subjects unto death itself. To fail or embarrass the emperor was a heinous, unforgivable crime for which there could be no penance or expiation other than self-destruction. This belief in the divinity of the emperor was cleverly and cynically exploited by the shoguns, who ruled the country through the emperor as figurehead.
The shoguns came to power after the imperial armies in the eighth century suffered setbacks at the hands of Japan’s original inhabitants, the Ainu—an extremely hairy race thereafter exiled to the inhospitable North by the heartless and frequently hairless Japanese, and called in contempt “the hairy Ainu.” Scorning the imperial conscripts, the shoguns formed their own smaller but better trained and disciplined armies. These were commanded by a new class of officers drawn from the sons of local clan chiefs and called Samurai. They formed this new hereditary class of professional warriors serving the daimyos, or feudal lords.
The Samurai were distinguished by their hair, shaven in front and top-knotted, and the clan badge worn on their kimonos. They lived Spartan lives and were rigidly drilled—from childhood to manhood—in self-control: a Samurai was taught to show “no joy or anger.” Nor was he ever to engage in trade or handle money. Like Christian seminarians, he had contempt for commerce as being infra dignitatem, beneath his dignity. He was also trained to excel in the martial arts. Indeed the two swords worn by the Samurai—one long and one short—were also badges of rank. Samurai were expected to become especially proficient with the long, two- handed sword, actually a thick, heavy, single-edged, and extremely sharp saber. The short one was for decapitating a fallen enemy or dispatching himself by seppuku, more commonly known as hara-kiri, literally, “stomach cutting.” To kill himself in atonement for failure or disgrace, a Samurai would squat on the floor and thrust his short sword into his stomach—turning it in a ceremonial disembowelment that, if it became unbearably painful, could be ended by a comrade standing by to strike his neck with a saber, severing the spinal column.
A lifetime of cultivating indifference to pain, however, was part of a Samurai’s code of Bushido: “the way of the warrior.” With this inevitably arrogant warrior class, permitted to cut down any commoner “who has behaved to him in a manner other than he expected,” the shoguns ruled Japan. And their reign continued for more than two centuries after the extinction of Christianity. It ended only when Commodore Perry appeared in his steam-driven “black ships,” so terrifying to the insular Japanese when they saw these vessels without sails moving easily against the wind on Tokyo Bay. Very quickly a treaty opening two ports to the Americans was signed.
This unprecedented deference (not to say obeisance) to a foreign power so enraged conservatives of all callings—the merchants, daimyos, the Samurai—that it provoked a revolution known as the Meiji Restoration ending the power of the shoguns and restoring it to the emperor. It also culminated the career of the Samurai. No ruler could feel entirely safe with such dangerous zealots at large within his borders, and so by imperial edict these fierce warriors accepted the lump-sum termination offered them to hang up their swords and become merchants, lawyers, doctors, or bureaucrats. But they did not remain long suppressed, for the Meiji Restoration, in perhaps the most astonishing national turnabout in history, had embraced in one swoop the entire apparatus of the once-despised Western civilization. Everything invented or developed by the “Round Eyes” since Greece, Rome, and the advent of the Christian Era—their science, industry, culture, political institutions, methods of education, business practices, economics, dress, and even sports—was swallowed whole by Nippon.
Despite the undoubted exuberance of this nonviolent social revolution (sometimes comical to a Westerner at first sight of a smaller Japanese going to his daily workplace in a tuxedo hanging on him like a scarecrow’s suit and a top hat reaching down to his ears), the change was outward only; Japan, for all of its pretensions to democracy, remained a paternalistic, authoritarian state. The secret police organized in the 1600s may have been banned, but the new Japan replaced them with Thought Police, censors and spies sniffing out sedition and “suspicious” activity like tireless bloodhounds, and empowered like the Samurai of old to put to death anyone caught doing “anything different.” In classrooms and army barracks young Japanese were taught to glory in Nippon’s military traditions, to believe that dying on the battlefield for the emperor was the most sublime fate to which a man could aspire.
Inevitably the spirit of the Samurai returned and their code of Bushido was revived. Soldiers of a mainly peasant army, both officers and men, were trained in the hard, selfless Samurai school, taught to think of themselves as heirs of that departed warrior class. Officers adopted a so-called Samurai saber, much like the two- handed long sword of old, as their badge of rank. Properly sharpened and even though wielded by diminutive Japanese, it could sever a prisoner’s head at a single stroke, and this summary execution of captives—usually after they had been tortured for information—became one of the least gruesome features of Japan’s new, Samurai-led army as it took the field in pursuit of territorial conquest and the raw materials and markets in which Nippon, for a modern industrial nation, was so deplorably deficient. Eventually the chief officers among them emerged as the War Lords of Japan. In collusion with the zaibatsu—leading politicians, bureaucrats, and industrialists such as the Mitsubishi and Mitsui families—the War Lords ruled the country through the figurehead of Hirohito.
This career of territorial aggrandizement by an authoritarian coalition began in 1879 with Nippon’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa was the largest. Sixty-six years later three typical Samurai took charge of defending this last barrier between American armed forces and the Home Islands of Japan.
Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima—commander of the Japanese Thirty-second Army—may be said to have been the Samurai beau ideal. Ramrod-straight and lean, sharp-featured with a graying military brush mustache, he was able to awe subordinates by his unshakable composure and iron self-control. Yet he was a considerate man whose staff not only respected but even revered him. Ushijima’s style was low-key. He abstained from the rough-and-tumble of staff discussions of policy, plans, or operations; in which, as had happened during the Guadalcanal disaster, irate officers could actually come to blows. Rather, he let his aides make the decisions, which he would either approve or reject. But he always took responsibility for the results, good or bad. In their unreserved admiration of him, his idolizing staff compared him to Takamori Saigo, a celebrated hero of the Meiji Restoration.
Early in the war Ushijima had distinguished himself as an infantry group commander during the conquest of Burma. There he met Isamu Cho, chief of staff of the Southern Army. They returned to Tokyo together, Ushijima to become commandant of the Japanese Military Academy, Cho to serve on the General Military Affairs Bureau. They also came to Okinawa together, Ushijima as the Thirty-second’s chief, Cho as his chief of staff—and no two men could differ more in character.
Ushijima the serene was a man of presence, capable of inspiring his subordinates. He also possessed the rare gift of seeing his own incapacities, which he filled by choosing Major General Cho, a firebrand and a planner and organizer, strict but resourceful, aggressive, and so invincibly explosive in argument as to be unpopular. Deceptively scholarly-looking with thick wide spectacles that exaggerated his owlish features, he was actually—in contrast to the Spartan, abstemious Ushijima—a bon vivant. In his quarters, even toward the end of the battle for Okinawa, might be found unrivaled meals, the best Scotch whiskey, the finest sake, and the prettiest women. The burly Cho was also something of a bully, and the young officers who served him resented his hectoring tirades, even though they admitted that he could make them work harder than any other officer.
Isamu Cho had risen at fifty-one to the rank of lieutenant general and was in line for another star. In 1930, while a captain, he had joined the Sakura-kai, or “Cherry Society,” whose hundred-odd members—all firebrands like Cho—were sworn to cleanse Japan of all Western influences that they considered inimical to the ancient virtues of the Samurai. Antidemocratic and anticapitalist, they sought to establish a military dictatorship and had chosen the cherry tree as their emblem because its brilliant though short-lived blossoms symbolized the warrior Samurai’s readiness to die for the emperor at any moment.
A few generals eager to wear the dictatorial mantle courted the Cherry favor, and thus contributed to the society’s increasing influence and to Cho’s emergence as the leading hothead and strong-arm advocate. In January 1931, he helped plot a conspiracy to murder the prime minister and replace him with a leading general, but that distinguished officer declined to accept the honor, since he seems to have expected to gain that eminence by legal
