The Imperial Japanese Army as Seen by a Junior Officer

Even when people know it’s wrong, the organization keeps rolling along. And as it keeps rolling on its own, as people grow intoxicated by it, they forget even what the mistake was. In the end it will surely collapse, but even after that happens, will they be able to realize it? What it was that went wrong.

The Imperial Japanese Army is the largest organization to have utterly collapsed over nearly the last hundred years. How on earth did it come to that? The author of this book declares it plainly: the Imperial Army destroyed itself. It fought an enemy it should never have fought, it had no idea how to fight even in the midst of fighting, and right up to the very end it failed even to come up with any proper strategy. And in the end it stopped thinking altogether and “tidied itself up,” convinced that things would somehow work out. As if bringing things to a close by committing seppuku.

The army, seen through the eyes of the author, who lived through this entire process as one of those at the very bottom of the organization, is wretched beyond words. Each and every dreadful thing he went through is lamentable. Yet the overwhelming majority of the army had no awareness of any of it. Rather than how to defeat the enemy, what mattered more was how one appeared in the eyes of the comrade standing right beside them. And so they drove themselves to exhaustion. Winning was not what mattered; what mattered more was that they were doing something, making some kind of effort. No one could raise an objection to this. Even a bare minimum of rationality became a betrayal of the organization. In the end, they burned up all their strength merely scrambling to keep the thing rolling along.

As I read this book, I find myself thinking. This aspect of organizations is surely not unique to the Japanese army. The people who silence their members, claiming they must sacrifice for the organization or for some great cause, are all the same. Defeat is preordained. They don’t even know what they themselves are doing. If they truly had such resolve, the proper order of things would be to devise a real solution. I’d like to make them read this book a hundred times over. Of course, there’s no chance they’ll read it, and even if they did, no chance they’d understand. It draws nothing but sighs.

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Yamamoto Shichihei. 2016. The Imperial Japanese Army as Seen by a Junior Officer. Translated by Choi Yong-woo. Geulhangari.