District-based recruitment ensured that an individual remained closely linked to his community. Again, Drea emphasizes that a soldier could ot escape his peers and village by joining the army; they came along, and the consequent motivation not to disgrace one family or village by delinquent military service was a powerful one.�The army thus attempted to recreate a traditional family setting in institutionalized form among new recruits. The result, writes Drea, was that ll of these little loyalties to higher authority in this surrogate or substitute family, cultivated originally in one own family, added up to the one great loyalty due to His Imperial Majesty, the emperor of Japan. For most conscripts it was a logical progression from the school curricula, which stressed the uniqueness of Japan because of the unbroken Imperial line.�8Postwar scholarship reveals that the imperial institution, the education system, and the national conscript army were powerful forces for forming and directing the actions of the people in support of national objectives, including fighting and dying in the Greater East Asia War. But how much did wartime propagandists know about Japanese history and culture and its impact on the motivations and aspirations of its people A great deal, at least by 1944. Propagandists�conclusions regarding Japanese wartime culture have proven to be amazingly cogent. John Dower asserts, for example, that the wartime studies prepared by social and behavioral scientists, many of which were examined by psychological warfare personnel, provided highly accurate assessments of the Japanese. Academics, says Dower, offered a ore balanced and empirical analysis of the Japanese national character�because they recognized that culture, not race, was the chief determinant of a people conduct. 19 The ways in which wartime propagandists accumulated knowledge of the Japanese enemy, appraised his strengths and weaknesses, and devised a plan of attack are the subject of the rest of this book, but it is worth noting at this juncture that long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the future head of PWB, SWPA produced an exceedingly interesting and insightful study of Japanese military psychology. Then Capt. Bonner F. Fellers wrote he Psychology of the Japanese Soldier�in 1935 while completing his coursework at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Much of this study was later incorporated into his Answer to Japan, an orientation manual distributed to propagandists after he became head of PWB nearly a decade later.20 Fellers 1935 study argued that the Japanese people were becoming imbued with a anatical religious patriotism�as a result of manipulation of the imperial institution, control over the dissemination of information, and inculcation of militaristic values through schools and military indoctrination. He pointed out the pervasive influence of military men and martial values, frequently quoting Gen. Araki Sadao, an ardent nationalist who served as war minister, army minister, and education minister during the 1930s and who had written in 1934 of the need to propagate the oldier Spirit among the whole nation� and portrayed the army as a sacred instrument of the emperor and nation. Fellers also concluded, much as postwar scholars would, that Japanese soldiers were not substantially different from the rest of the population. he psychology of the Japanese soldier is the psychology of his people,�he wrote. Japanese soldiers and civilians alike internalized a set of values based on loyalty to the emperor and devotion to nation, argued Fellers; they differed from Americans in that the Japanese army placed much greater emphasis on strength of will, offensive spirit, unquestioning obedience, and a psychology of sacrifice.
