Published on August 29, 2020. This essay examines the influence attributed to the GHQ’s War Guilt Information Program on Japanese perceptions of the war, drawing on Jun Eto’s The Closed Linguistic Space. It also discusses Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed and accounts of pre–Pearl Harbor U.S. planning against Japan in reconsidering the Roosevelt administration and the road to the Pacific War.

August 29, 2020
The following is a continuation of the preceding chapter.
■ Implementation of the WGIP
The WGIP was issued by the Civil Information and Education Section of GHQ as a “top-secret directive” to Japan dated February 6, 1948.
The Japanese people had been devastated by the shock of losing the war and by the hardships of daily life, but up to that point memories of slogans such as “the devilish Americans and British” and “fight until they are crushed” still remained, and they did not necessarily possess a sense of guilt or atonement for the war.
Nor had they lost their pride or spirit as Japanese.
Jun Eto, then a professor at Keio University, pointed out in his book The Closed Linguistic Space (1989) that although the Greater East Asia War had in reality been a war between Japan and the Allied powers led by the United States, the occupation authorities sought to implant the fiction that it had been “a war of aggression born out of a confrontation between Japanese ‘militarists’ and the ‘people.’”
The WGIP sought to implant in the Japanese people a framework in which Japan’s defeat, the mass killing of noncombatants through indiscriminate bombing, and even the atomic bombings were all the responsibility of Japan’s militarists, while the United States bore no responsibility because it had merely punished them.
However, regarding the circumstances that led to the outbreak of war, Freedom Betrayed, the memoir of Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, provides extremely valuable information. (Note 2: President Hoover: the 31st President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt was the next, the 32nd president. Hoover was criticized for failing in his response to the Great Depression; the book runs to approximately 1,000 pages.)
Because this is testimony from a man who had risen to the presidency and had access to the highest levels of classified information, its credibility is high.
Roosevelt was an extreme racist.
He could not tolerate the fact that the Japanese, a yellow race, had moved into the Chinese mainland ahead of the United States, which had fallen behind there, established Manchukuo, and even had the audacity to advocate such an idea as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, seeking to liberate the colonies painstakingly built by the white race and bring independence to the nations of Asia.
In addition, the Soviet Union, which at the time was struggling in its war against Germany, strongly requested that the United States enter the war against Japan.
American historian Alan Armstrong has pointed out that as early as five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had approved a plan for operations against Japan under the code name “JB-355.”
The plan was for the United States to provide China with 350 fighter aircraft and 150 bombers, have Chiang Kai-shek employ American pilots as mercenaries, and launch large-scale air raids against locations throughout Japan from the Chinese mainland.
However, as the European front became more urgent, the aircraft were diverted there, delaying the plan, and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor occurred first.
Hoover also acknowledges the existence of this operation in the aforementioned book.
The true Class-A war criminal who initiated the war and committed a “crime against peace” was Roosevelt.
To be continued.