by Craig Nelson
Though Japanese newspaper editors knew full well that both railroad bombs were detonated by Kwantung Army troops, they watched their circulations soar with such headlines as “Our Army Heroically Marches from Changchun to Jilin” and “Our Imperial Army Charges into Qiqihar, Its Great Spirit Piercing through the Sky!” On March 1, 1932, Japan officially renamed Manchuria Manchukuo, and in time, half a million Japanese immigrants would settle there, with the “last emperor” of China, Pu Yi, installed as the colony’s governor.
On January 28, 1932, a Chinese mob attacked five Japanese Buddhist priests in Shanghai, killing one. The Kwantung retaliated by bombing the city, killing hundreds of thousands. That same year in Tokyo, a group of army and navy cadets loyal to the Kwantung assassinated the “corrupted” leaders who had opposed the invasion of Manchuria, including the prime minister, the finance minister, and the chief of military affairs.
The Imperial Japanese Army’s legendary brutality began at this time, with the Kwantung’s training of green recruits. From his days in Manchukuo, Second Lieutenant Shozo Tominaga remembered, “We planned exercises for these men. As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human. Prisoners were blindfolded and tied to poles. The soldiers dashed forward to bayonet their target at the shout of ‘Charge!’ Some stopped on their way. We kicked them and made them do it. After that, a man could do anything easily. The army created men capable of combat. . . . Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months. Men were able to fight courageously only when their human characteristics were suppressed.”
The Japanese public, meanwhile, wouldn’t know the truth about their military’s overseas machinations for fifteen years.
Across this decade, the US ambassador to Japan was the exceedingly temperate and insightful Joseph Grew, a Boston Brahmin. He had, like Franklin Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, attended Groton and Harvard and was a member of Washington’s cosmopolitan internationalist wing, believing that the United States needed to stop isolating itself between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and wholly engage with the community of nations for both commercial and defensive gain. Joseph Grew had served as ambassador to Denmark, to Switzerland, and to Turkey, but after eight years in Japan, he and his wife, Alice—a grandniece to Commodore Matthew Perry and fluent in Japanese—had ascended to the peaks of Tokyo society. Ambassador Grew had developed deep insights into the complications of Japanese politics, insights that were wholly ignored by Washington.
On August 13, 1932, Grew sent a memorandum to Secretary of State Henry Stimson on Japan’s Chinese aggressions, which included, “This situation reminds me strongly of the efforts of the German Government, by calumniating foreign nations, to build up a public war psychology in 1914, the effort being repeated whenever some new venture, such as the indiscriminate submarine warfare, was about to be launched. Here in Japan the deliberate building up of public animosity against foreign nations in general and the United States in particular has doubtless a similar purpose—to strengthen the hand of the military in its Manchurian venture in the face of foreign, and especially American, opposition. I believe that on the part of the Japanese it is a sign of weakness, not of strength. The internal economic and financial situation in Japan is serious and may become desperate. The plight of the farmers is very bad, many industries are at low ebb, unemployment is steadily increasing. . . . Such a national temper is always dangerous. The German military machine, supported by a carefully nurtured public war psychology, took the bit in its teeth and overrode all restraining influences in 1914. The Japanese military machine is not dissimilar. It has been built for war, feels prepared for war and would welcome war. It has never yet been beaten and possesses unlimited self confidence. I am not an alarmist but I believe that we should have our eyes open to all possible future contingencies. The facts of history would render it criminal to close them.”
Grew’s boss had an more hawkish view. President Herbert Hoover had declared a new American doctrine on August 11—“That we do not and never will recognize title to possession of territory gained in violation of the peace pacts”—a policy drafted by his secretary of state, Henry Stimson. This policy’s ensuing categorical refusal by Washington to accept any Japanese government in China would be known as the Stimson Doctrine. In Japan’s view, the Stimson Doctrine was pure hypocrisy, since America’s own Pacific territories were acquired by force. When Hoover lost to Roosevelt in 1932, Stimson joined FDR’s cabinet as secretary of war, a position he’d also held under William Howard Taft, and the Stimson Doctrine continued as such a key tenet of America’s Asian foreign policy that it led directly to Pearl Harbor.
On February 24, 1933, delegates of the forty-member League of Nations met on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland’s Palais Wilson to consider Japan’s Manchurian expeditions. The League voted 42–1 that Japan should withdraw its armies and return sovereignty to the Chinese, the one opposing vote being Japan’s. The head of her delegation, Yosuke Matsuoka, then approached the podium. As a child, Matsuoka’s family was too poor to support him, so at the age of thirteen he became a ward of Methodist missionaries in Portland, Oregon. There he would be called Frank and work as a farmhand, janitor, busboy, rail worker, and substitute pastor, escaping destitution but facing racial prejudice. He would rise to become vice president of the South Manchurian Railway Company and then foreign minister of Japan, where he would in time try to create a new political party in the style of Mussolini’s Fascists and would engineer the Tripartite Pact uniting Tokyo with Berlin and Rome into the Axis powers. All the same, in 1938 Matsuoka would rescue Jewish refugees with a safe harbor in Japanese-controlled Shanghai.
On that evening at the Palais Wilson, Matsuoka in his trim white tie and tails, with a mustache notably similar to Hitler’s, announced that Japan, which had been one of the League of Nation’s Big Five framers and which had contributed more than its share of financial and diplomatic support, would quit the League. Matsuoka privately disagreed with Tokyo’s order to exit but on coming home, he discovered that his spirited declaration in Switzerland had made him a national hero as a man who had stood up to the racist and arrogant West. Exiting the League, however, also meant losing a restraint that the civilian government held over her military forces. With no global organization castigating the Japanese for their war crimes in Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army was unleashed to conquer an empire, and the fascist revolution was reignited.
In February 1936, a cadre of fifteen hundred servicemen assassinated the nation’s finance minister, the lord keeper of the privy seal, and the prime minster’s brother-in-law by mistake; they were trying to kill the prime minister. The terrorists stormed and occupied the War Ministry and Diet buildings, forcing legislators to flee for their lives, and published a manifesto: “The national essence of Japan, as a land of the gods, exists in the fact that the Emperor reigns with undiminished power from time immemorial into the farthest future in order that the natural beauty of the country may be propagated throughout the universe, so that all men under the sun may be able to enjoy their lives to the fullest extent. . . . In recent years, however, there have appeared many persons whose chief aim and purpose have been to amass personal material wealth, disregarding the general welfare and prosperity of the Japanese people, with the result that the sovereignty of the Emperor has been greatly impaired. . . . The senior statesmen, military cliques, plutocrats, bureaucrats, and political parties are all traitors who are destroying the national essence.”
These rebels were quickly surrounded, taken into custody, tried, and executed. Even so, many in the press and the public revered their “selfless” acts. The public reaction meant the Japanese government had fallen beneath the thumb of extremists who could blackmail with threats of assassination and coup d’état. The nation’s military now believed it could defeat any enemy, while its populace as a whole came to believe in kokutai, the idea that the Japanese were a unique race with a unique cul
ture governed directly by a godlike emperor. Starting in 1936, the nation’s secret police could imprison those acting contrary to kokutai with that year’s Law for Protection against and Surveillance of the Holders of Dangerous Thoughts.
• • •
Outsiders learning of kokutai and tenno heika banzai—“long live the emperor”—would understandably think that Japan’s head of state was divine and his rule, absolute, especially considering the sacred talismans accompanying the Chrysanthemum Throne—the sword, the jewel, and the mirror, representing courage, benevolence, and wisdom—bequeathed at the dawn of Japanese society from the Sun Goddess to her grandson, the first emperor, for his descent to the earth. In reality, after her legislature, military leaders, prime minister, and cabinet had agreed on government policy, it was both tradition and expectation that Japan’s emperor had to concur; the consensus policy was then revealed to the nation as his personal decision.
When he was crown prince, Hirohito’s tutor for ten years impressed on his charge the principle that meddling in politics would damage the imperial family’s reputation and its unique and lofty position as the spiritual embodiment of the Japanese race. Crippled by this tradition and by his own social awkwardness, as ruler Hirohito disliked, in turn, nearly every one of his generals, admirals, ministers, and advisers. Emperor Showa wanted to be a marine biologist, not a monarch; he liked whiskey more than sake, listened to Western classical music, and loved golf. His face was covered in moles, which to the Japanese signified good luck, but Hirohito was also a notorious tightwad, using pencils to their nubs, and wandering the palace grounds in ragged clothes with buttons fastened in the wrong places. All of this resulted in a leader who would only speak his opinions in the vaguest of terms. Subordinates had to interpret his cryptic, expressionless utterances, which usually took the form of poetry, or quotations from his ancestors. This vague lack of command allowed military hard-liners to do exactly as they wished, all in the name of the emperor . . . and yet Hirohito had faced assassination attempts in both 1923 and 1932.
On November 25, 1936, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, joining together to fight the menace of communism. Though Grew reported to Washington that Japan’s foreign office had categorically denied any military element to this agreement, many in the diplomatic community knew that Japanese and Nazi officers had come to a secret understanding. The Japanese navy, however, was still pro-Anglo-Saxon. Naval air visionary Shigeyoshi Inoue read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in German and was shocked to see that its anti-Asian and anti-Japanese diatribes had been left out of the Japanese translation.
On July 7, 1937, Chinese and Japanese soldiers were practicing maneuvers near the Marco Polo (Lugou) Bridge in Tientsin near Peking. Shots were fired. On the morning of July 8 a Japanese officer was discovered missing. Truce negotiations were begun, but then, more shots were fired—by whom is unclear. The Japanese thought it was a plot by Communist agents, while the Chinese believed that the Japanese were triggering incidents similar to the Manchurian railway bombings. Sporadic, chaotic, incidental skirmishes turned into battles, and both Peking and the port of Tientsin fell into Japanese hands.
Many Japanese leaders saw their imperial ambitions as mirroring not the path of Germany, but of the United States, echoing in 1823’s Monroe Doctrine, which declared that any attempts to colonize the western hemisphere would be considered hostile by the United States and be countered by American military action. Japan’s “Asia for Asians and Japan above all” philosophy began that same year with political scientist Sato Nobuhiro’s Kondo Hisaku (A Secret Strategy for Expansion), which held that “Japan is the foundation of the world” and described how the conquest of Manchuria and then the whole of China would begin Japan’s inexorable process of making the rest of the globe her “provinces and districts.” In the 1920s, politician Kijuro Shidehara explained this philosophy of hakko ichiu—“bringing the eight corners of the world under one roof”—as “the four races of Japan, China, Korea, and Manchuria will share a common prosperity through a division of responsibilities: Japanese, political leadership and large industry; Chinese, labor and small industry; Koreans, rice; and Manchus, animal husbandry.” Then in the same year that Teddy Roosevelt brought peace to Moscow and Tokyo with the treaty that embittered so many Japanese, he suggested to his Harvard classmate, reporter Kentaro Kaneko, that Japan should pursue her own version of the Monroe Doctrine. In the 1930s, junior officers in the navy and army passed around the demagogue Ikki Kita’s pamphlet “A General Outline of Measures for the Reconstruction of Japan,” which explained, “Seven hundred million brethren in India and China cannot gain their independence without our protection and leadership. . . . The only possible international peace, which will come after the present age of international wars, must be a feudal peace. This will be achieved through the emergence of the strongest country, which will dominate all other nationals of the world.”
In the World War II era, Japan would use this version of Monroe to justify her military aggression in Asia and its name—the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—would come from the man who’d walked out of the League of Nations and who was now the nation’s foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka. On December 23, 1935, a key official of the foreign office, Saburo Kurusu—who will appear again in this story, as he will arrive in Washington as the crisis between America and Japan escalates—met with American consular staff in Tokyo and explained this new thinking. He said that Great Britain was degenerating and that the Soviet Union was a bunch of dreamers who would never amount to anything, leaving one power in the West: the United States. Japan’s fate was to be the leader of an oriental civilization—the “boss of China, India, the Netherlands East Indies, etc.”—as the United States would become the leader of the occidental civilization. And, he insisted, these two great new world powers must never fight. That would be suicide.
If it is difficult for Americans today to imagine 1930s Japanese as enemies, it is just as hard to imagine 1930s Chinese as our closest friends. In fact, a 1938 poll revealed that 80 percent of Americans considered the Chinese to be their natural allies in the fight against global fascism, versus 40 percent who thought of the British in that way. For decades, US missionaries had crossed China seeking converts to Christianity in a campaign financed by children’s donations, similar to the March of Dimes. This vast network of Christian missionaries and their stateside fund-raising endeavors resolutely portrayed the country as a hardworking and earnest little brother trying to follow in America’s democratic footsteps. China’s American proselytizers included media baron (and child of American missionaries preaching in China) Henry Luce and bestselling Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck. Luce’s coverage of Chinese resistance to Japan’s brutal invasion in Time, Life, and Look rang with analogies to Americans fighting for their own freedom in the Revolutionary War, while American newsreels, projected before the entertainment in movie theaters, showed Japanese airmen—their padded cotton helmets and full-face goggles making them look more like robots than people—gleefully strafing rice paddies and water buffalo while vicious soldiers on the ground manhandled defenseless Chinese peasants and set their meager daub-and-straw dwellings on fire. The Depression-era American public was dazzled by the alluring Soong sisters, Madame Chiang (wife to the current leader, Chiang Kai-shek), and Madame Sun (wife to the father of the nation, Sun Yat-sen), and so loved China that the first US paperback book, test-marketed by Pocket in 1938, was Buck’s three-hankie weeper of striving Chinese peasants and devious landlords, The Good Earth. Yet this unswerving dedication to the Chinese baffled any number of American officials who found no reason for it besides a moral high ground. “We have large emotional interest in China, small economic interest, and no vital interests,” a perplexed US ambassador to France, William Christian Bullitt, pointed out to Roosevelt.
As highly as Americans regarded China at this time, they held Japan in low regard, thinking them slow brained, irrational, primitive, neurotic, compulsive, and mechanically
incompetent, with inner-ear defects, extreme nearsightedness, and buckteeth—racially inferior. A significant element in the surprise at Pearl Harbor was the great number of Americans who couldn’t conceive of Japan successfully attacking the United States. The most influential Asianist in the American State Department was a man who’d spent five years teaching in China before being named consul general to a city at the heart of Japanese aggression: Mukden. Stanley Hornbeck insisted that no matter what Washington demanded of Tokyo, the timid Japanese would never attack. When, as late as November 23, 1941, Foreign Service officer John K. Emmerson returned to Washington from a Tokyo posting to tell Hornbeck that if the United States kept pushing Japan into a corner, her militarists would insist on fighting, Hornbeck insouciantly replied, “Tell me of one case in history when a nation went to war out of desperation.” In fact, nearly this exact phrase had appeared in an October 7, 1941, letter from Yasaka Takagi to Joseph Grew, which Grew had forwarded to State: “The danger of war is by far the greatest . . . when [Japan] feels, rightly or wrongly, that she is driven into a corner, and, therefore, desperately strikes back defying consequences.” Hornbeck’s hard stance was mirrored by FDR’s secretary of war Henry Stimson, who insisted that he understood “the Oriental mind” from his experience as governor-general of the Philippines. Stimson advised, “To get on with Japan, one had to treat her rough, unlike other countries.”