Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  The Japanese invasion of Jehol—an area “approximately the size of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia combined”—commenced on February 23, 1933, one day before the assembly of the League adopted the Lytton Report, rejecting any change in the status of Manchuria.78 Encountering little effective Chinese resistance, the twenty-thousand-strong Japanese force completed its operation in about one week.

  The emperor had tried very seriously to delay, cancel, guide, and limit the invasion according to his judgment of the international situation. His chief aide-de-camp, General Nara, had worked actively to block him. Managing to dissuade the emperor from employing the imperial power of supreme command was Nara’s last major achievement. Shortly afterward Prince Kan’in nominated Honj, former commander of the Kwantung Army, as Nara’s replacement. First expressing mild dissatisfaction with that choice, Hirohito then sanctioned it when asked to do so by Grand Chamberlain Admiral Suzuki and Prince Kan’in.79 Later the emperor would take Honj’s measure and learn how totally untrustworthy he really was. At this time, however, Hirohito was not strongly opposed to a general whom, after all, he had feted as a national war hero just a few months earlier.

  IV

  As the year 1933 opened, the Japanese delegation at Geneva found itself totally isolated. In Tokyo there was angry debate over the refusal by the League to believe the official Japanese version of events. When Foreign Minister Uchida alerted the emperor to the imminence of Japan’s withdrawal, Hirohito queried him only about its effect on Japan’s guardianship of the former German possessions in Micronesia.80 One month later, on February 20, the Sait cabinet formally—but secretly—decided to quit the world organization. On the twenty-fourth the League, by 42 votes to 1 (Japan), adopted a report denying recognition to Manchukuo and mildly criticizing Japanese aggression; no one was surprised. The English-speaking head of the Japanese delegation, Matsuoka Ysuke, thereupon faithfully followed the cabinet’s withdrawal scenario and walked out.81 On March 27, the Japanese government formally notified the League that it had withdrawn.82

  Hirohito marked the occasion with an imperial rescript to the nation. Drafted by the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s Asia Bureau, Tani Masayuki, in consultation with the emperor and Makino, the rescript contained a pitifully feeble admonition that “Organs of military command and political organs should try not to infringe on their respective spheres.”83 Its real burden, however, was its assertion that a difference of opinion over the Manchuria problem had forced the government to withdraw from the world organization.84 Nevertheless, that withdrawal did not go against “the fundamental spirit of the League” and Japan would continue to work “for the welfare of mankind.” Depicting an obviously negative action as inherently positive and benevolent, the imperial rescript achieved a rhetorical mish-mash that obfuscated everything. This was an early instance of a practice that soon became standard procedure—the papering over of unresolved internal disputes by combining opposing actions and assertions in a bland—and blind—show of consensus when no one really agreed on anything.

  Interestingly, too, the same day that the cabinet voted on the League, Makino had noted in his diary:

  I do not applaud our quitting the League. The people act as if by withdrawing we have achieved something great, or they believe our achievement is withdrawal itself. And the media rush about…[trying to realize] that goal. All of this shows the shallowness of thought in the Japanese public. As time passes, they will surely come to realize how superficial they have been.85

  Perhaps Makino could have expanded on the role of the media in generating support for the Manchurian war, but he was not wrong about the uncritical popular response to anti-League propaganda.86 Many people were easily persuaded to move right, left, or about-face. But what about himself and the emperor? Belief in a policy of expansion, disagreement over how to use imperial authority to control the army, and fear of domestic unrest all lay behind the court’s appeasement of military expansion. Makino, particularly susceptible to such fear, had abruptly abandoned his support for Japanese-Anglo-American-cooperation when he was confronted by the advocates of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia. Rather than clash with the military, he abjured his long-held belief in the Versailles-Washington treaty system. He supported Hirohito’s decision to quit the League, which he himself had helped establish. Hirohito and Makino, standing at the top of the polity, became, in a sense, the earliest apostates in a decade of apostasy.87

  No documentation has been presented to show that Hirohito or his palace advisers ever sought to avoid a break with the League by proposing alternatives to the army’s continental policy. Influenced perhaps by the euphoric public response to the army’s deeds of valor, Hirohito decided to gamble. With little or no questioning of where the resulting diplomatic isolation might lead, he sanctioned the cabinet’s decision. Maintaining a good standing with his recalcitrant army was more important to him at that moment than international goodwill. Hirohito failed to see that international isolation would not heal the internal, structural rift between the cabinet and the army, which only widened the more he exercised his direct authority as supreme generalissimo.

  Prime Minister Sait was equally shortsighted. In reporting on the League to a secret session of the House of Peers (February 21), Sait, like the emperor, expressed concern only over small, immediate possible consequences of withdrawal, such as whether the League and the United States would allow Japan to continue controlling the mandated islands in the South Pacific.88 One would have expected Hirohito to question Sait on the long-term consequences of withdrawal. So far no evidence indicates that he did.

  The new direction in foreign policy encouraged changes in how the Japanese understood themselves and the outside world. The old ruling elites had failed to give hope and encouragement to the people during the worst phase of the depression. The nation had responded by supporting the military, which at least seemed aware of their suffering and frustrations, and to want to help. Once the nation succumbed to anti-Chinese, anti-Western xenophobia and embraced the Manchurian Incident, the only chance of checking the military lay with the court group. If Hirohito and his entourage had stood firm, the shift toward Asian Monroeism—the rhetorical assertion of a Japanese right to safeguard Asia from the West—might have been reversed. But the court group and those in its milieu also tended to see international affairs in antagonistic racial terms, disagreed among themselves as to which line to follow, and were opportunistically inclined to begin with. Ultimately they cooperated with the army.

  A policy of military and economic expansion on the Asian continent in defiance of the Great Powers was made easier by developments abroad. The Sait cabinet appeared on the scene when the industrialized West had come to be characterized by very different systems of national organization and values. In Germany, Hitler and his Nazi Party—the most revolutionary, nihilistic, racist movement ever to arise in Europe—were goose-stepping toward power in January 1933. Their open intention was to destroy the Versailles system and build up Germany’s armaments in preparation for war.

  In Britain the Conservatives had a keen sense of rivalry with Japan over control of the China market. At the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932, the Tories had gone over to protectionism and had resolved to form a British imperial sterling bloc, hedged in by preferential tariffs for members of the empire.

  In the isolationist United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting his first term as president, took a different approach to the economic crisis. He upheld free trade and offered reciprocal trade agreements to as many nations as possible to lower tariff duties. Above all he sought to give people hope by reforming some of the nation’s worst social ills and launching it in a new direction. But his New Deal recovery measures left intact the Jim Crow system of domestic racism in the south, while tending to reduce trade outlets for Japan in the Western Hemisphere and in the Philippines.89

  As for the Soviet Union, its centrally planned economy had come to symbolize heavy industrialization withou
t democracy. In 1932 the Soviet regime was returning to the international scene after having completed its first five-year plan. It was also starting to build up production of military aircraft and tanks and reequip its “Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army”—largely in reaction to Japanese expansion on the continent.90 It could be cogently argued that Soviet Russia, with its enormous military potential, was a barrier to Japanese strategic ambitions, and that communism was an ideological threat.

  Japanese supporters of continental expansion could point to other frictions with the United States and Britain. Although Britain and the United States disagreed on how to cope with the depression and had difficulty coordinating their policies with respect to Japan, British and American politicians could justly be depicted as hypocritical practioners of formal democracy at home and defenders of the imperialist status quo abroad—and Japanese journalists were happy to provide such depictions. Conversely, Japanese proexpansionists could soon suggest that the rise of National Socialism in Germany augured well for Japan. Germany had followed Japan out of the League, and was the potential enemy of Britain, the United States, and Russia. Moreover, in 1933, Nazi Germany was also in a state of emergency and like Japan aiming for a racial and cultural renaissance.

  Thus ideas advanced by Japan’s leaders to justify their actions in Manchuria gained reinforcement from the breakdown of global capitalism, emergent monetary and trade blocs, and contending domestic systems of politics and ideology. In a lecture delivered at court before Hirohito and his entourage on January 28, 1932, former army minister General Minami emphasized national security, raw materials, and the need for territory to explain the army’s creation of an independent Manchurian state. “Japan-Manchuria joint management,” he told the emperor, would enable Japan to “withstand an economic blockade from abroad” and “[continue] indefinitely as a great power.”91 The acquisition of Manchuria in its entirety would also solve the Japanese “population problem” by providing space for Japan’s rapidly increasing people, whose numbers by the end of the decade were expected to reach seventy million.

  Following up, Matsuoka (a former corporate officer of the South Manchurian Railway Company) delivered a court lecture on February 8, 1932, entitled “Japan-Manchuria Relations and the Diplomatic History of Manchuria.” When questioned by Hirohito, Matsuoka somewhat vaguely stressed the difficulty of sustaining amicable relations among nations so closely related racially as Japan and China. “This is a principle in biology,” he informed his marine biologist monarch.92

  Konoe, a frequent participant in court group discussions, cast the problems besetting Sino-Japanese relations in terms of conflict between the white and yellow races and asserted the spiritual superiority of the Japanese over their pale opponents. For Konoe the Manchurian Incident was a bolt of illuminating lightning that had “pierced the dark cloud of economic blocs encroaching around Japan.” “Even if the incident had not occurred and taken the form it did,” argued Konoe, “sooner or later an attempt would necessarily have had to be made to dispel the cloud and open a path for the destiny of Japan.” In “Sekai no genj o kaiz seyo” (Reform the world’s status quo), an essay he published in February 1933, Konoe sounded a Malthusian warning on the causal relationship between population pressure and war:

  Unequal distribution of land and natural resources cause war. We cannot achieve real peace until we change the presently irrational international state of affairs. In order to do that, we must…recognize two great principles. The first is freedom of economic exchange—that is to say, abolition of tariff barriers and the emancipation of raw materials. The other is freedom of immigration. Few possibilities exist for implementing these principles in the near future, however…. As a result of our one million annual population increase, our national economic life is extremely burdened. We cannot wait for a rationalizing adjustment of the world system. Therefore we have chosen to advance into Manchuria and Mongolia as our only means of survival.93

  For Konoe natural necessity, natural inevitability, and self-preservation justified Japan’s right of conquest in Asia. He sneered at Westerners who dared

  …to judge Japan’s actions in Manchuria and Mongolia in the name of world peace. They brandish the Covenant of the League of Nations and, holding high the No-War Treaty as their shield, censure us! Some of them even go so far as to call us public enemies of peace or of humanity! Yet it is they, not we, who block world peace. They are not qualified to judge us.94

  For Japanese who felt that the home islands and colonial Korea needed a territorial “buffer” against Soviet Communism and Chinese anti-imperialism, the idea of an “independent” Manchurian state was highly appealing. Defenders of Manchukuo also argued the great economic advantages of its vast resources. Manchukuo in time would become a life-space, providing land, homes, and food for a Japanese rural population, while its coal, iron, and agricultural resources would enable Japan’s economy to accelerate and grow, and in the process prepare for any future protracted war with the United States.95

  The idea of turning imperial Japan into a self-sufficient economic “empire” that could face down its Western colonial rivals in Asia militarily was, at one level, a rerun of the “Asian Monroeism” pursued by the Terauchi cabinet during World War I.96 Autarchy acquired widespread public appeal, however, only when the Western powers were seen as wantonly bullying Japan. Self-sufficiency also had special appeal to Japanese capitalists at a time when they were seeking to reduce their dependence on foreign resources and technology, and shifting their domestic investments from light industries to heavy and chemical industries.

  Of the many exaggerated, self-serving representations of the international situation proferred by Japanese opinion leaders during the incident, none was more effective in winning support for the army than the depiction of Manchuria-Mongolia as Japan’s economic, strategic, and moral “lifeline,” “our only means of survival.” The lifeline metaphor, first coined by Matsuoka, stirred widespread feelings of patriotism. Gripped by a false account of their army’s behavior in Manchuria, many Japanese seemed willing to confront even the greatest of the Great Powers in order to preserve their nation or uphold its honor. If recognition of Manchukuo and withdrawal from the League led to rejection of international law itself on the ground that international law was a Western construct, designed to freeze the international order at a point in time advantageous to the Anglo-Americans, then so be it. Japan would create its own hierarchical international framework grounded in norms that emanated from the emperor, who was morality incarnate and more real than the abstract Law Anglo-Americans cherished.

  Konoe best captured this Japanese sense of aggrieved nationalism. Years earlier, in his famous essay of December 1918, “Reject the Anglo-American Standard of Pacifism” (Ei-Bei hon’i no heiwashugi o haisu), he had argued that the white race, by discriminating against the yellow, and advanced states such as Britain and the United States, by monopolizing colonies, had violated international norms of “justice and humanity.” Japan, “an undeveloped country of the Yellow Race,” should not advocate a “servile type of status quo,” but a “standard of pacifism” which put Japan at the center of the world and ordered events from a Japanese perspective.

  This Manichaean view of the age as a confrontation between have and have-not nations, and antagonistic racial groupings, now predisposed Konoe to support the incident, and to advocate dismantling both the Versailles-Washington system and the various international treaties supporting it.97 In a speech given in November 1935, Konoe denounced the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Nine-Power Treaty, and the London Naval Treaty, saying: “Italian officials preach with great boldness and frankness why Italy must expand. German politicians openly proclaim in the Nazi program why Germany requires new territory. Only Japan lacks this frankness.”98 Konoe found the reason for this deficiency in “Anglo-American standards…diffused throughout our Japanese thought,” thereby strengthening “the institutions devoted to preservation of the status
quo.”

  Although often criticized by genr Saionji for these hard-line views, Konoe was trusted by Hirohito. It cannot be proved that Konoe influenced the emperor’s decision to permit Japan to leave the League. But Hirohito had long been exposed to the view that the Great Powers were motivated by racial rivalry and hoped to keep Japan from rising to the rank of the the dominant power in Asia. Moreover, we know that Konoe’s ideas did affect the court officials closest to the emperor, as well as the different elites with whom they had to deal in their role as consensus builders.

  Ultimately, however, short-term political considerations caused Hirohito to align with the military. Hirohito recognized and drew confidence from the fact that most states had accepted Japan’s faits accomplis. So far no Western power had recognized Manchukuo; but neither, so far, had any made Japan suffer economic punishment for that conquest. The most important need, in Hirohito’s view, was to stabilize the domestic political situation, which had been shaken by assassinations of prime ministers, attacks on his entourage, and aborted coup attempts. That priority required him to avoid a confrontation with the commanders of the Kwantung Army, which was needed to defend Manchukuo.99

  Of Hirohito’s private life during the Manchurian Incident there are virtually no published materials, apart from a two-page document in Kawai’s diary, and a few anecdotes by fiction writer Koyama Itoko, who claims to have met the emperor unofficially, and been shown court documents.100

  By 1932, Hirohito and Nagako had been married for eight years. She had borne four girls, of whom three had survived, and was pregnant with a fifth child. That summer, when the situation in Manchuria forced them to remain in the capital instead of traveling to their vacation retreat in Hayama, they spent many hours of the day in each other’s company, and maintianed carefully regulated work days. He awoke, as a rule, at seven-thirty, she a little earlier. They dressed without the aid of servants and usually breakfasted on milk and food prepared by two “court ladies” (that is, maids). When they finished, one of the maids rang a bell to let the chamberlain on duty know that he could enter and greet them. Their day started with baths, followed by outdoor exercise taken separately. For the pregnant Nagako, exercise consisted of tending flowerbeds or a round of golf accompanied by a nurse. Toward noon Hirohito returned from his office to lunch with her, then left for work until about four o’clock, when he again joined her for tea. They took dinner together around six-thirty and snacked again around nine before retiring to their bedroom, usually at ten. When Nagako was not tending her garden, she spent part of each weekday rolling bandages for the troops in Manchuria.