John Dolan below gives a very favorable review of "Racing the Enemy Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan," by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Do you know anything about this guy or the events discussed? It looks interesting. Thanks ahead of time.
Book Review
The Scholar and the Whore By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )
"Racing the Enemy Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan" - by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Harvard University Press 2005
See it on Amazon.com... We all know that it was the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WW II in the Pacific. We all know that the USSR only entered the Pacific War when Japan had already lost heart, and that the Soviet advance was a farcical beating of an already dead enemy.
Well, according to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who has spent decades reading the debates that swirled through the US, Soviet and Japanese elites during the last days of the war, much of what we all think we know about the leadup to VJ Day is simply wrong. Hasegawa's research shows that the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria was a far greater shock to the Japanese High Command: ":the Soviet entry into the [Pacific] war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender."
As Hasegawa says, all three major participants in the Pacific endgame have told self-serving, "parochial" versions of the bloody end of the war. The US sticks to its magic mushroom cloud fairytale, while the Japanese simply prefer not to discuss this period even among themselves. And, as Hasegawa notes, "American and Japanese historians have almost completely ignored the role of the Soviet Union in ending the Pacific War." Hasegawa demonstrates that in fact, "Stalin was an active participant, not a secondary player, as historians have depicted, in the drama of Japan's surrender."
To demonstrate why the Soviets were so vital in the final stages of the Pacific war, Hasegawa traces the debate within Japan's military elite over which war of conquest to pursue: either a showdown with the USSR for Eastern Siberia, or a Southern strategy pushing southward through China to the South Pacific. Defeated by Soviet forces in Manchuria in 1938 and again in 1939, the Japanese grew wary of taking on the Russians and decided to pursue the naval and air war against America and Britain, declining to attack the USSR even after the Germans invaded it from the west.
The high point of Japan's courtship of Stalin came in April 1941, when Japan signed a neutrality pact with the Soviets. Weirdly enough, the Japanese high command, cynical as it was about treaties and declarations in general, actually placed great faith in this agreement with Stalin, and counted on it even as their empire collapsed in 1945.
Hasegawa's reading of the Imperial junta's memos has shown that "the more [Japan's] military situation worsened, the more important the Soviet Union became in Japan's foreign and military policy." The Japanese command clung to a delusive vision of Stalin as last-minute peacemaker: "as the ruling elite of Japan became convinced of defeat, they came to rely more and more on the Soviet Union as the mediator for peace."
Hasegawa's story is soberly told, but he still does a fine job of revealing the sheer craziness of Japanese discourse during the last stages of the war. Debate had been stifled for decades, with dissenters silenced by assassination, resulting in what Hasegawa calls "a strategy of irresponsibility" in which the Emperor was assumed to be behind whatever mad military adventure the junta decreed. In this atmosphere, even bringing up the notion of ending the war could get you killed: "political figures who worked for peace might be assassinated" while pushing for obviously suicidal new attacks showed your loyalty to "the kokutai," the mystical ideal of Japanese nationhood in the name of which the military elite governed.
Managing to convey the thought processes, assumptions and biases of the Imperial elite is Hasegawa's greatest achievement. Like every decent historian, he starts with the willingness to see that these people had their own way of seeing the world. Sounds simple, but it's not so common among English-speaking historians. If it were, we wouldn't all be so smugly convinced that Japan surrendered because they feared annihilation.
The men in power in Japan in 1945 were very comfortable with the notion of suicide, personal or national; they feared losing face far more than annihilation. So Japan was unlikely to flinch merely because the B-29s could now unleash a more efficient form of death. Even after Germany had surrendered, with every city in Japan aflame and huge US flotillas closing in on the home islands, the Imperial elite insisted that "'Japan is not losing the war, since we have not lost any homeland territory.'"
Hasegawa quotes some truly stunning examples of the Kamikaze spirit among the elite, as when Army Minister Anami announces that the US may have as many as a hundred atomic bombs ready to drop on Japan's cities, then adds that he is absolutely in favor of continuing the war.
Some of Emperor Hirohito's comments are inadvertently comic in their psychotic understatement, as when he concedes that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, "protection of the kokutai would be difficult"-or his admission, in his surrender broadcast on August 15, 1945, that the current military situation was "not necessarily to Japan's advantage."
With delusion rampant in Tokyo, Stalin's envoys had an easy time portraying themselves to Japan's elite as the good cop to America's bad cop. After all, Soviet forces were not actually at war against Japan, and it was always Stalin's policy to keep smiling until the knife was actually deep inside his erstwhile ally's guts. Thus he allowed Molotov to flirt with a succession of Japanese envoys, conveying by the usual nods and smiles the USSR's willingness to serve as honest broker between Japan and America. So, up to the moment Soviet troops overwhelmed Japan's Manchurian forces, Japan was soft on Stalin, hard on Truman.
Stalin emerges from Hasegawa's research as the most impressive figure among the major players. From the start, he intended to punish Japan for its defeat of Russia in 1905, but as long as there was anything to be gained by doing so, he encouraged the Japanese delusion that the USSR had no territorial ambitions in the Far East and simply wanted all parties to find peace. The Japanese elite, hopelessly susceptible to such courtesies and locked in a war to the death with America, developed a hopeless infatuation with Stalin as disastrous as his with Hitler. The USSR ended up with all of Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles, and 600,000 Japanese POWs who came in very handy as slave labor in the GULAG.
Japan was slapped awake by the Soviet Union's declaration of war against it on August 9, 1945. In a poignant scene, Hasegawa describes the way Sato, Japan's ambassador to Moscow, reacted to the news: "With sarcasm shrouded in old-fashioned diplomatic formality, Sato expressed his profound appreciation to Molotov for working with him to keep both countries neutral during three difficult years, insinuating that in reality Molotov had been deceiving the ambassador and the Japanese government for four months: Molotov embraced Sato, and the two bid farewell."
The utter futility of Japan's reliance on formal courtesies shows almost pitiably in the exchange, as Sato attempts to retaliate against betrayal by Stalin's mouthpiece with "sarcasm"-even more pitifully, "sarcasm shrouded in diplomatic formality."
Yet so powerful was the high command's dream of Soviet help that, even as Soviet tanks were overwhelming Japan's Kwantung Army in Manchuria, "the Kwantung Army was instructed by the Imperial General Headquarters to limit action to self-defense," as if this might somehow placate the Soviets. In another twist to this weird tale, Hasegawa notes that it was the most extreme hawks in the Imperial Army who clung most fiercely to their Stalin-is-our-friend delusion, while the doves hoped that the Soviet attack could be "God's gift to control the army."
Hasegawa has assembled many quotes from memos, diaries and meeting notes to demonstrate that the Soviet attack shocked the Imperial circles far more than did the atomic bombs. Hirohito himself said, "The Soviet Union declared war on us, and entered into a state of war as of today: Because of this it is necessary to study and decide on the termination of the war."
Hasegawa's story is a weird, compelling one, and his case for revising our view of the leadup to VJ Day is overwhelming. Unfortunately, I doubt it will get the attention it deserves. It's just not a very pleasant or inspirational story, so the consensus will give it a polite nod and return to peddling the standard Paul Fussell fairytale: We dropped the bomb to save GIs' lives and slap the Japs awake, and thank God we did.
In my last book review, I discussed John L. Gaddis's consensus version of 20th-c. history, Cold War, and noted that Gaddis merely cites Hasegawa's book, then proceeds to tell the Fussell version of the end of WW II in the Pacific, not even bothering to argue with the dissenting account.
There's a stark contrast between Gaddis' book and Hasegawa's. Bluntly stated, Hasegawa is a true scholar and Gaddis is a whore. I think it might be a good idea to start treating the scholars with respect and treating the whores like whores. I suggest that Professor Hasegawa be given Professor Gaddis' chair at Yale, and that Professor Gaddis be given the employment for which Nature has fitted him: kneeling at an endowed glory hole in the toilet of the Republican Caucus.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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