CHAPTER 8

Japan: Internal Revolutions and Foreign Policy

THESE years, 1931–6, had been, for Japan also, a period of relentless pressure towards a formal war with China, which had come to be regarded as inevitable. Japan’s descent into Avernus, during the six brief years since the Manchurian Incident, and the corruption of its political system were rapid. Most of what happened prepared Japan for the part it was later to play. In this time Japan took, with great speed, a series of plunges which ensured that, when the Pacific War came, it was fought in a spirit that surprised the world by its barbarity.

Historians often despair at the fact that close examination of the web of historical events reveals it to be both intricate and seamless. Convention and the need for coherence force us to impose conceptual frameworks which assist us, imperfectly, in our efforts to describe the processes and events that form part of the history we seek to define. It is as well to recognize, however, that some of our conventional ideas concerning the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident and the Pacific War are hopelessly inadequate. As Ienaga Saburō, a distinguished and controversial Japanese who has had a profound effect upon Japanese historiography concerning ‘Japan’s Last War’, writes:

The six years of intermittent military action and political intrigue after the Manchurian Incident suggest that 1937 marked a new phase of a war already well underway. It is impossible to delineate the major ‘incidents’ as separate crises; in fact, it is probably more accurate to treat events from 1931 on as a single conflict.^∗

A rapid deterioration set in among most of the national institutions. It had the obvious effect of easing the path to war, and it harmed the spirit of the country profoundly. When there was a lull in the development of external events, the crisis deepened internally. The process can be traced from point to point. In Manchuria, in 1931, the decision to act had been made by the Japanese Army. It dragged the civilian Government in the wake of its fait accompli. The precedent was alarming, and was regularly acted upon by the Army in the years which followed, and accepted by the nation. No successful revolution took place, and no change of institutions was necessary: the civil service continued to operate, and remained comparatively unpurged. But in the Government of the day, with a constitution all too precise, it was enough that one of the controlling forces should shift the balance of power in the administration for the whole nature of government to change. The civil authority from time to time ceased to intervene in matters which were properly its concern, and left these to the Army. It was a species of anarchy.

This uneasiness, vague but pervasive, increased the danger of war. Many Japanese, fearful that the military, which they felt was already beyond control, might now move towards the acceptance of all kinds of radicalism in Japanese internal affairs, thought that its giddy mind would best be occupied by foreign quarrels. Many voices were raised in open opposition to this trend, but gradually, by the Kwantung Army’s successive faits accomplis, the critics were overborne.

Following hard on the success of the Kwantung Army in establishing its ascendancy throughout Manchuria in the years 1931–4, as we have seen, there was but a short step to its covert involvement in the political affairs of the buffer zone comprising Hopei, Chahar and even North China itself. In the end, this involvement became increasingly open, and Japan found itself with no option but to continue with its expansion in China, by peaceful or other means, despite the obvious inconsistencies in pursuing an aggressive foreign policy while complaining of Japan’s isolation in foreign affairs. At the same time, having announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japan now felt itself even more vulnerable than before to the constant and predictable winds of international disapproval for her actions and policies.

In these years there also took place a distinct shift in the religious life of the country. Attention was less on the compassionate, often intellectually subtle, religion of Buddhism; more emphasis was given to the religion which had co-existed with Buddhism for many centuries – Shintō, superficially a rather simple form of animism and worship of the symbols of state. Some of its adherents were inclined to take its cosmogony literally. Others found it more satisfactory as an extended metaphor. A Japanese scholar has noted that ‘The myth is essentially beyond science.’^∗Many western observers, who knew next to nothing about Shintōism, believed that it had no intellectual corpus to it. It certainly is true that it was neither readily perceptible nor translatable into Aristotelian terms. Like the Japanese language itself, it was highly symbolic and ambiguous, even vague. It must not be thought of as having no substance, however, for its efficacy can be seen from its social impact, from its political achievements. That these were purposeful, however, is doubtful, nor was it by accident that the circumspect authors of the Meiji Constitution had regarded Shintōism as an unsatisfactory organizing principle for modern Japan but borrowed some of its underlying assumptions.

In some ways it became ill-advised for a Japanese to diverge by however little from the norm in behaviour, sentiment or thought. Japan had never been kind to the pronounced individual and Japanese society had eyed any departure from conformity with uneasiness. (Only those cases where experimentalism had been backed up by a reputation of extreme religiosity were exempted.) The increasing tension in political life made the Japanese dislike eccentricity even more severely. In the years preceding the end of the Japanese military venture, there was an increasing anarchy in Japanese literature and in all departments of creative life. Older generations of Japanese deplored the enthusiasm with which the youth of the country embraced alien imports such as baseball, football, golf, the cinema, jazz and ballroom dancing, all of which seemed to break down traditional Japanese cultural values. These, however, were fads, group obsessions, and they reflected a widespread sense of material well-being. Of true individualism, of the man with the social courage to stand up and denounce what society was doing, or the innovator who worked under the pressure of his daimon and ignored the praise or censure of the world, there was strikingly too much evidence.

All of this reinforced the desire of the Japanese to promote the cherished plurality of Japanese society, Musubi – a dynamic, vitalizing process in which all things bind themselves together. Strangeness and conflict were no enemies here: they could be utilized, not merely tolerated, by finding every manifestation a proper place and limited function, harmoniously helping to create and define the larger purposes of the whole community and nation. All of this is, of course, an extended image, a descriptive representation of birth and growth itself. Above all it depends upon constructs of compartmentalization, boundaries, and life-giving power. This concept, one of the basic concepts of Shintōism, had a strong grip on the people of Japan.

It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that people from all walks of life wanted the sublime reassurance that came from submitting themselves to what they perceived was a universal community of place and purpose under a truly all-encompassing organizing principle, the sacred Imperial Will, made manifest in the Kokutai to which we have already alluded. This process, although it had formed the basis of the consolidation of political authority following the Meiji Restoration, itself involved a suspension of critical faculties, a febrile casuistry which, during periods of internal crisis, interfered with political judgement and made any hope of long-term political leadership objectively irrational. Japan had been saved from the dictation of a ruthless and flamboyant figure only because no such figure had the ability to seize the Government. The tradition of Japan was against individual leadership. Even in times of great crisis it required that revolutionaries should act in committees. But the spectacle of the administration of a great empire ceasing altogether for a few days, and great offices of state being hawked round by captains and majors, caused all lookers-on to marvel and to shudder.

The national temper began to be touched, but only touched, by hysteria. Thought control, imposed by the Government, meant the virtual interruption of all forms of rational thinking. An official version of Japanese history, drawing on fairy stories and full of absurdity, was made to prevail: it became dangerous to publish more serious matter. Dr Minobe Tatsukichi, the much respected Japanese professor, had been hounded from his job in 1935 because radical circles found it unforgivable that he had stated in a book on political science that the Japanese Emperor was an organ of the constitution. The Emperor was too sacred to be defined. The deification of the Emperor, which had been resurrected from the Japanese past, grew now to absurd proportions, and was especially ironical because it was known to be distasteful to the Emperor himself.

Nevertheless, consider these manifestations of the country’s malaise within some sense of proportion. Whatever the tendency of certain factions and special interest groups to pursue courses of action which were fundamentally irrational, and whatever the temptations of hindsight to perceive the national life itself as ineluctably hysterical in the years which we know ended in the catastrophic disintegration of the Japanese Empire, the Land of the Rising Sun was not without subjectively reassuring features that eased the political and moral transitions through which the country passed. As the distinguished Israeli historian Ben Ami Shillony, an acknowledged authority on the development of Japanese extremism and political terrorism, has observed:

Throughout the decade Japan remained a land of law and order, despite the eruption of occasional ‘incidents’. It was governed by its constitutional institutions: the Emperor, the Cabinet, the civilian bureaucracy and the military high command. There were constant frictions among them and periodic outbursts from below, but the system did not break. Gekokujō, or the rule of the higher by the lower, was a popular phrase with writers, but it very rarely materialised in reality. The special blend of pragmatism and fanaticism, which had characterised Japan in former times, continued to characterise her in the 1930s.^∗

Indeed, one may go even further: the same qualities that led Japan into the Greater East Asia and Pacific Conflict were to sustain it through the years of travail that followed, and were to prove receptive to the adaptations imposed upon Japan during the Allied Occupation in the post-war period.

The number of terrorist incidents multiplied. Some were simply lunatic in conception and execution, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi by Sagoya Tomeo at Tokyo Central Railway Station in 1930. Sagoya was a member of the Aikoku-sha (The Patriotic Society’), one of many right-wing jingoistic associations, clubs and societies that proliferated in Japan. It is ironic that these organizations were bitterly divided, for one idea shared by most of them was the notion that the entire Japanese people were an extended family. Elaborate schemes were concocted in attempts to establish common ground between them. These efforts generally collapsed, abandoned because of the paranoia and testiness of their respective leaders. This in turn left a legacy of failure, disappointment, recrimination and even fratricide.

A growing number of prominent political and military figures became involved. The so-called March Incident of 1931 was, in Professor Maruyama’s pregnant phrase, ‘born in the dark and buried in the dark’. It was the product of a conspiracy in which prominent members of the Tōseiha(of which more anon), notably Lieutenant-General Ninomiya Harushige, Vice-Chief of the Army General Staff, Major-General Koiso Kuniaki, the powerful Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau at the War Ministry, possibly Colonel Nagata Tetsuzan, Chief of the Army Affairs Section under Koiso, and certainly Major-General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, Chief of the Intelligence Division, were all deeply involved. Tatekawa was the general whom we find stumbling drunkenly outside on the night of the Mukden Incident six months later. Individuals such as these – and many of the junior officers who called upon them to rise up in the name of national integrity – were genuinely talented and privileged. They were motivated not so much by further personal ambition as by alarm at the drift of national policy and discontent over the quality of Japan’s civil administration.

They fell under the influence of disaffected officers who belonged to the Sakura-kai, the radical ‘Cherry Blossom Society’, a secret fraternity of fewer than one hundred junior officers, none over the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, formed in September 1930 by the notorious Lieutenant-Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō, a gunnery officer, then serving as Head of the Russian Desk at the Army General Staff after his return from an overseas posting as Military Attache in Turkey, determined to model his activities upon those of Kemal Atatürk. The Sakura-kai was created as a ‘discussion group’ for the furtherance of his brand of crypto-fascist radicalism, identified more broadly as the Seigunha or Army Purification Faction. The Sakura-kai was his own personal instrument: it had no rulebook or membership fees. His recruits were drawn from the War Ministry, the Army General Staff and from military training establishments and forces garrisoned within the vicinity of metropolitan Tokyo. Hashimoto’s plan called for close collaboration with a similar secret society of Navy officers, the Seiyō-kai (Stars and Ocean Society). He also sought and won the support of that indefatigable propagandist, Professor Ōkawa Shūmei, whose acquaintance we have already made.^∗ War Minister Ugaki Kazushige, too, was tainted by the affair, although his real attitude towards it, like that of Nagata, remains obscure.

At a restaurant in Tokyo, Dr Ōkawa concocted a plan for a mass public rally to be held outside the Imperial Diet building in protest against anti-labour legislation. Amid ugly scenes, the Diet would come under a mock attack. Troops would rush to the scene, seal off the building and restore ‘order’. The Cabinet would be compelled to resign. War Minister Ugaki would be called upon to form a reform Cabinet, sweeping away the corrupt party political machines. Hashimoto expressed enthusiasm for this plan, provided Ōkawa obtained Ugaki’s personal blessing. Later that night, Ōkawa reported that Ugaki was willing to take part. He asked Hashimoto to obtain a supply of practice grenades to add convincing sound-effects during the disturbances which were to lead to the military coup. Hashimoto encountered difficulty in obtaining these and approached Major-General Tatekawa, until recently his immediate superior, who gave Hashimoto a letter of introduction to the Commandant of the Army Infantry School which overcame all obstacles. He in turn handed the grenades over to Major-General Koiso, who took them away for safekeeping. When Dr Ōkawa was put on trial in 1934 on charges of sedition, he testified that ‘Koiso, taking charge of everything, told me that since there would be the danger of being discovered if too many fussed about it, we should pretend to have suspended it on the surface, and that I should represent the civilians and that he would represent the Army.’ Ugaki, however, evidently had second thoughts, the ever-vigilant Kenpeitai stood by, and the March Incident was nipped in the bud.

Seven months later, just a few weeks after the Manchurian Incident began, Lieutenant-Colonel Hashimoto went a step further. He had begun to feel that if civilians were involved, leaks would inevitably occur that would frustrate any attempt to overthrow the existing order. Together with one of his friends, Captain Chō Isamu, and Major Nemoto Hiroshi, Head of the China Desk at the Army General Staff, Hashimoto plotted a coup d’état known to history as the October Incident. Ostensibly they acted to prevent the Government from restraining the Kwantung Army’s rampage through Manchuria. Nevertheless, there is evidence that at the time Hashimoto had neither met nor established any liaison with Itagaki, Doihara, Ishiwara or the other Kwantung Army officers principally involved in the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident. In any event Hashimoto was conscious that there were good grounds for supposing that a harmony of views existed between them. Hashimoto’s plans began to assume fantastically grandiose proportions. The number of individuals involved rapidly increased. The plotters made preparations for mobilization of the First and Third Infantry Regiments of the Imperial Guards Division. The headquarters of the Army General Staff and the War Ministry were to be surrounded. Senior officers were to be coerced into declaring martial law. Naval aircraft from Kasumigaura Naval Air Training Centre would launch bombing attacks against key targets. A coordinated assault would be mounted against the Prime Minister’s official residence during a meeting of his Cabinet with the intention of murdering all those in attendance.

Although there are conflicting accounts about what happened next, it appears that War Minister Minami and Vice-Minister of War Sugiyama learned of the plot about a week before it was due to take place. They were unable to bring the insurgents to their senses. The two then turned to Lieutenant-General Araki Sadao, a former President of the Army Staff College whom the rebels admired as ‘a man of unimpeachable character’. Hashimoto and his conspirators regarded Araki as a model soldier and wanted to install him as Prime Minister. Minami and Sugiyama now asked him to sort out the mess. Araki’s response was somewhat ambiguous: he, too, was deeply enmeshed in factional politics within the Army (as we shall see), and Hashimoto’s plans caused him no little embarrassment. Minami asked the Kenpeitai to step in before the incident could take place. This time, however, the potato was too hot to handle. The forces of law and order achieved what must have seemed to be the best outcome to which they could aspire under the prevailing circumstances. Those at the heart of the dispute were placed in protective custody for a short time. They were not charged with the commission of any offence, nor were the careers of most of them blighted (although Hashimoto himself, promoted to full colonel in 1934, was relegated to the reserves and never rose higher in the next eleven years of peace and Total War). Inconceivable as it may seem, there was scarcely any serious criticism of the idealistic patriotic fervour which had impelled the rebels to resort to force. Fainthearts and realists alike were fatally compromised. In a footnote to this incident, Hashimoto, Chō and their Seigunha, having been inspired by General Araki’s eloquence in the past, now began slowly to turn against him, regarding him as a charlatan. Over the course of the next two years, there would gradually emerge a new, loose coalition of interests, bound together only in its opposition to Araki’s Kōdōha group. It would absorb the Seigunha and become known to its enemies as the Tōseiha, or Control Faction.

Meanwhile the politics of terror, born out of despair but nurtured by success, continued to enjoy a vogue among radical groups. In December 1931 the charismatic General Araki was promoted to War Minister in a shrewd manoeuvre to bring order to the Army. Araki succeeded in this and then went on to dominate the Cabinet.

Araki’s popularity among many junior Army officers remained high, and they were anxious to do nothing that might spoil his hopes of bringing about the political reforms they wanted by peaceful means. Their counterparts in the Navy, however, had never felt inclined to regard Araki as a national saviour. Despite opposition from the young Army officers, the Navy group decided to go ahead with a plan to kill a considerable number of leading statesmen and business magnates.

Inoue Nisshō, a half-crazed Nichiren monk, who prior to taking up holy orders had spent years in Manchuria as a secret agent of the Japanese Army, led a clandestine civilian gang that called itself the Ketsumeidan (the ‘Blood Brotherhood’, or ‘Dare-Devil Bunch’) and provided its members with what passed as spiritual guidance. He allied his movement with that of the young naval officers and even lent the conspirators his temple for an arsenal. In February 1932, Araki, who had been kept informed of developments, prevailed upon the young Army officers to have nothing to do with the plan. He did nothing to denounce the plot but the Naval General Staff caught wind of it and appeared to have averted it by a timely transfer of certain naval officers to sea duty. Unfortunately, this failed to prevent others from attempting to carry out the plan. Nineteen thirty-two became known as ‘The Year of Assassinations’.

The ‘Blood Brotherhood’ Incident of early February 1932 was a lineal descendant of Sagoya’s actions two years before. Inoue decided to act independently of both services. He selected a hit-list of twenty victims. His followers simply drew lots, a different assassin for each target. The first to be slain was Inoue Junnosuke (no relation to the turbulent priest), a former Finance Minister known to be strongly opposed to the Manchurian Incident. His death was followed by the murder of Baron Dan Takuma, Managing Director of the Mitsui business empire. Following police investigations, Inoue Nisshō and the other main culprits in the ‘Blood Brotherhood’ gang were soon arrested. After a trial they were convicted and Inoue himself was sentenced to life imprisonment; he was subsequently freed in 1940 as part of a general amnesty and later resumed an active political life with the help of his old disciples after the withdrawal of the Allied Occupation in 1952.

By tradition, Japanese Cabinets governed as long as they retained the confidence of their two armed services Ministers. The resignation of an unhappy War Minister or his Navy counterpart could force the downfall of a Cabinet. Civilian Ministers, however, could do the same. The most telling case was that of an ambitious Minister for Home Affairs, Adachi Kenzō, who in December 1931 compelled the Wakatsuki Cabinet to resign by refusing either to attend the Cabinet or to resign his office. Adachi had wanted to promote a Government of all the talents, modelled perhaps on Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government in Britain and led, he evidently hoped, by himself. His own ambitions foundered, but his actions led directly to the first minority Government ever to be formed in Japan since Prince Saionji’s introduction of party politics into National Government shortly after the turn of the century.

The new Prime Minister was Inukai Tsuyoshi, 76-year-old leader of the opposition Seiyūkai, who rejected calls for the formation of a Cabinet of National Unity in which both parties might participate. Inukai did not lack courage, and he took to heart the Emperor’s injunction to resist the military’s interference in Japan’s domestic and international affairs. Five months later, he was dead, assassinated by another cabal of radical officers who carried out the 15 May Incident.

The terrorists had struck again, after a brief pause, mounting their unsuccessful coup d’état on 15 May 1932. This time it was the turn of the junior naval officers, who joined forces with an even more feckless band of radical Army cadets that had fallen under the influence of civilian ultra-nationalists including Dr Ōkawa and Tachibana Kosaburō. The naval officers and the Army cadets kept a Sunday rendezvous at the Yasukuni shrine, embarked in a pair of taxis to the official residence of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, and simply walked in unchallenged. The operation was bungled, the intruders lost their way, but they finally found and murdered the now 77-year-old Premier. Leaving the building, the terrorists killed two guards. They made their way to the KenpeitaiHeadquarters and gave themselves up. In the confusion, the remainder of the Cabinet had escaped harm. Meanwhile, a second squad of naval officers threw grenades at the house of Count Makino, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Makino himself may have been warned of the attack by Ōkawa, who regarded the old man with affection and even had hopes that Makino could be prevailed upon to be Prime Minister after the revolution. In any event, this attack caused no fatalities. A third group lobbed bombs at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters, again to little effect. Tachibana and his agrarian reformists carried out an elaborate attempt to black out Tokyo’s electric power supply system but their bombs failed to wreck their targets. Finally, one of the Army’s leading young radicals was shot and wounded by one of Tachibana’s supporters for having been instrumental in withdrawing support for the plot six months before: it was a breathtakingly ill-conceived revenge attack which further cemented relations between the Army Young Officer movement and the Army top brass at the expense of future collaboration between the extremist factions of the two armed services. Once again, the leaders identified by the authorities were handled with kid gloves and respect for their lofty motives. The murderers of Premier Inukai declared at their trial that their motive had been to protest against the Japanese ratification of the London naval agreement which the Japanese Government had incurred much displeasure by accepting. It was to be the last constructive agreement for peace that a Japanese Government was to be allowed by public opinion to make. War Minister Araki issued a public statement proclaiming:

We cannot restrain our tears when we consider the mentality expressed in the actions of these pure and naïve young men. They are not actions for fame, or personal gain, nor are they traitorous. They were performed in the sincere belief that they were for the benefit of Imperial Japan. Therefore, in dealing with this Incident, it will not do to dispose of it in a routine manner according to shortsighted conceptions.^∗

Well may we marvel at his words. With the passing of time, however, opinion within the Young Officer movement was gradually hardening in its appreciation that Araki was too moderate for their taste, and began to think in terms of even more independent action.

The culprits showed no remorse for their actions. They had every reason to believe that the reactions of their superiors to the March and October Incidents of 1931 had indicated that direct action was a not unwelcome response to civil corruption and indolence. The cynical opportunism of senior officers was an important element in creating a climate in which mass terrorism by young officers could flourish. The mechanism was a well-established Japanese tradition, one to which we have already referred in passing, known as Gekokujō, that phenomenon involving the subordination of senior officers by junior officers – the tail wagging the dog. It is not, perhaps, the frequency of its occurrence which is important. What is more significant is the fact that it led to very widespread displacements of authority and political judgement when it did occur. The same process had manifested itself in the development of the Manchurian Incident.

Following the 15 May Incident, those apprehended by the authorities were arraigned on a variety of charges including murder and sedition. The proceedings were held in public and received unprecedented publicity. Although Japan was by no means given to civil liberty and to the unfettered freedom of the press, on this occasion no attempt was made to impose either effective state censorship or any discernible self-restraint by the news media.

The rebels took full advantage of the occasion to proclaim the righteousness of their cause. Their patriotic motives elicited popular sympathy. The country was in a political ferment. None of those found guilty were executed. The penal sentences imposed by the courts were, under the circumstances, exceptionally mild. The leader of the Army Cadet group, Gotō Terunori, together with his ten military co-defendants, was court-martialled. They each received four-year prison terms. They were freed on parole within the year and were pardoned soon afterwards. Koga Kiyoshi and Mikami Taku (Takashi), the two principal ringleaders of the naval faction, were sentenced by a naval court martial to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Their followers received sentences of thirteen, ten, two and one year’s imprisonment respectively. Pardons were granted to all of them by 1940. The civilians involved in the Incident were treated more severely by the civil courts. Tachibana Kōsaburō was singled out and sentenced to a term of life imprisonment. In Hugh Byas’s evocative phrase, the 15 May Incident had been carried out by ‘adolescents straying in a pink mist’. That mist was no more remarkable than the corrosive fog which enveloped the due processes of law and order.

In the following year, there was another hare-brained plot, known as the Shinpei-tai Jiken, or ‘Heaven-Sent Troops’ Incident. It was concocted by the Patriotic Labour Party and the Great Japan Production Party, both right-wing labour organizations which had links with the russo-phobic Amur River Society. This plot had no direct links with the Young Officer movement, but among the ringleaders were an Army Lieutenant-Colonel and a Navy Commander by the name of Yamaguchi Saburō. The idea was that on the morning of 7 July 1933, Yamaguchi, a naval pilot, would take off in his aircraft, bomb the Cabinet at the official residence of the Prime Minister, blow up the residence of the Lord Privy Seal, Count Makino, and then attack the Headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. He would then land in front of the Imperial Palace. At that point a mob of 3,600 men, having converged seemingly out of nowhere, would assault the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. A handpicked group of men would then rush away to attack the Prime Minister’s residence and assassinate any Cabinet Minister who might have survived the initial air attack. Other units would attack the homes of the presidents of the two main parliamentary parties, the residence of the Lord Privy Seal, the Japan Industrial Club (where it was hoped to kill a few zaibatsu), the headquarters of the left-wing Social Masses Party and a list of other hated targets. Still more units would smash their way into certain armouries to seize weapons and ammunition. The focus of the rebels would then shift to the Headquarters of the Industrial Bank of Japan where they planned to barricade themselves for a bloody last-ditch stand against the entire might of the Metropolitan Police. Evidently there was some thought that they might spark off a wider insurrection leading to Emperor Hirohito’s replacement by his brother Prince Chichibu and the establishment of a new Government under Prince Higashikuni. There is not a lot that one can say about this plan except that the police arrested a number of the conspirators in time to prevent the Incident from occurring. Nevertheless, there is some significance in the fact that the plot would have involved the assassination of War Minister Araki as well as his other Cabinet colleagues, and this lends some credence to suggestions that his opponents were also aware of the plan, hoped to use it as a pretext to seize power, and may even have intended to provide the conspirators with arms.

After the murder of Inukai in 1932, no other political party leader was to become Prime Minister until the defeat of Japan. It was not immediately apparent, but the mould of Japanese party government had been shattered – and the fault lay not so much with the terrorists (although they were a proximate cause) but mainly with the parties themselves, together with the local regional political machines upon whom they relied for support. It is notable that neither of the two mainstream political parties sought mass political support from the general public as a means of bolstering its claim to authority over its opponents. The system was corrupt, and looked it. Indeed, the political parties never truly reflected the aspirations and concerns of the Japanese public at large. The parties served to legitimize the views of élites more interested in power and patronage than in democratic values.

Paradoxically, the political parties were intended to provide a vehicle for national opinion. Constitutionally, the elected House of Representatives in the Imperial Diet was not designed to be a powerful branch of government. The Meiji oligarchs had confined its purpose to the expression of popular sentiment. It was not an instrument for actively governing the country. It could obstruct the imposition of unpopular laws, and it could initiate legislation of its own devising, but its will could be thwarted by the inactivity of the House of Peers or by a vote of the Privy Council. It lacked any real power to control the budget.

Moreover, the political parties were perceived by many circles in Japan as divisive, alien structures, incompatible with traditional Japanese values and above all inimical to the neo-Confucian harmony and benevolence that ought to extend from the Emperor to all of his subjects. As long as Japanese security was seen to depend upon a more or less cooperative relationship with the Western Powers, as had seemed to exist throughout most of the years between the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the late 1920s, more reactionary forces were held at bay notwithstanding the enmity that existed between the political parties. During this period, indeed, the political parties between them not only gained real control in the House of Representatives but selected successive Prime Ministers, determined the composition of their Cabinets and exercised a commanding influence over government policies on most issues. From thence the power of the political parties was extended into the House of Peers, determined the composition and attitudes of the Privy Council, intimidated the civil service, and established uneasy partnerships with factions in big business, in the armed forces and even in the Imperial Court itself. All of this seemed to represent a new kind of stability quite different from the clan-based oligarchic factions of previous decades. None of this had any natural place in the Meiji Constitution.

In the end, the party politicians lost whatever credibility they pretended to have. They seemed to be yesterday’s men. Few could command general respect. None appeared to have the vitality, imagination and flair that people trusted in old war horses like Admiral Saitō Makoto, Admiral Okada Keisuke and General Hayashi Senjurō, or figures such as the veteran Ambassador Hirota Kōki (a commoner) and the sophisticated Prince Konoye Fuminaro, last of the noble Fujiwara line: each of these men became Prime Minister, handpicked by the wily old democratic Genrō, Prince Saionji Kinmochi, who himself bitterly regretted the eclipse of the party system which he personally had introduced into Japanese society in the early years of the century. Now even Saionji appreciated that the leadership of the two great political parties of the mid-thirties was bereft of talent, criss-crossed with factionalism, utterly unfit for the daunting task of restoring a national consensus. The fact that after 1932 both main political parties – the Minseitō and the Seiyūkai – were committed to Japanese recognition of the puppet state of Manchukuo did nothing to relieve the anxieties of Saionji, who fervently hoped that the men he selected as Prime Ministers over the next few years had the strength of character and moral toughness necessary either to withstand the temptations of overseas expansion or, when that failed, to bring the political ambitions of the Army under control. If that strategy should fail, Saionji appreciated, then Japan was set on a course leading directly to its own ruination through economic collapse or through a collision with the Western Powers. Unhappily, the instruments through which Saionji attempted to manipulate the policies of the nation were unequal to his purposes.

Following the murder of Prime Minister Inukai in May 1932, Saitō Makoto was selected by Prince Saionji to take the dead man’s place. He had been a full admiral since 1916, had served as former naval attaché to the United States before the turn of the century and then, as Vice-Minister of the Navy for seven years between 1898 and 1906, had been largely responsible for building the Navy which was to defeat the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. He then had served as Navy Minister for a period of eight years until the beginning of the First World War. After the war he emerged from a period of retirement to serve as Governor-General of Korea between August 1919 and December 1927. He was very nearly the victim of a terrorist bomb thrown at his carriage, shortly after taking up that appointment but, undeterred, dedicated himself to the transformation of the Japanese colonial government from a military occupation to a civil administration. After attending the Geneva Disarmament Conference as a plenipotentiary in 1927, he took a well-earned rest. He was clearly a man of personal courage, and he later returned to Korea for a second stint as Governor-General between 1929 and June 1931 (a period when radical elements in the Korean Army were kept well under control). As one of Japan’s most distinguished elder soldier-statesmen, he was a man of proven ability and experience; he had a reputation for being relatively liberal by Japanese standards; and he had shown phenomenal staying power in the face of adversity. As Prime Minister, he also briefly reserved for himself the portfolios of Foreign Affairs (until July 1932) and Education (after March 1934). Nevertheless, the old man was tired. Two other figures, War Minister Araki Sadao and his Inspector-General of Military Education (Mazaki Jinzaburō), both leading figures in the Imperial Way Faction of the Army, dominated the policies of the Saitō Cabinet and were greatly esteemed by the same radical groups of Young Officers from whom the most recent crop of assassins had emerged. After presiding over Japan’s recognition of Manchukuo, rejection of the Lytton Report, withdrawal from the League of Nations, and the approval of a huge arms procurement programme for the Navy as well as the Army, Saitō had proved a great disappointment to Saionji and the moderate elements in the country. In the end, however, Saitō only felt obliged to resign from office in July 1934 after his Finance Minister (former Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo), other members of his Cabinet and senior officials in the Finance Ministry were implicated in a sleazy bribes scandal involving the sale of stocks in a rayon company. His successor was another admiral, Okada Keisuke, who more or less unwillingly followed down the same path of compromise that Saitō had been forced to tread. A year later, Saitō himself was appointed Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal as a mark of the Emperor’s affection, but the fire had gone out of his soul.

It should be said that corruption for some time had become much more blatant than before. Election fraud in particular had become a regular feature of Japanese political life, as had ‘pork barrel’ largesse and the sale of political offices to the highest bidder at local, regional and even national levels. The political parties did not exercise power autocratically, nor by means of any direct appeal for public support. Their authority survived only as long as they retained the allegiance of local political bosses at subordinate levels. This in turn meant that the political parties blocked efforts by the central bureaucracy to extend their power into local affairs.

Indeed, many bureaucrats found themselves unable to function at local or regional levels without surrendering their political initiative to the whims and personal interests of the local party bosses. As a result, discontent with the political parties spread laterally throughout the professional civil service apparatus as well as in the elite circles of the House of Peers (where political cant had begun to disrupt the clubby atmosphere of former times).

The whole system came crashing down under the weight of the Manchurian Incident and the international condemnation and isolation of Japan which became a permanent feature of the nation’s political life from 1932 until the end of the Pacific War. During this period, Japan turned gradually towards the military and civil bureaucracies to survive what was regarded universally as a period of national emergency surpassing anything in the country’s previous history. The fact that both of these groups could claim legitimacy under the Constitution as mere servants of the Imperial Will also gave them authority as the constitutional embodiment and voice of that national essence, Kokutai, to which reference has already been made in Chapter 3. Added to that was the evidence, borne out in the years of maladministration, corruption and the demonstrable incompetence of many members of the Imperial Diet, that modern government was no place for bumbling amateurs: the reins of power should be in the hands of those best equipped by intelligence, training and experience to perform the functions of their offices. As the reputations of the political parties diminished, so did the ability of those parties to attract into their ranks men of experience and probity who might have led them through successive crises.

Parallel with the eclipse of the political parties and the rising importance of the military and civilian bureaucracies in the domestic as well as in the overseas affairs of Japan during the thirties, there took place in Japan an ideological splintering of the Army and the Navy but more especially of the Army. Although the situation was often more complicated, as we have already intimated, the factionalization of the Japanese Army officer corps is generally perceived as a struggle between two major ideological groups, each of which dispensed patronage and found outside supporters. The efforts of these groups to achieve supremacy in Japan shook the nation to its core.

The Kōdō group stressed obedience to the divine Imperial Will and sought to emancipate Emperor Hirohito from the baleful influence of effete, liberal-minded palace officials, the corrupt, materialistic accretions of twentieth-century parliamentarianism, and the bureaucratic and capitalistic opportunists who used the state to further their selfish interests. They yearned for a ‘Shōwa Restoration’ to usher in a new age of Imperial splendour. They saw themselves as the natural successors to the Samurai clansmen who had carried out the ‘Meiji Restoration’ in the previous century. Their vision of life in that future age was obscured by the misfortunes, maladministration and structures of the modern era. Only when all that was swept away would the one true path forward stand revealed in crystal clarity. Thus, so said one adherent of the Imperial Way: ‘The punishment of evil men and the Restoration are the same thing.’^∗ In terms of foreign affairs and military policy, however, the Kōdōha regarded war against the Soviet Union as inevitable and imminent. At all events it became a fixed star towards which all Kōdōha sought to steer Japan. From this phobic obsession with the Soviet Union (and the Comintern) sprang the demand of the Young Officer movement, with which the Kōdōhawere allied, for the immediate spiritual reformation of Japan. At the moment, by contrast, it seemed prudent to avoid any military adventure against China. This consideration proceeded partly from the fact that the difficulties of overcoming Chinese resistance were regarded as considerable, and partly from a sense of kinship with the Chinese which members of the Kōdōha imagined the Chinese might be taught to reciprocate. By one means or other, however, the Imperial Way planned to embrace the Middle Kingdom: contrary to what is often supposed, the policy of restraint towards China was by no means unconditional. And when Kita Ikki, the most important ideologist associated with the movement, looked further into his crystal ball, he foresaw Japanese expansion beyond, as far as eastern Siberia and even, in due time, Australia.

Against the Kōdōha were ranged a number of groups which the Kōdōha tended to lump together under a pejorative label, the Tōseiha (Control Faction), in which a number of the elder generation of senior officers were allied to some of the young technocrats and brighter staff officers. Many of them rejected the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and traditional values promoted by General Araki and his cronies. Others felt that it compromised efforts to mechanize and introduce other technical innovations into the Army. The fixation of the Kōdōha about the Soviet Union worried those who wanted time to develop the economic infrastructure of Manchukuo rather than waste resources in a war for which they believed the nation would remain ill-prepared for a considerable period. Thus the Kōdōha harkened back to a mythical past but wanted radical changes overnight. The Tōseiha, arguably the more dangerous of the two groups in the long run, looked forward to a different kind of war, where all the resources of the modern state would be harnessed under unified direction: in two words, Total War.

The rapid eclipse of the Kōdōha began in 1934, when Araki resigned as War Minister, ostensibly due to ill-health but mindful of the animosity that he had generated within the senior ranks of the Army. As a naval Intelligence report on the Army, prepared within the Naval General Staff, observed rather drily:

While chanting effortlessly that he must promptly invest the Emperor’s Army with integrity and abolish all cliques from the Army, War Minister Araki, in fact, built up his own large faction. The Imperial Army is not so generous as to permit this deed.^∗

In the aftermath of Araki’s departure, the Vice-Chief of the Army General Staff, Lieutenant-General Ueda Kenkichi, had links with the Control Faction. Prince Kan’in Kotohito, the Chief of the Army General Staff, was personally rather favourable to it, too, while Major-General Nagata Tetsuzan, regarded as the ‘brains’ of the Tōseiha, now returned to the centre of power as Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau at the War Ministry after having being pushed out for a period by one of Araki’s favourites to serve as a brigade commander. Nagata had first risen to prominence as the protege of War Minister Ugaki in the ill-starred Cabinet of Hamaguchi during the great London Naval Conference controversy. He was an early advocate of Army modernization, the development of mechanized forces and research into biological and chemical weapons systems. He was dynamic, brilliant and thoroughly efficient. Araki’s successor as War Minister, General Hayashi Senjurō, was greatly influenced by Nagata, who had set himself the task of rooting out adherents of the Kōdōha from all positions of influence in the Japanese Army. However, since Nagata himself had been implicated in the March Incident of 1931, it was a case of poacher-turned-gamekeeper. The main obstacle in Nagata’s path was Mazaki, Ueda’s predecessor as Vice-Chief of the Army General Staff and presently Inspector-General of Military Education. Mazaki was regarded as a lion by the Young Officer movement and the Imperial Way Faction. Nagata’s schemes reached fruition, however, and Mazaki was forced to resign much against his will.

This signed Nagata’s own death warrant. A lieutenant-colonel by the name of Aizawa Saburō decided that Nagata’s actions in this and other matters had put him beyond the pale. He came up to Tokyo, made his way into Nagata’s office, and murdered him with his samurai sword. The ensuing trial of the malefactor put Tokyo on tenterhooks. The defence used the occasion to ventilate the frustrations of the Kōdōha and to malign the reputation, and personal reputations of leading members, of the Tōseiha. Aizawa himself said that his sole regret was that he had failed to slay Nagata with a single blow of his sword. For its part, the Control Faction, turning on those in the Imperial Way Faction whom they had recently been squeezing but had previously tolerated, determined to thwart further outrages by dispatching known Kōdōha troublemakers to the outer reaches of the Empire and beyond. Amid a general expectation of further outbreaks of violence, it had gradually become clear that the forces of discontent centred upon the First Division, which had been stationed in Tokyo for longer than scarcely anyone could remember. To defuse the situation, the First Division was ordered to proceed to Manchukuo. These steps, however, convinced leading elements within the Kōdōha that they must act in haste before the Tōseiha plans could be implemented and while the daily reports surrounding the public court martial of Aizawa still excited widespread national sympathy for the defendant.

In February 1936 the turbulence of the new Army reached its peak. There took place then an incident which embodied all the trends to violence of the time, and all the flouting of established political conduct. A plot was made by the younger officers in some of the most respected regiments. Plots, it will be gathered, were nothing new: it was the scope and audacity of this particular one which were original. The conspiracy was to murder the leaders of the Cabinet and the most respected elder statesmen who advised the throne. They intended to slaughter seven prominent individuals whom they regarded as representative of the reactionary elements of the country. These included the old Genrō, Prince Saionji (subsequently removed from the slate of intended victims); Prime Minister Ōkada; Finance Minister Takahashi; the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Viscount Saitō; his predecessor, Count Makino; the Grand Chamberlain, Admiral Suzuki, and Mazaki’s replacement as Inspector-General of Military Education, General Watanabe Jōtarō. A second deathlist was prepared in case any opportunities presented themselves during subsequent phases of the uprising. This list included the names of five individuals who were implicated in the terrorist plots of 1931 and the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident: War Minister Hayashi, Lieutenant-Colonel Mutō. Akira, Lieutenant-Colonel Nemoto Hiroshi, Major Katakura Tadashi and Colonel Ishiwara Kanji. Then, as an act of unheard-of impiety, the conspirators planned to give an ultimatum to the Emperor for the appointment of a particular kind of Cabinet.

The disaffected troops finally mutinied on 26 February 1936, when they carried elements of the Imperial Guards Division with them. The usual mishaps and bloodthirsty scenes occurred, and it was notable that both the Metropolitan Police and the Kenpeitaiwere conspicuous by their absence in the opening hours of the Incident. The rebels occupied key positions in the city, including the Metropolitan Police Headquarters, the Ministry for Home Affairs and the War Ministry, holding them for several days. The death toll was far less than might have been expected. The number of troops deployed by the rebels was far greater than had taken part in any previous rebellion on Japanese soil since the Great Saigō had been put down by the forces of the Emperor Meiji. The terrorists who conceived the incident failed because their plot was prepared inadequately, and because some of the leading figures escaped their would-be assassins. But for some days the politics of Tokyo, which at the time was snow-covered, was divided between a barracks, which housed the rebellious officers who were waiting for high personages such as their erstwhile spiritual mentor Araki Sadao to throw in their lot with them, and the rest of the metropolis, variously (and nonetheless entirely accurately) described as strangely apathetic, quiet or stunned by the enormity of what had been done.

No attempt was made to inform, much less to appeal, to public opinion about what was happening in the early stages of the uprising. The rebel troops even failed to take the elementary precaution of seizing control of the national broadcasting system or mounting any other kind of propaganda. Their civilian supporters printed a couple of hundred copies of two or three bulletins which they composed during the first two days of the uprising, then, with breathtaking fecklessness, contented themselves with posting these to their supporters. Accordingly, the disturbances did not spread beyond Tokyo. Apart from what little the people of Tokyo garnered from rumours about the horrific series of murders at the beginning of the Incident, all that was visible was an unnatural calm and the sight of troops occupying key positions near the Imperial Palace, Government buildings and the like in the centre of Tokyo. While the rebels and the rest of the Army sought to find some peaceful solution to the crisis, the rebels felt that it would be only a question of time before their coup would receive the Emperor’s own blessing. For some time Japanese troops outside Tokyo remained calm and obedient to military discipline.

Gradually, the assembled forces of the Government took stock of their position. Although the attitude of the bulk of the First Division remained unclear, the other division stationed in Tokyo, the Imperial Guards Division, largely remained in safe hands. Outside the metropolis, other commanders were very much opposed to the uprising. The factionalism with which the Japanese Army was riven made that certain. The struggle was not between military moderates and radicals. Many of those most keen to crush the rebellion had defied the central authorities when it had suited them: they included General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, who now commanded the Fourth Division in Osaka, General Minami Jirō, now Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army, and Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, who was appointed to head the Operations and Communications Sections of the Martial Law Headquarters in Tokyo.

The Emperor himself was powerless during the crisis. His initial reaction was one of undisguised outrage at the actions taken by the rebels. He subsequently told his chief aide-de-camp, General Honjō Shigeru: ‘They have killed my advisers and are now trying to pull a silk rope over my neck… I shall never forgive them, no matter what their motives are.’^∗

Having commanded his War Minister to smash the revolt without delay, the Emperor was at a loss to understand why his instructions were not carried out without further parleying. On the second day of the rebellion, the Emperor went further and told Honō that unless the Army proceeded at once to end the mutiny, he himself would take personal command of the Imperial Guards and crush it. There seems little reason to doubt his resolve to carry out that threat if necessary. He and his palace advisers were also determined to oppose mounting pressures for the installation of a new Cabinet that might open the way for the rebels to achieve their aims. When the surviving members of Admiral Okada’s Cabinet sent Home Affairs Minister Gotō Fumio to the Palace to suggest an interim Prime Minister, the Emperor appointed Gotō as Acting Prime Minister instead. Later, when Gotō returned to submit the collective resignations of himself and his colleagues, Emperor Hirohito informed Gotō that he would decline to permit any change in Government until his orders to end the uprising were carried out. News of this development finally reached the rebels on the night of 27 February, where it came as a shock. They had believed that they had hit upon a winning formula to achieve their demands by agreeing to return to their barracks if General Mazaki were to be appointed Prime Minister. The Emperor’s opposition, in the end, sealed the fate of their fanciful Shōwa Restoration.

The decisive step, however, may have been the landing of strong contingents of marines backed up by the guns of some forty ships, which sailed into Tokyo Bay on 27 February, obedient to orders issued by moderate leaders of the Navy who were appalled at the gravity of the rebellion, concerned for the safety of the Imperial Court and incensed at the reported murder of two admirals (the Prime Minister, Okada Keisuke, and the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Saitō Makoto) and the severe injuries sustained by a third (Suzuki Kantarō). Both the Army and the Navy shied away from an open confrontation, but the Navy was instrumental in forcing the military authorities to take positive action.

Finally the rebels recognized that their tide had run out. Their officers sent word that they would surrender their commands and commit suicide if ordered to do so by an Imperial Messenger. Hirohito, not wishing to dignify their actions, merely responded that if the rebels wanted to commit suicide then that was for them to decide. Stung by this rebuke, the mutineers decided to go down fighting. At the same time, the Cabinet, the General Staff and the Emperor were all determined that the rebel positions must be taken by storm. Throughout 28 and 29 February, military reinforcements poured into Tokyo from further afield. The city was cut off from the rest of the country. Civilians were evacuated from forward areas. Bombarded by Government leaflets, radio broadcasts and even an advertisement suspended from a tethered balloon, the rebels offered no resistance as the Army’s tanks moved forward. Their morale utterly broken, the mutiny simply collapsed as the rebels came out, surrendered and returned to their barracks.

After all 1,483 surviving participants in the rebellion were interrogated, civilian as well as military, 124 were prosecuted. These included all nineteen of the surviving officers (two others had committed suicide), seventy-three of the ninety-one non-commissioned officers, nineteen of the 1,358 common soldiers, and a sorry lot of ten civilians. The remainder were set free on the grounds that they had done no more than to obey the orders of their superiors. The majority were returned to active service with the First Division and transported in disgrace to the outer reaches of Manchuria. The trials, held in camera, were conducted in an atmosphere of severity in great contrast to the trials of previous terrorists. There was no popular support for the accused, and senior officers who had felt some sympathy for their aims now kept their own heads down. The rumours that surrounded them added to public confusion and a pervasive sense of interlocking and countervailing conspiracies. After a considerable delay, there were some exemplary executions. Thirteen rebel officers and four of the civilians accused of major responsibility for the 26 February Incident were stood before firing squads. Five officers were sentenced to life imprisonment, another received four years, while forty-four NCOs, four common soldiers and one other civilian found guilty were sent to prison for varying terms. In subsequent proceedings against persons accused of collaboration with the active conspirators, the authorities managed to protect a number of influential individuals who had been favourable to the rebel cause. The natural tendencies of mainstream politicians to seek the support of influential cliques now led to the serious embarrassment of the Seiyūkai. The same tendencies had tempted large and vulnerable financial conglomerates to curry the favour of military or political circles, and many well-connected zaibatsu were implicated, notably Ikeda Seihin (Shigeaki) (the de facto head in the vast Mitsui empire, who was tipped off in time to escape the assassins on 26 February), Kuhara Fusanosuke (founder of the Kuhara Mining Company, partner and brother-in-law to Ayukawa Gisuke of Nissan and a man whose reputation abroad was thoroughly unsavoury)^∗ and Ishihara Kichirō (Hiroichirō) (the President of the Ishihara Industries and Marine Transportation Company, who made his personal fortune as an importer of Malayan rubber and iron ore). Each of them attracted the unwelcome attentions of the police: Kuhara and Ishihara spent a period in protective custody. Ishihara was charged with conspiracy but was acquitted by the courts.

In the Army there were many leading figures, including some who harboured an honourable detestation of the wheeling and dealing that characterized the political and social life of Japan, who suddenly found themselves out of favour. Some of them retained sufficient influence to escape prosecution. General Mazaki Jinzaburō, who as Inspector-General of Military Education had been instrumental in exposing the leading rebels to the ideas for which they risked everything, was involved in the conspiracy up to his neck. He was indicted but won an acquittal. Retired General Saitō Ryū, who served as a middle-man between the zaibatsu and the plotters, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Other active sympathizers who were treated lightly included former War Minister Araki Sadao; General Kashii Kōhei, who commanded the Tokyo Garrison and was put in charge of the Martial Law Headquarters established to deal with the crisis; General Yanagawa Heisuke, Commander of the First Division until the eve of the Incident; General Hori Takeo, his successor; Major-General Yamashita Tomoyuki, Chief of the Research Bureau at the War Ministry, and General Murakami Keisaku, Chief of the Military Affairs Section of the Military Affairs Bureau, all of whom wriggled free. So, too, did War Minister Kawashima Yoshiyuki, who dithered throughout the crisis but at one point took the suggestion of Araki and other proactive generals and agreed to issue an official declaration supporting the aims of the rebels. Prince Chichibu, the Emperor’s brother, had close ties with several of the leading Young Officers in the conspiracy, but by common consent the authorities turned a blind eye to his true role in the crisis. One disgusted onlooker, General Ugaki Kazushige, then Governor-General of Korea and one of the intended victims of the most recent crop of conspirators, remarked in his diary: ‘How disgusting it is to watch these rascals, holding in one hand the matches and in the other one the water hose, setting fire and putting it out at the same time, inciting the Young Officers, pleading their cause and then claiming credit for having put them down.’^∗

By contrast the authorities did not spare two of Japan’s most notorious radical right-wing renovationists. The first was Kita Ikki, a one-eyed ascetic, fire-eating socialist turned Nichiren monk, whose most famous work, An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan, banned in its unexpurgated form by the censor, called for the foundation of a revolutionary empire and was found among the personal effects of the rebels. The second was his disciple, Nishida Mitsugi (Zei), once a promising young officer who had abandoned his career to pursue Kita’s mystical vision of national and East Asian upheaval and reform. The evidence against them was weak and entirely circumstantial. It was afterwards revealed that their judges, however, decided to condemn them to death by firing squad in spite of the fact that the guilt of these two accused was not proven. Both men had been closely associated with Ōkawa Shūmei for many years.

This abortive revolution, by its radicalism, led to a realization that the Japanese Army, or part of it, was ceasing to be a conservator of the state. One of its causes was said to be the unfamiliar outbreak of political discussion among junior officers. This was partly the result of their becoming affected by Japan’s economic problems. They were seeking solutions; they did not mind if these were radical. Hitherto the Army, to the comfort of the better-off classes of the Japanese, had seemed to connote safety, conservatism, stability. But they had to recast their thoughts towards what in Japan had been regarded as dangerous ideas. Some reflective onlookers noticed that, if the Army should turn towards Communism in its new adventurousness, it would have a good chance of putting the whole country on a communist footing. Japan, with its heavy industry, with its huge industrial population which was accustomed to strict discipline, and its underlying taste for violence, would be admirable material for a communist dictatorship to work on. The same was observed in the attractions which European fascism held for many Army officers.

The forces in opposition to the Kōdōha showed more diversity than might be supposed, especially in the period which followed the 26 February Incident of 1936. After the failure of that uprising, the influence of the Kōdōha simply collapsed. The surviving leaders of the faction were isolated, consigned to the Reserves or sent off to remote corners of the Empire and Manchukuo. Generals Araki, Mazaki, Yanagawa, Obata and the rest simply ceased to exercise a dominant role. In their place Generals Umezu, Tōjō, Sugiyama and Koiso took control, and under the guise of protecting the nation from right-wing populist radicalism, they insisted upon taking steps which ensured that liberalism, too, would gain no headway.

The resurgence of the Control Faction after the 26 February Incident was coupled with a drawing together of the military, court administrators, civil bureaucrats and zaibatsu. The agrarian and social reformist impulses of the Tōseiha yielded to what was regarded by the established forces as a perfectly prudent concentration of the nation’s resources on satisfying the requirements of the military. The Army leadership played upon the fears of the establishment, dwelling on their own alleged inability to restrain the Kōdōfaction if progressively more militaristic policies were not adapted. In this way the Tōseiha did indeed become a controlling faction in the political affairs of the state, far beyond their ostensible constitutional responsibilities, especially in the realms of industrial development, fuel policy, labour, wage and price controls, financial policy, and the formulation of foreign policy. Heavy-handed legislation was passed concerning thought control, and jingoistic measures were introduced to ensure that militaristic values were inculcated in all sectors of education. The military utilized their power to select and replace Ministers at will, regulated only by their own sense of national priorities, collectivism, bureaucratic conceits and the inter-service rivalry between the Army and the Navy.

The outcome of the uprising therefore did nothing to restore a sense of balance to Japan. It frankly did not matter that only six days before the Incident, a national election had been held which had returned a liberal Minseitō majority to the Imperial Diet. It is a measure of the rebels’ disinterest in any popular mandate that they acted before the outcome was even known. It is a measure of the Tōseiha’s victory that the outcome was irrelevant. After the incident, Hirota Kōki was selected as Prime Minister and General Terauchi Hisaichi was chosen to be his War Minister. The new Finance Minister, Baba Eiichi, submitted a greatly inflationary budget and the Government set its sights on the national mobilization of heavy industry. Ten months later the uneasy working relationships in the Government came unstuck. War Minister Terauchi took offence when a member of the Imperial Diet, Hamada Kunimatsu, accused the Army of seeking to establish a dictatorship in Japan. Terauchi, enraged by this slur, required Prime Minister Hirota to prorogue the Diet. Hirota refused on the grounds that the outcome of another election was uncertain. Terauchi promptly resigned, and the Army ensured that no other suitable candidate could be appointed. The Government thereupon fell from power, more or less bearing out Hamada’s prophecy.

A further period of instability followed. The Emperor invited General Ugaki Kazushige to form a new Government only to find that Ugaki was blocked by the ‘Three Chiefs Council’ of the Army (the War Minister, the Chief of the Army General Staff and the Inspector-General of Military Education), who felt quite rightly that he was determined to put a brake upon the rapid expansion to which they were becoming accustomed. Since the Hirota Cabinet had bowed to Terauchi’s demand for the reinstatement of a once-discarded provision of the Meiji Constitution that War Ministers must be selected from general officers on the active service list, the Prime Minister-designate effectively depended upon the grace and favour of the Army (and indeed the Navy) to fill his Cabinet. Ugaki had no choice but to return his mandate to the Emperor.

Instead, former War Minister Hayashi Senjurō formed a new Government in early February 1937. Two months later, seeking a popular mandate for a pattern of non-party government which he sought to legitimize, Hayashi called a snap election, the fourth since 1930. He abandoned any attempt to woo the political bosses and their party machines. Instead he offered the electorate a new party, the Shōwa-kai. His bombastic, barrack-square behaviour did not go down well, however, and the election gave the two main political parties a massive vote of confidence against the militaristic Hayashi. The two regular parties won 359 seats in the Diet with a tally of more than 7 million votes. The Shōwa-kai, by contrast, won nineteen seats with just over 400,000 votes, and another splinter party also backed by the Army, the Kokumin Dōmei, fared even more poorly. Thus the democratic instincts of the people (or the effectiveness of the party machines) remained surprisingly undimmed throughout the turbulent years that were to culminate in the outbreak of the China Incident in July 1937. Nevertheless, despite very outspoken criticism by members of the Imperial Diet concerning the drift of the nation towards militarism, the increasingly jingoistic and reactionary tenor of Japanese Governments was echoed in the mass media and, inevitably, was soon reflected by the general population.

On the whole, the Japanese showed little aptitude in their propaganda, particularly where it was intended for foreign parts. In great contrast to the Chinese, they not infrequently created greater misunderstanding and hostility towards themselves than had they left well alone. It was not a new problem: the Japanese had lost even the propaganda war with Tsarist Russia during the appeal to foreign opinion in the run-up to the Treaty of Portsmouth. In October 1934 the Japanese War Minister produced a famous pamphlet urging the creation of a centralized organ responsible for the dissemination of information and propaganda. One result of such pressure was the creation of the Dōmei Tsūshinsha (the United Press Agency) in June 1936 followed a month later by the establishment of a Cabinet Information Board, which was succeeded in turn by a Cabinet Information Division in September 1937 and upgraded to a Cabinet Information Bureau one year before Pearl Harbor. Whatever its name, these Cabinet organs were intended to manipulate the news and gradually fell under the control of military censors. At the same time the news apparatus became increasingly cumbersome, unreliable and an exasperation to foreign correspondents, who learned to place no reliance upon the factual accuracy of Japanese official statements as the years passed. Japanese goodwill missions likewise failed to achieve the positive impact upon foreign countries which exponents of these missions desired. Cultural exchanges often proved only slightly less counter-productive in the short term, and by the late 1930s only the short term mattered.

Public awareness of the irresponsibility of Japan’s continental adventure was less pronounced in Japan than it was abroad. In part this was due to the imposition of censorship involving all forms of press and broadcasting media. Even Japanese street theatre, notably Kamishibai, or picture-postcard theatre productions akin to Punch and Judy shows, were subject to close examination by thought control police and so, like the cinema, played safe. There were other factors, too, such as the Army’s step-by-step extension of the military training and indoctrination into Japanese schools, universities and factories. Then there was the matter of the economy.

Elated by the successes of the Japanese Armies, first in Manchuria and afterwards in Inner Mongolia and North China, initial worries in Japan about foreign reactions gradually subsided into mixed resentment and indifference when the West failed to take effective action. Industrial production in Japan by 1932 had returned to 98 per cent of its 1929 record, compared with corresponding figures of 84 per cent for the United Kingdom, 72 per cent for France, 67 per cent for Mussolini’s Italy, 53 per cent for Germany on the eve of Hitler’s accession to power, and 53 per cent for the United States at the commencement of the Roosevelt years. By 1933, therefore, the Japanese, buoyed up by defence expenditure, could regard the depression as a thing of the past. The illusion persisted for a surprisingly long period of time. Eventually the Ministry of Finance, excusing its own failure to operate within prudent monetary practices, as time wore on adopted the phrase ‘quasi-war economy’ to express the higher priority given to the development of Japanese military preparations for war rather than the demands of the civilian economy. In essence, the Japanese gradually were forced to recognize that what their British counterparts characterized as ‘the Fourth Arm of Defence’, financial stability, was something that Japan could not afford, and this added point to the importance of seeking concrete economic benefits from Japan’s dependencies on the Asian mainland. As the country ground through its gears towards Total War, the mobilization of the Japanese economy was plain to see, together with the cracks caused by its disfunctioning. The mortal danger to which this exposed Japan was well understood. Japan’s reliance upon the West for more than 90 per cent of its petroleum supplies meant that the liberty of Japan to wage war on the continent or anywhere else was subject to the goodwill of the United States and its friends, as the following table of Japanese petroleum imports in 1936 demonstrates:

Nevertheless, Japanese public opinion gradually appreciated that Japan was caught in an international crisis from which there could be no escape, and even began to develop a fatalistic sense, shared with many abroad, that war with the West as well as China might be unavoidable.

It was a world in which rearmament was becoming the order of the day. Recognizing the danger of a naval arms race against the combined strength of Britain and the United States, Japan demanded parity with each of them, with the object of making it impossible for the Anglo-Saxon countries to blackmail Japan. Thus the hard evidence of Japan’s irremediable dependence upon foreign imports of strategical raw materials was ignored by the Japanese during what were to become their last naval arms limitation discussions prior to the Pacific War. Their demands were thwarted, however, and in a major miscalculation by its Navy, Tokyo thereupon closed its eyes to the factors which had impelled Japan to accept previous humiliations, and withdrew from the 1935–6 London Naval Conference. The Army and the Navy, with a carelessness born of distraction, drove along through the night, mechanized now, on the road to Total War.