CHAPTER 3
AT the start of hostilities between two countries it is customary to take stock of their rival strength. Japan, both in its own eyes and in the eyes of the rest of the world, began the conflict, of which the first phase opened in 1931, with overwhelming advantages. Most eye-witnesses to the initial clash would have been astonished if they had had a glimpse of what it would eventually grow into. It was expected that Japan would settle the quarrel in a small-scale colonial war, such as the world had been accustomed to in the recent past.
Japan had reason for its confidence. It was a modern state, recognizably like the states of the western world. It had a formal constitution like a western country. It was indeed a copy of these, and it included such institutions as a constitutional monarchy, a cabinet, a civil service, and two houses of parliament with rather more than consultative powers. It had, moreover, a modern industrial structure. Its achievements in making a success of a western-style economic system is one of the wonders of East Asian history, the more remarkable because the traditions of Japan had appeared to tell against commercial success. The ethos of Japan remained unbusinesslike. There was, fairly widespread, a deep contempt for money. But this had not prevented the Japanese from setting money to do its work.
The state machinery was strong. Its administration, even if there was much corruption, was reasonably well organized. Though Japanese institutions were apt to strike the westerner as being odd and haphazard in the way they were run, they produced the result intended: they had the secret of effectiveness.
The national unity, which had been so conspicuous in the war with Russia nearly three decades earlier, had not been undermined as Japan entered on a more sophisticated life in the 1930s. Its people, in spite of an increase in wealth, continued to be easily régimented. The success of the Government in doing this was due to the extraordinary competence and ubiquitousness of the police, which was one of the traditional features of administration in Japan. For centuries the police had been harrying the Japanese people. One of the victims of modern extremism was the curious, nonconformist cults of Japanese Buddhism. The police seemed to be infuriated by their existence, and persecuted them severely.
Though there were the beginnings of social unrest and of a Communist Party, this was as yet scarcely reflected in Japan’s political life. Dangerous ways of thought were appearing among students – in themselves a surprisingly large class – and there was a dedicated, but very small and ineffective left-wing movement: but though this was enough to give nightmares to the police, and to the Army which played a special part in keeping the morale of the nation untainted, they could console themselves that they were dealing with an eccentricity rather than a serious threat.
Though Japanese is an exceptionally difficult language to learn, the population was almost entirely literate. Knowledge, especially technical knowledge, was advanced. The newly literate populace, which was so different from other populaces in Asia, did not band against the Government. Indeed, the Japanese people, though hardy and enterprising, remained extraordinarily docile to govern. They had an ancient tradition of turbulence, upheaval, and a readiness to make civil war: but these had become only a distant memory. Their martial quality had been mobilized, exclusively and entirely, in the national interest, and was embodied in the Japanese Army.
For the result of the war, much would naturally depend on the capability of the Army. The Japanese Army had had a various history, and had passed through changes since the days of the Meiji Restoration, during which it had been organized. In the 1930s it was a National Army, the product of universal military service. But though this was its origin, it stood apart from the nation in a rather sinister way.
The young men of the Army, when called to the colours, were trained in a manner which was calculated to ensure their obedience, to brutalize them, to make them unlikely to act like the rest of the Japanese people. They became docile instruments of the officer corps. Extraordinary stories leaked out of the barbarity of the system of military training. The Japanese Army was not the nation in arms – since it rejected much in Japanese life which might have made it more capable of self-control in the aftermath of battle – but it was the Japanese peasantry in arms. Such a force was dangerous because it was liable to be swayed by terrible spasms of inane and savage barbarism. The rigid discipline under which it was kept in Japan was suddenly set aside when it found itself under foreign skies and in different surroundings. The woes of the Asian continent wherever the Japanese soldier was to tread were to be proof of this.
The corps of professional officers, the centre of this military system, was drawn from the entire nation and, at least in theory, was not limited to certain parts of the country or certain social classes. In practice, the vast majority of soldiers sprang from rural peasant stock. In a sense most never left behind the poverty and deprivation of their backgrounds, living a Spartan existence throughout their years of service. Yet it did offer a unique escape from the rigid stratification of Japanese society outside. Boys who chose the Army as their career joined at the age of fourteen or upon completion of their compulsory primary education. Few would have been able to afford further schooling but for the Army. There they were trained in the numerous military schools. The most capable of them were selected through competitive examinations as officer candidates at the Japanese Military Academy. After some experience as junior officers, the brightest attended the Army War College and then graduated into the true elite of the Army as staff officers. With factionalism playing its peculiar part in Japanese affairs, their subsequent careers depended on the clique in the Army to which they attached themselves (a matter often predetermined by the geographical regions from which they originated).
Soldiers followed a certain conventional pattern in their lives, with somewhat different aims, interests and ethics from those of the majority of the Japanese people. They were less liable to be swayed by ordinarily changing ideas because their education had been distorted. The common soldier had no human rights and was subject to incessant oppression, brutality and cruelty from his superiors. Nevertheless, his was a better lot and an incalculably more interesting life than that of his family back home, where the struggle for daily existence made military life far more of an attraction or matter of the family’s economic survival than it was for urban youth. The better sort of officers, having come mainly from much the same background or from military families, had a deep-felt sympathy for the plight of their men and an intimate knowledge of the conditions of privation which they had left behind. Likewise, conservative country folk who deplored the percolation of western influences into the lives of the young and into the policies of their Government, looked to the Army for reinstatement of the values of old Japan. At any rate, it was widely appreciated that the strength of the Army lay in the strength of the peasantry, in the strength of equal opportunity for advancement through ability, and in the strength (and weaknesses) of an army educational system that had to carry an enormous burden further and wider than in other advanced countries. From thence there was a natural tendency for the War Ministry and for the Army’s powerful Inspectorate-General of Military Education to interest themselves in the indoctrination of youth throughout the nation – and in what Allied post-war prosecutors later termed ‘the preparation of public opinion for war’.
The Japanese educational system, founded on liberal principles, became a tool for ultra-nationalist and militaristic indoctrination at about the time of the First World War. This was possible only because more than 90 per cent of the population had achieved literacy by the turn of the century, a lasting tribute to the Meiji educational system. Military training was made compulsory in schools, and by 1925 military officers were assigned to all middle and upper schools and to universities. Arrangements were made for local military education centres to cater for the majority of the populace who could not afford to continue their education past the minimum of primary school. Thus by the end of the so-called liberal decade of the twenties, an effective system for national indoctrination had been implanted and was in use.
This was particularly obnoxious because of the peculiar quality of Japanese militarism. This derived from the fact that, in traditional Japan, the use of arms had been a monopoly of a military caste called the Samurai. Officially the Samurai had been brought to an end soon after the Meiji Restoration. Nevertheless, the tradition which animated these professional soldiers continued to prevail in the modern Army, and became dominant in the period of national assertiveness which prevailed in the thirties. By and large, the Japanese Army officers of the professional, thorough-going kind guided themselves by a code of ethics called Bushidō, the Way of the Warrior. Bushidō prescribed the life of the soldier at all points. It proclaimed that his ultimate fate was to serve his master, and as the Imperial Institution had divine status, the valiant death of a soldier in the service of his Emperor was a kind of sublime supernova of his bodily existence in which the fulfilment of perfect service was consubstantial with eternal righteousness and truth.
Bushidō laid down everything that was possible in the relation of one Samurai with another, the mutual obligations of paternalistic absolute lords and the total obedience of loyal knights. That same mantle of benevolence was to protect the weak and vanquished, and there was great concern that unfortunates and the wayward should be restored to paths of righteousness appropriate to their proper status. This should not be confused with tolerance, forbearance or respect for human rights. These liberal values were poles apart. Harshness, endurance, the carrying out ruthlessly of impossible orders, vengeance and the duty in circumstances of disgrace to commit Seppuku – more vulgarly known as hara-kiri (self-slaughter by a peculīarly courageous and painful method of dis-embowelment) – were its subjects: it is helpful to appreciate that the Japanese regarded neither the heart nor the intellect but the bowel as the seat of the soul. The Way of the Warrior demanded intense self-control and preparation, a process which alone permitted the fusion of a spiritual ideal with human flesh and will-power to produce a mystical energy offered in the service of one’s lord. It did not glorify unnecessary violence or mayhem but comprehended that the victims of either could find transcendence in death. Leadership, on the other hand, was both an instrument and function of the force of the code, produced out of an iron discipline and the effusion of a kind of tyrannical, overbearing love that did not admit of the vulnerability of the warrior. Not surprisingly, such esoteric teachings were corrupted and completely failed to meet the challenges of universal conscription and Total War against alien foes in the modern world.
Bushidō was a deeply fatalistic cult. Its parallels are perhaps to be found in old German sagas with their compounds of horror and doom, honour and absolutism. It is significant that the revival of the typical Bushidō outlook was associated with a type of politics such as that which prevailed amid the Nazis. The gloom and grimness of this tradition of Japanese militarism were symbolized in the deliberate drabness of the Japanese uniform. The Army was taut but without glitter. Alone among military Powers, Japan exhibited no military panache. Bushidō painted the heroic life as one which excluded frailty and which was directed to perfect service and success. This produced an ‘attack spirit’ which led to recklessness in rushing into conflict and to savagery in battle and afterwards. Surrender was punishable by death, and it was a disgrace to be taken prisoner alive. Nevertheless, most internecine Japanese civil wars – and they had been interminable until the twentieth century – had ended in a negotiated capitulation by the vanquished to the victor. It was the demonstration of superior force which imposed its own logic; it was not mass slaughter. Honour, then, was preserved on both sides. The reader may wish to recall these facts when contemplating the justifications commonly put forward for the use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Bushidō was a remarkably compelling code, abhorrent although aspects of it are when judged in terms of western values. It differed but was not incompatible with the fabric of mainstream Japanese culture. Honour, self-respect, the marriage of beauty and utility, and the avoidance of shame were of vital importance to Japanese in every walk of life, not merely ideals to which they paid little more than lip-service. Japanese traditionally loathe ostentation and regard egotistical self-advertisement as both despicable and unworthy: those who yield to such impulses incur scorn and ostracism. Simplicity and economy, on the other hand, are admired. Combining these factors, we begin to appreciate why Japanese militarism seems so curiously anonymous at a distance. It did not carry any ‘cult of personality’, as did most European and American brands of militarism. A consequence was that Japanese generals, interesting personalities though many of them were upon closer acquaintance, seldom attracted public adulation or popular glorification. The national heart neither venerated nor reviled them for their deeds. The public might feel pride, respect or satisfaction but rarely affection for them. Only within individual military units did loyalty, devotion and charisma find full expression – with the result that they often became the fiefdoms of gifted commanders.
The tragedy of Japan happened in dangerous ideas becoming so influential when, in the twentieth century, Japan possessed the power to make itself so formidable internationally. Japan’s modern military machine was administered by men who took as serious guides to conduct a rigid social and ethical tradition quite out of date and barbaric. Of course, not all the officer corps lived by this code. Some were as civilized as the most progressive civilians – or as susceptible to blandishment and self-gratification. Many Japanese regarded the ideas of the Samurai as absurd, medieval, deeply irrational, frightening and frightful. It was not uncommon to regard the cult of Bushidō (if not the Samurai caste) as a plague in Japanese civilization which must be eradicated. But the fact that it was really an eccentricity made Japanese militarism the more difficult to keep under control, and it attached itself easily to wild and irresponsible aims.
Japan was strengthened for war by a peculiar psychology of its people: so strange and well-marked that the study of its evolution has become one of the standard exercises of East Asian history. This psychology proceeded from certain moral conflicts which the Japanese, almost to a man, accepted as axiomatic. A Japanese longs, before all other things, for a world organized on the principles of harmony. Harmony is only to be achieved when everyone fills his predestined place, and asks for himself neither too much honour, dignities and awards, nor too little. It is an outlook curiously like that of the European Middle Ages, at least in its theory. It is worship of ‘degree, priority and place’. Above all, it is an outlook which detests anarchy. The simple fact which the Anglo-American democracies found hard to understand was the horror which the Japanese felt at an individual or group which had a clear conception of its own interests, as distinct and separate from those of the community, and which set out to realize them. In fact, that very idea was all but incomprehensible.
The state, to a Japanese, was itself a moral entity. The notion of Kokutai, the national essence or polity, is complicated but embraces absolute righteousness, truth and beauty – in short, all national virtue. It was inseparable from the Emperor-system. Private interests had no legitimacy except in the context of Kokutai. On the other hand, this also ensured that private interests, where they did exist, intruded into national concerns. Japanese ultra-nationalism, although it did not admit of private interests, derived its authority from an appeal to the internal moral fortitude of each individual and his inseparable identification with the national virtue. Resting upon a consensus of devotion to the Emperor and to the Kokutai, therefore, ultra-nationalism escaped the censorship of common sense in society as a whole. Little by little, this insane part of Japan succeeded in becoming dominant.
There was no sudden or diabolical transition from enlightenment to despotism. It is tempting to suggest that military, archaic Japan took captive twentieth-century, ingenious, civilian Japan, and swept it along towards the challenge to other civilizations of the world, which was the principal history of Japan in this time. Many historians have characterized the 1920s as liberal and democratic, and have condemned the thirties as a period of unmitigated terror and depravity. But the elements of modernity and reaction continued to exist side by side as they always had done; first one, then the other, moving back and forth into prominence. The images conjured up by Hugh Byas in a brilliant wartime book, Government by Assassination, are graphic, helpful and have proved durable, but recent investigators have struck a better balance between those who felt that only the Sturm und Drang of dark terror and brutality held centre-stage in Japan during the thirties and those, principally in Japan, who have been swayed by the romantic apologists of the period.
It is true that the period did produce violent domestic outbursts which appeared to threaten the social order of Japan. Assassination attempts cut down no fewer than three Prime Ministers and a host of other prominent officials and public figures. A number of revolutionary plots were exposed or briefly erupted into murder, melodrama and farce, but the scope of violence was strictly confined both by those who perpetrated such deeds and by those who apprehended them. Every one of the attempted coups d’état failed to achieve its ends. The plans of the conspirators, indeed, are remarkable not only for their boldness but for their deficiency in anticipating the consequences which would follow either from success or failure. They had not worked out detailed political programmes for change. They simply seem to have felt that the violence of their insurgency would itself provide an all-compelling logic for change to which the nation would respond satisfactorily.
The culprits, when caught, were regarded as misguided patriots, not traitors. It was recognized that they generally sought no personal gain, and indeed their heroic idealism and self-sacrifice attracted genuine public sympathy if not support. They were handled gingerly by the authorities. Some escaped punishment altogether, a few subsequently rose to higher command within the armed services, and others received light penal sentences. Yet all of the assassins and most of the other principals appear to have been dealt with severely by the courts, and some were executed. It is, perhaps, revealing that the greatest censure was reserved for those who had harmed the innocent, failed to act in a respectful manner towards victims and bystanders alike, or refused to do the decent thing by committing suicide afterwards. In these matters such terrorists had transgressed the code of Bushidō.
The Japanese nation was shaken by the terrorist crimes, some of which were appallingly bloody, but there was neither mass intimidation nor any sign of panic by people in authority. Paranoia did not affect the workings of the state, and attempts were made to accommodate or re-absorb rebels who atoned – although not necessarily the causes they espoused – within the political system. The broad political objectives of the terrorists were recognized as fundamentally revolutionary, not reformist. Yet there was no mass murder, no official or secret campaign of counter-terror mounted by the organs of the state, no private civil war between rival factions, no ‘outlaw’ category of ‘non-persons’, no exile system. The effect of the disorders was less than is commonly supposed.
A democratic state has the right to defend itself: whether it has the right to commit suicide is a question which arises from the history of Japan as well as that of Germany in the twentieth century. The Japanese Diet passed a peace preservation law in 1925. This was designed to combat the spread of communism, anarchism and other subversive doctrines after the First World War. The law attracted strong political support from the major parties and evidently met with a good deal of public satisfaction. A repressive ‘Thought Police’, the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, or Special Higher Police, was created to enforce the law. It is tempting to regard such Orwellian developments as proof of tyranny. Yet these measures were the creation of a widely admired and democratic system, not the trappings of a police state. Later, it is true, the military gendarmerie (Kenpeitai) played an increasingly important role towards the same end. Both of these police forces struck terror into the hearts of their enemies and were not averse to employing beatings and other forms of torture. Yet the remarkable fact is that the Japanese always preferred to rely upon conversion (tenkō) rather than penal sanctions. They had inquisitors but no fiery auto-da-fé. Although tens of thousands of people were arrested on suspicion of harbouring or promoting ‘improper thoughts’ between 1925 and 1945, only one Japanese was executed for such crimes (late in the Pacific War). Westerners in Japan were terrified by ugly street demonstrations against them, which often were known to have been deliberately incited by the police, yet not one foreigner was killed during these incidents. Japanese communists were jailed, but, even during the most militaristic period, liberals and western-style internationalists suffered no more than denunciation and censorship. The mainstream political parties themselves went into eclipse from the middle of the 1930s, but the civil and court bureaucracies and their institutions remained in place and were not simply replaced by military absolutism or fascism.
The Japanese also had a sense of being under an immense obligation, which any amount of altruistic behaviour could never requite, to their family predecessors, to the Japanese Emperor as embodying the Japanese state, and to the Government of the day for making life tolerable. It was possible for a Japanese Government to make extreme drafts upon this sense of obligation, and a diffused sense of responsibility in general among its people, and to do so almost without limit.
In organization for war, the Japanese system was the stronger because of the Emperor-system with which the whole was covered. Though in actual fact the Emperor had, or at least exercised, little political power, as a figure-head he was of the utmost possible importance. The Emperor, as an institution, has now undergone change, probably permanent. It is true that the Emperor survived the war; but he was to lose, by contact with the realities of the modern world, so much of the mystique which at this period continued to surround the office that today some careful inquiry is necessary to recapture it. The Japanese Emperor is no longer regarded as a divine person. But in the 1930s it was widely accepted as axiomatic that he was of different stuff from ordinary humanity.
Immensely awe-inspiring, extremely sacred, the incarnation of all that was meant by the Japanese national spirit, remote, mysterious, never criticized in press or parliament – the Emperor Hirohito obviously possessed qualities which made him the ideal mascot for war. In fact the role of the Japanese Emperor, at least in its remoter origin, was as much sacerdotal and magical as it was governmental. It is significant that the Japanese word meaning to observe a religious rite is radically connected with the word meaning government. Simply to dwell in the same country as the Emperor conferred felicity, and laid on his subjects a readiness to endure sacrifice which recognized no limit.
The court of the Japanese Emperor was not notably military in its atmosphere. He existed as a man, as well as an idea, and it was hard for him to live up to the position required of him by the theorists of the Japanese state. It was strange to find that the Emperor Hirohito was a mild-mannered, courteous prince, and that he lived in a court which was a museum of venerated or picturesque objects. It was rather like the entourage of a British monarch. It was decorous and somewhat dull: but it was colourful – and was much more strongly marked by fragile aestheticism than is ordinary life in Japan. This was not really surprising, because, in the long history of the Japanese monarchy, it had seldom been associated with military leadership. Though in theory the Japanese monarch was the supreme commander, in military matters as in civilian, only the Emperor Meiji had taken this at all seriously. His successors, including Hirohito, reverted easily to the more ancient attitude. Emperor Hirohito was head of the state, he received reports from ministers, and advised but played a strictly constitutional part. He did not sully the office with politics. The court class clearly did not want war.
A basic cause of all the misfortunes in East Asian politics was the fundamentally precarious state of the Japanese economy. Japan had built up, especially during this century, an impressive industry, but was at bottom a poor country. It lacked raw materials. Its chief asset was its manpower, and it owed its economic advance to the organization of this. Its people were strenuous, punctual, persevering, disciplined, adaptable: out of these talents, combined with a leadership capable of putting these to use, there was constructed one of the most thriving economies of the world. Japan threw itself with zest into imitating the western countries.
Starting in the early days of the Meiji Restoration, Japan built up its industry, and the rest of its economy, systematically. Its constant impediment was that it had to build bricks without straw. But it succeeded. The result was that the Japanese economy followed a particular pattern. It imported almost all the raw materials for industrial use: iron, the rare metals, coal, oil and, in the early days, machinery; it exported many of the products of industry. The raw materials were sent to Japan, and the Japanese people, organized in a great productive machine, processed these and marketed the product. It lived thus upon the proceeds of being the workshop of the East, but one to which the raw materials were delivered from abroad, and one which was kept going by orders from abroad. This was the basic pattern which shone through, although of course much in the economy was exceptional to the system.
The broad lines of the Japanese economy were thus very similar to those of the British economy in Europe. There were differences: Japan never allowed its agriculture to become so small a part of the economy as did Britain when Britain concentrated on being the workshop of the world. Japan, unlike Britain, never took the decisive step towards laissez-faire, and never abandoned the direction of its economic destinies to blind economic laws. It never, to the same extent, was confident, as Britain was at the time, that the economic machine, if left to itself, would automatically right itself, whatever the predicaments to which it was exposed by adverse political circumstance. The Japanese Government had constantly in mind that Japan’s prosperity was at the mercy of other countries allowing it unimpeded access to raw materials, and unimpeded access to markets for the sale of its products; and it sought, by countless means, to remedy this. Japan, like Britain and most other countries at the present time, had a continual anxiety from its balance of payments. It lived dangerously. It knew that it must export or die.
Its great industrial machine, and along with this, the remarkable nexus of mercantile institutions which it built up, all depended on the inward flow of raw materials, and on being able to find a foreign market for the finished products. If ever this process was interrupted, or seriously dislocated, Japan would be halted, its national talents would be wasted, its prosperity disappear, its nakedness be exposed.
Such a restless, dynamic society, explosive and always ready to seek new opportunities, uneasily aware of the narrow conditions for its survival, was not easy to fit into the world around it. It was constantly producing new situations: its nature, and its indispensable quality, was to be at home in constant vicissitudes. Though, as a military empire, Japan stood for a certain stability, it was really, though it would have denied this, the force making for constant instability in East Asia.
Arrogant although Japanese seemed to foreigners, there was nothing acutely xenophobic about either Bushidō or the civil structures of Japan. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, these institutions could not fail to be affected by the intense international pressures upon Japan. Even the anti-foreignism of the Tokugawa period was no less adopted as an expedient than the borrowing of western technology, education and institutions which prevailed in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. In each case, these were responses to what were perceived as threats from outside (and who is to say that they were disproportionate to the degree of danger). In reacting against these alien threats, the Samurai tradition became subverted into a pessimistic militarism that was an amalgam of reactionary national politics and an inherent belief in the spiritual dignity of the Japanese race and cultural traditions. It found itself a rival to the civil apparatus of a modern state in seeking to protect and act on behalf of the Imperial System.
The civilian bureaucracy and the economic infrastructure of Japan were not consumed by the coercive forces and atavistic spiritualism of militarism. They continued to operate side by side, each harnessed and constrained by one another. Policy did not evolve from tyranny. It evolved from a consensus of opinion, part of Japan’s historical sense of community, which took into account pressures for radical action, the perils of insubordination and fails accomplis. The need and desire to achieve an orderly consensus were profoundly felt by the public at large and by all decision-makers in particular. Their problem was that efforts to compromise with extremists could not produce policies which any external observer would regard as ‘moderate’. Astonishing although it may seem, Japan did remain a land of law and order throughout the years leading up to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, the processes of cause and effect in international relations guaranteed that Japanese policies tended progressively to become more and more outrageous. When the democratic institutions of Japan finally failed, it came about neither as a concession to indigenous terrorism nor even to institutionalized military indoctrination and subversion: it came about as a direct response to the emergency of war.
As the twentieth century proceeded, it became a fixed idea in Japan that the country was in great peril, and the Japanese felt their economy to be ever more insecure. They had had the experience of entrusting themselves to be carried forward by the great expansion of world trade, and had been taught by successive trade cycles to fear disaster. The grave effect of the world depression on Japan after 1929 strengthened the case of the Army for finding a military solution to economic dangers. Japanese exports were halved within the space of two years. While industrial wages declined by nearly a third, rural incomes dropped by two thirds. The price of raw silk fell by 65 per cent within a year of the Wall Street crash. This deprived the agricultural class of its second main source of income and caused widespread distress in the countryside. As banks foreclosed on the small farms and businesses in rural areas, the Army, with its intimate connection with the Japanese peasantry, was greatly concerned. The younger Army officers were frequently drawn from the class of small landowners and viewed affairs accordingly. Big business, banking interests and the new political order of post-war Japan were blamed for their avarice, for their over-dependence upon foreign nations, and for the calamitous effects of this reversal in the country’s fortunes. Steps were taken by the nation’s civilian leadership which headed Japan back towards economic recovery more rapidly than any of her trading partners: given the nation’s paucity of natural resources, this was a considerable achievement.
Nevertheless, ideas of expansion through foreign conquest were gaining in popularity. Right-wing propagandists found a sympathetic response in meetings of patriotic groups, veterans’ associations, chambers of commerce, fanners and even in the judiciary. In an early sign indicative of this change of mood, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Baron Hiranuma Kiichirō, who had served as a Minister of Justice shortly after the Washington Conference, founded one of the most powerful of all the extreme right-wing pressure groups, the Kokuhonsha, or National Foundation Society, as early as 1924, serving as its President between 1926 and 1936 (during the whole of which time he held office as Vice-President of the Privy Council): this particular society was dissolved when he became President of the Privy Council in 1936. Eventually he went on to become Prime Minister of Japan in 1939. Another example was Ōkawa Shümei, one of the most notorious of all the ultra-nationalist propagandists, an intellectual who had specialized in Marxist, Islamic and Indian philosophy after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University. Later, he headed the South Manchurian Railway Company’s influential East Asia Economic Research Bureau, then became a professor with particular expertise in colonial economic enterprises. He was a money-spinning rabble-rouser. Many of his political books and pamphlets today might appear to be the ravings of a lunatic, but they were taken seriously enough by many of his countrymen at the time. He became one of the arch-terrorists of the thirties, and his association with other conspiratorial figures of the day runs like a thread through the decades. One cannot escape the fact that there was a great deal of continuity in these affairs. It was not simply a question of an old guard giving way to brash new men who were more inclined than their elders to seek violent solutions. Not surprisingly, however, there was an answering response from the Army, where ideas of expansion through foreign conquest began to be heard once again, not now primarily from the generals but from the young officers. The militaristic dragons within Japan had awakened from their slumbers.
If Japan were able to conquer the adjacent territory from which raw materials could be produced – such as Manchuria – and if it should obtain military control of some of the markets for buying Japanese exports, it could breathe at peace. It could have the assurance of maintaining its industrial greatness, of safeguarding the livelihood of the countryside and of solving problems of over-population. The peace, prosperity and progress of all Asia, as well as Japan itself, depended on this consummation. The Japanese military were able to argue that they supported not only a narrow national cause, but that they were crusaders for the whole of Asia. The well-being of the entire continent depended on the safeguarding of the Japanese economy. Only the western countries could think it an advantage that the Japanese talent should be thwarted.
This was the frame of mind behind the Japanese attempt to gain absolute control of China, and later, of South-East Asia. The Japanese believed themselves to be economically propelled. This does not mean that the war was an economic necessity, or that the Japanese soldiers who made it were economic puppets. But they made Japan’s economic problems the justification of their military action, and, not insincerely, supposed themselves driven on by economic forces which compelled them to act as they did.
The Army’s emergent views on economics became a matter of concern to the large mercantile institutions which dominated the economy of the country. These institutions, with plenty of money to spare, found that, in the condition of Japanese politics of the day, it was prudent to buy support wherever possible – not only from politicians in the Diet, but from soldiers and from the cliques involved in canvassing the plans of the Army. Whether this was real corruption or should be seen as merely betokening the close harmony desired by commerce, the fighting services and government in Japan is a point where many Japanese observers feel westerners misinterpret Japan. It was certainly less crude than the relationship between, say, American big business and government has tended to be. Undoubtedly the degree of corruption can easily be exaggerated: there were many honest senior Army officers, just as there were many incorruptible Cabinet Ministers, bureaucrats and Diet members. But the links between the Army, with its economic fixation, and the opportunist commercial interests, were well-established, widely ramified, and liable to influence Japan’s politics in an irregular manner.
The gathering public discontent, which is inevitable in a difficult economic situation, expressed itself in growing criticism of the established organs of government, and of the regular methods of doing public business. The forces of radicalism became more insistent, and membership of extremist societies began to expand alarmingly. The famous ‘Shidehara Diplomacy’ of the later half of the 1920s had been little more than a re-articulation of the principles set forth in the Nine Power Treaty of Washington. But the post-war attitude of appeasement adopted by the Western Powers – of spinning out for as long as possible their period of privilege while eventually coming to terms with the changed world – seemed hardly comprehensible in Japan. The harsh facts of the economic depression supplied the country with arguments for a ‘forward policy’ of expansionism.
In the late twenties a document called the Tanaka Memorial was in fairly wide circulation in Tokyo. It was a Chinese forgery, dated 25 July 1927 and first published in Nanking through the pages of the December 1929 issue of a prominent current affairs monthly magazine, but like any successful forgery it had credibility. Baron Tanaka Giichi had served as War Minister at the time of the Washington Conference and more recently at the end of 1923. He became leader of one of the two main political parties of Japan in 1925 and, after a banking crisis and financial scandal in 1927 lost a rival three-party coalition a general election, he took office both as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Japan until July 1929. The document with which his name will always be associated purported to be a memorandum to the Throne presented by General Tanaka shortly after he became Prime Minister, and it outlined a plan to take military possession of all North China. It also proclaimed that ‘In the future if we want to control China, our primary aim must be to crush the United States, just as in the past we had to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. But in order to conquer China, we must first conquer Manchuria and Mongolia. In order to conquer Europe and Asia, Japan must conquer China, and in order to conquer the world, we must first conquer Europe and Asia.’ The document went on to declare that Japan must throw off the shackles of the Nine Power Treaty. Under the pretext of trade and commerce, the Japanese would spread their influence from Manchuria and Mongolia into the remainder of China. ‘Armed by the rights already secured, we shall seize the resources all over the country. Having China’s entire resources at our disposal, we shall proceed to conquer India, the Archipelago, Asia Minor, Central Asia and even Europe. But to get control of Manchuria and Mongolia is the first step if the Yamato race wishes to distinguish itself in Continental Asia.’ What a mad adventure!
In truth, however, the ‘Positive Policy’ adopted by Baron Tanaka’s Government bore very little relation to the so-called ‘Memorial’. It was characterized by a somewhat bellicose style of ‘military diplomacy’, but it differed little in practice from the objectives pursued by Baron Shidehara and other ‘moderates’. It did not include any blueprint for aggression. In fact, Tanaka did no more than deflect a military advance northwards by Kuomintang troops, who, preceded by a vanguard of propaganda agents, were seeking to crush the war-lords of North China and so round off China’s political and administrative reunification. The result was an experience which boded ill for the future.
Within a year of coming to office, Prime Minister Tanaka had reached an informal understanding with Chiang Kai-shek which appeared to guarantee an acceptable standard of protection for Japanese residents in North China and scrupulous respect for Japanese rights in Manchuria. Although the Chinese were in a belligerent and confident mood, making no secret of their intention to re-establish a tight control over North China, they had their hands full in conducting their own private war: the Japanese position in Manchuria did not seem imperilled. Tanaka, who relied heavily upon Japanese financiers and industrialists to preserve himself and his party in power, was keenly aware that they strongly opposed any measures that would harm Japanese trade with China. The Army General Staff, for reasons of caution, also opposed any intervention in China. Thus Tanaka and the Army were inclined to feel that Chiang Kai-shek and his moderates ought to be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they could indeed be relied upon to protect Japanese residents and their interests in North China. This, it was hoped, would create stronger bonds of mutual trust and goodwill. Although there were dissenting voices on the sidelines, the Governments of both nations, in short, wished to avoid any conflict.
The War Ministry, unwisely, favoured intervention, and there was foolhardy political pressure upon the Cabinet from its party supporters in the Diet, who reminded the Government of its election promises to extend any protection necessary to ensure the safety of Japanese residents in China during time of trouble. Finally, reluctantly, the Japanese Government sent out an expeditionary force to Shantung and appear to have intended to withdraw it as soon as it had served its purpose by demonstrating that the Japanese were sincere in their determination to protect Japanese citizens in China. There was no intention of using this force in large-scale combat operations. It was simply a token force, and in fact its size made it something of a hostage to the well-disciplined armies which China then had so close at hand. It was a mistake. As that ancient seer Sun Tzu had warned, ‘If not in the interests of the state, do not act. If you cannot succeed, do not use troops. If you are not in danger, do not fight.’
Unfortunately, the Commander of the Japanese division which landed in Shantung failed to resist the temptation to exceed his instructions. Seeking glory for himself– or more charitably for his Army – he proceeded to enter Tsinan, the provincial capital of Shantung, where there were more than two thousand Japanese residents. At the same time, a Kuomintang force also entered the city, possibly in ignorance or defiance of Chiang Kai-shek’s orders. Both sides maintained strict military discipline and, their honour having been upheld, the Japanese decided to trust to the promises of the Chinese forces and began to withdraw. However, a purely accidental clash then occurred, frantic efforts by both sides to disengage proved unavailing, and fighting gradually spread across the city. A temporary ceasefire finally took hold, and the bulk of the Chinese forces departed, leaving only a comparatively small holding-force behind to maintain order. But the Japanese Commander and his staff felt that the inconclusive result of the fighting had undermined Japanese military prestige. The Army General Staff in Tokyo, abandoning their earlier caution, took the same view. Both were determined to resume fighting. The Japanese Cabinet caved in under the pressure, and reinforcements were ordered to the area. The result was that the Japanese gained the military victory they craved and won control of the city and surrounding countryside, subjecting the unfortunate Chinese inhabitants to a terrible occupation which lasted into the following year.
Japan’s actions, of course, won for Chiang Kai-shek’s forces a propaganda victory of incalculable value which far outweighed his temporary loss of territory. The whole episode, however, was designed as a limited operation and, though bungled from start to finish, it was defensive, not aggressive, in intent. It was certainly true that a rough and ready faction within the Japanese Kwantung Army, guardians of the South Manchurian Railway zone, wanted to seize North China once and for all. At that time, however, neither the Army General Staff in Tokyo nor the Japanese War Ministry supported such a scheme.
The events at Tsinan are especially significant for three reasons. It serves to remind us that the Japanese soldier yielded to no one in foolishness and was second to none in vanity. Although acting in defiance of superior orders has always been a characteristic of the Chinese way of warfare, this was the first occasion on which insubordination by Japanese troops deliberately invited war with a foreign Power. It was the first example of any Japanese Cabinet’s acquiescence in pursuing a military adventure which it knew to be foolhardy. Although the Japanese commander at Tsinan was prematurely retired shortly after the Japanese forces were withdrawn, nothing constructive was done to prevent such a deplorable incident from happening again.
Always it was the northern part of the country which interested Japan. Though the nationalist ferment was happening in the south, and from South China came the impulses which were making China a revived power in world politics and a danger to countries such as Japan, even the forward bloc of Japanese imperialists was at first content that this should be left alone if Japan could cooperate with China in controlling the vast resources of manpower and potential economic wealth in the north. All the while, Japanese diplomacy and semi-secret organizations were busy spreading Japanese influence in China, softening up the Governors of the Chinese provinces where the Japanese sought to protect their own interests, and making propaganda to counter the effects of the nationalist ideas spreading from South China.
Many political groups in Japan, even those which declared themselves activated by generally liberal principles, found themselves in sympathy with the policy of containing Chinese nationalism. At least, few strongly resisted it; many, however, were inclined to regard a decisive counter-move by Japan as being more of a dream than practical politics. But, as the country moved towards what was to be its great expansionist adventure in Asia, there began to appear sharp differences between the different sections of opinion. These were over the extent to which Japan should press China; over tactics, methods and timetables; over whether Japan should aim at direct conquest of Chinese territory, or some form of indirect control. As the critical period came nearer, the danger of collision with other Powers grew increasingly plain, and there was disagreement about how they should be confronted. In particular the Army and the Navy came into conflict. The Navy had favoured the old plan of advance behind the umbrella of good relations with the Anglo-Saxon naval Powers, and for long was cool or hostile towards Asiatic adventures. But the Navy fiercely resented what seemed to be the pusillanimity of the civilian Cabinets in tamely agreeing with the United States and Britain to Japanese naval limitation. It supported conspiratorial sorties which resorted to assassinations as a protest; and in this set the Army a fatal example to follow. The right wing in politics was also divided. There were differences between cautious conservatives and wild visionaries: between those who were carried away by a mythical view of Japanese history and those who interpreted the realities of the day with cool realism.
These differences became increasingly expressed in struggles between organized factions. In these, there took place the real conflict over the path which Japanese affairs were to take. In Japanese politics during these years the great decisions were not fought out in the formal seat of national debate, in the Japanese Parliament, but were made as the result of fierce factional dispute. There were factions within the Army, factions within the different sections of business, factions of the Navy.
Political life of this kind – a tussle between factions fought in a jungle fashion – proved very congenial to Japan. It was more comfortably Japanese than was the contest between political parties carried on according to rules in the Japanese Diet. It was natural for a Japanese to look to a faction and its fortunes for forwarding his interests. The faction was organized in such a way as to give free play to Japanese paternalism. In Japan there is a disposition to see all problems in terms of personal relationships rather than great political principles. This was more compatible with the breakdown of society into competing factions than it was with the struggle of political parties.
After the Russo-Japanese War, the Army had estimated that twenty-five divisions would be required to guarantee the Empire’s safety. Subsequent events placed a severe strain upon the Army’s strength, and during the First World War it had lagged well behind the military efficiency of other major Powers. After the Siberian Intervention, the critical number was reduced to twenty-one divisions. The comparative liberalism of the twenties led to a growing assertion of civilian dominance over military affairs. Financial considerations led the Government to cut back military spending from 49 per cent of its budget in 1921 to 28 per cent in 1927, a drastic reduction by any standards. Such a dramatic decline graphically mirrored the declining influence of the fighting services during the period. The Navy, of course, bore the brunt of much of the cut-back and accordingly the Washington Naval Treaty spared a large part of Japan’s financial assets. At the same time, the Army perceived its need to effect a modernization programme to improve its efficiency in modern warfare. Four Army divisions were axed, and some of the money saved by demobilizing no fewer than 38,000 troops was spent on mechanization, Army aviation, an anti-aircraft régiment and specialist communications training establishments.
These developments, however, were accompanied by a shift in underlying assumptions, within the Army in particular, which ultimately played a crucial role in reversing the trend of civilian dominance. The War Ministry appreciated that the recent European War had shown that in any future hostilities, Japan would have to depend upon the ‘total mobilization’ of the nation’s economic, political and military resources. In a sense there was a convergence in doctrine between the European and Japanese defence staffs. By 1929 the Japanese Army had worked out the apparatus and at least an outline of contingency plans required for coordination of all the civil, military and economic strength of the nation in an emergency. Although resisted by some Army and reservist diehards, these arrangements and doctrines received widespread support within the Army, and in time they became an administrative basis for authoritarian control over the civil power during the period which lay to the future. Whether this should be regarded as a process achieved by usurpation rather than by mutual consent is a moot question to which we can supply no definitive answer. Nevertheless, it is clear that the civil power felt itself under compulsion to comply with what the Army demanded and that the Army seized almost every opportunity open to it to extend its grasp over the machinery of politics.
In 1931 Japan’s conviction of its manifest destiny, its need for economic recovery, the restlessness and ambition of its political leaders, especially of the Army, converged. The year seemed to be the predestined time for action. The place for action was Manchuria.
Manchuria consisted of three provinces which were an integral part of China, but were not part of old China. It lay to the north of the Great Wall which had been built to shelter China from barbarian raids. It was the home of the Manchus, which had been the barbarian tribe which in 1664 had penetrated the defences, overthrown the Ming dynasty, and substituted for it the Manchu dynasty which had continued until 1911. Towards the end of its life, this dynasty nearly lost its original homeland to tzarist Russia. It had the mortification of proving powerless to protect it, and of seeing Japan wage the Russo-Japanese War to put an end to Russia’s penetration of Manchuria instead of protecting it itself. As the result of that war, Japan did not annex Manchuria, but China did not recover its full and unconditional control of it, and Japan enjoyed special privileges.
The South Manchurian Railway Company, a corporation owned by the Japanese, had much authority and excessive control in the region. The railway company was operated by the Japanese in an expansive mood, and was used by them to build Japanese political power. It grew from being simply a railroad undertaking, operating the line which ran from north to south as the spine which held Manchuria together, into a general trading organization with vast interests in the development of the country: and it took on political functions which in turn led to Japan having to maintain a force for the defence of its employees.
In the civil war in China which followed the fall of the Manchu Empire in 1911, Manchuria suffered rather less than the rest of the country. A gifted common labourer turned bandit, named Chang Tso-lin, was able to build up power with which he took over the territories. He recognized that in these provinces he could survive only if he had the protection of the Japanese, or, at least, that he could not flourish against Japanese wishes. He chafed at Japanese interference, but he submitted, and governed Manchuria, in all that was essential, as a Japanese puppet. In his maturity, and perhaps in response to stirrings in China, he became restive.
He also had held a part of China south of the Great Wall. From there, in 1927, he was driven out by the expansion of the Kuomintang. The Chinese Nationalist challenge had come in that part of China where Japan had become dominant. In Manchuria, Japanese capital was making very substantial profits, and it had become the lodestar for Japanese economic expansion. Manchuria itself scarcely resembled the primitive and neglected hinterland which the Japanese and Russians had coveted since the beginning of the century. Japan was faced with the decision whether to acquiesce in China’s re-establishment of its control – in which case the Chinese pronouncements and record left no reasonable doubt that they would terminate Japan’s privileged position, at once or after a few years – or would stand and fight.
Chang Tso-lin himself was at first determined to resist. He tried to rally the people to join him in his struggle to exterminate the communist-tainted Nationalists. The Japanese Foreign Ministry wanted to warn both sides that Japan wished to remain neutral but must insist that no armed soldiers would be permitted to cross the Manchurian frontier. The ‘Old Marshal’ should be advised privately that it was time for him to retire (he was, in fact, only fifty-five years old). Prime Minister Tanaka, however, took the view that both peace and Japanese interests in Manchuria would be best protected by a continuation of Chang’s rule north of the Great Wall.
In a crucial Japanese Cabinet debate, the Prime Minister’s arguments prevailed. The Government decided to advise Chang to withdraw into Manchuria and issued instructions for the Kuomintang to be assured that Japan would forestall any attempt by Chang to interfere in China’s affairs again. At the same time, Japanese military authorities were given to understand that they should turn something of a blind eye towards attempts by Chang’s forces to smuggle their weapons back into Manchuria: they might well be necessary to contain any disruption by anti-Chang forces in Manchuria. This was to prove a fateful decision.
The Chinese Nationalists accepted the solution offered by the Japanese, but Chang, foolishly, for some months clung to a vain hope that he might be able to work out something better. In the end, perceiving the morale of his forces fast crumbling and that he could not block the Nationalist Armies from seizing control of North China, Chang agreed to the Japanese Government’s plan and ordered his troops to retreat into Manchuria. The Japanese Government’s plan appeared to be working.
In the course of his evacuation of his southern territory in 1928, the train in which Chang was travelling was blown up, and Chang Tso-lin perished. It was widely supposed at the time that the Japanese had found him unsatisfactory as the Japanese agent for resisting the Kuomintang and had murdered him. This does the Japanese Government less than justice. The truth was, if anything, more disturbing to the few who knew it. A small cabal of Kwantung Army officers, none above the rank of colonel, took strong exception to Prime Minister Tanaka’s instructions that Chang’s forces need not be disarmed at the frontier. They had plotted the assassination in hopes that it would provide an excuse to impose Japan’s direct rule over the whole of Manchuria by force. Neither the Army General Staff nor the Kwantung Army’s top brass knew anything about the plot in advance. Rather more surprisingly, even the hawk-eyed Kenpeitai surveillance officers appear to have been ignorant of it beforehand.
The murder of Chang Tso-lin failed to bring about the immediate military and political transformation which its authors desired, nor were they more successful in other bombings which they perpetrated afterwards in hopes of achieving the same ends: neither the Chinese nor the Japanese were prepared to embroil themselves in a wider conflict. The Japanese Government made an endeavour to discover who had been responsible for these outrages. A secret report was prepared by the Kenpeitai, named the guilty men and demanded their punishment. The Emperor wanted them severely punished, too, and went to unusual lengths to make his wishes known. The Government, embarrassed by the affair, also wanted to put the culprits on trial. The Army General Staff, however, took the view that full disclosure of the facts would tarnish the prestige of the Army to an unacceptable degree. Moreover, no one could doubt that the villains of the piece had been motivated by a sincere sense of patriotism. The Army connived with right-wing elements of Tanaka’s own political party in the Imperial Diet while at the same time the Government came under fire from the Opposition benches. Powerless to take any constructive action, Tanaka and his Government were forced to resign. Accordingly, the Kenpeitai Report was suppressed, the insubordination went unpunished, and, officially at least, the facts surrounding Chang Tso-lin’s death remained mysterious. Thus, although Tanaka showed considerable moral courage in striving to effect a genuine reconciliation with China during the last remaining months of his premiership, the Chang Tso-lin Incident became another of the stepping stones leading the Japanese Army into chronic instability and disorder: one conspiracy was following another, each designed to force the hand of successive governments and to present them with fails accomplis.
Chang Tso-lin was succeeded by his thirty-year-old son, Chang Hsueh-liang, a golf-playing, self-cured opium addict whose engaging personality disguised his huge will-power and immense intellect. He was much closer in touch with the mood of China south of the Wall than his father had been. To what extent was not realized by outside observers (although the Japanese Government was well aware of it): most people were astonished when he formally accepted the sovereignty of the Kuomintang over Manchuria. It was a recognition of the power of the national idea. Chang Hsueh-liang appeared to have admitted that the day of the war-lord was passing. Chinese nationalism had coerced him into accepting its claims to dispose of Manchuria as Chinese soil, and of himself as a Chinese subject. But the ‘Young Marshal’ also had to contend with attempts by the Japanese Government to dissuade him from siding with the Nationalists. Using their threats and fair words (knowing also that Japanese troops had murdered his father), he appeared to be tempted by the promises of Japanese emissaries, buying time to secure the best possible terms from the Kuomintang. He described his aims as ‘autonomy and compromise’. He achieved both. But though Chang himself submitted to the pretensions of the Kuomintang when he had wrung as many concessions from them as his position allowed, the Japanese did not fail to notice that Chang’s apparent acquiescence to his enemies firmly buttressed his personal authority in Manchuria (in much the same way as King John’s feudal submission of England to the Pope was a supremely astute move calculated to confound enemies moving in for the kill).
It was a challenge to Japan, which successive Japanese Governments were obliged to resist but could not be seen to do so directly. Accordingly, the Tanaka Government, while still clinging to power but irreparably damaged by the Shockwaves from Chang Tso-lin’s murder, made no protest when the Kuomintang flag was unfurled in Manchuria. Yet the Japanese made it perfectly clear that they would brook neither interference nor disregard for their treaty rights in Manchuria, and in this determination the Japanese civil and military authorities were united but only in this.
The incoming Japanese Government, under the direction of Prime Minister Baron Hamaguchi Osachi and Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō, altered the emphasis of Japan’s foreign policy from one of bilateral Sino-Japanese rapprochement to a wider design of multi-lateral cooperation in which not only Japan and China but the Western Powers would work together to create new conditions for peace, development and prosperity in East Asia. This strategy, known to history as the ‘Shidehara Policy’, was given a boost by renewed civil strife in China during 1930, which led to a number of atrocities against foreign residents. For a short time the Western Powers turned away from their individual efforts to seek better relations with China and decided that to dispel the chronic disorder in their relations with China, the foreigners must sink their differences and endeavour to achieve solutions based upon their common interests.
The Army in its entirety mistrusted the Shidehara diplomacy in relation to China. As we shall see in the next chapter, such policies opened deep ideological chasms within the Japanese naval establishment when the Government accepted appalling risks to her security for the sake of an international accord on naval arms limitations. That kind of split and the grave constitutional crisis which it provoked did not occur in the Army. The Shidehara Policy was regarded as particularly woolly-minded and abhorrent by the men who fancied themselves as the well-honed cuttingedge of the Japanese Army, the Kwantung Army Headquarters staff, who evolved a final blueprint for the military conquest of the whole of Manchuria.
The Japanese War Ministry, too, made contingency plans to ensure that Manchuria did not slip from Japan’s control. As the Tanaka Memorial had anticipated, the War Ministry’s prime consideration was the importance of Manchuria in the event of any future war against the Soviet Union or, come to that, against the United States. There was nothing especially sinister in this: such ideas were no more than the common currency of Japanese ultra-nationalists in those days. The War Ministry conceived a three-step plan to deal with the Manchurian situation. In the first instance, it was not proposed to go beyond the Japanese Government’s existing policy of insisting that the Manchurian authorities must have scrupulous regard for the holy writ of Japan’s treaty rights and interests. If this policy failed, however, the next step would be to install a régime favourable to Japan. If this did not produce the desired result, then the ultimate solution would be the military conquest of Manchuria (and possibly its incorporation into the Japanese Empire). While this may seem to differ little from run-of-the-mill contingency plans routinely produced by the military planning staffs of other nations, even without benefit of hindsight this particular draft plan could be regarded as a fairly bald scheme for aggressive imperial expansion, for in every important aspect the War Ministry’s plan conformed to the pattern of Japan’s handling of the Korean problem years before. That is scarcely surprising. Japan had few other precedents to draw upon from her own direct experience, and many senior officials within the War Ministry and Army General Staff had been involved personally in the subjugation of Korea during their careers. Indeed, the two successive Chiefs of the Army General Staff during this period each came directly from previous postings as Commanders-in-Chief of the Korean Army. The likelihood of the military taking independent action unauthorized by the Cabinet developed almost into a certainty when the Army General Staff, having already established a broad measure of agreement with the War Ministry, sent a senior emissary to Manchuria in November 1930 for a meeting of minds with key staff officers of the Kwantung Army Headquarters.
By August 1931 the Army General Staff, the War Ministry and the Kwantung Army’s strategists all knew more or less what they were prepared to do, but they spent the whole of that month seeking to agree on the details and timing of their plans for solving the Manchurian problem by direct military action. The War Ministry and Army General Staff in Tokyo wanted to delay matters until the spring or summer of 1932, not only to ensure that they would have time to complete all necessary preparations but also because it seemed prudent to await the inevitable downfall of the Wakatsuki Cabinet before embarking upon such an ambitious campaign, especially since the Opposition Party and the press were becoming increasingly demonstrative against the Shidehara Policy in relation to China and Manchuria. The Kwantung Army, however, or rather the small clique within it who were privy to the plot, were determined to take action in September 1931.
The general political blood pressure was rising fast. The Japanese were particularly bellicose following an outbreak of trouble at Wanpaoshan, north of Changchun (Hsinking), where antagonism between about 400 Korean immigrant farmers and local Chinese peasants bred violence for which the Chinese authorities refused to accept responsibility. This incident in turn produced a chain reaction of anti-Chinese riots within Korea itself, resulting in death and injury to several hundred Chinese. In a further incident that also took place during June 1931, a Japanese Army Intelligence officer, Captain Nakamura Shintarō, was murdered together with his three aides while on a secret foray into northern Manchuria: while the circumstances remained mysterious, it was widely conjectured during the summer that Chang Hsueh-liang’s men were responsible (indeed, a régimental commander of Chang’s Reclamation Army was arrested and charged with the offence a few days before the Mukden Incident which began the Manchurian Affair). The Wanpaoshan and Nakamura Incidents stiffened the resolve of those who were predisposed to seek a military solution of the Manchurian problem. Yet by September 1931 it was plain that a diplomatic resolution for each of these problems was in prospect. That scandalized those who aspired to a forceful, ‘forward’ policy, men who saw no other remedy to the underlying malady of Sino-Japanese rivalry in Manchuria.
The precise timing of the Mukden Incident, however, was decided by a handful of perhaps half a dozen Kwantung Army hotheads who were fearful that their own immediate superiors as well as the desk-bound Army bureaucrats of the Army General Staff and War Ministry were now at best half-hearted and at worst positively hostile towards the plot. These fears were amply justified. What they did not know was that War Minister Minami Jirō had been called to the Imperial Palace for an audience with Emperor Hirohito on 11 September and was told by Hirohito in no uncertain terms that Army discipline – particularly in the Kwantung Army – must be restored. The newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army, Lieutenant-General Honjō Shigeru, was a solid, highly respected soldier who previously had kept his political opinions to himself. But during the informal inspection tours which he undertook immediately after his arrival in August, he had lost no opportunity to lecture his officers and men against rash actions. His chief of staff, Major-General Miyake Mitsuharu, who had been impressed for some months by the Army General Staffs determination to avoid trouble in Manchuria for the time being at least, learned that the conspirators wanted to act in late September and tried to nip the matter in the bud: Miyake forthrightly refused to authorize any provocative actions and secretly cabled Army authorities in Tokyo that ‘the present situation was becoming very delicate’ and required ‘extensive personal talks’.
Tokyo caught Miyake’s meaning and an emergency conference was convened, attended by the top generals of the War Ministry and Army General Staff. Bearing in mind the Emperor’s attitude, and strong warnings given to Minami even more recently by Foreign Minister Shidehara, the generals decided that the Chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Division, Major-General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu (who had attended the meeting), should proceed at once to Manchuria bearing personal letters to Honjō from Minami and the Chief of the Army General Staff, informing Honjō of the Emperor’s wishes and instructing Honjō to prevent any unauthorized incident. Tatekawa, however, secretly let it be known to the conspirators what his mission was designed to achieve – and that he intended to take a roundabout route which would give the conspirators a few days’ grace before he would see Honjō and Miyake. Upon receiving this news, the conspirators promptly moved the date of their plans forward by ten days.
A Kwantung Army officer of the Special Services ordered a Japanese railway maintenance worker at swordpoint to set and explode small explosive charges which blew up 31 inches of the South Manchurian Railway downline just north of Mukden at about ten o’clock on the night of 18 September 1931. So little damage was caused that the speeding southbound express from Changchun, approaching the site a few minutes later, was seen to sway and lurch sideways over the gap but carried on without halting and reached Mukden Station punctually at 10.30 p.m. Nevertheless, this small blast, which the instigators of the plot and the Japanese Government afterwards blamed upon Chinese saboteurs, led within hours to the Japanese military occupation of Mukden and to the outbreak of full-scale military operations elsewhere.
Major-General Tatekawa, having arrived in Mukden dressed in civilian attire in the late afternoon before the Incident began, claimed to be ‘worn out’ from his journey, and dined with several of the leaders of the plot. Theif ringleader, Colonel Itagaki Seishirō, the Senior Staff Officer of the Kwantung Army, takes up the story:
He did not incline to mention his business immediately, except a few words to the effect that the superiors were worrying about the careless and unscrupulous conduct of the young officers. I answered that there was no need of worrying if that was the business, and remarked that I would hear him at leisure the next day, because he seemed tired out.∗
Tatekawa took his ease that night with a geisha at the Literary Chrysanthemum, the best Japanese inn in town, passing out from rather too much sake. He awakened to the sounds of gunfire as Japanese soldiers swarmed across Mukden. He staggered to the door and into the waiting arms of military guards, who took him back inside, admonishing him that it was dangerous outside and they were there to see that he came to no harm. It is said that later Tatekawa slipped away, was taken to a nearby unit command post and was later seen, brandishing his sword, rallying Japanese troops during an attack that night against the medieval citadel of Mukden.
Meanwhile, Major-General Miyake, hearing news of the Mukden Incident shortly before midnight, called together his staff and rang Honjō, who had retired for the evening (he was then in his bath). Among those who hurriedly gathered at the Kwantung Army’s Headquarters that night was another one of the principal architects of the plot, Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, the Kwantung Army’s brilliant and sardonic Operations Chief, who tells us:
Then appeared the Commander of the Army, after a careful study the whole staff arrived at the following conclusion: ‘The expected worst has unfortunately come owing to outrageous acts on the part of China; the limit of patience is reached. There is no knowing how the situation may aggravate even during this night unless we take a resolute measure to chastise the enemy. There is no time to lose. We must resolutely mobilize the whole strength of our military might to seal the fate of the enemy within the shortest possible time.’
When I expressed my opinion as the operational officer to General Honjō to that effect, he meditated a few minutes with his eyes closed, and then, judging from the general situation, he made a final decision, saying resolutely, ‘Yes, let it be done on my own responsibility.’ We were all silent with deep emotion…∗
Honjō and his staff then briefed themselves as well as possible. Honjō issued fresh orders and counter-orders, deploying his forces throughout Manchuria: Ishiwara had his hands full trying to keep the old general in line without disclosing the true nature of the plot (which aimed at nothing less than committing Japanese forces to such an extent that there could be no turning back). Finally, Honjō left Port Arthur with most of his staff shortly after 3 a.m., reaching Mukden in time for lunch. It was all a bit late by the time Major-General Tatekawa finally handed over his messages to Honjō on the night of 19 September.
Long before that, Consul-General Morishima Morito was summoned to the headquarters of the Japanese Military Special Services Mission in Mukden barely forty-five minutes after the outbreak of the Incident. When he began to remonstrate with Colonel Itagaki and his officers, it was soon clear what the Japanese Government was up against, as Morishima told the International Military Tribunal for the Far East fifteen years later:
I insisted that there was no question involved of interference with the right of military command but rather that I was certain the matter could be adjusted amicably through normal negotiations and that the latter course would be advisable from the viewpoint of the interests of the Japanese Government. At this point in the conversation, Major Hanaya †unsheathed his sword in an angry gesture and stated that if I insisted upon interference with the right of military command, I should be prepared to suffer the consequences. He stated further that he would kill anyone who endeavoured to so interfere. This outburst on the part of Major Hanaya broke up the conversation, and I returned to my headquarters to make a full report, which I did.‡
As it happened, the West was dealing with a British financial crisis, which led among other things to the British naval mutiny at Invergordon. That in turn drove Britain from gold and prompted the devaluation of the pound. But that did not influence the Japanese: it would have run against the entire history of Manchuria for Britain or any of the other Western Powers to mobilize naval forces against Japan in opposition to actions ostensibly taken in defence of treaty rights and interests. The Japanese Army stood forward as the undisguised makers of its policy towards China and sent units throughout southern and central Manchuria. The Japanese Government, with obvious misgivings by some of its members, was dragged along in its wake.
While Japanese diplomats assured foreign statesmen that the military operations were only a temporary expedient to restore peace and order and that Japanese troops would be withdrawn at the earliest possible moment, the advance of Japanese military forces in Manchuria continued scarcely without pause. Most international observers simply concluded that the Japanese Government was cloaking its naked aggression with sweet words that only compounded the sense of treachery and deceit, but in fact the Japanese civil authorities were striving desperately to restrain the Army. The War Ministry and Army General Staff were divided among themselves and unable to regain control of the Kwantung Army machine. Many senior officers were unwilling or unable to intervene. Some, like Major-General Tatekawa, had always been sympathetic to the conspirators. Others, including War Minister Minami, regarded this unauthorized military adventure with grave misgivings and alarm but felt obliged to support their men while military operations continued in the field. It seemed scarcely possible for them to do otherwise since the Kwantung Army, joined by forces of the Korean Army, defied orders from Tokyo and advanced inexorably from victory to victory.
The Japanese public, conscious of the strength of modern armaments, and for a long time inclined by the experience of their early victories to underrate China’s power of resistance, put their complete confidence in the use of force: they regarded the war light-heartedly and with rejoicing. Their levity recalls the comment in Coriolanus of the Volsces greeting war:
Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night:
it is sprightly, waiting, audible, and full of event: peace is a very
apoplexy, a lethargy, deaf, mulled, sleepy, insensible.
They would have been wiser to reflect on the comments of Thucydides at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece. He makes a wise envoy argue that war is so full of accident and so difficult to control that one should always embark on it with deep anxiety, even if the results seem assured. Thucydides writes: ‘Consider the vast influence of accident in war before you are engaged in it. As it continues it generally becomes an affair of chances, chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark.’ But Thucydides was a Greek, no Tatekawa, and not much read in Tokyo.