Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (80 page)

And the more Hirohito pressed “unity” upon the representatives of his chronically divided “government” and “high command,” the more they papered over their differences in policy texts that virtually impelled expansion abroad and, soon, war without end. It was not just the Japanese military provoking aggression in China during the middle and late 1930s; the religiously charged monarchy was
also driving aggression, while offering a shield from public criticism to those who acted in its name.

On August 25, 1936, the Hirota government announced that slightly more than 69 percent of the government's total 1937 budget (or nearly 33 billion yen) would be allocated to the military. This amounted to almost a threefold increase in the 1936 military budget of approximately 10 billion yen, or 47.7 percent of government spending.
⁶⁸
To pay for all this, taxes would be raised and inflation tolerated, armaments manufacturers and the great
zaibatsu
enriched, and the patriotism of ordinary wage earners fanned up while their wages were held down.

These policies of the Hirota cabinet reflected and to some degree were impelled by backlash within the navy over the army's unilateral actions at home and abroad. On March 27, 1936, the Third Fleet commander, Adm. Oikawa Koshir
, had offered to the navy minister and the chief of the Navy General Staff his “Views on National Policy Centering on China.” Writing from his flagship,
Izumo
in Shanghai Harbor, Oikawa pointed out that the Kwantung Army was rushing “political machinations” to “separate the five provinces of North China from the authority of the Nanking government and so form a buffer zone between Manchukuo and China.”
⁶⁹

After urging the navy not to permit the Kwantung Army to act unilaterally in so grave a matter, Oikawa recommended a policy of expanding southward into Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific, while also moving north. Although this should be done peacefully, Japan had to prepare and be ready someday to free itself of tariff and other obstacles to economic growth “by using military force.” Therefore, even if war against the Soviet Union should be decided on and “preparation for a war on land” made the immediate national goal, the navy still should prepare for war at sea.
⁷⁰
Oikawa also stressed the need to exercise care and pru
dence so as not to provoke the Great Powers and induce them “to unite against us.”
⁷¹

The reply to Admiral Oikawa by the navy vice minister and the vice chief of the Navy General Staff was later formally adopted as the Hirota cabinet's “Criteria for National Policy” and “General Principles of National Policy,” approved in August.
⁷²
The latter document spoke of making Japan the “stabilizing force in East Asia” while it expanded southward.
⁷³
At this time, however, the navy's senior commanders clearly recognized the irrationality of separate army and navy advances, fearing that this would exceed Japan's national strength and “ultimately lead to war with more than two countries.” They recommended a policy of “gradual and peaceful expansion” in both the north and the south.
⁷⁴

This was indeed the rational strand in the otherwise wildly ambitious strategy pursued by the cabinets of Hirota and his successor, General Hayashi. That influential groups in the navy, army, Foreign Ministry, and imperial court were still capable of lucid evaluations of Japan's problems during 1936 and the first half of 1937 is undeniable. Nevertheless, these same leaders were already beginning to be carried by the momentum of their choices. Sooner or later their policy goals—military expansion on the continent, naval control of the western Pacific and Southeast Asian sea lanes, and equalization of relations with the Great Powers—would provoke military clashes with China—and even more serious clashes with the United States and Britain.

Significantly, in the fall of 1936, after several incidents involving attacks on Japanese nationals living in central and south China, the navy began to study ways to improve its policing capabilities in south China. The air power theories of the Italian Maj. Gen. Giulio Douhet were then in vogue among navalists, and the resulting contingency plan included a punitive air campaign against the civilian population of China's major cities as well as preparations for conducting a coastal blockade should one ever be needed.
⁷⁵

Hirota's tenure as prime minister ended on January 23, 1937. He was followed on February 2 by General Hayashi, whose cabinet lasted only four months. Prince Konoe then organized his first cabinet on June 4. He was a descendant of the famous Fujiwara family of court nobles, whose women had for centuries regularly intermarried with imperial princes and during the Heian period (794–1185) had ruled Japan. Personal cleverness, charisma, and high lineage, as well as good connections with the navy and willingness to cultivate the army and the civilian right wing all combined to propel him to the top.

V

Following the February 26, 1936, uprising, under the prime ministerships of Hirota and Hayashi, the emperor and his entourage became more supportive of reinforcing his theoretically unassailable power from below. In this context the Ministry of Education accelerated efforts to further the nation's spiritual mobilization for a possible protracted war, and on May 31, 1937, published and distributed for school use an estimated three hundred thousand copies of
Kokutai no hongi
(The Fundamentals of the national polity). Eventually more than two million copies were sold nationwide.

Kokutai no hongi
was a discourse on the
kokutai
, and on the emperor's ideological and spiritual role as the exemplar of national benevolence and morality. A transitional ideological tract, it did not completely reject Western thought and institutions, but went beyond merely emphasizing Japanese cultural distinctiveness. Extolling the “bright,” “pure,” and selfless “heart” of the Japanese, and counterposing the
kokutai
to modern Western individualism and “abstract totalitarianisms,” it stressed the absolute superiority of the Japanese people and state over all other nations. “We loyal subjects differ completely in our nature from so called citizens of
Western nations…. We always seek in the emperor the source of our lives and activities.”
⁷⁶

Kokutai no hongi
also emphasized the centrality of the family-state, home, and ancestors, and reminded readers that the “divine winds” (
kamikaze
), which had twice saved Japan from Mongol invasions in the late thirteenth century, proved indisputably Japan's divinity and indestructibility. Above all the pamphlet implanted the image of the emperor as a military ruler and “a living god who rules our country in accordance with the benevolent wishes of his imperial founder and his other imperial ancestors.”
⁷⁷
All Japanese subjects had the duty to give Hirohito their absolute obedience. In practice that meant “to live for the great glory and dignity of the emperor, abandoning one's small ego, and thus expressing our true life as a people.”
⁷⁸
Here, in essence, was that peculiar amalgamation of Shinto, Buddhist, neo-Confucian, and Western monarchist ideals, known as
k
d
—“the imperial way,” that powered Japanese aggression, and was used by army leaders to browbeat critics and by right-wing thugs to justify their terrorist actions. For Hirohito the chief merit of the pamphlet was the possibility it offered of producing a stronger spirit of devotion to his person, thereby enhancing his influence over the military.

The myth of Japan as a tightly unified, monolithic state and society, which
Kokutai no hongi
perpetuated, was reaffirmed four years later in July 1941 in yet another hysterical Shinto-Buddhist tract published and distributed by the Ministry of Education. By this time Hirohito had become the symbol of Japan's “escape” from the West, and had begun the process that would lead to the momentous decision to declare war against the United States and Britain. He needed more than ever the strongest possible political influence over the entire nation. The country had taken on the identity of a fascist state and had even adopted the haunting rhetoric of fascism; its people labored under the burdens of food rationing and a total war economy; policies were in place designed to increase
war production by lowering living standards; in the emperor's name all open dissent had been squashed.

Against this background
Shimmin no michi
(The Way of the subject) called for overthrowing “the old order based on the dominance of individualism, liberalism, and dialectical materialism,” and building a new order in East Asia based on the principle of allowing “all nations to seek their proper places.”
⁷⁹
The pamphlet demanded that “a structure of…unanimity” be established in all realms of national life so that Japan could perfect its total war state and establish “a world community based on moral principles.” With every subject involved in serving the emperor, it called upon all Japanese to purge egotism from their souls and practice daily a relation to the state in which nothing is “our own,” and “even in our private lives we always remember to unite with the emperor and serve the state.”
⁸⁰

E
arly on the morning of July 8, 1937, an ominous unplanned incident occurred some twenty miles south of Peking, when Japanese army units barracked at Fengtai clashed with Chinese garrison forces at the Marco Polo Bridge (in Chinese, Lukouchiao). Army headquarters in Tokyo was notified immediately and ordered that the problem—stemming from a brief exchange of rifle fire the night before—be resolved on the spot. The fighting in the vicinity of the bridge, located on the railway line from Peking to the interior city of Hankow, went on for three straight days. By the eleventh, negotiations by the local commanders resulted in the signing of an armistice. Thereafter, for about three weeks, the military leaders succeeded in making their armistice hold.

Now the serious consequences of a split in China policy within the military required the emperor, vacationing in Hayama, to return to Tokyo. One group, based partly in the Military Affairs Section of the Army Ministry and partly in the Operations Section of the Army General Staff, saw the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge as an opportunity. Manchukuo had never received lawful recognition by China; the terms of the armistice that had ended the Manchurian Incident were not being observed; the demilitarized zone separating the provinces of North China from Manchukuo was often violated; and there were other irritating issues. If the fighting near Peking was taken as a provocatory pretext, all outstanding problems with
China could be settled by one powerful military strike—for the Chinese would never be a formidable military match. Therefore troops should immediately be moved to the Peking area to “protect Japanese lives and property.” The officers who held this hawkish position enjoyed the support of Kwantung Army staff officers and some civilian officials of the South Manchurian Railway Company (a major repository of imperial household investments) who hoped to extend the company's lines from Manchukuo into North China, and so wanted to see the incident expand.
¹

The other, more senior group, confined to the Army General Staff and centered on Major General Ishiwara, head of the First Department, and his Second Section chief, Kawabe Torashiro, feared becoming so embroiled in China that resources would be diverted from the buildup to defend against the Soviet Union. When, on July 9, the Konoe cabinet met in emergency session and decided temporarily to postpone sending more troops to North China, the views of this second group—the nonexpansionists who called for local settlement of the incident—momentarily prevailed. The expansionists, however, were already at work behind the scenes, placing homeland divisions on alert and drafting orders to send reinforcements, and when the Konoe cabinet met again on the eleventh, it reversed its decision of the ninth and decided to send thousands of troops to North China from the Kwantung Army, the Korean Army, and the homeland.

Meanwhile Hirohito reacted to the events in North China by first considering the possible threat from the Soviet Union. One week earlier, on June 30, Japan's recently mutinous First Division had been building fortifications on Kanchazu Island in the Amur River. At that point along the ambiguously demarcated border between northern Manchukuo and the Soviet Union, Russian troops came onto the island, a firefight ensued, and the Japanese destroyed two Soviet gunboats. The Russians, showing restraint, brought up more troops and artillery but did not immediately
respond otherwise.
²
Tokyo and Moscow exchanged charges, and a test of resolution seemed imminent. Would the Russians now attack along the Manchukuo border? The emperor summoned his chief of staff, Prince Kan'in, before meeting, in succession, with Prime Minister Konoe, the new army minister, Sugiyama, and the chief of the Navy General Staff.

Hirohito wanted to know exactly what the contingency plans were, and Kan'in was evasive. Nevertheless, despite his disappointment with Prince Kan'in's report, the emperor approved the decision of the Konoe cabinet to move troops to North China, and put his seal on the order for their dispatch.

Aware of the armistice yet anxious to resolve all of its outstanding problems with China in one stroke, the Konoe cabinet had decided to enlarge the incident, and the emperor had tacitly agreed from the very start. The sequence of decisions following the Marco Polo Bridge flare-up was thus quite unlike the pattern at the time of the Manchurian Incident, when field officers had perpetrated illegal faits accompli and the emperor had explicitly sanctioned their actions after the fact. On this occasion the Konoe cabinet was taking the initiative in tandem with the army expansionists, and Hirohito was supporting that decision from the outset in opposition to the nonexpansionists on the Army General Staff. On the other hand, in one respect the first episode of what would become the China war was similar to the far more premeditated Manchurian Incident. The shooting in the vicinity of the Chinese barracks at
Fengtai near Marco Polo Bridge on July 8 had been arbitrarily ordered by a Japanese regimental commander without orders from the center, in order to rectify a perceived “insult to the Japanese army.” Though this action did not really begin the war, Hirohito would later refer to it in blaming the army for expanding a skirmish, already calming, into the long and bitter China conflict.
⁴

Three years into the war the emperor looked back and expanded on his thoughts and actions that day in early July when he had pondered what to do in North China. The number one priority had to be preparation to fight the Soviet Union. Therefore he believed he had no choice in China except to compromise and delay; and so he had talked with Prince Kan'in and the Minister of the Army Sugiyama Gen about the Kanchazu Island matter. They told him, in effect, that so far as the army was concerned there was no need to worry: “Even if war with China came,…it could be finished up within two or three months,” which seemed unreasonable to Hirohito. So he left the matter open for a short time, decided to talk with Prime Minister Konoe, convene an imperial conference, and work through to a decision. If his military opposed it, then that was that. He spoke with the service ministers and the chiefs of staff. They did not convince him either way, but “they agreed with each other on the time factor, and that made a big difference; so all right, we'll go ahead.” The war with China was launched. Then it soon became clear that Japanese forces in China were not large enough. “Transfer troops from the border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union,” he said. But his military chiefs told him, “No, that can't be done.”
⁵
Hirohito was silent as to his own shortsightedness in the making of this decision.

The press report issued to the Japanese nation by the Konoe cabinet, also on July 11, 1937, stated that troops were being ordered to North China because “the Chinese side” had deliberately perpetrated an armed attack against Japan. “As our empire's constant concern is to maintain peace in East Asia, however, we have not abandoned
hope that peaceful negotiations may yet ensure nonexpansion of the conflict.”
⁶
Japan's domestic press emphasized the Konoe cabinet's hope to contain the fighting to the Peking-Tientsin area and left unchallenged the claim that the Chinese were wholly at fault. The emperor, who by now had acquired considerable experience in dealing with his divided and deeply flawed military apparatus, probably knew otherwise. But the incident had happened; it was ongoing; and it needed to be ended quickly.

Meanwhile, as preparations went forward for a general offensive in response to recurring small-scale clashes with Chinese troops, Hirohito's concern about Soviet intervention lessened, and he took satisfaction in the fact that the cabinet—which included Hirota as foreign minister, Sugiyama as army minister, Yonai as navy minister, and Kaya Okinori as finance minister
⁷
—had gone on record as opposed to expanding the incident beyond the Peking-Tientsin area.

Two weeks later, as the reinforcements from the Kwantung Army and the Korean Army were joined by the three divisions from the homeland, several minor clashes with the Chinese occurred, at Langfan, near Tientsin, on July 25 and at the Kuang'an Gate near the center of Peking the next day. Hirohito now pressed for a decisive, war-ending battle, and on July 27 sanctioned an imperial order directing the commander of the China Garrison Force to “chastise the Chinese army in the Peking-Tientsin area” and “bring stability to the main strategic places in that region.”
⁸

The broad Japanese offensive followed strictly orders sanctioned by the emperor and issued from Tokyo, and after only two days of fighting led to the occupation of Peking and Tientsin, in both of which cities the British and French maintained small treaty-port settlements.
⁹
By changing the mission of the China Garrison Force from protecting Japanese residents to occupying Chinese territory, Hirohito had abetted the escalation of the incident, leading to a new state of affairs in North China.

On July 29–30 there occurred a fresh incident which offered timely justification for Japan's renewed policy of aggression, undertaken in the name of “chastising Chinese violence.” Tungchow, a small walled city east of Peking, was under the control of the collaborator Yin Ju-keng and his (Japanese-trained) Chinese security forces. On July 29–30, the latter rose up and attacked the Japanese civilian community, left undefended by the departure for nearby Peking and Tientsin of the main Japanese garrison. The uprising triggered a mood of blind fury against the Japanese occupiers. Assisted by students and workers, the Chinese troops slaughtered eighteen Japanese soldiers, nine intelligence officers, and 223 of the city's 385 Japanese and Korean residents, including many women and children.

In Japan the Tungchow massacre generated a mood of anger and belligerence. The press reported a “second Nikolaevsk,” but failed to put the Chinese atrocity in perspective by mentioning that the Japanese invasion of the north was coming from the demilitarized zone, where Japanese and Koreans manufactured heroin and opium for smuggling into the provinces of North China.
¹⁰
Kido greeted the news with deep anger, as did, presumably, most policy makers. Prince Takamatsu discussed Tungchow with the emperor on August 2 and cautioned him to remember that the views of the nonexpansionists in the army did not represent the entire army. Takamatsu may also have told his brother that, as he observed in his diary, “[t]he mood in the army today is that we're really going to smash China so that it will be ten years before they can stand up straight again.”
¹¹

In view of such incidents it can hardly be said that the Japanese government was being dragged into war by its own forces. Rather it is more accurate to say that Konoe, backed by one group in the army, had resolved to exploit a small incident for the larger aim of punishing the Chinese army and securing control of the Peking-Tientsin area. In this, Konoe enjoyed the active support of Hiro
hito, who had cut short his vacation to return to the palace and was being carefully briefed on developments. As the historian Fujiwara Akira noted, “it was the [Konoe] government itself that had resolved on war, dispatched an army, and expanded the conflict,” and Hirohito had fully supported it.
¹²

At this point Chiang Kai-shek decided to abandon the north and by shifting the war to the lower Yangtze River region, starting at Shanghai, possibly involve the foreign powers in defense of their citizens living in China's largest and most international city. Japan had close to twenty-five thousand residents there, the Europeans about sixty thousand, and the Americans approximately four thousand. Nearly all of them lived in the foreign-ruled International Settlement area.
¹³
The Battle of Shanghai began August 13; the next day Chinese air force planes joined in by attacking Japanese troops and naval airplanes on the ground and bombing the Third Fleet's flagship
Izumo
. Almost immediately the Navy Ministry under Admiral Yonai became the main advocate of war expansion, including the occupation of Nanking.
¹⁴
This second series of moves, by Chiang Kai-shek on one side and the Imperial Navy on the other, turned the “North China Incident” into the China war.

At Shanghai, Chiang's best-trained and-equipped troops plus assorted “auxiliaries,” eventually totaling approximately 110,000 to 150,000 troops, took on some twelve thousand Japanese sailors and marines, who were quickly reinforced.
¹⁵
Gen. Matsui Iwane was made Hirohito's field commander on August 15, and five days later a Shanghai Expeditionary Force (consisting, eventually, mainly of poorly disciplined reservists in their late twenties and early thirties) was dispatched. The Twelfth Infantry Regiment and the Tenth Brigade Headquarters of the Eleventh Infantry Division were placed on alert at Dairen in case they were needed at Shanghai.
¹⁶

Concomitantly twenty naval planes based in Nagasaki made a four-hour transoceanic flight to bomb, for the first time, the Chinese capital of Nanking.
¹⁷
These aircraft were the “96-type long-
range bombers,” that had recently been developed under the guidance of Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku for use in a future air war against the United States; Yamamoto was anxious to test them.
¹⁸
On the seventeenth the Konoe cabinet, foreseeing quick victory, formally decided to abandon its nonexpansion policy and wage war for the singularly vague purpose of “chastising” China's armed forces. “The empire, having reached the limit of its patience,” read the announcement, “has been forced to take resolute measures. Henceforth it will punish the outrages of the Chinese army, and thus spur the Nanking government to self-reflect.”
¹⁹
Behind this decision, of course, lay the emperor's judgment and approval, just exercised in pushing troop reinforcements and strategic bombing—or it would never have come to pass. Equally important was his and the cabinet's arrogant disdain for the Chinese people and their capacity for resistance.