To set the stage for our conversation, could you first provide some background about the Senshi Sosho?
The Senshi Sosho is a de facto Japanese official history of the Asia-Pacific War and part of the Sino-Japanese War. It is 102 volumes, and each volume has more than several hundred pages. It was a huge project between 1966 and 1980. This was compiled by experts in the Defense Agency at that time. However, I said de facto official history. It doesn't mean that it was commissioned by the government to professional historians. So, there are some shortcomings and limitations due to this nature.
However, the lack of genuine official history of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan derives from perception or evaluation of the past war history of Japan. In the postwar years there had been strong anti-war feelings among Japanese people and there was a strong prejudice towards talking about or studying about war or military affairs in Japan.
On the other hand, the Defense Agency needed materials to teach their staff and officers. That was the background of Defense Agency people to gather materials and write the narratives of the Asia-Pacific War.
Due to this nature, I have to say that overall, it was a great project, but the quality of volumes is uneven. Some volumes are really well written and even as much as the academic standard, however some volumes are simply a chronological chart. This is because the people who wrote these volumes were not professionally trained historians. They were officers or archivists of the Self-Defense Force (Jieitai) at that time.
But still, I have to emphasize that if this project wasn’t executed in the 1960s and 1970s, it would be almost impossible to gather these very important materials and documents and also oral testimonies from those people who were involved in these affairs.
How does the Operation Imphal section fit into this overall document, and why was this selected to be translated into English?
When I heard about the creation of the Imphal Peace Museum, and the people in this museum are looking for a very serious project for the future, I thought that the first thing to do is to provide wide readers, researchers, and people interested in this matter the most important sources on the Japanese side. It is obviously the Senshi Sosho volume on Operation Imphal.
It is titled Operation Imphal, however it is about the Battle of Imphal and Kohima, which was fought in the spring to summer of 1944 on the Burmese-Indian border.
The literature written in the English language by English scholars or journalists — some of them are the veterans from that part of the war — these books and articles have wider currency, needless to say because they are written in the English language and published by publishers in the United Kingdom or the United States.
On the other hand, from the Japanese side, there are a tremendous amount of memoirs, books, articles, novels, and even documentary films and some dramas and films about the Battle of Imphal and Kohima. However, they are read only in Japan.
There is an abundance of literature on this issue in the Japanese language, however almost none of them are translated into foreign languages and made readable to scholars, specialists, and readers outside of Japan.
There's a great gap between the narratives told by the British side and those told from the Japanese side, and of course there's also one very important missing link, which is the Indian side.
In the past 50 years, a number of interesting studies and serious research in the Japanese language had appeared, and I thought it is also important to introduce those academic outputs on the Japanese side to foreign readers. Unfortunately, we couldn't make translations of all of them, but in the introduction of this Operation Imphal translation project, we tried to cover and introduce some of the most important sources, articles, and books on Operation Imphal and related subjects so that foreign readers and researchers can look at them.
I also asked some of my academic colleagues to write more specialized articles on specific issues related to Operation Imphal, such as the composition of the Japanese military at that time or managerial and legal aspects of the failure on the Japanese side or air operations or also memory of the war in post-war Japan about Operation Imphal. They are also included in the introduction part of this volume.
I understand that most people see the Battle of Kohima and Imphal as basically an Anglo-Japanese conflict, because it was Great Britain and the Japanese Empire who fought over Burma and part of India in 1944. In other words, it was a clash between the old empire, the British, and the new one, the Japanese over domination of Southeast Asia. That is the main feature the Anglo-Japanese War in Asia.
However, the actual battles were fought on the soil of present-day India. At that time, it was British India, and as you see, Imphal is in Manipur and Kohima is in Nagaland. Nowadays it is seen as the northeastern region of India.
One has to remember that those people who actually fought in these two cities and surrounding areas, on the one had there were Japanese soldiers. On the other hand, it was the British forces. In those days it was British India. However, from British India not only India but also Pakistan was created and also nowadays part of Pakistan became Bangladesh, and on the British side there were Gurkhas, those people recruited in Nepal, and there were even forces recruited in Africa, which means that the British forces that fought in India and Burma were very multi-ethnic, multi-national forces, which means that for those people from those regions it was perhaps the first contact with the Japanese in a very dramatic and drastic way, which was the contact on the battlefield. That was their first Japan experience.
There was no war between an independent India and Japan. However, Indians and Japanese soldiers fought on opposite sides in one of the fiercest battles of the Second World War.
Also, one has to remember that on the Japanese side, although the majority of the Japanese forces were Japanese soldiers, a quite impressive number of Indians also participated in this battle on the Japanese side. They were the Indian National Army (INA) led by Subhas Chandra Bose.
Their military contribution was very limited, I have to say. However, having such an eminent figure like Chandra Bose on the Japanese side did have great political impact on Anglo-Indian relations and Japan-India relations. Perhaps the recent studies really tell that the political aspects of this battle were much more important than once thought.
I’d like to go back to the point you brought up, which is the fact that while the Battle of Imphal and Battle of Kohima were fought by the British and Japanese, the British army that was actually fighting in these battles was predominantly composed of British Indian soldiers, and the Japanese troops at times were also fighting alongside the Indian National Army, or INA. Japan was also supporting the independence movement of Chandra Bose, who at that time was also the head of Azad Hind, or the Provisional Government of Free India. With this in mind, what is the significance of making these specific war records from Japan available in English and accessible to an English-speaking audience?
I'm not an India expert myself, so perhaps my knowledge is very limited. However, from a historical point of view, I must say that Azad Hind’s enterprise to liberate India from the British by using force failed because the Japanese failed to take Imphal and the Japanese Empire as a whole was defeated in the war. Also, the leader Subhas Chandra Bose was killed in a plane accident in August 1945 in Taipei and Azad Hind and the Indian National Army (INA) were dissolved. In that sense their enterprise ended in failure.
However, looking at history from a wider perspective and longer time span, we know that one of the major causes of the British quitting India in 1947 was the INA trials in 1945 and 1946, because at that time the British authority in India tried former INA officers as traitors, but when they were sentenced for a very heavy toll, a mass of Indian people became outraged by the British decision to punish these former INA officers. Even those people who belonged to the British Indian Army who fought INA on the battlefield, even those people were angry about the British decision to try and punish INA officers.
I really feel the complex history of Indian independence that former enemies who fought in the Battles of Imphal and Kohima and other battles in Burma, those people actually had a common feeling of belonging to the same nation or the same state. The British Indian soldiers actually supported their former enemy, INA people, when they protested the British in 1945-1946 trial.
It may be not wrong to say that the British failure to punish INA former officers through this trial was one of the catalysts of Indian independence in 1947, and the origin of this catalyst goes back to the Battle of Imphal and Kohima in which Azad Hind and INA took crucial part.
From that point of view, what happened in the Battle of Kohima and Imphal in 1944 and what sort of things that INA and other people were doing at that time is an extremely important part of the independence of India. I believe that we Japanese must provide the most important resources on the Battle of Imphal and Kohima from the Japanese side.
Can you think about any significance or any lessons that you think might be drawn in a broader sense from this translation project?
To understand history, you need to have both bird’s eye view and ant’s eye view. And academics tend to look at things from bird’s eye view, which is of course very important. Political background, diplomatic relations, social conditions, economic factors, they were also very important. But on the other hand, ant’s eye view is indispensable. In what condition these soldiers actually fought, and under such circumstances what local people saw and experienced in daily life, that really matters. Let me give you a few examples.
In this Senshi Sosho translation, one of the impressive parts is that in the first part of the operation, the Japanese were quite successful and were able to capture many materials in the battleground including food. The Japanese had to rely on captured food. When they occupied a British depot, the majority of edible materials there were flour, and that was for Indian soldiers to make nan. The Indian soldiers were happy about having nan, but Japanese soldiers didn't like nan and they wanted to have rice. So, although they had a great amount of flour, Japanese soldiers started starving because they didn't have rice. This sort of thing really matters in the battlefield.
Also, in some Japanese document I found that by that time, ammunition was running out. However, some Japanese forces were still bombarding British sites. Why was this possible? It was because Japanese captured a huge quantity of British weapons and ammunition. But we don't know much about what particular weapons they captured, how many they captured, what was the amount of ammunition they were able to use.
We don't know much about the detail, and probably to understand this, we have to get lots of bits and pieces together from various documents written or made by individuals. You cannot find this information in a bird's eye view history. You have to go down to the ant’s eye history or kind of “a history,” not “the history,” that has a more comprehensive picture of the whole thing.
We have to know why the Japanese disliked flour, and why they weren’t able to get rice, and we have to know what type of weapons did the Japanese capture from the British, how many of them, what was the amount of ammunition rounds? These things are not wholly discovered to date.
Some people might say that it's too specialized or too specific, but you cannot neglect small pieces to understand the whole picture. You will come across many such pieces of history when you read through the Senshi Sosho translation.
Shortly you will be traveling to Imphal, which is an area that you have been focusing on in this translation project and in your academic work, but this will be the first time that you are actually travelling to the region. What are your hopes or expectations for visiting Imphal for the first time?
Understanding something only by reading is very limited. If you read in textbooks or any kind of written media about how many kilometers from this point to that point or how high a hill is and what kind of river it was, to a certain extent I can imagine what it was like. However, if you actually go to the spot, you will discover many other things which you couldn't imagine only through reading documents or writings.
So, in that sense, I am very much interested in going to the actual site where all those things happened. I actually want to walk a little bit. I don't think I can walk several hundred kilometers with 30 kilograms of equipment like Japanese soldiers did. But you can imagine what sort hardships that soldiers on both sides went through in a particular geographical landscape. That is one thing I really expect to do.
And secondly, I'm very much interested in how history is displayed in the Imphal Peace Museum because how to display history in museums has become very important issue, a very political and social issue.
Memory of history can be a powerful component in building people's national identity or community identity. From that point of view, I really want to know what kind of impact these battles had on local people, how memories of the battles are passed to the next generation, how it is remembered, and what sort of feelings it created.
With that, we're now going to jump ahead in time a bit. Our last interview was back in the winter of 2022 when we were together in India, but now I'm here with Dr. Tohmatsu in the summer of 2024 and we are back in Japan. Given the amount of time that's passed, I'm hoping that you can give us an update about what's been happening with this project since our last conversation.
For the past a year and a half, after my visit to India in December 2022, we were almost finished with the basic translation of the text of the Senshi Sosho, the volume on the Battles of Imphal and Kohima. However, we took more time to double check and triple check the text so that we convey the accurate meaning of the original text of the Senshi Sosho to readers.
