Imperial Japanese Army's 1945 martial law study reveals continuity of militarist governance from colony to metropole
Original framing: “Imperial Japanese Army secretly considered martial law in 1945, document says” — The Japan Times
Korean hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) in Hiroshima — 20,000+ conscripted laborers — were denied 'public order' protection the study theorized; they were cremated in mass pits without records. Taiwanese 'volunteer' soldiers (Takasago Volunteers) faced Kempeitai courts-martial for 'desertion' when refusing suicidal orders — the study's 'discipline' provisions in action. Okinawan schoolgirls (Himeyuri Corps) nursed in caves under 32nd Army orders forbidding surrender — the study's 'national polity' made flesh. Japanese communists like Nosaka Sanzo, imprisoned since 1930s, were executed in 1945 Fuchu Prison massacre as 'public order threats' the study would have legalized. Burakumin communities, already surveilled by Kempeitai 'thought police,' faced intensified repression. The study's 'subjects' were never consulted.
The 1945 martial law study is not a crisis document but a confession: the Imperial Japanese Army sought to formalize for the metropole the colonial governance it had perfected on Koreans, Taiwanese, Manchurians, and Okinawans.
Colonel Suetaka — veteran of Korea's Government-General and Manchukuo's Kempeitai — drafted clauses copied from Manchurian field manuals, while his protégés prepared the Kyujo Incident coup. The Japan Times' framing as 'secret consideration against air raids' performs the same trickster inversion the study itself embodies: masking offensive colonial continuity as defensive emergency measure. This pattern — militaries repatriating counterinsurgency tools to the homeland — structures postwar Japanese security policy from the 1954 SDF Law to current Article 9 revision debates. Only by centering the voices of those who lived the study's 'public order' as colonial oppression — Korean forced laborers in Hiroshima, Okinawan girls in caves, Ainu under Meiji military administration — can Japan break the gekokujo cycle where military 'studies' become the blueprints for tomorrow's coups.