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50 O ne of Japan’s most famous spies, Onoda Hirö, graduated from the Nakano School, the military’s institute for espionage in the quiet western suburbs of Tokyo. School officials kept activities so secret that even townspeople living in the immediate vicinity had no idea what the buildings housed or that students there studied the“black arts.” Sent to the Philippines in December 1944, Onoda fought there for thirty years. The army specifically commanded Onoda not to commit suicide because the imperial forces considered his mission of paramount importance to Japan’s national security and ultimate victory. Army officers stipulated that even if it took three or five years military forces would eventually return and repatriate Onoda. In the meantime they ordered him to gather intelligence to be used to prepare the island for guerrilla warfare. After Japan’s defeat, even though Onoda picked up news leaflets dropped by US planes, he believed they were counterpropaganda. He did not surrender and return to Japan until March 9, 1974.1 A few years prior to Onoda’s surrender, another Japanese soldier, Yokoi Shöichi, became a national hero after he emerged from the jungles of Guam twenty-six years after the end of World War Two. Japanese media broadcast nationally his first words upon arriving in Tokyo, “It is with much embarrassment that I return,” a phrase that instantly became a popular saying. Onoda and Yokoi are extreme examples of Japanese wartime perseverance, but their attitudes mark an interesting trend within the development of wartime Japanese propaganda.When these men and a few others returned to Japan decades after both sides had signed the surrender treaties, they did not face ridicule but celebration. The population, enthusiastic after hosting the 1964 Olympics and blessed with a burgeoning economy, held up Onoda and Yokoi as the epitome of the Japanese ability to persist in the face of adversity (ganbaru ), even in a losing situation. An eminent historian of Japan, Ivan Morris, understood this characteristic as belonging to a culture that championed a “nobility of failure.” The ability to persist against dire odds intrigued the immediate postwar American research teams dispatched to calculate the Japanese response to the war’s end. The US teams analyzed the Japanese psychoCHAPTER TWO Defining the Limits of Society Defining the Limits of Society / 51 logical response toward domestic and Allied wartime propaganda and tried to establish a quotient correlating how public opinion varied with levels of bombing.2 The story of how Japan inculcated its population with the notion of destiny and modernity that raised soldiers like Onoda and Yokoi should begin with propaganda. Supporting the bureaucratic management already detailed was the physical reinforcement behind wartime propaganda. The police and the military played significant supporting roles in the construction and monitoring of wartime Japanese propaganda that over the period from 1931 to 1945 ultimately led to a society so galvanized by propaganda that it was able to change virtually overnight and accept defeat in 1945. The propaganda stabilizing Japan’s modern empire rested on a structure of collusion, and government rhetoric was not its only catalyst. The police, military , and governmental authorities worked to define and regulate the limits of acceptable behavior. The media and advertising industries assisted in visualizing those limits and created a concrete vision of what Japan’s future utopia would look like. In this process the police wielded more than just batons. They served as surrogates for the propaganda and identified themselves as the vanguard in Japan’s quest to build a new empire in Asia. A section of the Special Higher Police supervised foreigners residing in Japan and collected information on them. Other police divisions helped coordinate the ceremonies staged for soldiers departing from rural Japan. The police constantly took the pulse of the nation, like a doctor carefully keeping track of a needy patient. The Special Higher Police The police were indispensable to propaganda programs. The Tokkö Keisatsu, or Special Higher Police, were the central body that coordinated public safety from the prewar era and throughout the war. The Home Ministry, the main government department in charge of public order, formally established the Special Higher Police in August 1911, partly in response to a planned attempt on the Meiji emperor’s life. This new division of police took responsibility for monitoring foreign elements residing in Japan, including Koreans, subversive thought, censorship, and other potential aspects of civic unrest. In 1920 the ministry strengthened...

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