important operational documents to fall into the hands of the American military when he got captured by anti-Japanese guerrillas before the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Vice Admiral Fukutome was taken prisoner, but the brass let him off the hook. Had he been a common soldier, there’d have been hell to pay.”
“They ordered the rank and file to kill themselves rather than be captured, but turned a blind eye when it was one of them.”
“It was common practice in the Army as well not to hold the top elite liable. Masanobu Tsuji was never taken to task for his repeated foolish operations on Guadalcanal. Lieutenant General Mutaguchi was never officially made to take responsibility for his unbelievably stupid Imphal operation that resulted in some thirty thousand soldiers dying of starvation. By the way, before the War in the Pacific ever began, Tsuji’s inept plans during the Nomonhan Incident had led to massive casualties, but he wasn’t held accountable and just continued to rise through the ranks. In his stead, field officers were forced to take the blame, and many regimental commanders were coerced into committing suicide.”
“How awful!”
“If Tsuji and other senior general staff had been made to take the fall for Nomonhan, it might have prevented the later tragedies on Guadalcanal from ever happening.”
Keiko grimaced in irritation. “But why were they let off the hook?”
“I’m not too clear on that point,” I said. “But my feeling is that they’d turned into bureaucracies.”
Keiko nodded. “I see—they were able to shirk responsibility because the elite all covered up for each other. Making a fuss about their peers’ failure might come back to bite them later when they screwed up.”
“I think that definitely was the case. Division Commander Kotoku Sato, who pulled back his troops against Mutaguchi’s orders during the Battle of Imphal, never faced a court-martial. They ruled it a mental breakdown and let him off the hook. Had a court-martial taken place, they’d have had to assess Mutaguchi’s blame as the operation’s commander. So to cover for Mutaguchi, they declared Sato mentally unfit to stand trial. Court-martial proceedings might touch on their own accountability as senior IGHQ staff since they’d green-lighted Mutaguchi’s operation. By the way, Lieutenant General Kawabe, who was the one who approved Mutaguchi’s Imphal operation as his superior, became a full general.”
“That sucks,” Keiko muttered. “The regular troops had to risk their lives fighting for such people?”
“Speaking of responsibility, remember what Ito-san told us? Commander-in-Chief Isoroku Yamamoto left for Pearl Harbor with the parting words, ‘Make sure this won’t be a sneak attack,’ but it did, in fact, end up being a nasty surprise attack thanks to the laxness of the embassy staff in Washington, who delayed in delivering the declaration of war. That story kept bugging me, so I did some research and found that no one was made to take any blame after the war.”
“The higher-ups had been at a party the night before, right?”
“Yeah, they drank the night away at a farewell party and were late getting to work the next day, a Sunday. The day before, they’d received a ‘Memorandum to the U.S. Government,’ an extremely high-priority thirteen-part cable from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, yet they didn’t bother typing it up and went partying. When they saw the telegram declaring war that arrived the next morning, they panicked and started to type out the memorandum first. It took them forever, and by the time they delivered the cable to Secretary of State Hull, the attack on Pearl Harbor had already commenced. The declaration of war itself was only eight lines long.”
“They should have been dismissed from the civil service.”
“Or worse. Thanks to their screw-up, Japanese suffered the unbearable stigma of being ‘a race of people who stoop to vile sneak attacks.’ That was huge, you know? About America having dropped the atomic bomb, for instance, there are views that ‘those vile Japanese got exactly what they deserved.’ After 9/11, their mass media compared the terrorist attacks to Pearl Harbor, or so I’ve heard. Yet not one of the embassy higher-ups was held accountable for an inexcusable failure that besmirched Japan as a country. A certain career diplomat even tried to pin the blame on a non-career telegraph worker who had, in fact, offered to stay overnight. The very same man who’d said, ‘That won’t be necessary’ and sent him home turned around after the war and tried to blame it on the poor fellow.”
Keiko sighed.
“So in the end, not only did the high-ranking diplomats all wash their hands of the whole matter, but a few of them went on to become the ministry’s undersecretary after the war. Had they been thoroughly taken to task back then, we might have avoided the ‘vile race’ stigma and won back some honor. Americans might have said, ‘Ah, so it wasn’t meant to be undeclared.’ But even to this day, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hasn’t officially admitted its error, and globally speaking, people still think of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor as a sneak attack.”