The Gods Left First: The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956

By Andrew E. Barshay

At the time of Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast expanse of a vanquished Asian empire. Half civilian and half military, they faced the prospect of returning somehow to a Japan that lay prostrate, its cities destroyed, after years of warfare and Allied bombing campaigns. Among them were more than 600,000 soldiers of Japan’s army in Manchuria, who had surrendered to the Red Army only to be transported to Soviet labor camps, mainly in Siberia. Held for between two and four years, and some far longer, amid forced labor and reeducation campaigns, they waited for return, never knowing when or if it would come. Drawing on a wide range of memoirs, art, poetry, and contemporary records, The Gods Left First reconstructs their experience of captivity, return, and encounter with a postwar Japan that now seemed as alien as it had once been familiar. In a broader sense, this study is a meditation on the meaning of survival for Japan’s continental repatriates, showing that their memories of involvement in Japan’s imperial project were both a burden and the basis for a new way of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780520956575

Andrew E. Barshay

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The Gods Left First

The Gods Left First

The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese

POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956

Andrew E. Barshay

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley•Los Angeles•London

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University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

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© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as "The Painted Gulag: Kazuki Yasuo and The Siberia within Me," in Representations 119 (Summer 2012): 60–91. Used with permission.

An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The Gulag Memoirs of a Japanese Humanist, 1945–49, Journal of Japanese Studies 36, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 255–88. Used with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barshay, Andrew E.

The gods left first : the captivity and repatriation of Japanese POWs in northeast Asia, 1945–56 / Andrew E. Barshay.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27615-4 (alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520956575

1. Japanese—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—History—20th century. 2. Concentration camps—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—History—20th century. 3. Japanese—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—Biography. 4. Concentration camp inmates—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—Biography. 5. Japanese—East Asia—History—20th century. 6. Repatriation—Japan—History—20th century. 7. Imperialism—Social aspects—East Asia—History—20th century. 8. Manchuria (China)—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. 9. Korea—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. 10. Japan—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. I. Title.

DK759.J37B27 2013

940.53’1450952—dc23

2013008849

Manufactured in the United States of America

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

Maps and Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Names and Terms

Prologue: The Gods Left First

The Siberian Internment in History

Kazuki Yasuo and the Profane World of the Gulag

Knowledge Painfully Acquired: Takasugi Ichirō and the Democratic Movement in Siberia

Ishihara Yoshirō: My Best Self Did Not Return

Coda

Appendix: How Many?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Maps and Illustrations

I. MAPS

Northeast Asia, 1932–1945

Northeast Asia, 1946–present

Approximate locations of labor camps in the former Soviet Union

II. ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.Satō Chūryō, Camp Gate (1980)

Figure 2.Kazuki Yasuo, 1945 (1959)

Figure 3.Kazuki Yasuo, Saw (1964)

Figure 4.Kazuki Yasuo, Demonstration (1973)

Figure 5.Kazuki Yasuo, Northward, Westward (1959)

Figure 6.Kazuki Yasuo, Domoi (1959)

Figure 7.Kazuki Yasuo, His Majesty Speaks (1970)

Figure 8.Kazuki Yasuo, Globe (1968)

Figure 9.Kazuki Yasuo, Stars Summer (1966)

Figure 10.Returnee resistance (1949)

Figure 11.Satō Chūryō, Prisoners Taking a Body for Burial by Sled (1980)

Figure 12.Camp lecture-study meeting (1948?)

Figure 13.Camp musicians (1948?)

Figure 14.Domoi ceremony (1949?)

Acknowledgments

I began work on this book in 2002, when I was fortunate to receive a UC President’s Fellowship for Research in the Humanities to launch the project. Over the decade since then, the Department of History and Center for Japanese Studies at Berkeley have been generous in providing support, which I acknowledge here with much gratitude.

Colleagues and friends close to home and in Japan have been of great help over the years. Randolph Starn, Yuri Slezkine, and Irwin Scheiner took the whole manuscript in hand at different times. I have learned much from their comments and am heartened by their encouragement. The anonymous readers for the University of California Press also offered pertinent suggestions, many of which I have gratefully followed. Choosing occasionally not to do so has at least given me the courage of my narrative convictions. I am grateful as well to Reed Malcolm and Stacy Eisenstark at UC Press for seeing the book through to publication; to Michael Bohrer-Clancy and John Raymond for their fine editorial work; to Ben Pease for creating the maps; and to Thomas Dewald of Art Seed (Tokyo) for help with art permissions.

For the opportunity to present portions of the manuscript in congenial settings across the United States, I am grateful to Kären Wigen, James Bartholomew, Donald McCallum, Gyan Prakash, and again to Yuri Slezkine. Gregory Levine, Thomas Laqueur, Alan Tansman, Mariko Tamanoi, James Vernon, and Stephen Kotkin each kindly read and commented on early chapter drafts. In Japan, Yasui Yūichirō, formerly vice-director of the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, has been surpassingly generous with his time, expertise, and practical assistance. I could not have written the chapter of this book on Kazuki Yasuo without him. Tomita Takeshi, who has taken the lead in organizing the scholarly study of the Siberian internment in Japan, has been a welcoming guide to the work of Japanese and Russian scholars. Oshima Mario, Kojima Shūichi, Shimizu Yasuhisa, Gotō Yasuo, and Gotō Nobuyo, cumulatively friends of many years, have made it possible for me to appreciate how the past and present are connected in Japan.

It is a special pleasure to thank a number of individuals who have provided me a direct link with the internment experience. Kazuki Fumiko, the widow of Kazuki Yasuo and author of a work on their life together, graciously gave me permission to reproduce the paintings from his Siberia Series used in this book. Fujita Isamu, whom I was fortunate to meet at an early stage, was an internee and participant in the democratic movement in the Siberian camps, and was kind enough to critique my treatment of Takasugi Ichirō. Alongside his scholarly career as a sociologist of law, Fujita was among a group of camp veterans, led by the late Takahashi Daizō, who labored for two decades to compile an invaluable collection of hundreds of internee reminiscences and accompanying studies of the camp system. Finally, I am grateful to Iwao Peter Sano, whom I first met in Palo Alto. Born in Brawley, California, Peter Sano was sent to Japan as a teenager to be the adopted heir of a maternal uncle, only to be swept up by the military draft, sent to Manchuria with the Kwantung Army, and interned in Siberia. His memoir, 1,000 Days in Siberia (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), was among the first accounts I read. It has a permanent place in my own memory for its remarkable serenity and clear-sightedness. Having him read my attempts to write about an experience he knew at firsthand has been an honor, as it was to have him speak to my undergraduate class about his life.

I close with thanks to Kimiko Nishimura, who not only brought her critic’s sense to bear on every line, through draft after draft, but was able to see the way forward when, more than once, I had reached a narrative impasse. I know I tried her patience. But once in, she was all in: she understood, as I hope I did, that the subject demanded nothing less. All in all, I have learned more about writing, and about the importance of good advice, from this project than anything else I have worked on. Yet, ten years on and ten years older, I feel as if I am just now beginning to understand the story I try to tell in these pages.

Note on Names and Terms

With the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973), the term gulag entered the vocabulary of the Western public. It has come to stand for the entire system of labor camps and prisons that operated in the former Soviet Union for much of its history, if not for the Soviet Union itself. Literally, gulag is an acronym for Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel’no-Trudovykh Lagerei i Kolonii, hence GULag).

In this book I refer to Japanese prisoners as having been in the gulag. Strictly speaking, they were not, at least not initially. As prisoners of war, captured Japanese were placed in a variety of camps run by the so-called Chief Administration for POW and Internee Affairs (Glavnoe Upravelenie po Delam Voennoplennykh i Internirovannykh, or GUpVI), which, like the GULag, was under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). GUpVI’s major function, as its name suggests, was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union.

In a broader sense, the term gulag is not inappropriate. The top management of GUpVI was drawn from the GULag system, and the two systems were operated in much the same manner. One difference between them was that GUpVI camps did not hold convicted criminals. A significant minority of Japanese POWs were convicted of so-called counterrevolutionary offenses against the Soviet Union, however, and on sentencing they were transferred to camps and prisons of the GULag system proper.

Soviet citizens tended not to refer to the gulag, but to camp or the camps (lager, lageria) or the zone (zona). Japanese writers have followed suit, almost always using the term rāgeri (camps). But since Western readers will find this usage unfamiliar, I have elected to adopt gulag as a covering term for the system of forced labor as a whole. Finally, it should be noted that the lager in both the GULag and GUpVI systems were made up of many constituent camps, also referred to as lager. That is why the estimated number of camps in which Japanese were held can vary so widely. As is discussed in the text, the generally accepted figure is two thousand.

•   •   •

Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own. Japanese names are given in standard order, that is, family name first.

Northeast Asia, 1932–1945

Northeast Asia, 1946–present

Approximate locations of labor camps in the former Soviet Union. One can easily appreciate from this map both the geographical extent of the Soviet camp system and why it inspired one Japanese writer to compare it to black-roasted sesame seeds sprinkled over white-rice porridge. As indicated by the shaded bubbles in the map above, the vast majority of Japanese prisoners were held in Siberia and Central Asia.

Quid mihi, Livor edax, ignavos obicis annos, ingeniique vocas carmen inertis opus

—Ovid, Amores, 1.15

Prologue: The Gods Left First

At the time of Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on August 15, 1945, some six million Japanese were left stranded across the vast territories of a now vanquished empire. Overnight, imperial authority had dissolved. In Korea, the Shintō priests of the Chōsen Jingū shrine, founded in 1919 and dedicated to the combined worship of the sun goddess Amaterasu and the emperor Meiji, hurried to conduct the rites that would send their spirits safely back to the imperial palace in Tokyo. The mirror and other visible symbols of their presence were returned by airplane ten days later.¹

The return from Korea of the spirits of the sun goddess and the emperor Meiji, her lineal descendant, was the first instance of the repatriation of Japanese to the home islands. The First Repatriates, so to speak, were evacuated in advance of any soldiers, resident officials, or settlers because of their (and their shrine’s) exalted status. Throughout the empire, in Korea and Taiwan, occupied China and Manchuria, south Sakhalin and the Kurils, the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, the establishment of hundreds of Shintō shrines had gone along with military boots and flags to mark territory as Japanese. Not all shrines were equal, however, any more than all Japanese were. At war’s end, in Manchuria, China, and Korea especially, a great many shrines were attacked and burned to the ground. In such places, often all that the priests or local Japanese could do was to bury the go-shintai, or visible symbol of the shrine’s tutelary deity, and leave the buildings to their fate.² With people, too, the story was similar. As Japan’s rule disintegrated, it was civil officials and military officers of high rank—the human gods of colonial society—whose departure was most carefully prepared. The rest were left on their own: to die or to survive, and if they survived, to make sense as best they could of what they had lived through.

Slightly under half of the 6.3 million returnees from the erstwhile Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were soldiers or civilians attached to the imperial forces. This means that, albeit by a slim margin, the greater number of repatriates from Japan’s lost empire were (as the official accounts put it) common Japanese. This book is about the repatriation of some of that vast number who remained after their gods had left. I focus here on the northeast, especially on Manchuria, and especially on military returnees. For Manchuria, the total number of repatriates approached two million, between 1.1 and 1.3 million civilians and around six hundred thousand soldiers and officers of the Kwantung Army, which garrisoned the territory.³ Some settlers had lived their entire lives in cities such as Dalian or Fengtian, and barely knew Japan. Others were sojourner government officials or corporate employees. But the majority of settlers were of recent vintage, including perhaps 270,000 agricultural pioneers (many recruited en masse in official campaigns), businessmen and doctors, petty traders, teachers, Buddhist and Shintō priests, or modest seekers after fortune. To this number, one must add Japan’s colonial subjects—both voluntary migrants from Korea to the puppet state of Manchukuo, and forced laborers later brought from Korea and Taiwan to work in the main islands or overseas territories such as south Sakhalin. They too were to be repatriated, though to where was unclear.

But why focus on the northeast? The reasons are simple but compelling. By far the largest colonial settlement by Japanese came in Korea and Manchuria, and later in China proper. Apart from the island of Taiwan (which was easier to garrison and defend), the northeast formed the core of the empire. Most important, and decisively, Manchuria, northern Korea, and the islands north of Hokkaidō felt the direct, devastating blow of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion by the Red Army, which began in the early hours of August 9, 1945—the same day as the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Two months earlier, the main force of the Kwantung Army had begun to withdraw, leaving defense of the Manchurian border to poorly trained and armed recruits, many just conscripted from the region’s cities and farm colonies. The strategy was a disaster. Within barely a week, tens of thousands had been killed, the rest of the army had surrendered on imperial order to Soviet forces, and Manchukuo had dissolved. Meanwhile, settler families and sojourners fled ahead of the southward Soviet advance, but large numbers—well over a million in Manchuria, almost three hundred thousand in south Sakhalin and the Kurils—were forced to remain under Soviet control, in general for at least a year. And in a completely unexpected move, the defeated soldiers of the Kwantung Army were transported to the camps of the Soviet gulag, mainly in Siberia but elsewhere as well. The vast majority were held for between two and four years. Used for forced labor under conditions of bitter cold, crude shelter, and paltry and miserable food, they were also subject to a sustained campaign of ideological reeducation. A smaller number were sentenced to extended terms for a wide variety of counterrevolutionary offenses against Soviet law, while a handful of senior officers faced trial for conducting bacteriological warfare in China. Taken as a whole, the capture and imprisonment of the Kwantung Army is known as the Siberian internment (Shiberia yokuryū). And it is this episode—as experienced, remembered, and interpreted by those who lived it—that is my principal concern in this book. For among all those, military and civilian, who were repatriated from Japan’s lost empire, it was the Siberian internees whose time in limbo and captivity went on the longest, whose process of return was the most ridden with political manipulation and existential uncertainty.

•   •   •

Next to Kimigayo (His Majesty’s Reign), Japan’s national anthem, perhaps the best known, even loved, of its wartime patriotic songs was entitled Umi yukaba, or If I Should Go to the Sea.⁴ Taken from a longer poem dating from the eighth century, it was set to music in 1937 and from then on was heard frequently on the radio and sung as a sendoff for troops going into the field. During the Pacific War, as Japan’s defeats mounted, Umi yukaba was used by imperial headquarters to signal reports of gyokusai, that is, last-ditch stands that ended with the death, either at enemy hands or by suicide, of entire commands. The original poem, in six short lines, reads:

Such were the sentiments that soldiers most of all were expected to hold in their hearts as they went to war. Despite its first four lines, which might seem to suggest a sense of resignation to fate or even bitterness at wasted life, we see that death for His Majesty is a high good and something to be desired. To be sure, Japan’s wartime culture lacked none of the cruder celebrations of masculine valor or the prowess of modern weaponry. And by the same token, every military nurtures a cult of noble death. But the striking aspect of modern Japan’s version of that cult is its corollary: the absence of psychological preparation or training in case the desired—or at any rate expected—death did not come, and the exceedingly harsh sanctions against surrender. Having fatefully mixed tactical with symbolic modes of action in deploying armed force, the gods expected that soldiers would internalize their individual dispensability. And of course many did just that, even if not in the prescribed fashion. It is known, for example, that young Special Attack Force (or Kamikaze) pilots and many other soldiers did not go to their deaths with cries of devotion to His Majesty on their lips. They may have spoken sincerely of dying for their country. Most often, it seems, they called out for their mothers.⁵ But die they did, in the millions.

The obverse of the value system that produced Umi yukaba was what one might call an anticult of ignoble survival. Those who lived until the end of the war and lay down their arms found themselves members, willy-nilly, of a new sort of collective and challenged by a new sort of dilemma. For survivors, who were left now to assimilate not just defeat but the loss of the vast army of the dead, the gods were gone, or seemed to be. For the Siberian internees whose experiences I explore in this book, the issue of assimilating, or making sense of this loss, was extraordinarily acute. As the limbo of their postsurrender captivity stretched from months into years, they had to work out some way of filling the void of meaning that was their everyday life, but under circumstances radically different from those being faced in Japan itself. The chapters that follow discuss these matters in detail. For now, let me just suggest that one powerful and symptomatic response, at least as later remembered, was a gut-level rejection of the notion that national belonging and sacrifice could heal the sort of invisible wounds that survivors now bore; and that such sacrificial belonging was the highest value to be sought in life. The Umi yukaba world was gone. In its place was this:

•   •   •

In this book I explore the gulag experience, needless to say, and touch as well on the high politics attending the negotiations (between the Soviets on one side and the Japanese and Americans on the other) over the return of the Siberian internees to Japan. My focus is on the life-course of this vast group, both before and after their fateful incorporation into the Japanese military. As we will see, the postwar story intersects with the history of the Communist Party and the cultural Left more generally. More important, it is one of the reincorporation into family and community life of hundreds of thousands of more or less ordinary men, or at least of men who had been more or less ordinary before their mobilization and capture. What did their internment experience mean to them—what did they make it mean, and how? And what in turn did their presence mean to the society they had come back to? As one of the iconic episodes of the early postwar era, the internment was the focus of waves of media concern, which by its nature was transient and heavily politicized. It is also represented in art and poetry created by former internees as a mode of remembrance. Some of that art and poetry was of epochal importance and is treated here at length. Above all, the internment is the subject of a very large memoir literature—perhaps two thousand printed accounts, including over five hundred of book length. Overall, they range from short, stereotypical reminiscences that are small catalogues of common episodes and tropes to deeply affecting and clear-sighted examinations of what it means to undergo prolonged and unwilling captivity.

Collectively, the internment memoirs convey a narrative that is suffused with compassion for those who went through it, for the dead and their surviving families, but also with bitter resentment at the treatment of the Japanese while in Soviet hands. The institutionalized memory of this experience imparted an intractable tension to the postwar relations between Japan and the former USSR. At the same time, no small number of Japanese gulag veterans found aspects of their experience to have been positive—everyday interactions with Russia’s common people are almost always spoken of this way, and expressions of admiration for Soviet egalitarianism and what seemed an absence of racism in Soviet society were not uncommon. To be sure, as many accounts relate, internees went to great lengths to display the mandated ideological enthusiasm if they thought it would speed their return. But neither this commonsense explanation, nor the ubiquitous accusation of Soviet brainwashing, seems adequate. Those who voiced positive perspectives placed themselves at odds with the very many for whom internment called up only feelings of hatred, bitterness, deprivation, and loss. More than the official accounts compiled by Japanese government agencies at different junctures, the internment memoirs reflect these deep-running political and existential divisions; that is why they must be given pride of place in our historical interpretations of the gulag experience.

As I hope is now clear, the events I am concerned with include not only those comprising the internment per se, or of the years leading up to it, but just as much the later production by some former internees—a small minority of the total number—of their own individual recollections. Those later efforts, the struggles to recall and then to come to terms with, even to overcome, what was recalled, have their own context, personal and conjunctural. They are integral to grasping the internment experience and to the writing of its history.

•   •   •

And it is, of course, the project of writing the history of the internment that I hope to contribute to. A few concluding words are in order, therefore, on the context and conjuncture of this work.

The scholarly literature on Manchuria, Manchukuo as a political entity, and repatriation, mostly in Japanese but with valuable recent works in English (and Chinese) as well, has grown significantly since the 1980s, with distinctive contributions by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary critics. This surge is no doubt part of the notable larger trend toward studies of empire everywhere—how they take shape, how they operate, how they collapse, and so on. No doubt, too, the end of the Cold War has made it possible to combine archival and journalistic sources with memoirs in a way that yields a far more comprehensive and finely grained understanding. And there is, finally, the increasingly urgent task of attending to the experiences of the wartime generation while there is still time to capture living testimony.

The state of play with respect to the Siberian internees, however, is strikingly different. With a few exceptions, the Manchurian boom has not extended to the internment; it is as if the internment had nothing to do with the collapse of Japanese dominion in the region. Though the Siberian internees are beginning to be integrated into gulag studies by Russian scholars, it still seems true to say that they have barely registered in the historiography of Japan’s lost empire, or of the postwar era. Compared to the memory work done on Japan’s continental repatriates, the internment has remained more in the shadows, a road less taken. I suspect there are three reasons. For Japanese nationalists, the unresolved sovereignty dispute with Russia over the so-called Northern Territories—a group of islands immediately to the northeast of Hokkaidō—has had a far higher profile. Another is the long holdover of a vestigial Stalinism on the Japanese left that made it a near taboo to write too critically of the world’s first socialist state. Perhaps the most important is that because the internees were (virtually all) soldiers, they were liable to be treated as a tainted mass. But this situation is changing. For with the emergence of the Japanese empire (and its dissolution) as a historiographical concern, the last, catastrophic phase of the settlers’ Manchurian experience has been joined to its predecessor phases of territorial aggrandizement and expropriation. Following on this revision, the time would seem to have come for the interned former soldiers of the Kwantung Army to be recognized as internally diverse and politically divided, and finally worthy of the historian’s attention. That is why I have focused on them here. In the coda, I return to my starting point: the observation that both the Siberian internment and Japanese civilian repatriations emerged from the same Manchurian vortex. What did it mean to recollect the experience of that vortex—of the flight of the gods, of imperial collapse, of captivity and flight? More, I suggest, than reenacting victimhood or mourning a lost personal future. To that more I now turn.

The Siberian Internment in History

THE PRINCE’S TALE

On August 16, 1945, the day following the imperial broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender, Prince Takeda (Takeda-no-miya) Tsuneyoshi was called to the emperor’s temporary residence on the palace grounds—temporary since the main residence had been bombed.¹ Along with him, and by his testimony equally in the dark about the reasons for this summons, were three other imperial princes: Asaka, Kan’in, and Higashikuni. The purpose was soon made clear. Higashikuni was to become prime minister, though only for a matter of weeks, as it turned out. Asaka, Kan’in, and Takeda were each to be sent to different theaters of the just ended war. There they were to convey to the theater commanders the emperor’s sacred will that all those who had fought in his name now put down their arms and surrender peacefully to the representatives of the Allied forces. For Kan’in, the mission was to the South Pacific, and Asaka’s to China. Takeda was to be sent to Manchuria, that is, to the Kwantung Army.

Like the others, Takeda, at the time a lieutenant colonel, combined imperial rank with full military credentials. Both rank and credentials, it is fair to speculate, must have been thought necessary to ensure the mission’s success. The entire situation was without precedent. On the one hand, Japanese forces had never before been defeated—had never surrendered to an enemy—on such a scale. On the other hand, over the years of the Asia-Pacific War, they had been thoroughly and effectively indoctrinated in the belief that surrender was an intolerable humiliation. There was no small mea sure of fear in official circles that, by itself, the imperial broadcast of August 15 might not be sufficient to overcome the stigma placed on the act of surrender. Even if it was certain that the rescript had reached scattered and remote forward units, it still had to be interpreted and backed with the further sanction that only a personal—and professionally credible—imperial emissary could provide. And just to make sure, a second rescript, addressed to Our Soldiers and Sailors, was issued on August 17. With greater brevity and in somewhat plainer language, it called on Japan’s soldiers to comply with Our intention to surrender.

The decision to send Takeda to Manchuria was more than sensible. Born in 1909, he had succeeded to the headship of his house at the age of ten, and at twenty briefly entered the House of Peers. The following year he had graduated in the forty-second class of the Army Academy, was commissioned a lieutenant in the cavalry, and by 1936 had risen to the rank of captain. After graduating from the Army War College in 1938, he was briefly commander of a cavalry unit in Hailar, in far northwest Manchuria. But what he really wanted was to serve in a frontline unit in China, and after repeated refusals from his superiors he was finally permitted to do so, finding it not at all pleasant to have bullets flying toward me. At length, Takeda was recalled to Tokyo. Promoted to major in 1940, he served on the