Summary: In the previous twelve chapters of this series we recalled the 1916 April Revolution that overthrew Japan’s monarchy and established the Japanese People’s Republic; the JPR’s brutal suppression of all dissent during the early post-revolutionary years; the JPR regime’s expansionist attitudes and actions in foreign affairs; Japan's confrontations with the Allied powers during the Pacific phase of World War II; the overthrow of JPR chancellor Mitsuharu Yamagida in October of 1944; and the signing of the armistice that ended Japan's involvement in the Second World War. In this segment we'll examine the effect Japan's withdrawal from the conflict had on Adolf Hitler's own wartime policies as the Third Reich crumbled at his feet and also the post-Yamagida Japanese government's efforts to deal with popular discontent in the early years after the war ended.

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With Japan’s withdrawal from the Second World War, Nazi Germany was essentially carrying the banner for what remained of the Axis by itself. Hitler’s marriage of convenience with the Yamagida regime had collapsed in ruins, and his last slim hope for prevailing against the Allied powers had crumbled along with it. The idea that fighting the Japanese People’s Republic would distract the United States, Russia, and Great Britain from the war in Europe had proved to be a false hope....and the German people would pay a heavy price for that deception. With the Russian Federal Army thwarting the Wehrmacht’s last desperate attempts to push into Poland and American, British, and Free French troops driving the Nazis out of Holland and Belgium, only the most willfully blind could have possibly doubted the Third Reich was finished.

    In fact, even as Japanese and Allied diplomats were gathering in Stockholm to sign the armistice that ended the war in the Pacific, an overwhelming feeling of defeatism was taking hold of the German civilian population. Even as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels continued to spout high-flown rhetoric predicting Germany’s ultimate triumph against all her enemies German troops were in growing numbers choosing to throw down their arms and surrender to Allied forces rather than risk getting themselves maimed or killed fighting for a doomed cause. The most notable exception to this was the Waffen-SS, who in their fanatical belief in the Nazi ideology continued to resist the Allies up until almost the very last hour of the Second World War.

    Perhaps one of the bloodiest battles to happen in Europe in the final months before the collapse of the Third Reich took place near the village of Tubingen in December of 1944. That engagement between British and U.S. forces and the Waffen-SS, which lasted more than three weeks and would be immortalized in the American press as “the Battle of the Bulge” because of the shape of the German salient around the town, saw nearly half the U.S. and British troops who took part in the engagement killed in the first 12 hours alone. The dogged resistance by SS troops at Tubingen accomplished little for the Germans except to delay the end of the war in Europe for a few weeks and to reduce the town to ruins.

     But even at this point Hitler refused to concede he was beaten. Even with Allied bombers now pounding Berlin on an almost hourly basis and U.S. and British senior generals coordinating strategy with their Russian peers for the final assault on the Reich capital, the Führer continued to cling to the fiction that the tide of the war would soon turn back in Germany’s favor. When Allied troops crossed the Rhine and the Oder in late February of 1945 to begin the final push on Berlin, he consistently overruled every attempt by his generals to get him to listen to reason and ordered them to launch counterattacks with forces that had long ago ceased to exist except in his mind. What German forces were still available at that point became the victims of overwhelming Allied superiority in terms of troops numbers, equipment, and resources.

     The introduction of the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter briefly disrupted the Allied air campaign in Europe during the final months prior to the collapse of the Third Reich, but that disruption was soon overcome as the Allies developed tactics to catch the Me-262s on the ground before their engines had reached full power. Between this, the introduction of the British Gloster Meteor jet fighter, and the depletion of what was left of the Luftwaffe’s fuel stock, the Luftwaffe had in effect ceased to exist as a fighting force by the time Allied advance units reached the outskirts of Berlin on March 11th, 1945.

     Still Hitler would not back down. If anything, he became that much more determined to hold out against the encroaching Allied armies even if it meant dragging his own country into ruin; in fact at one point he told his minister of armaments, Albert Speer, that if the German people failed to share his desire for Götterdämmerung then they deserved to perish along with Germany itself. Disagreeing sharply(to say the least) with the Führer on that point, Speer secretly circumvented Hitler’s “scorched earth” order to leave Germany a wasteland; he also did whatever he could to help German civilians flee the Gestapo’s wrath and reach the comparative safety of the Allied lines.

    By March 15th, a day ahead of Eisenhower’s original target date for securing the center of Berlin, Allied infantry and armored troops were converging on what was left of the Reichschancellery. Rather than risk being put on trial as a war criminal or having to concede that the war was lost, Hitler chose to commit suicide; he shot himself shortly after midnight on March 16th, 1945. It was left to Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, to work out the final terms of surrender with the Allied powers. Four days after Hitler’s death German and Allied delegates met in Reims, France to sign the agreement officially ending the Second World War in Europe.

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    The Liberation Society regime in Tokyo had tried hard to spin its armistice with the Allies as a victory for Japan, but the majority of ordinary Japanese citizens didn’t see it that way. In their eyes, even though they were afraid to say so openly, the armistice represented a defeat for Japan-- and a particularly bitter one at that. Not only had the promised goals of Japanese supremacy in Asia and spreading the April Revolution’s ideals beyond Japan’s borders not been fulfilled, but the Japanese economy lay in ruins thanks to a combined of the Allied wartime blockade and the government’s own abysmal mismanagement of its economic policies.

    Dissent with the official Liberation Society party line, for so long unthinkable to the average Japanese citizen, began to simmer once again under the outward patina of conformity which covered Japan like volcanic ash. For the second time in its modern history Japan had come out on the short end of the stick in a war with a larger and more powerful adversary, and it stuck inside the collective craw of the Japanese masses. For that matter the younger members of the Liberation Society party leadership had started to question the necessity of absolute one-party rule. In April of 1945 new Japanese chancellor Yoshi Komura, the top civilian leader in the coup that had ousted Mitsuharu Yamagida from office, organized a committee to study the question of what could or should be done in the way of reform for Japan’s political structure.

    Some younger Japanese didn’t feel like waiting for the committee to finish its work. Despite the Liberation Society’s restrictions on access to information from the outside world, these “children of the Stockholm armistice”(to quote the words of one British historian) had become aware of the freer life enjoyed by citizens of Western countries and wanted to get a taste of that freedom for themselves as soon as they could. And in learning how to gain that taste of freedom, they didn’t have to look too far for inspiration: the Korean liberation movement, despite the sternest efforts of Tokyo and its puppets in the government of the Korean People’s Republic to crush it, was still hanging on and fighting for an end to the inference of the Liberation Society in Korea’s affairs. Indeed, since the Stockholm armistice between Japan and the Allied powers the anti-Japanese movement in Korea actually seemed to be gaining strength.

One of the most important lessons the anti-Liberation Society forces in Japan learned from their Korean brethren was the value of keeping the structure of their organization as loose as possible. Accordingly, when an anti-Society underground movement began to take shape in Japan around 1950, it was set up in a series of three-man cells to minimize the risks of infiltration or disruption by the regime’s security forces. Ironically enough, some agents of those same security forces found themselves drawn to the underground, becoming double agents for the very resistance groups they’d been assigned to destroy.

    At the same time they were trying to squelch the budding underground movement, the leaders of the Komura regime started to experiment with a limited form of local self-government for the Japanese people. The chief hopes of the regime in sanctioning this experiment were that it might (A) help get internal popular discontent under control before it could turn violent and (B)give Japan a more favorable public images in the eyes of the outside world, particularly the United States. And in the second aim at least, the experiment was rather successful in the short term; in the face of vehement protests by his right-wing critics, President Harry S. Truman agreed in the spring of 1951 to resume full diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Japan. Great Britain would follow suit that summer, and by September the Russian Federation had reopened its former embassy in Tokyo while a new Japanese embassy was established in Moscow.

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    In March of 1952, in an attempt to simultaneously better the domestic economic lot of the Japanese people and encourage international companies to re-invest in Japan, the Komura government began loosening some of the strict economic controls its predecessors had imposed in the wake of the April Revolution. Once such action would have been unthinkable, and even in Komura’s own time was still hard to imagine. But Komura was intent on making Japan a financial power as well as a political one on the stage of world affairs. For all the Liberation Society’s railings against “wicked” capitalism, the simple truth was the government of the Japanese People’s Republic was quite aware-- and envious --of the level of productivity and prosperity enjoyed by Western countries in general and the United States in particular. At a time when television was already a ubiquitous medium for entertainment and communication in much of the Western world, in Japan it had barely moved beyond the experimental stage. Regular TV broadcasting was still at least a year away, and the industrial plants which were meant to produce a steady flow of television sets for the Japanese masses could barely even manage a trickle.

    That didn’t suit Komura in the least. He told his economic ministers in no uncertain terms that their jobs-- and Japan’s future --were on the line and that if the appropriate quotas weren’t met. And sure enough, when Japan’s official state-run television set production company fell short of its target by 5000 sets, at least two dozen industrial and communications ministry officials were summarily fired or demoted, and many others would be obliged to accept “help” from the secret police in doing their jobs in the months to come. But Japan did eventually achieve regular TV broadcast service-- in February of 1953, almost a full year after the Komura regime began cautiously experimenting with economic reform, the Japanese People’s National Television Broadcast Service went on the air for the first time.

     Much of Japan’s state television service’s programming content in its early days consisted of saccharine dramas with overtly patriotic themes or mind-numbingly stodgy cartoons meant to teach children how to properly act and think as citizens of the Japanese People’s Republic. The network also served up a steady and generous helping of propaganda against the enemies of the JPR-- not the least of who was the now more active than ever Korean liberation movement. Thanks in part to Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and some tacit financial support from the United States, the anti-JPR forces in Korea were further undermining Tokyo’s already shaky grip on the levers of power in that country. Two men in particular, Princeton-educated Syngman Rhee and fiery socialist Kim Il Sung, were making life miserable for the Japanese-backed puppet regime in Seoul and the Nomura government hoped its televised propaganda might totally discredit both Kim and Rhee in the eyes of their fellow Koreans.

    Of course it had the opposite effect. Kim and Rhee quickly became national heroes in the eyes of their downtrodden fellow Koreans, and to add insult to injury the Voice of America quickly embarked on its own TV propaganda blitz in support of the Korean liberationists; assisted by the Australians, and to a lesser extent the Khrushchev government in Russia, a team of Korean culture specialists and former Madison Avenue advertising execs worked seven days a week creating TV programs aimed at chipping away at Tokyo’s supposedly iron-clad grip on the Korean Peninsula. And in spite of the Liberation Society regime’s best efforts to marginalize their work, it was clear to any objective observer who read between the lines that the VOA team was by far doing the more effective job on the propaganda front. Komura’s critics within the Society elite took note of this and started to make plans to remove him just as he himself had plotted to nearly a decade earlier to overthrow Yamagida....

To Be Continued