On September 3 Russia celebrated a new holiday: Victory over the Japanese Empire Day. It was marked as a public holiday in the Soviet Union in 1945-1947, and on April 14, 2020 on the initiative of a number of deputies, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted a law changing the date of the Military Commemoration Day marking the end of the Second World War to September 3. This date is particularly significant in the Far East of Russia. For example, the Regional Patriotic Forum Victory in the Far East was held in Khabarovsk from August 27-30, 2023. The present author, who had participated in the Forum returned from the event with a number of thoughts on the reasons why, although in the public consciousness this holiday has never had as great a significance as the day of victory over Nazi Germany, more attention should be paid to this date – and not just because of Japan’s current rapprochement with Washington and its reaction to Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. In fact, this is a much more significant issue.
There is a simple test to determine what ideas are predominantly associated with any given concept. A person is given a word and asked to say the first thing that comes into their heads in connection with that word. And when Russians hear the words “War” and “Victory”, the vast majority of them immediately understand that we are talking about the Great Patriotic War. That is what is meant by the War, with a capital letter. It was a conflict that defined the image of war as an unprecedented ordeal in which the enemy reached the edges of the capital city and victory was achieved at the cost of unimaginable sacrifice and destruction. Almost every family lost someone, and this applies to senior politicians as much as ordinary citizens. Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union for most of the second half of its history, served as a front-line soldier who participated in the fighting and was then involved in overseeing the reconstruction of destroyed areas. The legacy of that conflict was to create a taboo around the idea of open militarism in the USSR, and in many areas state policy was based on the informal slogan of “no war, whatever the cost”. The word “war”, naturally, was understood to mean a national catastrophe on the scale of the Great Patriotic War.
As a result, there are no other events that might lend the word “war” more positive associations in the public consciousness. The Soviet Union was involved in other conflicts, but this information was generally classified, and even the Afghan War received very little official publicity. People talked about in the privacy of their homes, but it was not discussed openly. In part because of this secrecy, some of the veterans of that conflict had problems adjusting to life in civilian society, a situation that became known as Afghan Syndrome, a condition similar to Vietnam Syndrome in the USA.
In the US, the Vietnam War was generally seen as a lost war that America had fought for no clearly defined reason, and in the present author’s view, the US authorities, realizing this, tried to present those subsequent conflicts that obtained major media coverage (e.g. Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War) in a way that would change public attitudes to wars. In the three instances just cited, the media focus was on an easy victory thanks to superior US weaponry, and US troops were unambiguously portrayed as the “good guys” and as defenders of justice, opposing corrupt dictatorial regimes, and in these cases (unlike in the DPRK) the propaganda was relatively close to the reality.
But let us return to the Soviet Union’s, and Russia’s, experience. As is well known, in both battles and sports, a “clean win” is valued much more highly than a “win on points”, even though movies like to focus on long and closely-contested fights – whether in war or in sport – in which one side only managed to overcome its rival right at the last moment. However, a much higher value is attached to a true victory, which is based on careful planning and study of the enemy’s position, and in which the victor maximizes their strengths and makes the most of the enemy’s weaknesses, while striving to prevent the enemy from doing the same. And victories of this kind, which in cinema we see mostly in samurai films, a genre in which a combat is presented as hand-to hand sword fighting with much cutting off of heads at lightning speed, are a reflection of the victor’s strength, rather than of the loser’s weakness.
The Soviet army’s victory over the Japanese Empire was just such a victory. Although the Pacific theatre of World War II, or even the Japanese intervention in the Soviet Far East, are not very well known in modern Russia, Japan was a very serious, aggressively intelligent and brave opponent. In the clashes with Japan at Lake Hasan and Khalkhin-Gol the USSR found itself tested to the limit and its experience may have led to a rethinking of Soviet military doctrines, which then played an important role in the Great Patriotic War.
When fighting the Allies in the Pacific, Japan carried out a lightning military campaign that was even more devastating than Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Europe. And although some experts believe that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, given the difference in economic power, the Imperial Japanese Army proved to be a formidable opponent in both offensive and defensive actions. Japan was also preparing for a conflict with the Soviet Union. Japan’s Kwantung Army was a strong and sizeable military contingent ready to face its enemy from entrenched positions in massive underground bunkers.
We have recently written about the role played by the Soviet Union in the Allied victory over Japan, and will not repeat ourselves here. Instead, we will focus on a different issue. The USSR was able to defeat the mighty Japanese war machine in just 6 days. On August 9 the Soviet Army entered the war, and on August 15 Emperor Hirohito ordered his troops to stop hostilities. Moreover, the USSR defeated Japan in areas in which the Japanese considered themselves to unsurpassed.
Let readers judge for themselves: many of Japan’s successes in the Pacific were based on the Imperial Army’s ability to cross territory which, according to Western strategists, no army could pass through. Thus, the Japanese made their way through what everyone assumed to be impenetrable jungle, and reached Singapore, where no-one was expecting them. They then forced that impregnable fortress to surrender, even though its garrison outnumbered the Japanese attackers. But even the Japanese considered the waterless Gobi Desert and the Greater Khingan mountains adjacent to it to be an insurmountable natural obstacle. But the Soviet army not only crossed this territory, but did so with tank divisions. Japan’s Kwantung Army was ready to defend its positions, but the Soviet army’s coordinated command and its standards on the amount of artillery pieces per kilometer of front swept away their defenses like autumn leaves blown by the wind.
The bravery of the Japanese soldiers and officers, their professionalism and their readiness to lay down their lives in their Emperor’s service are beyond question. However, when the Japanese soldiers faced their Soviet counterparts, the standoff was soon over – after all, the Soviet troops had four years more fighting experience, and were, on average, 20 centimeters taller and 20 kilograms heavier than the Japanese.
The historical record of the victories in the Far East includes many heroic confrontations that have never been celebrated in cinema. The defeat of a strong and dangerous enemy adds to the honor and glory of the victor. And that is why, as the present author often insists, the triumph in the Far East is an example of a perfect and pure victory, the feeling of which we have been missing all these years. A victory that should be commemorated and celebrated despite all the challenges we face in our modern world.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”