Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (68 page)

Later that night Hirohito sent a chamberlain to seek out Nara's views again. Nara knew perfectly well that the cabinet could control the military only by going through the emperor. Nevertheless he replied in writing that “[i]t is improper for anyone other than the cabinet to stop the operation.”
⁷⁶
Hirohito acquiesced. The Sait
cabinet subsequently approved the Jehol operation; on February 12, Hirohito sanctioned Jehol for a second time on the condition that they “never cross the Great Wall during the course of the invasion, and if they do not listen to this, I shall order a cancellation.”
⁷⁷
These were the words of a highly frustrated commander in chief, not one who acquiesced unconditionally in the conduct of his high command.

The Japanese invasion of Jehol—an area “approximately the size of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia combined”—commenced on February 23, 1933, one day before the assembly of the League adopted the Lytton Report, rejecting any change in the status of Manchuria.
⁷⁸
Encountering little effective Chinese resistance, the twenty-thousand-strong Japanese force completed its operation in about one week.

The emperor had tried very seriously to delay, cancel, guide, and limit the invasion according to his judgment of the international situation. His chief aide-de-camp, General Nara, had worked
actively to block him. Managing to dissuade the emperor from employing the imperial power of supreme command was Nara's last major achievement. Shortly afterward Prince Kan'in nominated Honj
, former commander of the Kwantung Army, as Nara's replacement. First expressing mild dissatisfaction with that choice, Hirohito then sanctioned it when asked to do so by Grand Chamberlain Admiral Suzuki and Prince Kan'in.
⁷⁹
Later the emperor would take Honj
's measure and learn how totally untrustworthy he really was. At this time, however, Hirohito was not strongly opposed to a general whom, after all, he had feted as a national war hero just a few months earlier.

IV

As the year 1933 opened, the Japanese delegation at Geneva found itself totally isolated. In Tokyo there was angry debate over the refusal by the League to believe the official Japanese version of events. When Foreign Minister Uchida alerted the emperor to the imminence of Japan's withdrawal, Hirohito queried him only about its effect on Japan's guardianship of the former German possessions in Micronesia.
⁸⁰
One month later, on February 20, the Sait
cabinet formally—but secretly—decided to quit the world organization. On the twenty-fourth the League, by 42 votes to 1 (Japan), adopted a report denying recognition to Manchukuo and mildly criticizing Japanese aggression; no one was surprised. The English-speaking head of the Japanese delegation, Matsuoka Y
suke, thereupon faithfully followed the cabinet's withdrawal scenario and walked out.
⁸¹
On March 27, the Japanese government formally notified the League that it had withdrawn.
⁸²

Hirohito marked the occasion with an imperial rescript to the nation. Drafted by the chief of the Foreign Ministry's Asia Bureau, Tani Masayuki, in consultation with the emperor and Makino, the rescript contained a pitifully feeble admonition that “Organs of mil
itary command and political organs should try not to infringe on their respective spheres.”
⁸³
Its real burden, however, was its assertion that a difference of opinion over the Manchuria problem had forced the government to withdraw from the world organization.
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Nevertheless, that withdrawal did not go against “the fundamental spirit of the League” and Japan would continue to work “for the welfare of mankind.” Depicting an obviously negative action as inherently positive and benevolent, the imperial rescript achieved a rhetorical mish-mash that obfuscated everything. This was an early instance of a practice that soon became standard procedure—the papering over of unresolved internal disputes by combining opposing actions and assertions in a bland—and blind—show of consensus when no one really agreed on anything.

Interestingly, too, the same day that the cabinet voted on the League, Makino had noted in his diary:

Perhaps Makino could have expanded on the role of the media in generating support for the Manchurian war, but he was not wrong about the uncritical popular response to anti-League propaganda.
⁸⁶
Many people were easily persuaded to move right, left, or about-face. But what about himself and the emperor? Belief in a policy of expansion, disagreement over how to use imperial authority to control the army, and fear of domestic unrest all lay behind the court's appeasement of military expansion. Makino, particularly susceptible to such fear, had abruptly abandoned his support for Japanese-Anglo-American-cooperation when he was confronted by
the advocates of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia. Rather than clash with the military, he abjured his long-held belief in the Versailles-Washington treaty system. He supported Hirohito's decision to quit the League, which he himself had helped establish. Hirohito and Makino, standing at the top of the polity, became, in a sense, the earliest apostates in a decade of apostasy.
⁸⁷

No documentation has been presented to show that Hirohito or his palace advisers ever sought to avoid a break with the League by proposing alternatives to the army's continental policy. Influenced perhaps by the euphoric public response to the army's deeds of valor, Hirohito decided to gamble. With little or no questioning of where the resulting diplomatic isolation might lead, he sanctioned the cabinet's decision. Maintaining a good standing with his recalcitrant army was more important to him at that moment than international goodwill. Hirohito failed to see that international isolation would not heal the internal, structural rift between the cabinet and the army, which only widened the more he exercised his direct authority as supreme generalissimo.

Prime Minister Sait
was equally shortsighted. In reporting on the League to a secret session of the House of Peers (February 21), Sait
, like the emperor, expressed concern only over small, immediate possible consequences of withdrawal, such as whether the League and the United States would allow Japan to continue controlling the mandated islands in the South Pacific.
⁸⁸
One would have expected Hirohito to question Sait
on the long-term consequences of withdrawal. So far no evidence indicates that he did.