Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (82 page)

Furthermore the cabinet (as a whole) could not exercise control over its military members because of its weak powers of integration
and the unique position within it of the army and navy ministers, who enjoyed independent authority to advise the emperor. At the insistence of the navy, which feared both army control of the Imperial Headquarters and any weakening of its own independent “right of supreme command,” the prime minister and civil officials were excluded from the Imperial Headquarters. Although Hirohito sanctioned this arrangement, it reduced efficiency and hampered communication and coordination with the civil organs of state throughout the war.

Having established the Imperial Headquarters, Hirohito found it somewhat easier to perform as an active supreme commander in chief, something his grandfather Meiji had never been. In communicating his highest orders, called Imperial Headquarters Army Orders (
tairikumei)
and Imperial Headquarters Navy Orders (
daikairei
), directly to the theater commanders, area army commanders, often division commanders, and fleet admirals, Hirohito's army and navy chiefs of staff acted as “transmitters.” Although it was physically impossible for him to scrutinize all the orders of the Imperial Headquarters, these orders in the highest category—his supreme commands—were carefully examined by Hirohito before being returned to the chiefs of staff for transmission.

The same was true of the more important orders and directives that the chiefs of staff issued based on the
tairikumei
and
daikairei
. Drafts originated in the operations sections of the army and navy, were revised by department heads and bureau chiefs, moved up the chain of command to the vice chiefs of staff and chiefs of staff, and finally were presented to the emperor for his approval before being sent out.
³⁹
Thus, not only as the force that animated Japan's entire war system, but as the individual with free agency who carefully examined and sanctioned the policies, strategies, and orders for waging wars of aggression, Hirohito's responsibility was enormous.

Hirohito interacted with his Imperial Headquarters through probing questions, admonitions, and careful repetition of his
instructions and questions to his chiefs of staff and war ministers. Over time he also learned how to use his position to put constant psychological pressure on them. Usually he operated temperately, more in the courteous manner of George C. Marshall, one might say, than in that of George S. Patton. His “questions,” however, were tantamount to orders and could not be ignored. Sometimes he met objections to the changes he wished to see implemented in ongoing military operations, but so long as he persisted, he prevailed—even if that meant his chiefs of staff had to override the wishes of important department heads and operations sections chiefs who desired different policies. The chiefs of staff, in short, were responsible to an energetic, activist emperor, and could never wage the China war just as they liked.
⁴⁰
The same was true of the army and navy ministers, who were also subjected to Hirohito's interrogations and sometimes made to feel his anger.

Moreover, at key moments for which documentary evidence is available, Hirohito not only involved himself, sometimes on a daily basis, in shaping strategy and deciding the planning, timing, and so on of military campaigns, but also intervened in ongoing field operations to make changes that would not have occurred without his intervention. He also monitored, and even occasionally commented on, orders issued by area commanders to their subordinate units, though the extent to which he did this cannot be determined.
⁴¹

Informal briefings (
nais
) from the cabinet, which Hirohito had received ever since the start of his reign, were augmented from late 1937 onward by the Imperial Headquarters, which regularly supported Hirohito in his supreme commander role. To some extent the informal briefings were question-and-answer sessions—questions from his majesty (
gokamon
), answers from his briefers. The usual participants were the chiefs of staff and certain cabinet ministers. From time to time there were more formal sessions. At these the emperor silently received written or oral reports (
j
s
) from his ministers or senior military staff. During the
nais
briefings,
exchanges of information and ideas could lead to discussions of policy, strategy, even tactical matters, and to decisions arrived at by Japanese-style “consensus”—with the result that cabinet decisions were predetermined “finished products” that mirrored Hirohito's thinking and therefore rarely had to be revised.
⁴²

II

In late October the positional warfare in and around Shanghai showed signs of drawing to an end. On November 9 the Chinese army began a partial withdrawal. Some three square miles of the city and large parts of its environs had been devastated by artillery shelling and by air and naval bombardment. Nearly a quarter million Chinese had been killed, including many women and children who had fought on the front lines. Japan had suffered 9,115 dead and 31,257 wounded.
⁴³
Chinese defenses crumbled around mid-November, after the Shanghai Expeditionary Force's Sixteenth Division, commanded by Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago, came ashore unopposed at Paimaoko on the banks of the Yangtze River, threatening to link up with the Tenth Army, under Lt. Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke, which had landed a week earlier on the northern coast of Hangchow Bay.
⁴⁴
The demoralized and disorganized soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek, exposed to constant bombing and strafing from Japanese navy planes and to shelling from Japanese gunboats, retreated pell-mell through villages and towns along the Yangtze toward Nanking, some 180 miles away.

Columns of Japanese troops, heavily reinforced but badly in need of rest and resupply, pushed west in hot pursuit. The original mission of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force had been to conduct only a limited war in the Shanghai area and to avoid problems with the British and the Americans. These restrictions were now ignored as field commanders began to exercise their own discretionary power in defiance of the high command in Tokyo. Entering for the
first time into direct contact with ordinary Chinese civilians, the troops (who had been killing prisoners of war throughout the Shanghai fighting) were now ordered to disregard the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. As stated in the attack order of the Second Battalion of the Sixth Infantry Regiment, issued on November 11, “All the law-abiding people have retreated within the walls. Treat everyone found outside the walls as anti-Japanese and destroy them…. Since it is convenient in conducting sweep operations to burn down houses, prepare materials.”
⁴⁵

Burning and plundering villages and towns as they proceeded inland along main roads and along the rail trunk line toward Nanking, the different units of the Japanese army drove ahead of them a vast exodus of Chinese troops and civilian refugees. On December 1 Hirohito's newly established Imperial Headquarters ordered the Tenth Army and the Shanghai Expeditionary Force to close in on the capital from different directions. The following day Prince Asaka took command of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and General Matsui, then in poor health, was promoted to command the Central China Area Army, which comprised his own Shanghai force and the Tenth Army. On December 8 troops under Asaka's command began the assault on the Chinese defenses. The walled city of Nanking, with a population estimated at four to five hundred thousand, fell on December 13, after a defense of only five days.

There were no orders to “rape” Nanking. Nor did Imperial Headquarters ever order the total extermination of the enemy as the ultimate goal of the Nanking encirclement campaign. Standing orders to take no prisoners did exist, however. And once Nanking fell, Japanese soldiers began to execute, en masse, military prisoners of war and unarmed deserters who had surrendered. They also went on an unprecedented and unplanned rampage of arson, pillage, murder, and rape. The resulting slaughter continued in the city and its six adjacent rural villages for three months, and far exceeded ear
lier atrocities committed during the Battle of Shanghai and along the escape routes to Nanking. General Nakajima's Sixteenth Division, in just its first day in the capital, killed approximately 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers. Another Japanese estimate reduces that total somewhat, to 24,000.
⁴⁶

When General Matsui, with Asaka's assent, Asaka insisted on staging a triumphal victory parade on horseback down the broad main thoroughfare of Nanking on December 17, Asaka's chief of staff, Inuma Mamoru, then ordered the Sixteenth and Ninth Divisions to intensify their mopping-up operations within the occupied city and its surrounding villages so that no harm would befall the imperial prince. On the night of December 16 and into the morning hours of the seventeenth, with the battle already won and the Chinese remnant troops, mostly unarmed and out of uniform, trying desperately to flee, Japanese soldiers rounded up and indiscriminately executed more than seventeen thousand men and boys. Just within the Nanking city walls.
⁴⁷
Meanwhile the Ninth Division stepped up its murderous operation in Nanking's outlying administrative districts.

At 2
P.M
. on December 17, General Matsui, accompanied by Admiral Hasegawa, concluded the victory ceremony by bowing to the east and raising the Sun Flag from the front of the former Kuomintang Government office building. “Banzai for His Majesty the Supreme Commander!” shouted Matsui three times. More than twenty thousand assembled combat troops—one-third the total number occupying the city—echoed in unison.
⁴⁸

The total number of Chinese atrocity-victims—both within the walled city and its rural districts—remains hotly disputed. The best Japanese estimates put the figure at “no fewer than two hundred thousand,” while acknowledging that the true number may never be known. The postwar Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal accepted an estimate of “over 200,000” civilians and prisoners of war “murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks.”
⁴⁹
The war crimes trial held at Nanking accepted a figure of “over 300,000,”
and later uncorroborated estimates made in China increased that figure to 340,000 victims.
⁵⁰
In December 1937 the first Western news accounts of the Nanking massacres, based on limited access to the city, gave estimates of from ten thousand to more than twenty thousand killings in the first few days.
⁵¹
Of the specific battlefield conditions that led Japanese soldiers to commit these horrendous crimes, the ones most frequently cited by Japanese historians are the breakdown of discipline, racial chauvinism, desire for revenge, and “extreme psychological frustration.”