Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (95 page)

Admiral Takagi's auditor knew exactly what he meant by “final line of national survival”—that strategic configuration of naval and army outlying island bases, garrisons, airfields, fortifications, colonies, which could provide protection of the sources of the raw materials Japan did not possess internally, and protect also the sea lanes for transportation of those essential materials. The “line” also involved home island defenses, and on the continent certain coastal areas stretching southward, from which enemy aircraft could attack the sea lanes linking the resource-rich colonies of Southeast Asia to Japan.

On August 8 Admiral Takagi had another conversation with a palace representative—Matsudaira Yasumasa, Kido's chief secretary, which once again reflected views about Japan's options that would emerge during the next imperial conference:

Locked in a desperate struggle with Britain, the United States, and the Dutch regime in Batavia, all of whom were concerting to develop barriers to further Japanese expansion, the Konoe cabinet publicly complained of an “ABCD encirclement.” The prowar Takagi blamed Japan's predicament on the oil embargo and the deadlocked Japan–U.S. negotiations. So too did the emperor, who understood technical, qualified arguments, supported by statistical data, and liked clear-cut, detailed analysis by competent specialists. Hirohito sided with Takagi and the navy, and showed no understanding that Japan owed its quandary to the bankruptcy of the Konoe cabinet's policies of relentless aggression against China and now Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, he wanted, in Kido's words, “to have more assurance of victory before he was willing to [take] the nation into war.”
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Following Hirohito's ratification of the drive into Southeast Asia, the liaison conference, which now had fully usurped the cabinet's decision-making function, met on more than a dozen occasions. After each meeting Hirohito received briefings on the progress of the crisis from the prime minister and his chiefs of staff.

His brother Prince Takamatsu, serving on the Navy General Staff, also added his private views on the situation. In late August he warned the emperor that “October is crucial for our oil reserves.” Hirohito answered (according to Takamatsu), “we will have nothing to bargain with when the time comes to make peace if we don't leave the fleet intact.” The prince retorted, “I told him his idea was useless, taking the example of the German fleet at the time of the Great War in Europe. Or maybe I said that oil from northern Karafuto is not enough.”
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Throughout the month of August, Hirohito became very familiar with the navy's argument that an early opening of hostilities was desirable because the American oil embargo would gradually sap Japan's military power. Soon he too came to believe that a decision to initiate a new war should ultimately be based on tactical and technical grounds offered by military specialists and supported by map drills conducted by the navy.
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Those grounds included the size of the Imperial Army and Navy, the quality of their armaments, their considerable combat experience and readiness, their esprit de corps, their anticipated relative rates of consumption and resupply of war matériel, and their forward deployment in China and Southeast Asia.

Significantly absent from the calculations of Hirohito and the high command was any assessment of the enormous nonmaterial political power that Roosevelt also had in reserve and was rapidly mobilizing for possible war against the Axis. With the newly expanded American draft army in the process of completing its largest-ever “war games,” the American public was gradually becoming supportive of the government and more martial in its own sense of national identity.

In Tokyo the navy's leaders were making the case for an early opening of hostilities while also pushing for continuation of diplomatic talks in order to persuade the United States to change its stance. At this stage, however, the navy's arguments were not being turned into national policies, for the main players in the drama—the ministers and vice ministers of the army and navy, the chiefs and vice chiefs of the two general staffs, Foreign Minister Toyoda, and Prime Minister Konoe—could not reach consensus. Unwilling to withdraw from China or to defect from the Axis, which most of them believed would emerge victorious over Britain and the Soviet Union, the decision makers kept incorporating changes in the international situation as the key element in their scenarios for war or diplomacy, but never once carefully examined the full range of policy choices open to them. Even Prime Minister Konoe, the main
advocate of continued negotiations with the United States, was saying, “[W]e must be very cautious about procrastinating [diplomatically] or we may end up being forced to fight at the same time we are sliding into ‘gradual decline.'”
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So the decision makers plowed ahead as if they were wearing large blinders and compelled to follow the furrow they were creating. On September 3 the liaison conference met and adopted a short document stating first, “The empire, for its existence and self-defense, shall complete war preparations by about the latter part of October with the resolve not to hesitate to go to war with the United States (Britain, and The Netherlands).” The second item read, “In tandem with this [decision], the empire shall endeavor to achieve its demands vis-à-vis the United States and Britain through diplomatic means.” The third item indicated the degree to which Japan would “not hesitate to go to war” and was designed to meet the army and navy's need for time to prepare. It stated, “In the event there is no prospect for achieving our demands by about early October, we shall immediately decide to initiate war with the United States (Britain, and The Netherlands).”
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The time element had now been moved into the policy-decision-making process. If the emperor approved these time-lines, the government would continue its negotiations with the United States while also continuing to prepare for war; and if its diplomatic wishes were not granted “by about early October,” there would be another imperial conference to make the final, fateful go-or-don't-go choice for war.

At 5
P.M
. on September 5, Prime Minister Konoe came to the palace to brief the emperor on this newest “national policy” document of the liaison conference, which the cabinet had rubber-stamped late the previous day.
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Forty-four-year-old Hirohito already knew the approximate burden of the document and could hardly have been taken aback by its arrival, or by the request for an imperial conference. The high command had kept him informed in
detail about the steadily worsening crisis and the military plans for dealing with it. According to Kido's diary, he knew he would soon be called upon to make “a truly grave decision if the United States does not simply and straightforwardly accept our proposal.”
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Now the moment had arrived for him to focus on the most important decision of his entire life. He was going to be asked to break Japan free of its own deadlocked foreign policy by resorting to a war strategy against a vastly superior adversary and continental giant, the United States, which Japan could not possibly defeat militarily.

A Japan–U.S. war was not predetermined. Hirohito did not have to hurry to accept the high command's introduction of a time limit on diplomacy with the United States; nor did he have to agree to subordinate diplomacy to war preparations. With the German invasion of Russia in its sixth week and far from producing a decisive victory, and with Britain and its empire still in the war, a man with his well-trained skepticism might have reasonably anticipated that Germany would not easily triumph over either of its enemies. Recently returned ambassador to Britain, Shigemitsu Mamoru, a strong supporter of the new order movement, had told him exactly that in both a private audience and a court lecture. Japan could maintain its great power status and exert influence in postwar politics if it stayed out of the European war. All he needed to do was call for “a reexamination of current policy.”
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Hirohito clearly had options at this moment. He could have slowed the momentum to a new war by choosing to concentrate on the one already in progress. He could have thown into China Japan's huge army along the Manchuria-Soviet border area. He could have opted to profit commercially from the war in Europe by staying out of it, for the time being, as London and Washington were warning. This would have meant halting the southward advance and withdrawing troops from colonially partitioned Southeast Asia, thereby losing the chance to seize the Dutch East Indies.
Some of the navy's top officers had deep misgivings about going into Indochina, and all of them would have acceded to such a decision had the emperor made it.

An untitled document in the Takagi S
kichi papers describes the briefing of the emperor on the night of September 5. When this account is collated with other contemporary evidence, an interpretation can be made of what actually transpired on the eve of Hirohito's formal ratification of the decision to initiate war under certain conditions. Unlike the postwar diaries of Kido and Konoe, or the Sugiyama “notes,”
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this Takagi version contains not only the emperor's angry scolding of Sugiyama but also, at the end, his all-important exchange with Konoe: the only person in the room with a constitutional responsibility for advising him.

Konoe, unconvinced by Nagano's logic, gave the emperor one last chance to revise the outline. Hirohito, persuaded by Nagano's and Sugiyama's hardline arguments, ignored it.

When Admiral Nagano recalled this meeting in a roundtable with his former wartime colleagues soon after the surrender, he remembered the emperor's “unusually bad mood” that evening and also suggested that Hirohito had not been pressured to approve the outline of the “national policies.” Nagano, moreover, said that it had been he rather than Konoe who had asked, “Should I reverse the order of Articles 1 and 2?” The emperor had answered, “Let the order in the draft stand just as it is written.”
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Whether Konoe, who opposed war with the United States, or Nagano, who favored it, asked that question is unimportant. The point is that the emperor was reminded, not even subtly, that this was a chance to stop, or slow, or lengthen the countdown to all-out, unbounded war. Instead of using his opportunity in any way that would have displeased the pro-war forces in the military, Hirohito accepted their “rapid decline” arguments and ruled to set time conditions—ruled, that is, in favor of opening hostilities once certain conditions were met. The momentum toward war would continue to build.