Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

Tg responded, “Is there no way we can manage a decisive battle in a short period of time?”78 But after the liaison conference adjourned, Tg concurred with the army and navy on a cutoff date for negotiations with the United States, followed by the use of diplomatic trickery. Thereafter he repeatedly rejected Ambassador Nomura’s requests to offer the Americans meaningful concessions.

  On November 2 Tj and the military chiefs, Admiral Nagano and General Sugiyama, briefed the emperor on the previously decided national policies. Tj reported that his reexamination of eleven points, including the raw materials situation, begun on October 23, had been in vain; precious time had been lost.79 The emperor seemed satisfied. No doubt he felt that he had gone an extra mile. He now had his excuse for ratifying the decision to initiate war. The stipulated next step was at hand, but he needed one more detail settled. “What,” he asked Tj, “are you going to do to provide justification [for the war]?” Intent on shielding his public image, so different from the leader his military and cabinets knew, and even more concerned with total public support for the forthcoming conflict, Hirohito ordered the loyal Tj to devise the most plausible war rationale possible. Tj answered, “The matter is presently being examined. I shall soon report on it.”80

  That same day Hirohito ventured a surprise proposal to Tj. Develop an action plan for ending the war, he told him, so that the last act could be controlled and foreseen. Make contact with the “Roman pope” in the Vatican!81 Tj acted quickly, demonstrating his trustworthiness. However, his plan to move from war to peace, duly adopted at the liaison conference on November 15, was no more than a scenario for seizing opportunities for concluding a war not yet begun (and projected as likely to conclude no better than a draw) once Japan and Germany had already triumphed.82 Still, it pleased Hirohito.

  On November 8 Hirohito received detailed information about the Pearl Harbor attack plan. On the fifteenth he was shown the full war plan, in all its details.83 The single most important feature of this final, perfected plan was its hypothesis that an “impregnable” military system to defend economic self-sufficiency, needed for waging a protracted war, would be established following the completion of the first stage of the oceanic offensive in the South Pacific. Apart from that, no long-term, concrete plan for guiding the war through its protracted stage existed. The army and navy had different strategic concepts—and goals—for the offensive stage. Just as situational thinking had pervaded the policy-making process leading to the war decision, so now unknown future conditions and circumstances would determine the war strategy. Nor did the plan specify where and when to end the initial offensive. Despite this glaring flaw, Supreme Commander Hirohito confirmed it. The stage was set for Japan’s fatal delay later in shifting to defense in the Pacific.

  Worth noting are the following lines in the explanation of the full plan: “This surprise attack operation, comparable to the Battle of Okehazama, is extremely bold. Of course its success will largely depend on the luck of the battle. However, so long as the enemy fleet is anchored there on the day of the attack, it is possible to sink two or three battleships and aircraft carriers.”84

  Statistical evidence presented by the chiefs of staff, and by the president of the Planning Board, Gen. Suzuki Teiichi, coupled with enticing illustrative comparisons from Japanese military history, probably helped convince Hirohito that a protracted war was not only possible to fight but could be concluded satisfactorily even without any real plan for doing so.

  The emperor had discussions with his high commanders on November 3. Toward noon on the fourth, he told Kido that two problems still bothered him about the operation:

  Suppose we invade Thailand, won’t we need to provide a clear justification for that? How is the research on this matter going? And in the event that [enemy] airplane and submarine interdiction [on our lines of supply and transport] occurs from bases in Australia, do we have countermeasures so we can be sure of uninterrupted acquisition of oil and supplies?85

  That was indeed a serious question and indicated Hirohito’s keen sensitivity to the strategic weakness in Japan’s position in the South Pacific. If control of the sea-lanes could be weakened by Anglo-American air and submarine attacks, Japan’s strategy for a long war would prove flawed. The emperor’s questions also demonstrated his ingrained habit of sniffing through procedural and tactical details and sometimes losing sight of the big issue—a dangerous habit for a supreme commander.

  That afternoon Hirohito broke precedent by attending for the first time a full meeting of the Conference of Military Councillors. For three and a half hours he sat silently listening to questions put to his chiefs of staff and Prime Minister Tj by Princes Higashikuni and Asaka, Gens. Terauchi Juichi, Yamada Otoz, and Doihara Kenji, and Adms. Oikawa Koshir and Yoshida Zengo. Hirohito’s purpose in being present at the discussions was to imbue the forthcoming national policy document with the greatest possible authority prior to his sanctioning it. In the evening Lt. Col. Tanemura Sataka entered in the secret war log of the Twentieth Group that “the emperor [okami] seemed extremely pleased. Now the decision of the state is further strengthened and the result will be fine.”86

  On another early November occasion, Hirohito once again went over the war plans with his two chiefs of staff:

  Emperor: I understand you’re going to do Hong Kong after Malaya starts. Well, what about the foreign concessions in China?

  Sugiyama: We are studying the confiscation of concessions by right of belligerency.

  Emperor: You are going to attend to the concessions after Hong Kong? Right?

  Sugiyama: Indeed, Your Majesty. If we don’t, our surprise attack in Malaya will fail.

  Emperor: Then when will you take over the foreign concessions?

  Sugiyama: It is mixed up with diplomacy, so I shall have to report to you later. But we are going to make sure that we don’t [seize] the concessions beforehand.

  Emperor: You say the landings will be difficult due to the monsoon. Can we land even in December?…Now, next, when does the navy plan to open hostilities?

  Nagano: We are planning for December 8.

  Emperor: That’s a Monday [Japan time; Sunday in Hawaii].

  Nagano: This day is better because [everyone] will be tired from the weekend.87

  Clearly, in the early days of November Hirohito’s mind had become fixed on war. He no longer agonized over the deadlocked negotiations with the United States. At his daily informal briefings by the chiefs of staff, he had approved the contents of the national policy document that was to be presented at the next imperial conference; approval had also come from the Conference of Military Councillors. All these decisions were made before the cabinet had ever met to deliberate them, though the issues were a matter of life or death.88

  On November 5, at the imperial conference that was not reported in the press, Hirohito made the actual (though next to last) decision for war by sanctioning both the completion of “preparations for operations” and a deadline for terminating the Washington diplomatic negotiations, at midnight December 1.89 The negotiations were to go forward on the basis of two proposals, A and B, to be offered in succession.

  A, favored by the army, was communicated to the United States on November 7. It sought a full settlement of differences based on a revised version of ideas that had been presented during earlier stages of the Japan–U.S. talks, including the question of stationing troops in China, the principle of nondiscriminatory trade in China, and the interpretation of the Tripartite Pact. This time the army indicated its willingness to confine its forces to fixed areas in North China and Mongolia for a fixed period of time, and not automatically to act in accordance with the Tripartite Pact. On the principle of nondiscrimination in commerce, Tg insisted on attaching the condition that it was acceptable as long as it was applied not only to China but worldwide—that is, to Western possessions as well.

  Proposal B, transmitted on November 20, omitted mention of China and simply sought a modus vivendi. It promised that Japan would not
advance by armed force any further than French Indochina and would withdraw to the northern part of that colony after peace was reached in the war with China. In return the United States was asked to restore relations prior to the freezing of Japanese assets, furnish Japan with a million tons of aviation fuel, and assist it in procuring raw materials from the Dutch East Indies.90 Each proposal comprised a package; each had a deadline of midnight, November 30. Since the decision to proceed with final war preparations had been made, and only a few weeks allowed for a settlement of issues, the result was a foregone conclusion.

  Kido wrote on the fifth:

  Our policy toward the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands was decided upon at the imperial conference that convened in the emperor’s presence at 10:30 A.M. and continued until 3:10 P.M. At 3:40 P.M. Prime Minister Tj came to my office and we discussed the matter of the organization of the Southern Area Army, the dispatch of Mr. Kurusu [special envoy] to the United States, and so forth.91

  Simultaneously Admiral Nagano, navy chief of staff, went over the war plan in detail with the emperor. “Imperial Navy Operations Plan for War Against the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands” had been drafted by the general staff of the Combined Fleet aboard the battleship Nagato, then forwarded directly to the Navy General Staff before going up the chain of command.92 No ministers of state attended this audience, at which Hirohito gave the final go-ahead to attack Pearl Harbor.

  According to Sugiyama’s notes, the emperor (who already knew the approximate time, places, and methods of attack at all points) was worried about maintaining secrecy. Hirohito wanted to know when the assault groups could be set in motion. The precise dates would be settled shortly, said Nagano. Secrecy was essential, so they had to be especially careful to avoid too-early forward deployment. Even with great care, in an operation involving so many units, one could not be sure how long it could all be kept hidden. Hirohito, worried as always about the Soviet Union, cautioned Nagano to be especially careful in the north so as not to provoke the Russians.

  They next turned to China, where Japan, after four years and nearly five months of fighting, had built up huge forces and was potentially capable of destroying Chiang’s armies. Sugiyama told his supreme commander: “Since it is unsuitable at this time to withdraw troops from Yi-ch’ang [a main river port near the entrance to the Yangtze gorges, and a natural jumping-off point for an army intending to move into Szechwan Province and attack Chungking], we are thinking of using home units to reinforce our assault force. We are going over that now.” Hirohito, however, was of a different opinion. “We should probably withdraw the troops from Yi-ch’ang.”93

  The last remark seems somewhat cryptic, but no matter what the emperor was really thinking, he wanted Yi-ch’ang, which since 1940 had been the staging area for the Japanese Eleventh Army in the Wuhan area to launch an assault against Chungking, to be downgraded to secondary importance, at least for a time. He thus left open the possibility of returning to Yi-ch’ang once the primary operation had been successfully completed. The underlying strategic problem, of course, was that Hirohito and his high command were taking the nation into a completely new war while more than half the Japanese army was, and had to remain, tied down on the continent.

  V

  After November 5 all Japanese “negotiations”—whether still aimed at securing oil from the United States and the Dutch East Indies or at stopping the United States and Britain from interfering with Japan’s activities in China or taking any other action that could threaten Japan’s fleet operation in Southeast Asia—were partly sincere, partly fraudulent. For months these negotiations had been of utmost gravity and importance to Japan’s leaders, including Hirohito, who had very detailed knowledge of them and had hoped to see them succeed. Though Hirohito did invest hope in proposal B, at the same time he felt it wouldn’t work and that it was therefore better to string Washington along until the exact moment when he and the high command were ready for the showdown. To Roosevelt and his strategists the negotiations were expressions of Japanese weakness. To have agreed to anything proposed by Tokyo would have been seen, all across the United States, as an act of “appeasement.” More important, they were under strong pressure from Britain and China not to compromise with Tokyo. By not taking seriously the Japanese military threat, the Roosevelt administration did not take seriously either the alternative to such a threat, which was a temporary settlement of differences that left the Japanese with a guaranteed minimum amount of oil and thus an incentive to go on talking at a moment when the anti-Axis coalition was at its weakest.

  Hull had been reading decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages (intercepted and decoded by the system code-named MAGIC). He, like Roosevelt, was aware of the new Tj cabinet’s military timetable for war and of Japanese troop movements toward Southeast Asia. On November 26, contrary to the advice of Ambassador Grew in Tokyo, Hull handed Ambassador Nomura and his special assistant, Kurusu Sabur, a “draft mutual declaration of policy” and a ten-point written outline of principles for a comprehensive agreement rather than a temporary truce or tactical delay. The two-part document was headed “strictly confidential, tentative and without commitment.” The second part, entitled “Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement Between the United States and Japan,” omitted any reference to the earlier Japanese proposal for a temporary truce. It called for Japan to “withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indochina” but left “China” undefined in all six places in the text where the word appeared. It also omitted any mention of Manchuria, for Hull had discarded Stimson’s earlier nonrecognition doctrine from the start of the talks. Equally important, Hull stated no deadline for troop withdrawal. On the other hand the draft document made quite clear that the United States would not support any government in China other than Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.

  When this “Hull note”—a postwar Japanese term—arrived in Tokyo on the twenty-seventh, Tj misrepresented the American action by telling the liaison conference that Washington had issued an “ultimatum to Japan.” Tg knew, of course, that Hull’s statement was not really an ultimatum, for it was clearly marked “tentative” and lacked a time limit for acceptance or rejection. But Tg kept silent. Afterward some members of the privy council also pointed out that Hull’s memorandum could not be considered as America’s final word because of its heading—an observation that apparently made no impression on Tg. Soon he too consented to the opening of hostilities, just as in early November he had consented to the army’s demand that the United States desist from supporting Chiang Kai-shek.

  Perhaps Tg perceived in the spirit of Hull’s memorandum a tone of colonialist arrogance in the American position. Like everyone else in the room, he may have felt relief that the hard-line American position, grounded in abstract principles, had absolved them of moral responsibility for what they were about to do. Now they could claim that the United States government had “forced” them to opt for war in self-defense: We didn’t do it of our own volition; the “Hull note” triggered the war, and hereafter we shall use this American document to prove it.94

  Through every stage of the Hull-Nomura secret talks, under three foreign ministers—Matsuoka, Toyoda, and Tg—the Army, Navy, and Foreign Ministries had practiced policy making by suspension, with nobody backing down and differences left unresolved but papered over. All three ministries blocked and checked one another, while the army especially never made meaningful concessions or acted in ways that might have begun to build trust by suggesting a new pattern of behavior.95 All three foreign ministers clung to an already existing agreement—the “Basic Treaty” with the client Wang Ching-wei regime, which guaranteed the stationing of Japanese troops in China. More important, they stuck to their system of policy making, which, because of bureaucratic conflicts and divisions, never consolidated and, in late 1941, could only make for continuous movement in the single direction of war.

  Ultimately it was always more advantageous for each
of the forces in this process, including the emperor and Kido, to move to expand war rather than risk paralysis and complete breakdown of their system of rule. This was especially true of Hirohito, who, at different times in the decade after the Manchurian Incident, had expressed fears that not taking some warlike action—like not pumping up the kokutai or not suppressing dissent—would jeopardize the imperial system of government and eventually damage the imperial institution itself. For Hirohito domestic conflicts were more dangerous than the escalation of war, for they carried the risk of eroding the monarchy. In the Japanese wartime system of decision making, the major players worked toward consensus by subordinating the nation’s interests to their own bureaucratic, institutional interests, all the while mouthing the false rhetoric of harmony and consensus. Whenever they failed to reach agreement, they glossed over their differences in vague policy documents that placated all sides and allowed the exigencies of the situation, the preparation for war, and their own special interests to determine their final course of action.

  As the time approached for his final decision for war, Hirohito requested a last round of discussions with government leaders and senior statesmen. On November 27 a large Japanese task force, with six aircraft carriers, set off from Tankan (Hitokappu) Bay in the southern Kurile Islands headed toward Hawaii, and the liaison conference decided on the “Sequence of Administrative Procedures to be Taken Regarding the Declaration of War.”96 On November 29 the leaders assembled at the palace, and he listened to their comments. Prime Minister Tj and members of his cabinet spoke first. Next, the senior statesmen—Wakatsuki, Hirota, Konoe, Hiranuma, Okada, Yonai, Hayashi, and Abe—gave their opinions. Hirota, Hayashi, and Abe pushed for war. The majority argued that it was better to maintain the status quo and endure American pressure, but nobody expressed flat-out opposition to beginning hostilities.97

  On November 30 Prince Takamatsu went to the palace and attempted to stop his brother from taking the empire into a new war. The navy had its hands full, he cautioned. Its leaders were not certain of ultimate victory and wanted to avoid war with the United States if at all possible. Although their encounter lasted only five minutes, Takamatsu would never forget his futile last-minute attempt to have a voice in the policy-making process. Afterward a puzzled Hirohito asked Kido, “What’s going on?” Kido replied, “The decision this time [the next day] will be enormously important. Once you grant the imperial sanction, there can be no going back. If you have even the slightest doubt, make absolutely sure until you are convinced.”98 After next checking with Tj, Hirohito called in his top naval leaders, Nagano and Shimada, for yet another joint review. Both men reassured him that the war operation would be successful. Whether Hirohito also questioned them about the navy’s confidence after the first two years of war—Takamatsu’s concern—we have no way of knowing.