file: russo-jap war ESSAY ON PEARL HARBOR.doc   Sunday, July 22, 2007

WHY JAPAN ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR

By H. Peter Metzger

It is always a pleasant surprise for me to gain a new insight into a part of history that has long eluded me. For example, I have always wondered why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, since it seemed like such a self-destructive move even at the time.

I have just finished reading a small book about the Russo-Japanese war and suddenly all of my questions have been answered. Moreover, I have developed a new respect for Japan and my life-long hatred for Russia has been rekindled anew. For another surprise, this story even has a very crucial Jewish angle (­Heroes and Friends: Behind the Scenes of the Treaty of Portsmouth, by Michiko Nakanishi, published by Peter Randall, Portsmouth, NH).

Now finding historical parallels is often a bad habit of historians, and while the book’s author did not dwell on these, I sure did. I think the parallels between the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 are so strong, that they should have become the principal guide for American foreign policy towards Japan in early 1941 at least. But best of all, I am satisfied that at last I understand why the Pearl Harbor attack happened in the first place.

GOOD JAPAN/US RELATIONS: THE FIRST 40 YEARS

It’s important to realize that the Japanese are a very proud people, being far more like Europeans in this regard than other Asians. Now, national pride cannot co-exist with humiliation for very long, particularly in a nation with a strong military capability. But from the time that Japan was opened up to world trade in 1854, she had been treated insultingly by a series of arms limitation treaties not to mention humiliating immigration quotas by the United States. The West demanded that Japan stay a second rate power, and since she still was, she had to “endure the unendurable” and accept it. But unlike other Asian countries, Japan had a great ambition to become something much more, and so she saw the demands of the West as provocations, which they certainly were. But at first she went along, at least publicly.

For example, only ten years after Japan’s entry onto the world stage, when she was still governed by Shogunates, a maverick Lord fired upon some European merchant ships. In a punitive expedition, British, French and Dutch squadrons retaliated by bombarding Shimonoseki harbor (only one American vessel was involved). The local Shogun sued for peace and in behavior reminiscient of the infamous Treaty of Versailles, the European powers demanded the payment of a crushing indemnity from Japan. This caused the Shogun to be deposed, but the new government repaid the debt in full anyway.

Most unlike the Europeans, and in the first of many honorable acts between Japan and the United States, two American Secretaries of State saw the injustice of the excessive indemnity forced upon Japan and urged that Congress re-examine the matter. Soon both houses of Congress voted that the entire amount of the American share be returned to Japan.

Thus the Americans saw something very unusual in the Japanese; that they paid their war debts. And the Japanese saw something very unusual in the Americans. Foreign Minister Okuma put it this way; “The United States voluntarily returned the indemnity out of a sense of justice and goodwill without any conditions attached”.

Thus, the behaviour of both nations began on a far higher moral plane than would have been the case had European political values been employed. And so began forty years of a golden age of mutual respect between Japan and America, ending when the American President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the (soon to come) Russo-Japanese war. At that point, another 40-year period began, this time of bad relations between the two countries, culminating in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941

  HUMILIATION OF JAPAN BY RUSSIA AND THE WEST

But back to the turn of the century, Japan won a war against China in 1895 and played the largest part in the European coalition to quell the Boxer (Chinese) rebellion in 1900. Impressed with the military prowess of the Japanese, Britain saw an Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902) as being of great advantage in containing Russian expansion into the Pacific, which posed a threat to the British sphere of influence.

To say that the Japanese fighting spirit impressed the West would be an understatement. It was a new thing for the Europeans to see an army which refused to surrender; even when all hope was lost. They saw a people who were quite different from what the West had grown to expect from the Asians, particularly from the apathetic Chinese.

(illustration #1 at the end shows how the Japanese army improvised a siege engine by making a bridge using their own bodies in order to breach the newly built Russian fortifications at Port Arthur.)

Alarmed by the unexpected appearance of Japanese power, a strange thing happened. It was called the Triple Intervention of 1895. Russia, Germany and France ganged up on Japan and forced her to return most of the territory she seized from China at the end of the recent war. There was no fighting over this matter and not a shot was fired, for it was done solely by intimidation. The Europeans offered some unsolicited “friendly advice” to Japan to return the territory she won from China in exchange for a larger indemnity, or face war with the West. Facing a hostile coalition of Europeans, Japan backed down and returned the prized Liaotung Peninsula, along with its harbor city, Port Arthur, to China.

Having thus pried Port Arthur away from Japan (for the announced purpose of returning it to China), and in an act of monumental impudence, Russia immediately seized the entire Liaodong Peninsula from China for itself and then began to fortify Port Arthur as Russia’s new warm water port on the Pacific. In the feeding frenzy which followed, Germany and France moved in on paralyzed China and seized even more of Japan’s spoils which she had won in her recent war with China.

Much as The Treaty of Versailles is blamed for humiliating another proud people, the Germans (thus paving the way for the rise of Hitler), the proud Japanese people reacted in much the same way forty years earlier. The thing that provoked them most was that they knew that they had the military power to resist these seizures but didn’t dare use it because no Asian power had yet presumed to challenge a European military power. But that would soon change.

This continued and further humiliation at the hands of the Europeans led to a cultural change in Japan called Gashin Shôtan, meaning “Persevering through Hardship” (for the sake of revenge), an ideology resulting in a massive increase in heavy industry and the strength of the armed forces, particularly the navy, all at the expense of the ordinary Japanese subject.

RUSSIAN IMPERIALIST EXPANSIONISM

To make matters worse, Russian imperialism was fast closing in on the far East, as the Russian Trans-Siberian railroad penetrated deeply into Japan’s sphere of influence. This was the logical outcome of Russia’s eastward expansion in her long quest for an ice-free port on the Pacific. Actually that penetration began forty years earlier, when Russia annexed a vast province of China, and built a fortified naval port on the Sea of Japan (Vladivostok), but it was not reliably ice-free however.

To save 350 miles, the Trans-Siberian Railroad took a shortcut through Manchuria, another neighbor of Japan, necessitating a continuous military occupation there which was garrisoned with 40,000 Russian troops. Finally, only Korea remained as a buffer state standing between Russia and Russian command of the Tsushima strait, where she could attack the Japanese navy at will.

Clearly, Russia did not worry a bit that this squeeze play might create a reaction from Japan, since a serious military threat to a European power by an Asian power was considered an impossibility. But such Russian pride had no foundation because that country was about to collapse under the weight of its own corruption.

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While it was surely true that Russia had the largest single army in the world, that power did not translate into strength. Much like the France of WWII, which also had the largest army in Europe but lost every battle, Russia had known few victories in all its history (except against its own people). Moreover, the Russian military and social fabric was rotting from within, waiting for the slightest push in the wrong direction, and that push came the very next year in the form of the Russian Revolution of 1905.

ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE WEST

But in 1904, Russia was still much feared and Japan knew that to make war against this colossus was a huge risk, and so Japan was fully prepared to accept many defeats and great losses in order to win victory in the end.

But the future did not look all bad for Japan since she had some powerful encouragement from the West. The Anglo­-Japanese Alliance of 1902 had already demonstrated that Russia was not much liked by England whereas Japan was. Also The Netherlands looked upon Russian eastward expansionism with worry for its Indonesian colonies. Indeed, Imperial Russia was regarded with ill concealed contempt by most European and American statesmen.

For example, after the conflict to come, President Theodore Roosevelt said, this “preposterous Csar has been unable to make war, and now he has been unable to make peace”.

It was then that President Roosevelt told an envoy from Japan, words that no one in Japan would dare ever to have hoped to hear. He said, “Japan should be the leader and protector of all the Asiatic nations from the Suez Canal to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and shouldn’t let any European or American powers intervene … Japan ought to declare an Asiatic Monroe Doctrine”, he said. Well, Japan certainly took this advice to heart, even though she had already come to the same conclusion on her own.

Even so, it must have been with a heavy heart that Japan made its decision to risk everything, and even Japan knew that their little nation could prevail against Russia for no longer than a year at the most, but Japanese pride had been humiliated once too often and there was no turning back. Nevertheless, it still came as a big shock to the world when Japan finally did attack Russia, and two days before a declaration of war too.

Unlike in 1941, no nation censured Japan for that sneak attack and so it was obvious that Japan should continue the same policy when she attacked Pearl Harbor.

THE WAR

The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was a lopsided affair. Without meaning to minimizing the huge Japanese losses, Japan won every battle, and spectacularly so too, surprising even the Japanese. The war saw the largest land battle in history and the largest rout in a sea battle also, up until that time. It was a titanic humiliation for Russia and the Tsar blamed his commanders.

To be fair, not Russia, nor any other European power had seen anything like the determination of the Japanese army before. It was like a force of nature, indeed like unstoppable Army Ants, which also make bridges out of their own bodies if that’s what it takes to win a victory.

(see the illustration at the end which shows how real ants do this)

By war’s end, a Russian Admiral was actually captured on the high seas by Japanese forces (unheard of) and not a few Russian Generals were tried and convicted of treason, being accused of cowardice under fire.

Moreover, the entire Russian Baltic fleet, which was sent across the world by the Tsar to battle Japan, was sunk by the Japanese Navy with almost no losses. Of the 38 ships in the Russian fleet, only three made it home, while Japan lost only three small torpedo boats in the bargain, with all of this happening in an astonishing five hours.

Among other things, this war illustrated how deeply the world hated Russia. And it was well deserved too, since Russia (then as now), was infamous the world over for its brutality towards its own people, which gave rise to many international condemnations. Indeed, much of the help given to Japan was motivated by this golden chance to punish Russia, something in which I regard with great personal glee.

THE REVENGE OF THE JEWS

In fact, it was revenge that motivated the help for Japan where it really mattered the most. That help came from a most unexpected quarter and solved what could have been the only thing that Japan might not have managed on its own, no matter how courageous her soldiers were. And that was how to finance the war. She had to get money from somewhere and she did, as if by a magic accident.

This is a story of remarkably good luck. After months of failure in trying to float Japanese war bonds in the West, diplomat Takahashi found himself at a dinner party seated next to one Jacob Schiff, who was very interested in Japan. Takahashi had never heard of Schiff, who was a powerful financier, but in the course of their long conversation, Takahashi told Schiff about his mission and his failure to accomplish it so far.

Takahashi soon found out that he was talking to a man who controlled enough money of his own to make instant decisions involving huge amounts of money, which must have been a welcome and unexpected change for Takahashi, being accustomed to dealing with bank committees. Virtually on the spot, Schiff agreed to float a new bond issue to cover all that Takahashi needed to complete his mission. Not only that, but Schiff took the inexperienced Takahashi under his wing and taught him the business of international finance, introducing him to all the right people along the way.

Much later, Takahashi learned of Schiff’s motives and why he wanted to know so much about about Japan’s situation, particularly concerning Russia. As a staunch Jew, Schiff was devoted to Jewish causes and was infuriated by the fact that the Tsar himself, and the Russian government itself, were actively financing the hate and murder of Jews.

Only the previous year, the infamous Kishinev massacre took place there, causing a great international outcry. Many Jews were murdered (with government help) after having been accused of killing a Christian child and using its blood in Jewish religious ceremonies. According to The New York Times, “the mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘Kill the Jews,’ was taken up all over the city… The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror”.

So it’s no surprise that Schiff decided to punish the Russians by aiding Japan. Later, the other Frankfurt-based Jewish financiers became involved too, such as the Rothschilds, the Kuhns, and the Loebs, and so Japan had no more trouble in financing her war after that.

By another happy coincidence, several Japanese victories took place at the very same time that the various bond issues were first floated, resulting in headlines across the world and long lines in London and New York City to snap up the new Japanese war bonds, causing all of them to sell out in a single day.  

AFTERMATH OF THE WAR

As the war ended, political instability rocked both nations as riots and revolution spread, based upon the popular misconception in both countries that the war ended badly for each.

Although the war ended with a Japanese victory, popular discontent with the peace treaty erupted in riots in all the major cities of Japan. The mobs forgot that Japan had recovered Port Arthur, that it had been given a “sphere of influence” over Korea, that it had gained the South Manchurian Railway (which it had not built) and that it regained the better half of Sakhakin Island.

But events in Russia were far more serious, because there were many more reasons for discontent there. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a full scale war all right, but it wouldn’t truly end until a dozen years later when the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ended with the Tsar killed.

In an interesting sideshow, Jacob Schiff paid for the distribution of revolutionary pamphlets among the 50,000 Russian prisoners of war still in Japan who then returned home as hardened Communist revolutionaries.

It took longer for anti-government discontents to make themselves felt in Japan. It was in 1936 when a massive military revolution broke out in Tokyo. Led by ultra-nationalists and army officers, rioters attacked moderate political figures in their homes as assassination became part of the normal political process. Parlimentary government was destroyed and martial law stayed in place for five months. The army became so strong, that it created incidents on its own, occupied Manchuria, and eventually created the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932).

Neither country survived the effects of the 1905 war for a great many years to come. Both were soon taken over by uncontrollable forces which were set loose by the war, Russia by a single political party, and Japan by the army. Russia only gained a measure of political freedom in 1990, while Japan was freed from army rule only after losing the war against America in 1945.

WHY THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR

The reason for Japan to resort to war against the United States was not because Japan was being surrounded by an enemy, which was the case in 1905. In 1937, Japan was at war with China again which America duly protested. The protests soon became demands which the United States backed up by placing an embargo on all arms shipped to Japan as well as all related materiel such the oil and steel needed for her war. The military government in Tokyo, riding on the wave of ultra-nationalistic anger that had been building since the end of Russo-Japanese war, now turned that anger against the United States.

It became clear to Japan that the United States was the only force standing in the way of the fulfillment of that old Japanese dream of having a free hand in Asia. Thus, Japan would have to push the United States far enough across the Pacific so as to be out of Japan’s sphere of influence. The only way to do this was to inflict a massive blow on the American Navy and sink it in the first few hours of the war. Then a negotiated peace could be reached, setting Japan free to run Asia at last.

After all, the plan was following exactly what Japan had already successfully pulled off in 1904 against Russia. Then Japan had already beaten another country sixty times larger than itself and since America was only forty times larger than tiny Japan, the military mindset held that it would be even easier to win a war with the United States. As for the difference in populations, Japan assumed that the samuraization of all Japan would give one man the strength of ten, and so on. But there were two fatal flaws in that argument.

Japan’s first mistake turned on her definition of war at the time. A war with America could not be the kind of war in which both countries slugged it out until only one was left standing. Japan knew that she didn’t have the staying power for that kind of war. What Japan hoped for was that the Americans would be like the Russians were and quickly tire of war and sue for a negotiated peace favorable to Japan, all within one year.

Japan’s second mistake was in assuming that Americans were like the Russians, whose utterly decadent officer corps were risk-averse to laying down their lives for a tyrant. It was hoped that America’s vulnerability was her love for pleasure and the easy life, which had hindered her natural instincts for self-defense (a belief shared by Hitler, by the way).

Both of these assumptions were justified when applied to Russia. The much feared Russian army of one million men was totally demoralized from the start, and not inclined fight at all. But what  was true for  Russia in 1904 was a fatal mistake to apply to America in 1941.

Even so, the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war convinced the Japanese military that a single decisive and successful surprise attack would cripple America and end in victory for Japan, a victory crowned by an advantageous armistice. And even though many highly placed Japanese saw through this insane scheme, the entire country was consumed with war fever and any dissent was met with swift assassination. And so, with all the voices of moderation thus silenced, Japan found herself on the slippery slope to disaster with no way back.

That is why Japan thought that she could win a quick war against the United States of America.

--------end of essay text, two pictures follow---------

Like Army Ants, these Japanese soldiers form a bridge out of their own bodies to scale the walls of Port Arthur:

Here are real Army Ants doing the same thing. How can such soldiers be stopped?

===========end of essay=============