I can run wild against the British and the Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, I have no expectation of success.
-Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku
Tora! Tora! Tora!
-Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
-Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
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“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.
Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.
My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.
By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.
It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.
Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”
For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.
But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.
At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.
But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.
As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.
Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.
Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.
Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.
At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.
For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?
As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?
75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
