Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (69 page)

 

The new direction in foreign policy encouraged changes in how the Japanese understood themselves and the outside world. The old ruling elites had failed to give hope and encouragement to the people during the worst phase of the depression. The nation had responded by supporting the military, which at least seemed aware of their suffering and frustrations, and to want to help. Once the
nation succumbed to anti-Chinese, anti-Western xenophobia and embraced the Manchurian Incident, the only chance of checking the military lay with the court group. If Hirohito and his entourage had stood firm, the shift toward Asian Monroeism—the rhetorical assertion of a Japanese right to safeguard Asia from the West—might have been reversed. But the court group and those in its milieu also tended to see international affairs in antagonistic racial terms, disagreed among themselves as to which line to follow, and were opportunistically inclined to begin with. Ultimately they cooperated with the army.

A policy of military and economic expansion on the Asian continent in defiance of the Great Powers was made easier by developments abroad. The Sait
cabinet appeared on the scene when the industrialized West had come to be characterized by very different systems of national organization and values. In Germany, Hitler and his Nazi Party—the most revolutionary, nihilistic, racist movement ever to arise in Europe—were goose-stepping toward power in January 1933. Their open intention was to destroy the Versailles system and build up Germany's armaments in preparation for war.

In Britain the Conservatives had a keen sense of rivalry with Japan over control of the China market. At the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932, the Tories had gone over to protectionism and had resolved to form a British imperial sterling bloc, hedged in by preferential tariffs for members of the empire.

In the isolationist United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting his first term as president, took a different approach to the economic crisis. He upheld free trade and offered reciprocal trade agreements to as many nations as possible to lower tariff duties. Above all he sought to give people hope by reforming some of the nation's worst social ills and launching it in a new direction. But his New Deal recovery measures left intact the Jim Crow system of domestic racism in the south, while tending to reduce trade outlets for Japan in the Western Hemisphere and in the Philippines.
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As for the Soviet Union, its centrally planned economy had come to symbolize heavy industrialization without democracy. In 1932 the Soviet regime was returning to the international scene after having completed its first five-year plan. It was also starting to build up production of military aircraft and tanks and reequip its “Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army”—largely in reaction to Japanese expansion on the continent.
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It could be cogently argued that Soviet Russia, with its enormous military potential, was a barrier to Japanese strategic ambitions, and that communism was an ideological threat.

Japanese supporters of continental expansion could point to other frictions with the United States and Britain. Although Britain and the United States disagreed on how to cope with the depression and had difficulty coordinating their policies with respect to Japan, British and American politicians could justly be depicted as hypocritical practioners of formal democracy at home and defenders of the imperialist status quo abroad—and Japanese journalists were happy to provide such depictions. Conversely, Japanese proexpansionists could soon suggest that the rise of National Socialism in Germany augured well for Japan. Germany had followed Japan out of the League, and was the potential enemy of Britain, the United States, and Russia. Moreover, in 1933, Nazi Germany was also in a state of emergency and like Japan aiming for a racial and cultural renaissance.

Thus ideas advanced by Japan's leaders to justify their actions in Manchuria gained reinforcement from the breakdown of global capitalism, emergent monetary and trade blocs, and contending domestic systems of politics and ideology. In a lecture delivered at court before Hirohito and his entourage on January 28, 1932, former army minister General Minami emphasized national security, raw materials, and the need for territory to explain the army's creation of an independent Manchurian state. “Japan-Manchuria joint management,” he told the emperor, would enable Japan to “withstand an
economic blockade from abroad” and “[continue] indefinitely as a great power.”
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The acquisition of Manchuria in its entirety would also solve the Japanese “population problem” by providing space for Japan's rapidly increasing people, whose numbers by the end of the decade were expected to reach seventy million.

Following up, Matsuoka (a former corporate officer of the South Manchurian Railway Company) delivered a court lecture on February 8, 1932, entitled “Japan-Manchuria Relations and the Diplomatic History of Manchuria.” When questioned by Hirohito, Matsuoka somewhat vaguely stressed the difficulty of sustaining amicable relations among nations so closely related racially as Japan and China. “This is a principle in biology,” he informed his marine biologist monarch.
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Konoe, a frequent participant in court group discussions, cast the problems besetting Sino-Japanese relations in terms of conflict between the white and yellow races and asserted the spiritual superiority of the Japanese over their pale opponents. For Konoe the Manchurian Incident was a bolt of illuminating lightning that had “pierced the dark cloud of economic blocs encroaching around Japan.” “Even if the incident had not occurred and taken the form it did,” argued Konoe, “sooner or later an attempt would necessarily have had to be made to dispel the cloud and open a path for the destiny of Japan.” In “Sekai no genj
o kaiz
seyo” (Reform the world's status quo), an essay he published in February 1933, Konoe sounded a Malthusian warning on the causal relationship between population pressure and war:

For Konoe natural necessity, natural inevitability, and self-preservation justified Japan's right of conquest in Asia. He sneered at Westerners who dared

For Japanese who felt that the home islands and colonial Korea needed a territorial “buffer” against Soviet Communism and Chinese anti-imperialism, the idea of an “independent” Manchurian state was highly appealing. Defenders of Manchukuo also argued the great economic advantages of its vast resources. Manchukuo in time would become a life-space, providing land, homes, and food for a Japanese rural population, while its coal, iron, and agricultural resources would enable Japan's economy to accelerate and grow, and in the process prepare for any future protracted war with the United States.
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The idea of turning imperial Japan into a self-sufficient economic “empire” that could face down its Western colonial rivals in Asia militarily was, at one level, a rerun of the “Asian Monroeism” pursued by the Terauchi cabinet during World War I.
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Autarchy acquired widespread public appeal, however, only when the Western powers were seen as wantonly bullying Japan. Self-sufficiency
also had special appeal to Japanese capitalists at a time when they were seeking to reduce their dependence on foreign resources and technology, and shifting their domestic investments from light industries to heavy and chemical industries.

Of the many exaggerated, self-serving representations of the international situation proferred by Japanese opinion leaders during the incident, none was more effective in winning support for the army than the depiction of Manchuria-Mongolia as Japan's economic, strategic, and moral “lifeline,” “our only means of survival.” The lifeline metaphor, first coined by Matsuoka, stirred widespread feelings of patriotism. Gripped by a false account of their army's behavior in Manchuria, many Japanese seemed willing to confront even the greatest of the Great Powers in order to preserve their nation or uphold its honor. If recognition of Manchukuo and withdrawal from the League led to rejection of international law itself on the ground that international law was a Western construct, designed to freeze the international order at a point in time advantageous to the Anglo-Americans, then so be it. Japan would create its own hierarchical international framework grounded in norms that emanated from the emperor, who was morality incarnate and more real than the abstract Law Anglo-Americans cherished.

Konoe best captured this Japanese sense of aggrieved nationalism. Years earlier, in his famous essay of December 1918, “Reject the Anglo-American Standard of Pacifism” (
Ei-Bei hon'i no heiwashugi o haisu
), he had argued that the white race, by discriminating against the yellow, and advanced states such as Britain and the United States, by monopolizing colonies, had violated international norms of “justice and humanity.” Japan, “an undeveloped country of the Yellow Race,” should not advocate a “servile type of status quo,” but a “standard of pacifism” which put Japan at the center of the world and ordered events from a Japanese perspective.

This Manichaean view of the age as a confrontation between
have and have-not nations, and antagonistic racial groupings, now predisposed Konoe to support the incident, and to advocate dismantling both the Versailles-Washington system and the various international treaties supporting it.
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In a speech given in November 1935, Konoe denounced the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Nine-Power Treaty, and the London Naval Treaty, saying: “Italian officials preach with great boldness and frankness why Italy must expand. German politicians openly proclaim in the Nazi program why Germany requires new territory. Only Japan lacks this frankness.”
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Konoe found the reason for this deficiency in “Anglo-American standards…diffused throughout our Japanese thought,” thereby strengthening “the institutions devoted to preservation of the status quo.”