Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (39 page)

First, on February 17, 1923, he had the chiefs give formal reports to him at his Numazu mansion. The next day he asked for the views of his highest military advisory organ, the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals. On February 21 Field Marshal Oku Yasukata reported to Hirohito at Numazu, and on the twenty-fifth
Hirohito allowed Prime Minister Kat
to view the revised defense policy draft. Finally, on February 28, Hirohito again summoned his two chiefs of staff to Numazu and gave them his approval of the draft. Thus, rather than blindly putting his seal to the revised national defense plan, he approved it “only after he had fully understood it.”
⁵⁷
This insistence on withholding his assent until he had been made fully informed was his standard operating procedure after he became emperor in his own right.

Following the adoption of the 1923 national defense plan, the army began to implement the first of the three personnel reductions that it was to carry out between 1922 and 1924. The navy stopped building capital ships and began scrapping old vessels in order to develop a modern fleet air force and a submarine force. And in 1923 the nonparty cabinet of Prime Minister Kat
(who had led the Japanese delegation at the Washington Conference) began withdrawal of Japanese troops from China's Shantung Province. Two years later, in May 1925, Army Minister Ugaki (in the party cabinet of Kat
K
mei) deactivated four divisions and used the resulting savings to begin the modernization and reorganization of the army in order to prepare it for a future “total war.” As a result, military spending by the army and navy as a percentage of total annual government expenditures decreased steadily throughout the decade.
⁵⁸

These reductions in personnel, armaments, and expenditures went forward amid deep regrets and angry recriminations in the officer corps. The feeling grew that Japan had fallen behind the other Great Powers economically, socially, and politically. Yet both services avoided fundamental institutional reform during the twenties. And because the army retrenched when it was under no foreign pressure to do so, General Ugaki became the object of bitter resentment among middle-echelon officers for yielding to the wishes of fiscally conservative politicians and industrialists.

Meanwhile the erosion of military discipline and morale that had resurfaced during the undeclared war in Siberia against the Bol
sheviks (1918–22) continued throughout the 1920s. Unquestioning obedience to orders weakened while incidents of insubordination in the ranks proliferated.
⁵⁹
The Report Concerning the Thought and Actions of Returning Troops, sent to the army minister in March 1919 by the commander of a garrison division, noted that “due to the rise in general knowledge and social education that enlisted men receive from newspapers and magazines, along with changes in popular thought,” they could no longer be counted on “to be blind followers of the orders of their noncommissioned superiors.”
⁶⁰
Two years later, in 1921, Army Minister Tanaka Giichi warned his divisional commanders of the weakening discipline in the lower ranks, where “in recent years…. they have become bold and rebellious in their attitudes, and criminal acts have increased, especially cases where men form small groups and act violently.”
⁶¹

In response to these warnings the rules and regulations governing military life inside the barracks were revised to encourage discipline based on more rationalistic criteria, while military education began to stress “awareness education.”
⁶²
These changes lasted only a few years, however. In 1924 Army Minister Ugaki alerted divisional commanders to give the utmost attention to their soldiers' behavior in view of “the increase in criminal actions by low-ranking officers” and “the influence of [new] social thought.”
⁶³
Four years later, at the start of Hirohito's reign, when workers' and peasants' protest movements had intensified, senior officers again sounded the alarm about the number of soldiers coming into barracks with attitudes critical of the imperial system.

These circumstances forced Japan's military leaders to question whether the armed forces should continue to characterize themselves as the forces led by the emperor and his government, or turn to the nation and become the people's military. Army Ministers Tanaka and Ugaki—both supporters of fiscal restraint and cooperation with the political parties—argued the need to reemphasize the army's traditional “founding principles”: namely, that all Japanese
are soldiers; the emperor directly commands them; they do not interfere in politics or let politicians interfere in military matters; and their mission is to protect the state and spread the foundations of imperial rule. But the army in the early and mid-twenties was divided. Some officers argued over these principles; others said that the military, formed from the masses of the nation, was totally independent of the central government.
⁶⁴

Eventually Gen. Araki Sadao, a future army minister and a leading opponent of Ugaki's retrenchment policy, would settle the dispute by advocating the notion of the “emperor's army” (
k
gun
). For Araki the “emperor's army” was a force of workers and peasants for the defense of the nation under the emperor's guidance, rather than a “bourgeois force” for the defense of the ruling establishment.
⁶⁵
But in the mid-twenties, the army had not yet begun to indoctrinate its troops to Araki's idea.
⁶⁶

Toward the end of his regency Hirohito became aware of the army's crisis of institutional identity and of mission. General Nara reported to him on the growth of factional fighting within the military, and General Ugaki lectured at court on the great importance that the army attached to the “independence” of the right of supreme command (
t
suiken no dokuritsu
). The term
t
suiken
carried both military and legal connotations and had always been used by military men broadly and vaguely.
⁶⁷
Although the emperor's power to command the armed forces was already “independent” before the drafting of the Meiji constitution, the constitution never clearly recognized that “independence.” It specified only that “[t]he emperor has the supreme command of the army and navy” (Article 11) and “determines the organization and peace standing of the army and navy” (Article 12). Moreover, the first sentence of Article 55, declaring that “[t]he respective ministers of state shall give their advice to the emperor and be responsible for it,” left open a possible constitutional ground for “interference” by civilians in the
t
suiken
.