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The Battlefield Experience of Japanese Soldiers in the Asia-Pacific War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
The total number of Japanese casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In contrast to the popular image in Japan of these war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought valiantly in service of the nation, however, the realities of war were quite different. Rather than being killed in combat, some sixty percent of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the battlefield, succumbing to disease and starvation. Others suffered from the military's failure to secure dependable supply lines to provide food and equipment replenishments, resulting in a large number of otherwise preventable deaths. In this article, Professor Yoshida Yutaka focuses on the grim realities of war death as experienced by ordinary soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, a topic rarely touched upon by scholars. Combining a social historical approach with rigorous statistical analysis, Yoshida sheds light on the institutional issues and peculiarities of what was once proudly known as the “Emperor's military.”
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References
Notes
1 Yoshida Yutaka, “Ajia-Taiheiyō sensō no senjō to heishi,” in Senjō No Shosō: Iwanami Kōza Ajia-Taiheiyō Sensō 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 59-86. Since his retirement from Hitotsubashi University in March 2020, Professor Yoshida has become the director of The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage.
2 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihongun heishi: Ajia-Taiheiyō sensō no genjitsu (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2017).
3 “Sensō he no ikari, kenkyū genten,” Asahi Shinbun, 2 February 2020.
4 Biruma no tategoto was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1956. Ichikawa later remade the movie in color with a new cast in 1985.
5 Although the 1950s did see the publication of a few books on the Asia-Pacific War, they were primarily eyewitness accounts written by former military officers. See Takagi Sōkichi, Taiheiyō kaisenshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1949); Hayashi Saburō, Taiheiyō sensō rikusen gaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1951); Hattori Takushirō. Daitōa sensō zenshi (Tokyo: Masu Shobō, 1953), vols. 1-4.
6 This account of the development of postwar Japanese historiography on military history draws heavily on a guest lecture given by Yoshida at the Institute of Politics and Economy (Seiji keizai kenkyūjo) in September 2019. Yoshida Yutaka, “Sengo rekishigaku to gunjishi kenkyū: ‘Nihongun heishi’ o tegakari ni shite,” presentation notes, 20 September 2019. I have supplemented this with Fujiwara Akira, Tennō no guntai to Nicchū sensō (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2006).
7 Bōeichō bōeikenkyūsho senshi shitsu ed., Senshi sōsho, 102 vols. (Tokyo: Chōun Shinbunsha, 1966-1980); Toga Hiroshi, “Zen 102-kan kanketsu no ji,” Daitōa (Taiheiyō) sensō senshi sōsho furoku 102 (1980), 1-2.
8 Other characteristics of the work produced by the Center for Military History, originally known as the Office for War History (senshi shitsu), include its willingness to defend the decisions and actions taken by the prewar Japanese leadership, its bias toward central command, and the reproduction of institutional rivalries between the Imperial Army and Imperial Navy, owing to the initially large number of ex-Army officers within its ranks. Fujiwara, Tennō no guntai to Nicchū sensō, 230; Yoshida, “Sengo rekishigaku to gunjishi kenkyū,” 2.
9 One notable exception, as referenced by Yoshida in his introductory paragraph, is Kuroha Kiyotaka's article published in the August 1971 issue of the journal Shisō. Kuroha based his analysis on a combination of statistical data and poems written by servicemen describing their battlefield encounters.
10 Fujiwara Akira, Gunjishi (Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha, 1961).
11 Hata Ikuhiko, Nitchū sensōshi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1961); Hata Ikuhiko, Gun fashizumu undōshi: 3-gatsu jiken kara 2.26 go made (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1962).
12 Ienaga Saburō, Taiheiyō sensō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968). An English translation by Frank Baldwin is Ienaga Saburō, The Pacific War: World War II and the Japanese, 1931-1945, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Yoshida points out that Ienaga's work is limited to using the experience of ordinary soldiers to underline the Japanese military's undemocratic and anti-rational tendencies. Yoshida, “Sengo rekishigaku to gunjishi kenkyū,” 2.
13 Ōe Shinobu, Nichi-Ro sensō no gunjishiteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976).
14 Yoshida, email communication to translator, 11 May 2020.
15 Yoshida Yutaka, Tennō no guntai to Nankin jiken: mō hitotsu no Nitchū sensō shi (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998); Yoshida Yutaka, Nihon no guntai: heishi tachi no kindaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002).
16 Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). The original is Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kusa no ne no fashizumu: Nihon minshū no sensō taiken (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1987).
17 Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992; reprinted 2008). For a collection of translations of private diaries, see Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005). Yamashita followed this book up with Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), which attempted to construct a “history of everyday life” (Alltagsgeschichte) in wartime Japan using published diaries, letters, and memoirs. Through these works, Yamashita has allowed us to hear the forgotten voices of ordinary Japanese on the home front.
18 Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire's 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010).
19 Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
20 As noted by Uchiyama, the kamikaze—known officially as the “special attack force” (tokkōtai)—represent one of the few areas concerning Japanese soldiers about which there is a sizable body of English-language scholarship. Some examples include Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975); Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); M. G. Sheftall, Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (New York: NAL Caliber, 2005); Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and chapter 6 of Yamashita, Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945. See also Uchiyama, Japan's Carnival War, 204-207.
21 James R. Brandon, Kabuki's Forgotten War: 1931-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009); Sharalyn Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen Year War (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
22 Sabine Frühstück, Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017). Frühstück's book is not limited to the Asia-Pacific War and examines the series of modern wars beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.
23 While the book-length study is yet to be published, a concise summary of the project can be found in Sheldon Garon, “Transnational History and Japan's ‘Comparative Advantage,‘” The Journal of Japanese Studies 43, no. 1 (February 1, 2017): 65–92.
24 For an example of a recent dissertation that examines the wartime cooperation of Japanese Christian groups, see Bo Tao, “Imperial Pacifism: Kagawa Toyohiko and Christianity in the Asia-Pacific War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2020). Japanese Christians, who were particularly vulnerable to charges of “unpatriotic” conduct due to their adherence to a foreign religion, strove to prove their loyalty to the nation by staging wartime rallies, writing patriotic hymns, and organizing donation drives to help fund military aircraft.
25 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
26 Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
27 Fujitani does include the testimony of several Korean prisoners-of-war held captive by Allied troops. Even there, however, his main concern is with interrogating their motives for serving in the Japanese army, and not on their battlefield experiences per se. See Fujtani, Race for Empire, 239-298.
28 Lee K. Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2015).
29 Kuroha Kiyotaka, “15-nen sensō ni okeru senshi no shosō: ‘tōkei’ to ‘uta’ to,” Shisō, August 1971.
30 Kasahara Tokushi, “Chiansen no shisō to gijutsu,” in Senjō no shosō, Iwanami Kōza Ajia-Taiheiyō Sensō 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 215-244.
31 A conscript who had attained a middle school education had the option of applying to become an officer candidate (kanbu kōhosei) upon entering the Army. Those who passed the exam had a number of possibilities to serve away from the frontlines. An officer candidate in the accounting department (keiri bu), for example, was eligible to become a low-ranking officer dealing primarily with financial accounts. This was a relatively safe post in the Army. This, of course, required one to have obtained a middle school education, which was not the case for around 80 percent of the conscript population—which had little leeway in selecting their place of service. Yoshida, email communication to translator, 19 April 2020. For more on this issue, see Yoshida Yutaka, Nihon no guntai: heishi tachi no kindaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002). (BT)
32 Ōe Shinobu, Shōwa no rekishi 3: Tennō no guntai (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1982). While the need to retain farmers in the countryside was recognized by the state, it became more and more difficult to enforce this policy once the war situation necessitated a greater degree of mobilization. As a result, the remaining sources of labor in villages during the latter stages of the war consisted primarily of women, children, and the elderly. Yoshida, email communication to translator, 19 April 2020. (BT)
33 The intended target of the draft deferment system was industrial and factory workers, and the “laborers” mentioned here did not include farmers. Yoshida, email communication to translator, 19 April 2020. (BT)
34 Jōestu shishi hensan iinkai, ed., Jōetsu shi tsushi hen 5 (Jōestu-shi, Niigata: Jōestu-shi, 2004).
35 First and second reserve troops formed the majority of the Japanese military presence in China. This was due to the Japanese Army's prioritization of the Soviet threat, which led them to permanently station active-service divisions at the Russian border. As a result, only “special divisions” (tokusetsu shidan) consisting primarily of older reserve soldiers were available for deployment to the China front. Fujiwara Akira, Tennō no guntai to Nitchū sensō (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2006), 15. (BT)
36 First and second reserve troops had previously undergone an intensive two-year regimen as active-service soldiers and looked down on officers called in from the conscript reserve ranks—whom they regarded as inferior because of their lack of proper training—as well as reserve officers and non-commissioned officers who were younger. Being older than the average soldier, many were also married and thus anxious about the family they left back home, inwardly resenting the fact that they had been recalled to duty. Due to this combination of a lack of respect for their immediate superiors and a concern for home front affairs, once the war became protracted and the prospect of an early return dissipated, some older reserve troops turned to acts of violence and atrocity, as well as insubordination toward superior officers. Yoshida, email communication to translator, 19 April 2020; Fujiwara, Tennō no guntai to Nitchū sensō, 15. (BT)
37 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihon no guntai: heishi tachi no kindaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002).
38 Yoshida Yutaka, Gendai rekishigaku to sensō sekinin (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1997).
39 Active-service soldiers, who would have been in their early twenties at this point, typically did not have families, and therefore were sent to the front lines to replace older troops who did have families. The same policy was applied to younger soldiers in the conscript reserves. (BT)
40 Rikugunshō, Shōwa 10-nen chōhei jimu tekiyō (Tokyo: Rikugunshō, 1936); Rikugunshō, Shōwa 16-nen chōhei jimu tekiyō (Tokyo: Rikugunshō, 1942).
41 “Kenpei taisaku shiryō tuzuri,” Bōeichō Bōei Kenkyūjo Senshibu.
42 Rikugunshō Heibika ichi-kain, “Chōhei kensa yori mitaru kenpei taisaku no jūyōsei ni tsuite,” Kaikōsha Kiji Tokugō 824 (1943).
43 Aoki Masakazu, Kekkaku no rekishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003).
44 Jōestu shishi hensan iinkai, ed., Jōetsu shi tsushi hen 5.
45 Shimizu Hiroshi, “Guntai to chiteki shōgaisha,” Kikan Sensō Sekinin Kenkyū (Spring 2003).
46 “Nihon busōgun no kenkō ni kansuru hōkoku,” Center for Military History (Senshibu), National Institute for Defense Studies.
47 Rikujō jieitai eisei gakkō, Eisei senshi: hondo kessen junbi (Not-for-sale item, 1979).
48 Manabe Motoyuki, Aru hi, Akagami ga kite (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 1994).
49 “Kenpei taisakujō yori mitaru kyūyō jōshiki ni tsuite,” Koi Dai-5173 Squadron, Eisei kankei raikan tsuzuri, vol. 2, Center for Military History, National Institute for Defense Studies.
50 Nagao Goichi, Sensō to eiyō (Tokyo: Nishida Shoten, 1994).
51 Aoki Kesami, Kōgunbyō teiyō, (Not-for-sale item, 1936).
52 Shichōheishi Kankōkai ed., Shichōheishi (ge) (Not-for-sale item, 1979).
53 Yoshida, Nihon no guntai.
54 Dai 27-shidan eisei gyōmu yōhō,“ Daitōa sensō rikugun eiseishi hensan shiryō, Center for Military History.
55 Operation Ichi-Gō (Ichi-gō sakusen, lit. “Operation Number One”), also known as tairiku datsū sakusen (“Continent Crossing Operation”), was a Japanese military campaign on the China front that took place in April-December 1944. It had two main objectives: to capture air bases in southeast China from which American bombers were launching attacks on Japanese shipping and naval assets, and to open a land route from China to French Indochina, which was under Japanese control at the time. The campaign mobilized 500,000 Japanese troops, 800 tanks, and 70,000 horses over 2,400 kilometers, and was the largest single military operation conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army. (BT)
56 As mentioned in the Translator's Notes, soldiers from the first conscript reserve only received brief training totaling less than six months, while those from the second conscript reserve received no basic training. (BT)
57 Fujiwara Akira, Chūgoku sensen jūgunki (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 2002).
58 Kume Shigezō, Sensō wa owatta (Not-for-sale item, 1991). The Battle of Hunan-Guangxi was part of the series of battles comprising Operation Ichi-Gō, which took place across three Chinese provinces (from north to south): Henan, Hunan, and Guangxi. (BT)
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66 Ibid.
67 Sakai Shizu, Ekibyō no jidai (Tokyo: Taishūkan Shoten, 1999).
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71 Fujiwara Akira, Uejini shita eirei tachi (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2001).
72 “Kaiyō sakusen ni okeru heitan teki kyōkun,” Center for Military History.
73 Rikusen gakkai senshi bukai ed., Kindai sensō shi gaisetsu (Tokyo: Rikusen Gakkai, 1984). The combat casualties do not include those in Manchuria.
74 Kurosawa Yoshiyuki, “Eisei hokyū no shiteki kōsatsu (dai 6 hō),” Bōei Eisei 32, no. 6 (1985).
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81 Shirai Akio ed., “Senkunhō” Shūsei 3 (Tokyo: Fuyō Shobō Shuppan, 2003).
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87 Sawachi Hisae, Berau no sei to shi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1990).
88 Rikusen gakkai senshi bukai ed., Kindai sensō shi gaisetsu. Such death ratios were not necessarily a given, as can be seen in the high officer-to-enlisted soldier casualty rates of the British Army in WWI, where nearly half of all officers became casualties during the first year. Peter R. Mansoor and Williamson Murray, eds., The Culture of Military Organizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 168. (BT)
89 Gunshi Jun, Gunji engo no sekai (Tokyo: Dōseisha, 2004).
90 “Shina jihen ni okeru shussei (senshishō)-sha izoku kazoku no dōkō ni kansuru chōsa,” Shisō Geppō 55-56 (Tokyo: Bunsei Shoin, 1974).
91 Kikuchi Keiichi and Ōmura Ryō eds., Ano hito wa kaette konakatta (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1964).
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98 Hayakawa Noriyo, “Kazokuhō no kaisei,” in Nihon No Jidaishi 26, ed. Yutaka Yoshida (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2004). The law regarding the removal of family register names is Article 749, Clause 3 of the Civil Code.
99 Kawaguchi Emiko, Sensō mibōjin (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2003).
100 Zenkoku kenyūkai rengōkai hensan iinkai ed., Nihon kenpei seishi (Not-for-sale item, 1976).
101 Shuppan keisatsu hō (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1982).
102 Namihira Emiko, Nihonjin no shi no katachi (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004).
103 Rikugunshō onshōka ichi kain, “Guntai kanbu to shite senbotsusha izoku shidōjō no sankō,” Kaikōsha Tokuhō 60 (1940).
104 The instructions originated from Army Order no. 24, issued in May 1939.
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106 Niigata ken minseibu engoka ed., Niigata ken shūsen shori no kiroku (Niigata-shi, Niigata: Niigata-shi, 1972).
107 Ichinose Toshiya, Jūgo no shakaishi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2005).
108 Kōsei shō shakai engo kyoku 50-nen shi henshū iinkai ed., Engo 50-nen shi (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 1997).
109 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005).
110 Oda Makoto, “Nanshi” no shisō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991).
111 Tomiyama Ichirō, Senjō no kioku (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 1995).