ABSTRACT
As the New Year dawned in 1945, Yoshida Shoin’s dream of a Japanese empire, fired by the fright of Perry’s unstoppable landing on his nation’s sacred shores, was doomed. After the last gasp in Japan’s war efforts at the battles of the Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944) and at Leyte Gulf (October 23-25, 1944), the Imperial navy and air force were very nearly spent. It was during the battle of the Philippine Sea that Japan had ceased to be a credible air rival to the United States, while the fateful three-day battles of Leyte Gulf doomed the Imperial navy as well. Yet, the dream that had raised these formidable forces before Pearl Harbor lived on in the imaginations of the Koiso-Yonai cabinet in Tokyo, and even in the wistful yearnings of the Emperor. Shipless and nearly flightless, the defenders of Japan’s sacred soil were once again vulnerable to the barbarians’ advance, much as they had been before the Meiji revolution. The final obstacle to an American and allied conquest of Japan was the formidable force of six and a half million soldiers and sailors (now irreversibly beached on their home shores) steeled to deny the Americans their return to Japan at any cost to themselves, even a futile suicidal slaughter.
