Japan

by Edwin Reischauer

  The organized ultranationalist movement remained relatively small in Japan and never proved politically dominant, as it did in Italy and Germany. It was principally significant for helping stimulate a much broader but more inchoate reaction against the liberal trends of the twenties. It was natural for this reaction to center around the army and navy, which despite their modern origins seemed to symbolize the old values. The military officers were no Junker class, and the samurai coloring of early Meiji days had largely been lost. By the 1920s military leaders, like most of the other elites, were the product of a specialized education and career and not distinguished by birth. Nonetheless, Japanese found it easy to believe that army and navy officers, as servants of the state, were more honest and dependable—or, as they put it, more “sincere”—than rich industrialists and self-seeking politicians. The military officers themselves, segregated from other Japanese by education at a relatively early age and deeply indoctrinated in a proud tradition, believed this fully. Naturally they tended toward conservative views and were particularly concerned that the abandonment of imperial expansion in the twenties would ultimately undermine Japan’s security.

  In some ways, the peasantry had a special affinity for the military. Though the descendants of peasants who for almost three centuries had been denied swords or other arms and had been treated with disdain by the samurai class, they were soon induced by the new mass education to take pride in Japan’s military exploits and to glory in the ideal of military service to the emperor and, if necessary, death in his name on the battlefield. Constituting the great bulk of the conscripts, they often found service in the armed forces their one exciting release from an otherwise boring life of farm labor, and the reservist organizations of military men who had completed their terms of active service were important forces in the life of rural Japan. The military officers, for their part, worrying that the rural depression of the late twenties was undermining the health of the peasantry on whom they relied for manpower, were seriously concerned about economic conditions in the countryside. There was thus a genuine resonance in emotional attitudes between the military and the peasantry.

  Some historians have suggested that if the party governments had been wiser and had won the confidence of the people to a greater extent, the militaristic reaction of the thirties might have been avoided. In particular, it has been argued that if the new parties of the Left had been given greater freedom, the tragedy of militarism might have been averted. But this seems doubtful. The older parties continued to win overwhelming majorities in elections right through the thirties, at the very time when real power was slipping from their grasp. Perhaps if the twenties had been more favorable economically and party government had had the chance to function for a couple of decades of relative calm and prosperity, democratic precedents might have strengthened sufficiently to bear the weight of more difficult times, but this was not what happened. Parliamentary government had only a decade of troubled supremacy before it was forced to shoulder what proved to be unbearable problems.

  In the late 1920s there were many reasons for discontent and anxiety, but, as in the 1850s and 1860s, it was foreign issues that proved crucial. Throughout the decade, the civil government basically followed a policy of accommodation to Chinese nationalism and conciliation toward the views of Britain and the United States. Much has been made of the contrast between the relatively liberal policies of the cabinets of the Minseito line from 1924 to 1927 and 1929 to 1931, in which the foreign minister was Shidehara Kijuro, and the “hard line” toward China of General Tanaka as Seiyukai prime minister from 1927 to 1929, but the difference between the two was more a matter of style and nuance. Both parties clung tenaciously to Japan’s established position but sought to avoid open confrontation.

  As the decade progressed, however, there was growing discontent, particularly in the military. Japan, it was felt, was being bottled up by hostile forces that would keep it a second-class nation permanently. Japanese were denied the right to emigrate to the attractive open lands of North America and Australia; their exports were meeting growing restrictions abroad; they had been persuaded to give up trying to win a greater empire in China and were even having trouble holding on to the rights they had already won, as Chinese nationalist fervor swept northward into Japan’s special bailiwick of Manchuria. Meanwhile, Japan’s dependence on foreign sources of raw materials and food increased steadily as population and industry both grew.

  The nation, it seemed to many, faced a serious population crisis that could only be solved by military expansion. The leadership at home appeared weak and irresolute, while national will and public morals were degenerating. The time for drastic action was at hand; Japan must reverse course and seize an adequate empire, more comparable to those of the Western powers in order to support its burgeoning population and industry. History was to prove such thinking wrong. The wars it produced were disastrous, and Japan after World War II, unencumbered by any empire, has become a far more prosperous and successful country than ever before. But in the late twenties and thirties militaristic concepts seemed like common sense to many Japanese.

  The army and navy were most concerned with foreign policy and thanks to Yamagata had retained a large degree of autonomy from the civil government, enabling them to act on their own. The army had shown signs of independence in 1912, but the first clear indication of just how willing it was to act on its own came in 1928. In May Japanese army units temporarily blocked the northward advance of the Chinese Nationalist armies in Shantung, and in June young officers of the Kwantung Army, the Japanese military force in Manchuria, blew up a train to get rid of the local warlord and Japanese puppet, Chang Tso-lin, whom they considered insufficiently cooperative. The new emperor, Hirohito, who after five years as prince regent for his incompetent father had succeeded to the throne late in 1926. He had come to maturity at the height of postwar liberalism and had studied briefly in England in 1921. He was outraged at the unauthorized killing of Chang Tso-lin and demanded of his prime minister, General Tanaka, that the responsible officers be disciplined. The army refused Tanaka’s request, claiming that such discipline would hurt army prestige and that, according to the constitution, the civil government had no authority over the army, which came under the “supreme command” of the emperor alone.

  This incident was very revealing in three ways. As far as is known, this was the first important political action a Japanese emperor had initiated in modern times, and it failed. Also, the army successfully defied the civil government, even though the prime minister was a man who had recently been in charge of the army. And the crisis, which helped commit Japan to a more intransigent stand in Manchuria, had been precipitated by middle-grade officers in the field, who received the support of their sympathetic seniors on the grounds that the man on the spot had to be given wide discretionary powers.

  It is doubtful that this insubordinate action would have occurred if the mood of the nation and particularly the military had not changed considerably from what it had been only a short time earlier. This shift in mood was again revealed in the 1930 London Naval Conference, which was a follow-up to the earlier Washington disarmament conference. The limitations on naval construction were extended to include a ratio for heavy cruisers of 10:10:7 among Britain, the United States, and Japan. The agreement was not accepted in Japan without violent protest and the almost fatal shooting of the Minseito prime minister by a fanatic. In 1935 a third naval conference, again held in London, ended in complete failure.

  The full turn of the tide came in 1931 with another case of “direct action” by some middle-grade officers in Manchuria, but on a larger scale than in 1928. On the night of September 18, they blew up a small section of the South Manchurian Railway, which Japan owned. Claiming that this had been sabotage, they used this pretext to overrun all Manchuria in a series of rapid military moves. Obviously they could not have done this without tacit approval by elements of the high command in Tokyo
, and the whole of the army closed ranks behind them. The emperor and the leaders of the civil government tried to keep the “incident” under control, but found themselves helpless. The navy, jealous of the army’s glory, stirred up a fight with the Chinese in Shanghai late in January 1932, but its landing party was unable to finish the job and had to be rescued by three army divisions. The army separated Manchuria from China, making it a puppet state, and in September 1932 Japan recognized this as the nation of Manchukuo, under the last Manchu emperor of China, who had abdicated the throne as an infant in 1912.

  In January 1932 the United States enunciated a policy of “nonrecognition” of Japanese conquests, which it held to thereafter. The League of Nations sent a commission of inquiry to Manchuria, which brought in a report condemning Japan. But when the League adopted this report in March 1933, Japan simply withdrew, thus contributing to the League’s rapid decline. In 1933 and 1934, undeterred by foreign criticism, the Japanese army continued a series of smaller “incidents” that established its control over the eastern part of Inner Mongolia and areas in North China around Peking.

  The so-called Manchurian Incident created a war psychology in Japan. The populace was swept by a nationalistic euphoria over the spectacularly easy conquest of Manchuria, an area far larger than Japan itself, with a population of 30 million hard-working Chinese. The army became committed to an expansionist policy on the continent, from which it could not back down without great loss of face and of power in Japan itself. The “incident” also made clear what had been merely hinted at in the murder of Chang Tso-lin in 1928: The emperor and the civil government could not control the army. In fact, it was the army that was establishing Japanese foreign policy through faits accomplis, and all the civil government could do was serve as an unhappy apologist for this policy before the world. A sort of dual government was emerging, with the military holding the upper hand so far as foreign policy was concerned.

  UPI

  Japanese troops entering Harbin in northern Manchuria in February 1932.

  The military is commonly spoken of in the singular, but it was itself a complex, pluralistic aggregate of individuals and factions. The army generals were divided between the modernizers, who sought to build a more fully mechanized force, and those who emphasized the “spiritual power” of the emperor’s army as the true source of its strength. The latter element, which came to be known as the “imperial way faction” (kodoha), enthusiastically supported such acts as the assassination of Chang Tso-lin and the Manchurian Incident. The modernizers, though not at all averse to military expansion, were more aware of the needs for greater mechanization in the face of growing Soviet military power and were less approving of middle-rank officers whose adventurous “direct action” verged on insubordination. This group, later called the “control faction” (toseiha), felt the need for more discipline and contended bitterly with the “imperial way faction” for control of the army.

  Another division in the military existed between the army and navy, which had always been jealous of each other. The navy, patterned on the British navy and more open to the influence of world opinion because of its higher technology and greater international contacts, tended to be more cautious than the army. It was concerned about the sources of fuel for its ships, which at the time was oil largely from the West Coast of the United States and from Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. The navy was primarily interested in a strategy directed southward toward Indonesian oil and the bases of Anglo-American naval power, while the army thought in terms of a northern strategy aimed at expansion on the nearby continent and against Soviet land power.

  Another cleavage in the military had developed between the older, more conservative officers and the more thoroughly indoctrinated younger officers, who were eager for daring action as well as promotions, but saw themselves blocked in both by their elders. Protected by the “imperial way” firebrands among their superiors, junior officers in the field frequently bullied their more cautious commanders into taking “direct action,” while staff officers in military councils in Tokyo put more subtle pressure on their superiors. By the early 1930s the so-called younger officers problem had reached serious proportions. A small extremist element among the younger officers was beginning to adopt terrorist tactics at home by reverting to the sort of political assassinations that had been common during the last troubled years of the Tokugawa. For the most part these men were young zealots who had become disciples of one or another of the popular ultranationalist propagandists. Younger officers of this type plotted in the spring of 1931 a “Showa Restoration,” named for the year period of Hirohito’s reign. This and a second plot that autumn were quashed by the military authorities, but in February 1932 young officer extremists did succeed in assassinating the finance minister who had just left office and a leading Mitsui executive, and on May 15 (in the so-called 5–15 Incident), they assassinated the Seiyukai prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, who was probably the most democratic person to have attained that post and had been specifically chosen by Saionji the previous December in order to control the Manchurian Incident. Similar assassination plots were nipped in the bud in 1933 and 1934, but in 1935 a lieutenant colonel cut down one of the three chief generals of the army in his office in an outburst of factional violence.

  The army’s direct actions in Manchuria had brought a reversal of Japan’s foreign policy, and this was soon followed by a shift in the balance of power within the civil government at home. The shift was a direct outgrowth of three related factors—the increased influence of the military as the controller of foreign policy, the changed public mood produced by military success abroad, and the terrorist activities of some of the younger officers. Although the military did not officially condone the acts of the young zealots, it used them to put pressure on the civil government. In their trials the culprits were allowed to expound their own views at length and to condemn their victims, with the result that the trials seemed to be aimed more at the victims than at their murderers. The public proved extraordinarily tolerant of these deeds of violence, tending to admire openly the “pure” motives of the young assassins and condoning crimes they saw as mitigated by the “corruption” of those who had been killed.

  Some civil leaders thought of bringing the army under control through the budget, but the majority felt this would be too dangerous, possibly sparking a military coup d’état. Under these circumstances, Saionji concluded that it was time to return to “national unity” cabinets, a new version of the old “transcendental” concept. Since the navy was considered less controversial and more moderate than the army, he selected Admiral Saito Makoto, known as the most “liberal” of the Japanese governor-generals of Korea, as successor to Inukai in 1932. Saito still had seven party politicians in his cabinet, and Admiral Okada Keisuke, who succeeded him in 1934, appointed five. But Okada also included several of the so-called revisionist bureaucrats, who supported the army’s new foreign policies. He also took the supervision of Manchurian affairs from the foreign ministry and put it under the army ministry, and he opened civil service posts to military officers, starting what turned out to be a growing penetration of the civil government by the army and navy.

  Another big turning point in domestic politics was precipitated by the February 26 Incident (or 2–26 Incident) of 1936. A group of young extremist officers used elements of the First Division in Tokyo to try to sweep away all the top government leaders of whom they disapproved. They succeeded in killing the current finance minister and former prime minister, Takahashi; the Lord Privy Seal, who was the former prime minister, Admiral Saito; and one of the three top generals of the army; but they only wounded the Grand Chamberlain, Admiral Suzuki Kantaro; while Saionji and the current prime minister, Admiral Okada, managed to escape, the latter because his brother-in-law happened to resemble him and was killed instead through mistaken identity. This “incident” was the biggest military challenge to the government since
the Satsuma rebellion of 1877. The “control faction” of the army, by then in control, saw that it had to crack down on this sort of insubordination, and it firmly suppressed the incipient coup d’état and dealt severely with the leaders. This was made possible because the emperor was determined that such acts be punished and because the navy decided to back the more conservative army forces, marshaling its power in their support. Discipline was restored to the army, and there was no further violent factional fighting or rank insubordination by younger officers. But from the army’s point of view, there was no longer any need for that sort of “direct action” either. By then the military had achieved control over the civil government as well as over Japan’s foreign policy.