Posted on 07/31/2018 11:28:01 AM PDT by Jagermonster
A used bookshop owner in Japan found the memo tucked away in a journal. The document gives the first glimpse into conversation between Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo on the eve of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tokyo –– A newly released memo by a wartime Japanese official provides what a historian says is the first look at the thinking of Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust the United States into World War II.
While far from conclusive, the five-page document lends credence to the view that Hirohito bears at least some responsibility for starting the war.
At 8:30 p.m. in Tokyo, just hours before the attack, Tojo summoned two top aides for a countdown to war briefing. One of them, Vice Interior Minister Michio Yuzawa, wrote an account three hours after the meeting was over.
"The emperor seemed at ease and unshakable once he had made a decision," he quoted Tojo as saying.
To what extent Hirohito was responsible for the war is a sensitive topic in Japan, and the bookseller who discovered the memo kept it under wraps for nearly a decade before releasing it to Japan's Yomiuri newspaper, which published it last week. Hirohito was protected from indictment in the Tokyo war crimes trials during a US occupation that wanted to use him as a symbol to rebuild Japan as a democratic nation. Hirohito died in 1989 at age 87 after 62 years on the throne.
"It took me nine years to come forward, as I was afraid of a backlash," said bookshop owner Takeo Hatano, who handled the document carefully as he showed it to Associated Press journalists. "But now I hope ...
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
I read the article in CS Monitor - he says the Dec. 7th date caught his eye. But I thought the go ahead for the attack had to be given somewhat earlier? (If the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” is to be believed. Clearly the planning was long before. I’m not sure how this squares with Hirohito being in the loop before the last minute. Is the memo genuine?
I don’t know either way, just wondering...
I saw that documentary too.
With England battling for its survival and barely hanging on to key bases in the Mediterranean and N. Africa, Japan saw a onetime opportunity to strike in the South Pacific, overrun British and U.S. possessions there, and expand their empire in order to have access to the raw materials they otherwise had to import. Their calculation was that taking out the fleet in Pearl Harbor would set us back years and by that time, they would have consolidated the South Pacific.
They knew that the U.S. was going to make them pay eventually but they were not expecting us to be able to fight back so quickly. They figured we would get dragged into the European war and be mired over there for years. Long term, they expected the U.S., wary of fighting yet another war, to eventually accept the new situation (in the South Pacific), after perhaps "winning back" some token possessions like Hawaii and the Aleutians.
The battles of Coral Sea and Midway (mid 1942) stunned the Japanese and it was then that they realized they made a grave error. But by then, it was too late.
Battle of Midway was devastating to the Japanese. Four of their best carriers sunk. They would never recover even though it did take three more years for us to finish the job.
Too never new the falsexteeth we gave him had” Remember Pearl Harbor” engraved in them.
You obviously are not a student of BUSHIDO. If you were you'd understand the shame of being captured and why most Japanese preferred death to it.
If anyone bares some responsibility, it's the US Government for not informing GI's that their enemy played by a different, very different set of rules; but of course they didn't. As for the Asian, they knew what was coming and usually capitulated .
That is funny
If you war games it, Japan wins huge in the beginning. Japan spent too many resources taking things that didn’t matter. Everything should have been immediately aimed at Midway and Hawaii. If you take those, everything else comes in due time. All you need is the oil.
But eventually you lose because the Americans have almost infinite resources to throw at you.
They lost their highly trained experienced naval air arm at Midway. They then had to move their training cadres into the fleet as replacements. When they were gone, they were stuck with naval aviators who could barely fly, take off & land was about it.
its been a good day,
its not often I get to quote Cool Hand Luke, Blazing Saddles and Animal House in one day,
now if I can only find a story with a Big W in it,
The Japanese government bears all responsibility for how they treated prisoners of war, and for how they treated conquered countries (and for conquering them in the first place). That the US bore any responsibility for the enemy's war crimes is outrageous.
“’Tojo is a bureaucrat who was incapable of making own decisions, so he turned to the emperor as his supervisor. That’s why he had to report everything for the emperor to decide. If the emperor didn’t say no, then he would proceed,’ Furukawa said. ‘Clearly, the memo shows the absence of political leadership in Japan.’”
This doesn’t ring true at all. First, everyone in any position in Imperial Japan was incapable, to some extent, of making his own decisions. Individualism wasn’t how they rolled. It doesn’t typically work that way in other governments or in corporations either.
And war with America was a prospect of existential consequence. There’s no way Tojo or anyone else, short of the god king, would put the fate of the nation on the line.
Tojo didn’t turn to the emperor because he couldn’t decide, he did it because such a decision was above his pay grade.
Everyone with a desk has some inkling of the limits of his authority.
In Imperial Japan, where a man was obliged to disembowel himself for making a poor choice, consensus was an imperative at every level.
Nor does this indicate any “absence of political leadership.” The war wasn’t mere politics. True, there were factions within the government, at odds as to how to govern and how to proceed with an ongoing war that nearly all of them were committed to expanding. But war is never simply “politics by other means.” Not for long. Not in Japan where the supreme political authority was regarded literally as a god.
Not defending Tojo here, who may indeed have been a narrow-minded fellow on his own turf, but getting a wink from Hirohito in this case doesn’t reflect badly on his performance. He did it because it was unthinkable to do otherwise.
This and their pathetic ASW capabilities early in the war was their biggest issues IMO. Their sonar sucked and wasn't very good until the very end of the war.
Yes it was a BIG mistake. The USA handled them while maintaining the Europe first strategy and still almost wiped them off the planet
Hirohito should have hung because of the Rape of Nanking, ALONE!
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was another reason for a rope!
I understand the mentality about the Japanese - spent over three years there while in the Marine Corps - but Hirohito was not a dummy or puppet - he was ruthless, heartless and power-mad!
Two things, their aircraft lacked armor protection and we also broke the IJN code( their “enigma”). Midway was a miracle we should gave lost that battle according to all the computer simulations of the battle.
If we did that, Japan would have become a Soviet client, guaranteed.
Edward Behr cleaned up some of the difficulties in Bergamini’s work, and then there’s Hata in Japan, who unfortunately hasn’t always been very scholarly but his evidence is difficult to refute.
The essential point is that Hirohito wasn’t the figurehead-nerd-marine-biologist that what today we would call the fake news painted him as. The one thing I have never understood is why he didn’t simply abdicate to take responsibility and put his young son on the throne, then pull the strings from even further behind the curtain. Maybe not abdicating was part of the deal SCAP made with him to keep the country from revolting after the occupation began.
Well, the 7th in Hawaii was the 8th in Japan.
Their strategy of “Death before dishonor” cost them dearly. They lost almost all their good pilots by 1943. Shoot, they could have taken Midway on the way home from Pearl Harbor. It’s amazing that we did come back on them so quickly.
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