Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (294 page)

103.
By 1943 Hattori had risen to become chief of the Operations Section of the Army General Staff. In his postwar comment on the Nomonhan incident, Hirohito takes credit for the imperial command that led to the fighting:
Because the Soviet-Manchukuo border in the Nomonhan area is not clearly demarcated, both sides made false accusations of illegal encroachment. Since an imperial command had been issued to Yamada Otsuz
[this is an error; Hirohito means Gen. Ueda
Kenkichi], the Kwantung Army commander, to strictly defend the Manchukuo border, there was a reason why the Kwantung Army engaged the invading Soviet troops in battle…. Later…the orders were changed so that they did not have to rigorously defend the border in undefined or remote areas.
STD
, pp. 44–45, Eguchi,
Taikei Nihon no rekishi 14, futatsu no taisen
, pp. 273–74.

104.
Fujiwara Akira, Awaya Kentar
et al.,
Tettei kensh
: Sh
wa tenn
‘dokuhakuroku'
(
tsuki Shoten, 1991), p. 49.

105.
See Donald Cameron Watt,
How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939
(William Heinemann Ltd., 1989), pp. 349–60.

106.
Tanaka,
Dokyumento Sh
wa tenn
, I: shinryaku
(Ryukuf
Shuppan, 1984), pp. 98–99.

107.
Harada nikki, dai nanakan
, pp. 334, 335–36; Inoue,
Tenn
no sens
sekinin
, pp. 127–29.

108.
On U.S., British, and Japanese “monetary warfare” in China between 1935 and 1941, see Jonathan Kirshner,
Currency and Coercion: The Political Economy of International Monetary Power
(Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 51–61.

109.
Quoted in Tanaka,
Dokyumento Sh
wa tenn
, I: shinryaku
, p. 89, citing “jij
bukanch
nikki,” in
Bungei shunj
rinji z
kan
(May 1971).