A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER : CHAPTER 2 : A Spy in the Cold

Takeo Yoshikawa was a Japanese spy. And since people of Japanese ancestry were the largest ethnic group in Hawaii at the time, he could easily get close to his work.

Quietly, he fished in Pearl Harbor, measuring its depth with his line. Was it deep enough for torpedoes?

Like a tourist, he cruised the harbor in a glass-bottomed boat. But he was interested in more than mud and mullets. He watched for channels and obstacles and how to miss them.

Yoshikawa was barely 30 years old and lonely. He frequented a teahouse on a hill overlooking the harbor to talk with the geisha there. He got to know them well and would use binoculars set aside for guests to keep track of the warships sailing in and out of the U.S. naval base.

He took the geisha on airplane rides over Oahu, and he got an even better look at the harbor and everything in it. He noted the weather--where there might be air pockets, for instance, or when it turned cloudy. Such data could be important to pilots.

When he was not flying over air bases--Hickam, Wheeler or Ewa--or sipping sake with the geisha at the Shuncho-ro teahouse, he walked along Pearl City peninsula, checking Battleship Row. Disguised as a Filipino, he worked in U.S. officers’ clubs. He sent lengthy coded messages back to Tokyo.

In October, a courier brought a request for more detail: Where is fuel stored? Are there torpedo nets? On which days of the week are the largest number of ships in the harbor? He responded to the latter question: Sunday.

December came. And now Yoshikawa was asked to report more frequently. Dressed alternately as a sportsman, a laborer or a tourist, he spied on Pearl Harbor without surcease. He reported to Tokyo on everything he saw. Then, on Dec. 6, he suddenly paid his debts and burned his documents. Yoshikawa sensed in his gut that his country, which was already at war, was about to open another front. It would be an American front. Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor.

What an exquisite irony. Japan was fighting for economic expansion, national security and world recognition. And who had taught it to need these things? The Americans themselves.

It all began when a U.S. commodore named Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in July, 1853, with a letter from his President, Franklin Pierce. The letter demanded trade relations. Since early in the 17th Century, Japan had barred its doors to the rest of the world.

As a result, by the time Commodore Perry arrived, science and an incipient industrial revolution had strengthened other nations beyond compare. Perry’s big black ships steamed against the wind--and he had guns that rendered the Japanese defenseless. Edo, as Tokyo was called then, had no choice. It reopened the doors.

The Japanese accepted an American consul, and the consul negotiated a commercial treaty. Japan’s impotence in the face of this intrusion brought its government down. Roaming samurai attacked the arriving Westerners. They killed the American consul’s secretary, and they burned a British legation. The marauding samurai cried “Sonno joi!”-- “Honor the emperor; expel the barbarians!”

When a new government was installed, it was run by nobles and moderate young samurai, who realized that joi , at this point, was impossible. Instead, they engineered an aggressive plan to learn from the West, bringing in hundreds of Westerners to teach them the latest technology in shipbuilding and gunnery. They sent scholars to Germany to study its parliamentary system and to France to learn about modern law.

Almost overnight, samurai lost their special privileges. At the same time, the new government adhered strictly to sonno --and did everything in the name of the emperor. This was classic Japanese syncretism--the ability to combine and reconcile seemingly opposite beliefs and mutually exclusive world views.

By the late 1800s, the Meiji Restoration, as the period was called, had, in theory, revived the imperial rule of antiquity. But in fact, said the late historian Edwin O. Reischauer, “nothing of the kind actually took place.” Instead, with help from the West, the Meiji Restoration had reformed society, education and economics--and transformed Japan into a modern nation.

But in the process of modernizing, Japan’s leaders unleashed frustrations both among the rural poor and the disenfranchised samurai. Foreign adventures were one way to divert the nation’s attention. And for a while it worked.

In 1894, the Japanese swept through Korea and into Manchuria. They captured the port of Weihaiwei, across from the Korean Peninsula on the Chinese mainland, and they destroyed the Chinese fleet. They won the island of Taiwan and a southern tip of Manchuria.

Then, ten years later, Japan attacked Russian ships in ports near Weihaiwei. When the Russians sent a fleet around Africa and into the Pacific seeking revenge, the Japanese destroyed it. Japan won Russian leases and railroads in Manchuria. It won the southern half of Sakhalin Island. And it won Russian acknowledgement of Japanese interests in Korea.

The United States did not complain. It also was carving out spheres of influence wherever it could. So good were relations between Japan and the United States that Theodore Roosevelt agreed to serve as a mediator in the Russo-Japanese War--and the treaty that ended the fighting was signed at Portsmouth, N.H., in 1905.

Japan allied itself with the United States and Britain in World War I, winning German colonial interests in China and German islands in the north Pacific. Unlike many in the United States, the people of Japan did not count participation in World War I as a mistake. “The Meiji leaders, who had set out in 1868 to create a Japan that would be militarily secure from the West and fully equal to it, had, within the lifetimes of their more long-lived members, done exactly that,” Reischauer said.

But the system contained a fatal flaw. Lacking both a strong Parliament and an effective emperor, there was a vacuum that was to be increasingly filled by the military.

BICKERING AND INVESTING

Japan emerged from World War I with a booming economy. While Europe bickered, Japan invested in new production, particularly in textiles. To give its industry an edge, the Japanese government favored corporations deemed best qualified to lead economic growth. Collusion, Americans would have called it. The result was to concentrate production in a few large family-owned conglomerates called zaibatsu.

“The government induced the zaibatsu to go into areas where it felt development was needed. For their part, the zaibatsu pioneered the commercialization of modern technologies in Japan, and they achieved economies of scale in manufacturing and banking that were on par with those of the rest of the industrial world,” wrote Chalmers Johnson, a UC San Diego, professor of political science.

The zaibatsu included a wide range of businesses, from manufacturing and mining to trading and shipping. To keep their workers from running off to competing enterprises, these combines developed a system under which young businessmen joined a zaibatsu for life, rising through the ranks as they moved among its various units. Later, the system of lifelong employment was extended to skilled workers as well. A system of interlocking directorships further tied units of the conglomerate.

These combines grew extremely wealthy. They had the capital and the broad base necessary for long-range investments in risky new fields. At the same time, Reischauer said, “the zaibatsu families, apparently influenced by Confucian and feudal Japanese values, proved to be conspicuous underconsumers. . . . They did not go in for yachts, foreign bank accounts and villas abroad, but assiduously plowed back their profits into expanding their economic empires.”

While the zaibatsu grew wealthy and powerful, traditional sectors of the economy, including farmers, remained poor and oppressed.

The army, full of the sons of poor farmers, became a strong proponent of nationalistic politics. It viewed America as a materialistic country that intended to keep Japan from expanding its interests. In 1921, a general named Kojiro Sato wrote a book called “If Japan and America Fight.” Sato blamed Japanese problems on the United States and suggested pirate-type attacks on the great power. “If bands of death-daring men . . . should be thrown in upon San Francisco,” he said, “it would be very interesting indeed.”

America’s exclusion of Japanese immigrants in 1924 fueled anti-American feeling. At about the same time, the government strengthened the hand of the militarists even more. It added military training to normal schools. Two thousand army officers were assigned to teach young people that Japan had a special mission to expand throughout Asia.

At the same time, however, the Japanese were leaving their farms and moving into cities. In 30 years, Reischauer said, the number of city dwellers swelled from 10% to 50% of the population. And with urbanization came a new spate of learning from the West. What they learned, Reischauer said with poetic irony, were “liberalizing tendencies.”

These were the 1920s.

Japan fell in love with flappers. Moga , they were called, after the American “modern girls.” The Japanese fell in love with movies. They imported Hollywood films and made Hollywood-style films of their own. They fell in love with jazz. And with taxi dancing. And nightspots--called cafes--with Victrolas and eager young men and winsome young waitresses.

Golf links were built for the rich, while young people took up skiing. Baseball, however, was the great national sport, and university and high school baseball games drew crowds comparable to those attending major college football and big league baseball games in the United States.”

In Japan, too, the Roaring Twenties ended in collapse. The Great Depression spared no one. Japanese banks failed. Trade pinched down to a trickle. Rice prices and silk prices dropped by half. So did farm income.

“A lot of farmers didn’t have anything to eat,” said Akira Fujiwara, a historian, recalling his childhood. “They sold their daughters to pay their debts. Even at my school (attended by the sons and daughters of soldiers), many kids had nothing to eat, and they would go out into the play yard at lunchtime while we ate.”

In six prefectures in northern Japan alone, 52,000 women were sold as contract laborers in 1936. An additional 2,000 were sold as geishas, and 17,000 were sold as factory workers. Many people faced starvation. In 1938, imports fell by half, and 390,000 businesses went bankrupt in one month.

In ever increasing levels of control, the government established a four-year plan to promote 15 key industries. It outlawed unions. And it began deciding what companies should produce and what they should invest in.

At the same time, Korekiyo Takahashi, the minister of finance, engaged in large-scale deficit financing--for armaments. In five years, he increased military spending from 28% to 43% of the national budget.

Although this Keynesian spending on the military helped Japan pull itself out of economic crisis faster than the rest of the world, it was not enough. To restore economic health completely, it seemed to Japan that it had to expand. On one side, the Soviet Union was increasing its industrial strength. On the other, the West was raising tariffs because of the Depression.

Americans were talking about “yellow peril.” They had outlawed Japanese ownership of property in the United States. And now they were excluding Japanese immigrants entirely. Japan must find its own resources, its own markets--and some place to send its burgeoning population. Manchuria became Japan’s new frontier: the place for the poor and the idealistic to seek their fortune and for Japan’s growing industrial base to find markets and raw materials. Japan already owned Manchurian railroads, booty from previous wars. Now Japan’s army wanted the entire region.

In 1928, Japanese army officers dynamited a train, killing Manchuria’s powerful ruler who was resisting closer ties to Japan. Three years later, they manufactured an excuse for invading. It was this incident that set Japan on its path toward the Pacific war. Ostensibly to protect Manchuria, Japan would later invade China. And to keep its gains in China and Manchuria, it would make the fateful decision to bomb Pearl Harbor.

As Japanese troops marched ever farther afield, back home Kuniko Hashimoto was in the first grade. She and others published reminiscences not long ago in the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s leading newspaper. The first page of one of her textbooks, she remembers, declared: “They bloomed, they bloomed, the cherry trees bloomed.” Then, farther along on the third page, the textbook said: “Advance, advance, the soldiers advance.” Hashimoto recalled: “We would all stand up at attention and read that in unison.”

She learned a dance called “Totechiteta (the trumpet sound), the Soldiers Are On Their Way.” When she was in the third grade, her class would go to the railroad station regularly to meet the ashes of dead soldiers. The ashes were sent in boxes wrapped in white cloth. The boxes were handed to young widows, who stood stoically and never complained.

The toll made little difference because of intense indoctrination. “We shouted, Banzai! Banzai!” remembered Iwako Arai, a village housewife. “And (we) sent off soldiers waving Japanese flags. . . . (They) saluted and went off to Manchuria. Grandmother, who had to take over household tasks, would say: ‘Can’t they leave even one boy behind?’ ”

The young men trained with wooden guns, and Iwako helped make cloths of “one thousand stitches” that the soldiers wrapped around their waists for good luck.

War fever swept up even the children. They painted whiskers on their faces and dressed in uniforms. The indoctrination crept into commercial advertising. A Kirin beer ad called for soldiers to advance and showed them carrying a giant beer bottle as if it were a battering ram. Kiyoshi Sato, a store owner, remembers a poem he had to memorize as a child: “Great Japan, great Japan, its emperor is a descendant of God. The emperor treats all 80 million of us as his children . . . and we see him as our father. We serve you as our god. . . . We have never lost to our enemies. Day by day, our country shines greater with glory.”

Once they conquered Manchuria, the Japanese called it Manchukuo and urged their people to go there and colonize it. Many did, enthusiastically. But Japan’s conquest was viewed with less enthusiasm by the world community. The League of Nations condemned it by a vote of 42-1, which Japan said was evidence of “the siege of Japan by the whole world.”

The conquest of Manchuria, according to historian Ronald Spector, did not produce the economic miracle the Japanese expected. “This failed to dampen the ardor of the zealots,” he said. “Their goals were vague, but they always pursued them with passionate fanaticism.”

This fanaticism took several forms. Now anything un-Japanese was condemned: ballroom dancing, golf and English words--in conversation and on street signs. Golf was replaced with Japanese archery. Dance halls were closed. Women who got permanents at their hairdressers were warned against Western decadence.

“Students, labor unions and newspapers were curbed with increasing rigorousness,” Reischauer said. “And women, while encouraged to come out of the home and fill the workforce needs of a wartime economy, were at the same time told to be nothing more than the obedient wives and dutiful mothers of Japanese tradition. The trends toward a totalitarian society were unmistakable.”

Dreaded tokko, or “thought control” police, terrorized those who questioned the government or criticized the army. Freedom of thought and freedom of expression were banned; intellectuals and dissidents were jailed, and every effort was made to brainwash recalcitrant thinkers, forcing them to rehabilitate themselves with “conversion” statements.

The press was cowed into writing propaganda. “The Japanese word for democracy combines the characters for people and master. The very word went against the Emperor,” said Akira Fujiwara, the Japanese historian. “You weren’t even allowed to use the word.” By the end of 1939, he says, “we had no (real political) parties (one party was widely seen as representing the Mitsui conglomerate, the other as representing Mitsubishi), no labor unions. We were following in the footsteps of the Nazis.”

Although there were those who tried to slow Japan’s headlong rush towards militarism, they were cowed by ultra-nationalist secret societies that brought a reign of terror to Japan in the 1930s by assassinating political leaders they didn’t like.

In 1930, on the platform of the Tokyo railway station, they shot and gravely wounded Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi, who favored a conference to reduce naval forces. Outside a grade school, they assassinated Finance Minister Junnosuke Inoue, who had resisted additional military funding. In a surprise attack, they shot to death Takuma Dan, a key Mitsui official. Finally, they shot and killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi at his official residence. He had opposed army activities in Manchuria.

Feelings ran high. About 110,000 petitions for clemency were sent to judges who put the accused killers on trial. The petitions were signed or written entirely in blood. “Nine young men . . . asked to take the place of those on trial,” said John Toland, the American historian. “And to show their good faith, (they) enclosed their own nine little fingers, pickled in a jar of alcohol.” Finally, an army division rebelled in Tokyo. Soldiers killed Cabinet members and narrowly missed another prime minister. This time 15 conspirators were executed. They were shot through bull’s-eyes painted on their foreheads.

AN APPETITE FOR EMPIRE

As Japan’s appetite for empire grew, so did China’s belligerence. Finally, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. Both nations refused to settle the incident, and Chinese planes tried to bomb Japanese ships near Shanghai. The Chinese hit their own city by mistake, and a ground battle flared. The Chinese were defeated, and Japanese forces went on to capture the Chinese capital of Nanking.

Although some Japanese rightists deny it, the Chinese say the Japanese sacked Nanking in an orgy of raping and pillage. They say the Japanese beheaded Chinese people, drowned them, used them for human vivisections and tortured them with hot bars of iron.

In a recent Asahi Shumbun self-examination of its coverage at the time, reporter Nobuo Danno wrote that he had seen Japanese soldiers blindfold Chinese prisoners and cut off their heads. A young Japanese officer missed in his effort to decapitate one old man, slicing off his arm instead, Danno said. While the Japanese officer reddened with embarrassment, the elderly Chinese hardly flinched. Danno said he had wanted to write about the strong spirit of the Chinese--but knew that if he sent such a story to Tokyo, his paper would not print it.

In memoirs, two Japanese nurses also told of Japanese atrocities. Hiroko Kanazawa recalls sailing up the Yangtze River with Japanese forces. “We could see large numbers of prisoners being lined up on the shore and shot, their bodies falling into the river.”

A second nurse, Yoshiko Kumada, said she saw Chinese prisoners with wire looped around their necks. The wire was tied to their arms, she says. “The slightest movement strangled them.” A young Chinese who worked at her hospital, whom she describes as studious and generous, “told me how, when the Japanese had first landed on Chongmingdao, they had locked up the Chinese residents in their houses, which had thick clay walls and no windows, and then set fire to the buildings. In their agony, some of the Chinese had managed to break holes in the thick walls just large enough to put their heads through, only to die that way.”

In time, Japan controlled most Chinese cities, seaports and railroads. But the war dragged on. Chinese nationalists fought from a provisional capital at Chungking, and the Chinese Communists developed guerrilla resistance in the northwest.

“There was a feeling that China could only resist Japan because of American aid,” says Fujiwara, the historian. At home, the Japanese people were running out of necessities because of the war. “We thought we should be stronger,” Fujiwara says, “that we weren’t winning in China because of the United States.”

America’s unfriendly intentions seemed confirmed in July, 1939, when the United States let its existing commerce treaty with Japan expire and placed limited restrictions on the sale of strategic goods to Tokyo.

Perceived American hostility, rising respect for Nazi Germany’s successes in Europe and a singular event in Manchuria seemed to change Japanese strategy. Until 1941, the Japanese had in mind defeating China and then the Soviet Union--their traditional enemy in Asia since the Russo-Japanese War.

But now, in August of 1939, Japan suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the Soviets at Nomonhan, a disputed border area in southeastern Manchuria. An American historian, Alvin D. Coox, who recently spent six months at the Japanese Defense Ministry researching the planning for Pearl Harbor, says: “Everything until (Nomonhan) was geared to the Soviet Union. Preparation for war against the Soviet Union dominated their thinking.”

By April of 1941, the army was still proposing an attack on the Soviet Union, according to recent public television documentaries aired in Tokyo. But now the navy countered with a proposal to thrust south instead--into Indochina and Indonesia, where German victories in Europe had orphaned French and Dutch colonies that were rich with minerals and oil.

These things were badly needed because the United States had protested the invasion of China by banning the sale of high-grade scrap iron and aviation fuel to Japan. With all of these circumstances--and the defeat at Nomonhan--firmly in mind, a new government of strong militarists under a weak prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, signed a nonagression pact with the Soviets and ordered Japanese troops, sweltering in woolen uniforms made for Siberia, to turn south and invade Southeast Asia.

They would establish a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japan signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy that gave the Japanese primacy in East Asia. Under the pact, Germany, Italy and Japan also pledged to come to each other’s aid should any one of them be attacked by the United States.

THE 10-YEAR QUESTION

For 10 years, says William Manchester, students at the Japanese Naval Academy had been required to answer this question to graduate: “How would you execute a surprise assault on Pearl Harbor?” And by early in 1941, historian Alvin Coox says, Japan’s military planners had begun in earnest to draw up the blueprints for just such an attack.

Japan occupied Indochina, including Vietnam. President Roosevelt responded by freezing Japanese assets--”which meant,” William Manchester says, “no more oil from America.” Britain did the same. So did the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia)--which was Japan’s chief source of petroleum.

Japan saw itself being squeezed to death by what it called the ABCD encirclement: the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch. Within days, an army lieutenant colonel, Akitoshi Ishii, was given the task of drawing up a proposal for action. “I thought about it day and night,” Ishii recalled recently on Tokyo public television. “What should we do? I thought about it at the office and at home. Finally, when I confirmed that not a drop of oil was coming into Japan, I decided that we would have to go to war.”

With classical Japanese syncretism, he combined that with a proposal to negotiate. Emperor Hirohito was unhappy. He thought the point about negotiating should have come first. Prime Minister Konoe asked for a summit meeting with Roosevelt. But the American President said no. Instead, he sent an ultimatum. Japan must withdraw its troops from Manchuria, China and Indochina. It must denounce the Tripartite Pact, and it must sign a nonagression pact with its neighbors.

“All knew of the dangers of going to war with America, but nobody could make the decision to pull out of China,” historian Fujiwara said. “They believed in the economic bloc of China and Manchuria, even though it never provided much benefit. (And) they were afraid if they pulled out of China it might undercut the emperor system--there might be a revolution or a coup d’etat.

“They didn’t trust the people. They thought the people would be unhappy if they withdrew from China. They didn’t know what the people were thinking. The leaders had no link to the people. The emperor only read articles in the newspaper that were specially clipped out for him. The emperor admitted in 1946 that he worried about a coup d’etat if he had outright opposed the war.”

In fact, Japan in that fall of 1941 was a nation at once richer than ever before and yet poorer, suffering under the shackles of state control and militarism. Spurred by heavy investment in military production, the Japanese economy had pulled out of recession and was running at full employment. Yet everyday necessities from clothing to fertilizer were in short supply as resources were redirected to the production of gunpowder, uniforms and battleships.

What was left was exported to pay for necessary machinery and raw materials. The average citizen was reduced to buying clothes and shoes made from poor quality synthetic materials that felt uncomfortable to wear and soon fell apart. Sugar and kerosene had been rationed for more than a year, and just a week before the Pearl Harbor invasion, cakes, meat and bean paste were added to the list.

Japanese still flocked to movie theaters to watch American films. That fall, the Hibiya movie house in Tokyo showed James Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and Spencer Tracy in “Edison, the Man.”

But dance halls were being closed down and anti-American propaganda was growing. As a result of intense propaganda in the schools, including war films shown against white sheets in schoolyards, the goal of most children was to be accepted into one of the country’s military academies after finishing junior high school at age 12 or 13.

Amid it all, Japanese leaders met on Oct. 12 at Prime Minister Konoe’s residence. Konoe said he favored continuing negotiations. “I have no confidence in the war,” he said. “If you are going to go to war, you will need someone with confidence.”

Hideki Tojo, minister of war, refused to take orders from Konoe. He said the military was mobilized--and that now it was up to the emperor.

Konoe resigned.

Emperor Hirohito appointed Tojo prime minister. Militarism had reached such a pitch that the emperor reportedly felt that only Tojo could control the army.

On Nov. 1, Shigenori Togo, the foreign minister, made a last-ditch effort to encourage negotiation. But by now, the plans for an attack on Pearl Harbor were ready. Military leaders gave him until Dec. 1 to succeed.

On Nov. 26, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull handed the Japanese ambassador a note demanding that Tokyo withdraw all forces from China and Indochina. Japan viewed the note as an ultimatum.

When, on Nov. 29, the Japanese Cabinet met to assess the Hull note, there was consensus. An official record of the meeting shows the course of the discussion:

Togo: Is there enough time left so that we can carry on diplomacy?

Navy Chief of Staff (Osami) Nagano: We do have enough time.

Togo: Tell me what the zero hour is. Otherwise I can’t carry on diplomacy.

Nagano: Well, then, I will tell you. The zero hour is ----------. There is still time, so you had better resort to the kind of diplomacy that will be helpful in winning the war.

Citing other documents, the Japanese translator of this official record fills in the blank with this footnote:

He said, in a low voice, “December 8.”

Because of the international dateline, this meant zero hour in Hawaii would be:

Dec. 7, 1941.

A Note on Language

For reasons of historical accuracy, the term Japs appears in this special section of World Report, even though it has long been The Times’ policy to avoid such pejorative racial terms.