Japan's Imperial Army

by Edward J Drea

  In December 1916 Tanaka approached navy leaders about a formal revision of imperial defense policy. Besides the new requirements of total protracted warfare, dramatic changes on the international scene threatened to isolate Japan in a highly unstable region. International reaction to Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, condemnation of the Twenty-One Demands imposed on China in 1915, and apprehension about expansion into Shandong plus the seizure of German colonial possessions in the Pacific left westerners apprehensive about Japan’s motives and expansion.45 Furthermore, following the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911, China had steadily disintegrated into warlordism, further worsening regional stability. Beyond those strategic realities lay the bottom line of military funding.

  As long as the army and the navy failed to agree on a unified national defense policy, they would have to compete with each other for shares of the military budget. Service leaders worried that the political parties could turn the situation to their advantage, play the services against one another, and reduce the military’s overall funding requests. To avoid the appearance of disarray, it was in the services’ interests to resolve, or at least paper over, their differences in a reworked version of national defense policy that would eliminate the party threat. It took about one year to work out a new strategy agreeable to the services and acceptable to the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals as well as Yamagata.

  Military strategy would still rely on forward-based offensive operations, and Tanaka initially envisaged a short, decisive conflict requiring fast-moving offensive operations.46 Upon further reflection, however, he concluded that the age of short wars had passed and that the great powers had entered a new era of protracted warfare requiring the total mobilization of all state resources. This new awareness in theory made the nation subservient to the army because the military, not the politicians, would control national mobilization. It also made access to China’s resources even more important for Japan’s security.

  Maj. Koiso Kuniaki, a general staff officer, reached similar conclusions in an August 1917 study compiled by the general staff’s military geography section under his guidance. It addressed economic and industrial requirements of a total war state and deduced that Japan had to expand its national productivity and resource base during peacetime to prosecute a future war successfully. Koiso seconded Tanaka’s assessment that unfettered access to China’s natural resources was Japan’s sole means to achieve these economic goals.47

  Under Tanaka’s direction these ideas merged in September 1917 when the general staff ’s first department synthesized Koiso’s research with a May 1917 study of China’s role in Japan’s military preparedness into a basis for a revised national defense policy. The document acknowledged that future wars would be struggles of attrition that necessitated preparations during peacetime for a protracted conflict, not the traditional short decisive war. Japan therefore needed access to China’s resources, a peacetime economic base fully convertible for wartime industrial mobilization, and personnel mobilization planning that geared the entire nation to wage total war.48

  Also working in Tanaka’s favor was Yamagata’s shifting worldview. The army’s elder statesman gradually grew less concerned about a Russian war of revenge and more interested in expansion into China. In October 1917 Yamagata publicly described the need for unified national power, not just the military power, and warned of an impending race war caused by western and American aggression in Asia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and ensuing chaos further diminished Russia as a serious future opponent, and by the next year the army’s strategic focus shifted to a policy of exploiting China’s resources as an essential ingredient in a national effort to prepare for total war.49

  After further discussions between army and navy staff officers, in the late spring of 1918 the army conducted a final review of the draft defense policy under the auspices of War Minister Ōshima Ken’ichi, Chief of Staff Uehara, and Prime Minister Terauchi. Terauchi’s status on the active duty list allowed him to participate in military planning and made for greater unity concerning national objectives, particularly the need for the resources of China, between the government and military than had been the case in 1907.50 After review and the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals endorsement, in June 1918 Emperor Taishō approved the revised policy.

  The latest national military strategy posited Japan fighting against a coalition, likely composed of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. It mollified the traditionalists by retaining the short-war concept of preemptive offensive operations for a quick and decisive victory, and it appealed to revisionists because early battlefield success would ensure self-sufficiency, which in turn would enable Japan to fight a protracted struggle. Some officers, like Maj. Gen. Ugaki Kazushige, noted the contradiction that peacetime preparations for short war complicated designing a national mobilization strategy to fight a protracted conflict. Others wondered why all the army’s operational plans still presupposed rapid opening offensives to execute a short, decisive war since future warfare was no longer simply a matter of armies fighting one another but involved the mobilization of the state’s entire war-making potential.51

  According to the revised strategy, at the outbreak of war the army would deploy troops to defend Japanese interests and residents in China. It would seize strategic locations east of Lake Baikal and in joint operations with the navy occupy Luzon, Philippines. This required twenty-two divisions in peacetime and forty in wartime. Improved weapons and equipment would compensate for diminished manpower, making it possible to reduce the force structure. But the cost of army modernization more than offset the savings from personnel reductions.

  The army would capture U.S. naval bases at Manila and Subic Bay but thereafter had no operational plan of campaign for a second stage of operations. As for the navy, one fleet would destroy U.S. Navy warships in Asian waters, another would escort army units to Luzon, and a separate third fleet, the main surface battle force, would defeat the Americans in a decisive naval engagement when they tried to retake the Philippines. Because the navy currently had two fleets, the new strategy required the enormously expensive construction of a new fleet.52

  Increased tax revenues generated by the wartime boom had allowed the Terauchi cabinet to spend more on defense as part of a “positive economy” to promote national defense and simultaneously rebuild the domestic economy. Service budgets skyrocketed from about US$85 million, roughly divided between army and navy, in 1915 to US$324 million in 1920, with about two-thirds going to the navy for fleet expansion.53

  Wartime prosperity soon turned to postwar bust. In October 1918 Prime Minister Hara brokered an agreement on the 1920 budget with War Minister Tanaka, Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo, and Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō, who concurred that after the completion of naval expansion in 1927, the army’s budget requests would receive full funding. This was the only time that the army and the navy ever agreed on a budget.54 By 1919, however, public opinion had turned against defense spending and military expansion, an attitude subsequently reinforced by the international trend toward disarmament and Japan’s 1921 financial panic.

  Intervention in Siberia

  During World War I, Japan had enjoyed great diplomatic and military leeway attributable to the battlefield stalemate in Europe and the Entente’s need to replace its enormous casualties, which invariably brought western diplomats to Tokyo seeking military assistance. In August 1917 the French approached the Japanese ambassador in Paris about using Japanese troops on the Balkan front. A subsequent general staff study estimated that Japan would have to deploy forty divisions (a total mobilization) to exert a decisive influence on the European war. Even if this massive contribution secured recognition of Japan’s wartime gains, it was not worth the investment because it would seriously weaken the nation at a time when Russia seemed in danger of disintegration and a separate German-Russian peace was likely. The disastrous Italian collapse at Caporetto in early November 1917 forced Britai
n to redeploy troops from the Middle East and Balkans to Italy, and London soon pressed Tokyo for troops to bolster either the Russian front or its weakened Mesopotamian theater.55 The Americans and British were also seeking Japanese troops for a planned intervention in Russia.

  Worried about postwar isolation over its aggressive China policy and under mounting allied pressure for troops, the army was unwilling to reject allied requests outright but set impossible conditions for supplying large forces. The general staff demanded an independent command, unilateral choice of its theater of operations (a decision to be determined in large part by the status of the Russian army), allied financing of Japan’s operations (estimated at $1.5 billion annually), and 600,000 tons of allied shipping to move and sustain the Japanese expeditionary force. Furthermore, the allies would recognize Japan’s rights in China and place the Trans-Siberian Railroad under Japanese control. The terms were intentionally outrageous because neither the army nor the cabinet wanted to gamble the fate of the nation on a far-away foreign war. Closer to home, however, the general staff was willing to take risks.

  In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and quickly negotiated an armistice with Germany. Civil war and disorder then spread throughout Russia. In December Japanese troops temporarily intervened in Vladivostok to restore order after fighting broke out between workers’ soviets and local authorities. With conditions worsening, in February 1918 Vice Chief of Staff Tanaka Giichi secretly established the Military Affairs Cooperative Committee, composed of department and bureau chiefs from the war ministry and general staff, to prepare forces for Siberian operations. The committee doubled as a clandestine army headquarters and excluded political parties from interfering with its work.56

  Tanaka at first enthusiastically supported armed intervention as a means to establish a buffer zone east of Lake Baikal and by putting additional pressure on China to exploit the natural resources of Manchuria. Uehara and the general staff saw the opportunity to rid Japan permanently of its traditional Russian enemy.57 Yamagata and the Terauchi cabinet were more cautious, supporting involvement as part of an allied expedition to avoid a repetition of the international criticism created by Japan’s unilateral and heavy-handed imposition of the Twenty-One Demands. In early March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed a formal peace treaty with Germany and then demanded that Czech army units then in Russia disarm. The Czechs, who were fighting on the Entente side, refused and occupied sections of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Subsequent fighting between the Czechs and Bolsheviks became the pretext for allied intervention to rescue the Czech Legion.

  Japanese naval infantrymen landed at Vladivostok in April, ostensibly to prevent the city’s supply depots from falling into German hands and to protect Japanese nationals. Around the same time, the army was clandestinely arming anti-Bolshevik Cossacks operating from northern Manchuria. British and French preparations were under way to land forces at Murmansk in western Russia, and they requested that American and Japanese troops intervene in Siberia. The United States then proposed a combined American-Japanese expeditionary force not to exceed 7,000 personnel. The Terauchi cabinet, egged on by the general staff, approved the expedition in July, and Emperor Taishō sanctioned it in early August.

  Japanese reinforcements soon exceeded the agreed personnel ceiling, alienating the Americans.The Foreign Affairs Research Committee, led by Seiyūkai chiefs Hara Kei and Makino Nobuaki, desired America’s postwar cooperation and opposed additional reinforcements that might alienate the United States. Terauchi needed Hara’s support for his cabinet policies and, following discussions with the Americans, agreed to limit Japanese forces to 12,000 men on condition that more reinforcements might be needed for operations beyond the immediate Vladivostok area. General staff officers used that loophole to dispatch more troops, citing the rapidly changing operational situation in Siberia to justify their action.

  The 12th Division landed unopposed at Vladivostok on August 18, and the next day the division commander requested the general staff immediately dispatch reinforcements. The cabinet agreed to an emergency reinforcement of the 7th Division, then assigned to the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, and the mobilization of a third division. Hiding behind the shield of independence of supreme command, the staff thwarted the Foreign Affairs Research Committee’s intentions, and soon three divisions were operating as far west as Lake Baikal. By mid-September, the 12th Division occupied Khabarovsk and continued advancing westward to the Amur River. Meanwhile, the 7th Division with Russian Cossack auxiliaries had moved from western Manchuria to seize Chita and link up with 12th Division cavalry units along the Amur. By the end of October the Japanese army’s commitment had grown to 70,000 troops.58

  The intervention soon turned sour. Army units occupied strategic nodes along the Trans-Siberian Railroad and became bogged down in a cruel guerrilla war against Soviet partisans. Alliances with notorious White Russian and Cossack gangs and consolidation of their holdings east of Baikal were crucial to the army’s attempts to create an anti-Bolshevik buffer state, but they worked at cross-purposes with the western allies’ objectives. The army raised further suspicions about the government’s true motives by sending a large military force and expanding its zone of operations in Siberia.

  In September 1918 rice riots, widespread popular outbursts against inflationary food prices, engulfed every Japanese prefecture as millions of demonstrators took to the streets and forced the government to call in the army to crush the most violent protests. Army officers who faced the demonstrations found the assignment distasteful, not for any sympathy with the mobs but because the sight of fixed bayonets confronting citizens threatened to undo a generation of public relations to develop a popular base of support for the military. Amidst worsening domestic conditions and growing labor unrest, army leaders were also keenly aware of popular complaints of the unfairness of sacrificing the nation’s sons in the Siberian wastelands. Terauchi resigned, and Yamagata, frightened by the specter of the mob, agreed to support a new cabinet led by Hara Kei, leader of the Seiyūkai and an opponent of the Siberian adventure. Hara selected Tanaka Giichi, the serving vice chief of staff, for his war minister. The sight of the army mired in Siberia, American criticism of the army’s excessive deployments, and growing popular disenchantment with the expedition had cooled Tanaka’s earlier enthusiasm for intervention.59

  By December the cabinet, with Tanaka’s authorization, had sharply reduced the number of Japanese troops in Siberia. Uehara and Tanaka clashed over this decision and more specifically about the war minister’s authority. Tanaka asserted that the expedition was not a declared war, so decisions regarding it were subject to the war minister’s administrative control and the cabinet’s direction. Uehara steadfastly contended that the war minister had no right to interfere in operational matters because they involved the prerogative of the general staff. Neither would budge, and the controversy left Tanaka irked by Uehara’s dogmatism and Hara angered by the chief of staff ’s insubordination.60

  Guerrilla warfare likewise dictated events. The 12th Division hailed from southern Kyūshū but in the 1918–1919 Siberian winter found itself fighting Bolshevik partisans around Blagoveschensk. Unacclimated and poorly equipped for a winter campaign, the troops looked more like vagabonds than soldiers. To keep warm they padded their cotton jackets with goat or dog fur, stuffed so much straw in their trousers that they bulged like pantaloons, tied strips of wool or cotton around their ears, donned hoods, and wrapped their boots in woolen cloth. In late February 1919 an infantry battalion so encumbered lost 300 men fighting Bolshevik partisans about 200 miles southeast of Blagoveschensk. Shocked by the stinging defeat, the army extracted revenge with a large-scale punitive expedition whose standing orders were to burn villages to deny the partisans shelter.61

  In May 1919 Hara asked the western allies to recognize an anti-Bolshevik regime in Siberia backed by Japan. But the Soviet Red Army defeated the reactionary Russian fo
rces supported by the Japanese army, and in August 1919 the anti-Communist regime collapsed. By that time the British had decided to withdraw from Russia, but the general staff in Tokyo wanted to send as many as 250,000 troops to prop up eastern Siberia. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo curtly pointed out that such a deployment was unaffordable and would wreck the national economy, already under great strain. As the anti-Bolshevik front crumbled, Tanaka appealed vainly for reinforcements and Prime Minister Hara asked the Americans to supply more troops.

  Instead, the United States withdrew its troops from Siberia in the spring of 1920, enabling the general staff to demand an additional division to replace the departing Americans. By this time the Czech Legion had completed its withdrawal, but the cabinet justified reinforcements because of the Soviet threat to Japanese interests in Korea and Manchuria. A subsequent massacre of Japanese civilians at Nikolaevsk in May enabled the general staff to keep troops in Siberia. By August the army began withdrawing troops from the Baikal district and northern Manchuria, but that October it launched a murderous operation to destroy the stronghold of anti-Japanese forces in northern Korea near the confluence of the Yalu and Tumen rivers. A two-month campaign marked by burning Korean villages, indiscriminate killing, and generalized violence was the last major operation of the Siberian expedition.62

  In February 1921 Tanaka suffered a heart attack; to pave the way for his successor, Lt. Gen. Yamanashi Hanzō, he arranged for Uehara to resign so that a fresh chief of staff could work with the new war minister. In exchange, that April Uehara was promoted to field marshal and promised an appointment to the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals, conditional upon his resignation as chief of staff within a reasonable time. Yamagata, himself gravely ill, then changed the agreement and kept Uehara as the head of the general staff, leaving the ministry and staff as divided as ever over their respective powers and entrenching Uehara’s traditionalist ideas in the staff.63