"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."
-- George Santayana
Between Roppongi and Akasaka -- two of the ritziest precincts in Tokyo -- there lies a discrete spot, nestled away among the most expensive real estate anywhere on the planet. It’s the modest residence of a long-dead Japanese soldier, under a sweeping shroud of weeping cherry trees in the shadow of one of Japan’s tallest and most fabulous contemporary buildings, the Midtown Project.
The opulent Project’s motto may be: “Introducing Japan’s newest significance to the world,” but right next to it, in this austere, smallish house built in 1902 with a red-brick stable and a compact garden, Japan’s most venerable significance to the world may be found.
For, contrary to the popular Hollywood film, Tom Cruise was not the last samurai. General Maresuke Nogi was.
Born to a samurai family in 1849, at the age of twenty Nogi embarked on a military career. Being of the first generation to come of age during the Meiji Restoration, as part of the new modern Imperial Army he trained in accordance with Prussian infantry procedures. In 1871, he was commissioned as a major, and he saw service in the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, during which a Bakumatsu hero, Saigo Takamori launched a last-ditch stand to preserve the old samurai values.
For his valorous service in this campaign, Nogi was promoted to colonel. Around that time, he married Shizuko, a daughter of a Satsuma samurai who, in short order, bore two sons.
In 1887, Nogi went to Germany to study European military tactics. From then on, his career would follow the fortunes of the increasingly confident, expanding Japanese Empire. By 1894, already a major general, Nogi had command of the First Infantry Brigade that bested Chinese defenses during the First Sino-Japanese War and occupied Port Arthur after only a single day of combat. In 1895, now a lieutenant general, he was charged with the task of invading Taiwan, and a year later was appointed as the Japanese Governor-General of that island.
Imperial designs by both Russia and Japan on Manchuria and Korea would come to a head in Manchuria. Its key port, Port Arthur -- now the Chinese city of Liaoshun -- lay along a natural harbor in the Liaodong Peninsula. Japan had been ceded this port in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki with China, but Russia would manage to lease it from China anyway. In February 1904, Japan gave notice that it would have none of it. In an eerie precursor of the tactics used to strike at Pearl Harbour thirty-seven years later, Its navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at anchor in Port Arthur bay, managing to sink or damage much of the enemy’s naval assets.
In May 1904, the Japanese Second Army, 38,500 strong, landed on the Liaodong peninsula. The Russian forces arrayed against it consisted of 17,000 soldiers under the command of Major-General Anatoly Stoessel.
By 26 May 1904, the Japanese had fought their way to the 116-meter high Nanshan hill, which guarded the approach to Port Arthur. 3000 men of the 5th East Siberian Rifles were there, dug into fortified positions protected by mine fields, machine guns and barbed wire obstacles. Nine assault waves by determined Japanese troops failed to break the Russian defense. It was only when the Russians had run out of ammunition that they retreated toward Port Arthur.
The first, "high-tech" war had begun.
Ten days later, the Japanese Third Army, led by General (and by now Baron) Maresuke Nogi, made landfall on the Liaodong Peninsula. Nogi already knew that his firstborn son had just been killed in the Battle of Nanshan. Nogi’s younger son was with him, among the 90,000 troops under his command.
Battered by the Japanese forces, the rest of the Russian units retreated to Port Arthur, where they consolidated under the command of General Stoessel. Nogi believed that he could take Port Arthur quickly, just as he had ten years before. He had a 2-to-1 advantage against the nearly 50,000 Russian soldiers, and he had 380 canons. But the Japanese general did not realize that the Port Arthur of 1904 was not the one he had known in 1894.
Port Arthur was a natural stronghold, surrounded by hills that protected against attack from all directions, including the sea. It was Russia’s only warm water port in the Pacific. Since taking over in 1898, they had turned it into a giant fortress, with four major forts, Laoti, Chikuan, Erhlung and Sungssu in the east, and four major forts in the west.
All these were built of brick and stone on steep hills, with gun batteries, deep moats and ditches, bastions, firing parapets, blind turns and no-exit mazes. Such classic features of European fortification engineering were augmented by new defensive inventions: 6-meter wide belts of densely interwoven barbed wire, night illumination by powerful searchlight batteries and star shells, electric fences, plus such dual-use technologies as hand grenades, poison gas, machine guns and quick-fire howitzers, heavy mortars, bolt-action magazine rifles, and more.
On 7 August 1904, General Nogi launched a frontal assault on the Russian positions. After bitter fighting in torrential rain, the Russian defenders were forced to withdraw, but only after inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers. The Japanese now attacked the northwest hill positions. Here, the barbed wire entanglements held up their advance at an effective Russian machine-gun range. By dawn, the entanglements had been buried under piles of Japanese soldiers’ bodies.
An assault on Erhlung and Chikuan put the Japanese force on a 1 km-wide strip between the two forts, where it was mowed down by Russian machine gun crossfire, even as the two forts were being turned to rubble by Nogi’s artillery. An attack on the Russian fort on the 174-Meter Hill replayed the Pyrrhic victory scenario of Nanshan. An attack on the 203-Meter Hill saw whole battalions of Japanese soldiers charging repeatedly with fixed bayonets up the 40-degree incline of the ramparts, to be cut down by machine gun and cannon fire.
After three weeks of fighting and not much territorial gain, the butcher’s bill for the Japanese Third Army was 16,000 casualties. The attackers now dug in for a classic siege. They built trenches perpendicular to the Russian forts, and dug tunnels under them. Despite their bravery, by September’s end they had conquered little new territory. The Russians, though weakened by many dead and wounded, dwindling food supplies and scurvy, were digging tunnels under the Japanese tunnelers. In some of those, the two sides met and fought with sapper’s knives and pick mattocks.
Nogi then resumed the assault on Erhlung and Chikuan. The Japanese had reduced Erhlung to a pile of rubble through heavy shelling and underground mining. Still, the remaining Russian defenders at the two forts continued to rake with dense fire, turning the approach slopes into blood-slicked killing fields. Repulsed, Nogi concentrated now on the 203-Meter Hill, which he intended to present to Emperor Meiji for the latter’s 29 October 1904 birthday.
Wave after wave of Japanese soldiers crashed onto the hill, using hand-grenades and bayonet-fixed rifles, under cover of dense artillery fire. It was hand-to-hand combat, six days and nights, with the latter illuminated by Russian searchlights. Instead of the intended present, Nogi had to report to Emperor Meiji the deaths of additional 124 officers and 3611 soldiers.
But failure was unthinkable. On 17 November, the Japanese attacked Chikuan again. They were repulsed after a night of close combat. Again, fallback, artillery bombardment, renewed attack. The Japanese attackers on 26 November were showered with hand grenades and explosive charges, burning oil and firebrands. The maze works channeled them straight toward the business end of Russian machine gun nests. They sustained 12,000 casualties in that assault, with nothing gained.
Next day, Nogi resumed the frontal attack on the 203-Meter Hill. Again, columns of Japanese soldiers charged up the steep slope, led by volunteer units whose order was not to come back alive. The battle lasted 15 hours, and left the hill strewn with Japanese bodies.
By December 5, out of the original force of 5000, only 1000 Russian defenders remained on the hill, most of them wounded. The Japanese launched one more attack, at dawn.
Out of ammunition, the Russians fought with rifle butts and swords, to the last man standing. By mid-afternoon, a Japanese standard was flying from the top of 203- Meter Hill. Among the dead, four layers thick that day, was General Nogi’s last surviving son.
15,000 Japanese troops had been killed or wounded in the final six-day assault on 203-Meter Hill. Nogi was so emotionally shattered that he asked for permission to commit the ritual samurai suicide, seppuku. Emperor Meiji’s direct order prevented him from carrying out his wish.
It was back to Chikuan and Ehrlung. More giant mines exploded under ramparts, hand-to-hand combat, soldiers killed and maimed by the thousands. Chikuan fought to the last man. Out of the initial 50,000, only 5,000 Russians were still capable of combat. General Stoessel surrendered Port Arthur on 2 January 1905. Rarely had so valiant defenders fought such brave attackers.
1. Aftermath
The Siege of Port Arthur cost the Japanese 57,780 casualties, not counting thousands more dead from diseases. The Russians had 31,306 casualties. Over 23,000 more were taken into captivity. General Nogi had little time to contemplate this, as he now took his remaining soldiers north, to join the forces of Marshal Oyama against the main bulk of the Russian army.
Nogi’s breach through the Russian rear over the Hun River sealed the fate of the Battle of Mukden. It would be the last land battle of the Russo-Japanese War. There had been and there would be further sea battles, with the Battle of Tsushima ranking as one of the greatest naval battles in history. But we aim here to trace the fate of an infantry commander.
Nogi returned to Tokyo to a hero’s welcome and to great honors. But he settled with his wife as a now-childless couple in their spartan home in Akasaka, and became a personal tutor to the future heir to the Japanese throne, Hirohito. Late in his life, Emperor Hirohito would remark that Nogi had had a lasting influence on him, instilling precepts of frugality and stoic virtues of endurance, loyalty and dignity.
Guilt over the carnage of Port Arthur and despair over the loss of his sons must have tormented the old general. He spent his personal fortune on memorial monuments for the Japanese soldiers killed during the Russo-Japanese War, and on hospitals for those wounded there. It’s a testimony to his character that he caused the Japanese government to erect a memorial monument in Port Arthur to the Russian fallen too.
On 13 September 1912 at 19:40, just as Emperor Meiji's funeral procession was getting under way, Maresuke Nogi and his wife seated themselves facing the emperor's portrait in the upstairs parlor of the home that now stands under the weeping trees. They had already bathed, changed into white kimonos, and shared a cup of sake. Then, Mrs. Nogi plunged a dagger into her heart, and the general disemboweled himself with his sword. In notes left for posterity, Nogi apologized for the tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers he had sent to their death in Port Arthur, and for other self-perceived failures in his military career.
The Nogis’ suicide was front page news for months in Japan. Many saw it as a warning from an exalted member of the last samurai generation against the rampant materialism and decline in moral values that had become evident since Japan’s opening to the West. But the establishment saw a golden opportunity in emphasizing Nogi’s loyalty to the emperor, for in his exit poem Nogi had expressed the wish to follow the emperor in death.
Within days of General Nogi’s suicide, government propaganda commenced to enshrine it as the embodiment of the highest virtue – loyalty to the emperor. This loyalty-unto-death aspect would grow to mythical proportions – until it, and the emperor’s divinity, crashed in the embers of World War 2.
Today, the mention of Maresuke Nogi’s name in Japan elicits mild embarrassment. The military-political junta that had led Japan to suicide in World War 2 had chosen to emphasize those parts of General Nogi’s life and death as would bolster its misbegotten aims. But the man who rendered judgment onto himself deserves better.
2. Never Again: History Repeats Itself
Aspects of Nogi’s life story are virtually indecipherable to the Western mind, starting with the very concept of a divine emperor of a modern nation, and ending with the slicing open of one’s own belly like a grapefruit. It’s unwise, as well, to judge a man born in 1849 by the standards of 2017. But it’s useful to compare Nogi’s conduct to that of European generals who, merely two years after his suicide, would send millions of soldiers to their death in vast hails of bullets and clouds of mustard gas while conducting frontal attacks on fortified trenches.
Nogi was the first commander to lead a major infantry campaign in the face of 20th century military technology. His Prussian training had emphasized massed infantry charges against defensive positions. Such tactics had led to his first easy conquest of Port Arthur, in 1894. But by 1904, firepower capability had doubled, and new defensive technologies had been implemented. Nogi was unable to understand the full implication of this in time to adapt his tactics. For that, 57,780 of his soldiers paid with their lives, and, by his own choice, so would he.
But the Allied generals of World War 1 had Nogi’s errors to learn from. Yet they ignored the Port Arthur precedents out of haughty stupidity and unwarranted hubris. The French in 1915- 1917, the British in 1916-1917, and the Americans in 1917-1918 would commit all the deadly tactical errors that the Japanese had committed in 1904 and 1905. 5.7 million Allied soldiers paid for this with their lives, and 4 million Central Powers’ soldiers too – the greatest carnage of soldiers in history, until World War 2 upped the ante.
It was all so eminently avoidable. For the siege of Port Arthur had been one of the first international mass media events ever. Reporters from the major Western newspapers had come to observe the fighting, and they described it in newspapers, magazines, and books. The Illustrated London News brought out on 7 January 1905 an extra double number, “Port Arthur: Its Siege” . Among its three special supplements, one was a detailed, illustrated history of the operations by Charles Lowe, a military historian. The Times’ reporters were so zealous that the Russians threatened to arrest them, citing security concerns.
Foreign military observers from all the Western powers were thick on the ground and at sea in all the large battles of the Russo-Japanese War. They saw and reported to their superiors what modern firepower from fortified defensive positions could do. They published voluminous accounts and analyses.
Yet, one of these, General Ian Hamilton, would send division after British and ANZAC division, to storm over minefields bullet-spewing fortified Turkish positions on the cliffs and beaches of Gallipoli, wasting 141,000 soldiers in the 1915 Dardanelles campaign.
In 1915 too, General Douglas Haig -- also a Russo-Japanese War observer -- would send repeated charges of tens of thousands of British soldiers “over the top,” straight into entrenched German machine gun, mortar and howitzer fire. In the four months of the Somme campaign alone, by ignoring the lessons of Port Arthur the British high command wasted 420,000 British soldiers, and the French 200,000, all to gain two miles of land. A generation of British women would be left to live and die as spinsters.
It just wasn’t necessary.
The British were not alone in this shame. General Lombard, chef the French Mission Militaire attached to the Japanese Army, described in his reports a 2600-strong Japanese regiment that had been reduced to 30 soldiers and three officers at the Battle of Mukden, due to the power of modern firearms. Yet, a few years later, the French General Robert Georges Nivelle could plan a 48-hour offensive against the German forces along the Western Front, with 10,000 projected casualties. The offensive lasted 23 days and resulted in 148,000 French casualties.
Throughout World War 1, Allied casualties were especially heavy among officers, who dressed in spiffy uniforms that German riflemen had learned to spot at a distance. Camouflage, crawling under fire, and other defensive methods were considered dishonorable, even though French military observers had concluded already in 1905, in Manchuria, that these precisely would be the indispensable methods of survival in the modern theatre of war.
Nor were the Americans immune. Among the 17 American military observers in Manchuria was Captain John J. Pershing. Yet, 13 years after Port Arthur, Pershing, now Lt. General and commander of the American forces in World War 1, allowed 1,811 U.S. Marines to be slaughtered and 7966 to be wounded in six foolhardy attacks against sweeping German machine gun fire at the Battle of Belleau Wood.
These bemedaled, calcified eminences went on to fame and glory after the war, with few exceptions like Hamilton and Nivelle, who were slapped on the wrist for having sent hundreds of thousands to their profligate death. General Maresuke Nogi occupies a different moral plane, and for that he deserves remembrance and respect.
3. Once is not enough
What happened to General Nogi, to his troops, and to the valiant Russian defenders of Port Arthur, was a tragedy. But when tragedy repeats itself, it’s as comedy. And the clowns on the second occasion, the Great War, would neither be held to account nor would they hold themselves to account like Nogi had done. It’s in this macabre farce, worthy of Rowan Atkinson’s 'Blackadder,' that Europe’s first attempt at mass suicide was enveloped.
The trauma of mechanized slaughter of millions of cannon fodder conscripts, orchestrated by operetta generals in World War 1 was so great, that almost all the social pathologies of the 20th century may be traced to it. Communism, Fascism, Nazism, “democratic” socialism, pacifism, militant feminism, nouveau liberalism, false egalitarianism, aggressive Third-Worldism -- all blossomed from the wreckage of this war.
George Orwell could thus write of an England ruled by “people whose chief asset was their stupidity,” and a generation of post-War writers, from PG Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, seconded him in this opinion.
The Western system of values, its standards of merit and beauty, were compromised too. An artistic movement called Dada, a urinal on a pedestal in a museum, would have been unthinkable prior to the Great War. The devaluation of manly valor, of honor, integrity, stoicism, fidelity, loyalty, patriotism, began when Europeans realized that millions of their kin had just been sent to automated abattoirs in foreign mud fields by inept, mustachioed martinets in cavalry breeches, spouting patriotic slogans in an utterly unnecessary war.
People who had experienced the horrors of the Great War came to believe that nothing was worth fighting for. Even as Hitler arose amidst them, they would do nothing until it was nearly too late. Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, would mutate into the cowardly appeaser of Vichy. Neville Chamberlain would sue for peace before a shot had been fired. Western intellectuals were marching as one to the drumbeat of a psycho Georgian killer running Mother Russia the way Ivan the Terrible once had.
Spanish writer, Sebastián Vivar Rodríguez, would later decry that Europe died in Auschwitz. But the dream of Europe had already perished at the Somme, Verdun, Ypres and Passchendaele, twenty five years earlier, by its own hand. What incinerated in 1939 -1945 was the new shoots that had sprouted from the stump of a felled tree.
A few such shoots survived, regenerated, and grew into a new Europe, again full of self confidence and vigor between 1946 and 1966. But this new tree too is being sawed through by the West’s “best and brightest,” though not of the beribboned kind now. Running as fast and as far as they can from the evils of the two world wars, they are dragging the West right into the opposite evil, the love of elitism.
Like a pendulum that can only swing from one extreme of its arc to the other, the 2017 heirs to the mantle of 1917 politicians have become their cartoon antithesis. Though Europe’s 20th century suicide in two acts should have discredited militarism, pusillanimity, chauvinism, racism, colonialism, gender and class discrimination and nihilism, the bien pensant have harnessed the blowback to discredit war in self-defense, courage, patriotism, white ethnicity, the every peoples’ (Caucasian, African, Asian) self-determination, white males, inequality based on merit, and Christianity.
The Vikings are now the obsequious servants of their women and their imported freeloaders. Not that there was true glory in being savage brutes; but being eunuchs is not much better. And the United States, once of ‘manifest destiny,’ has curdled into a “proposition nation” of no discernible borders, language, culture or continuity -- as though the people who founded and built it, their culture and their descendants, never existed. Donald Trump's victory, was an acute rejection of this ethos, though his flawed presidency seems destined to further polarize socio-economic extremities.
From the self-confidence and sense of superiority of the 1900s and 1950s, the West has evolved into a groveling clump of meek masochists, worshipping false idols because they are not the old false idols. The political, intellectual and artistic elite in every country of the West is now fawning on its previous perceived lessers: the non-white, the foreign ethnic, the non-Christian, the female, the homosexual, the dumb and deviant. And it does so as though such “minorities” had the sole monopoly on virtue. The tyranny of pc culture is absolute. The result was Brexit, a reaction not only to economic globalism, but a backlash against the perceived self-indulgent, multilayered, overpaid levels of bureaucracy which even now strangles the EU.
Forever fighting the previous war when it’s no longer relevant, eyes firmly planted on the realities of 1915 and 1940, Western elites are busy combating “racism,” “orientalism,” “ethnocentrism” and “sexism”. And they do so by committing a dual act of treason. Its one prong is the forced dilution and suppression of the Western founding peoples’ racial, ethnic and cultural heritage and identity. Its other prong is the forced injection of the previously slighted “minorities” into the upper echelons of power, regardless of merit. Hence the 'quota' policies which build resentment and are, in their own way, every bit as divisive as all the statues of Confederate generals.
Just because a hundred years ago power was wielded by incompetent white males of dubious character, the main qualification for the new Praetorian Guard is to be a woman, a non-heterosexual, or a “person of color” of dubious wisdom. But only true meritocracy and ethnic cohesiveness can save the West from being destroyed by the spreading chaos from the less progressive nations of some of the Third World, and by the might of the East, where male oligarchies, tribal allegiance, and ruthless sexist meritocracy still hold sway.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the West and Japan came to kiss the hand of the once-sleeping giant that they had formerly belittled and exploited, and now enriched and armed to the teeth beyond the wildest reaches of imagination. And China, one of the world’s most ethnocentric, xenophobic, oppressive (i.e. witness Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo's treatment) and imperialist powers (the 'Belt and Road initiative and the rampant militarization of the South China Sea islands), skillfully exploits Western shame at having once been themselves ethnocentric, racist, tyrannical and imperialist.
Mouthing their mea culpa for Port Arthur and Nanking, opium and Hong Kong, the world’s leaders would have to pass under the giant portrait of Mao Zedong, in order to enter the Forbidden City. And Mao, proudly flaunted by the Chinese hosts, is one of the worst mass murderers in history, responsible for snuffing out at least 60 million Chinese lives, and by some accounts up to 80 million in examples of excess such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. China has every right to superpower greatness, yet doing so by playing on foreign guilt and adopting instances of artifice does not give one particular confidence that they will actually act like like superpower should.
That the great chiefs of the guai-loh, the white devils, would attend an opening ceremony in which a fake singer was lip-synching to the words of "Hymn to the Motherland," and 56 children from the Chinese Han majority dressed in the ethnic costumes of 56 Chinese minorities would be paraded to show the white fools that China too loves diversity. And after that, the poor white devils went on to cheer at ball games and toast at 30-course banquets even as the Chinese continued working dawn to dusk and saving 35% of their income while the armored columns of another patriarchal, ethnocentric, racist and tyrannical empire, Russia, having planned for months for precisely this moment, smashed into Georgia.
There were lessons for the West to be drawn from the 2008 visit in China, just as there had been in 1904. But if the lessons of 1904 had fallen on the deaf ears of cocky chauvinists, the lessons of 2008 were lost on self-satisfied globalists.
One hopes that future historians will see the West’s postmodern regime of liberalism, multiculturalism, sham egalitarianism, tolerance of the intolerable, cowardice, one-worldism and stigmatization, for the suicide it is. It could be just as plain as our image of World War 1 is now. And just like then, by paying heed to lessons from the East, the Western self-erasure unfolding now can still be averted.
The greatest lesson, though, and one that is by now outer-space alien to the shallow midgets running many of the G20 countries on behalf of their devitalized demos, is embedded in the character of the man whom we began this article. Here is how war correspondent, Richard Barry, who was with General Nogi for nine months in Manchuria, eulogized him in the New York Times on 14 September 1912:
“Of all the human beings I have ever known he rises in my memory as the one superb, complete person. He was at once soldier and poet, statesman and artist. Always he was the gentleman -- wondrously gentle, and a man to the bone. That figure of a poised, intent, suffering, masterful spirit, tried alternately by desperate defeat and by tremendous triumph, neither deterred by the one nor elated by the other, will always stand before me as an ideal. He had learned that the hope of heaven and the fear of hell are vulgar vices and that the superior man loves right for its own sake. He was the arch-type of the old high order of chivalric thinking, of unshrinking living, and of stoical dying. Other great men may come, but such a great man as this we are not likely to see again.”
Look around at your President, Prime Minister, Head of State or Head of Government. By the criteria above do they approximate those values? Do they come close? And if so, how?
Would that we can today find someone of whom such an epitaph can be written.
