More than seventy-five years after its end, World War II continues to be a fertile topic for both scholarly research and popular history. Entire podcasts are devoted to World War II, and television documentaries are too numerous to mention.
Peter Wetzler, a senior research fellow at the Ostasieninstitut (East Asia Institute), has a more focused brief in Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: the final stages of the Asia-Pacific War, from mid-1942 to mid-1945. Wetzler has a long-standing interest in imperial Japan and the military, first recounted in Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan.Footnote 1 In his latest book, he introduces a framework to differentiate between nation and state in order to demonstrate the catastrophic results of the Shōwa emperor and military leaders’ conviction of their own racial superiority. The book aims to more clearly explain the course of the war and its events, especially decision-making at the highest level. In doing so, it highlights the imperial-military relationship and how the “belief in a ‘unique’ religious ideology” helped bring about Japan's defeat.
Many have wondered why imperial Japanese leaders insisted on continuing the fight after it was clearly lost. Wetzler argues that it can be explained by “the collective Japanese fear of loss of face and the extinction of their empire—a desperation that galvanized self-assuring hubris based on unquestioning belief in their nationalistic religious ideology” (p. 7). To this relatively conventional explanation, Wetzler adds a unique analytic frame. He defines nation as a “commonly acknowledged set of beliefs, traditions, and spiritual orientations idolizing and legitimizing the actions of the rulers and administrators of a state,” and state as “an executive apparatus ruling and administering a defined geographical area” (p. 2). According to Wetzler, Hirohito was the “nation,” but not in an absolute sense the “state.” The gap between the two is the subject of the book.
To illustrate this argument, Wetzler shows how the strategic loss of Saipan led to Tōjō Hideki's fall from power, the undermining of imperial authority through false situation reports, and the start of B-29 air raids on Japan. He looks at how systematic kamikaze strikes followed what the Imperial Navy claimed was an increase in letters encouraging such strikes. Wetzler argues that the division of state and nation is observable in the way that the emperor neither planned nor sanctioned such strikes, but instead deferred to the Imperial Navy General Staff. For Wetzler, Japanese military leaders’ discounting of logistics and supplies, use of suicide attacks, and disregard for wholesale economic destruction “verged on nefarious criminal conduct” (p. 6).
Of course, the lack of materiel is one reason why the military emphasized “Japan's unique spiritual qualities.” “Kokutai’’ or “national essence,” writes Wetzler—using a historical rather than theoretical definition—was a “venerated sociopolitical order sanctified by the ‘eternal imperial line’” (p. 4). As Japanese leaders continued to fight a war where they expected a minimum of 500,000 servicemen killed, and many more wounded, they also struggled over this ultimate source of authority. He paints a picture of Japanese military authorities riven: an emperor seeking to preserve the “national essence,” an Imperial Army seeking to continue the struggle, and an Imperial Navy which merely sought a favorable way of losing.
Wetzler argues that, in the end, the war continued for so long because “national pretenses and state intimidation materialized out of preliminary concerns employed to save a ‘unique’ ultimate concern,” that is, “the national essence including the eternal imperial line—even if it ultimately was a fiction” (p. 177). He concludes that military leaders were unable to save the state, but the emperor saved the nation.
A primary contribution of this book is to introduce and contextualize Japanese-language sources in English, perhaps most importantly, The Actual Record of the Showa Emperor (Shōwa Tennō Jitsuroku). Wetzler also helps explain Japanese-language historiographical debates. Scholars will find the bibliography of great assistance. The book would be most useful to non-Japanese-speaking scholars interested in the Japanese emperor and military relationship during World War II.
