Wednesday, July 18, 2007
WHY JAPAN ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR
By H. Peter Metzger
It is always a pleasant surprise for me to gain a new insight into a part of history that has long eluded me. For example, I have always wondered why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, since it seemed like such a self-destructive move even at the time.
I have just finished reading a small book about the Russo-Japanese war and suddenly all of my questions have been answered. Moreover, I have developed a new respect for Japan and my life-long hatred for Russia has been rekindled anew. For another surprise, this story even has a very crucial Jewish angle (¬Heroes and Friends: Behind the Scenes of the Treaty of Portsmouth, by Michiko Nakanishi, published by Peter Randall, Portsmouth, NH).
Now finding historical parallels is often the habit of historians, and while the book’s author did not dwell on these, I sure did. I think the parallels between the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 are so strong, that they should have become the principal guide for American foreign policy towards Japan in early 1941. But best of all, I am satisfied that at last I understand why the Pearl Harbor attack happened in the first place.
GOOD JAPAN/US RELATIONS, THE FIRST 40 YEARS
It’s important to realize that the Japanese are a very proud people, being far more like Europeans in this regard than other Asians. Now, national pride cannot co-exist with humiliation for very long, particularly in a nation with a strong military tradition. But from the time that Japan was opened up to world trade in 1854, she had been treated insultingly by a series of arms limitation treaties not to mention humiliating immigration quotas by the United States. The West demanded that Japan stay a second rate power, and since she still was, she had to “endure the unendurable” and accept it. But unlike other Asian countries, Japan had a great ambition to become something much more, and so she saw the demands of the West as provocations, which they surely were. But at first she went along for the most part.
For example, only ten years after Japan’s entry onto the world stage, when she was still governed by Shogunates, a maverick Lord fired upon some European merchant ships. In a punitive expedition, British, French and Dutch squadrons retaliated by bombarding Shimonoseki harbor (only one American vessel was involved). The local Shogun sued for peace and in behavior reminiscient of The Treaty of Versailles, the European powers demanded the payment of a crushing indemnity. This caused the Shogun to be deposed, but the new government repaid the debt in full.
Most unlike the Europeans, and in the first of many honorable acts between Japan and the United States, two American Secretaries of State saw the injustice of the excessive indemnity forced upon Japan and urged Congress to re-examine the matter. Soon both houses of Congress voted that the entire amount of the American share be returned to Japan.
Thus the Americans saw something very unusual in the Japanese; that they paid their war debts. And the Japanese saw something very unusual in the Americans. Foreign Minister Okuma put it this way; “The United States voluntarily returned the indemnity out of a sense of justice and goodwill without any conditions attached”.
Thus, the behaviour of both nations began on a far higher moral plane than would have been the case had European political values been employed. And so began forty years of a golden age of mutual respect between Japan and America, ending when the American President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the soon to come, Russo-Japanese war. At that point, another 40-year period began, this time of bad relations between the two countries, culminating in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.
HUMILIATION OF JAPAN BY RUSSIA AND THE WEST
But back to the turn of the century, Japan won a war against China in 1895 and then took part in the European coalition to quell the Boxer (Chinese) rebellion in 1900. Impressed with the military prowess of the Japan, Britain saw an Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) to her advantage in containing Russian expansion into the Pacific, which posed a threat to a British sphere of influence.
To say that the Japanese fighting spirit impressed the West would be an understatement. It was a new thing for the Europeans to see an army, which refused to surrender; even when all hope was lost. They saw a people who were quite different from what the West had grown to expect from the Asians, particularly from the apathetic Chinese.
(the illustration at the end shows how the Japanese army improvised a siege engine by making a bridge using their own bodies in order to breach the newly built Russian fortifications at Port Arthur.)
Alarmed by the unexpected appearance of Japanese power, a strange thing happened. It was called the Triple Intervention of 1895. Russia, Germany and France ganged up on Japan and forced her to return most of the territory she seized from China at the end of the recent war. There was no fighting over this matter and not a shot was fired, for it was done solely by intimidation. The Europeans offered some unsolicited “friendly advice” to Japan, to return the territory she won from China in exchange for a larger indemnity, or face war with the West. Facing a hostile coalition of Europeans, Japan backed down and returned the prized Liaotung Peninsula, along with its harbor city, Port Arthur, to China.
Having thus pried Port Arthur away from Japan, and in an act of monumental impudence, Russia immediately seized the entire Liaodong Peninsula from China for itself and began to fortify Port Arthur as a Russian warm water port of its own. In a feeding frenzy, Germany, France and even Great Britain moved in on the paralyzed China and seized more of Japan’s spoils from her recent war with China.
Much as The Treaty of Versailles is blamed for humiliating another proud people, the Germans, and thus promoting the rise of Hitler, the proud Japanese people reacted in much the same way forty years earlier. The thing that provoked them most was that they knew that they had the military power to resist these seizures but they didn’t dare use it for no Asian power had yet presumed to challenge European military power. But that was soon to change.
This continuing and further humiliation at the hands of the Europeans led to a cultural change in Japan called Gashin ShÅtan, meaning “Persevering through Hardship” (for the sake of revenge), an ideology resulting in a massive increase in heavy industry and the strength of the armed forces, especially the navy, all at the expense of the ordinary Japanese subject.
RUSSIAN IMPERIALIST EXPANSIONISM
To make matters worse, Russian imperialism was fast closing in on the far East, as the Russian Trans-Siberian railroad penetrated deeply into Japan’s sphere of influence. This was the logical outcome of Russia’s eastward expansion in her quest for an ice-free port on the Pacific. Actually that penetration began forty years earlier, when Russia annexed a vast province of China, and built a fortified naval port on the Sea of Japan (Vladivostok), but which was not reliably ice-free, however. Later, Manchuria fell under Russian influence as the great foreign railroad cut through that country, another neighbor of Japan. Finally, only Korea remained as a buffer state standing between Russia and Russian command of the Tsushima strait, where she could attack the Japanese navy at will.
Clearly, Russia did not worry a bit that this encroachment might create a reaction from Japan, since a serious military threat to a European power by an Asian power was considered an impossibility. But such Russian pride had no foundation because that country was about to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. ¬
While it was surely true that Russia had the largest single army in the world, that power did not translate into strength. Much like the France of WWII, which also had the largest army in Europe but lost every battle, Russia had known few victories in all its history (except against its own people). Moreover, the Russian military and social fabric was a house of cards, waiting for the slightest push in the wrong direction, and that push came the next year in the form of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE WEST
But in 1904, Russia was still much feared and Japan knew that to make war against this colossus was a huge risk, and so was prepared to accept many defeats and great losses, as was predicted at the time by all the Japanese leaders.
But the future did not look all that bad for Japan since she had some powerful encouragement from the West. The Anglo¬-Japanese Alliance of 1902 had already demonstrated that Russia was not much liked by England while Japan was. Also The Netherlands looked upon Russian eastward expansionism with worry for its Indonesian colonies. Indeed, Imperial Russia was regarded with ill concealed contempt by many European and American statesmen.
For example, after the conflict to come, President Theodore Roosevelt said, this “preposterous Csar has been unable to make war, and now he has been unable to make peace”.
It was then that President Roosevelt told an envoy from Japan, words that no one in Japan would dare ever to have hoped to hear. He said, “Japan should be the leader and protector of all the Asiatic nations from the Suez Canal to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and shouldn’t let any European or American powers intervene. Japan ought to declare an Asiatic Monroe Doctrine”.
Even so, it must have been with a heavy heart that Japan made its decision to risk everything, and even Japan knew that their little nation could prevail against Russia for only one year at the most, but Japanese pride had been humiliated once too often. Nevertheless, it still came as a big shock to the world when Japan attacked Russia, and two days before a declaration of war too. Unlike in 1941, no nation censured Japan for that sneak attack.
THE WAR
The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was a lopsided affair. Without meaning to minimizing the huge Japanese losses, Japan won every battle, and spectacularly so too, surprising even the Japanese. The war saw the largest land battle in history and the largest rout in a sea battle also, up until that time. It was a titanic humiliation for Russia and the Tsar blamed his commanders.
To be fair, not Russia, nor any other European power had seen anything like the determination of the Japanese army before. It was like a force of nature, indeed like unstoppable Army Ants, which also make bridges out of their own bodies if that's what it takes to win a victory.
(the illustration at the end depicts this)
By war’s end, a Russian Admiral was actually captured on the high seas by Japanese forces, and not a few Russian Generals were tried and convicted of treason, being accused of cowardice under fire. Moreover, the entire Russian Baltic fleet, which was sent across the world by the Tsar, was sunk by the Japanese Navy with almost no losses. Of the 38 ships in the Russian fleet, only three made it home, while Japan lost only three small torpedo boats in the bargain, with all of this happening in an astonishing five hours.
Among other things, this war illustrated how deeply the world hated Russia. And it was well deserved too, since Russia (then as now), was infamous the world over for its brutality to its own people, which gave rise to many international condemnations. Indeed, the help given to Japan was often motivated by this golden chance to punish Russia.
THE REVENGE OF THE JEWS
In fact, it was revenge that motivated the help for Japan where it really mattered the most. This help came from a most unexpected quarter and solved what could have been the only thing that Japan couldn’t manage by itself, no matter how courageous her soldiers were. It was how to pay for the war. She had to get money from somewhere and she did, as if by a magic accident.
How that happened is a story of remarkably good luck.
After months of failure in trying to float Japanese war bonds in the West, diplomat Takahashi found himself at a
dinner party seated next to one Jacob Schiff, who was very interested in Japan. Takahashi had never heard of Schiff, who was a powerful financier, but in the course of their long conversation, Takahashi told Schiff about his mission and his failure to accomplish it so far .
Takahashi soon found out that he was talking to a man
who controlled enough money of his own to make instant
decisions involving huge amounts of money, which must have been a welcome and unexpected change for Takahashi being accustomed to dealing with bank committees. Virtually on the spot, Schiff agreed to float a new bond issue to cover all that Takahashi needed to complete his mission. Not only that, but Schiff took the inexperienced Takahashi under his wing and taught him the business of international financing, introducing him to all the right people along the way.
Much later, Takahashi learned of Schiff’s motives and why he wanted to know so much about about Japan’s situation, particularly concerning Russia. As a staunch Jew, Schiff was devoted to Jewish causes and was infuriated by the fact that the Tsar himself, and the Russian government, were actively sponsoring hatred and opression of Jews.
Only the previous year, the infamous Kishinev massacre took place there, causing a great international outcry. Many Jews were murdered (under government direction) after having been accused of killing a Christian child and using his blood in Jewish religious ceremonies. According to The New York Times, “the mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken up all over the city… The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror”.
Accordingly, Schiff had decided to punish the Russians by aiding Japan. Later, the other Frankfurt-based Jewish financiers became involved too, such as the Rothschilds, the Kuhns, and the Loebs, so Japan had no more trouble in financing her war thereafter.
By another happy coincidence, several Japanese victories took place at just the same time that the various bond issues were first floated, resulting in headlines across the world, and long lines in London and New York City to snap up the new Japanese war bonds, causing all of them to sell out in a single day.
AFTERMATH OF THE WAR
As the war ended, political instability rocked both nations as riots and revolution spread, based upon the popular misconception in both countries that the war ended badly for each.
Although the war ended with a Japanese victory, popular discontent with the peace treaty erupted in riots in all the major cities in Japan. People forgot that they recovered Port Arthur, had been given the “sphere of influence” over Korea, had gained the South Manchurian Railway (which they had not built) and had gotten back the better half of Sakhakin Island in the north.
Events in Russia were far more serious, no doubt because there was far more substance to the complaint, and so it ended with the full scale Russian Revolution of 1905, which only ended finally with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The asassination of politicians became an everyday event, both in Russia as well as Japan. In an interesting sideshow, Jacob Schiff paid for, and George Kennan (the American explorer and pro-communist), administered, the distribution of revolutionary pamphlets among the 50,000 Russian prisoners of war still in Japan who then returned home as hardened revolutionaries.
It took longer for things in Japan to come to a head when a massive military revolution broke out in Tokyo in 1936. Led by ultra-nationalists and army officers, 1,500 rioters attacked moderate political figures in their homes, and asassination became part of the normal political process. The basis of parlimentary government was irretrievably damaged and martial law stayed in place for five months. The army became so strong, that it created incidents on its own, occupied Manchuria, and eventually created the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932.
Neither country survived the effects of this war for a great many years. Both were soon taken over by uncontrollable forces which were set loose by the war, Russia by a single political party, and Japan by the army. Russia only gained a measure of political freedom in 1990, while Japan was freed from army rule only after losing WWII in 1945.
WHY THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR
So how was it that Japan thought that a good outcome could ever come from attacking the United States and starting a major war against a power far greater than her own? What in the world were they thinking of?
Well, the simple answer is that Japan had done it before and it had worked.
The reason for Japan to resort to war against the United States was not because Japan was being surrounded by an enemy, which was the case in 1905. In 1937, Japan was at war with China again which America duly protested. The protests soon became demands which the United States backed up by placing an embargo on all arms shipped to Japan as well as related materiel such the oil and steel needed for her war. The military government in Tokyo, riding on the wave of ultra-nationalistic anger that had been building since the end of Russo-Japanese war, now turned that anger against the United States.
It became clear to Japan that the United States was the only force standing in the way of the fulfillment of the old Japanese dream of having a free hand in Asia. Accordingly, the United States would have to be pushed back across the Pacific and out of Japan’s sphere of influence. The only way to do this was to inflict a massive blow to the American Navy and sink it in the first few hours of the war. Then a negotiated peace could be reached, setting Japan free to run Asia at last.
Japan had already beaten another country sixty times larger than itself in 1905, and since America was only forty times larger than tiny Japan, the military mindset held that it would be even easier to win a war with the United States. But there were two fatal flaws in that argument.
Japan’s first mistake turns on her definition of war at the time. A war with America could not be the kind of war in which each country fought it out until the one was destroyed. Japan knew she didn’t have the staying power for that kind of war. Japan hoped that the Americans would be like the Russians were, and soon tire of war and sue for a negotiated peace favorable to Japan, all within the first year.
Japan’s second mistake was in assuming that Americans were like the Russians, utterly decadent and risk-averse to laying down their lives for a principle. It was hoped that the vulnerability of America would be her love for pleasure and the easy life, which would hinder her natural instincts of self-defense.
Both of these assumptions were justified when applied to Russia. The much feared Russian army of one million men, was totally demoralized from the start, and not inclined fight at all. Japan assumed that the Samuraization of all Japan would give one man the strength of ten, and so on. This was true for the most part when applied to Russia but it was a fatal mistake to apply that same wish to America.
The lesson of the Russo-Japanese war convinced the Japanese military that a single decisive and successful knockout blow would cripple America and end in victory for Japan, a victory crowned by an advantageous armistice. And even though many highly placed Japanese saw through this mad scheme, the entire country was consumed with war fever and any dissent was met with swift asassination. And so with all the voices of moderation thus silenced, Japan found herself on the slippery slope to disaster with no way out.
And so that’s why Japan thought that she could win a war against the United States of America.
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Like Army Ants, Japanese soldiers form a bridge out of their own bodies to scale the walls of Port Arthur:
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Here are real Army Ants doing the same thing. How can such soldiers be stopped?
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