Officers, NCOs, and Conscripts
During the 1870s and 1880s, army officers were mainly from the former samurai class, but as commerce and industry expanded, the social base for officer recruitment widened to include the emerging middle classes. In 1890 about 40 percent of officers were commoners, and by 1920 that percentage had doubled. Military academy graduates included a high proportion of sons of military officers (35 percent in 1910), and these second- and third-generation soldiers were likewise overrepresented at the regional military preparatory academies.47
Following Ugaki’s reforms, in 1927 a reserve officer system opened the way for commissions for middle-school graduates who had completed the school military training program. Officer cadets attended an eleven-month course offered at regional officer cadet schools, after which they served as cadet aspirants for four months with a regular unit. Upon successful completion of service they received commissions as reserve officers. Six years later the army abolished the provision that required volunteers to pay for their subsistence and uniforms, further expanding opportunities for commissions. Volunteers initially served four months on active duty, after which the army tested them and, depending on the results, accordingly divided them into A (officer cadets) and B (NCO cadets).48
Qualified graduates of the military training courses could volunteer for a reserve commission. They entered the army at a higher enlisted grade and, if they passed comprehensive tests after one year of service, matriculated to the officer cadet school for further training and commissioning as reserve second lieutenants. The officer cadet schools produced about 4,000 reserve officers annually in peacetime.49
The army selected its noncommissioned officers from those it allowed to reenlist and men who volunteered for active duty before being drafted. In 1927 it reestablished the NCO Preparatory School to train candidates. The school was initially restricted to the infantry branch but in 1933 expanded to include cavalry and artillery branch instruction. Other branches had their own preparatory schools or specialized training units for the purpose. By 1936 more than 14,000 young men had volunteered for NCO training, a national rate of about thirty-one applicants per 1,000 inductees, the majority from rural Japan. Volunteers spent a year training with their parent unit and a second year at the preparatory school. Upon graduation they assumed their NCO duties. Because of the Japanese respect for primogeniture, NCOs traditionally tended to be the second and third sons of farming or peasant families; during the economic downturns of the 1920s they had little prospect of employment at home and found a comfortable home and career in the army.50
The conscripts too were changing. Since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the army annually inducted about 20 percent of the available 20-year-old male cohort. As Japan’s population steadily migrated to the cities, the number of conscripts from farming backgrounds proportionately declined—from 75 percent of inductees in 1890 to 54 percent by 1920. Conventional army wisdom held that the city boys from the streets of Tokyo or Osaka made poor soldiers and that their regiments suffered from low morale, lax discipline, and lackadaisical attitudes. The latest conscripts were also better educated, noticeably so after the state introduced six-year compulsory schooling in 1907. In the 1919 cohort (the last before mandatory education) more than 13 percent of those examined had not completed primary school; the next year that figure dropped to just 0.03 percent. So too did illiteracy or semiliteracy, from 30 percent in 1901 to a negligible figure by 1920.51
Although conscripts were better educated, the educational system had heavily indoctrinated them with state ideology that linked loyalty to the nation to filial piety and made them susceptible to further manipulation once in the barracks.52 Draft resistance remained sporadic. Young men drank soy sauce the night before their physical examination to raise their blood pressure, others faked medical conditions, and some simply prayed to the gods for an exemption. Still, there was little outright draft evasion (between 2,500 and 3,500 cases annually among the more than 500,000 men examined), as most Japanese apparently had accepted the conscription system as a fact of life.53
Widespread antiwar sentiment during the postwar era, however, tarnished the military’s self-image. Ideologies like communism and democracy appeared to undercut the imperial orthodoxy, which in turn diminished the army’s status in society. A postwar economic depression devastated the rural communities, the source of the army’s best conscripts. The Taishō emperor’s physical and mental debilities and what leaders perceived as dangerous levels of lax discipline led the army to reemphasize imperial ideology.
The 1921 revision to the squad handbook sought to inoculate the barracks from the dangerous ideas and ideologies of postwar communism, democracy, and leftist philosophies. The manual first used the term kokutai (national polity) to accentuate the army’s unique relationship with the throne along with a grassroots appeal to nationalism wrapped in contempt for other Asians. Stressing that kokutai and the unbroken imperial line conferred a sacred uniqueness on the army, authorities reaffirmed the army’s intangible attributes of self-sacrifice, loyal service to the emperor, unselfishness, and courage to cultivate a distinctive ethos that distinguished the institution from the civilian culture. Conscripts were required to recite an abbreviated version of the imperial rescript (beginning in 1934 they had to recite the entire lengthy memorial). In an extreme, but perhaps predictable, case in 1936, a second lieutenant erred while reading the memorial to conscripts and later committed suicide to atone for his blunder. Coupling this nationalistic appeal with familial concepts that governed deportment built a powerful ideological bulwark against left-wing ideas.54
Authorities also enforced stricter discipline by equating the order of a superior to the direct order of the emperor that soldiers had to obey without hesitation or question. It was on that basis that an army court-martial acquitted three military policemen charged with murdering the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Tokyo earthquake. Members accepted the defense’s contention that the accused had no recourse except to obey a direct order from a superior and that to convict them would undermine army discipline.55 In other words, military orders superseded the laws of the nation.
Hard-nosed training combined strict formal discipline with harsh informal punishments that hammered unquestioning obedience into recruits with fists, kicks, and hazing. As the notion of the “imperial army” and emperor cult became more pronounced, appeals to imperial symbols and imperial authority further reinforced unquestioning obedience to superiors, who were the transmitters of the imperial will. By the early 1920s, the term kōgun (imperial army) gained currency over kokugun (national army) in a conscious attempt by army authorities to link the military directly with the throne.56 The result was a potent combination of politicized junior officers and malleable, unquestioning conscripts.
By the late 1920s the army had established on paper fundamental, integrated, and complementary doctrine for strategy, operations, tactics, and squad training. If strategy for a short war with a decisive engagement depended on forward offensive operations, then operations stressed aggressive offensive action based on tactics that stressed the attack, envelopment, and annihilation of the enemy army. The keystone tactical manual endorsed defense to the death to hold ground and sustain the attack. The squad regulations played on Japanese uniqueness to inculcate fighting spirit and absolute obedience to orders. This vertical integration of concepts permeated the army from its senior commanders to its lowliest conscript. Everyone was expected to fight to the last for an emperor who bestowed the uniqueness on Japan. Yet the army lacked a shared vision of future warfare. Reformers and traditionalists were divided over strategy—long war versus short war; over force structure and organization—large square divisions versus small triangular divisions; and over modernization—technology versus fighting spirit. Attempts by army leaders to resolve these institutional issues only accentuated fundamental disagreements and exacerbated factionalism at a time of escalating tensions with China.
9
Conspiracies, Coups, and Reshaping the Army
Convinced that control of China’s resources was essential to the army’s future strategic goals, senior officers were apprehensive in the spring of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Guomindang and commander of China’s Central Army, approached the Shandong Peninsula. Chiang’s Northern Expedition had already fostered anti-foreign outbursts in central China, directed primarily against the British and Japanese residents, and army leaders blamed the foreign ministry’s conciliatory policies for encouraging Chiang to take advantage of Japan’s seeming weakness.
Then a financial panic following the collapse of the quasi-official Bank of Taiwan in April 1927 resulted in a change of cabinets. The new prime minister was retired general Tanaka Giichi,1 who a decade earlier had identified access to China’s natural resources as vital to Japan’s national interests. Now the Seiyūkai leader and a hard-liner on China, Tanaka appointed his boyhood friend, Lt. Gen. Shirakawa Yoshinori, as war minister. Shirakawa’s rise owed much to Tanaka’s patronage, and the two worked closely together later that month when Tanaka, displaying his tougher stand, sent troops to Shandong to protect Japanese residents and commercial interests. After Chiang’s defeat at Jinan by Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, however, the Central Army forces veered away from Shandong, enabling Tokyo to recall its troops in August and end the First Shandong Expedition.
During the expedition, Tanaka had described his assertive China policy at a series of meetings, collectively known as the Far Eastern Conference (Tōhōkaigi), held in late June and early July at the foreign ministry. His new approach promoted regionalism in China to preclude the emergence of a united government capable of contesting Japan’s continental ambitions and appropriate use of force to preserve Japan’s special interests and to protect its citizens and concessions, especially those residing in Manchuria. Shortly afterward, at a mid-August meeting held at the Kwantung Army headquarters in Dairen, the deputy foreign minister (Tanaka was concurrently foreign minister) passed on the cabinet’s willingness to interfere militarily in Chinese affairs to senior foreign ministry officials and army officers.
By the spring of 1928 Chiang had regained his traction and his armies were again advancing on Shandong. According to intelligence reports, rank-and-file Chinese soldiers, incited by inflammatory anti-Japanese propaganda, were plundering or burning Japanese-owned property and attacking Japanese residents. In mid-April Tanaka ordered the Second Shandong Expedition, expecting that a show of force near the port city of Qingdao would deter Chiang and prevent further incidents.2
After landing at Qingdao, however, the Japanese division commander unilaterally moved on the provincial capital at Jinan. Accepting exaggerated field reports of Chinese resistance at face value, Lt. Gen. Araki Sadao (promoted in July 1927), the director of the operations department of the general staff, and Maj. Gen. Koiso Kuniaki, the director of the general affairs department of army aviation headquarters, urged Tanaka to send reinforcements to salvage the army’s reputation. Chinese and Japanese units clashed near Jinan on May 3, each side claiming self-defense. Five days later the cabinet approved reinforcements, but the same morning heavy fighting broke out near Jinan when a Japanese regimental commander arbitrarily ordered his men to fire on the Chinese. Two days of fierce fighting claimed about 3,600 Chinese casualties, most of them civilians, and Jinan fell to the Japanese.3 Chiang again pulled out of Shandong, but a Japanese officer’s intemperate action in the name of field initiative had sparked an incident that poisoned Sino-Japanese relations for years to come.
Some midlevel staff officers, including several China experts, felt Tanaka’s China policy was not tough enough and that only eliminating Zhang Zuolin would resolve matters. Tanaka, however, had previously worked with Zhang, believed him amenable to fronting for Japanese interests in Manchuria, and insisted on aiding the warlord. When Chiang’s reconstituted forces threatened Zhang’s headquarters in Peking, Tanaka suggested the warlord withdraw to the safety of Manchuria.4
The Kwantung Army expected to disarm Zhang’s warlord armies as they entered Manchuria and had repositioned units within its treaty-imposed railway corridor that ran from Port Arthur to Mukden. To move beyond that narrow railway zone required an imperial order, which Tanaka refused to request.5 Alarmed by the specter of thousands of warlord soldiers streaming into Manchuria, sowing disorder, and intensifying anti-Japanese sentiment, Kwantung Army staff officers decided to kill Zhang.
The ringleader was Col. Kōmoto Daisaku, scion of a wealthy family and an experienced China hand, with service as military attaché at Peking and as the head of the China section of the general staff. With a sharp mind and a tongue to match, he cavalierly dismissed Zhang as an arrogant, ungrateful, and overbearing gangster who could be replaced by someone more favorable to Japanese interests. He decided to murder Zhang, blame Chinese bandits for the crime, and use the incident as a pretext for Japanese troops to take advantage of the disorder and overrun Manchuria. Kōmoto enjoyed tacit support from the army’s highest authorities in Dairen and Tokyo as well as the sympathy of influential cabinet ministers and politicians.6
On June 4, 1928, an explosion along the South Manchurian Railway tore through Zhang’s special railcar, mortally wounding him. The Kwantung Army disclaimed involvement, but within days Prime Minister Tanaka received a detailed account of the conspiracy. Shirakawa, having recently assured Tanaka and the foreign ministry that the army would not interfere in foreign policy, dismissed the report, but Tanaka still ordered a preliminary investigation. When the war ministry recalled Kōmoto to Tokyo in late June to testify, he officially denied any involvement but privately told several senior army officers the truth.7
Rumors of the army’s complicity persisted, and in early September Tanaka ordered Shirakawa to open a formal investigation. Shirakawa had laundered money through the railroad minister for Kōmoto’s use, and the two deflected any investigation on the grounds that it would damage the army’s reputation and thereby imperil national security. Simultaneously, Prince Saionji Kinmochi, the last elder statesman or genro, was pressuring Tanaka to explain matters to the young new Shōwa emperor, better known in the West as Hirohito.8 A comprehensive military police report that implicated Kōmoto as well as other Japanese officers reached Tanaka on October 8, and soon afterward a separate investigation confirmed the findings.9
While the investigations were in progress, the press and big business grew increasingly critical of the Shandong expedition, fearing that the inevitable Chinese backlash to the army’s aggressiveness would provoke widespread boycotts of Japanese-manufactured goods. Tanaka did withdraw troops by October, but this only weakened his standing with cabinet hawks and the army. Under increasing pressure from his party, the army, and Saionji, in late December he reported to the emperor (who had been absent from the capital on official duties) about the army investigation under way and his intention to punish anyone involved severely. Hirohito agreed that harsh measures were essential to restore army discipline.10
By this time, Shirakawa acknowledged that Kōmoto had murdered Zhang, but he insisted that public disclosure of the crime would cause grave harm to Japan’s national interests and subvert army discipline. In late March 1929 he recommended that the army handle the matter internally using administrative punishment and assured the emperor that the army’s leadership backed this solution. Additional details of the plot gradually leaked to the public, and in mid-May the Asahi newspaper identified Kōmoto as the prime suspect.11
Army authorities officially continued to deny any involvement in the murder, and on June 27 Shirakawa reported their position to Tanaka. The prime minister upbraided Shirakawa, who stormed out in a rage, threatening to resign and bring down the government. Unwilling to self-destruct, the next day the cabinet endorsed the war minister’s version of events. Shirakawa in turn recommended administrative punishment to Hirohito. When Tanaka went to the palace later that afternoon, Hirohito confronted him wi
th the discrepancy between Shirakawa’s plea for leniency and Tanaka’s previous promises and suggested he resign.12 Four days later Tanaka stepped down as prime minister. As for Kōmoto, on July 1 the army suspended him from active duty for misconduct, and one year later it seconded him to the reserves.
The army had placed its prestige above the law, justifying a cover-up in the name of national security. Generals had condoned a criminal conspiracy and assassination, tried to conceal evidence, and threatened to bring down the cabinet if the army did not get its way. A volatile mixture of the prerogative of field command, the decade-long emphasis on bold initiative and independent action, and an open contempt for the civilian cabinets and politicians became a familiar pattern in the army’s continuing illegal attempts to achieve its domestic and international ends.
Japan's Imperial Army Page 24