Imperial Japanese Army

The Imperial Japanese Army is the victorious military institution that, after the Axis victory in World War II, occupies the western portion of the former United States and enforces a rigid social hierarchy known as "Place." Its officers and retired generals appear throughout the novel as collectors of Americana, arbiters of cultural value, and participants in a covert diplomatic mission that could determine the fate of Japan itself.

Identity and Structure

The Imperial Japanese Army is the land warfare branch of the Empire of Japan, which, together with the Imperial Japanese Navy, secured the Axis victory in World War II. By the novel's present—the early 1960s—the Army has been largely superseded in administrative authority by civilian Trade Missions and the puppet government in Sacramento, but its retired officers retain immense prestige and informal influence. The Army's historical role as the conqueror of the Pacific Coast is the foundation of the "Place" system, under which white Americans like Robert Childan must bow to any Japanese, endure deliberate mispronunciations of their names, and accept humiliation as a daily fact of life. The Army's victory is also the source of the Japanese craze for American historical artifacts—a market that Childan serves and that the Army's collectors, such as Major Ito Humo, helped create.

Officers as Collectors and Cultural Arbiters

Retired Army officers are among the most avid collectors of American historical objects. Major Ito Humo, a tall, slender, white-haired ex-Army man, gave Childan his first inkling of the commercial potential of Americana when he spent an entire afternoon searching through old magazines in Childan's secondhand bookshop. Humo collected old magazines dealing with U.S. brass buttons, as well as the buttons themselves, and introduced Childan to the "Horrors of War" flip cards that had been dispensed with bubble gum during Childan's childhood. Another retired officer, a friend of Humo's, collected the same cards and lacked only one—the Sinking of the Panay—for which he offered a substantial sum. These officers treated the objects not merely as curiosities but as artifacts of a defeated civilization whose material culture could be owned, categorized, and displayed by the victors. The Army's victory thus created not only a political hierarchy but an entire economy of historical authenticity, in which Japanese collectors paid high prices for objects that white Americans had once taken for granted.

General Tedeki and the Secret Diplomacy

The most consequential appearance of the Imperial Japanese Army in the novel is that of General Tedeki, the former Imperial Chief of Staff, who travels incognito to San Francisco under the cover name "Mr. Yatabe" to meet with Rudolf Wegener, a German Abwehr captain posing as a Swedish businessman. General Tedeki is described as an elderly man of about eighty, with a stern, coherent spirit and no fogging of his wits. He is a "fire-eater" who once advocated a crash program to get Japan into space, and his presence in San Francisco is known to the German consulate, which attempts to intercept him. In the meeting at Mr. Tagomi's office, General Tedeki listens as Wegener reveals Operation Dandelion—a plan for a nuclear attack on the Home Islands—and discusses the possibility of supporting SS General Heydrich's faction against the Goebbels government. The general accepts Wegener's microfilmed evidence and places a transpacific call to Tokyo, but he also makes clear that the Emperor would never tolerate an alliance with the SS, which he regards as evil. His role is that of a conduit between the German opposition and the Japanese government, acting not through official channels but through the informal network of retired military men who still command respect in Tokyo.

The Army's Moral and Political Legacy

The Imperial Japanese Army's victory has left a complex moral legacy. On one hand, the Army's occupation is harsh and humiliating for white Americans, who must defer to Japanese at every turn and who live under the constant threat of the Kempeitai, the military police. On the other hand, the Army's legal system is portrayed as rigid but just—as when the Trade Missions cut off the profiteering of a corrupt Japanese landlord like Mr. Oinuro. The Army's officers, unlike the Nazi SS, are not associated with genocide; Mr. Tagomi recalls that during the war, when the Nazi minister at Shanghai requested that the Japanese massacre the Jews interned at Hongkew, his superiors replied that "such is not in accord with humanitarian considerations." This distinction is crucial to the novel's moral calculus: the Imperial Japanese Army, for all its colonial brutality, is not the existential evil that the Nazi regime represents. General Tedeki himself embodies this ambiguity—he is a stern imperialist who accepts the necessity of allying with the SS to save Japan, yet he recoils from the moral implications of that choice. The Army's legacy, in the end, is one of power without redemption, of victory without moral clarity, and of a hierarchy that humiliates the conquered while offering them no hope of liberation.