World War 2 Was A Race War Part 4: What Was Japan Thinking?
Were the Japanese as guilty of racism as we were? Also, Pearl Harbor was not the original target! And: Mickey Mouse attacks Japan! Plus: First anime was propaganda!
What was Japan thinking before it went to war with the United States? The following article is one of the few that mentions Japan's original target was the Soviet Union. Almost all articles, books, documentaries and films leave that crucial information out. To understand the Soviet spy apparatus and its incredible worldwide influence I believe you must understand the Soviet Union and Japan. Before we get to the article, this is what happened (and what less than 10% of the world's population knows):
The international spy ring had orders to prevent a war between Russia and Japan, who had many conflicts large and small over the years. In June of 1941 when Hitler broke the peace pact with Stalin the fear was that Japan would launch an attack from the East and force Stalin to fight a two front war.
The Soviet master spy Sorge went to Japanese newspaper journalist and spy Hotsumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji and ordered them to get to work trying to stop Japan from attacking Russia but instead to attack the United States, British and Dutch outposts. Ozaki had worked his way from his press position to adviser to Prince Konoye, Saionji was a member of the group that met every morning with the Imperial Cabinet to discuss the international politics of the day. Both began arguing that without an attack on western forces, there wouldn't be enough oil for Japan to fight a war, and Russia had little of it. The Japanese military, which had wanted to attack the Soviet Union, began to change their minds.
Richard Sorge, Soviet masterspy
In the United States Communists and spys sprang into action. The military here had wanted to seek a truce with Japan and would call for Japan to end its war with China. We supported Chinese nationalists but communists were told to support Mao. Lauchlin Currie, a spy and adviser to FDR began a series of meetings with FDR urging him to fight Japan in the Pacific and not to open a second front against Hitler in Russia. Stalin did not want U.S. troops in Russia. Another spy, Dexter White with the Treasury Department flooded FDR with memos urging us to help the Communists in China and not to send troops into the Soviet Union to fight Hitler. In his memoirs, Soviet agent Vitaliy Pavlov describes flying to the U.S. to meet with both White and Currie to make sure all comrades knew that a truce with Japan was unacceptable.
Professor Owen Lattimore- hailed by liberals worldwide as an innocent victim of McCarthy until the fall of the Soviet Union revealed he too was a spy, began a series of articles from China on the heroic actions of Mao's military against Japan which accused the guy we backed, Chiang Kai-shek of collaborating with Japan. These charges it turns out, were false.
William Hinton, an author who was revealed to be a spy after the fall of the Soviet Union and whose propaganda for Chinese communism is still used in colleges in the U.S., did the same.
This incredible spy ring was positioned to work in unison from Japan, Washington D.C. and China. Both FDR and Japan would do its bidding. - Mike FloresI think the reason this information is hidden is that it is very difficult to promote the idea there were no Soviet spies in the U.S. and McCarthy just made it all up, including randomly selecting names, if one is told what the spies did on Pearl Harbor. Like the second list Joe had but the public still has not been told about, though it is declassified, it would mean what we are taught it is one big lie. (It is interesting to note that in an interview Julian Assange commented when a reporter said he was a victim of "modern McCarthyism" that he no longer believed the stories about McCarthy and he was going to investigate the truth. Shortly afterwards, the U.S. went after him even plotting his assassination!).
Economic Background
While the United States was still struggling to emerge from the Great Depression at the end of the 1930s, and would do so partly because of the war, Japan had emerged from its own period of depression, which had begun in 1926, by the mid-1930s. Many of the young soldiers mobilized into the Japanese army by the early 1930s came from the rural areas, where the effects of the depression were devastating and poverty was widespread. Their commitment to the military effort to expand Japanese territory to achieve economic security can be understood partly in these terms. The depression ended in the mid-1930s in Japan partly because of government deficits used to expand greatly both heavy industry and the military.
Internationally, this was a time when "free trade" was in disrepute. The great powers not only jealously protected their special economic rights within their colonies and spheres of influence, but sought to bolster their sagging economies through high tariffs, dumping of goods, and other trade manipulation. The Japanese, with few natural resources, sought to copy this pattern. They used cutthroat trade practices to sell textiles and other light industrial goods in the East Asian and U.S. markets, severely undercutting British and European manufacturers. They also developed sources of raw materials and heavy industry in the colonies they established in Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria. Japan used high tariffs to limit imports of American and European industrial products.
The Japanese military faced a particular tactical problem in that certain critical raw materials — especially oil and rubber — were not available within the Japanese sphere of influence. Instead, Japan received most of its oil from the United States and rubber from British Malaya, the very two Western nations trying to restrict Japan's expansion. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's embargo of oil exports to Japan pressured the Japanese navy, which had stocks for only about six months of operations.
The Japanese army, for its part, was originally concerned with fighting the Soviet Union, because of the army's preoccupation with Manchuria and China. The Japanese army governed Manchuria indirectly through the "puppet" state of Manchukuo and developed heavy industry there under its favorite agencies, disliking and distrusting the zaibatsu (large Japanese corporations). But the Soviet army's resistance to Japanese attacks was sufficient to discourage northern expansion.
Meanwhile in 1937, the intensification of Chinese resistance to the pressure of the Japanese military drew Japan into a draining war in the vast reaches of China proper, and in 1940 into operations in French Indochina, far to the south. Thus, when the navy pressed for a "southern" strategy of attacking Dutch Indonesia to get its oil and British Malaya to control its rubber, the army agreed.
While it seems that economic factors were important in Japanese expansion in East Asia, it would be too much to say that colonialism, trade protection, and the American embargo compelled Japan to take this course. Domestic politics, ideology and racism also played a role.
Domestic Politics
The political structure of Japan at this time was inherited from the Meiji era and was increasingly dominated by the military. During the Meiji period, the government was controlled by a small ruling group of elder statesmen who had overthrown the shogun and established the new centralized Japanese state. These men used their position to coordinate the bureaucracy, the military, the parliament, the Imperial Household, and other branches of government. Following their deaths in the early 1920s, no single governmental institution was able to establish full control, until the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japan took control of Manchuria. This began a process in which the military behaved autonomously on the Asian mainland and with increasing authority in politics at home.
From 1937 on, Japan was at war with China. By the time General Hideki Tôjô became prime minister and the war against the United States began in 1941, the nation was in a state of "total war" and the military and their supporters were able to force their policies on the government and the people. The wartime regime used existing government controls on public opinion, including schools and textbooks, the media, and the police, but Japan continued to have more of an authoritarian government than a totalitarian one like Hitler's Germany. In particular, the government was never able to gain real control of the economy and the great zaibatsu, which were more interested in the economic opportunities provided by the military's policies than in submitting loyally to a patriotic mission.
The emperor has been criticized for not taking a more forceful action to restrain his government, especially in light of his own known preference for peace, but Japanese emperors after the Meiji Restoration had "reigned but not ruled." One wonders if a more forceful emperor in fact could have controlled the army and navy at this late date. The doubts are strengthened in light of the difficulty the emperor had in forcing the military to accept surrender after the atomic bombings. The emperor's decision at that point to bring agreement among his advisers was an extraordinary event in Japanese history.
Ideology
The emperor-based ideology of Japan during World War II was a relatively new creation, dating from the efforts of Meiji oligarchs to unite the nation in response to the Western challenge. Before the Meiji Restoration, the emperor wielded no political power and was viewed simply as a symbol of the Japanese culture. He was the head of the Shintô religion, Japan's native religion, which holds, among other beliefs, that the emperor is descended from gods who created Japan and is therefore semidivine. Westerners of that time knew him only as a shadowy figure somewhat like a pope.
The Meiji oligarchs brought the emperor and Shintô to national prominence, replacing Buddhism as the national religion, for political and ideological reasons — since Buddhism had originated in India and come to Japan via China. The people were not allowed to look at the emperor, or even to speak his name; patriotism had been raised to the unassailable level of sacredness.
It is sometimes difficult to comprehend the extreme sacrifices the Japanese made in the name of the emperor. This can perhaps best be viewed, however, as extreme patriotism — Japanese were taught to give their lives, if necessary, for their emperor. But this was not entirely different from the Americans who gave their lives in the same war for their country and the "American" way. The kamikaze pilots, who were named for the "divine wind" (kami kaze) that destroyed the Mongol fleet in the thirteenth century and saved Japan from invasion, might be compared to the young Iranian soldiers fighting in suicide squadrons in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, or even to fanatical Shiites responsible for the truck bombing of the U.S. Lebanese embassy in 1983.RacismThe Japanese were proud of their many accomplishments and resented racial slurs they met with in some Western nations. Their attempt to establish a statement of racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations was vetoed by the United States (because of opposition in California) and Great Britain (Australian resistance). The Japanese greatly resented this.
The Japanese military was convinced of the willingness of its people to go to any sacrifice for their nation, and it was contemptuous of the "softness" of the U.S. and European democracies, where loyalty and patriotism were tempered by the rights and well-being of the individual. The military's overconfidence in its own abilities and underestimation of the will of these other nations were thus rooted in its own misleading ethnic and racial stereotypes. While Asians, the Japanese saw themselves as less representatives of Asia than Asia's champion. They sought to liberate Asian colonies from the Westerners, whom they disdained. But although the Japanese were initially welcomed in some Asian colonies by the indigenous populations whom they "liberated" from European domination, the arrogance and racial prejudice displayed by the Japanese military governments in these nations created great resentment. This resentment is still evident in some Southeast Asian nations. Next: What Japan thinks now.
This is a 7 minute Japanese propaganda cartoon - with Mickey Mouse attacking Japan! It’s from 1936, before the war!
[First Anime Movie] 1945 Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors English Subtitles
First Anime film ever produced, directed by Mitsuyo Seo, who was ordered to make a propaganda film during World War II by the Japanese Naval Ministry.