The Progress of the War with Japan
- Excerpt from an Article by Leon Trotsky, 1944
With the surrender or destruction of the last of the Japanese Empire's forces in what was once "American Samoa" we can now form for ourselves a picture of the sort of challenge posed to us by the remaining fascist powers in this global war. While Japan is certainly the lesser menace to the Proleteriat of the world than the primary menace posed by Hitler's Fascist Germany, Japan has yet the most people languishing under its chains with hundreds of millions of people across Asia and the Pacific suffering from its exploitation and the depraved cruelty that the Empire is willing to use to expand its interests. Our struggle against global Fascism has seen the close of the theater warring against Salgado's would be hegemony and the rapid withdrawal of Fascism from Western Asia and Africa. However, the struggle with Germany and Japan (and Italy, though in a reduced state), and their stooges still remains ahead of us, and there remains much to be done. Having already laid out an analysis of the war against Fascism in Europe, I shall now look to our conflict in Asia. Perhaps most recently important is the seizure of Samoa as part of the general offensive towards Tokyo itself and as part of the drive to retake the Solomon islands.
To see why these islands are so important, we must look at the chain of events that has lead us here. The American Samoa islands were quickly seized by the Empire of Japan in 1933 for "security" reasons and to serve as a Japanese base of influence in the South Pacific. The Japanese seizure of Samoa was at first welcomed by the Island's capitalist administration as a means of ensuring the security the power of the propertied landlords in the Islands and guarding against the progress of the American socialist movement. However from the reports we may finally glean from the Island, the Japanese propaganda machine's depiction of Samoa being a model member of the "Co-prosperity sphere", are easily found to be farcical.
The typical brute terror shown by the Empire of Japan in its imperialistic conquests was put into full force by the Empire's soldiers. The first strikes by the plantation workers in protest of the harsh demands for resources of Japan were met with a simple, uncomplicated response; machine guns and bayonets. With Japan able to maintain a veil of secrecy around the islands through its Caesaropapist Fascist regime's complete control of access to the islands, the world was left completely ignorant of the "bloody wednesday massacre" that saw more than five hundred workers dead within a day, one thousand dead by the end of the week when resistance finally stopped. With a population of only some eleven thousand, this massacre quickly established to the whole island that the "Immortal Empire of the Rising Sun" would have no qualms with protecting the power of Japanese capitalists with the most naked sort of violence.
The traditionally communally owned lands; wherever they were not nationalised to accommodate the Empire's control; were quickly acquired by the so called "Zaibatsu" of Japan, a means of capitalist organisation that sees the largest of Japan's economic vultures form nearly feudal business cartels that have symbiotic relations with the mechanisms of the Japanese state. These organisations control virtually the entirety of the Japanese economy not in the direct control of the state, leaving very little room for any sort of petit-bourgeoisie to take root and creating the space for a morbidly fascinating world of corporate dynastic politics and backstabbing. This means of organisation is a holdover of Japan's queerly incomplete transition from feudal to capitalist organisation during the Meiji restoration that saw the power of the Shogun forever cast away in favour of the clique formed around the "Tenno" or Emperor with some of these groups tracing their founding to the 1600s; such as the Sumitomo group.
It is the Sumitomo Zaibatsu in particular that concerns us in the case of Samoa, as the group quickly appropriated the bulk of the Island's land and put them to work producing rations for the Japanese Army and Navy as well as constructing a major naval base and air field to guard and advance the Empire's designs on the South Pacific. With the assistance of the Japanese army and imported labourers from the far flung corners of the vast Japanese Empire, this Zaibatsu was able to exert absolutist control over what parts of the Island were not requisitioned to the service of the fascist Japanese state or its rivals in parasitic imperialism. From the estimates to the records we have available so far, the Empire directly controlled thirty percent of all land on the Island, Sumitomo claimed a third, and the remainder was split among Mitsubishi and Furukawa.
The well used brothels set up by the Japanese army confirm that the loathsome practise of "Comfort women" was set up with little delay by the Japanese whose chauvinist views of sex relations feed into a myth of sexual entitlement, birthing forth the idea that the soldiers of the Empire "need" access to the bodies of women to prevent further misbehaviour. Given the abundance of reports of the sort of crimes seen in Southeast Asia and China being repeated in smaller scale, it should not take a master of the social sciences to determine that the stated "necessity" of this program is nothing but the most invidious sort of falsehood pushed by outdated and harmful traditionalist mindsets and happily profited on by Japanese and collaborationist capital all too willing to sell to the Empire its prostitutes.
However to lay the blame solely upon these businesses would be to fall victim to making use of many of the apologetics used by the defenders of Capitalism who would claim that the rot is not at the core of their system but simply a few bad patches of misbehaviour that either more or less regulation depending on which part of the Capitalist spectrum you ask would solve, it is the very nature of Capitalism and Imperialism and Japan's material conditions that drive these issues in the first place. A common apologetic canard used by the defenders of Capital is that their ideology promotes a "peace between nations" via the mechanisms of trade and the unprofitability of war between states. Given that Liberalism has done very little to abate the cycle of at least one great war across the "western world" every century since the Crusades and indeed, has seen us in the modern age doubly blessed with two world spanning wars in just thirty years, we can dismiss this claim as farce born of either naive ignorance or malicious deceit.
"Free trade" as it were can only truly endure with a single hegemonic capitalist power to enforce it, where there are challengers there will be trade wars as the national bourgeoisie come to resent the competition from each other affecting their ability to maintain profits, and from trade wars can arise wars waged with bullets instead of stocks. We saw this in the road to the first world war where the German and Austrian elite's sense of national inferiority to the more widespread reach of British, French, and American markets lead to destructive collision. We see this now in the rhetoric of the fascists who have only praise for their own native capitalists but scorn those of foreign countries; accusing them of exploiting and impoverishing their own bourgeoisie and blaming them for the conditions of the Proleteriat. Japan, as a country which has tied its prosperity to the fortunes of its export market and as a latecomer to the game of Imperialism, faces not only the fear of the fall of its aristocrats and bourgeoisie to the advance of Socialism as is being advanced by America and the Soviet Union with the invaluable aid of our comrades in China, Iran, and Latin America and all the oppressed peoples of the world, but also the Damocles' sword of a dependency on the good will of the three principal foreign capitalist powers of the far east; Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
To depend on their trade would render Japan dependent on western Europe itself. To make their profits, Japan's capitalists must hope that their European counterparts will accept their attempts to undercut their goods without turning towards the Bourgeois state to try and eliminate the competition. To try and cut off this dependency has a logic to it, an attractive and appealing one, to allow Japan to better set its own terms with the Capitalists of the rest of the world. Such an obstacle has one principal issue however, Japan is a poor country. Not poor in the sense of Yen, but poor in the resources needed for industry, the twin emperors of the modern age in Iron and Oil above all, it cannot survive long without resources. Unless of course, it expands. The East Indies are rich with virtually every natural resource from Copper to Food to Rubber and of course; the world famous Dutch oil companies. The Philippines and Southeast Malaysia offer a similar bounty of natural resources, while Korea, Formosa and Manchuria principally feed the Japanese hunger for mineral resources such as Iron to make the steel for its tanks and warships.
With this hunger in mind, we can clearly see the reason for Japanese Fascism's desire for expansion. They are not, as many British and Anti-Petainist rightist and centrist French publications have certainly bemoaned, uniquely savage among the peoples of the Earth, and so I must caution and warn against the impulse to assume that the Japanese soldier is some demon. He is ensnared by Fascism yes, and he is part of an army that has committed crimes of the most grotesque savagery from institutionalised rape to games of "catching children" on bayonets, but the fault lies not with the Japanese man, but the system that hammers a false consciousness into his mind so that he may be willing to die for the fortune of the Empire. An Empire that when faced with the contradiction of wanting to be resource independent and yet utterly dependent on external trade has come to the conclusion that the next step is conquest to alleviate that dependency and so has seized upon national myths of a divine destiny.
With this in mind, we can now better examine the course of our conflict and what must be done. Japan is an island nation whose war effort is sustained by a vast but disparate empire spanning two oceans, thousands of islands, and engulfs hundreds of millions of people. This means that to fuel its factories, all supplies must come by ship. Thus it stands to reason that the principal thrust of the war effort must come from death by strangulation. America has the advantage of a ship building capacity that the Empire cannot hope to match, Japan could sink five ships for every one that the Empire loses and would still be whittled down to nothing over the course of a war. To indulge in the fantasy, as many would advocate, of a "second Tsushima" by hoping to catch the Japanese fleet in some epic struggle on the high seas through some great northern thrust from Alaska to Hokkaido and Honshu would be to play into their doctrine of decisive battle and the entire structure of how their fleet is designed.
The loss of a carrier group here, a battleship flotilla there, a cruiser pack elsewhere, and a destroyer picket somewhere is sustainable. More can be trained to replace these losses; to lose an entire Armada in one battle is to gut the foundations of experience that build any military and Japan would love nothing more than to catch the fleets of our "united nations" in a grand contest of strength that it has been preparing for decades for.
No, a slow death for the Empire is what is needed. Scattered fleets to cut open the arteries of Japanese supply, submarines to bleed and worry its convoys and transports. The army too, is not to be caught and smashed in a single spectacular battle; not until the Home Islands are within our reach, it is to be withered in the course of many battles for islands of strategic importance. Those garrisons not necessary to secure the advance to Japan are to be ignored, their garrisons left to wither in starvation until they surrender. In this, I can find no fault in the current plan by the Communist international or the Alliance of Free States to smash Japanese fascism by turning away the flank of it that threatens New Zealand and Australia as well as guards the southern route to the Empire's den. With the turning aside of Japan's blow at Hawaii comes the need to press forwards once again, and with Japan's dependency on East Indies Oil, there is no better angle to approach Japan than from the south so as to deprive them of the luxury of having fuel for their machines.
As we advance northwards and westwards, it would be advisable to strike our blow not at the Philippines or the East Indies and drag ourselves into a protracted battle for endless little islands, but to cut them off. The Bourgeois Democracies of Europe can bleed for their colonies if they wish, but victory in the pacific must come from striking a devastating blow at Japan proper and opening up the access routes into China to assist the Chinese struggle against Japanese and collaborationist annihilation. The more northernly islands such as the Marianas and Guam should be seized to lay bare the route to Formosa. As modern Japan's first colony, it will be doubtless that our Imperialist enemy will fight tooth and nail to hold onto it and its extensive factories and resource extracting operations. But to liberate Formosa would be to slice a dagger across the Empire's neck. This grasp to the nerve center of the enemy's means of production would thus bypass the bulk of their military forces and force either a confrontation with our forces on our own terms or accept its loss and suffer our interdiction of their entire war effort.
Further islands that could put Japan in the reach of bombers such as Okinawa, Sakhalin, and the Kuril and Bonin Islands must also be seized so as to encircle Japan and deny it the possibility of reinforcement by sea. Then comes the bloody work of giving the final push of Japan off of the mainland of Asia, so that those languishing in slavery from Manchuria to Malaysia may breathe free. The natural angle of this attack will be into Japanese held southeast Asia by the Allies, and into Manchuria and Korea by the Comintern. With this work done, it should be a simple matter to drive into China and extinguish the farce of Chiang Kai-Shek's "Reorganised Chinese state" once and for all. This leaves the task of Japan proper to deal with.
I myself have analysed the arguments for an easy liberation and a hard liberation and must say that I reject both. The optimists, as we shall refer to the partisans for an easy battle for Japan as, believe that surely the moment the Chinese, Hispanics, Americans, Soviets and Iranians of the Comintern land upon the Islands of Japan that they shall surrender en masse and upon having the privlege to gaze upon a Communist shall give up their Fascist ways and form the glorious republics of Nippon. This is childishly naive and idealistic nonsense based on orientalist beliefs that the Japanese are like children lacking a proper education. From what can be discerned from the citadel of secrecy that Japan resides in, the Japanese socialist movement is disorganised, demoralised, and weak after decades of brutal repression from the state that only intensified following the great Kanto earthquake giving Japan's tone deaf clique of militarists the excuse they needed to purge the left of the Japanese body politic. It is undoubtably there, and it is stronger than Japan would like the world to believe, but the conditions for revolution in Japan do not yet exist and the fascists have had many years to ingrain the most invidious of propaganda into the people. This deceit will not be easily broken.
Those who come up with all manner of wild and fanciful statistics for how many will die in the invasion of Japan with figures reaching as high as millions of Comintern military casualties and tens of millions (with at least one article claiming Japan will take the "Paraguayan" option, referring to Solano Lopez's vainglorious attempt to fight against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the 1864-1870 war to the last man and the last bullet, leaving as little as a quarter of his people alive when he was finally put down like a rabid dog) of Japanese casualties as they throw themselves at our weapons like ants attacking an intruder to their hive. They predict years of struggle and never ending guerilla conflict as every citizen of the empire down to the last dog shouts "Tenno Heika Banzai!" before making an attack. They envision endless waves of suicide bombers, guns behind every blade of grass, and all the stockpiles of Japan's most gruesome biological and chemical weapons being unleashed. These pessimists as we call the, are also obviously victims of Orientalist thought rooted in racist Yellow Peril nonsense. The Japanese are not machines programmed to be endlessly loyal to their God Emperor, they are humans just like you and I. Humans can change their mind and opinions, humans in most cases prefer to live rather than die, and humans are surprisingly adept at adjusting to new ways of life.
For example; until the Soviet revolutionary war, it was believed that the average citizen of that Empire was so ignorant, so backwards and so enthralled into the cult of the chosen of Christ and Tsar of all Russians that there could be no serious revolution after the failure of the 1905 revolution. Now a Briton can hardly imagine a Russian or Ukrainian or Kazakh as anything but a committed revolutionary and communist. How things can change in less than thirty years! The Americans too, were once believed to be the most sexually repressed of all the peoples of the industrialised world, they were thought to be arch-capitalists so drunk on the ideology of Liberalism that they could not even realise that Liberalism was an ideology and not simply a constant of the cosmos themselves. Yet we have found that there is indeed no "liberalism" particle in atomic physics as many in the physical sciences joke, and now Americans are seen as either sexually free or depraved depending on the conservatism of the one you ask, and are seen as the great vanguard of socialist revolution.
The struggle to liberate Japan will be hard, yes, many will die and there will be firm resistance. However it is not impossible, nor must we acquiesce to defeatism such as allowing a Monarchist and Capitalist Japan remain with a generous peace that does little but slap their wrist and tell them they were a very naughty child; such a Japan would be sure to align with the reformists in western Europe the moment it could afford to, and we would find ourselves facing the same situation once again some twenty years down the line. That is not to say that the path to victory will be laid upon a bed of roses, but the house of the rising sun must be torn up board by board and anyone who would tell you that this will be a simple task is a fool. I expect somewhere around a year of struggle, and certainly millions of casualties, but there will be a Japan to free at the end of it all. And that I think, is worth fighting for. We are not fighting just to repel Japanese aggression on our comrades, but to free Japan itself as well.
As for what is to be done with Japan? I have many ideas of course, as a major bastion of industrialised capitalism, Japan would be invaluable as a member of the Communist international. Suggestions that would ask to leave the Tenno in place must be cast aside. The Empire of the Rising Sun must set forever. Regardless of whether one subscribes to the theory that Hirohito is simply a figurehead that the military keeps shut away so as to be able to claim to act in his name without him having any chance to contradict them or whether you believe he is a Monarchist Hitler, he is complicit in the formation of Japanese fascism. Just as one may argue at length about whether or not Louis XVI was the culprit or simply a symptom of the decay of the French ancien regime, for progress to be made he must be at the very least be removed from the throne through the abolition of the throne, and his execution or exile is a likely necessity to break the back of the Imperial cult. If he commits Seppuku to maintain his honour; so much the better.
The soft hand that America has been able to afford is unlikely to be applicable to Japan. America had a widespread and popular leftist movement already in place, and came to power with a Bourgeois mandate. It is doubtless that many of the Japanese will see the imposition of a Socialist state upon them as becoming colonies to people they were raised to hate. It is certain that many will act on this perceived assault on their way of life and resist with force and such force will have to be dismantled with all means. Class consciousness must be given space to grow and decades of lies will need to be unpacked. A great many social traditions of Japan will have to be undone, from its perception of women to the role of children and even the very way they deal with their daily labour. Japan's "State Shinto" will need to be defanged. There is no place for the deification of a bloodline or the "spiritual characteristics" of Japan in a revolutionary republic. As a faith of small shrines instead of a centralised clergy, the imposition of state atheism will also have to take on a local character. The only people who can cast off the Kami are the Japanese themselves, all we can do is provide them the tools for it.
I expect a need for a strongly centralised state for no less than twenty years before Japan embraces a more American socialism. There will no doubt be a great deal of reactionary terrorist violence against the worker's state that will need to be met with violence and terror in kind to disorganise the remnants of Fascism and Monarchism in the new Japan. A powerful state body will be needed to root out counter revolution and the whole of Japanese society must be uprooted. It will be a program of a generation before revolutionary thought becomes safe enough in Japan to use a lighter touch. But, to those defeatists who believe this too hard and those orientalists who would purge Japan on racist nonsense I have this to say. It always seems too hard to do until it happens.
