Imperialism/Militarism

The imperial era military conscription system, first announced by the emperor in 1872 and promulgated a year later, was a piece of institutionalised violence that symbolised Japanese imperialism and militarism.

The Meiji government carefully studied conscription law in Europe and the United States and modelled their system after the one in Prussia. Proponents of conscription such as Omura Masujiro, a scholar of Dutch studies, had been familiar with Prussia's military studies through Dutch publications since the Tokugawa period. The law mandated that all non-exempted 20-year-old Japanese citizens serve in the military for three years and enlist in the reserve forces for four years.^{^[538]}

The size of the conscripted military was small at first. In 1874,5.3 per cent of all 20-year-olds (14,461) were called to serve. In 1875 and 1876, the numbers were 2.4 per cent and 3.2 per cent, respectively. In the early Meiji years, the government was not able to afford a large military, and it selected a small number of capable young men from a large pool of candidates. The system at first provided a series of exemptions from mandatory conscription through legal means. For example, bureaucrats, medical school students, public university students, students studying abroad, heads of households, adopted sons, siblings of a drafted brother, criminals imprisoned a year or more, and those who paid 270 yen were all exempted from the service.^{^[539]}

By 1889 the empire needed a large military, and these legal exemptions, except for those pertaining to men with criminal records, disappeared. The empire drafted more than 10 per cent of the eligible 20-year-olds in 1896, nearly 20 per cent in 1919, and approximately 60 per cent in 1943. In 1944, the government revised the law and inducted not only the 20-year-olds, but also 19-year-olds.

This enabled the government to draft more than a million men. In 1945, approximately 90 per cent of the nineteen- to twenty-year-olds who passed the medical examination served in the military. By the end of World War II, the imperial army and navy had enlisted more than 7 million servicemen.^{^[540]}

Those enlisted servicemen included ethnic minorities such as Koreans and Taiwanese. Taiwan became Japan's colony in 1895, after the Sino-Japanese War, and Korea became a part of the Japanese empire in 1905, after the Russo- Japanese War. By 1943, both the army and the navy adopted Taiwanese volunteers. While the total number of Taiwanese volunteers in the navy is unknown, nearly 5,000 Taiwanese served in the army by the end of the war. The government was planning to pass a conscription law that would make military service mandatory for Taiwanese, but the war ended before it was executed. As to the Koreans, by 1943 the military enlisted more than 16,000 and military service became mandatory for the Korean minorities in 1944. In 1944, the army drafted 45,000, while the navy inducted 10,000. Both military institutions drafted the same number of servicemen in the following year. While the empire made military service compulsory in Korea, it did not extend suffrage to those minorities in its colonies.^{^[541]}

According to Fujiwara Akira, a veteran who later became a renowned scholar of modern Japanese history, the imperial military can be summarised as a violent organisation that stripped individuality from servicemen with strict discipline and punishment. In the military, absolute obedience was mandatory, and senior officers constantly used physical abuse and violence against their juniors. While the military officially prohibited corporal punishment, certain officers believed that physical punishment would cultivate strong minds and patience among the servicemen, transforming them into tough and courageous soldiers. Newly recruited soldiers learned that they were no longer in the civilian world through public humiliation and physical abuse from their seniors.

Slaps on the face, beatings on the buttocks and blows of fists were all common in both the army and the navy. As violence was so systemic, many Japanese soldiers were accustomed to it, and did not hesitate to exercise violence on their own troops when they became senior in the military.^{^[542]}

Indeed, imperial Japan had a highly disciplined military. In the final years of the Asia-Pacific War (1941-5), the imperial military demanded that its servicemen fight to the death. Nonetheless, the battles themselves did not inflict the most critical damages on them. One estimate suggests that starvation and malnutrition-related disease caused more than half of the deaths of 2.3 million servicemen. Another study finds that 70 per cent of the dead succumbed to hunger and related illnesses. In the postwar years, some of the veterans who survived the war in the Philippines and New Guinea even confessed to having committed cannibalism during the war. Although the exact figure of the deaths from starvation is unknown, the loss of air and naval supremacy to the Allies in China and in the southern Pacific in the end of the war brought substantial deaths from starvation among Japanese servicemen.^{^[543]} ^{^[544]}

Similarly, drowning was another significant cause of deaths among Japanese servicemen. One study concludes that approximately 182,200 navy servicemen and 176,000 army servicemen died by drowning during the Asia- Pacific War. In short, 15.6 per cent of the 2.3 millionJapanese servicemen who died (including ethnic minorities) were killed in the sea. The Allied strikes were the direct causes of these deaths, but the military exacerbated the problem by packing too many servicemen into each ship. In addition, due to the shortage, the military used not military transport boats but commercial cargo ships that were more vulnerable to the Allied assaults. Servicemen's deaths from drowning during the Asia-Pacific War were four times those of the Russo-Japanese War.11

While the number is much less striking compared with the deaths by starvation or drowning, deaths from suicide attack were also significant among Japanese servicemen.

Both the imperial army and the navy decided to utilise suicide tactics to alter the tide of war in early 1944. It was in February that the navy first commissioned a prototype of a human torpedo. The Army Chief of Staff urged the Commander in charge of the defence of the Philippines to employ suicide tactics in order to destroy enemy morale. The first kamikaze suicide attack occurred at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. More than 4,000 servicemen (including those from Taiwan and Korea) died in suicide attacks by aircraft, and 43 percent of the navy's and 23.5 per cent of the army's suicide forces were teenagers, the youngest of whom were 16 years old. In addition, 68 per cent of the navy's and 55 per cent of the army's servicemen deployed for suicide missions were rank-and-file military men. As to the officers, the military preferred reserve officers for these missions, meaning that those who graduated from ordinary colleges and universities, instead of the Imperial Army Academy or the Navy Academy, were more likely to be selected for those missions.^{^[545]}

Various kinds of weapons were used for suicide missions besides aircraft, casualties of which were not included in the figure in the previous paragraph. Kaiten, a weapon developed by the navy, was a small submarine with explosives on its front. Approximately eighty Kaiten crews lost their lives during missions. The Navy also built Oka, a rocket propelled glider with explosives, and Shinyo, a motorboat with explosives. The Navy used the battleship Yamato, with approximately 3,300 men on board, for a suicide mission at the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. The mission failed, and the battleship sank to the bottom of the ocean, killing all but 276 of the crew. Similarly, the army built Marure, a suicide motorboat, and often utilised ‘human bullets', soldiers with explosives, who were ordered to destroy tanks and other armed vehicles.^{^[546]}

During the last years of the empire's existence, civilians too suffered extreme violence in many different forms.

The empire demanded that its people on the Japanese islands and colonies sacrifice their lives for the empire, if necessary. Okinawa, for example, became a battlefield in March 1945, and approximately a half of the 244,000 Japanese losses were civilians.^{^[547]} This is partly because the government mobilised the residents in Okinawa to defend not only the Okinawan islands, but also the Japanese mainland. Historians such as Hayashi Hirofumi consider the Battle of Okinawa itself a suicide mission meant to protect the emperor system and the Japanese mainland.1^{^[548]} All able-bodied people, including children, ethnic minorities and women, were mobilised to prepare for the battle, building air bases, barracks and bunkers and transporting necessary equipment and materials. The army drafted some 22,000 men aged 17 to 45 to reinforce its undermanned units and mobilised male and female students and youth aged 14 and above into the youth, the medical and the transportation units. One third of the Japanese defence forces consisted of the Okinawan draftees and students. While many of the Okinawans perished in the American assaults, many others died from starvation, took their own lives, or died at the hands of the Japanese military.^{^[549]}

As more than 2 million shells fell on the islands, the civilians and the defending forces retreated to southern Okinawa, taking shelter in natural underground caves. Two-thirds of the civilian deaths occurred after the retreat. The Army often drove out civilians who had been hiding in the caves without much food, and these wanderers consequently lost their lives in the bombardments. When the caves were shared between the army and the civilians, the army often prohibited the civilians from surrendering to the American troops and forced them to die with the servicemen. Compulsory mass suicides by the ‘volunteers' frequently occurred during the battle, and the army provided grenades for them to kill themselves.

In addition, the army often executed suspected Okinawan spies, including those who refused to give up their food or shelter, who attempted to surrender, who received food from the American troops, or who provided ‘suspicious' responses to the army interrogators.^{^[550]}

Wartime education, aimed at creating imperial subjects (kominka), justified the government's war efforts and provoked patriotism among the youth, such that many young Okinawans, like their counterparts in other regions, saw sacrificing themselves for the empire as ethical and just.1^{^[551]} In addition, the wartime mass media demonised the American and British people.1^{^[552]} It is not surprising that the young Japanese patriots chose to fight to the death rather than surrender as they often believed that the American enemy would torture Japanese men and boys to death and would rape and kill Japanese women and girls.^{^[553]} The trend of the times hardly allowed the youth to question patriotism imposed by the empire. The empire utilised various tools, including its judicial system, to control dissent. Treason was a serious crime, and unpatriotic Japanese had no place in the empire.^{^[554]}

This mobilisation of youth was not limited to Okinawa. It happened across the empire, and children were forced to work at unsafe places such as the poison gas factory on Okuno Island (built in 1929) in Hiroshima. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, professor of history at Chuo University, estimated that the imperial military produced a total of 73.8 million tons of toxic gas between 1931 and 1945, of which 66.2 million tons were made on the island.^{^[555]} Due to its strategic importance, the island was erased from the map during the war. At its peak, approximately 5,000 workers produced lethal gas at the factory.^{^[556]} From June 1943 to August 1945, more than 1,000 students aged between 13 and 16 were mobilised to work on the islands. Their duties included moulding ignition powder for the smoke canisters and rolling drums filled with lethal materials from the storehouse to the pier. These drums were often covered in remnants of the toxic liquids, but the children had little protection. Nearly 64 per cent of the former student and adult workers on the island experienced respiratory and digestive problems in the postwar period.^{^[557]}

In order to cope with the labour shortages and to propel war industries, the empire also mobilised residents ofJapan's colonies and occupied territories. For example, one estimate concludes that, between 1939 and 1945, the Japanese government mobilised more than 6 million Koreans to propel Japan's war machine. Approximately 1.5 million of these Koreans were transported to Japan in order to work at mines, military factories, construction sites, and other places that required hard manual labour.^{^[558]} As for Chinese mobilised labourers, nearly 40,000 people in northern China were transported to Japan and forced to work in the 135 mines and other construction sites across Japan.^{^[559]} Their working conditions were generally harsh, and approximately 18 per cent of them died. In addition, the Japanese government transported thousands of Chinese ‘special labourers' (tokushu kojin), including suspected communist sympathisers and prisoners of war, to the mines in Manchuria as the region needed more than 1.1 million workers.^{^[560]}

Exploiting prisoners of war for work was not uncommon in the Japanese empire. In 1942, the army announced that it had captured more than 260,000 Allied servicemen after they surrendered to the empire. Between November 1942 and October 1943, the empire mobilised approximately 60,000 Allied prisoners of war in addition to tens of thousands of Asian labourers (romusha) in order to build the 260-mile Burma-Thailand Railway.^{^[561]} As the army did not allow its servicemen to be captured, its policy towards the Allied prisoners was hostile and often cruel. The Army forced these labourers to work more than ten hours a day in order to build the railway as fast as possible. It was no surprise that approximately 43,000 are estimated to have died during the construction because of exhaustion, malnutrition, disease and physical abuse.^{^[562]}

Many of the guards of the Allied prisoners were ethnic minorities. In 1942, the Army sent more than 3,000 Koreans and Taiwanese to the Allied prisoner of war camps in South-East Asia. The army tried to use these Allied prison camps as facilities to convince the imperial subjects that the empire was superior to the American and European powers. This is one example of how prevalent racist thoughts were during the war. A statement on 5 November 1941, by Hara Yoshimichi, president of the Privy Council, revealed his concern that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor would unite ‘the entire Aryan race' against Japan.^{^[563]} He, like many others of the period, understood international affairs from a perspective of race relations.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

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