The IJN's efforts to conceal the scale of the defeat had a powerful patron in the form of Emperor Hirohito. The Naval General Staff informed the Emperor of the scale of the defeat on 8 June. This meeting was done privately, without any IJA representative or other state officials. The Emperor responded that although the losses were regrettable, they should not interfere with the Navy's morale. This gave the IJN a degree of cover to distort the battle and its losses in the joint IJA-IJN command conference on 10 June. The IJN could not conceal that it lost the battle, but it did obscure the scale of its losses from the Army and the wider public. Only the Emperor, the upper echelons of the IJN, and select individuals of the imperial household and IJA knew the full truth. Tojo, even though the head of the government, complained postwar that he did not know of the realities of the defeat until a full month after the battle.
One stratagem for this deception involved using a degree of bureaucratic sleight of hand to hide the fact that these ships were at the bottom of the Pacific. The official 10 June IJN announcement noted that one carrier was lost and another damaged along with a heavy cruiser. The bulletin did not announce which ships were lost and internal IJN memoranda picked Kaga as the designated sunk ship, while the other carriers were still on the naval registry as damaged. The result was a paper shell game in which nonexistent damaged ships were supposedly in various Japanese ports and unmanned. The IJN then gradually revealed the sinking of these carriers and the Mikuma. The families of those KIA were also gradually informed of the loss of their loved ones, but over the course of a few months. In the meantime, for all intents and purposes, these sailors were alive with their ships, but under strict secrecy not to contact their families. The Chief of Staff for the Sixth Fleet sent out this instruction:
Concerning those KIA, the personnel bureau and personnel section will gradually notify the families of the deceased, but the name of the ship sunk will not be mentioned. The policy is to handle the killed merely as individuals.
So in this scenario, their deaths were completely unrelated to the Midway defeat and kept as vague as possible.
This type of secrecy also extended to the some 600 wounded from Midway. Most of them were shunted into hospitals with strict instructions not to contact their families or let on to the nature of the defeat. The naval hospitals quarantined the wounded and only allowed specially vetted doctors and nurses to treat them. The men were not permitted mail and after they recuperated, they were not allowed to go on leave for over a year. A few such a the dive-bomber pilot Takashige Egusa escaped this cordon of security on their own volition, but this was not an option for many of these men.
The emerging attrition campaign in South Pacific also abetted the efforts of the IJN to maintain its fictions. Surviving Midway personnel from the carriers were ordered to IJN ship and shore units to meet the Guadalcanal campaign. The enlisted men were allowed no home leave and they were distributed throughout the Southern front. The surviving aviators, of which there were much more than the popular American accounts of Midway hold, filtered back into the IJN air establishment to replenish losses from the Coral Sea or man some of the new carriers. Egusa, for example, went from carriers to instructor work at Yokusuka. The increasing tempo of operations because of Guadalcanal meant that many of these men did not have much time to dwell on the defeats of June in light of these new challenges. Reiji Masuda, a merchant seaman involved in the salvage operation of Mogami, reflected some of these concerns. He recalled postwar that he encountered both charred bodies as well as testaments by dying men. All Masuda could think about with this grim evidence was "I won't be coming back again," when he received his orders to go south.
The Japanese press was largely acquiescent in this deception. Naval journalists repeated the IJN's lies verbatim as well as the cushioning blow that one should always expect losses in war. A number of journalists knew that something dire had happened. For example, Domei News Agency cameraman Tatsuzo Asai recalled:
We learned we were gradually losing. It was after Midway that things got bad. Before that operation, I was in Sumatra. Someone told me, "Planes are being transferred," so I wangled my way onto one. Something must be up. We flew back to the Homeland, but then we kept on going north, to Paramushiro Island, near Soviet Kamchatka, then with a scouting mission flew over Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians. When I went out, the plan for the invasion of Midway was being implemented in the Central Pacific. When I got back, everyone looked so deflated. So glum. The staff officers at headquarters kept saying, ''This is terrible. A disaster."
But putting two and two together immediately was quite difficult given the paucity of information about the battle. In contrast to the US's treatment of Kimmel and Short for Pearl Harbor, there was no command shake-up at the IJN in light of the disaster. Nagumo remained in charge of the reconstituted Kido Butai and Yamamoto still had a very public presence in the IJN.
The net result of all this deception was that by the time the full scale of the Midway defeat was made clear by the gradual release of information, Japan was facing an even deeper military crisis. By 1943/44, by which time anyone diligent enough could see that the four carriers were no longer in operation, these losses were becoming eclipsed by other losses. The management of information also created a dubious precedent for the IJN to cloud news of its post-Midway losses. News of the Midway defeat became just one of many nebulous setbacks for Japan's war effort and enmeshed into a wider web of lies.
Sources
Bix, Herbert P. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York, NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2000.
Cook, Haruko Taya, and Theodore Failor Cook. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New Press, 1992.
Parshall, Jonathan B., and Anthony P. Tully. Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005.