Japanese Homefront Mood, Jul. 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 115-118:

The sun was shining from a bright Pacific sky, but Admiral Ugaki Matome’s mood was much more accurately reflected in the dreary seasonal showers that he knew were now hitting the Japanese home islands. As commander of one of the fleets that had been beaten so profoundly off Saipan, he was fully aware of the implications. “It will be extremely difficult to recover from this disaster and rise again,” he wrote in his diary. “When I think the prospect of a victory is fading out gradually, it’s only natural that my heart becomes as gloomy as the sky of the rainy season.”

Back in Tokyo, the humiliation was felt equally intensely. Retired Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa was in despair. “Although I do not know [the] exact details, Japan has lost the war,” he told a colleague. “We have been defeated beyond doubt. Whoever leads the war, there is nothing to be done.” Hirohito was in a daze and spent his time gazing at fireflies in the Fugiake Garden of the Imperial Palace. “Under the circumstances, there is nothing better for him than to divert himself and to recuperate,” his second cousin Irie Sukemasa wrote in his diary.

Vice Admiral Miwa Shigeyoshi spoke for many when he commented: “Our war was lost with the loss of Saipan. I feel it was a decisive battle. The loss of Saipan meant [the Allies] could cut off our shipping and attack our homeland.” Rear Admiral Takata Toshitane, the deputy chief of Military Affairs at the Navy Ministry added, “We knew that from then on the war was going to be pretty tough. We realized that with the destruction of our industrial capacity, our production would naturally drop to practically zero.” Nagano Osami, the emperor’s supreme naval advisor, put it succinctly: “Hell is on us.”

The few foreigners left in Japan felt the different atmosphere. The Vice Admiral Paul Werner Wenneker, German Naval attaché to Tokyo, noted a clear change in the mood of the Japanese governing elite after the debacle at Saipan, an actual piece of Japan, and not recently conquered territory. “Saipan was really understood to be a matter of life and death,” he said. “About that time they began telling people the truth about the war. They began preparing them for whatever must happen. Before that, they had been doing nothing but fooling the people.” A few days after the loss of Saipan, Tōjō did indeed tell the public that “Imperial Japan has come to face an unprecedentedly great national crisis.”

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Prime Minister Tōjō came under pressure over the loss of Saipan. His wife received phone calls from people who did not give their names and simply asked, “Hasn’t Tōjō committed hara-kiri yet?” In an indication that after years of war Japan was nowhere near becoming a hard dictatorship like Germany, Tōjō faced criticism that he was amassing too much power in his own hands. Some even compared him with Adolf Hitler, arguing that it was the German dictator’s insistence on making all the big decisions himself that had led to the disaster at Stalingrad in early 1943. Tōjō was unperturbed: “Chancellor Hitler was a corporal. I am a general.”

In what could have been an almost perfect parallel to the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944, two Japanese officers in the same month planned to throw a bomb at Tōjō’s car as it passed through the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, but their plan was thwarted, and they were sentenced to death—and later granted a stay of execution. Instead, political pressure built on Tōjō to resign from his post. An alliance of court officials and senior naval officers had been seeking to oust him for months but had been prevented from achieving their aim by Emperor Hirohito’s strong support of Tōjō.

They had been waiting for the right moment to strike, and now with the fall of Saipan, the opportunity was there. They acted by the middle of July, preparing a resolution to Hirohito stating that “the minds and hearts of the people must be infused with new life if the empire is to survive… a powerful new cabinet must be formed that will surge forward unswervingly.” With the loss of the emperor’s backing, Tōjō was doomed. On July 18, a deeply disappointed Tōjō was forced to tender his resignation. He was replaced by General Koiso Kuniyaki, who was not Hirohito’s first choice as head of the Cabinet, being seen as too easy to sway and with a dangerous penchant for mystical nationalism, probably the last thing Japan needed at this particular time.