Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (85 page)

During 1938 the major cities and railways of northern, central, and southern China came under occupation by the Japanese army, while the vast hinterland of villages and mountainous areas in between served as bases for Chinese guerrillas. Everywhere during the first four years of the China war, the Japanese area armies slighted Communist troops controlled by Mao Tse-tung, regarding them as mere “bandits,” and directed virtually all their main blows against the “Nationalist” forces of Chiang Kai-shek. The same was true of the army air force, which carried out five long-range bombing campaigns in the interior of northern and central China during this period. They bombed military facilities in the Communist base-area of Yenan on only two occasions in October 1939. The main target of air attack was always Chungking. Not until August 1941, did the army commit large numbers of its bombers to attacking Yenan.
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Meanwhile, with the capture of Wuhan and Canton in October 1938, the Japanese ground offensive reached its apogee, and thereafter Japan shifted to the strategic defensive.
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Confronted with a deadlocked war and no prospect of victory in sight, Japan's leaders pressed on as if unable—more than unwilling—to change their ultimate goals. Against a backdrop of full national mobilization, tighter press censorship, and ever higher levels of military spending, they initiated numerous peace maneuvers. These turned on exploiting conflicts between the Chinese Nationalists and their domestic enemies. Prime Minister Konoe's famous declaration of a “New Order in East Asia” in November 1938 was the most significant of these initiatives. Konoe expressed his hope of achieving peace in China through Chiang Kai-shek's enemy—and leader of his own faction within the Kuomintang—Wang Ching-wei. This particular effort to supplement military action with polit
ical maneuvers eventually culminated in the establishment of the Wang regime in Nanking at the end of March 1940, and the signing of a Japan-China Basic Treaty in November 1940. Yet never really trusting Wang or believing in his ability to end the war, the Konoe government delayed recognizing his regime, and later forced him to cede to Japan, by treaty, a vast array of military, economic, and political privileges that turned his government into a puppet regime lacking any legitimacy in the eyes of most Chinese.

But whether focused on a direct settlement with Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking, or on the installation of a new sham government in Nanking, Japan's efforts at ending the war aimed ultimately at expanding, consolidating, and legitimizing its war gains. Never did its “peace feelers” manifest any intention to set a deadline for withdrawal of Japanese troops from North China, let alone relinquish control over the puppet state of Manchukuo.

The Japanese summer offensive against Wuhan was scheduled to begin in July 1938, and the Army General Staff was worried about the posture of the Soviet Union. On July 11, 1938, the commander of the Nineteenth Division precipitated a major clash with the Soviets over possession of a hill on the border of Manchukuo. Known as the Chang Ku-feng Incident, the result for Japan was a complete and costly defeat. At the time diarist Harada Kumao noted Hirohito's scolding of Army Minister Itagaki: “Hereafter not a single soldier is to be moved without my permission.”
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In other words he told his army minister that he would be in charge here, then took no disciplinary action at all against the officer who had provoked the incident. Shortly afterward, when it was clear that Soviet forces were not going to counterattack across the border, he gave the go-ahead for the planned offensive in China to begin.
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It was yet another example of his selectivity in using his authority to intervene.

Once again Japan expected to crush the Chinese quickly. Enjoying overwhelming ground, naval, and air superiority, the Japanese
offensive of late 1938 triumphed in virtually every encounter. But Chinese resistance was also stiffening, forcing Japanese troops to rely increasingly on chemical weapons. (Here too there were Western precedents: most notably, Germany's first use of poison gas in World War I and Fascist Italy's use of gas in Ethiopia in 1935.) By November, Japanese troops had occupied the “three Wuhan cities” of Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang on the Yangtze River in central China, and Canton in the far south; they controlled the main railways throughout the country and had established controlling enclaves in all of China's richest, most developed coastal provinces.
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Chiang Kai-shek, proclaiming that the war must continue, retreated with his entire government farther into the interior to the walled, mountain city of Chungking, beyond Japan's power to pursue him.
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For Japan, Wuhan was indeed the high point of the war, the extreme limit of its offensive capability at that time. As news of its victories came back, the nation celebrated as it had when the press first reported (prematurely) the news of Nanking's fall: Sirens sounded, newspapers published extras, and the emperor, as he had done during the Manchurian Incident, donned full uniform and appeared astride his white horse.

Konoe soon issued his second statement on the war, on November 3, l938. Maintaining that Japan intended to construct a “New Order in East Asia,” he also declared that it would not veto participation by the Nationalist Chinese government. Eight weeks later, on December 22, Konoe made an important third pronouncement, which set forth the “three Konoe principles,” thereafter considered to be Japan's official war aims. First, China must formally recognize Manchukuo and establish relations of “neighborly friendship.” This principle implied that China cease all anti-Japan activities. Second, China would be required to join Japan in defending against Communism; this implied that Japan had a right to maintain armies within China. Third, there must be broad economic cooperation
between the two governments, including acceptance of Japan's right to develop and exploit the natural resources of North China and Inner Mongolia.
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On these three principles, Japan hoped to establish its “New Order in East Asia.” Konoe's statement was intended to drive a wedge between the factions in the Nationalist government—former premier Wang Ching-wei on the one hand and Chiang Kai-shek on the other. The eventual outcome would be a new collaborationist government to rule from Japanese-occupied Nanking over Japanese-controlled provinces.
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IV

On January 4, 1939, Konoe resigned, unable to end the fighting in China or to bring about a consensus within his divided cabinet on a military alliance with Nazi Germany. His departure opened the way for three successors—former privy council president Hiranuma, Gen. Abe Nobuyuki, and Admiral Yonai—to carry the “holy war” forward. An accommodation with Wang Ching-wei to establish a rival regime in Nanking was in the offing. But Japan had not crushed Chiang Kai-shek. On the contrary, it had aroused a deep spirit of national resistance wherever its often wantonly brutal troops had advanced. Unable to maintain control of the vast rural countryside, forced to stretch its fronts and their lines of supply and communications to the limit, the Japanese armies in China soon found themselves hopelessly frustrated, both militarily and politically. At that point World War II started in Europe, and Japan's ruling groups began to imagine that the rising power of Germany offered them a way out of their dilemma.

Following his resigned prime minister's recommendation, the emperor at the start of 1939 appointed Hiranuma as Konoe's successor. Hiranuma was a strong supporter of the army and a person whom Hirohito had once considered an outright fascist. Since the
army mutiny of 1936, however, he had distanced himself somewhat from the radical right by dissolving the Kokuhonsha—at Prince Saionji's insistence—and cultivating ties with members of the court entourage. Now, under coaching from Finance Minister Ikeda Seihin and the court group, he redefined himself further, promising not to make enemies of Britain and the United States by entering hastily into a military alliance with Nazi Germany. His partial turnaround on the German alliance was enough to put him in Hirohito's good graces.
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For the next nine months Hiranuma grappled not only with military and diplomatic problems arising from the deadlocked war in China but also with the problem of the Soviet Union. In May the Kwantung Army clashed with Soviet and Mongolian forces near Nomonhan village, on the border between northwestern Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia (the Mongolian People's Republic). The fighting quickly developed into a full-scale border war, involving large numbers of tanks, artillery, and aircraft. Although the Kwantung Army brought biological warfare weapons to the front, no conclusive evidence shows that they actually used germ warfare against Mongolian and Soviet forces, as later charged.
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Fighting at Nomonhan continued until September 15, when Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Japanese ambassador T
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Shigenori signed a truce agreement in Moscow.

Japanese casualties—excluding their Manchukuoan auxiliaries—totaled more than 18,925 dead, wounded, or missing—virtually an entire division.
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The officers responsible for provoking the disastrous Nomonhan incident—the commander of the Kwantung Army, Gen. Ueda Kenkichi, and his two senior staff officers, Maj. Tsuji Masanobu and Lt. Col. Hattori Takushiro—were merely reassigned. No rethinking of army plans and methods took place. The emperor again refrained from punishing anyone, and in 1941 he even allowed Tsuji and Hattori to be promoted and to serve in important positions on the Army General Staff, just as he had ear
lier allowed the perpetrators of the Manchurian Incident to be posted to central headquarters in Tokyo, and promoted.
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Moreover, it appeared that the officers involved had acted legitimately on the basis of a document—the “Outline for Dealing With Disputes Along the Manchuria-Soviet Border”—that Hirohito had sanctioned shortly before the incident erupted. As the troops were following orders he had approved, he certainly did not want to punish them; and the army high command also saw no need to give more attention to a reckless action that had ended so miserably.
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That summer of 1939 the Hiranuma cabinet confronted yet another serious diplomatic problem arising from the stalemated war in China. For several months the North China Area Army had been unhappy over London's decision to stabilize China's national currency. Alleging the presence of Chinese terrorists operating from within the British concession in the occupied city of Tientsin, the army began puting pressure on the enclave. Japanese troops encircled the entire concession with an electrified wire fence and started searching foreigners for their possession of banned Nationalist currency. In mid-June they escalated their harassment to a full blockade and started strip-searching British citizens, male and female alike. Concurrently, at home, the army and right-wing groups unleashed an anti-British propaganda campaign.
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To the delight of army leaders, Hiranuma's home minister and close consultant, Kido, refused to rein in the campaign even though it had incurred Hirohito's displeasure.
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As Japan's relations with Britain worsened throughout the spring and summer of 1939, the pending problem arose of whether to strengthen ties with Germany, an idea the emperor opposed. When pro-Nazi ambassadors Gen.
shima Hiroshi in Berlin and Shiratori Toshio in Rome refused to convey the Foreign Ministry directive carefully circumscribing the terms under which Japan would join a new Axis pact, Hiranuma merely fretted. When he informed the emperor of their actions, Hirohito too grew excited but chose not to order their recall.
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