There was a man called Fujimori Seiichirō
There was a man called Fujimori Seiichirō. Before the war he opposed going to war, and after it he turned into one of those rare but recurring monster-like figures... I'm not sure this will land, but something along the lines of Hata Masanori. He was a seriously impressive person, on about the same level as Ishiwara Kanji.
As military attache in Peking, Fujimori grasped the actual state of China through talks with Wu Peifu and others, and on that basis correctly foresaw both the error of Japan's China strategy and the inevitability of war with America. He put it in writing and submitted it to the central command, where it was ignored, and in 1940 he was transferred to the reserve list. At the end of the war he worked as one of Suzuki Kantaro's brains, and afterward he switched for a time to democratic civics education.
After that he ran the Ichigen Kyokai, the Japanese People's Independence Movement and other groups, and published his personal magazine *Independence* through 278 issues. Although he came out of the navy's flag officer class, he kept pressing the question of the Emperor's war responsibility. In situational awareness, intellectual independence, and the ability to judge without pandering to the current of the times, he clearly had a superior mind.
There are plenty of people whose writing changes completely between wartime and postwar, but this man was consistent. During the war, when "the whole hundred million" were being "asked to take up battle stations", he argued that it made no sense not to treat people who died in combat action inside the country as war dead.
Getting children into air-raid shelters, doing firefighting drills — those were combat too, and "ordinary citizens killed by bombs ought to count as killed in action". And: "when it comes to air-raid shelters and the like, those with money build good ones while the great majority are left out in the rain — that is not what fighting a war looks like."
At Fujimori's own house, "the other day a fire-insurance salesman came around and told me that if I had no wartime policy they could take no responsibility in case of bombing", which enraged him. Leaving "damage arising from acts of war to be borne by individuals" showed a lack of fighting spirit; this was "a war at the crossroads of national survival", so suspending life insurance and fire insurance "entirely and for the duration" would free up "several hundred thousand" workers. If there was going to be a decisive battle on the home islands, then "the subjects' livelihood should be guaranteed entirely by the state", and only then does it make sense to ask the people for "their best efforts toward the exertion of fighting power". You'd have to call that a sensible position.
Fujimori's thinking stayed consistent on one point: if you're going to do it, do it all the way. That he started democratic civics education immediately after the war is surprising, and I can't help wondering whether he did it to earn money after being purged from public office, but here too what he writes is sound.
Japan has been defeated. Its state functions are lost and it lies under the control of the Allied powers. Why has it been placed in such a fate? Because the Japanese people were deficient in the qualifications of a citizen. Because the Japanese people were not world people. And so, because the existence of the Japanese was a destruction of culture and an obstacle to international society, the world set upon them all at once.
People of Japan. First, reflect. What should the Japanese as an international person do? What are our qualifications as a citizen, as a member of society? What resolve and what cultivation do we require, so that the existence of the Japanese adds light to the world? The nation of Japan since the beginning of its history has failed at this. How shall Japan and the Japanese hereafter contribute to the world? Research into this and its practice must be the urgent task of our people under the present situation. Let those who share this concern come and join. Let us strive together for the construction of a new Japan.
Fujimori Seiichirō, *What Is a Citizen: An English-Japanese Parallel Text* (Komin to wa: Eiwa taiyaku), Kōmin Kyōhonsha, April 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections (accessed 2026-03-16 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗
There is not the faintest whiff of money-making here, and nothing in it to make a reader feel good. And it is consistent. During the war he criticized the regime — "you talk about a hundred million battle stations while leaving the damage to individuals; that is not a war footing" — and in 1946 he accepted the fact of defeat and set out to make international people for the construction of a new Japan. That *What Is a Citizen* came out as an "English-Japanese parallel text" was, for Fujimori, only natural.
Fujimori went stupid in one specific area!
And yet after the war Fujimori also wrote some completely deranged things.
If we had fought on the home islands another year, Japan's population would have been halved and everything would have been destroyed. But the American army would also have taken something like a tenth of that in dead. And so the expeditionary force would have lost and gone home to its own country one day or another. As history's examples show, the American army too would have given up continuing a pointless war.
What we urged at the time of the unconditional surrender was that, given the population, the conditions for independence could not be met on four islands. If the population had been halved at that time, a self-sufficient posture could have been established and an army of half a million or a million could have been maintained; but as things stand today, we must conclude that the time when Japan can become independent will not come.
"Young men, rise up" / Fujimori Seiichirō / *Nihon oyobi Nihonjin* 4(1), J&J Corporation, January 1953. National Diet Library Digital Collections (accessed 2026-03-16 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗
In short, the claim is that it would have been better not to surrender unconditionally and instead to fight until the population was cut in half.
Japan's population then was about 72 million, so this works out to an assumption that 36 million people die — isn't that impossible? The bit about the American army getting tired of the war and going home is sloppy too, and it's a mystery why halving the population would make self-sufficiency work, since a decisive battle on the home islands would also destroy the farmland, the infrastructure and the industrial base. If the productive base is wiped out, self-sufficiency doesn't hold even at half the population, and you can't maintain an army of half a million or a million. It's the kind of content a child would mock you mercilessly for — stupid, stupid, that's a moron's thinking — but looking at "Young men, rise up" as a whole, he doesn't write anything all that strange.
Japan had already lost the moment it depended on America for both military and civilian supply, and since that had been clear since before the war, he had wanted to avoid an armed conflict; but once it had started, unconditional surrender in particular had to be prevented, because no other occupied country had surrendered unconditionally. Even at the stage when the atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima and the Soviet Union had entered the war, Fujimori drew up a document saying that "only fighting it out to the end can keep Japan alive" and distributed it to Imperial General Headquarters. It's close to a crank document, but Soviet entry was a settled matter in his mind, and he had presumably prepared his response to this situation in advance. This was not panic in an extreme situation; "fight on until the population is halved" was worked out in advance.
Even here you can see the sharpness of his thinking, but fighting until the population is halved is insane. Then again, Fujimori also writes that "everyone past the prime of life today is responsible for the defeat" and that "people past the prime of life are people who failed, so nothing can be expected of them". You could just about read the half that ought to disappear as the "past the prime of life", "failed", "responsible for the defeat" group including himself, but that's probably reading too much into it; the natural conclusion is simply that the war made him stupider.
Speaking generally, prolonged extreme stress degrades cognitive function, and chronic stress damages complex judgment and long-term thinking. Speech is restricted, the number of people voicing dissent drops and information becomes skewed. Because you are forced into immediate responses to the problem in front of you, the time available for thinking shrinks, and across the board you get stupider.
Fujimori's case is a little different, and my guess is that it runs like this.
- He knew we would lose and the war was started anyway
- Once started, it ought to have been won
- I told Suzuki as much
- And this is the result
There was very likely a memory this intense at work, shaping his thinking. War makes intense experiences and traumas like this more likely, and the result is that war makes people stupider — a situation where each individual is made stupider by his own personal experience, but seen as a group it looks like stupidity spreading in every direction at once.
People go stupid when they run out of money, and they go stupid when there's a war
You sometimes hear it said that war advances technology. It's true that where the goal is clear and the criteria for evaluation are obvious, that does happen. Improving radar performance, breaking codes, increasing the destructive power of bombs — these advance because a crisis concentrates resources. It gets done because the field of vision has narrowed at the scale of an entire nation.
In another sort of case, being placed in a crisis makes noradrenaline and dopamine pour out, and the head spins ridiculously fast for a while; a war probably makes that more likely too. But this too stops working once the crisis drags on and becomes chronic.
The fair judgment is that war sharpens certain cognitive abilities while damaging others. The difficult part is that the experience of success through hyperfocus blocks any awareness of the damaged parts. Partial correctness hides the derangement of the big-picture judgment. The same thing happened to Fujimori.
If Japan had gone through with a decisive battle on the home islands as Fujimori urged, the Soviet Union might have invaded Hokkaido and Japan might have been split north and south. That would have been the result furthest of all from the "independence" Fujimori wanted. The end of the war was the worst and ugliest of outcomes, but the state survived and the machinery of government was still functioning when it moved into occupation. Fujimori of all people should have been able to see that far ahead. That he could not is, I think, a concrete example of war making people stupider.
Going stupid in a war resembles going stupid when you have no money; in the latter case the mechanism is that having no money takes up your thinking, so there are fewer resources left for other judgments. The same person makes rational decisions when there is money, and the quality of the decisions drops when the money runs out.If there is a difference, it is that going stupid from having no money is reversible — the money increases and you go back to normal.
But a head made worse by war does not go back. The dead stay dead, and Fujimori's experience of "I was right and we lost our independence anyway" cannot be filled in. That is why Fujimori kept the slogan "no peace and no freedom without independence" on the cover of *Independence*.