by Ian Kershaw
In 1917 Japan reached an agreement with the United States, accepting the principle of the ‘Open Door’ (established in 1899 to allow all nations equal access to trading ports in China) in return for American recognition of her ‘special interests’ in China. There was ambiguity in the agreement, but the Japanese took it to mean American acquiescence in Japan’s position in southern Manchuria. By the time the war ended, Japan had extended her influence in the region–one rich in mineral resources–and emerged strengthened. Meanwhile, any semblance of centralized state control in an enfeebled China had collapsed. The country was wracked by political disorder.
A combination of international pressure and internal opposition to Japanese rule in Korea and encroachments in China encouraged Japan, however, to adopt a more conciliatory approach in the 1920s. The framework for the interwar international order in the Pacific region was laid down in 1921–2, at the Washington Conference. A nine-power treaty–signed, apart from Japan and China, by Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United States–upheld China’s independence and integrity.1 China, it was hoped, would evolve through international cooperation to a stability which would reduce tension in the region and be of economic advantage to the western powers. The ‘Washington system’, as it was dubbed, by and large worked during the 1920s. Japan retained her moderate course. In 1928 Chinese nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, were able to establish a central government in Nanking, and, through foreign (mainly American) capital, started to build transport and communications networks. China, despite her continuing travails, was on the way to incorporation in an international economic order based upon the ‘Open Door’ principle which the western powers, most of all the United States, had a vested interest in upholding.
Within Japan, however, the voices of those who saw the ‘Washington system’ as a threat to the country’s future were becoming more voluble, and gaining greater public support. Mounting social unrest, as the world economic crisis prompted by the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 began to bite, provided the backdrop to anti-western feeling. Ideas of autarky–maximizing economic self-sufficiency to reduce dependence on western capitalism–were nourished.2 At the same time, boycotts of Japanese goods instigated by Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist regime in China, and infringements of the economic rights in Manchuria acquired by Japan since 1905, inflamed animosity towards the Chinese within Japan. Anger rebounded onto the Japanese government. Radical voices demanding stronger government and a more assertive foreign policy gained support. Within the military, too, dissatisfaction with what was seen as a compliant stance in international affairs, harmful to Japanese interests, had intensified. The discontent and restlessness were most evident among younger, middle-ranking officers, who were becoming increasingly difficult to control by the army General Staff in Tokyo.
Some of the most radical adherents of change, aiming to break the constraints imposed on Japan’s foreign policy by her dependence upon the western powers and their liberal-capitalist principles, were to be found among the officers of the Kwantung Army, which since its creation in 1906 had guarded Japan’s Manchurian possessions. On 18 September 1931, with tension running high, some of these officers engineered an attack by Japanese troops on night manoeuvres on local Chinese forces at Mukden in southern Manchuria.3 Though the attack had not been ordered by the Japanese government, it rapidly gained retrospective sanction in Tokyo, an early indication not only of how little control the civilian government could now exert over the army, but also of its readiness to back arbitrary and dangerous initiatives, and thereby to accede in the dynamic set in train by autonomous actions on the part of the military.
What initially seemed a minor incident proved a turning point. It ended the postwar cooperation in the Far East embedded in the ‘Washington system’, began Japanese international isolation, and inflamed still further both anti-Chinese and anti-western feeling within Japan. Chinese appeals for international help against Japan fell on deaf ears. In the throes of the Depression, western countries looked to their own interests. The League of Nations failed its first major test. No sanctions were imposed upon Japan. It was an early manifestation of the weakness that was soon to be fully exposed, both in east Asia and in Europe. The United States, not a member of the League, concurred in avoiding denunciation of Japan. Encouraged, the Kwantung Army extended their aggression, retrospectively backed, as earlier, by the Tokyo government and public opinion within Japan. The bombing of Chinchow in south-west Manchuria, on the border with China proper, on 8 October 1931 finally stung the Council of the League of Nations into action–but only as far as setting up a commission, headed by Lord Lytton, a British peer, to examine the causes of the conflict and arrive at recommendations for a settlement. By the time the Lytton Commission reported in September 1932, condemning the Japanese action but also exhorting China to acknowledge Japan’s interests in the region, a puppet government had been installed in Manchuria. The newly named Manchukuo was only nominally an independent state. In reality, it was totally under Japanese control.
Amid widespread international condemnation and refusal to accept the status of Manchukuo, Japan left the League of Nations in March 1933. This sealed her isolation. At home, the aggression in Manchuria and establishment of Manchukuo had been greeted with much rejoicing, both among the general population and within the elites. Japan’s international isolation fed resentment and defiance. Propaganda had no difficulty in persuading the general public of the justness of Japan’s cause and the unfairness of western attitudes (though ironically the Japanese were modelling their own imperialist claims in no small measure on the British Empire they so resented). Politically, the country moved further to the right. Ideologies emphasizing ‘national renovation’, solidarity, devotion to the Emperor (portrayed as a ‘living god’) and traditional Japanese culture and mythology gained ground. Parliamentary government had been ended in May 1932, and a Cabinet of national unity formed, mostly comprising military leaders and bureaucrats. Increasingly, the military (though there were significant internal divisions within the army) were forcing the pace, while civilian representatives of government, their effective power reduced, for the most part reacted, usually in compliant fashion, to the pressure.
The Kwantung Army remained at the forefront of the radicalizing drive.4 Fighting with Chinese troops continued. By May 1933, the borders of Manchukuo had been extended to the Great Wall, little more than forty miles from Peking. Two years later, Chiang Kai-shek’s national government felt compelled to withdraw its troops from the border areas south of the Great Wall, including from Peking itself. Puppet governments under Chinese warlords were installed to control the region. By this juncture, Japanese policy was focused upon consolidation of the gains in Manchukuo and stabilization of relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government in its capital of Nanking. However, the potential for further conflict remained close to the surface.
By the middle of 1936 the Japanese government was ready to define the ‘Fundamental Principles of National Policy’, along revised lines.5 The definition lacked precision at this stage, and attempted to incorporate, without resolving their possible tensions and contradictions, the competing aspirations of the army and navy. The underlying consideration was the need to undermine the ‘policy of aggression’ by the great powers in east Asia. This was to be done by securing Japan’s power on the east Asian continent, by fortifying defences and economic strength in Manchukuo to eliminate ‘the menace of the Soviet Union’, and by expansion into the South Seas. This was the first time that southern expansion had been expressed as a policy guideline. Though still no more than a vague expression of intent, this reflected the growing stridency within the navy, which had retained its high status since the war with Russia in the early years of the century and had successfully pressed in December 1934 for the abrogation of the naval arms limitation treaty signed with Great Britain and the United States in 1922 and renewed in 1930. The aims of foreign policy, as laid out
in the summer of 1936, were to be attained peacefully. But army forces were to be built up in Manchukuo and Korea to the level where they could ‘deliver the initial blow to Soviet forces in the Far East at the outbreak of hostilities’. Naval rearmament would enable ‘command of the Western Pacific against the United States Navy’ to be secured. The need for good relations with Great Britain was emphasized, as long as Britain recognized the Japanese vital interest in China and avoided joining the United States, the Soviet Union and China in applying pressure upon Japan. At the same time, particularly on account of her anti-Communist stance, good relations with Germany were to be built up.
Despite the expressions of peaceful intentions, a possible collision course with Britain and the United States was implicit in Japanese policy. The army, meanwhile, stayed wedded to the need for preparation for a war against the Soviet Union, to remove the threat from the north. Japan had by now plainly turned her back on the limitations of the ‘Washington system’ of 1922. As if to advertise the fact, and clearly indicating the desire for good relations with Germany, the country which had torn up the postwar order in Europe, Japan joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, agreeing that neither she nor Germany would provide any assistance to the Soviet Union, should either country become involved in war with her.
By 1937 the need for a common front against Japan, reflecting heightened anti-Japanese feeling, temporarily superseded the bitter divisions between nationalists and Communists in China. Within Japan, the army backed away from the prospect of war with China, while the civilian government reverted, for a short period, to considerations of solving its economic problems not through further territorial expansion, but through a policy promoting industrialization, external trade and international cooperation. Such views could not prevail. They ran counter to the thinking, by now deeply embedded, and not just in the military, that Japan’s future lay in economic autarky secured by force of arms. Interference by the army, or groups within it, in the running of government had mounted since the ‘Mukden Incident’. An attempted coup of army militants, who murdered several government ministers, had failed in February 1936 and brought severe punishment of those involved.6 But the consequence was further government instability. The hand of the army in internal affairs had nonetheless emerged still further strengthened.7 Policy towards China was at the root of its increasing influence. In January 1937 military pressure forced the government to resign. Its replacement lasted only a few months before giving way to the formation in June of a new Cabinet, now headed by a Prime Minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who had good connections to the military and favoured a policy on the Asian continent requiring control of land and natural resources, seen as justified for a ‘have-not’ nation fighting for its survival.8 This was the climate in which a minor and unplanned incident–in itself no more than a skirmish–on the night of 7 July 1937, near the Marco Polo bridge south of Peking, when shots were fired by Chinese soldiers on Japanese troops, marked the opening of what would soon develop into full-scale war between Japan and China.9
Some senior figures in the army General Staff tried to contain the incident. Their concern was that any escalation leading to prolonged Japanese involvement in China would hinder rearmament to counter the Soviet Union. Briefly, it looked as if the incident might indeed peter out without the danger expanding. But in the prevailing circumstances a truce locally agreed on 11 July had little chance of succeeding. Both in China and in Japan, the governments were under pressure to act from nationalist sentiment which they themselves had stirred up and manipulated. Chiang Kai-shek saw the Japanese aggression as an opportunity he could exploit to expand western support for his cause. For their part, weighty factions in the Japanese military portrayed the incident as a chance to defeat and subjugate China through swift and powerful action. The Army Minister, Sugiyama Gen, and chief of the Imperial Staff, Prince Kan’in Kotohito, told the Emperor that a war with China could be successfully concluded within two or three months.10 Such opinion prevailed.
The civilian government backed a decision to expand the conflict. Towards the end of July, major troop reinforcements were sent to China. Within two days Peking and Tientsin in the north of the country were occupied. A horrific atrocity in Tungchow, where Chinese troops slaughtered more than two hundred Japanese and Korean civilians, many of them women and children, on 29–30 July, then sparked predictable fury within Japan. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Takamatsu, commenting on the army’s mood, noted in his diary: ‘we’re really going to smash China so that it will be ten years before they can stand up straight again.’11
By the middle of August, the fighting had spread to Shanghai, where Japanese troops, planes and ships were bombed by Chinese aircraft. Heavy Japanese reinforcements were sent to the area. The Japanese Army Minister now spoke of ‘total war’. The government started to refer to the conflict with China as ‘holy war’.12 Konoe, the Prime Minister, spoke of the ‘spiritual mobilisation’ of the nation.13
By early November, as their demoralized troops started to withdraw from Shanghai in the direction of Nanking, the nationalist capital, almost a quarter of a million Chinese civilians (including many women and children) had been killed in the city.14 Japanese dead and wounded totalled around 40,000. Japanese troops pursued the fleeing Chinese army and civilian refugees to Nanking. When the city fell on 13 December, prompting great celebration in the streets of Tokyo, Japanese soldiers went on the rampage. At least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in six weeks. Foreign observers put the number of rapes of women and girls of all ages at around a thousand per day.15
Reports of the orgy of killing and rape shocked the world. As the horror of Nanking was beginning, revulsion at Japanese behaviour had already been aroused by the shelling of Chinese refugees, then the bombing by trigger-happy Japanese pilots of an American gunboat, the Panay, anchored on the Yangtze river north of Nanking, with diplomats and journalists on board. Japanese soldiers had even fired on the last lifeboat making its way to shore from the burning ship. The government in Tokyo rapidly apologized for such a grave error and agreed to pay substantial reparations. But lasting damage was done. Public opinion in the west, quite especially in America, became intensely anti-Japanese. Sympathy with China, unsurprisingly, grew in response. There had always been an idealistic component of American commercial exploitation of Chinese markets through the ‘Open Door’ policy. Japanese atrocities now intensified the feeling in the United States that support for China was a moral cause.16
Not that this translated at this stage into much more than symbolic gestures. Moral condemnation of Japan went hand in hand with political inaction.17 President Roosevelt associated the United States with the League of Nations’ denunciation of Japanese aggression, but vetoed proposals of economic sanctions against Japan. He did, however, take the first steps towards coordinating the exchange of intelligence between the American and British navies in the Pacific, a sign that the Japanese threat was now regarded as serious.
The Japanese government had shown through its swift attempt to make amends for the Panay incident that it was anxious at this stage to avoid confrontation with the United States. But this did not go so far as tempering its policy in China. Extremely harsh terms, effectively imposing Japanese control over China, were offered to Chiang Kai-shek after the fall of Nanking.18 He could not possibly accept them. Japan’s stance now hardened still further. Diplomatic relations with the Chinese nationalist government were severed in January 1938. The Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Konoe, chillingly announced the intention to ‘eradicate’ Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.19
During the following months, the Japanese army greatly extended its control in China–and in highly brutal fashion. Huge swathes of the country were now under Japanese rule. But by the end of 1938, with 600,000 troops based in China, Japanese resources were stretched. Casualties were mounting. More than 62,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict.20 And Chiang, who had moved h
is capital to Chungking in the west of China, was bowed but far from defeated. The cruelty of the occupying army saw to it that nationalist resistance stiffened rather than diminished, helped by material aid from America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. For Japan, the high water mark of the war had been reached. It was now stalemate.
In November 1938 the Japanese government had reformulated its war aims. The basic objective was stipulated as the creation of ‘a new order for ensuring permanent stability in East Asia’.21 The uncompromising stance adopted the previous January was partially modified. Cooperation with Chinese nationalists was now seen as possible. But the price was recognition of Manchukuo, cessation of anti-Japanese activities, collaboration in the defence against Communism (meaning, in effect, the acceptance of Japanese troops within China) and acknowledgement of Japanese economic exploitation of northern China and Inner Mongolia. It was an initiative directed at splitting the nationalist camp by winning over Chiang Kai-shek’s rival, Wang Ching-wei, to the Japanese side. Wang, who broke with Chiang Kai-shek in December 1938, was ready to collaborate, advocating peace with Japan on the basis of a united and strong anti-Communist policy. He would eventually be installed, by March 1940, as head of a Japanese client government based in Nanking. But, unsurprisingly, Chiang remained implacable. Chinese nationalists continued overwhelmingly to support him. Unable to attain complete victory, and equally unable to extract itself from the conflict, Japan was bogged down in a political and military quagmire of her own making.
Relations with the United States had meanwhile deteriorated still further. Responding in November 1938 to a protest at the infringement of American rights on the basis of the ‘Open Door’ in China, the government in Tokyo explicitly rejected the principles of the ‘Washington system’.22 Soon afterwards, a loan–the first of many to come–of $25 million by the United States signalled the American determination to prop up the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. On 26 July 1939, following numerous protests at Japanese actions in China, the United States announced the abrogation of a vital commercial treaty with Japan, dating back to 1911 and due to lapse in 1940. Since almost a third of Japan’s imports came from the United States, this was a serious matter.23 It gave warning that economic sanctions could be the consequence of further aggression. Japan depended quite especially upon the import of scrap metal and oil from America. If these were to be cut off, Japan’s war effort could hold out for no more than six months.24