By repeatedly censuring and then finally firing his prime minister, General Tanaka, Emperor Hirohito had signaled to the political community that a cabinet led by the head of the Seiykai Party was not qualified to govern under his rule. He reacted quite differently, however, in the case of the Minseit, the other main conservative party, on whose president, Hamaguchi, he bestowed the mantle of prime minister in July 1929.
Hamaguchi, having understood the lesson in Tanaka’s failure, kept the young emperor fully informed before implementing policy measures. Moreover his personal values, as well as his policy goals of military and financial retrenchment, were entirely agreeable. The court group at this stage also approved of Hamaguchi’s attempt to come to terms with Chinese nationalism by returning Shidehara to the post of foreign minister and signing a customs treaty with China.
Unfortunately, a few months after Hamaguchi formed his cabinet, the international financial system based on gold collapsed when, on October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed in the United States, the world’s leading creditor nation and market for industrial goods. Soon the entire world economy fell into an unprecedented slump, with profound effects on the established international order. Emperor Hirohito’s earlier decision to indulge the army in its insubordination, and to dismiss the only prime minister who had treated him as though he were a real constitutional monarch, had given young army officers in Manchuria a feeling that they could take matters into their own hands.
A small minority of them now proceeded to do so. During the year that elapsed between Chang Tso-lin’s assassination in June 1928 and the Tanaka cabinet’s resignation in early July 1929, Colonel Kmoto resigned his post as senior staff officer. His successor on the staff of the Kwantung Army, Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara, began the planning that would lead to the Manchurian Incident. Middle-and upper-echelon officers who advocated reform of the state for the purpose of waging “total war” strengthened their organizational unity and their ties with civilian right-wing groups; while elements of Tanaka’s Seiykai (led by the dynamic Mori) joined forces with the military and the civilian right wing.
On December 29, 1928, Chang Tso-lin’s son and successor, Chang Hsueh-liang, the warlord of the Three Eastern Provinces (“Manchuria”), united his territory with that of new Kuomintang government at Nanking. As China completed its nominal unification, the stage was being set in Japan for the coalescence of new forces of aggression and the neutralization of groups that supported policies of international cooperation and compromise in China. Neither the emperor nor his staff showed any understanding that the political attacks on the court by the military and the right wing, which marked his reign from 1929 onward, were the price they had to pay for infusing religion into politics and helping to create the fetish of imperial will in the first place.
III
On August 27, 1928, Japan became a signatory to the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, known in the West as the Kellogg-Briand Pact (or the Pact of Paris) and in Japan as the No-War Treaty. The pact’s signers renounced war “as an instrument of national policy” and promised to settle all disputes by peaceful means. France and the United States had presented this treaty to Japan as another project in the spirit of international conciliation endorsed at the Washington Conference. The Tanaka cabinet accepted it and dispatched Privy Councillor Uchida Ksai to Paris with instructions to use the occasion of the signing to inform the United States and other powers of Japan’s special position in Manchuria. Uchida was not to arouse foreign suspicions of Japan’s territorial ambitions, however, by indicating that Manchuria would be exempted from the obligations imposed by the treaty.35
How this treaty fared in Japan revealed much about the court group’s attitude toward international law. By signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Japanese government accepted that the concept of “aggressive war” was a recognized crime in international law.36 In the first of the pact’s two articles, the signatories pledged “in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” In the second article they agreed to resolve “by pacific means…all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin…which may arise among them.”37 When the Tanaka government submitted this short treaty for review by the Imperial Diet, the phrase “in the names of their respective peoples” immediately became an object of dispute.38
In the United States, where the postwar peace movement had spawned the idea of criminalizing war, the treaty enjoyed wide support from the intellectual community and the public.39 Similar general acceptance might have been secured in Japan if the emperor had put his prestige behind it and made the outlawing of aggressive war his own personal project. That never happened. Instead the treaty immediately bumped against the unfolding crisis in Manchuria and a government-sponsored campaign to bind the people to the emperor, overcome the nation’s increasing political fragmentation, and promote martial spirit after a decade of reviling the military.
More particularly the import of the treaty was obscured by contention over the twin issues of the emperor’s sovereignty and his foreign policy prerogative. When the Imperial Diet convened in early 1929, the opposition Minseito accused the Tanaka cabinet of infringing on the emperor’s sovereign powers of state because “the High Contracting Parties” in Article 1 of the No-War Treaty called for outlawing war “in the names of their respective peoples” rather than in the emperor’s name.40 Although Minseito and Seiykai politicians were at one in supporting the No-War Treaty, the former could not refrain from scoring points against the governing party by claiming that the wording in Article 1 of the treaty assumed the principle of popular rather than monarchical sovereignty and was therefore inconsistent with the kokutai.
The Diet debate on the treaty thus highlighted the ruling elites’ unanimity in denying any popular agency in the making of foreign policy. At the same time it revealed the profound rhetorical shift then under way in the very process of political deliberation itself: from not dragging the throne into politics to “fighting night and day by implicating the imperial house” in political debate.41
In addition the No-War treaty fared poorly in Japan because Hirohito was personally advised on this issue by his teacher of diplomacy and international law, Tachi Sakutaro. At the time Tachi went on record deprecating the pact’s intent and significance.42 Hirohito certainly wanted Diet debate on his sovereign powers ended and the pact ratified, in keeping with the spirit of conciliation with the Western powers. On many occasions from March through early June 1929, he questioned Prime Minister Tanaka on how the treaty was faring in the Diet and in the privy council.43 Yet Hirohito did not see the pact as a commitment to resolving by peaceful means all disputes that might arise with China over Japan’s leasehold rights in Manchuria (due to expire during his reign). For him the Manchurian treaties and rights—contracts originally negotiated with the Ch’ing dynasty, later augmented by agreements secured by military faits accompli—were part of his grandfather’s legacy. As such they were sacrosanct and deserving of protection even by the use of armed force.
On this score young Hirohito’s view of the world was as unenlightened and rigid as Tachi’s. Tachi’s advice was that the pact would not inhibit Japan’s resort to force to protect its interests in China, and that the moral element in it was of little consequence. Tachi focused, then and later, on defining self-defense broadly, seeking “loopholes” in the No-War pact to permit Japan to protect its interests and extraterritorial rights in Manchuria should a future need arise for armed intervention there. Tachi’s position, moreover, was fully in tune with Japanese intellectual opinion at the time, which, unlike American opinion, responded skeptically to the No-War Pact.44
Specifically Tachi, like many other Japanese “realists,” was dissatisfied with the way the liberal democracies—Britain and the United States—required all nations to adhere to the brand-new ethica
l code forbidding recourse to war as a means of resolving international conflicts. He saw this as an attempt by the Anglo-American powers to freeze the postwar international order to their own advantage.45 Publicly, however, he did not reject either the peace ethic informing the new international law or the institutions that embodied that ethic, but rather sought to undermine both by developing loopholes and defining self-defense so broadly as to justify virtually any act of force as an instrument for resolving disputes.
While legalistic debate over the phraseology of the No-War Treaty raged during late 1928 and early 1929, Hirohito and the court group backed off. Instead of encouraging the new spirit of peace and antimilitarism to which the state (in Hirohito’s name) was then committing itself by treaty, they decided to pump up his enthronement and thereby strengthen the trend toward chauvinistic nationalism. On the tenth anniversary of the signing of the European armistice ending World War I, the court group had a perfect opportunity to make the pacifism of the No-War Treaty the emperor’s personal project, and to lead the Japanese nation to an understanding that wars of aggression had been made illegal. Before Hirohito got around to ratifying the treaty formally (June 27,1929), however, his enthronement ceremonies had helped tilt Japan in the direction of a heightened nationalism that would prove difficult to retreat from.46
In Geneva, as the historian Ik Toshiya has pointed out, Japan’s delegates to the Council of the League of Nations did not seek ways to improve the Covenant and promote security. Instead, under Foreign Minister Shidehara’s direction, they resisted bringing the Covenant into conformity with the new treaty banning aggressive war. Claiming that the peace machinery of the League could not work in the Far East, they repeatedly opposed mediation by third nations in disputes involving China. On every occasion between 1928 and 1931, the party cabinets sought to leave open the possibility of exercising force in China in the name of self-defense. If Hirohito, his court entourage, and the Foreign Ministry had not been so negative about strengthening the Covenant and preventing League intervention in Sino-Japanese disputes, and if new collective security agreements had been in place when the Manchurian Incident occurred, it might have been harder for the Kwantung Army to justify its arbitrary use of military force.47
IV
Despite having been informed by his chief aide, Nara, of the degeneration of discipline in the army and navy, the emperor continued to overlook problems of factional conflict, service rivalry, and growing fragmentation within both military branches. As the army’s senior leaders grew lax in their exercise of control over the professional officer corps, officers of all ranks began to denounce their superiors and spread rumors to the public that the political parties were harming Japan’s defense. Hirohito responded to this situation by avoiding battle. He shifted responsibility for dealing with the recalcitrant Navy General Staff onto the shoulders of Grand Chamberlain Suzuki, and onto General Nara responsibility for quelling insubordination and disobedience in the army. He also had Nara pressure Fleet Admiral Tg into agreeing to the ratification of the London Naval Treaty.48
In early 1930 Hamaguchi, strongly supported by Hirohito, clashed with the Navy General Staff over the signing of the London Naval Treaty. No sooner had that controversy ended than many navy leaders resigned their posts, and opponents of the treaty carried out a purge of officers who had supported it. The navy’s political intervention influenced the army and undermined the position of Army Minister Ugaki, who continued to control the core personnel of the army.49 The Seiykai immediately took advantage of the turbulent domestic situation to avenge itself on the Minseito and the court entourage for the latters’ previous interventions.
Ultimately the controversy over the London Naval Treaty did most to hurt the young emperor’s image. Disaffected right-wing politicians joined military officers in viewing the signing of the treaty in September 1930 as the transgression of a moral boundary. By crossing it, they charged, the Minseit had violated the honor of the state. Since they could not criticize the emperor, they blamed the court entourage for having monopolized his will and abetted the corruption of the parties. As early as 1929 Hiranuma Kiichir, a leading ultranationalist in the judicial bureaucracy and an adviser to many right-wing groups, had privately criticized Hirohito for relying too much on Makino, and for repeatedly dispatching emissaries to Saionji, whether to learn the genr’s wishes or to convey his own will.50 In Hiranuma’s extreme right-wing circles, the mistaken impression grew that the emperor’s “will” was entirely in the hands of Saionji and the court entourage who guided his movements.
Critics of the palace and the parties railed against Western liberalism and democracy, which for a whole decade they had equated with Judaism and “Freemasonry.” What they really wanted to smash was the restrictive Washington treaty system, which they had come to view as an Anglo-Saxon “iron ring” preventing Japan from expanding abroad. For them Japan had submitted once again to the United States and Britain, white powers that had earlier tried to curb its World War I Asian continental expansion. Drawing the inference that the West no longer acknowledged Japan as a first-rate power because of Anglo-American insistence that Japan adopt an inferior ratio in capital ships, opponents of the London Naval Treaty came to feel a keen sense of alienation from the Meiji constitutional order. The exaltation of the Shwa emperor had charged the state itself with energy and vigor, while sanctifying the policies implemented in the emperor’s name. The problem facing the disaffected military and some political leaders was how to reverse those policies. Casting politics based on the political parties as inordinately corrupt, and the court entourage as obstructive of the emperor’s will, was their chosen procedure.
When Sagoya shot Prime Minister Hamaguchi on November 14, 1930, he was angered by Hamaguchi’s role in expediting the London treaty and also wanted to see the birth of a Seiykai cabinet. That disaffected members of the Navy General Staff had also influenced him was rumored but never proved.51
At the time military spending was only slightly more than it had been at the start of the Shwa era: nearly 29 percent of the annual budget, or 3.03 percent of GNP.52 The Army and Navy General Staffs, however, were fiercely at odds with their service ministers over the issue of continued arms reduction and stagnating military allocations; the press had begun to build popular support for the military’s “right of supreme command;” and the army as an institutional entity showed signs of marching out of control.
At the start of the new year, 1931, Justice Ministry bureaucrat and Privy Council Vice President Hiranuma, surveyed the scene in depression-stricken Japan. For nearly a decade Hiranuma had attacked Western liberalism, the values of the political parties, and Taish democracy in general. Now he heralded the parting of the ways between the new nationalism and the internationalism that Japan had pursued since 1922.
[T]oday the Great Powers openly emphasize the League of Nations while behind the scenes they steadily expand their military armaments. We cannot simply dismiss as the foolish talk of idiots those who predict the outbreak, after 1936, of a second world war. Our nation must be prepared to serve bravely in the event of an emergency. If other peoples [i. e., Europeans and Americans] obstruct world peace and the welfare of mankind, we must be prepared to display our nationalism in a grand way, based on the spirit of the founding of the state.53
Hiranuma went on to declare that if Japan was to pursue its ideals, it would have to build up its military power, which was hard to do:
The depression in the business world is reaching its height. Unemployment is increasing daily. The family is breaking up. Starving people fill the streets. Do you think people are satisfied with this situation? This is the responsibility of statesmen who govern under the auspices of the emperor’s will. To ignore this situation is to ignore the emperor’s will. Therefore, at the start of this new year…to hide the reality and pretend that everything is peaceful would be the height of disloyalty. Because I firmly believe that one who respects the imperial house and loves the fatherland would
not embellish the situation, I am clarifying here the essence of nationalism.54
V
By the summer of 1931 the political dispute beween the military and the Minseito government of Wakatsuki Reijiro, Hamaguchi’s successor, had become too threatening for the court officials to ignore. On June 13, 1931, Kawai recorded in his diary that
the highest leaders of the army are conducting a united, organized campaign against arms reduction, saying that only the military may decide, as a matter of command, the size of the armed forces. The genr [Prince Saionji] says that we should not slight the argument for dispatching troops in the event that a great disturbance erupts in Manchuria.55
Two weeks later Kido informed Privy Seal Makino that he had “heard from Harada Kumao [information gatherer for Saionji and Kido] about ‘rather considerable plans for Manchuria that are being prepared by the military.’”56 Then, in July, fighting erupted between Chinese and Korean farmers at Wamposhan, in the border area between Manchuria and Korea; the fighting led to anti-Chinese rioting and attacks on Chinese residents throughout the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese colonial authorities there failed to prevent the loss of 127 Chinese lives at the hands of Koreans, with the consequence that the mainland Chinese responded with a boycott of Japanese goods. To many Japanese suffering from the worldwide Great Depression, the boycott seemed a calculated plot by the Nationalist government in Nanking and the regime of Chang Hsueh-liang in Mukden to destroy Japan’s strategic and economic interests in China.57
The crisis on the Asian continent worsened in August, when the Japanese army announced the disappearance in Manchuria of Capt. Nakamura Shintar of the Kwantung Army staff. Japanese press accounts disclosed that Nakamura had been apprehended by Chinese soldiers and murdered near the border of northern Manchuria.58 Immediately the Seiykai charged that the Chinese were treating the Imperial Army with contempt. Played up by the parties and the press, the Wanpaoshan riots and the Nakamura incident heightened Japanese hostility against the Chinese. Behind that useful pretext the Kwantung Army increased pressure on the Mukden authorities.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 24