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2024 Book Review #41 – Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta

Almost everything I know about World War 2, I learned against my will through a poorly spent adolescence and reading people argue about it online. Living in Canada, Japan’s role in it is even more obscure, with the wars in the Pacific and China getting a fraction of a fraction of the official commemoration and pop culture interest of events in Europe. So I went into this book with a knowledge of only the vague generalities of Japanese politics in the ‘30s and ‘40s – from that baseline, this was a tremendously interesting and educational book, if at times more than a bit dry.

The book is a very finely detailed narrative of the internal deliberations within the Japanese government and the diplomatic negotiations with the USA through late 1940 and 1941, which ultimately culminate in the decision to attack Pearl Harbour and invade European colonies across the Pacific. It charts the (deeply dysfunctional) decision-making systems of the Imperial Japanese government and how bureaucratic politics, factional intrigue and positioning, and an endemic unwillingness to be the one to back down and eat your words, made a war with the USA first possible, then plausible, then seemingly inevitable. Throughout this, the book wears its thesis on its sleeve – that the war in the Pacific only ever seemed inevitable, that until the very last hour there was widespread understanding that the war would be near-unwinnable across the imperial government and military, but a broken political culture, the career suicide of being the one to endorse accepting American demands,, and a simple lack of courage or will among the doves, prevented anything from ever coming of it.

So I did know that Imperial Japan’s government had, let’s say, fundamental structural issues when I opened the book, but I really wasn’t aware of just how confused and byzantine the upper echelons of it were. Like if Brazil was about the executive committee – the army and navy ministries had entirely separate planning infrastructures from the actual general staffs, and all of them were basically silo’d off from the actual economic and industrial planning bureaucracy (despite the fact that the head of the Cabinet Planning Board was a retired general). All of which is important, because the real decisions of war and peace were made in liaison meetings with the prime minister, foreign minister, and both ministry and general staff of each branch – meetings which were often as not just opportunities for grandstanding and fighting over the budget. The surprise is less that they talked themselves into an unwinnable war and more that they decided on anything at all.

The issue, as Hotta frames it, is that there really wasn’t a single place the buck stopped – officially speaking, the civilian government and both branches of the military served the pleasure of the Emperor – whose theoretically absolute authority was contained by both his temperament and both custom and a whole court bureaucracy dedicated to making sure the prestige of the throne didn’t get mired in and discredited by the muck of politics. The entire Meiji Constitution was built around the presence of a clique of ‘imperial advisers’ who could borrow the emperor’s authority without being so restrained – but as your Ito Hirobumis and Yamagata Aritomos died off, no one with the same energy, authority and vision ever seems to have replaced them.

So you had momentous policy decisions presented as suggestions to the emperor who could agree and thus turn them into inviolable commands, and understood by the emperor as settled policy who would provide an apolitical rubber-stamp on. Which, combined with institutional cultures that strongly encouraged being a good soldier and not undercutting or hurting the image of your faction, led to a lot of people quietly waiting for someone else to stand up and make a scene for them (or just staying silent and wishing them well when they actually did).

Now, this is all perhaps a bit too convenient for many of the people involved – doubtless anyone sitting down and writing their memoirs in 1946 would feel like exaggerating their qualms about the war as much as they could possibly get away with. I feel like Hotta probably takes those post-war memoirs and interviews too much at face value in terms of people’s unstated inner feeling – but on the other hand, the bureaucratic records and participants’ notes preserved from the pivotal meetings themselves do seem to show a great deal of hesitation and factional doubletalk. Most surprisingly to me was the fact that Tojo (who I had the very vague impression was the closest thing to a Japanese Hitler/Mussolini there was) was actually chosen to lead a peace cabinet and find some 11th hour way to avert the war. Which in retrospect was an obviously terrible decision, but it was one he at least initially tried to follow through on.

If the book has a singular villain, it’s actually no Tojo (who is portrayed as, roughly, replacement-rate bad) but Prince Konoe, the prime minister who actually presided over Japan’s invasion of China abroad and slide into a militarized police state at home, who led the empire to the very brink of war with the United States before getting cold feet and resigning at the last possible moment to avoid the responsibility of either starting the war or of infuriating the military and destroying his own credibility by backing down and acceding to America’s demands. He’s portrayed as, not causing, but exacerbating

every one of Japan’s structural political issues through a mixture of cowardice and excellent survival instincts – he carefully avoided fights he might lose, even when that meant letting his foreign minister continue to sabotage negotiations he supported while he arranged support to cleanly remove him (let alone really pushing back on the army). At the same time, the initiatives he did commit were all things inspired by his deep fascination with Nazi Germany – the dissolution of partisan political parties and creation of an (aspirationally, anyway) totalitarian Imperial Rule Assistance Association, the creation of a real militarized police state, the heavy-handed efforts to create a more pure and patriotic culture. He’s hardly to blame for all of that, of course, but given that he was a civilian politician initially elected to curb military influence, his governments sure as hell didn’t help anything (and it is I suppose just memorably ironic that he’s the guy on the spot for many of the most military-dictatorship-e aspects of Japanese government).

One of the most striking things about the book is actually not even part of the main narrative but just the background context of how badly off Japan was even before they attacked the United States. I knew the invasion of China hadn’t exactly been going great, but ‘widespread rationing in major cities, tearing up wrought iron fencing in the nicest districts of the capital to use in war industry’ goes so much further than I had any sense of. The second Sino-Japanese War was the quintessential imperial adventure and war of choice, and also just literally beyond the material abilities of the state of Japan to sustain in conjunction with normal civilian life. You see how the American embargo on scrap metal and petroleum was seen as nearly an act of war in its own right. You also wonder even more how anyone could possibly have convinced themselves that an army that was already struggling to keep its soldiers fed could possibly win an entirely new war with the greatest industrial power on earth. Explaining which is of course the whole point of the book (they didn’t, in large part, but convinced themselves the Americans wouldn’t have the stomach for it and agree to a favourable peace quickly, or that Germany would conquer the UK and USSR and impose mediation on Japan’s terms, or-).

When trying to understand the decision-making process, I’m honestly reminded of nothing so much as the obsession with ‘credibility’ you see among many American foreign policy hands in the modern day. The idea that once something had been committed to – the (largely only extant on paper) alliance with Nazi Germany, the creation of a collaborator government in China to ‘negotiate’ with, the occupation of southern Vietnam – then, even if you agreed it hadn’t worked out and had probably been a terrible decision to begin with, reversing course without some sort of face-saving agreement or concession on the other side would shatter any image of strength and invite everyone else the world over to grab at what you have. The same applies just as much to internal politics, where admitting that your branch couldn’t see a way to victory in the proposed war was seen as basically surrendering the viciously fought over budget, no matter the actual opinions of your experts – the book includes anecdotes about both fleet admirals and the senior field marshal China privately tearing their respective superiors in Tokyo a (polite) new one for the bellicosity they did not believe themselves capable of following through on, but of course none of these sentiments were ever shared with anyone who might use them against the army/navy.

The book is very much a narrative of the highest levels of government, idea of mass sentiment and popular opinion are only really incidentally addressed. Which does make it come as a shock every time it’s mentioned that a particular negotiation was carried out in secret because someone got spooked by an ultranationalist assassination attempt the day before. I entirely believe that no one wanted to say as much, but I can’t help but feel that people’s unwillingness to forthrightly oppose further war owed something to all the radical actors floating around in the junior ranks of the officer corps who more than willing to take ‘decisive, heroic action’ against anyone in government trying to stab the war effort in the back. Which is something that the ever-increasing number of war dead in China (with attendant patriotic unwillingness to let them die ‘for nothing) and the way everyone kept trying to rally the public to the war effort with ever-more militaristic public rhetoric assuredly only made worse.

That same rhetoric also played its part in destroying the possibility of negotiations with the United States. The story of those negotiations runs throughout the book, and is basically one misunderstanding and failure to communicate after another. It at times verges on comedy. Just complete failure to model the political situation and diplomatic logic of the other party, on both sides (combined with a great and increasing degree of wishful thinking that e.g. letting the military occupy southern French Indochina as a concession for their buy-in on further negotiations would be fine with the Americans. A belief held on exactly zero evidence whatsoever). The United States government was actually quite keen to avoid a war in the pacific if possible, as FDR did his best to get entangled in Europe and effectively start an undeclared naval war with Germany – but the negotiating stance hardened as Japan seemed more and more aggressive and unreliable, which coincided exactly with Japan’s government taking the possibility of war seriously enough to actually try to negotiate. It’s the same old story of offering concessions and understanding that might have been agreed to a few months beforehand, but were now totally unacceptable. In the end, everyone pinned their hopes on a face-to-face diplomatic summit with FDR in Juneau, where sweeping concessions could be agreed to and the government’s credibility staked on somewhere the hardliners could not physically interfere with. The Americans, meanwhile, wanted some solid framework for what the agreement would be before the summit occurred, and so it never did.

After the war, it was apparently the general sentiment that the whole nation was responsible for the war with the United States – which is to say that no individual person deserved any special or specific blame. Hotta’s stated aim with the book is to show how that’s bullshit, how war was entirely avoidable, and it was only do to these small cliques of specific, named individuals that it began. The hardliners like Osami Nagano, but just as much the cowards, careerists and factional partisans like Konoe, Tojo, and (keeper of the Privy Seal) Kido. Having read it I, at least, am convinced.

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Review for the Night-Bird’s Feather

Look, I’m not your typical reviewer of the Night-Bird’s Feather. I want to get this out of the way: I am not going to rave review about the deeper meaning of this story, in part because I’m just not intelligent enough, I think. But as a fond connoisseur of fairy-tales, even sometimes dark ones, and being marginally familiar with Dr Moran’s previous work, mostly from Ryuugi’s fanfic and Glitch, I bought the Night-Bird’s Feather.

I bought it on Kindle thanks to Prokopetz’ recommendation, having bought Glitch Version 0 beforehand (also on Prokopetz’ recommendation). I give the Night-Bird’s Feather 10/10 stars. 100/10. 2500 mechanical spiders/10. I will read it again at some point in the future on my Kindle, probably when there’s no data coverage, on the Tube, again, and spend half the trip reading and half the trip trying to figure out what the characters are saying when they’re not being incredibly blunt. I recommend that you buy it. I recommend that you read it. I don’t recommend that you comprehend it. Comprehension is not necessary for this anthology of connected fairy tales. In fact, arguably, it’s better if you don’t, and let the rhythm of the words wash over you and turn your brain off. Certainly the incredible over-stimulation and twisty layers made me feel like a child again, poking at a mother who is probably stuck in a heron’s egg, and definitely not capable of explaining what the bloody fuck is going on beyond the absolute surface layer.

This is not going to be a spoiler free review. I love it too much and comprehend it too little to dance around plot points. I have no criticism to give, because almost the whole thing went over my head, beyond the usual things where Dr Moran is absolutely brilliant at worldbuilding and scene-setting, having tied it in some part to the Bleak Academy, and the characters are, while mostly setpieces in the way that fairy-tale characters are, are also vocal mouthpieces talking in complex tongues, registers, and reasoning, regardless of physical or developmental age. Yes, it’s unrealistic and heavy-handed on the philosophical moralizing, but as I mentioned, I understood none of the philosophy, so I can’t and won’t criticize it. Since it also doesn’t seem at all out of place. The massive monologues are a part of the style and weave easily into the narrative. In any case, realism is not what you read Dr Moran or fairy-tales for.

The Night-Bird’s Feather is at once a combination of fairy/folk-tale anthology, in the way that linked fairy-tales are, and at the same time an examination of one central character’s life through time (literally through time in some ways), a legendary figure and/or matriarch of an inestimable family, where the matriarchy mostly happens off-screen. The reader is introduced to this matriarch in her founding, origin story, via a child of the family, and the rest of the cast of characters star in various, repeating roles as they move toward the child of the family’s personal present (for a given definition of present, given the nature of the bleak academy), a nest of stories, like scheherazade; but honestly the central linking conceit of the story reminded me the most of The Time Traveler’s Wife, had the perspective been centered on the time traveler rather than the wife.

The anthology has an incredible exploration into a very small number of characters: all of the relevant characters are introduced in the first story, and all of them are explored in great detail and are all very relevant. No additional mice, except for those family members locked in the initial egg, are introduced, which scurry off into the ether - the story ends when the central character has moved on to other things, and feels simultaneously finished in a nice neat bow and unfinished in a Wattersonian way.

The book, as a whole, is darkly beautiful, and very Slavic. I hadn’t read much Slavic fairy tales beforehand, so I can’t attest as to the stylization’s accuracy - the only one I know is Koschei, and that was a Britishized version for ages 6 and under, anyway. The prose is stunning - glittering and evocative, imaginative and lush, ornamented yet clear. It is a book which drips poetry out of every line, which I adore, and is simultaneously a clearly-understandable fairy-tale for children (if dark and mature - along the lines of Grimm - though in no part edgy - I think - nor with a focus on gore for the sake of gore), and a deeply meaty chunk of philosophizing for adults. It’s worth buying for the descriptive prose alone.

The book is also, on occasion, incredibly funny. Because it relies on subverting expectations of fairy tales, and the focus character is something of a guile hero given the stakes she puts herself up against, sometimes the characters make razor-sharp observations against expectations that absolutely shattered my sides. 

You can - I certainly did - push the heavy cerebral stuff to the side, and just focus on the fairy-tale. There is a lot of it, and all of it is good. I think the heavy cerebral stuff actually adds something - in that in its exclusion, everything else is starkly, darkly emotional, kind of. But the tone is unrelentingly miserable, a drudging, if beautiful, tragedy by Westernized and flanderized fairy-tales’ standpoint - from what I have seen of Slavic mythology and fairytales, that tone is pretty much on point. With the clear cerebral philosophy + comedy, though, and all the time and dream travel, that makes it bearable, even addictive.  

I read all of it in a single sitting. I understood almost none of it. I’d read my partner, if I had one, this story, before bed. We would likely dream lush, vibrant, beautiful dreams, like watching rain pour down from inside a cozy house, like we were kids again and ignoring all the really thorny problems of the world that only adults could see and comprehend. There’s a beauty in just being able to push it aside and admit that it’s just way too much for us. If asked, I’d be able to explain none of this book. I recommend it to everyone.

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There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.