Fighting on all Fronts (53 page)

The blame for the Pacific War is usually laid at Japan’s feet. As Peter Edwards says, Japan “had revealed an expansionist and profoundly antidemocratic underside. This had to be eradicated, and it was”.
⁸
But the causes lie deeper; they lie in the rise of global imperialism and industrialism. By the 19th century predominance within the system of empires was going to those who embraced industrial capitalism. But there were some who sought to defy this. Among them was a set of islands in the north west Pacific.

For two centuries Japan had isolated itself and it had threatened no one outside its borders. But the Western powers would not allow it to remain a backwater forever. In 1853 Commodore Perry’s US ships arrived to begin forcing Japan open to foreign trade and influence and the British followed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had described how western expansion was breaking down the “Chinese walls” of recalcitrant peoples.
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They might have been writing about Japan.

The war was sold to the population as a “righteous war”.
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Early in the 20th century nationalist thinker Hibino Yutaka wrote in an influential book that his country faced a world of annihilating competition. Indeed a “discarded scrap of flesh upon the Asiatic continent has the power to assemble the hungry vultures from the whole earth”.
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Japan would need to match the vultures for strength and so it began building an empire. In doing so it adapted and modified Dutch and French colonial practices the brutality of which were to make it notorious.
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The Japanese ruling groups had entered a period of crisis that was only resolved after a series
of struggles consolidated power and led to the return of the emperor as the symbolic head of state in what is referred to as the Meiji Restoration.

By 1905 Japan had defeated Russia in a major war but Russia was weak and it remained difficult to impose militarism on the people of Japan. It was not some historical inevitability; rather there were sharp struggles over what direction society would take. Millions of workers opposed capitalism, expansionism and the military. During the sensational 1930 Toyo Muslin strike young working women singing the Internationale waged street battles with police and company guards.
¹³

Japan’s brutal aggression against China was partly a response to Western pressure. Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Tokyo, said that the Japanese, believing that Britain and the US threatened them, “sought to carve out an economic sphere in which to operate should the Western world deny them access to raw materials and markets”.
¹⁴
Chris Harman has outlined how both Germany and Japan, as late-comers to the global carve-up, were impelled by a sinister logic:

Once the path of military expansion had been decided upon, it fed upon itself. To challenge the existing empires required the maximum military-industrial potential. Every successful imperialist adventure increased this—for example, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, the German annexation of Austria and then Czechoslovakia. But at the same time it increased the hostility of the existing empires—leading to the need for a greater arms potential and further military adventures. The breaking points were the German seizure of western Poland and the Japanese onslaught on Pearl Harbor.
¹⁵

The US forced Japan to take the road of conquest, then blocked the road. Washington imposed a savage oil blockade on Japan, apparently to provoke war. It demanded a large-scale Japanese retreat, something Tokyo saw as impossible. However, Japan lacked the material resources to confront the US. Or did it? Was there any way to break out of the circle? The key problem, said a senior Japanese Navy Ministry official, was oil and if its reserves were depleted, Japan would grow weaker: “A grim and humiliating end. However if we could strike boldly and get the oil in the south…”
¹⁶
The south meant Indonesia. But a strike to the south would only succeed if Japan could cripple the US Pacific fleet centred on Pearl Harbor.

A British Admiralty intelligence report acknowledged that “had she not gone to war now, Japan would have seen such a deterioration of her economic position as to render her ultimately unable to wage war, and to
reduce her to the status of a second-rate power”.
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Joseph Rochefort, Commander of Station HYPO (combat intelligence centre for the Pacific Fleet) was blunter: “We cut off their money, fuel and trade. We were just tightening the screws on the Japanese. They could see no way of getting out except going to war”.
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The Japanese government’s “Main Principles of Basic National Policy”, formulated in 1940 and adopted after the move to the south began, underpinned the southern strategy and emphasised bringing “the eight corners of the world under one roof”.
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The 1870s and 1880s had seen the emergence of a democratic broadly popular People’s Rights Movement which focused attention on political freedoms and individual rights through demands for a national assembly and a broadening of the political power base.
²⁰
The movement secured the establishment of a parliament and was only halted in the end by tough internal security laws.

The new climate created greater space for the left. A proletarian literature movement arose which “with an explicit class perspective presented anti-war ideas and unflattering descriptions of the military”.
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These had some appeal because in a time of détente and relative prosperity the military lost prestige. Young men sought careers in other fields and “the public began to look down upon the army as a superfluous if not parasitical element of society in a peaceful world”.
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However, the relatively peaceful climate ended in 1891 after which Japan was almost continuously at war.

Japan went through a tense time during the First World War, experiencing food riots and a wave of labour disputes. But the 1920s were a time of relative prosperity as well as international détente, exemplified by the 1921 Washington Conference at which the powers arrived at a set ratio for naval assets. As long as the world capitalist economy grew, allowing Japan a certain affluence and social peace at home and reducing external pressures on the imperial state, elements of liberal government could emerge.

The rule of the Taisho Emperor (1912-1925) is popularly referred to as Taisho Democracy. Universal male suffrage, granted in 1925 following mass protests, expanded the electorate from 3 million to 13 million. There was growing interest in left wing ideas and the General Election Law of 1925 benefitted some left wing candidates. Attempts to pass legislation protecting workers’ rights to join unions, however, continued to be blocked by business interests.

Nevertheless, although the period was characterised by a two-party parliamentary system, the repression identified with the 1930s is evident. Laws such as the Police Security Law (1900) were introduced to contain mass protests and the growth of left wing ideas and combined with the Peace Preservation Law (1925) to curb “radical” elements in the labour movement.

The Communist Party was formed in 1922 but due to the increasingly repressive conditions decided to dissolve in 1924. It reformed in 1925 as a broader based party. Continued repression decimated the party and by 1935 it had ceased to operate. The government conducted a series of “red” mass arrests, murders and torture of left wing activists—in 1922, 1928 and again in April 1929. On 15 March 1928, 1,600 people were arrested in a single day.
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The Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) provided the opportunity to massacre Koreans and Chinese living in Japan and to murder the imprisoned anarchist Osugi Sakae and women’s liberationist Ito Naoe.
Burakumin
(ethnically Japanese but considered outcast) activists associated with Marxists were also arrested and tortured in this period.
²⁴

The state used imperialist adventures to undermine class struggle at home. During 1933 and 1934 cabinet meetings repeatedly complained that domestic unrest was a “great problem, impeding national defence”.
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As early as 1929 Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji had written: “Japan must expand overseas to achieve political stability at home”.
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The 1931 Manchurian Incident, which opened the way for Japanese invasion to China’s north, was the first opportunity to apply this logic. When in September 1931 the Kwangtung Army marched in to set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, it created a surge of patriotism and repression. The labour movement retreated. “In the winter of 1933, an estimated 80,000 union workers and 20,000 non-union employees agreed to work on a Sunday or holiday and donate that day’s wages to the army’s National Defence Fund Drive”.
²⁷
In 1920
Sōdōmei
(Greater Japan Federation of Labour), the largest trade union federation, had condemned Japan’s Siberian intervention in 1918 and called for self-government in Korea. It dropped the word “Greater” from its full name to show its opposition to Japanese imperialism.
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However, after 1931
Sōdōmei
union contracts began incorporating a promise of “industrial service to the nation”.
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From this time Japan was effectively at war.

General Ugaki Kazunari wrote that the main objectives of his time as army minister were achieved through the Manchurian offensive: the unity of the military and the people and the “popularisation of national defence”.
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An Army Ministry newspaper remarked: “Since the
Manchurian incident, confrontational attitudes between social classes with differing economic interests appear to have gradually subsided”.
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Millions of workers opposed capitalism, imperialism and the military. As early as 1903 socialists were working to build an anti-war movement, arguing in their newspaper that “war benefits the bourgeoisie but sacrifices the common people”.
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In Japan as in any other society, there were anti-war and militarist tendencies, liberal and authoritarian impulses, left wing and right wing movements. Tragically, the militarists won.

General society

In the atmosphere of the 1920s left wing culture coalesced, becoming the basis for criticism of the growing militarism. The
Nihon Purōrateria Bunka Renmei
(Japan Proletarian Cultural Association) was formed in 1931 uniting the arts and sciences. It produced numerous journals and magazines. This was the first ever educational and cultural movement in Japan based on workers and peasants and its impact was significant. Films and social criticism also flourished despite heavy censorship. In 1932 over 400 activists associated with the
Nihon Purōrateria Bunka Renmei
were arrested but those who had escaped this fate remained active underground.

Continued repression destroyed the
Nihon Purōrateria Bunka Renmei
in 1934.
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However, intellectuals and artists still found ways to protest. The
Gakugei Jiyū Yōgo Dōmei
(Federation to Protect Freedom of the Arts), which was formed in July 1933, opposed fascism and the war but was unable to develop because of the repression. Two dissident journals,
Chikaki yori
and
Kashin
, continued to publish monthly even after the beginning of heavy air raids and appeared in mimeographed form until the day the war ended. Even a village theatre performance reflected resistance: “I don’t understand the guys that send you off with a cheer (
banzai
). No one comes back alive. Instead of shouting
banzai
, they would be better off saying
Namu Amida Butsu
—the Buddhist death rites”.
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Cultural circles formed in factories and villages allowing workers and peasants to have their own independent culture. These movements allowed the illegal Japan Communist Party and left wing of the union movement to operate semi-legally and played a major role in the mass dissemination of anti-war ideas and the ideas of scientific socialism and revolution. Education was also affected by the formation of the
Shinkyō Kyōiku Kenkyūjō
(Progressive Education Institute) which opposed imperial and
militarist education, instead supporting a democratic education system. The influence of scientific socialism was widespread among primary school teachers. In February 1932 the “Red Teachers’ Incident” involved the arrest of numerous teachers in many prefectures and the following February in Nagano prefecture 230 teachers were arrested.
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The mood among the public in general, and workers in particular, was hostile to the government and often to the emperor. Police records from as early as 1942 reported growing contempt for existing authority extending even to the emperor. “Ten labourers in the steel industry were apprehended after a conversation in which they reportedly had discussed the emperor at some length and concluded that when the farmers and workers made their own world they should throw the emperor into the Siberian snow, like the Russian revolutionaries did with the tsar and his family”.
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There was much hostility towards military officers. One report records that when a staff officer inspected an area, he saw burnt-out residents sitting exhausted by the road. “Suddenly they all jumped up and shouted, ‘This all happened because of you military men! What’s the point of you coming here to look at it?’ Without a word, the officer got back into his car and hurriedly drove off”.
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Anti-war protests

In Nagoya,
Sōhyō
(Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Sōhyō Gikai—union federation) mobilised 300 people at a demonstration commemorating the first anniversary of the Manchurian Incident and distributed leaflets with slogans including “Oppose the Imperialist war!” Students from several of the elite imperial universities formed a movement to protest at the suppression of free speech and government demands for “red” professors to resign. Nationally 1,500 students were arrested.