But where did obtuse truculence end and foreign policy begin? It was a peculiar tragedy of Japan’s ultranationalist psychodrama that the men best qualified to deal with the West were shunted to the margins of power. Japan did not lack for experienced and worldly diplomats, men who had studied at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford, spoke fluent English, cultivated foreign friendships, and were practiced in the ambassadorial arts. The Foreign Ministry at Kasumigaseki was stacked with them. Many were perplexed and anguished by the drift toward war. But they were powerless to do anything about it, because the militarists who controlled the country had successfully discredited them as a fifth column. Some were murdered outright. Others were forced from office, or exiled to foreign embassies where they were kept in the dark. The military connived to have generals and admirals appointed as foreign ambassadors, or even (in 1941 and again in 1942) as foreign minister. The army set up an in-house office to deal directly with foreign governments, circumventing Kasumigaseki altogether. “The diplomats in fact had become a corps d’elite, a class apart in the public service, or, to put it more cynically, peacocks in a gilded cage,” wrote Toshikazu Kase, a chief secretary to the foreign minister throughout the war years. In the turmoil of Japan’s “dark valley,” the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing—and why would it, when there was no functioning brain center to send coherent instructions to either hand? Professional diplomats sensed that war with the United States was coming, but felt as if nothing could be done to stop it. “Events sometimes overwhelm you, surge around you, and carry you along,” wrote Kase. “You can’t always move them. One man’s will alone is not enough to do anything. War has a life of its own.”
Isoroku Yamamoto was unwilling to assume such a passive attitude. He took a stand. He did not conceal his contempt for the shrill, vociferous style of the ultranationalist right, nor the rigidly dogmatic, mindlessly antagonistic politics they championed. He did not approve of their efforts to regulate the dress, tastes, opinions, thoughts, and daily routines of the Japanese people. He publicly undermined some of the goals of the “National Spiritual Mobilization,” such as the proposal that all Japanese men should shave their heads. “What does it all matter?” he replied, when asked his opinion by a group of reporters. “I myself have worn my hair short for years. . . . On the other hand, a slob is a slob, however close-cropped he may be. So either’s OK, surely?” He dismissed the army brass as a pack of “damn fools,” and he never liked their war in China, regarding it as a costly drain of manpower and military resources. Hiroyuki Agawa describes a meeting in which an army officer seated next to the admiral rose to his feet “and began to harangue those assembled at interminable length.” Yamamoto stealthily edged the man’s chair back several feet. When he had finished speaking and tried to sit down, the officer missed the chair and fell sprawling on the floor. The admiral kept a straight face, looked straight ahead, and continued the meeting as if nothing had happened. In a speech given in his hometown in April 1939, he said the talk of a “national emergency” was overblown, and the government should lower its tone: “I have serious doubts as to whether it is desirable that everyone in the nation, high and low, old and young alike, should be constantly strung up to such a pitch. If you pull a piece of elastic to the point where it will stretch no more, it loses its ability to function as elastic.”
In 1937, Yamamoto was appointed vice minister of the navy. There he would serve under Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, a former commander in chief of the Combined Fleet who was also a political moderate, aligned with the navy’s Treaty faction. Together they were determined to crack down on insubordinate ultranationalist naval officers, and to stop the headlong slide toward a disastrous war with the United States. “Orders must naturally come from the top to the bureau chiefs . . . ” Yamamoto wrote, “and the subordinates are to devise merely means of implementing these policies.” Ensconced in his Navy Ministry office, a dimly lit room lined with bookshelves, Yamamoto opposed the army’s attempts to have the Japanese Diet dissolved in 1937 and worked behind the scenes to bring civilian statesmen and scholars back into circles of influence. Yonai was personally close to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew, and wanted to renew arms limitation talks with the Western powers to avoid a costly new arms race. After the sinking of the Panay in 1937, Yamamoto had presented himself at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo with a humble (and by some reports, tearful) apology and offered a cash indemnity of $2.2 million. But the political climate in Tokyo would not allow for a return to disarmament. Both Yonai and Yamamoto were marked for assassination by ultranationalist goons, many of whom aired their threats publicly and without fear of arrest. In 1939, the conflict between the army and navy seemed to verge on civil war. Naval police were brought in to guard the homes and offices of senior officers whose lives were believed to be in danger. The ministry ordered fleet units into Tokyo Bay and prepared to bring detachments of sailors and marines into Tokyo to put down a rumored insurrection.
The great foreign policy question of the day was the Tripartite Pact, the German-Italian-Japanese alliance that marked the formal creation of the Axis. The ultranationalist right found much to admire in the military-authoritarian model of Nazism, although they found its Aryan master race ideology troubling and tended to ignore it. German influence was strong in the army: German military texts were taught at the Army Staff College and many mid-level officers had done tours of duty in Germany. Hitler was presented in Japanese newsreels as a heroic figure; Mein Kampf was sold in translation (with unflattering references to Asians edited out) and was an immensely popular bestseller. “Japanese youth at that time adored Hitler and Mussolini and yearned for the emergence of a Japanese politician with the same qualities,” recalled Harumichi Nogi, a student at Nihon University. “We wanted decisive action.” The military triumphs of Nazi Germany in 1939 and 1940 did no good for the Japanese advocates of a cautious foreign policy. The European democracies looked impotent before Hitler’s juggernaut, and the army was frantic to obtain an alliance with Germany before the (presumably imminent) fall of Britain. With such an alliance in place, Japan would be well placed to seize British colonial territories in Asia.
A right-wing ambassador in Berlin, bypassing his higher-ups in the Foreign Ministry and working furtively with the army staff, negotiated a draft treaty with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and sent it to Tokyo for ratification. Yonai and Yamamoto threw the entire weight of the navy against ratification, but the rapid disintegration of France in May 1940 cut the ground out from under their feet. Yamamoto warned that signing the Tripartite Pact would put Japan on the road to a potentially ruinous war with the United States, and “given the existing state of naval armaments, especially in naval aviation, there is no chance of winning a war with the United States for some time to come.” Japan, poor in natural resources, relied on areas controlled by the United States and Britain for four-fifths of its vital imports of oil and steel. At a navy conference in September 1940, he addressed the pact’s proponents directly: “I want you to tell us quite clearly what changes have been made in the materials mobilization program in order to make up for the deficiencies.” They declined even to answer. The single most important objective of Japan’s foreign policy, Yamamoto often declared, was to avoid war with the United States at all costs. But the government was drifting into precisely such a war, while refusing to come to grips with most of the fundamental strategic problems it presented. He remarked that Prince Konoye, the prime minister who approved the pact, would someday be “torn into pieces by the revengeful Japanese people.”
Each day men dressed in formal kimonos arrived at the redbrick building of the Naval Ministry and demanded to see Yamamoto. They carried formal complaints written in fine calligraphy on handmade parchment, and spoke of the impending punishment of heaven: “We are prepared to take other measures, so be forewarned.” Oddly, no action seems to have been taken against those menacing envoys. Yamamoto sometimes perused the threatening letters, making margin comments i
n red ink—“Stupid!” “Bunch of fools!” “Insulting!”—but given the recent history of Japan, the threats could not be ignored. When the cabinet of Prime Minister Kuchiro Hiranuma fell in August 1939, Yonai was named the new prime minister (a thankless office, with little power), and Yamamoto, whose life was thought to be in imminent danger, was sent back to the Combined Fleet as the new commander in chief, a post he would hold until his death. The Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940.
As Yamamoto had predicted, the Roosevelt administration began to tighten the economic screws. An oil trade agreement expired in January 1940, and the United States declined to extend it. Japan had previously imported 80 percent of its oil from the United States or U.S. territories, and now it appeared that that entire source might be cut off. That same month, the United States cut off sales of aviation fuel and scrap metal to Japan. Gradually the noose was tightened, as new categories of materials were added to the embargo lists. Negotiations opened in Washington between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Japanese ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura. In July 1941, when Japan invaded southern Indochina at the expense of the Free French, the British and Dutch announced that no further exports of oil to Japan would be permitted, and all Japanese assets in the United States were frozen. That brought events to a head, because although Japan had stockpiled enough oil for about two years of operations, that did not provide for the army or for Japanese industry, and the navy alone was consuming about 400 tons of the stuff every day.
The sixty-one-year-old Admiral Osami Nagano was appointed navy minister in March 1936. He seems to have accepted that war was inevitable, even if not desirable, and made no real effort to stop it. He allowed himself to be pressured and manipulated by younger officers. Vice Admiral Yorio Sawamoto reflected on the reasons why the navy allowed itself to be pressured into a war that it was not really prepared to fight. The reasons had to do with “a competition of mediocrities; there was no outstanding leader of outstanding ability. Pressure from subordinates was the order of the day. Younger officers would not respect their seniors and this made the matter even more difficult. . . . Everybody wanted to evade responsibility and no one had the grit to sacrifice himself to do his duty . . . The atmosphere was such that it put a premium on parochial and selfish concerns for either the army or the navy; considerations of the nation and the world were secondary.”
From his flagship, usually anchored at Hashirajima, Yamamoto continued to lobby for accommodation with the United States. He foresaw that a naval war in the Pacific would not be decided by a single “decisive battle” in the pattern of Tsushima, but would evolve into a long war of attrition. He challenged his more bellicose colleagues to acknowledge the size and latent potential of the American industrial economy, and he foresaw that Japan’s densely inhabited cities were vulnerable to air raids. The admiral had no confidence in the traditional Japanese war plan of “interceptive operations” to reduce the strength of the American fleet as it advanced across the vast wastes of the central Pacific. He correctly predicted that the Americans would not play into Japanese hands by sending a fleet to rescue the Philippines in the first phase of the war, but would take as much time as needed to build up overwhelming naval and air power, and then return by way of a methodical island-hopping campaign.
Again and again Yamamoto made his views known to Tokyo. On December 10, 1940: “It is too late now to be surprised, enraged, and distressed by America’s economic oppression. It is like a schoolboy who lives for the moment and behaves thoughtlessly.” The war would be a “calamity,” he wrote, and must be avoided at all costs. On October 14, 1940, he wrote Kumao Harada, secretary to Prince Saionji: “To fight the United States is like fighting the whole world. But it has been decided. So I will fight the best I can. Doubtless I shall die on board Nagato [his flagship]. Meanwhile Tokyo will be burnt to the ground three times.” Yamamoto was willing to go to great lengths to preserve the peace with the United States: he favored abrogating the Tripartite Pact and even withdrawing all Japanese troops from China. When asked directly by Konoye about Japan’s chances, he replied, “If we are ordered to do it, then I can raise havoc with the Americans for the first six months or a year, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”
After the Nakajima Type 97 torpedo bombers performed brilliantly in 1940 fleet exercises, Yamamoto mused to his chief of staff, “It makes me wonder if they couldn’t get Pearl Harbor.” There lay the germ of his plan to launch a sudden carrier air attack on the American stronghold. It was one of the rich ironies of Yamamoto’s career that he simultaneously opposed war with the United States, even to the extent of risking his own life, while also insisting on the attack on Pearl Harbor, even to the extent of resigning his command. “What a strange position I find myself in,” he wrote a friend on October 11, 1941, “having been assigned the mission diametrically opposed to my own personal opinion, with no choice but to push full speed in pursuance of that mission. Alas, is that fate?” Lieutenant Commander Genda, then serving on the staff of the First Naval Air Wing, had been studying the possibilities of massed carrier airpower since seeing a cinema newsreel about an American fleet review. The footage had depicted four aircraft carriers sailing in a single file. Genda realized that concentrating multiple carriers into a single task force would allow a huge air armada to be launched in one coordinated strike.
The raid on Pearl Harbor was an eleventh-hour revolt against more than thirty years of war planning, which had envisioned a decisive fleet battle in the western Pacific. In the traditional scenario, submarines, airplanes, and destroyers might peck away at the American fleet as it advanced across the ocean (“attrition operations”), but the killing blow would be delivered by the battleships, concentrated in orthodox Mahanian fashion, after lying in wait for the Americans in Japan’s home waters. But Yamamoto now asked: What if the American fleet did not play its part? What if it refused to repeat the around-the-world odyssey that had led Admiral Rozhestvensky to his doom at Tsushima? What if the Americans prudently chose to bide their time and build up their strength before coming to the rescue of the Philippines? How would Japan then score the decisive victory it needed?
Rear Admiral Takijiro Onishi, asked by Yamamoto to make a thorough study of the proposed attack, concluded that there were two significant problems. First, to make the torpedoes run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Second, to achieve surprise. The shallow-run torpedo problem was solved by devising an ingenious set of wooden fins. As for surprise, Onishi estimated the chance of success at about 60 percent. Others, including Genda, put the odds higher. (For the sake of the navy’s honor, Yamamoto asked that Japan’s declaration of war precede the attack by at least one hour.) When some of his fellow officers urged that the plan was too risky, Yamamoto replied, “Don’t keep saying, ‘It’s too much of a gamble,’ just because I happen to be fond of playing bridge and shogi. . . . Pearl Harbor is my idea and I need your support.”
Several hundred handpicked pilots were sent to Kagoshima Bay, a place that resembled the topography and appearance of Pearl Harbor, to practice the shallow, short-run torpedo drops that the mission would require. The raid on Pearl Harbor would be carried out by a task force of twenty-three ships, including six aircraft carriers, commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. While negotiations dragged on in Washington, Yamamoto demanded that the Naval General Staff approve his plan. When he was refused, he replied, “Unless it is carried out, the Commander in Chief Combined Fleet has no confidence that he can fulfill his assigned responsibility.” That last constituted a direct threat to resign, and Nagano gave in, saying, “If he has that much confidence, it’s better to let Yamamoto go ahead.”
The Combined Fleet chief had decided on his opening gambit in the war, but remained adamant that the wiser course was not to fight at all. On September 29, 1941, with the fleet preparing to sail for their rendezvous in the Kurile Islands, Yamamoto told Nagano bluntly that the pending war w
ould be a catastrophe. He saw the entire picture clearly, and laid it out with devastating clarity. “It is obvious that a Japanese-American war will become a protracted one,” he said:
As long as tides of war are in our favor, the United States will never stop fighting. As a consequence, the war will continue for several years, during which materiel will be exhausted, vessels and arms will be damaged, and they can be replaced only with great difficulties. Ultimately we will not be able to contend with [the United States]. As the result of war the people’s livelihood will become indigent . . . and it is not hard to imagine [that] the situation will become out of control. We must not start a war with so little a chance of success.
Evidently that was a view shared by all or nearly all of the top-ranking officers of the navy, but most were reluctant to say so. They felt pressure from below, from hotheads and hard-liners in the middle ranks—and they were vividly aware that agents of the radical right would gun down any man who stood in the way of Japan’s “imperial destiny.” But there was a third dimension, perhaps the most important of all: the rivalry between the army and navy. The two services were pitted against each other in an eternal brawl over funding, political influence, and the allocation of resources. Competition between military branches was hardly unique to Japan, but the Meiji Constitution placed both services in a direct advisory relationship with the emperor, with mechanisms freeing them from parliamentary or cabinet control. In practice, by the late 1930s, either service could effectively veto any national budget or depose any prime minister. Conceivably the emperor could be asked to resolve a deadlock between them, but so long as the admirals and generals reached a consensus, he was expected not to interfere. In other words, there was no one in Japan—no office, no agency, no legislature, no dictator, no commander in chief—who could overrule the army or navy when their institutional priorities did not fit into a coherent national policy. The predictable upshot was that both services got what they wanted.