Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (62 page)
Read Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Online
Authors: Herbert P. Bix
Tags: #General, #History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #World War II
In early August, Army Minister Minami Jir
broke military precedent and disclosed to the press a speech he had given to a special meeting of regional and division commanders. In his speech General Minami denounced arms reduction proposals as “a sellout” and urged his fellow officers to protest military cutbacks.
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Thereafter Army Chief of Staff Kanaya Hanzand Gen. Suzuki Sroku spoke out publicly against the curtailment of military spending in general.
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As these danger signs mounted, Hirohito and the court group finally began to consider how to cope with the politicized officer corps. On Hirohito's instruction Makino discussed with Saionji the problem of “maintaining military discipline,” and the venerable
elder statesman advised him to handle the situation by dealing directly with the military authorities rather than with Prime Minister Wakatsuki.
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The Wakatsuki cabinet had been struggling unsuccessfully with the economic depression and alienating the military with its policies of financial retrenchment. To add insult to injury, Wakatsuki had chosen the summer of 1931 to compensate for revenue shortfalls by cutting the salaries of civil bureaucrats.
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Not until Japan was alive with rumors of imminent war in Manchuria, however, did Hirohito personally intervene. On September 10 and 11, he queried Navy Minister Abo Kiyokazu and Army Minister Minami respectively concerning the state of military discipline. Abo answered that he had just questioned the fleet commanders and had been told there was no problem in the navy.
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Abo did not inform the emperor that the navy was very concerned about the army's activities in Manchuria, or that it would soon establish a “special organ” in Manchuria to spy on the Kwantung Army. Abo may also have been unaware that two months earlierâ“in June or July”âsenior officers of the Army General Staff had actually informed the heads of the Navy General Staff of their plan to seize Manchuria by force, and had asked for the navy's cooperation; the naval staff officers had failed to express any opposition to what the army was about to do.
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Minami was, however, in on the Kwantung Army's secret plans to bring Manchuria and Inner Mongolia under Japanese control by force, and he frankly admitted to the emperor that certain “young army officers have recently criticized our diplomacy as weak-kneed; the wording of their criticism was not precise and has led to their being misunderstood.” He immediately added, however, that “we cannot permit such actions, and intend to suppress them fully. The army believes that diplomacy should be conducted as a national policy by Foreign Ministry officials and shall caution [our junior officers] about this.”
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Hirohito responded that the army's political partisanship was
interference with national policy, and he ordered Minami to tighten control. The army minister replied, duplicitously, “Ever since I heard such rumors, I have been carefully controlling matters.” Hirohito then summoned Grand Chamberlain Suzuki and told him to inform Makino that “although the army minister reported to me that he has been controlling matters sufficiently so as to prevent [further acts of] military indiscipline, I urged him to be even more cautious.”
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Minami explained the emperor's attitude to those senior officers in the Army Ministry and at General Staff Headquarters who were privy to the plotâtimed to begin sometime in late September. They decided to move more cautiously. Their goal of wresting Manchuria from China by force did not change, but the emperor's stance led them to postpone action and not to defy the cabinet. Minami, newly chastened, thereupon circulated admonitory instructions within the army.
On September 15 Foreign Minister Shidehara received a top secret telegram from his consul general in Mukden, informing him that the Kwantung Army was about to launch a large-scale offensive action. Other reports over the next few days kept Shidehara fully informed of the Kwantung Army's plot. Nevertheless, throughout the early months of the Manchurian Incident, Shidehara functioned as the leading defender of the Kwantung Army to the Western world, claiming that victimized Japan was merely acting in self-defense, upholding the sanctity of treaties.
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Minami entrusted a letter to Gen. Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, chief of the General Staff's Intelligence Section, and told him to deliver it personally to the newly appointed Kwantung Army commander, General Honj. Tatekawa, who had participated in Chang Tso-lin's assassination, was thought to have influence in Kwantung Army circles. Before leaving for Mukden with his message urging patience and postponement of action, Tatekawa disclosed to Col. Hashimoto Kingor, planner of the abortive March coup, the decision of the
army's senior leaders to postpone the planned hostilities. Immediately Hashimoto sent telegrams to Col. Itagaki Seishir, the senior staff officer of the Kwantung Army at Mukden, one of which warned him to act quickly: “Plot discovered. Tatekawa coming; strike first to avoid implicating him. If Tatekawa arrives, take action before receiving his message.”
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Three days later, Lt. Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Colonel Itagaki put their plans into effect.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the senior editors of the Tokyo
Asahi
and Osaka
Mainichi
newspaper chains, Ogata Taketora and Takaishi Shingoro, were also party to this deception. For two months earlier, on the night of July 16, 1931, they had attended a meeting in Tokyo (probably at the residence of Baron Harada Kumao) where, in the company of Foreign Ministry officials, they had heard the Military Affairs Bureau Chief, Major-General Koiso Kuniaki, advocate the “independence of Manchuria” and say that if the army starts a war the Japanese people will support it.
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So on the eve of the Mukden fighting many influential persons in Tokyo either knew or strongly suspected that the Kwantung Army was about to start trouble. Hirohito and his top palace advisersâMakino, Suzuki, Sekiya, Kido, and Naraâalso sensed the growing unrest in the military but misread the situation and were laggard in responding to it. Believing they had acted in ample time for the imperial admonition to work its dampening effect, they never imagined that the Kwantung Army would seize the initiative, completely overturn the Minseito cabinet's policies, and undermine the emperor's authority. Hirohito and the court bureaucrats had deeply underestimated the factionalism and discontent that had been brewing for some time among the army, the foreign ministry, and the political parties. But they also failed to counter this danger because they naturally supported the army's mission in Manchuria, and had ever since 1905.
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D
uring the night of September 18, 1931, Kwantung Army officers detonated an explosion near the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway line at Liut'iaokou (north of Mukden) and blamed it on the soldiers of Chang Hsueh-liang and armed Chinese “bandits.” Using an incident they themselves had staged as a pretext, and that had left the rail line itself undamaged, Staff Officer Col. Itagaki Seishirordered the Independent Garrison Force and the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment to attack the barracks of the Chinese Manchurian Army within the walled city of Mukden. Taken by surprise, the Chinese troops fled or laid down their arms. An hour later Itagaki's co-conspirator, Lt. Col. Ishiwara Kanji, stationed in Ryojun [Port Arthur], conveyed the false report of what had happened to Kwantung Army Commander HonjShigeru. Honjthen issued attack orders that Ishiwara had carefully prepared long in advance. Over the next twenty-four hours Kwantung Army units advanced beyond the leased territory and seized control of the strategic towns along the railway. The army then prepared to move on the major population centers of southern Manchuria.
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The next day, September 19, the palace learnedâthrough newspaper reports based on Kwantung Army explanationsâof the clash in Manchuria. Responsibility, according to the army spokesmen, rested with the Chinese. Chief Aide-de-Camp Nara Takeji promptly informed the emperor, adding that he believed “this inci
dent [would] not spread.”
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Nara may also have suggested, then or a few hours later, that Hirohito convene an imperial conference to take control of the situationâan idea that Makino and Saionji quickly negated on the ground that “the virtue of his majesty” would be “soiled” if the decisions of such a conference should prove impossible to implement.
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Once started, the Manchurian Incident set off a chain reaction of international and domestic crises that interacted and fundamentally altered the whole trajectory of Japanese state development. China immediately sought redress before the League of Nations; the Kwantung Army sought reinforcements. Gen. Hayashi Senj
r, commanding in Korea, sought permission, through central army headquarters in Tokyo, to send units across the Yalu River into Manchuria. On September 19 the government was still helpless and ill-informed. Prime Minister Wakatsuki appealed to Harada Kumao, secretary to
genrSaionji, for assistance:
I am not being kept informed by either the Foreign Ministry or the Army Ministryâ¦. I have just warned them through Chief Cabinet Secretary Kawasakiâ¦. The Chinese forces in Manchuria and Mongolia number more than two hundred thousand [
sic
] while we have only some ten thousand. I asked the army minister, “What are you going to do if, by chance, your challenge causes something you haven't anticipatedâsomething that given you are so outnumbered you can't stop?” The army minister told me, “We'll send in troops from Koreaâ¦indeed, they may have already gone in.” I rebuked him: “How can you allow dispatch of soldiers from Korea without government authorization?” He said, “Well, the fact is that during the Tanaka cabinet [1927â29] troops were dispatched without imperial sanction.” I gathered he had not foreseen any problem at allâ¦. Under these circumstances I am quite powerless to restrain the military. How can his majesty's military act without his sanction? What can I do? Maybe I
should not be talking to you like this, but can you do anything?â¦I am in serious trouble.
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That evening members of the court group met at Harada's residence. In attendance were Kido (his diary is the available source); Konoe; Okabe Nagakage, first section chief of the Foreign Ministry's Bureau of Political Affairs; and another titled peer.
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All were in their forties and tended to be critical of Saionji and Makino and sympathetic to the military's attempt to resolve the Manchurian problem by force. They agreed that the orders of the high command were not being fully obeyed, and that the emperor concurred with the cabinet's initial desire to prevent the incident from getting worse and doing more damage to Japan's public image. The problem, Kido reported, was twofold. The military was angry both at the palace entourage for influencing the emperor's statements, and at Saionji, whom it considered hostile. Hence “it would be better hereafter for the emperor himself not to speak except when a situation is out of control;” and Saionji should be dissuaded from coming to Tokyo “unless the situation changes.”
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In effect those meeting at Harada's mansion agreed that Hirohito should approve the military's actions, and that Saionji and the senior palace officials should neither pursue the illegal infringement of the emperor's powers of military command, nor do anything else to provoke the military. Holding this attitude, the court group, over the course of the entire Manchurian war, would never take a firm stand against the army.
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On September 21 Wakatsuki convened his cabinet for six hours. They decided not to authorize reinforcements from either the homeland or Korea, and to treat the fighting in Manchuria as only an “incident,” thus avoiding a declaration of war.
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The Kwantung Army, meanwhile, had for three days been pressing army central headquarters for permission to allow General Hayashi, commander
of the Korean Army, to send reinforcements across the Yalu River into Manchuria. At 1:00
P.M
. on September 21, while the cabinet was still meeting, Hayashi on his own authority ordered troops to cross the border. Shortly afterwards, Army Chief of Staff Kanaya reported to the emperor that despite orders to stand by on alert, the Mixed Brigade of the Japanese colonial army in Korea, in accordance with the principle that the field commanders have such discretion, “had crossed the border and advanced on Mukden.”
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Kanaya, of course, knew well that in this instance no such principle of operational autonomy could justify Hayashi's illegal action.
Thirty-year-old Hirohito now had an excellent opportunity to back the Wakatsuki cabinet, control the military, and stop the incident from getting worse. Politically the military was still weak. National opinion regarding Manchuria was divided. If he wanted to rule as a British-style “constitutional monarch” instead of an autocratic monarch saddled with a constitution, this was his chance.
Nara's diary entry for September 22 says what Hirohito did at this critical moment:
In the afternoon, when I was summoned by the emperor, he asked me whether I had warned the chief of staff [Kanaya] not to broaden the action. I replied, “Yes, I did warn him, but even without my warning he understood very clearly both the cabinet's intention and your majesty's will, and he is already addressing each part of the problem in turn. Regrettably it is touch-and-go with the outlying army, and they often go their own way.”â¦[Later] At 4:20
P.M
. Chief of Staff Kanaya had an audience with the emperor and asked him to approve, post facto, the dispatch of the mixed brigade from the Korean Army. I heard the emperor say that although this time it couldn't be helped, [the army] had to be more careful in the future.
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Having now understood the need to reinforce the vastly outnumbered Kwantung Army's forward units, Hirohito accepted the
situation as a fait accompli. He was not seriously opposed to seeing his army expand his empire. If that involved a brief usurpation of his authority, so be itâ
so long as the operation was successful
.
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By October 1, 1931, two weeks into the incident, most Japanese had begun to rally behind the army. Hirohito knew that the incident had been staged. He knew who had planned it, who had ordered it, and who had carried it out. He was totally aware that several senior officers had violated the army's own penal law of 1908 by ordering troops into areas that lay outside their command jurisdiction. Nevertheless, as Chief Aide-de-Camp Nara's diary makes quite clear, Hirohito intended to order only the lightest of punishments for the army chief of staff and the Kwantung Army commander.
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