Tears in the Darkness Read Online Free PDF

navy. They also set up new industries, built transportation networks, and established a national system of public schools. But in their rush to strengthen their emerald domain and safeguard their precious sovereignty, the parvenus who were racing to embrace the present also held hard to the past, for at heart they were traditionalists, aristocrats, many of them, who did not want Japan to lose its soul—that deep sense of divine origin and the ancient impulse to loyalty and sacrifice that they believed held their society together. Theyborrowed from the West, these reformers of the Meiji Restoration, as that great change came to be called, borrowed some of the West’s social science and many of its machines and fashions, but their aim always was to keep Japan Japanese. “Eastern ethics, Western science,” was the adage of the day, though Eastern ethics apparently included the West’s inclination for empire and the notion that a strong arm was needed to acquire it.
    After the turn of the twentieth century, Japan found itself in conflict with Russia over concessions in Korea, just across the Sea of Japan and strategically important to the Japanese. Most military observers of the day predicted that the Russians would swiftly overwhelm the force Japan sent against them, “The Eagles had . . . already fixed their talons on the carcass,” wrote one British officer. Nippon, however, struck fast, and its troops, as fierce as any the West had ever seen, defeated the mighty Russians at Port Arthur. 22
    In just fifty years Japan had transformed itself from a feudal overlord-ship into a modern military and industrial state, and now it was ready to share in the swag and booty of empire, to grab territory and force concessions in China and domains south, just as the Europeans had been doing in the Pacific since Magellan’s famous sorties in the first decades of the sixteenth century. 23
    Japanese diplomats, pressed to defend their country’s aggression, claimed necessity. Japan had suffered a series of recessions, and by 1929, the year of widespread financial collapse, the economy was faltering. Ultranationalists in government, aided by right-wing army officers, pressed for a military solution. And by 1937, the army had provoked so many military “incidents” on the Asian mainland that they got what they wanted—a full-scale war. By the end of 1938 the Japanese had more than a million troops fighting in China.
    Alarmed, America began an economic war of nerves with the Japanese. Using embargoes of vital materials such as scrap iron, machine parts, and aircraft, America hoped to force Japan to pull back from China. When nothing worked, President Roosevelt in July 1941 froze all Japanese assets in the United States, in effect creating an embargo of the commodity Japan needed most—crude oil. And since America was Japan’s chief source of oil, the boycott left the Imperial Army and Navy in a crisis.
    The Japanese decided to take what they needed, and what they needed was in the hands of the British and the Dutch. War planners inTokyo knew well that by striking the East Indies they would provoke Europe’s ally, the United States, into a fight. They also knew that they could not defeat the industry-rich Americans; the United States with its vast resources and its capacity to manufacture whatever war matériel it needed would eventually wear them down. Japan’s only chance was to win as much as they could as quickly as they could, then sue for peace and the status quo. Keep the Americans off balance for six months, seize the mineral-rich colonies in the southwest Pacific, then set up a ring of defenses to protect their gains.
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    SURPRISE WAS ESSENTIAL. Surprise had helped Hideyoshi in Korea in 1592 and had carried the day against the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904. Officers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy also knew well the words of the Kendo master Miyamoto Musashi: