In my first years as a college instructor, whenever I gave my lecture on the Japanese home front during the Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945), I always wondered out loud whether the general population of Japan was as fanatically loyal to the emperor as American propaganda had led us to believe or whether they were, at least in part, “victims” led by their military leaders into a disastrous war, as the judges at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East had concluded in 1948. I pointed out that in his groundbreaking book Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two, historian Thomas Havens argued that the war had a lot of popular support and elucidated his main points.¹ But I found myself wanting to know more about how exactly the wartime government generated and maintained that support and whether the home front population really believed what they were told.

In the 1990s, I set out to try to answer these questions. I searched for the wartime letters and diaries of ordinary Japanese men, women, and children, which I thought might reveal their true feelings about the war and whether they really supported it. During my many research trips to Japan, I collected about 200 diaries, most of them published, and fifty memoirs, and have spent the last thirty years reading what I collected. As I had hoped, these wartime diaries, letters, and postwar memoirs offered a more complex and nuanced picture of the wartime lives of ordinary Japanese. I thus was able to document popular Japanese support for the war and to describe in some detail its many forms. I also identified five methods that the wartime government used to mobilize the home front population for the war effort, transforming them into loyal subjects ready, if not always willing, to fight to the death. The essay that follows should be useful to instructors and students who want a richer understanding of Japan at war. I begin in Japan in November 1937. As historian Kenneth Ruoff pointed out, in the months following the Japanese invasion of China in July 1937, the Japanese government instituted a new practice to generate and maintain popular support for this war: it created moments of reverential silence that all Japanese and colonial subjects had to observe. No matter where they were, they were to stop what they were doing, face the imperial palace in Tokyo, and bow, holding that posture for one minute. This was done for the first time on November 3, 1937, the anniversary of the Emperor Meiji’s birthday. At precisely 9 a.m., all citizens of the Japanese empire faced the imperial palace and bowed for one minute.²

The same ritual was performed the following year (1938) on these national holidays: New Year’s Day (January 1), National Foundation Day (February 11), and the emperor’s birthday. To recognize the achievements and sacrifices of Japan’s military forces, the government also orchestrated a series of moments of ritual silence on Army Day (March 10), Navy Day (May 27), and a “Moment to Express Gratitude to Soldiers and Sailors” (October 7).³ These public moments of ritual silence became even more important after Japanese forces attacked American and British installations in Asia and the Pacific on December 7–8, 1941.Starting on February 8, 1942, the imperial rescript that announced the start of war with the Allies was broadcast at 11:59 a.m. on the eighth day of every month, which came to be known as “War Remembrance Day.” Throughout the home islands and the empire, Japanese citizens and subjects observed a minute of ritual silence in government offices and factories, gathered at local Shintō shrines to read the rescript together, and assembled in schoolyards to hear the rescript read.⁴ On December 8, 1943, Sakamoto Tane, a housewife in Kōchi on the island of Shikoku, recorded in her diary: “Got up at four in the morning. Finished breakfast and went with my husband at 6:00 a.m. to Kainan Middle School . . . To commemorate the second anniversary of the start of the war, we performed the ritual reading of the emperor’s declaration of war rescript.”⁵ Reading the emperor’s declaration of war out loud reminded everyone present that their country was still at war. “War Remembrance Day” and the other designated moments of ritual silence were observed until the war ended on August 15, 1945.⁶

The New Nationalist Discourse In the Wake of Pearl Harbor and Other Attacks

The government encouraged popular support for the war in a second way: it created a new state-sponsored nationalist discourse that was designed to mobilize the country ideologically for war. It was contained in the “Guidelines for the Execution of the National Spiritual Mobilization,” which the cabinet of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro issued in August 1937, calling upon all Japanese to be ready and willing to sacrifice themselves for the war effort. The new nationalist discourse quickly appeared in the form of slogans. The government inscribed “The nation as one, exhausting loyalty and serving the country with dogged patriotism,” “Extravagance is the enemy,” “Hoarding is the enemy,” and “Think of the troops at the front” on banners hung from buildings in cities and on posters plastered on walls in towns and villages throughout the country.⁷ The new discourse was elaborated in Kokutai no hongi (The Principles of Our National Polity), written by a committee of scholars led by Kyoto University Professor Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889–1980) expressly for teachers and published in 1937. It is more than a hundred pages long and filled with quotations from the Japanese classics. The opening passage of this text sets the tone:

The unbroken line of Emperors, receiving the Oracle of the Founder of the Nation, reigns eternally over the Japanese Empire. This is our eternal and immutable national entity. Thus, founded on this great principle, all the people, united as one great family nation in heart and obeying the Imperial Will, enhance indeed the beautiful virtues of loyalty and filial piety. This is the glory of our national entity.⁸

Kokutai no hongi became a canonical text that supplied educators with material that they could present to their students. The Ministry of Education also widely distributed two shorter works that summarized the principles in Kokutai no hongi that the general population was to follow: Shinmin no michi (The Way of Subjects) in the summer of 1941 and Ie no michi (The Way of the Family) in 1942. As one might expect, the new nationalist discourse was taught in Japanese schools. Wartime textbooks were filled with references to “Japan,” its ruling family, and the country’s divine origins. They introduced the paraphernalia of war—helmets, canteens, tanks, and aircraft—and described servicemen as conquerors and occupiers who were willing to die for their monarch and country. Predictably, the textbooks elevated Japan above all other countries. For example, an excerpt from a second-year reader:

Japan is a fine country, a strong country. A glittering and great world country.⁹

But the textbooks stressed as well the importance of students fulfilling their duties as a son or daughter, older sibling, or senior student, and acting as members of a collective and not as individuals.¹⁰

The new nationalist discourse also reached a broader public through daily radio broadcasts. Beginning in January 1938, it suffused the nightly war news broadcast and informed rousing wartime anthems and songs—such as “The March in the Pacific,” “The Sinking,” “Tokkan,” and “Comrade Cherry Blossoms”—that were aired daily. That they had the intended effect is clear from Kōbe housewife Nakamura Chiyoe’s comment in a letter to her evacuated son dated October 6, 1944: “There was music that came on after the seven o’clock news the day before yesterday—‘The March in the Pacific,’ ‘The Sinking,’ and the ‘Tokkan’—and I sang along with the radio and was really happy.”¹¹ Thus, the new nationalist discourse was ubiquitous during the war. It was invoked at public rallies and reproduced on public banners and posters, as well as in newspapers and magazines; it was represented in Principles of Our National Polity, The Way of Subjects, and The Way of the Family; and heard in daily radio broadcasts and taught in schools.

Physical Mobilization

Everyone who has studied the home front in Japan during the war has recognized the importance of a third method the government used to maintain popular support for the war: the physical mobilization of the entire population of the home islands and the colonies of Taiwan and Korea. The government made sure that all Japanese and Japanese subjects were members of what were called tonarigumi (neighborhood associations), each consisting of eight or nine households. For the next higher level, the government created what it called chōnaikai (community councils). In cities and towns, each community council consisted of several city blocks, and in the countryside, one or two villages. By 1940, there were 180,000 community councils and, by the end of 1942, more than a million neighborhood associations. These organizations were the essential cogs in the machine of the wartime state and the chief channels for disseminating government communications. The government’s orders were communicated first to the community councils and then from there to the neighborhood associations.

Japanese Government (Home Ministry) 

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Community councils

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neighborhood associations

The neighborhood associations met often, sometimes several times a week, in a member’s home to discuss topics like air defense, savings bond campaigns, labor brigades, rationing of food and scarce commodities, sending off local men to war, and greeting the spirits of the war dead. Neighborhood associations also distributed food rations and scarce commodities. The diary of Kōchi housewife Sakamoto Tane reveals how the neighborhood association and community council became part of her life. 9/2/1943: The air-raid alert has not been lifted, and the neighborhood association meeting [was] held at the Uehara residence. 9/3/1943: Mrs. Uehara came to our house to discuss the national savings-bond campaign. Mrs. Shimamura and Mrs. Tokuhiro also came and responded to various points. . . . 9/8/1943: . . . From 6:30 p.m. the community council met for an hour. Seventy-four attended, and because everyone was enthusiastic, the head of the community council seemed extremely pleased. Everyone pledged to make every effort to respond well when we have a real attack. . . . 9/15/1943: . . . From 7:30 p.m. I hosted a meeting of officials at our house. We discussed the requisition order of the Community Council head, Yamamoto, and the problem of succession after the survey is completed and the requisition is decided on. The meeting broke up just before 10:00 p.m.¹² Wartime diaries reveal that attendance at neighborhood association meetings, donations to war bond campaigns and metal drives, and those who showed up to send off local boys and men were carefully recorded and that those who did not do as they were supposed to were shamed. This suggests that the neighborhood associations used social pressure to maintain support for the war.

Censorship and Monitoring Japanese

The fourth method was the government’s attempt to control what Japanese knew about the war. Beginning in 1937, government agencies carefully censored newspapers and magazines, with the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Greater East Asia censoring reports of developments in foreign relations and the War and Navy ministries censoring all military news.¹³ The government even tried to expunge all traces of the American enemy from the daily lives of Japanese by substituting English words like “sukatto” (skirt) with hakama (a formal Japanese skirt), “poketto” (pocket) with mono-ire (place where you put things), and “burazzieru” (brassiere), which became chichi-osae (“breast suppressor”). Even baseball terminology was changed: “sutoraiki” (strike) became honkyū (center ball), “boru” (ball) became gaikyū (outside ball), and “hitto-andu-rannu” became kyōsōda (compete, run, and hit). The government even tried unsuccessfully to ban the words “mama” and “papa.”¹⁴ American music and films were banned as well. But even though jazz was condemned as “enemy music,” it survived, with jazz aficianados simply going underground. The film Chicago was playing in Japanese theaters on December 8, 1941, and it stopped being screened that day, with no more American films shown after that.¹⁵ The authorities even monitored what its subjects were thinking. Servicemen, teenagers, and children were required to keep personal diaries, and submit them to superiors and teachers for “diary checks.” Pilots, for example, had to keep diaries of hansei nikki (self-reflection) during their training, providing evidence they had reflected on what they had learned, what they had done well or poorly, and how they felt about this. These journals were submitted to superiors once every seven to ten days for a nikki kensa (diary check).¹⁶ Teenagers were another group whose diaries were “checked” periodically. Terada Miyoko was a twenty-year-old student at Japan Women’s University when she was mobilized for factory work in eastern Tokyo in September 1944. Although enthusiastic at first, over time she came to resent her bosses at the factory, and her diary is brimming with passive aggression. Since her bosses at the factory read her diary periodically, she made a point of noting that fewer and fewer members of her group were showing up for factory work: fifteen out of seventeen on December 16, 1944, twelve of seventeen on January 13, 1945, and five of seventeen on February 9, 1945.¹⁷ The 1.3 million children between the ages of nine and eleven who were evacuated from eleven Japanese cities to the safety of the countryside starting in 1944 also had to keep diaries, which their teachers checked every seven or eight days.¹⁸ Nakane Mihōko was a nine-year-old schoolgirl from Tokyo who was evacuated to the small provincial town of Fukumitsu in western Japan in April 1945. On July 19, 1945, she described in her diary what she and her classmates did for a teacher who had been drafted and was about to leave for the front:

Today we made rice cakes for Ishida-sensei’s send-off celebration. . . . Tanaka and I together made things to give to him. We’ll give him a charm, two dolls, and a little of the “Ishida-sensei Diary” that I wrote. In the afternoon we had a send-off ceremony. Tokorozawa represented us and read things that were written on a piece of paper. I felt that today was far sadder than the send-offs I went to when I was in a school in Tokyo, but I had happy feelings when I thought about Ishida-sensei’s going to war for the sake of the country. Then we had a prayer service in front of a [Shintō] shrine just before dinner. (A very interesting diary).¹⁹

Note that when Nakane submitted her diary for the periodic “diary check,” her instructor wrote “(A very interesting diary)” at the bottom of this entry. The evacuated children’s teachers also corresponded with their parents, and together they collaborated in transforming the children into “splendid little citizens” who supported the war.²⁰ Clearly, everyone was being watched by the government. Those who worked or were active in their communities were watched by their colleagues and neighbors, and servicemen, teenagers, and children kept diaries that were vetted by their superiors. The only wartime documents that escaped direct surveillance were the diaries and letters of civilian adults, which is why they are of special value to historians.

Cycle of Benefaction–Gratitude–Obligation–Repayment

My research revealed the wartime government appropriated one particular social practice to ensure that all Japanese and Japanese subjects supported the war. Most people who have spent time in Japan know that repaying a favor or a gift is important. When someone does something for others or gives them something, the recipients of the act of kindness or gift first should show gratitude toward the person who performed the kind act, then feel indebted to their benefactor, and finally must repay the debt in some way. I call this the “cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment.” The wartime government’s use of this social practice to generate and maintain popular support for the war may have been its most important method. It operated during the war on several different levels: the emperor (Hirohito) was the supreme benefactor of the people, and Japanese were taught to feel grateful to him and also obligated to repay him in some way. The same mechanism worked with imperial Japanese army and navy forces. They were presented as fighting to protect Japan’s home islands, and the Japanese people were encouraged to show enormous gratitude and feel a powerful obligation to repay their protectors in some way. Farmers were seen in a similar light, and all Japanese were urged to show gratitude to them for the food they produced. And of course, children were reminded to show gratitude to their parents. What made the government’s appropriation of the cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment so effective was its universality. All Japanese people understood and practiced it. Anthropologist Takie Lebra argues that this social practice was the foundation of Japanese morality and that an individual who understood, and performed, the cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment was a “moral person.” “Japanese morality . . . is characterized by an overwhelming sense of [an] unpayable debt to countless benefactors, which makes one at once humble and obligation–bound.”²¹ The most shocking example of how the wartime authorities used the cycle of benefaction-gratitude-obligation-repayment involved children. Beginning in fall 1944 and continuing until the end of the war, the Japanese army and navy resorted to what they called “special attack” tactics, or what Westerners call kamikaze (divine wind) tactics, against Allied ships and ground forces in the Pacific. As these pilots prepared for their final flights, their superiors had them write isho (“last letters”) to their families and to nearly everyone they knew in their hometowns, and even supplied templates for these letters. One of these pilots was a man known to me only as “Fukujirō sensei,” or “Teacher Fukujirō.” In June 1945, shortly before his final flight, he wrote a letter to eleven-year-old Satō Shizuko, whom he had taught, and his letter was sent to the Satō home in Tokyo. When Shizuko’s mother received it, she immediately shared its contents with her daughter, who had been evacuated to the countryside. She wrote:

I read Teacher Fukujirō’s last postcard, thankfully and happily. I feel nothing but gratitude. In the few hours he had left, he did not forget you, and I am full of gratitude for the letter he sent you. As for his really and truly giving this to you, when we think about how he must have felt, let’s give our all for our country, shall we?²²

The key passages are “I read Teacher Fukujirō’s last postcard, thankfully and happily. I feel nothing but gratitude. In the few hours he had left, he did not forget you, and I am full of gratitude for the letter he sent you” (gratitude), and “Let’s give our all for our country, shall we?” (repayment). Notice that Shizuko’s mother is encouraging her daughter to recognize Teacher Fukujirō’s gift and to feel gratitude and a sense of obligation, and to repay him at some point. This is precisely how Teacher Fukujirō’s letter was supposed to work: it was to ensure that the Satō family, including their eleven-year-old daughter, felt such gratitude toward their former teacher that they would do as he did and “give their all” if necessary. It is not hard to imagine that these “last letters” made those in the pilots’ home communities feel that they too should “give their all.” What made the cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment a sure-fire method of generating and maintaining popular support for the war was that all Japanese performed it in their daily lives. Their wartime diaries reveal that people shared food with their neighbors, who always reciprocated, and that those living in the countryside sent seafood or vegetables to their urban relatives, and that they always sent something back in return.Kanazawa housewife Ōshima Shizu was typical. She carefully recorded in her diary not only what food her family received from their neighborhood association or managed to buy but also what neighbors or out-of-town relatives supplied and how she reciprocated.²³ The diary of Yasumura Shizu, a young mother evacuated with her children from Okinawa to live with relatives in Miyazaki, reveals that those who could not repay the obligation immediately used their diaries as a record of what they received and would need to reciprocate in the future.²⁴

Conclusion

These were the five methods the Japanese government used during the Asia-Pacific War to transform its citizens into loyal subjects ready to do whatever was asked of them to help their country win the war. The first transformation began in the fall of 1937 with the creation of ritualized moments of collective silence that were observed in the home islands and the colonies until the day the war ended. It continued with the dissemination of a new nationalist discourse that was reproduced on public banners and posters and in rousing marches broadcast on the radio. It also filled wartime handbooks like Principles of Our National Polity, The Way of Subjects, The Way of the Family, and the textbooks used in Japanese schools. The government also mobilized the entire population of the Japanese empire, organizing them into community councils and neighborhood associations. The latter included every man, woman, and child as part of an eight- or nine-family group that shared responsibility for distributing scarce commodities and food, collecting contributions to savings bond campaigns and metal drives, filling work details for various projects, and preparing for air raids. The government even tried to control what its citizens were thinking and feeling by censoring war news and expunging the polluting influence of British and American popular culture by outlawing jazz and stopping the showing of American films. Servicemen and teenagers who were mobilized for war work and children were required to keep diaries that they submitted every eight days for diary checks. Finally, the government co-opted what I call the cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment, recasting it as a series of interlocking networks of dependence that encompassed the entire population of Japan and its colonies. The wartime government’s efforts to generate and maintain support for the war were successful, as most Japanese citizens and subjects supported the war effort until Japan surrendered. The emperor’s announcement of the surrender was broadcast at noon on August 15, 1945, and it effectively undid everything that had been done up to that point to mobilize all Japanese citizens and subjects for the war effort. Most important, the announcement dissolved the cycle of benefaction–gratitude–obligation–repayment, releasing all Japanese from the obligation to repay the emperor and their other benefactors for everything they had done for them and saving tens of thousands of Japanese citizens and subjects from the senseless, last-ditch stand that the military authorities were contemplating. Nonetheless, the damage had been done: the effects of the war were catastrophic. Nearly 6,000,000 men from the home islands and the empire served in the Japanese military, and 2,120,000 died. Allied bombing reduced Japan’s major and provincial cities to ash and is reported to have destroyed a quarter of all Japanese dwellings. As many as 880,000 civilians died, most during the bombing raids that began in the fall of 1944, a staggering 150,000 on the island of Okinawa when the Allies invaded in April 1945 and 210,000 as a result of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also the war’s broader impact: although the numbers are uncertain, as many as 15,000,000 people died in China.²⁵ But this is the subject for another essay.

The Sino-Japanese War of Annihilation

The military history of the Sino-Japanese War is not well-known in the West because, for the most part, it lacked the big military campaigns of Europe. Yet possibly the blood tax paid by China was close to that paid by the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the Sino-Japanese struggle became so violent because it developed into the largest insurgency ever fought, and serious students of war know that insurgencies are relentless, painful, and very bloody. Many Chinese battlefields were bloody, but much more killing took place in the countryside. After Japan’s initial offensives, the Imperial Army lacked the resources to go further. There were no defined lines in the Sino-Japanese War like the kind found in Europe. Japan held most of the major coastal cities. Thinly stretched Japanese forces occupied strategic points but not the countryside. The northeast front was larger, but here, too, the Japanese lines were very porous. Even though it was impossible to drive out the Japanese, Chinese forces could sustain a low-level insurgency on any part of the front. By 1939, the situation was clear to the Japanese, and it grew worse when the Chinese Communists saw the advantages of establishing “liberated zones” behind Japanese positions. American aid allowed a slow buildup of an organized Chinese Army. Faced by Chinese insurgents and troops, Japanese soldiers perished at a low but steady rate over six years. The only response for the Japanese was to launch constant counterinsurgency sweeps through enemy-controlled areas, killing large numbers of civilians and insurgents in each operation. The Japanese formed bands of Chinese mercenary auxiliaries, who often proved even more deadly than Japanese troops when unleashed on a Chinese village. In turn, if the collaborationist troops had families in the area, they became targets for the insurgents. If a collaborating soldier’s mother was killed, another one of her sons might join the Japanese for revenge. As in every insurgency, irregular warfare served as the perfect cover for murderous banditry. Dead people in the street were a common occurrence, and any crime investigation was unlikely Readers interested in the 1937–1945 Sino–Japanese War might also find Eleanor McCallie Cooper’s Pinnacle Book Award-winner for Young Adult Historical Fiction, Dragonfly Dreams, useful in the classroom. The story is based upon the author’s American cousin, Grace, who married a Chinese man, and after 1941, lived in hiding with the family until August 1945 and because of malnutrition, weighed eighty-six pounds when the war ended. —EAA Editorial Office Sources: Excerpts from Eric Bergerud, “Japan, the US and the Asian-Pacific War,” Education About Asia 17, no. 3 (2012): https://tinyurl.com/yruev4kn; Eleanor McCallie Cooper, Dragonfly Dreams (Virginia Beach, VA: Koehler Books, 2021). See Anne Prescott’s review from the fall 2022 issue at https://tinyurl.com/43ztrzf9.