Why Disturb Tranquillity?

JOURNEY TO THE Missouri (282 pp.]--Toshikazu Kase--Yale University ($4).

Japan took the big decision in an imperial conference on Sept. 6, 1941: war against the U.S. unless the U.S. backed down on China by early October. The proposal of the supreme command was blunt and final; Hirohito's civilian ministers accepted it. Apparently only Hirohito himself felt called upon to make any further observations. He pulled out a poem that had been written by his grandfather, the Emperor Meiji, and read it aloud:

When I regard all the world

As my own brothers,

Why is it that its tranquillity

Should be so thoughtlessly disturbed?

"All the participants were deeply moved," says Author Toshikazu Kase, but of course the decision stood.

"Nothing Further Removed." In Journey to the Missouri, Author Kase, onetime foreign-office career man, tells his own version of the Japanese story which ended on the quarter-deck of the Big Mo. Sketching in events since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and going through to V-J day, it is by all odds the fullest and most interesting account yet to come from the Japanese side.

Writing in a rhetoric-ridden English which he learned as a student at Amherst and Harvard, Kase repeats many of the glib imperialist excuses that Westerners have heard before, e.g., the characterization of the China invasion as an anti-Communist crusade, the explanation of Japan's joining the Axis as "a means of improving Japan's diplomatic position visa-vis the democratic powers" in order to secure peace. Yet Author Kase's hatred for the army's trigger-happy expansionists sounds sincere enough. And he has little more regard for the navy, although he records that as late as Oct. 14, 1941, the naval high command seemed halfheartedly opposed to an attack. When warmongering War Minister Tojo dared the navy to state its apparent reluctance openly, the navy quickly backed down, fearful "of encroachment [by the army] on its prerogatives if it showed any signs of weakness."

Most of Japan's statesmen turn up in Author Kase's book carrying olive branches. Although " Prime Minister Konoye's government brought Japan into the Axis, sanctioned the July 1941 invasion of French Indo-China, and went along with the supreme command's proposal, two months later, to declare war on the U.S., "nothing . . . was further removed from Konoye's mind than to engage upon war with the British Empire or the United States." Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, who signed the Japanese surrender, was "a man of confirmed liberal views, consistently opposed to any policy of aggression and aggrandisement." To explain his own action in remaining in the government in spite of his anti-war bias, Author Kase declares that he "was told that under the circumstances my resignation could not be accepted."

A Nobler Ideal. Some of the whitewash seems a little thick. But the timidity of Japanese statesmen who wanted peace is explained, in part at least, by the army's ferocity in assassinating its enemies in the government, as well as by its success in dissolving any cabinet that opposed its views. Even after the fall of Okinawa, the supreme command was determined to fight on, ignoring frantic Japanese diplomatic moves to negotiate a peace through Russia's good offices.

On Aug. 10, 1945, the day after Atomic Bomb No. 2 struck Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito stepped down from the clouds at another imperial conference, and for the first time in his career dictated a major decision: to accept the Allies' terms of unconditional surrender.

A few weeks later, General MacArthur was facing the Japanese surrender delegation (including Author Kase) on the Missouri. His speech calling for a world dedicated to "freedom, tolerance and justice" left Kase "thrilled beyond words, spellbound, thunderstruck. For the living heroes and dead martyrs of the war this speech was a wreath of undying flowers."

In Author Kase's report on the ceremony for the Emperor, he "raised the question whether it would have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity. Clearly, it would have been different ... Indeed, an incalculable ideological distance separates America from Japan. After all, we were not beaten on the battlefields by dint of superior arms. We were defeated by a nobler ideal."

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