＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:https://skawa68.com/
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
In the year before last, North Korea repeatedly provoked the United States militarily by launching missiles and conducting nuclear tests. Recently, the “explosive military confrontation” between the U.S. and North Korea has reached a lull due to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s “forward-looking stance toward reconciliation with North Korea” and President Trump’s “positive stance toward the U.S.-North Korea talks.
However, behind the “smiling diplomacy” of last year’s PyeongChang Olympics, North Korea continued to develop nuclear weapons, and I believe it is unlikely that it will ever give them up.
On the other hand, international tensions have recently continued, including trade and cyber wars between the U.S. and China, the nuclear arms race and cyber war between the U.S. and Russia, and the struggle for “hegemonic powers” between the U.S., China, and Russia, which has been called the “Second Cold War” or the “New Cold War Era.
In order to understand such international politics and relations today, it is meaningful to look back at the past.
In this issue, I would like to consider the “ABCD siege” in the Pacific War and the “atomic bombing and unconditional surrender of Japan” just before the end of the war.
１．ABCD siege
The composition of the conflict between the “Axis Powers” of Japan, Germany, and Italy and the “ABCD encirclement” of the United States, Britain, China, and the Netherlands may be a poor metaphor, but it feels similar to the composition of the conflict between North Korea, Russia, and China and the democratic coalitions of the West and Japan.
It can be said that the Allied Powers, who had cornered Japan through economic sanctions (economic blockade) such as the “oil embargo,” forced Japan to resort to war as if “a cornered rat bites a cat. Without oil, tanks, fighter jets, and battleships cannot operate. If this situation continued, not only “total withdrawal from China and total abandonment of its interests” but also “colonial rule” might have awaited Japan.
U.S. President Roosevelt could not allow Japan to monopolize its interests in China, so he thoroughly pursued Japan.
North Korea has a point when it claims that it is unreasonable to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons while the U.S., Russia, China, and other countries have nuclear weapons.
It should be noted that “economic sanctions” against North Korea by Western countries are substantially less effective because of the backing of Russia and China.
According to Masatoshi Muto, former Japanese Ambassador to South Korea, “aid to North Korea to evade economic sanctions” has recently been provided by the Moon Jae-in administration of South Korea. Aid in the guise of “humanitarian aid” is also helping to prolong the life of the “Kim Jong-un regime.
Even recently, a “field report” from a “collaborator” living in Jilin Province, China, stated, “Smuggling from China to North Korea is taking place on a large scale during the severe cold season from the end of December to mid-March, when the two rivers (Yalu River and Tumen River) that are the border between China and North Korea are completely frozen. There are automobiles, steel materials, and even pharmaceuticals.” The news was reported. Concrete evidence of “evasion of economic sanctions.”
２．The Atomic Bombings and Japan’s Unconditional Surrender
It seems that Japan had been negotiating peace terms with the United States behind the scenes many times before the end of the war. However, the United States always ignored this and continued to refuse, stating that they would only accept the unreasonable demand of “unconditional surrender.” Then, under the orders of President Truman, the “atomic bombs” were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was clearly a “violation of international law” that killed many innocent civilians who were not soldiers and destroyed buildings other than military facilities.
This was apparently the “madness” of President Roosevelt, who wanted to show that the United States was the dominant power in the postwar world.
Whether it was the “Hull Note” ultimatum to start the war between Japan and the U.S. and the resulting “attack on Pearl Harbor,” the “unconditional surrender” as a necessary condition for ending the war, or the “atomic bombing” that took place before Japan unconditionally surrendered, all were the result of President Roosevelt’s cowardly, cunning, and clever scheming.
Since Japan lost the war, Japanese prime ministers, military officers, and others were executed or punished with the stigma of “Class A war criminals” or “Class BC war criminals.
The reason is that the Far Eastern Military Tribunal is a “one-sided military tribunal (Victor’s justice) by the victor.
If the U.S. had lost the war, it is hard to know whether Japan would have held a one-sided trial like the “Far Eastern Military Tribunal”.
However, a similar trial would have resulted in the execution of President Roosevelt, who ordered air raids on Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and other cities (indiscriminate bombing raids that killed and injured large numbers of civilians and destroyed homes and other property), President Truman, who ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs, and many other military personnel.
If we are to fairly condemn “war crimes” in light of “international law,” there are clearly “war criminals” in the US Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as well as Stalin in the Soviet Union, but they were not charged with crimes because they were leaders of victorious countries.
３．Far Eastern Military Tribunal
It strikes me that one of the judges sent by the Allies at the “Far Eastern Military Tribunal” (Tokyo Tribunal), Judge Radha Vinod Pal (1886-1967), an Indian jurist and judge, was the only “conscientious judge”.
He opposed the movement by other judges to seek unanimous convictions in accordance with the wishes of the leaders of the Allied nations, and submitted an opinion (known as the “Pearl Decision”) that stated that the crimes against peace and crimes against humanity were “ex post facto laws” created by the victorious powers, and that judging the accused based on ex post facto laws was contrary to international law.
By the way, the terms “Class A war criminals” and “Class BC war criminals” have become commonplace and “self-explanatory,” but do you know what they really mean?
This is a term for war criminals who fall under the crimes in paragraphs a (crimes against peace), b (war crimes), and c (crimes against humanity) of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (also known as the Statute of the International Military Tribunal) signed in London on August 8, 1945, by the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
Paragraph a. Planning, preparation, initiation, or conduct of a war of aggression or a war in violation of an international treaty, agreement, or covenant, and involvement in a common plan or conspiracy for the purpose of accomplishing any of these acts
Paragraph b is a violation of the laws or customs of war. This includes killing, mistreating, transporting for slave labor or other purposes, capturing, or killing or mistreating civilians belonging to or in occupied territory, or at sea, killing hostages, looting public or private property, arbitrary destruction of urban towns and villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity. These include, but are not limited to.
Paragraph c. shall apply to the killing, extermination, enslavement, transportation and other inhuman acts committed before or during the war against the entire civilian population, or acts of persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed in the commission of or in connection with a crime within the jurisdiction of the court, whether or not in violation of the national law of the place of the crime.
If these crimes are to be judged fairly, then the “air raids on the Japanese mainland,” “atomic bombings,” and “forced internment of Japanese Americans” by the U.S., as well as “invasion and illegal occupation in violation of the Soviet-Japanese Nonaggression Pact (Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact)” and “Siberian internment and forced labor” by the Soviet Union must also be condemned harshly.
This may be an extreme view, but to put it more bluntly, the “colonial policies” of the Western imperialist powers also fall into this category, and the Western nations must continue to make reparations and apologize to their colonized countries from generation to generation, must they not?
４．Military and Japanese Government Miscalculations
As a side note, if Japan had correctly recognized the difference in quantity between Japan and the U.S., it would have sought an early end to the war, no matter how cornered it was or how inevitable the war was. However, the Japanese, drunk on their victory in the initial stages of the war, expanded the front too far. As Sun Tzu said, “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
Also, tactically, “big-boat big-artillery” like the battleship Yamato was an “anachronism” that was incompatible with modern warfare methods based on “aircraft carriers” and “fighter armies. To use an old Japanese battle analogy, it would be like trying to counter an army of guns with swords and long spears, and the victory or defeat would be obvious.
In the end, they were on the road to self-destruction, flying wooden fighter planes and suicide planes with only one-way fuel in a “stretched front” with no supply lines.
By the way, the fact that Japan was occupied by GHQ (led by the U.S.) after the defeat in the war may have been a blessing in disguise in the sense that Japan did not become a country like North and South Korea or North and South Vietnam, where the Soviet Union controlled the northern half and the U.S. the southern half. If the occupation had been by the Soviet Union, Japan would now be a “communist country” and the Japanese people might have been in a more dire situation than before the war.