The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  Snow was now falling steadily in huge flakes, and it reminded several of the insurgent officers of the incident of “the forty-seven ronin.” In the seventeenth century a provincial lord was so disgraced by Kira, the chief minister of the shogun, that he committed suicide. Oishi, a samurai warrior serving the dishonored man, vowed to avenge his death, and for the next seven years he pretended, in the tradition of samurai sacrifice, to be a dissolute drunk while secretly planning revenge. Early one morning in a snowstorm, the forty-seven ronin (samurai who had lost their master and were forced to become wanderers; they might be compared to America’s drifting cowboy heroes) raided the Kira home, not far from the Imperial Palace. They assassinated the chief minister, cut off his head and brought it to the temple where their master’s ashes were enshrined. Then, in true bushido style, all forty-seven committed hara-kiri. A factual story, it represented an ideal of samurai behavior and was a favorite theme in Japanese movies and the kabuki theater.

  The groups headed for their various destinations: one, led by Koda himself, would seize the War Minister’s official residence and force high-ranking officers to support them; another would occupy police headquarters; four other groups would assassinate the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and the Grand Chamberlain. The killers of the Privy Seal would then proceed to the suburban home of the Inspector General of Military Education and murder him while two other units raced out of town as well, to kill Count Nobuaki Makino, former Privy Seal and counselor to the Emperor, and eighty-seven-year-old Prince Kinmochi Saionji, the Emperor’s closest adviser, the nation’s most honored elder statesman, the last genro.d

  Lieutenant Kurihara and a military police officer approached the front gate to the Prime Minister’s official residence. A police officer on guard inside the gate asked what was going on. The kempei said, “Open the gate quick.” The guard didn’t think anything of it because they were a colleague and an Army officer. As they came closer to the gate Lieutenant Kurihara’s hand grabbed the police guard, and poking his pistol at him with the other hand, ordered, “Open up!”

  Kurihara and other officers broke in ahead of their men and disarmed the sleeping policemen in the guardhouse by the gate. Kurihara pushed past them into the residence, which was in total darkness. He turned on the hall light, got his bearings and snapped it off. Suddenly the corridors reverberated with deafening gunfire. This was the signal the rebels outside had been waiting for; they opened up with heavy machine guns. The chandelier in the hall shattered and plummeted to the floor.

  Just before five o’clock young Hisatsune Sakomizu, one of Prime Minister Okada’s secretaries, had been wakened by a muffled commotion outside his house, which was across the street from the rear gate of the official residence. They have finally come! he thought, for he had long anticipated an attack on his employer, and jumped out of bed. His ties to the old man were close; he was married to Okada’s daughter, and his father’s younger sister was Okada’s wife.

  Sakomizu softly opened the window and in the whirling snow saw the policemen who were guarding the rear gate mill around in confusion. He phoned police headquarters.

  “We just heard the minister’s alarm bell ring,” replied a voice. “One platoon is already on the way. Reinforcement units are just leaving.” Reassured, Sakomizu started to go back upstairs, when he heard the clop of boots in the street. He looked out expecting to see either the police reinforcements or the special Army troops detailed to protect the Prime Minister, but a rifle shot cracked and he saw one policeman fall and others retreat before a group of soldiers with glittering bayonets. There was a shattering burst of fire—it sounded like rifles and machine guns—and the secretary finally realized that Army troops were attacking the residence. He hastily dressed so he could help the admiral. As he rushed into the street he could hear shots inside the Japanese section of the ministry. Soldiers at the gate came forward brandishing their rifles. They forced Sakomizu back into his own house and followed him without taking off their wet boots. Frustrated, Sakomizu paced up and down. What had happened to the special Army troops or the police reinforcements? The police had already come and been driven off; the troops were among the rebels.

  Sakomizu again called police headquarters. “This is the insurgent unit,” said a voice. About five hundred rebels were occupying the building. Sakomizu hung up and called the Kojimachi kempeitai station nearby. “The situation is out of control” was the sheepish answer. “What can we do?”

  A few blocks from the Prime Minister’s official residence 170 men, commanded by a first cousin of Sakomizu’s, stormed into the official residence of War Minister Yoshiyuki Kawashima. With them was Captain Koda. He routed out Kawashima and began to read off a list of demands: political and social reforms; the arrest of leaders of the Control clique; the assignment of Imperial Way clique officers to key positions (the insurgents were against expansion into China); the assignment of General Arakie as commander of the Kwantung Army “for the purpose of coercing Red Russia.” Koda also insisted that martial law be proclaimed and that the War Minister visit the Palace at once to convey the rebels’ intentions to the Emperor.

  While the argument was going on, Captain Teruzo Ando and 150 men were bursting into the official residence of Grand Chamberlain Kantaro Suzuki, who, like Viscount Saito, had so enjoyed the private showing of Naughty Marietta a few hours earlier. The elderly admiral, wakened by a maid, rushed to a storage room for a sword. He couldn’t find it. Hearing footsteps in the corridor, he stepped into the next room—it would have been a disgrace to die in a closet. In moments he was hemmed in by a score of bayonets. One soldier stepped forward and asked politely, “Are you His Excellency?”

  Suzuki said he was and raised his hands for quiet. “You must have some reason for doing this. Tell me what it is.” Nobody answered and Suzuki repeated the question. Silence. The third time he asked, a man with a pistol (he looked to the Grand Chamberlain like a noncom) said impatiently, “There’s no more time. We’re going to shoot.”

  Suzuki supposed they were acting under orders from a superior and didn’t know why. “Then it can’t be helped,” he said stoically. “Go ahead and shoot.” He drew himself erect as if facing a firing squad. Just behind him hung the pictures of his parents. Three pistols erupted. One bullet missed, one hit him in the crotch, and the third went through his heart. As he fell, still conscious, bullets struck him in the head and shoulder.

  “Todome [Coup de grâce]!” someone shouted repeatedly. Suzuki felt the muzzle of a pistol pressed against his throat, then heard his wife say, “Don’t do it!” At that moment Captain Ando entered. “Todome?” asked the man with the pistol.

  Two years earlier Captain Ando had come to Suzuki with a program for reform; the admiral had refuted his arguments so forthrightly that Ando still secretly admired him. Now he said that todome would be “too cruel,” and ordered the men to salute His Excellency. They all knelt by the fallen admiral and presented arms.

  “Get up! Leave!” Captain Ando told his men. He turned to Mrs. Suzuki. “Are you okusan [madam]?” She nodded. “I have heard about you. I am particularly sorry about this.” He said they had no ill feeling toward the admiral. “But our views on how to bring about reformation in Japan differ from His Excellency’s, and so we had to come to this.”

  The captain left, burdened by a sense of guilt and certain Suzuki was dying (one of the maids heard him say that he was going to commit suicide). But miraculously Suzuki would survive to play a leading role in Japan’s last days as an empire.

  A lieutenant led his men to the large sprawling home of Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi. They broke down the door of the inner entrance, and while one group seized half a dozen police guards and servants, the rest roamed through the house, kicking down the doors of room after room looking for their victim.

  Minister Takahashi was alone in a spacious ten-mat bedroom. He was a remarkable man who had started as a footman, turned Christian and become
president of the Bank of Japan and a member of the House of Peers. The young officers loathed him for having fought the previous year’s huge military budget.

  Finally the lieutenant entered the minister’s room brandishing a pistol. He kicked the quilt off Takahashi, crying “Tenchu!” (Punishment of Heaven!). Takahashi looked up unafraid and shouted “Idiot!” at the lieutenant, who hesitated before emptying his pistol into the old man. Another rebel officer leaped forward and with a shout swung his sword with such force that it cut through the padded coat Takahashi was wearing for extra warmth and severed his right arm; he then stabbed the minister through the belly and slashed him viciously right and left.

  Mrs. Takahashi burst from her room in the attached Western-style section, and at the sight of her disemboweled husband, cried out in anguish. As the lieutenant shouldered through the crowd of servants gathered horrified in the corridors, he said, “Excuse me for the annoyance I have caused.”

  Prime Minister Okada had been awakened by the sound of the alarm bell just before five o’clock and moments later his brother-in-law, Denzo Matsuo, a retired colonel, pushed into the bedroom with two police officers.

  “They’ve finally come,” said Okada, adding fatalistically that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  “It’s no time to talk like that!” shouted the sixty-one-year-old Matsuo. An energetic, dogmatic man, he had insisted on serving his brother-in-law, whether Okada liked it or not, as unofficial factotum without pay. He pulled the reluctant Okada, clad in a thin nightgown, across the corridor toward a secret exit, but on hearing the rebels break down doors, one of the policemen shoved Okada and Matsuo into a bathroom which was used primarily as a storeroom, and closed the door. A moment later they heard shouts from the corridor, several shots, a scuffle, then silence.

  “Stay here,” said the impetuous Matsuo and left. The Prime Minister tried to follow but in the darkness bumped into a shelf, knocking down several sake bottles. He stiffened with fear. Silence. Okada moved again, this time stumbling noisily over the sake bottles.

  “Don’t come out yet!” one of the policemen called weakly from the corridor, so Okada quickly returned to the bathroom. When he heard a voice shouting, “There’s someone in the courtyard!” he looked through the window and saw his brother-in-law standing pressed against the building and half a dozen soldiers watching him from inside.

  “Shoot him!” yelled their leader, but the soldiers hesitated. “You men will be in Manchuria soon! What are you going to do, if you can’t kill a man or two now?”

  Reluctantly the men stuck their rifles through the windows and fired into the courtyard.

  “Tenno Heika banzai [Long live His Majesty the Emperor]!” cried Matsuo and slumped down on a doorstep, bleeding profusely. Painfully he straightened his shoulders, as if on parade, but could not keep from groaning.

  Lieutenant Kurihara, followed by Pfc. Kuratomo, pushed their way through a wall of soldiers, rigid with shock. They told Kurihara that it was Prime Minister Okada. The lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Kuratomo and ordered, “Todome!”

  Kuratomo was reluctant; all he had was a pistol. “Use it!” said Kurihara impatiently.

  Against his will Kuratomo leveled the weapon and fired one bullet into Matsuo’s chest, another between his eyes. The colonel toppled forward, dyeing the snow red.

  Kurihara, who had taken the Prime Minister’s photograph from his bedroom, knelt beside the body and compared it with Matsuo’s face. “Okada!” he said without hesitation. “Banzai!” shouted the soldiers and carried the body to the Prime Minister’s bedroom, laying it on a thin mattress.

  To find out what had happened, Okada crept out of the bathroom into the corridor. One of the police guards was lying there unconscious, his left arm slashed off; a few yards away the other was jackknifed over a chair, dead. Okada bowed his head in tribute and continued on to his bedroom. Seeing Matsuo’s body on the mattress, he sobbed and flung himself down. Finally he rose and began putting on a kimono. As he was tying the strings on an outer garment he heard footsteps and went out to the corridor.

  “What’s that?” a soldier called out and Okada lurched to a dark corner.

  “I just saw something strange,” the soldier told several comrades. “It was an old man. But he disappeared like a ghost.”

  Death seemed to be everywhere and yet by a miracle Okada was alive. Until that moment he had been sure he would die. For the first time he began to think of the future. Had the rebels seized the Palace? Were the jushinf assassinated? He decided it was his responsibility to stay alive, and once the uprising was suppressed, enforce discipline on the Army. But where could he hide in a house overrun with rebels? The answer was solved for him when he suddenly came upon two maids in the corridor. They hustled him to their room, pushed him into a large closet and covered him with a pile of soiled laundry.

  By now two of the attack groups assigned to out-of-town missions had reached their destinations. Lieutenant Taro Takahashi and thirty men broke into the suburban home of Mazaki’s successor, Inspector General Jotaro Watanabe. Mrs. Watanabe and a maid tried to stop Takahashi, but he pulled free and broke into the bedroom where the general lay on a futon with his young daughter. Takahashi fired a pistol at Watanabe, then drew his sword and slashed at his head.

  The other group was ranging through a resort in the mountains in search of Count Nobuaki Makino, whom Saito had succeeded as Privy Seal and who still was one of the Emperor’s closest advisers. Unable to find him, the rebels set fire to the hotel to drive him into the open. The old man was led out through the rear of the hotel by his twenty-year-old granddaughter, Kazuko. They struggled up a steep hill, but the soldiers were at their heels and loosed a fusillade. Ignoring the bullets, Kazuko stepped in front of her grandfather and spread out her kimono sleeves. One of the rebels, perhaps moved by the girl’s heroism, shouted “Success!” and persuaded his mates to leave.

  The third group, the one assigned to kill Prince Saionji, never left Tokyo. At the last moment the officer in charge refused to go; he could not bring himself to do any violence to the last genro.

  At his home in Okitsu, the aged prince had just wakened from a horrifying dream—he was surrounded by decapitated heads and a heap of bloody bodies. Once news of the uprising was received from the capital, the local police arrived in force and took Saionji to a nearby cottage. Then came a telegram announcing that a large automobile filled with young men in khaki uniform was heading for Okitsu. The prince was wrapped up like a mummy and transferred from place to place to fool the assassins—who turned out to be patent-medicine salesmen.

  At the War Minister’s official residence, Captain Koda found continued vacillation among the hierarchy. The generals were still reluctant to either join the uprising or confront the rebels. Major Tadashi Katakura, a brilliant, impetuous career officer, was one of the few showing any resolve. The rebels infuriated him. He was not so much against their aims as against disorder and insubordination. The Army, he believed, could only exist through stern discipline and absolute loyalty to the Emperor.

  Katakura was in the courtyard of War Minister Kawashima’s residence assailing a group of rebels for misusing the power of His Majesty’s Army. The Emperor alone had the right to mobilize troops, he shouted, and demanded to see the minister, General Kawashima.

  “The Showa Restorationg is what we are all thinking of,” he told a crowd that gathered around him. “I feel as you do about the reforms. But we must continue to revere the Emperor and honor the Supreme Command. Don’t make private use of the troops.”

  A rebel commander emerged from the building. “We cannot let you in to see the minister,” he said.

  “Did the minister himself tell you that?”

  “No, Captain Koda gave the order. The minister is just getting ready to go to the Imperial Palace. Please wait awhile. The situation will soon clear up.”

  Katakura assumed the rebels were using violence to force the War Minister to help them set
up a military government. He started toward the entrance, where General Mazaki was standing aggressively with his legs apart, like one of the deva kings that guard Buddhist temples. Katakura had an impulse to rush at Mazaki and stab him—Mazaki must be behind all this; he probably wanted to be prime minister. Katakura controlled himself; first he would find out more what was going on. Just then the Vice Minister came out of the building. Katakura accosted him and asked to have a few words. As the other put him off, the War Minister himself came out of the door buckling on his sword.

  Something crashed against Katakura’s head and he noticed a peculiar odor. He instantly put his left hand to his head. “You don’t have to shoot,” he yelled. A pale-faced captain (it was Senichi Isobe, another of the leaders of the uprising) advanced with drawn sword.

  “We can talk! Sheathe your sword!” Katakura cried out. Isobe slid it back in its scabbard, then changed his mind and pulled it out again.

  “You must be Captain Koda,” Katakura continued. “You can’t mobilize troops unless you get an imperial order.” Faintly he heard someone, perhaps Mazaki, say, “We must not shed blood like this.”

  He staggered, and several officers helped him to the War Minister’s car. As it was passing through the main gate, he dimly saw several kempei. “Get the kempei in the car,” he exclaimed. They did. Someone suggested they take him to the Army Hospital or the Army Medical College, and again he forced himself to speak: “No … some private hospital in the city.” He didn’t want to be assassinated in bed.

  3.

  William Henry Chamberlin, chief Far Eastern correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, first heard of the rebellion from a Japanese news agency. In town he encountered a rash of conflicting rumors. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was open and unoccupied by rebels, but no one was there to tell the foreign correspondents what was going on. Troops were posted at the main crossings in the center of Tokyo. Chamberlin didn’t know whose side they were on. Was any government in existence?