Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (56 page)

Strongly supportive of the navy's blatant intervention in politics during 1930, and sharing Kato's contempt for party government (and for what Kat
called Japan's “Judaized society” or “the Jewish enemy in our hearts”), were General Araki and Admirals Ogasawara and T
g
.
⁹
All four men maintained close ties to civil
ian ultranationalist ideologues and exerted influence on the Navy and Army Ministries, the Diet, the privy council and the palace (via Prince Fushimi). Their efforts accomplished nothing, however; for Hamaguchi stood firm against Kato, Suetsugu, and T
g
and accepted the compromise cruiser tonnage ratios, as court officials had urged him to do. Thereupon the Seiy
kai joined with the military to publicly attack Hamaguchi and the court entourage, accusing them of having signed the treaty without the support of the Navy General Staff, thereby infringing on the
emperor's
“right of supreme command.”

Determined to overthrow the Minseit
cabinet, and resentful of the palace entourage for having earlier forced Tanaka to resign, the Seiy
kai leaders accused Hamaguchi and the “evil advisers” around the throne—Makino, Suzuki, and Kawai—of relying on arms limitations treaties and on the “cooperation” of Britain and the United States to defend Japan's interests in China. By charging that Grand Chamberlain Suzuki had blocked the formal report to the emperor of the chief of the Navy General Staff, and that the government was pursuing a mistaken defense policy, the Seiy
kai politicians contributed to an atmosphere that fostered extremism.

Meanwhile literary, artistic, political, and international events were all coming together to create a new mood in Japan. Little had been written on the victorious Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars during the entire Taish
period. In 1930, however, the military commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Russo-Japanese War, after having remembered it only five years earlier. In the interim, many emotional articles, books, picture books, and plays had appeared that gave national prominence to the Russo-Japanese War and to the admiral whose “divine action” (
kamiwaza
) had saved Japan in its confrontation with Russia.
¹⁰
These stories featured, as “paragons of the military man” and leading “war gods” (as opposed to mere heroes), Fleet Admiral T
g
, who was still alive and active, and Comm. Hirose Takeo, who in 1904 had died
attempting to seal the harbor in the second battle of Port Arthur.
¹¹
In 1930, at the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo,
The Fall of Port Arthur
, in which General Nogi lost two sons, was enacted. When a Russian general in the play extended his sympathy to Nogi, Nogi replied, “‘I could not have returned to Tokyo with my sons alive. As a father, I am pleased with the death of my two sons for the emperor.' At this the frenzied crowd cheered wildly.”
¹²