Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (87 page)

J
apan's ruling elites had embarked on a war in China for which Hirohito and the authority of the throne were absolutely essential. Officially the armed forces were chastising the troops of Chiang Kai-shek and spreading the virtues of the emperor, not creating chaos and cruelty. Hirohito's symbolic role was to obfuscate the relationship between the government's principles of peace and its policies of violence. He personally made the whole military endeavor seem both ethical and rational. Outwardly he was the model of morality for Japanese society, the embodiment of its aristocratic and national values, a symbol of its professedly benevolent intentions. The role he played as supreme commander, shaping the fighting strategy and the conduct of the war from behind the scenes, was deliberately camouflaged. Yet the experience he gained in playing that role during the first four years of struggle against the Nationalists altered his attitude toward war in general and eventually made him more willing to risk Japan's security for larger purposes.

Hirohito did not regard China as a “modern” state and probably never believed Japan's aggression there to be wrong. He supported the policy of withholding a declaration of war against China and ratified and personally endorsed the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war as stated by the army vice chief of staff in a directive on August 5, 1937: “In the present situation, in order to wage total war
in China, the empire will neither apply, nor act in accordance with, all the concrete articles of the Treaty Concerning the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare and Other Treaties Concerning the Laws and Regulations of Belligerency.”
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The same notification advised staff officers in China to stop using the term “prisoner of war.” Throughout the war in China the Japanese military captured tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers annually. Yet, at the war's end, when Japanese authorities claimed to have had in their possession scores of thousands of Western prisoners, they acknowledged having only fifty-six Chinese prisoners of war.

Hirohito had studied international law under Tachi Sakutaro; he knew that Japan had signed (but not ratified) the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. He had also read the clause calling for respect for international law in the imperial war rescripts of his grandfather and father. Yet he never had orders issued to his armed forces that would have prevented the mass murder or mistreatment of Chinese prisoners. That act of omission reflected a widespread tendency among many Japanese bureaucrats, intellectuals, and right-wingers during the 1930s to regard international law itself as a purely Western fabrication. For them the rule of international law was something that, ever since the end of World War I, the British and the Americans had wanted to develop and spread because it served their interests, not Japan's.

For many Americans, Europeans, and Asians, the aspect of Japan's war of aggression that more than anything created the stereotype of the heartless, cruel Japanese—a stereotype that has never entirely been forgotten or forgiven—were the atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners of war.
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Behind the atrocities lay precisely the military's refusal to apply international law to China; for that void Hirohito shared responsibility. He alone was free to act in this area, needed to act, but did not act. If he had intervened and insisted on establishing rules and regulations, or even an organization for handling war prisoners, the result could well have been different.

Hirohito bore more direct responsibility for the use of poison gas, a weapon that caused the death of many Chinese and Mongolian combatants and also noncombatants. Before the China Incident had turned into a full-scale war, he had sanctioned the dispatch to China of chemical warfare personnel and equipment. Article 171 of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and other international agreements signed by Japan after World War I, banned the use of poison gas—including tear gas. Yet the army had no problem violating the ban in the case of a technologically inferior enemy. Neither, apparently, did Hirohito. His first directive authorizing use of chemical weapons was dated July 28, 1937, and transmitted by Chief of the Army General Staff Prince Kan'in. It stated that in mopping up the Peking-Tientsin area, “[Y]ou may use tear gas at suitable times.”
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A second imperial order, dated September 11, 1937, and again transmitted through Prince Kan'in, authorized the deployment to Shanghai of certain special chemical warfare units. These orders authorized the beginning, at first experimental and on a very small scale, of what would become, by the spring and summer of 1938, extensive use of poison gas in the main battle theaters in China and Mongolia.
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Gas was the one weapon over which Hirohito, the Imperial Headquarters, and the high command retained close, effective control throughout the entire China war. Front-line units were never free to use this highly effective weapon at their own discretion; even area army headquarters lacked the power to authorize that use. Gas could be employed only after explicit authorization had been requested and received from Imperial Headquarters–Army Department, usually in the form of “directives” issued by the chief of staff after having first obtained the emperor's permission.
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In the Wuhan offensive, from August to late October 1938, Imperial Headquarters authorized the use of poison gas on 375 separate occasions. In the concurrent offensive against Canton in the far south of China, it authorized the Twenty-First Division com
mander to use both tear gas and poison gas.
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In March 1939 Imperial Headquarters granted Gen. Okamura Yasuji permission to use more than fifteen thousand canisters of gas in the largest chemical attack of the war. Okamura justified his request by saying that the gas canisters were needed to restore the reputation of the troops and to give them “the feeling of victory.”
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On April 11 the emperor approved Directive Number 11, issued by his army chief of staff, authorizing further use of poison gas by the North China Area Army and its Garrison Force in Inner Mongolia.
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By May, when the major transport center of Hsuchou fell, the Japanese army was using chemical weapons whenever they could be effective in turning the tide in closely fought battles.
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“Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 301,” sealed by Hirohito on May 15, 1939, authorized the carrying out of field studies of chemical warfare along the Manchukuo-Soviet border.
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What the content of those studies was remains unclear. In July 1940 Hirohito approved Prince Kan'in's request to authorize the use of poison gas by the commander of the Southern China Area Army. A year later, however, in July 1941, when the army moved into the southern part of French Indochina, Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama issued a directive explicitly prohibiting the use of gas. Presumably Hirohito and the high command were concerned that gas not be used against Western nations that could retaliate in kind.
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Their well grounded fear of American possession (and forward stockpiling) of chemical weapons continued to deter them from using such weapons down to the end of World War II.

Hirohito also sanctioned during 1940 the first experimental use of bacteriological weapons in China.
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It is true that no extant documents directly link him to bacteriological warfare. But as a methodical man of scientific bent, and a person who questioned what he did not clearly understand and refused to put his seal to orders without first examining them, he was probably aware of the meaning of the
orders he approved. Detailed “directives” of the Imperial Headquarters that the army chief of staff issued to the Kwantung Army command in charge of biological warfare, Unit 731, were as a rule shown to the emperor; and the Army Orders of the Imperial Headquarters–Army, on which such directives were based, were always read by him. Biological weapons continued to be used by Japan in China until 1942, but the full consequences of this Japanese reliance on both chemical and biological warfare would come only after World War II: first, in the Truman administration's investment in a large biological and chemical warfare program, based partly on transferred Japanese BC discoveries and technology; second, in the massive American use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.
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Though no documents directly tie him to it, another feature of the brutal China war for which Hirohito should be charged with individual responsibility was the strategic bombing of Chungking and other cities, carried out independently of any ground offensives, and using many types of antipersonnel explosives. Starting in May 1938 and continuing until the beginning of the Pacific War, the Japanese naval air force initiated indiscriminate bombing against China's wartime capital of Chungking and other large cities. The bombing campaign was uncoordinated with the army's strategic bombing of Chinese cities. First studied by military historian Maeda Tetsuo, the navy's air attacks on Chungking anticipated the German and Italian bombing of cities and the strategic bombing of Japan's own cities that the United States initiated during the last stage of the Pacific War. At the outset the navy deployed seventy-two bombers (each with a seven-man crew) and dropped incendiary as well as conventional bombs. In their first two days of raids, they reportedly killed more than five thousand Chinese noncombatants and caused enormous damage.
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Two months later, in retaliation for this indiscriminate bombing, the United States embargoed the export of airplane parts, in effect imposing its first economic sanction against Japan.
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Apart from the strategic bombing of China's cities, Hirohito also knew of and approved the “annihilation” campaigns in China. These military operations caused death and suffering on a scale incomparably greater than the totally unplanned orgy of killing in Nanking, which later came to symbolize the war and whose numbers have probably been inflated over time. At the end of 1938 the North China Area Army inaugurated the first of many self-designated campaigns of annihilation against guerrilla bases in Hepei Province. These operations targeted for destruction “enemies pretending to be local people” and “all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies.”
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They continued off and on for the next four years, gradually becoming larger in scale, more organized, systematic, and widespread.
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Eventually the Chinese Communist Party labeled them the “three alls policy”: that is, “burn all, kill all, steal all,” or, in Japanese,
sank
sakusen
. Hirohito was apprised of the nature of the pacification problem in North China and on December 2, 1938, signed off on Tairikumei 241, the redirection of policy that led to the annihilation campaigns.

The pacification of the five occupied provinces of North China—Heipei, Shantung, Shensi, Shanhsi, and Chahaer—had by then become the main goal of the North China Area Army. During 1939 and early 1940, the area army had tended to overlook the organizing activities of the Chinese Communists and to target for destruction Nationalist military forces, though it did launch some small-scale operations against Communist base areas in Inner Mongolia as early as the summer and winter of 1939. As the Communist-controlled base areas in remote mountain regions expanded, during 1939–40, to include control over scores of millions of people, the area army finally took note, but before it could act, the situation changed dramatically. In August 1940 guerrillas of China's Eighth Route Army launched two surprise offensives—known as the “Hundred Regiments” campaign—against Japanese railways, bridges, coal mines, blockade houses, and communications facilities throughout North China. The
most extensive physical damage and the heaviest loss of Japanese lives occurred in Heipei and eastern Shantung Province.
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In response to these destructive guerrilla attacks, Maj. Gen. Tanaka Ry
kichi of the North China Area Army, developed in late 1940 one of the first plans for attacking and so totally destroying the Communist guerrilla bases that “the enemy could never use them again.” The first Japanese campaign of “total annihilation” was directed against Communist bases in Shanhsi Province.
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Full-scale, highly organized extermination operations by the area army did not begin to be implemented, however, until July 1941, when General Okamura took command. Okamura's guidelines for subordinate commanders called for targeting mainly Communist forces, encircling and caging them by constructing interdiction and containment trenches. To that end North China was divided into pacified, semipacified, and unpacified areas. The latter were to be made unhabitable and cut off from the semipacified areas by the building of trenches. Hirohito gave his approval to this policy in Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 of December 3, 1941, which ordered the theater army to “strengthen the containment of the enemy and destroy his will to continue fighting.”
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