by Ian W. Toll
Japan’s hard-liners did not find the economic arguments at all interesting or relevant, and the treaty supporters were slow to understand how disarmament was crystallizing the wrath of the hard right. Resentment grew against civilian parliamentary government, with its emphasis on economy and its ability to ram through defense cuts that seemed, in the critics’ eyes, to compromise Japan’s ability to protect its overseas interests. Some 1,700 commissioned and warrant officers and 5,800 petty officers were dismissed from the navy. Nine out of ten vice admirals were forced against their will to retire. The entering class of the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima in 1922 was one fifth the size of the prior year’s class. It seemed that the navy, which had been one of the most prestigious career paths in Japan, was suddenly a dead end. The treaty put an end to the navy’s cherished plans for an “eight-eight fleet”—a fleet of eight battleships and eight heavy battle cruisers. It dealt a heavy blow to the shipbuilding industry, one of Japan’s largest and most advanced: the sudden cancellation of naval contracts coincided with a downturn in the private market, forcing shipyards to shut their gates and lay off thousands of workers—perhaps as many as two thirds of the total that had been employed at the peak. Japan’s major shipbuilding centers, such as Nagasaki, were devastated. A brand-new 40,000-ton battleship, the Tosa, had to be scuttled. As some 50,000 Nagasaki shipyard workers and their fellow citizens watched, a small fleet of tugboats towed the great shape of the newly launched steel hull out to sea. She went to Kure to suffer the penultimate ignominy of serving as a target for gunnery tests. Then her derelict remains were sunk in the Tosa Gulf, the body of water for which she had been named. A generation of Japanese regarded the fate of the Tosa as a farce, an atrocity, and an unconscionable betrayal, and they would acclaim her as a martyr to the gutlessness and corruption of Japan’s diplomats.
The 5:5:3 ratio was extended for six more years by the London Naval Treaty, signed on April 22, 1930, at the Court of St. James’s. Opponents in Japan campaigned against ratification. Admiral Kanji Kato declared: “It is as if Japan were bound hand and foot and thrown into jail by the Anglo-American powers!” It was not an abstruse debate, carried on above the heads of the Japanese public—from 1930 on, the 5:5:3 ratio was an incendiary popular cause, with the capacity to mobilize the Japanese “street.” That was due in no small part to a disciplined corps of ultranationalist journalists, scholars, and military officers who took up their pens and their radio microphones to rail against the hated formula as symbolic of the persecution of Japan by the Western powers. Since Perry’s arrival in 1853, Japanese foreign policy had been shaped by a quest for international respect, with the ultimate aim of being accepted as an equal by Britain and the United States. To a degree perhaps unique throughout the world, the Japanese people regarded treaties not as mere foreign policy expedients, but as cosmic measurements of their rank in the hierarchy of nations. Sixty percent? Was that all Japan was worth?
On October 1, 1930, the emperor’s privy council ratified the London Treaty. For Japanese liberals, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The day was a turning point in Japanese history; it unleashed sinister forces that would not be fully vanquished until 1945. Within the navy it incited a deadly feud between the senior officers who had traditionally supported the treaty limits (the “Treaty faction”) and a rising cohort of hard-liners (the “Fleet faction”). (Isoroku Yamamoto’s loyalties would remain with the Treaty faction, though he was politically astute enough to survive the periodic purges of like-minded officers in the 1930s.) Admiral Kato complained of the American proposals in London: “It is a most high-handed proposal, offering us, as it were, only the crust of a pie without the filling.” The revered Admiral Togo, hero of the Russo-Japanese War, agreed that the treaty would impose an “irreparable loss” on Japan. In both the navy and the army there was a feeling that civilian statesmen and diplomats were infringing on terrain that fell under the rightful purview of the military. Critics charged treaty supporters with having fallen under the influence of the West; or worse, having been secretly bought by the West. By any means necessary, the civilians had to be put back in their places. By any means necessary, the military must reclaim control over the nation’s destiny. It was no doubt the emperor’s will.
On September 18, 1931, units of Japan’s Kwantung Army launched the imperial adventure known to history as the “Mukden Incident.” Troops seized and occupied the city of Mukden, and soon thereafter poured across the entire length and breadth of Manchuria, a land rich in raw materials, including coal, iron, and copper. The action would be depicted as an emergency response to insurgent attacks along the route of the South Manchurian Railway by “bandits” or “terrorists” linked to local Chinese Nationalist groups. In fact the entire operation, including the bombing attacks on the railroad, had been meticulously plotted in advance by mid-level officers on the Army General Staff, with the passive knowledge of dozens and perhaps even hundreds of senior military and civilian officials in Tokyo. In 1932, the region was reconstituted into a putatively independent country named “Manchukuo,” and Pu-yi, the last emperor of China’s Qing Dynasty, was installed as a puppet emperor, channeling the orders of the Japanese Kwantung Army.
When the League of Nations condemned that annexation, Japanese representatives walked out in protest. That left Japan in a state of international diplomatic seclusion, which was exactly what the ultranationalist right had intended, for it opened the way to a path of further aggression and conquest. Hirohito may have been privately appalled by the behavior of the army but declined to punish the perpetrators and passively acquiesced in the seizure of Manchuria so long as the army delivered military successes. The cabinet and the genro (elder statesmen) advised the emperor to tolerate the Mukden Incident as a fait accompli, and he did. It was a short-term expediency to stabilize the domestic political situation; but over the longer term his failure to act was disastrous, because it only encouraged the conspirators in the army to plan further aggression, both at home and abroad. Daikichi Irokawa convincingly writes, “If, as Hirohito later stated, he had desired to be a constitutional, peace-loving monarch at that time, he should have taken a stand by 1933, when the aggression was beginning in earnest. Soon after it became extremely difficult to take any action against the militarists.”
The tragic pattern of Japan’s “dark valley” was now set. Secretive cliques of mid-level military officers would take control of Japan’s major domestic and foreign policy choices through intimidation, assassination, and violent provocations, both at home and abroad. They would take action and then bully their superiors into acquiescing in the consequences. There was a name for that—gekokujo, “those below overcome those above,” and it had a venerated place in Japanese history. (In centuries past, lower-ranking samurai in unstable fiefdoms had used similar means to manipulate their superiors.) The insurgent officers of the 1930s often behaved like gangs of criminal thugs, hoodlums in uniform, speaking reverently of the emperor, issuing threats in his name, then demanding bribes under the title of “loans” in order to spare potential victims. The major zaibatsu (business groups), such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo, financed those groups, and it is impossible to say whether those funds were paid in order to advance the interests of the firms in the army-controlled territories on the mainland, or whether they were in fact payments to protect leading industrialists from the threat of assassination. Perhaps both motives were present. In Manchuria, gangs with links to the army practiced blackmail, extortion, racketeering, and kidnapping: their victims were predominantly Chinese but sometimes included their own countrymen. In 1930, Minister Osachi Hamaguchi came to power with the support of Hirohito, who was exasperated by General Giichi Tanaka’s inability to curb the military and bring it under civilian control; but Hamaguchi was shot dead at the end of the year. In 1931, two attempted coups were put down, but the ringleaders got off with halfhearted reprimands. No charges of treason were ever brought, and the leaders maintained their freedom, even lounging with g
eishas at teahouses in Tokyo and boasting freely of what they had done. Ultranationalist intellectuals provided the rhetoric and ideas to justify their program; an entire apparatus of radio, film, and newspaper propaganda rushed to defend and glorify them.
They would brook no opposition. They gunned down any man who stood in their way, and that included the highest-ranking civilian ministers of the Japanese government. On May 15, 1932, a gang of naval officers, all wearing their uniforms, broke into the home of the seventy-seven-year-old Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai and shot him dead. His offense had been to warn the emperor that the military was now operating outside any responsible authority. (By murdering him, of course, they only proved his point, but still Hirohito could not bring himself to punish the conspirators.) Confederates attacked and occupied other private homes as well as the Tokyo police headquarters, the Rikken Seiyukai Party headquarters, and several banks. They had hoped to depose the civilian government altogether, and spoke of a “Showa Restoration” in which the emperor would take all power and property unto himself, presumably with policy implications that would favor the military. The navy high command had some wind of the event but, as usual in those cases, took no action to stop it.
With the May 15 incident, a Rubicon had been crossed. The assassination effectively marked a new era of military domination of the Japanese government. Parliamentary party democracy was said by the insurgents to be basically “un-Japanese.” The slain prime minister’s political party was driven into extinction. From that point on, the Japanese government would no longer function as a parliamentary government. The leader of the majority party in the Diet would no longer be entitled to serve as prime minister. Indeed, the prime minister and other cabinet heads would generally not be selected from the Diet at all, but from the ranks of the military or the court aristocracy. In December 1933, when parliamentary leaders publicly questioned the military budget requests submitted for the year 1934, the Army and Navy ministries issued press releases denouncing their critics as Communist conspirators. For politicians to criticize the military in such a way was unacceptable, one such statement declared: “Such a movement—to separate the public mind from the military—is an attempt to disturb the harmonious unity of the public mind, the essential basis of national defense; and the military authorities cannot overlook it.” Any and all civilian statesmen, bureaucrats, aristocrats, or business kingpins who had opposed the Manchurian operation or higher military spending were put on “death lists.” Often the threat was enough to silence them; if not, a bullet would do the trick.
Liberals and moderates found themselves operating within a shrinking perimeter. They could do little more than defuse each successive crisis, using the time-honored techniques of passive resignation and appeasement, always hoping that the storm would abate and the militant nationalists would fade into impotence. To wait, to survive, to avoid inflaming the opposition, to trust in the future—that was the course chosen by Japanese liberals in the 1930s. They supposed the pendulum, given enough time, would swing back in their direction, but it never did. Indeed, they were forced to recant their past heresies, to mouth the slogans of the ultranationalists and the high priests of Kodo. It was not just repression but, strangely, a kind of moral suasion. Prosecutions were selective. Dr. Tatsukichi Minobe, a retired law professor, had once (in a twenty-year-old law article) made the mistake of referring to the emperor as an “organ of the state.” The old man was pilloried and forced to resign from the House of Peers. In Orwellian fashion, all of his past books and articles were hunted down and destroyed. His colleagues kept quiet. Prime Minister Keisuke Okada, asked to come to Minobe’s defense, replied in the spirit of the times: “We cannot afford to make a mistake. There is no alternative but to assume a passive attitude.”
Repression was not entirely necessary. The ultranationalist program enjoyed plenty of popular support. The young officers appealed to Japan’s romantic imagination. They were celebrated as spiritual descendants of the “Ronin,” the masterless samurai of the nineteenth century, proud warriors cast adrift by the collapse of feudal fiefdoms, who wandered like tramps from town to town, penniless, hungry, and humiliated. “In Japan there is a tradition of sympathy for those who strike out against overwhelming odds, even if their idealism or zeal is misplaced,” explained Akio Morita, who grew up in the 1930s and went on to found the Sony Corporation. “Many of Japan’s folk heroes are men who died trying to accomplish the impossible.” Whether their actions were right or wrong, they were thought to be animated by chukin, or “zealous devotion to the emperor,” the purest and noblest of virtues. They might break the law, they might execute cabinet ministers, they might engineer military adventures overseas without authority—but by the logic of prewar Japan, they were never entirely wrong if their motive was to serve and aggrandize the Tenno.
As in Europe, the Great Depression aggravated all the nation’s internal economic pressures and converted Japanese society into a cauldron of the aggrieved and dispossessed. The country was sent into chaos by poverty, famine, mass unemployment, landlord-tenant disputes, industrial strikes, a wave of bank failures and bank runs, and the demise of many small local firms and factories that had employed a large percentage of Japanese. In 1930, at about the same time the London Naval Treaty won ratification, the bottom fell out of rice and silk prices, and in remote northern reaches of Honshu entire families took to the roads. They were wraiths in rags, driven to the edge of starvation, drifting without any sure destination, shunned and abused by the people of the villages along the way. Parents, despairing of feeding their children, sold them into slavery by the thousands. According to statistics collected by the Japanese government, in the northeastern provinces hit hardest by the decline in farm prices, 58,173 girls were sold by their families between 1932 and 1934. They became servants, maids, waitresses, and prostitutes: a few would become geishas. Hundreds of thousands of young men enlisted in the army.
With a population of some 70 million, Japan was the most densely populated country in the world. Its birthrate in those years was almost double that of the United States. It had 2,900 inhabitants per square mile of arable land, and it was widely believed that any further growth in the population would have to occur overseas. Japan was poor in natural resources, requiring imports of oil, rubber, and minerals; and it needed access to foreign markets for its manufactured goods. The seizure of territory in Asia was offered as an outlet, in the same way Hitler spoke of the need for Lebensraum, or living space, for Germans. Millions of Japanese, especially from the small towns of the rural interior, emigrated to Korea, Manchuria, and Formosa in pursuit of better living standards. A foreign empire was a vital necessity for Japan, as the Japanese imperialists saw it, and any attempt to deny them that amounted to a foreign conspiracy to bottle up the large Japanese population to the point of starvation and critical overpopulation.
On February 26, 1936, a group of young officers of the army’s First Division, stationed in Tokyo, attempted a coup d’état. The move was triggered by an order sending the division to Manchuria. Before dawn, about 1,400 troops departed their base and spread out through Tokyo. They seized or laid siege to major government buildings in the city center, including the Diet, Ministry of War, and police headquarters. The main building of the Asahi Shinbun was attacked and its press equipment vandalized. They invaded the homes of the prime minister and several members of Hirohito’s court: they assassinated several officials, including the lord keeper of the privy seal, the inspector-general of military education, and the finance minister. In a manifesto distributed to the newspapers, the rebel leaders declared their purpose to break the grip of the business tycoons, the political party mandarins, and the elderly civilian statesmen, and to acclaim the emperor as supreme ruler, unencumbered by constitutional limitations—in a phrase, to effect a “Showa Restoration.” “Japan now confronts a crisis,” it announced. “Therefore it is our duty to take proper steps to safeguard our fatherland by killing those responsible. On the eve o
f our departure to Manchuria we have risen to attain our aims by direct action.”
They had counted on inciting a popular revolution, or at least hoped for the backing of the army and navy. There is considerable evidence that their goals were popular, and the insurgents seem to have been considered heroes by many of their countrymen. For three days, Tokyo hung in suspense: the generals did not move to suppress the rebellion, perhaps waiting to see if it would spread. Hirohito was incensed, and was apparently the only man in Tokyo willing to call the uprising what it was—a mutiny. When his cabinet tried to resign, he refused to accept their resignations, telling his ministers they were duty-bound to stay in office and deal with the problem even at the risk of losing their own lives. At last Hirohito issued a peremptory order for the troops to return to their barracks, sucking the life out of the movement, and the navy was sent in to restore order. On February 29, after failing to gain entrance to the imperial compound, where the insurgents hoped to appeal directly to the emperor, the uprising was finished. Several ringleaders were arrested and several others took their own lives. Those arrested were tried in secret and later executed, shouting “Banzai!” to the emperor as they died.