The Home Front: Mobilising Support

Abstract

The scale of modern war and the rise of sanctions against exploiting enemy non-combatants meant that victory or defeat came to depend heavily on support from home. During the later Pacific war, Japanese propaganda, gladly taken up and turned against it by the US and its allies, was of ‘a nation with a heart beating as one’ behind the armed forces. Similar images have persisted from the first Sino-Japanese war. This persistence, however, results from the dearth of research on wartime society. Frequently, the single comment of Japanese historians is that no one opposed the war, and, as evidence, they cite Uchimura Kanzo, a leading Christian intellectual who defended Japan at the time as the crusader of civilisation in East Asia.¹ Deeper questions about the role of the emperor, local government, schools, the media, commerce and religion have, at best, received only perfunctory consideration. It is to these subjects that we turn in this and the following chapter. First, the structures for mobilising popular support: at their pinnacle was the emperor.