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Katanas of the Rising Sun: Difference between revisions
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Japan, 1867. Commodore Perry has visited Japan to display some [[Gunboat Diplomacy]] a decade-and-a-half or so ago, and the potential onslaught of Westerners to dominate Japan the way they did the rest of Asia has galvanized a clique of low-ranking samurai from the southern fiefdoms of Satsuma and Chōshū into leading their Western-style private armies against the Tokugawa Shogunate. They seize the boy-Emperor Mutsuhito at his Residence in Kyoto before the Shogun can secure him. The Shogun is dealt a heavy PR-blow by this, and many lesser Daimyos refuse to come to his aid as it would appear that they were going against the Emperor. The Shogun's forces slug it out, but are eventually driven off Honshu entirely and flee to Hokkaido where they set up a short-lived Republic in Hakodate. Eventually, this too falls, and Japan is more or less united under a new government, which moves the Emperor to Edo (renamed Tokyo) and proclaims the start of the Meiji ("Enlightened Rule") era.
To cut a long story short, the government was much more powerful than it was before. Its new powers were ostensibly based upon the "restored" power of the Emperor -- restored to what it was in Legend, that is. Hence, "restoration" and not "revolution". The oligarchy of southern middle-class ex-samurai hid behind the Emperor, using him as a rallying point for State Shinto and Japanese Nationalism.
History is a fickle thing, for if Perry had not returned to America due to the [[American Civil War]], Japan may not have had the chance to so peacefully develop itself into Imperial Japan. Noting how China (the hegemonic power of East Asia for millennia) wasn't doing so well these days, and how it seemed to have a lot to do with the Imperial European powers, Japan decided that China was no longer the centre of learning and culture they had acknowledged it as for the last thousand years, and figured that it was time for another radical change. Where before, Japan had adopted Chinese religion, culture, medicine and natural science with a view to incorporating them into their own understanding of the world, now it was time to take on Western Science and medicine, to industrialize and become an Imperial power... hopefully, without losing sight of what it meant to be Japanese in all other respects. Broadly, they succeeded. A postal service from Britain, a School system from France, a Prussian Constitution -- thus the trappings of democracy like voting and elections and parties without actually granting the resultant MPs any real powers -- and so on.
In a fanatic stance change to hold the West in awe, some went as far as advocating for women to marry Western men [[Values Dissonance|to bring "superior genetic stock" into Japan, the women's opinions notwithstanding]]. In short, the West was the new China, and this called for a revision in all their administrations. There was very quickly a backlash against this sort of attitude, and there was a certain crisis of identity caused by the rapid changes in Japanese society. There was a renewed emphasis on retaining an essential Japanese-ness, which after flirting with [[Social Darwinism]] manifested itself in the form of a burgeoning belief in Japanese ''supremacy'', not inferiority. Because, they reasoned, who else could come so far in so short a time? This was clearly a demonstration of the Japanese people's innate superiority, above and beyond that of the European powers. Japan could do all they could -- Imperialism and everything -- and do it ''better''.
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Japan joined [[World War One]] late on the side of the Allies, and received a nominal share of the rewards, including most of Germany's imperial possessions in the Pacific. They also developed an imperialist attitude towards China to match the Western powers, forcing numerous concessions from the Chinese. Ultra-nationalist sentiment abounded, and the military, having cast itself as the creator and guarantor of Japan's new place in the world, seized virtually all power, often by killing people who got in their way.
The army led Japan into an invasion of China, which was initially successful but ultimately proved an open-ended manpower sump: China was simply too large and had too many people to conquer outright. Japan could not find enough manpower to do more than take and hold several major cities and the roads that linked them. However, the invasion in turn committed Japan to a dangerous clash of interests and sentiments with America and Britain. The US in particular felt a somewhat paternal attitude towards the Chinese and embargoed strategic goods, such as oil, in response to continued Japanese aggression in China, while Japan was heavily relying on America to fuel its industrial progress.
Japan, running out of options, believed it had to take and hold new sources of oil and strategic minerals. It also believed (quite possibly wrongly) that it would have to fight America if it tried to take the Dutch and British possessions that had the things it needed. Thus, Japan launched a surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, home of the US Pacific Fleet, to buy themselves enough time to take and fortify the areas they thought they needed. But America understandably took this ''very'' [[It's Personal|personally]], being attacked without receiving a formal declaration of war quickly enough<ref>A declaration ''was'' issued, but was marred by typical Japanese indirectness -- "it appears that negotiations are no longer necessary", rather than "we are now at war" -- and strategic blundering that resulted in it being presented ''after'' the attack</ref>. Following this were a series of invasions of British, Dutch, Australian and American territories throughout the Pacific. But Japan had, by Pearl Harbor, bought itself a long war that its industry and economy could not sustain. Outfought and outproduced, they were pushed back across the Pacific over the course of the next two years by a resurgent USA, with assistance from Australia and New Zealand. The Imperial Navy, after performing well in the opening battles, was shattered by several major defeats. Japan's island garrisons were either left to rot on the vine or were subjected to overwhelming assault and suffered hideous losses. Finally Japan was [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|bombed, burned, and flattened]] by the rather grisly [[General Ripper|General Curtis LeMay]]. Still unwilling to surrender, Japan was subjected to the [[Death From Above|atomic bomb]]; while its necessity is debated to this day, the belief at the time was that this would prevent the need for a repeat of the grisly battles in Iwo Jima and Saipan, where Japanese forces had fought nearly to the last man, most Japanese civilians had committed suicide rather than accept an Allied occupation, and the Allies, despite winning the battle, lost many men. An invasion of the Japanese mainland, it was thought, would result in the deaths of millions, making the loss of [[A Million Is a Statistic|a few hundred thousand]] a small price to pay.
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* [[Determinator]]: Do we really need examples?
** Because of the nature of ocean warfare, the entire conflict between Japan and the U.S. boiled down to a contest of who could [[Buffy-Speak|out-determine]] the other. A lack of resources meant that Japan didn't have the long-term replenishment capacity of the U.S., but because of Pearl Harbor, they started out with a head start and more ships on the balance sheet. If Japan blinked first, they would sue for a beggar's peace and likely give up their Pacific conquests with harsh terms. If America blinked first, they would see the time and effort of rebuilding their fleet to recapture those conquests as not being worth the cost. And say what you will, but as time passed and Japan's new territory shrunk island by island, ending with hundreds of thousands of Allied troops poised to invade the home islands themselves, ''they never blinked''.
** Some holdouts continued fighting the war for up to ''thirty years after it was over''. In a few cases, they had to actually locate the former commanding officers of those units and bring them to the remnant soldiers to convince them to surrender.
* [[David Versus Goliath]]: In all of its major campaigns, Japan (and later, their small empire of Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Manchuria) was out of its weight classification. This was modified by the fact that the Russian Empire was a [[Vestigial Empire]] at the time, wracked with financial problems and having to fight Japan halfway across the globe, the Dutch East Indies were in disarray following the Netherland's defeat in Europe and taken my surprise, and China was a poor and low tech nation in the middle of a civil war. But the last time around was a very different matter; Japan could never have mustered the economic and logistical power to defeat the United States, the richest nation on the planet, and one of the most high tech. The best it could have hoped for ''(and indeed, it was the grand strategy for the war)'' was to press the U.S. and inflict such damage that they would deem it not worth the trouble and expense to rebuild and recapture their conquered territories. At their most mouth-frothingly optimistic, there were plans to capture Hawaii, perhaps after a [[Curb Stomp Battle]] at Midway wiped away most of the surviving American forces, but those never made it off the drawing board.
* [[Eats Babies]] : Some comfort women (read as "forced sex slaves") testify that some Japanese men brought meat stew for them and made them eat it, then laugh and reveal that they were chopped remains of babies cut out from other sex slaves they impregnated (and their mothers strangled with their intestines).
* [[The Empire]]
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** From Japan's perspective, this helped them a lot in the Second-Sino Japanese War.
* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: Ironically enough, Imperial Japan was one of the friendliest nations to fleeing Jewish refugees, refusing to hand over its tiny Jewish population to the Nazis and not questioning the large number of exit visas issued by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese consul to Lithuania. Compare this to the relative indifference towards Jewish refugees exhibited by the US, UK, and other Allied powers at roughly the same time period.
** A possible explanation for some of this is that Japanese government officials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries read anti-Semitic literature about how Jews had supposedly grown rich by exploiting Christians, but not having the Christian background that such anti-Semitism was based on, interpreted it to mean that Jews had magical money powers or extremely good business sense.
** Some Nazis expressed this attitude towards [[Rape, Pillage and Burn|the Japanese campaign in China.]]
* [[Final Battle]]: The Battle of Iwo Jima.
** Iwo Jima and Okinawa were more like long sieges and were something of a [[Last Stand]] (not a [[Villain Last Stand]] as not all were villains though a number were). Leyte Gulf is more like this trope because it was more dramatic, and it was the final sea battle which in a predominately naval theater made it at least a good candidate, even though there was considerable land fighting afterwards. Leyte was also the last large fleet action ever to be fought - some say in all of time.
** Operation Olympic/Coronet, the invasion of the Home Islands, would have been the ultimate in final battles as far as [[WW 2]] went, with even its planners describing it as a "blood-soaked apocalypse". Fortunately, the atomic bomb rendered it unnecessary.
* [[For the Evulz]]: Some of the things Japanese grunts did for fun are truly horrifying and pointless. For example, see [[Eats Babies]].
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* [[Insane Troll Logic]]: The Allies "forced" Japan to attack them by refusing to sell ''their own oil'' which Japan of course absolutely needed to sustain their brutal colonization of China.
** [[Insane Troll Logic]], or rather the realization of it, is the reason why the Japanese public grew to hate the military fairly quickly after the Battle of Saipan, when it became obvious even through the propaganda that Japan was in way over its head.
* [[God-Emperor]]: Hirohito was treated like this, as were earlier [[The Emperor|Emperors]].
** This had a political purpose as well. It represented an anchor in [[Good Old Ways|the past]] during the Meji Reformation.
** Post-War [[M Acarthur]] forced the Emperor to deny he was divine in a speech but it was not the best phrased and was ambiguous, apparently.
* [[Government Conspiracy]]: Elements in the Imperial Japanese Army. It is hard, even in retrospect, to be sure who [[The Man Behind the Man|really ruled]] Japan at the time. General MacArthur has muddled this even further, because the US Army needed the Emperor to make the Japanese population cooperate, and portrayed the Emperor as an innocent puppet ruler.
** Hideki Tojo was officially the Prime Minister of course, but he was so unassertive in personality compared to Mussolini and Hitler that one might almost think he was chosen to be a puppet.
*** Tojo might have seemed unassertive, but he was a high level military guy, with a reputation for being charismatic and sharp minded, it's doubtful he was a puppet, but he couldn't effectively control the Japanese war machine, and it's worth noting that he started facing stiff opposition from the military once they started losing.
** For much of the 30s and 40s, you can just say "the military ruled Japan".
** To be precise, Japan was a military-industrial anarchy, more or less. There wasn't even a single cabal of generals that did all the decisions (primarily because their own juniors frequently assassinated them for not being militaristic enough!). It was an Emperor with a defined but small power, and a military force with an undefined but massive power.
* [[Honor Before Reason]]: Or [[Lawful Stupid|"honor without reason."]]
** As an example: When the US landed at Guadalcanal, there were 16 Japanese divebombers sitting at Rabaul loaded for a ground-attack mission against a target in New Guinea. They did not have the range to strike Guadalcanal and return, nor were they armed with weapons that could significantly harm a ship. [[Attack! Attack! Attack!|The divebombers were ordered to attack at once.]] This gesture was absolutely relished by apparently every involved officer except the squadron leader, but it cost them sixteen perfectly good aircraft and twenty-eight veteran aircrew for nothing.
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* [[Improvised Weapon]]: Kamikazes. The rocket-fueled suicide planes were designated "Ohka" (Cherry Blossom), but they were so worthless that someone in the Pentagon named them "[[Baka]]" (Idiot). Ohkas played a role in the loss of a Japanese carrier transporting them, which is one more than the number of US carriers they sunk. The American name turned out to be apter.
** Kaiten, glorified torpedoes with room for a man to guide them. Evidence suggests that they were actually less effective than standard torpedoes.
* [[Katanas Are Just Better]]: The IJN officers had cheap, mass-produced katana that were used for torture and executions rather then fighting. Of course, fervent about the samurai spirit they did use these for combat but few if any were trained in their proper combat use, and often broke or chipped their swords.
** Indeed, the Katanas also caused said officers to have a [[Highly-Conspicuous Uniform]] on the battlefield, and they often found themselves drawing fire from the American troops as a result.
* [[The Laws and Customs of War]]: Played straight and then subverted later. Interestingly the Japanese were complimented widely for their gracious adherence to this during the Russo-Japanese war. They did not have this reputation during [[World War II]].
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* [[Karmic Death]]: The architects of the US firebombing campaign considered it a justified response to Japanese atrocities. After the war Japan was essentially a pre-Industrial Age wasteland with almost no cities still standing and came very close to mass famine as their transport system was in ruins.
* [[Karma Houdini]]: Arguably many Japanese officers and grunts from the war. Particularly the ruling family.
* [[Leave No Survivors]]: The armed forces of Imperial Japan during [[WW 2]] came frighteningly close to treating this as standard operating procedure.
** US soldiers in the Pacific Theater came pretty close too for various reasons.
* [[Made of Explodium]]: The "Long Lance" was a scarily good torpedo. But it got its range and speed from using pure oxygen (where other torps would have compressed air). A '''lot''' of destroyers (and several cruisers) were lost when their torpedoes exploded.
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* [[Only Sane Man]]: Isoroku Yamamoto, mentioned above, seemed to be the only man in the country that thought an unprovoked attack on America might be a bad idea... at least in his diary. He's often portrayed as having openly protested or denounced it, but most of the quotes attributed to him may have actually been apocryphal. More recent scholarship suggests the Pearl Harbor attack may have actually originated with Yamamoto.
** Subverted by Homma and Yamashita, other "sane men".
** Raizo Tanaka, considered by many Americans the best destroyer commander in the IJN , was relieved of duty for playing the [[Only Sane Man]] by pointing out Imperial General Headquarters had set impossible objectives during the Guadalcanal campaign.
* [[Proud Warrior Race]]: The concept of ''Yamato damashii'', the spirit of the Japanese race, played a major role in the self-image of Japan's armed forces.
* [[Rape, Pillage and Burn]]: Often used as a reward to soldiers for winning battles. The IJA often gets compared to a barbarian horde for this very reason. This was especially prominent in China.
* [[Recycled in Space]]: [[Star Blazers]].
* [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]]: Remember Pearl Harbor!
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* [[Technician Versus Performer]]: The USN thought of itself more as a technician of war and the IJN more as a performer.
* [[This Means War]]: Pearl Harbor.
* [[Underestimating Badassery]]: Both America and Japan did this to each other to some degree at the start of [[World War II]]. Indeed Japan's whole plan was based on the assumption that a nation of quiet, polite shopkeepers would never have the heart to put [[Honor Before Reason]] and would give up pretty quickly unlike a true [[Proud Warrior Race]].
** Khalkin Gol, where Japan learned you never, under ''any'' circumstances try to invade Russia, as they mostly achieved a [[Pyrrhic Victory]] the first time. The earlier Russo-Japanese War was indeed a fluke as the Russians claim. The Japanese ended up losing some 30,000 soldiers, almost twice as much as the Russians, and retreating.
* [[Unobtanium]]: America and [[The British Empire]] placed an embargo on oil and other resources to Japan before [[World War II|the war]] as they really didn't want it to be used by Japan to beat up China, where they had their own interests including the local [[Balance of Power]]. The Japanese could not carry on military operations without such things and withdrawing would [[Honor Before Reason|lose face]]. Thus they decided that they should attack Pearl Harbor, Singapore, the Phillipines, Burma, and Malaya, thinking a quick strike would and a quick "magnanimous" offer of peace would end the war. [[It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time]].
* [[We Have Reserves]]: The Chinese attempted to use this strategy against Japan, but [[Curb Stomp Battle|it worked out very poorly]] against Japanese tanks, planes, mortars and machine guns. The Japanese themselves attempted to use this against the advanced armies of the United States and the British Commonwealth, which also ended in disaster for much the same reasons. Also, unlike China who could actually afford to replenish losses, Japan couldn't afford to have large amounts of troops killed. On paper, their empire had a very large population to draw from. In reality, they didn't have the food to feed them, the money to train them, or the ammo to equip them.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Forces With Firepower]]
[[Category:Katanas Of The Rising Sun]]
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