Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (79 page)

When Hirohito ordered the immediate suppression of the rebels on the morning of February 26, he was angry at them for having murdered his closest advisers, and at his senior army officers for procrastinating in putting them down. On the second day Minister of Commerce and Industry Machida assumed the additional post of finance minister, and fear of economic panic and confusion became a reason, though not the main one, for the emperor's action. Thereafter Hirohito felt that every hour of delay harmed Japan's international image.
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Repeatedly since the Manchurian Incident, the emperor had clashed with the military over infringements of his authority but never over fundamental policy. Occasionally, in step with the army's rise to power, he had impressed his own political views on policy making, just as he had done earlier under the Hamaguchi cabinet.
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The February 26 mutiny taught him and Yuasa—his privy seal from March 1936 to June 1940, and the very first lord keeper of the privy seal to come to court daily—the importance of exercising the emperor's right of supreme command to the full whenever circumstances required. Even with Honj
acting against him, Hirohito had
received support and gotten his way by taking a firm stance. His decisiveness abruptly ended the period in which alienated “young officers” had tried to use him as a principle of reform to undermine a power structure they could not successfully manipulate. Hirohito, however, had learned precisely how to manipulate that establishment in most situations and circumstances.

The decision-making process had built into it secrecy, indirection, lack of clear lines of communication, vagueness in the drafting of policy statements, and manipulation of information networks—in short, confusion, misunderstanding, and perpetual intrigue to negotiate elite consensus. That was the way things worked in Tokyo. It was how the emperor worked. Now, once again, he had reminded all the close-knit elites that
he
was
the reason
the system worked.

IV

On May 4, 1936, in his rescript at the opening ceremony of the Sixty-ninth Imperial Diet, while Tokyo still lay silenced under martial law, Hirohito had finally closed the curtain on the February mutiny. For a short time he considered sending the military and the nation a strong message of censure of the army, but after much thought and procrastination over a three-month period, he settled for one terse, utterly innocuous sentence: “We regret the recent incident that occurred in Tokyo.”
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Many in his audience of Diet members and military officials responded with startled “awe,” and privately some were disappointed. Once again, at a crucial moment, Hirohito declined an opportunity to rein in his military publicly through his constitutional role. Nevertheless, owing to his actions behind the scene, the drifting and yawing in domestic policy that had characterized Japan since the Manchurian Incident now ended, and over the next fourteen months, the emperor and most of his advisers concurred with the demands of the army and
navy for accelerated military buildup and state-directed industrial development.

The Hirota K
ki cabinet, formed immediately after the February 26 mutiny, following Privy Seal Yuasa's recommendation, is remembered for having furthered military influence in politics while allowing interservice rivalries and jealousies to affect national goals. In May 1936 Hirota, on the advice of his army and navy ministers, revived the practice of appointing military ministers only from the roster of high-ranking officers on active duty. He professed to believe the measure would prevent officers associated with the discredited Imperial Way faction from someday regaining power.
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By narrowing the field of candidates and increasing the power of the army vis-à-vis the prime minister, Hirota's action paved the way for army leaders to use this weapon to overthrow the cabinet of Admiral Yonai in July 1940.
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In policy toward China, Hirota spurned cooperation based on equality and supported the army's plans to separate the five provinces of North China, with a population estimated at more than eighty million, from the Nanking government. Hirota had been foreign minister when the Japanese commander of the China Garrison Force, based in the port city of Tientsin, and the chief of the Mukden Special Agency had signed local agreements with Chinese Nationalist minister of war, Gen. Ho Ying-ch'in, by which Chiang Kai-shek withdrew both his political organs and his Central Army from North China. Like the emperor, Hirota had thereafter done nothing to counter statements by the commander of the China Garrison Force and other generals publicly suggesting that the coal-and iron-rich northern provinces be split away from the rest of China and, in effect, incorporated into the Japanese continental holding.
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Also like the emperor, Hirota shared an assumption that many Japanese officers considered self-evident: China was neither a nation nor a people but merely a territorial designation, and Japan
was entitled to rearrange that territory and take whatever parts it wished. Emperor Hirohito, on April 17, 1936, sanctioned the army's request for a threefold increase in the size of its small China Garrison Force from 1,771 to 5,774 troops.
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He also approved the establishment of a new military base at Fengtai, a rail junction in the southwest suburb of Peking, not far from the historic Marco Polo Bridge. Strong Chinese protests ensued, but the expanded garrison went ahead with the construction of its Fengtai barracks. Japanese troops were soon conducting training exercises with live ammunition, in close proximity to Chinese military facilities, setting the stage for repeated clashes with Chinese troops.
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Hirohito should have known that Japan needed time, capital, and more industry—in short, needed years of at least relative peace, if it was going to profit from its new territories on the continent and the industrial development already in place. And the Army General Staff also ought to have appreciated the dangerous animosity and distrust Japan had stirred up within China's educated public of workers, students, and intellectuals, and especially among such Manchurian exiles as Chang Hsueh-liang and his officer corps, who identified strongly with the northeastern provinces and were determined to go on resisting Japan.

Hirohito and his strategists were more concerned with protecting their overlong (and exposed) northern lines of supply and communication from possible Soviet interruption than with the “united front” that Chiang Kai-shek and his archrival Mao Tse-tung were forming throughout the first half of 1937. Japanese contingency planning under the Hirota cabinet focussed on defense against the Soviet Union. A major war with China was neither expected, desired, nor prepared for. Japanese relations with Moscow deteriorated as the Kwantung Army reinforced and expanded its activities in Inner Mongolia, and strengthened its positions along the northern border with Outer Mongolia.

The Hirota cabinet responded favorably to Nazi Germany's
policies of rapid rearmament on a gigantic scale, anti-Sovietism, economic autarchy, and racial and religious bigotry and intolerance. The signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936 was preceded by the growth of military ties between the Imperial Army and Navy and the German military command, and came on the heels of a series of foreign policy coups by Hitler that destroyed the post–World War I settlement in Europe.
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A secret protocol to the pact committed the signatories not to assist Moscow in the event of war between one of them and the Soviet Union.
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A year later Italy joined the pact. Having aligned internationally with the rising Nazi and Fascist dictatorships, imperial Japan could now be expected to act together with them in the future.
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For the democratically elected governments of Britain, France, and the United States, the Anti-Comintern Pact united the looming crises in Europe and Asia.

Hirota adopted his most important foreign policy measures in mid–1936, in four-and five-member ministerial conferences that departed from the practice of full cabinet meetings envisioned under the Meiji constitution. The “Criteria for National Policy,” and the “Foreign Policy of the Empire,” both decided on August 7, 1936, set forth a grandiose, provocative and unrealistic array of projects and goals, which, if they came to be concurrently attempted, would quite exceed Japan's national power. Manchukuo was to be built up; the resources of North China were to be secured for the empire through puppet regimes; preparations would be made for future war with the Soviet Union; control of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia was to be brought about, which would require new naval construction in competition with the United States, as well as the building of air bases and radio stations on Taiwan, the Marianas, and the Carolines (in the Central Pacific)—and, at the same time, there would be an increase in military and naval manpower and logistical support structures.
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The “Criteria for National Policy” registered the tendency of
Japan's bureaucratic elites to line up their respective positions, side by side, in vague official texts that could be interpreted to suit the convenience of their drafters.
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This was to be the pattern of decision making for all later stages of the crisis of Japanese diplomacy. That this tendency made its appearance on the eve of war with China was significant, for it meant that the prime minister, foreign minister, army and navy ministers, and the two chiefs of staff had abandoned the task of thrashing out their disagreements in reasoned argument. Rather than struggle to reach genuine consensus, they adopted a simpler, easier procedure. They enscribed their respective positions in “national policy” documents that postponed reckoning over the resources needed to accomplish their goals, and also left unclear whether force or diplomacy, or both, would be employed.

The drafters of the national policy equated their first criterion—to “eliminate the hegemonistic policies of the Great Powers in East Asia”—with “manifest[ing] the spirit of the imperial way” in foreign policy. Henceforth foreign policy would become more expansionist and radical, for the “imperial way” implied, internationally, that the emperor's “benevolence” be extended until Japanese overlordship was established throughout Asia. The second yardstick of sound foreign policy required Japan “to become the stabilizing force in East Asia in both name and reality” by building up armaments. The third and fourth “criteria of national policy”—and the core of the document—were “to secure our footing on the East Asian continent, and to advance and develop in the Southern Oceans by combining diplomacy and national defense.”
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The reference to the “East Asian continent” met the wish of the army to advance north with a view to countering the Soviet Union; the “Southern Oceans,” an elastic geographical term, denoted the navy's goal of moving southward and preparing to achieve supremacy over the United States and Britain in the vast western Pacific. Neither service was happy with the goal of the other; nei
ther trusted the other. By posting their plans side by side, thereby avoiding a clear decision as to which one should prevail, they prevented the pluralistic system of advising the emperor from breaking down.

Japan was now only a year away from all-out war in China, but the inability of its constitutionally mandated imperial advisers and the chiefs of staff to agree on a unified national policy was more than ever an endemic feature of the political process. And complicating these disagreements and splits between “the government” and “the military,” under both Hirota and his successors, was continuing discord between the Army General Staff in Tokyo and officers in the field charged with implementing policy.

Once Japan entered a serious war emergency, with the prestige of the throne exalted far beyond the limits of ordinary times, this multitiered structure of bureaucratic conflicts created increasing room for Hirohito to maximize his influence in policy making. Constantly becoming more experienced in playing his designated political and military roles, Hirohito would watch as his advisers developed their policies, note their disagreements, and finally insist that they compose their differences and unify their military and political strategies. As it was impossible for them to do so, the pressure he exerted complicated the already confused decision-making process. His “unity” card would become Hirohito's special wedge for driving home
his
views, ensuring that those of “middle stratum” officers did not prevail in national policy making, and that the process itself remained primarily “top-down” in nature.