Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (83 page)

Also in dispute is the number of rape victims. Foreign observers at the time estimated that approximately one thousand women and girls of all ages were sexually assaulted and raped, daily, throughout the early stages of the occupation, when the imperial army had completely isolated Nanking from the rest of China. Raping continued into late March, by which time order in the ranks had been restored. “Comfort stations,” where women from throughout the Japanese empire were forced to serve as prostitutes, were beginning to proliferate; and the army had established a new “National Restoration Government” for the central China area to match the one installed some three months earlier at Peking. Yet widespread violence against Chinese civilians continued. Between the start of the China war in August 1937 and the end of 1939, as many as 420 Japanese soldiers would be convicted by military courts for the rape and murder of Chinese women. Yet no Japanese soldier was ever executed for such crimes.
⁵²

Hundreds of Japanese reporters and newsreel cameramen accompanied the army in China at this time, and a relatively small number from the United States and Europe. Only the latter conveyed to the world what was really happening. The censored Japanese press, prohibited from quoting foreign news sources critical of Japan, did not discuss massacres, war atrocities, terrorized civilians, or rapes, but merely reported many prisoners captured at Nanking and large numbers of Chinese dead left unburied.
⁵³
Never
theless the story of two Japanese second lieutenants competing to cut down with their swords a hundred Chinese soldiers had appeared several times in the
Tokyo Nichi Nichi shinbun
prior to the capture of Nanking, so that a context for grasping the violence on the battlefields in China existed.
⁵⁴
Yet only very discerning Japanese readers and those with access to foreign newspapers, such as the Christian scholar Yanaihara Tadao, made the connections and became aware that killers in uniform had committed crimes that did not accord with Japan's idealized self-image.
⁵⁵

Members of the imperial family, including Hirohito's fifty-year-old granduncle Prince Asaka, who had commanded the attack on Nanking under Matsui's supervision and was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities; forty-nine-year-old General Prince Higashikuni, chief of the army air force and an uncle of Empress Nagako; and seventy-one-year-old uncle Prince Kan'in, chief of the Army General Staff, all knew of the massacres and the near-total collapse of discipline.
⁵⁶
So too, of course, did Army Minister Sugiyama. Many middle-and upper-echelon officers of the Imperial Headquarters knew. Reserve Maj. Gen. Et
, a member of the Lower House of the Diet, knew.
⁵⁷
The Foreign Ministry certainly knew. Its East Asian Bureau chief, Ishigari Itar
, confided to his diary that “A letter arrived from Shanghai reporting in detail on the atrocities of our army in Nanking. It describes an horrendous situation of pillage and rape. My god, is this how our imperial army behaves?”
⁵⁸
The diplomat and old China hand Shigemitsu Mamoru wrote soon after the war of how, at the time, he had “made great efforts to develop a good policy toward China in order to compensate for crimes [committed] when occupying Nanking.”
⁵⁹

It seems unlikely that the Konoe government knew of the rape and pillage at Nanking but the well-briefed Hirohito did not. Hirohito was at the top of the chain of command, and whatever the shortcomings of the command system at that very early stage, he could not easily be kept ignorant of high-or middle-level decisions.
He closely followed every Japanese military move, read diplomatic telegrams, read the newspapers daily, and often questioned his aides about what he found in them. As the commander in chief who had sanctioned the capture and occupation of Nanking, and as the spiritual leader of the nation—the individual who gave legitimacy to the “chastisement” of China—he bore a minimal moral as well as constitutional duty to project—even if not publicly—some concern for the breakdown of discipline. He never seems to have done so.

Growing foreign diplomatic complaints about the behavior of his troops in the Shanghai-Nanking war zones may also have come to Hirohito's attention. Certainly they came to the attention of the high command and the Foreign Ministry, not to mention several members of the Diet. U.S. ambassador Grew twice formally protested the Japanese army's pillaging of American property and desecration of American flags in Nanking to Foreign Minister Hirota, who then raised the issue at a cabinet meeting in mid-January 1938.
⁶⁰

Diplomat Hidaka Shinrokur
, who visited Nanking right after its fall, also reported in detail to Hirota, and may even have briefed the emperor on the atrocities in late January, though the evidence for this is conjectural.
⁶¹
Hidaka spoke fluent English. He personally knew the Nazi German John Rabe, one of the organizers of the Nanking International Safety Zone, established by Westerners near the city's center to provide a sanctuary for refugees.
Manchester Guardian
reporter Harold J. Timperley, author of
Japanese Terror in China
(1938), the first book on the Nanking massacre, was his personal friend. He also discussed Nanking events with
New York Times
correspondent Hallett Abend. Hidaka even transmitted to the Foreign Ministry some of the complaints of members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, including those written by Rabe and Nanking University professor Lewis Smythe. If either Hidaka or Foreign Minister Hirota had briefed Hirohito on the atrocities committed by the army, he would have been very well informed indeed.

Assuming, however, that Hirohito was not officially informed by them or anyone else in a formal position of authority of the true scale of the mass executions his soldiers were carrying out, under divisional, regimental, and even staff orders, in violation of international law, he still had secondary intelligence of the breakdown of army discipline from non-chain-of-command sources, such as the domestic and foreign press, or perhaps from his brothers, who might have passed on to him orally rumors of what was going on in occupied Nanking.
⁶²
Since he did have such secondary intelligence, he could secretly have ordered an investigation. Yet no documentary trace exists of an imperial order to investigate. Instead there remains Hirohito's silence about the criminal behavior of the imperial forces whose movements he was following closely up to the very moment they took the city. There also remains the equally undeniable fact that throughout the prelude to the incident and during the entire period of the murders and rapes, rather than do anything
publicly
to show his displeasure, anger, or remorse, he energetically spurred his generals and admirals on to greater victories in the national project to induce Chinese “self-reflection.”

On November 20, more than three weeks before the fall of Nanking and the day his new Imperial Headquarters was established, Hirohito had bestowed an imperial rescript on the commander of the China Area Fleet, Adm. Hasegawa Kiyoshi. He applauded the officers and men of the fleet for cooperating with the army, controlling China's coasts, and interdicting its lines of marine transportation. At the same time he had warned, “We still have a long way to go before we achieve our goal. Increasingly strive to accomplish more victories.”
⁶³

Four days later, while attending his first Imperial Headquarters conference, Hirohito had given after-the-fact sanction to the momentous decision of General Matsui's Central China Area Army to attack and occupy the capital of China. During that meeting the head of the Operations Department of the Army General Staff
explained to him that both the transportation corps and the artillery units of the army in central China were still lagging far behind the foremost units on the front lines, and that while the army regrouped, “the air forces of the army and navy will…bomb Nanking and its strategic areas.”
⁶⁴
Thus Hirohito was quite aware of and approved the plans to bomb and strafe Nanking and its environs. He ratified (post facto) the removal of all restrictions on the army's perimeter of operations; he did nothing to hold back the army and navy during their headlong rush toward Nanking without prior authorization from Tokyo. On December 1—many days after aerial bombardment and sea and ground attacks on Nanking had begun—Hirohito gave the formal order for General Matsui to attack: “The commander of the Central China Area Army, acting jointly with the navy, will capture and occupy the enemy capital of Nanking (Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 8).”

Hirohito had been eager to fight a decisive battle in “the enemy capital” because at that time, like most of his high command, he had subscribed to the view that one big blow would bring Chiang Kai-shek to his knees and end the fighting. Consequently, despite the diplomatic harm Matsui's and Asaka's actions were causing, the emperor publicly praised them. On December 14, the day after Nanking fell, he conferred an imperial message on his chiefs of staff expressing his pleasure at the news of the city's capture and occupation.
⁶⁵
When General Matsui returned to Tokyo to be released from temporary active duty in February 1938, Hirohito granted him an imperial rescript for his great military accomplishments.
⁶⁶
Prince Asaka had to wait until April 1940 to receive his honor, the Order of the Golden Eagle.
⁶⁷
In such ways did Hirohito exercise his authority indirectly to condone the criminality of his troops. Although he may have been privately dismayed by what had happened at Nanking, he took no notice of it publicly, and did nothing to make up for it by taking an interest in and changing Japanese policy on the treatment of prisoners of war.

Both army and navy officers and men perpetrated the Nanking atrocities. Their start coincided with the shelling by the Japanese army of Chinese refugee vessels and the British gunboats
Lady Bird
and
Bee.
At the same time two Japanese navy planes deliberately bombed the U.S. gunboat
Panay
, at anchor on the Yangtze River some twenty-seven miles upstream from Nanking, with diplomats and American and European journalists and photographers aboard.
⁶⁸
To add insult to injury, after the
Panay
's crew and passengers had abandoned the burning ship, Japanese soldiers in motorboats boarded it and fired on the last lifeboat making its way to shore. Accounts of these incidents, in which three Americans later died and three others were seriously wounded, reached the West just when the British and American press began reporting the sensational news of the Nanking massacres.
⁶⁹
The two events impressed American public opinion with the aggressiveness, cruelty, and sheer audacity of the Japanese military, which had attacked warships of the two powers that had been most critical of Japan's actions in China. They also gave new resonance to the image of Japan as a direct threat to American security.