Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Hirohito did not regard China as a “modern” state and probably never believed Japan’s aggression there to be wrong. He supported the policy of withholding a declaration of war against China and ratified and personally endorsed the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war as stated by the army vice chief of staff in a directive on August 5, 1937: “In the present situation, in order to wage total war in China, the empire will neither apply, nor act in accordance with, all the concrete articles of the Treaty Concerning the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare and Other Treaties Concerning the Laws and Regulations of Belligerency.”1 The same notification advised staff officers in China to stop using the term “prisoner of war.” Throughout the war in China the Japanese military captured tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers annually. Yet, at the war’s end, when Japanese authorities claimed to have had in their possession scores of thousands of Western prisoners, they acknowledged having only fifty-six Chinese prisoners of war.

  Hirohito had studied international law under Tachi Sakutaro; he knew that Japan had signed (but not ratified) the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. He had also read the clause calling for respect for international law in the imperial war rescripts of his grandfather and father. Yet he never had orders issued to his armed forces that would have prevented the mass murder or mistreatment of Chinese prisoners. That act of omission reflected a widespread tendency among many Japanese bureaucrats, intellectuals, and right-wingers during the 1930s to regard international law itself as a purely Western fabrication. For them the rule of international law was something that, ever since the end of World War I, the British and the Americans had wanted to develop and spread because it served their interests, not Japan’s.

  For many Americans, Europeans, and Asians, the aspect of Japan’s war of aggression that more than anything created the stereotype of the heartless, cruel Japanese—a stereotype that has never entirely been forgotten or forgiven—were the atrocities and the mistreatment of prisoners of war.2 Behind the atrocities lay precisely the military’s refusal to apply international law to China; for that void Hirohito shared responsibility. He alone was free to act in this area, needed to act, but did not act. If he had intervened and insisted on establishing rules and regulations, or even an organization for handling war prisoners, the result could well have been different.

  Hirohito bore more direct responsibility for the use of poison gas, a weapon that caused the death of many Chinese and Mongolian combatants and also noncombatants. Before the China Incident had turned into a full-scale war, he had sanctioned the dispatch to China of chemical warfare personnel and equipment. Article 171 of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and other international agreements signed by Japan after World War I, banned the use of poison gas—including tear gas. Yet the army had no problem violating the ban in the case of a technologically inferior enemy. Neither, apparently, did Hirohito. His first directive authorizing use of chemical weapons was dated July 28, 1937, and transmitted by Chief of the Army General Staff Prince Kan’in. It stated that in mopping up the Peking-Tientsin area, “[Y]ou may use tear gas at suitable times.”3 A second imperial order, dated September 11, 1937, and again transmitted through Prince Kan’in, authorized the deployment to Shanghai of certain special chemical warfare units. These orders authorized the beginning, at first experimental and on a very small scale, of what would become, by the spring and summer of 1938, extensive use of poison gas in the main battle theaters in China and Mongolia.4

  Gas was the one weapon over which Hirohito, the Imperial Headquarters, and the high command retained close, effective control throughout the entire China war. Front-line units were never free to use this highly effective weapon at their own discretion; even area army headquarters lacked the power to authorize that use. Gas could be employed only after explicit authorization had been requested and received from Imperial Headquarters–Army Department, usually in the form of “directives” issued by the chief of staff after having first obtained the emperor’s permission.5

  In the Wuhan offensive, from August to late October 1938, Imperial Headquarters authorized the use of poison gas on 375 separate occasions. In the concurrent offensive against Canton in the far south of China, it authorized the Twenty-First Division commander to use both tear gas and poison gas.6 In March 1939 Imperial Headquarters granted Gen. Okamura Yasuji permission to use more than fifteen thousand canisters of gas in the largest chemical attack of the war. Okamura justified his request by saying that the gas canisters were needed to restore the reputation of the troops and to give them “the feeling of victory.”7 On April 11 the emperor approved Directive Number 11, issued by his army chief of staff, authorizing further use of poison gas by the North China Area Army and its Garrison Force in Inner Mongolia.8

  By May, when the major transport center of Hsuchou fell, the Japanese army was using chemical weapons whenever they could be effective in turning the tide in closely fought battles.9 “Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 301,” sealed by Hirohito on May 15, 1939, authorized the carrying out of field studies of chemical warfare along the Manchukuo-Soviet border.10 What the content of those studies was remains unclear. In July 1940 Hirohito approved Prince Kan’in’s request to authorize the use of poison gas by the commander of the Southern China Area Army. A year later, however, in July 1941, when the army moved into the southern part of French Indochina, Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama issued a directive explicitly prohibiting the use of gas. Presumably Hirohito and the high command were concerned that gas not be used against Western nations that could retaliate in kind.11 Their well grounded fear of American possession (and forward stockpiling) of chemical weapons continued to deter them from using such weapons down to the end of World War II.

  Hirohito also sanctioned during 1940 the first experimental use of bacteriological weapons in China.12 It is true that no extant documents directly link him to bacteriological warfare. But as a methodical man of scientific bent, and a person who questioned what he did not clearly understand and refused to put his seal to orders without first examining them, he was probably aware of the meaning of the orders he approved. Detailed “directives” of the Imperial Headquarters that the army chief of staff issued to the Kwantung Army command in charge of biological warfare, Unit 731, were as a rule shown to the emperor; and the Army Orders of the Imperial Headquarters–Army, on which such directives were based, were always read by him. Biological weapons continued to be used by Japan in China until 1942, but the full consequences of this Japanese reliance on both chemical and biological warfare would come only after World War II: first, in the Truman administration’s investment in a large biological and chemical warfare program, based partly on transferred Japanese BC discoveries and technology; second, in the massive American use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.13

  Though no documents directly tie him to it, another feature of the brutal China war for which Hirohito should be charged with individual responsibility was the strategic bombing of Chungking and other cities, carried out independently of any ground offensives, and using many types of antipersonnel explosives. Starting in May 1938 and continuing until the beginning of the Pacific War, the Japanese naval air force initiated indiscriminate bombing against China’s wartime capital of Chungking and other large cities. The bombing campaign was uncoordinated with the army’s strategic bombing of Chinese cities. First studied by military historian Maeda Tetsuo, the navy’s air attacks on Chungking anticipated the German and Italian bombing of cities and the strategic bombing of Japan’s own cities that the United States initiated during the last stage of the Pacific War. At the outset the navy deployed seventy-two bombers (each with a seven-man crew) and dropped incendiary as well as conventional bombs. In their first two days of raids, they reportedly killed more than five thousand Chinese noncombatants and caused enormous damage.14 Two months later, in retaliation for this indiscriminate bombing, the United States embargoed the export of airplane parts, i
n effect imposing its first economic sanction against Japan.15

  Apart from the strategic bombing of China’s cities, Hirohito also knew of and approved the “annihilation” campaigns in China. These military operations caused death and suffering on a scale incomparably greater than the totally unplanned orgy of killing in Nanking, which later came to symbolize the war and whose numbers have probably been inflated over time. At the end of 1938 the North China Area Army inaugurated the first of many self-designated campaigns of annihilation against guerrilla bases in Hepei Province. These operations targeted for destruction “enemies pretending to be local people” and “all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies.”16 They continued off and on for the next four years, gradually becoming larger in scale, more organized, systematic, and widespread.17 Eventually the Chinese Communist Party labeled them the “three alls policy”: that is, “burn all, kill all, steal all,” or, in Japanese, sank sakusen. Hirohito was apprised of the nature of the pacification problem in North China and on December 2, 1938, signed off on Tairikumei 241, the redirection of policy that led to the annihilation campaigns.

  The pacification of the five occupied provinces of North China—Heipei, Shantung, Shensi, Shanhsi, and Chahaer—had by then become the main goal of the North China Area Army. During 1939 and early 1940, the area army had tended to overlook the organizing activities of the Chinese Communists and to target for destruction Nationalist military forces, though it did launch some small-scale operations against Communist base areas in Inner Mongolia as early as the summer and winter of 1939. As the Communist-controlled base areas in remote mountain regions expanded, during 1939–40, to include control over scores of millions of people, the area army finally took note, but before it could act, the situation changed dramatically. In August 1940 guerrillas of China’s Eighth Route Army launched two surprise offensives—known as the “Hundred Regiments” campaign—against Japanese railways, bridges, coal mines, blockade houses, and communications facilities throughout North China. The most extensive physical damage and the heaviest loss of Japanese lives occurred in Heipei and eastern Shantung Province.18

  In response to these destructive guerrilla attacks, Maj. Gen. Tanaka Rykichi of the North China Area Army, developed in late 1940 one of the first plans for attacking and so totally destroying the Communist guerrilla bases that “the enemy could never use them again.” The first Japanese campaign of “total annihilation” was directed against Communist bases in Shanhsi Province.19 Full-scale, highly organized extermination operations by the area army did not begin to be implemented, however, until July 1941, when General Okamura took command. Okamura’s guidelines for subordinate commanders called for targeting mainly Communist forces, encircling and caging them by constructing interdiction and containment trenches. To that end North China was divided into pacified, semipacified, and unpacified areas. The latter were to be made unhabitable and cut off from the semipacified areas by the building of trenches. Hirohito gave his approval to this policy in Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 of December 3, 1941, which ordered the theater army to “strengthen the containment of the enemy and destroy his will to continue fighting.”20

  Thereafter “annihilation campaigns” continued to involve burning down villages, confiscating grain, and forcibly uprooting peasants from their homes and mobilizing them to construct “collective hamlets.” The Japanese strategy also centered on the digging of vast trench lines, many twenty feet wide and thirteen and a half feet deep, and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers, roads, and telephone lines. Japanese police and collaborating Chinese constabulary mobilized millions of Chinese peasants to do this work for periods of up to two months at a time.21 But except for killing Chinese, directly and indirectly, the enormous effort that went into these campaigns, which were always sanctioned by Hirohito, was for naught. Chinese guerrillas were invariably able to return to the no-man’s land and control it after the Japanese had departed.

  There are no Japanese statistics on the number of Chinese military casualties resulting from the sank operations. But according to the recent rough estimate of historian Himeta Mitsuyoshi, “more than 2.47 million” Chinese noncombatants were killed in the course of those battles.22 Although detailed empirical analysis of this aspect of the China war, by Japanese scholars, is now under way, it has been clear for some time that the well-planned sank campaigns were incomparably more destructive and of far longer duration than either the army’s chemical and biological warfare or the “rape of Nanking.” Yet in the United States the latter, though extremely important and deserving of attention, figures as the centerpiece in the moral condemnation of Japanese wartime conduct, and is even compared—thoughtlessly, without regard to purpose, context, or ultimate aim—with the German genocide of European Jewry.

  I

  During the summer of 1940, Hirohito’s judgment on how to direct the Japanese military to end the war in China was shaped by his perception of how the international situation was developing in Europe, and how Britain and the United States would react to any new Japanese military moves.

  On July 22, 1940, Konoe formed his second cabinet, with Matsuoka Ysuke as foreign minister and General Tj as army minister. Five days later Konoe convened the long-suspended Imperial Headquarters–Government Liaison Conference. In a mere ninety minutes the conference decided on a new national policy designed to exploit changes in the structure and dynamics of the international system brought about by Germany’s victories in Europe.23

  The vagueness of the July 27 “national policy” document, adopted at this meeting, was seen in its emphasis on shifting focus to the “Southern area” if the war in China could not be concluded quickly, then deciding issues by exploiting foreign and domestic situations. Afterward Konoe and the chiefs of staff formally reported the document (entitled “Outline for Dealing with Changes in the International Situation”) to the emperor. The July 27 outline also called for a military move into French Indochina to establish bases there, and the acquisition, by diplomatic means, of the raw materials of the Dutch East Indies. If Japan had to use armed force to realize these aims, it would seek to fight only Britain; at the same time it would prepare for war with the United States.24 Hirohito approved this general prescription for renewed aggression knowing that whenever concrete policies based on it were formulated, they would be reported to him and his sanction sought on each occasion.

  The army’s interest in a military alliance with Nazi Germany had developed slowly until 1938, when, in response to German suggestions, a positive campaign for an alliance was initiated. Throughout 1939 and early 1940, Hirohito rejected the army’s idea not so much because he thought there was anything fundamentally wrong in Hitler’s racist, radically anti-Semitic regime, or the German quest for continental control, but because he wanted an alliance to be directed solely against the Soviet Union. Admirals on the navy high command also opposed the idea, but for a different reason: They believed a military pact with Germany would force Britain and the United States to increase their aid to Chiang Kai-shek and thus postpone resolution of the China Incident. The European war, and the frenzied international response to Germany’s blitzkrieg offensive of spring-summer 1940, changed everything. An almost palpable bandwagoning mood arose. Hirohito’s brother Prince Chichibu repeatedly importuned him to end his opposition to a German alliance. Then suddenly the navy high command, whose lead Hirohito often followed, abandoned its former skepticism and began to favor a military alliance with Hitler that would move Japan more firmly into the anti-Anglo-American camp.

  The key moment in the navy’s reversal came during the ninth month of the European war—June 1940—after the French government had fled Paris, Italy had entered the war, and the Germans had conquered France and taken control of the resources of most of Europe up to the Soviet borders. Several factors figured in the navy’s conversion. Adm. Takagi Skichi, a navy leader with close ties to the palace, pointed out
in an internal policy document that the navy hoped that so long as Germany was allied with the Soviet Union, if Japan became a military ally of Germany, the enthusiasm of Japan’s generals for war against the Soviet Union would be at least dampened.25 Both navy and army leaders also believed that Hitler would soon crush Britain, and that by “entering into a tripartite pact…Japan would be responding to Hitler’s strategy and [so] joining in the new international order.”26 A third factor leading the navy to favor alliance was that the pact’s negotiators had deleted from the treaty any automatic war-participation clause, thereby guaranteeing Japan would not be drawn against its will into Germany’s war with Britain.

  Furthermore the navy leaders projected not only an early end to the German-British war but the possibility that the Soviet Union might formally join the Axis, creating a four-power system. This possibility—not out of the question in the late summer of 1940—reflected an accurate assessment of the role of ideology in Stalin’s USSR. More substantively the navy leaders believed that Germany could help Japan end its diplomatic isolation and confront the American diplomatic offensive from a position of greater strength. Finally, by agreeing to the treaty with Germany, the navy leaders hoped to eliminate a major part of their long-standing rivalry with the army. They might then be able to restrain the army’s domination of the domestic political scene. With the navy lining up in support of the pact, and Germany triumphant in Europe, it remained only to persuade the emperor. A change in his chief political adviser helped to accomplish that.

  On June 1, 1940, the emperor exercised his own discretion in choosing a new lord keeper of the privy seal. Ignoring genr Saionji’s qualms about Kido’s right-wing bent, expressed through the former’s refusal to recommend a candidate, Hirohito decided to heed Konoe and Yuasa’s positive recommendations and appoint Kido, the revisionist bureaucrat and class-conscious leader of the hereditary aristocracy, to succeed the ailing Yuasa as his most important political adviser.27 The youngest man ever to hold the post, Kido was nearly fifty-one; Hirohito was thirty-nine. More than a year earlier, Kido had reportedly told Harada that the emperor was “a scientist” by nature, and “very liberal and pacifistic at the same time.”