Following the February 26 Incident, Hirota Koki, one of the revisionist bureaucrats from the foreign ministry, supplanted Okada as prime minister. Although he retained four party men in his cabinet, it had a decidedly more conservative cast than the preceding cabinet, and he cooperated in the further penetration of the civil government by the military. He also restored Yamagata’s old ruling that only generals and admirals on active duty could head the service ministries. In February 1937 Hirota was followed by General Hayashi Senjuro, who for the first time had no party men in his government. The parties had thus lost any foothold in the cabinet. But the two main parties still could win elections. Five months after the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, they had won between them 447 out of the 466 seats in the lower house. Six days before the February 26 Incident of 1936, they were able to win 379 seats, and in April 1937 they carried 354 seats. In the 1936 election the Minseito actually won a clear plurality with the slogan “What shall it be? Parliamentary government or Fascism?” The new leftist movement was also doing well at the polls. The Social Mass party (Shakai Taishuto), which was an amalgamation of the more moderate leftists who were willing to work through parliamentary methods, won 18 seats in 1936 and doubled its showing to 37 the next year.
But despite overwhelming majorities in the Diet and occasional daring speeches by some Diet members, the parties had lost virtually all political power. The public, while voting for them, emotionally supported the army’s foreign policies and the belief that the “crisis” required cabinets of “national unity.” The parties, in an effort to hold on to whatever political power they could, had employed the same strategy of pragmatic compromise they had used to come to power—but now the process worked in reverse. Each successive compromise left them with diminished influence.
The powerful civil bureaucrats, divided among mutually jealous ministries, fought to maintain their various prerogatives but failed to take concerted action to block military domination, and their revisionist members jumped on the army bandwagon. Only some of the high court officials around the emperor stubbornly held out in favor of the old Meiji interpretation of national unity. In January 1937 Saionji attempted to arrange the selection as prime minister of a former general who had cooperated well with the parties in the twenties and was willing to be his own army minister, but in the face of determined army opposition the attempt failed. In June 1937, after the resignation of General Hayashi, Saionji again sought to create a truly “transcendental” cabinet by selecting his own protégé from the old aristocracy, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, as prime minister. Konoe, however, turned out to be a weak and ambivalent man, and the outbreak of war with China only a month after he took office robbed him of any chance to rein in the military. On the contrary, he permitted the formation in October 1937 of a Cabinet Planning Office, staffed in large part by military officers, which usurped the power of financial coordination from the ministry of finance, thus giving control of the very heart of the civil government to the military. Saionji, aware of his own great age, created a body of “senior statesmen,” consisting of former top admirals and generals and retired prime ministers, and theoretically this group took over his duties when he died in 1940 at the age of ninety-one. But by then the military was firmly in control of the government.
After the outbreak of the war with China in July 1937, a so-called Imperial Headquarters (Dai hon’ ei) was set up between the army and navy to direct the war, and it became the place where the truly important national decisions were made. Liaison Conferences between it and members of the cabinet became the medium for passing the decisions of the military on to the civil government, which in a sense had come to be merely in charge of managing the home front in behalf of the military. Particularly important decisions were ratified by so-called Imperial Conferences, in which military decisions were presented to the military and civil leaders assembled in the presence of a silent emperor. Finally, in the face of imminent war with the United States, this dual but imbalanced structure of government was reunified. On October 18, 1941, General Tojo Hideki, the army minister, became at the same time the prime minister and for a while the home minister in charge of local government. Thus the military’s control over the whole government became completely clear.
As the military leaders took control step by step and a war psychology increasingly permeated the country, Japan took on some of the totalitarian coloring of the Fascists and Nazis of Europe, though in considerably more muted shades. The army and navy had no love for industrial capitalism, and many officers tended toward the national socialist thinking of contemporary Europe. The zaibatsu leaders and most other businessmen, on the other hand, looked with alarm at the adventurist policies of the military abroad and their soaring budgets at home. But neither side proved doctrinaire in its attitudes, and a sort of marriage of convenience ensued.
There was less economic change than one might have expected. Despite its supposed concern for the peasantry, the army did little or nothing directly to alleviate rural conditions. The twenties and thirties saw the continued development of the economy from light industry to heavy industry and chemical production. This happened to fit in well with military needs for expanding arms production. War also demanded increased budgets through deficit financing, bringing Japan quite early to a sort of Keynesian solution to the economic depression then gripping the world. The result was another burst of industrial expansion. While the older zaibatsu firms were wedded to traditional international trading patterns and the earlier kinds of industry, new entrepreneurs eagerly developed the fields of chemical production and heavy industry.
At first the army had been determined to exploit the economy of its new Manchurian empire on its own, but when it found itself lacking the skills for this, it encouraged the participation of these “new zaibatsu” in the development of this continental empire. Much has been made of the supposedly pro-militarist stance of the “new zaibatsu” as opposed to the older ones, but the real distinction between them was not so much their political attitudes as the types of industrial activity on which they concentrated. The army for its part, while theoretically despising businessmen and favoring some sort of national socialism, did almost nothing to nationalize the economy. It sought instead to mold the existing forms of business and industry into a self-sufficient, industrially strong “national defense state” and to achieve “total mobilization,” which, rather than national socialism, were the catchwords used to describe its economic goals. Under wartime conditions and attitudes, Japanese industrialization pushed ahead as fast as it could, channeled by the military leaders toward strategic objectives, but not constrained by political and social theories.
Changes that were much greater and more clearly totalitarian took place in the areas of personal freedom and thought. The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 had made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the “national polity” or the abolition of private property, and after 1931 laws such as this were enforced with new vigor, at home by the “special” police, often called the “thought control” police, and throughout the empire by the infamous military police, the kempeitai. Hundreds of leftist political and labor leaders, intellectuals, and university students were thrown into prison and forced to recant their “dangerous thoughts.” Professors were dismissed for their theories. Minobe, whose “organ theory” had been generally accepted by sophisticated Japanese in the twenties, was now accused of lèse majesté. In 1935 he was dismissed not only from his university post but from his appointive seat in the House of Peers, and his writings were banned. This sort of official McCarthyism on the part of the government was outdone by volunteer McCarthyism perpetrated by ultranationalist enthusiasts, whose tactics of harassment and intimidation proved very effective in silencing most dissent in what was still a relatively tightly knit and conformist society.
The other side of the coin was indoctrination. The Japanese government had engaged in this from the start of its program of modernization, but now
the effort was stepped up and spread not just through the schools but also through the mass media. Textbooks were repeatedly revised to bring them in line with the spirit of the time. There was, however, no Mein Kampf of Japanese totalitarianism. An effort was made to produce a national philosophy, resulting in a book called Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of National Polity), but this was a strange amalgam of outmoded ideas. It stressed the ancient mythology and the superiority of Japan to other countries because of the uniqueness of its unbroken imperial line. There was a great deal of material about the “imperial will,” but also much about the Confucian virtues of harmony, loyalty, and filial piety as well as Japan’s own medieval “way of the warrior.” It was deeply anti-Western and even more specifically aimed against individualism, which was alleged to be responsible for all the Western vices from democracy to communism. But there was little to give guidance to the movement.
The Kokutai no hongi was characteristic of much of the thought of the time, which increased in emotional intensity but not in intellectual content. Its positive ideas were at best vague. It fell back largely on undefined terms like “Japanese spirit,” “national polity,” and assorted slogans, such as one dug out of ancient Chinese philosophy and thought to mean “the whole world under one roof” (hakko ichiu). Conveniently, this could be interpreted as innocuously referring to the natural bond between all peoples or more menacingly to worldwide Japanese domination. The thought of the time was somewhat more explicit in what it condemned: greedy capitalists, corrupt politicians, individualism, internationalism, and a menacing but at the same time effete West. These were all lumped together in obloquy, each helping to discredit the others through their common Western background in a sort of institutional guilt by association. All Westerners were looked upon with suspicion, and by the late thirties children sometimes shouted the English word “spy” at any Westerner encountered on the street.
These political and intellectual trends had their effects on society. Anything considered “un-Japanese” was condemned, though the term proved as slippery to define as “un-American.” Ballroom dancing was frowned upon as an immoral Western custom, but no one dreamed of abandoning Western military technology. Baseball remained popular, but golf was criticized as a Western luxury sport. A not very successful effort was made to stem the flood of English words into Japanese conversation and writing. Street and railway signs were remade with the Romanized equivalents of place names omitted. Students, labor unions, and newspapers were curbed with increasing rigorousness. And women, while encouraged to come out of the home and fill the work-force needs of a wartime economy, were at the same time told to be nothing more than the obedient wives and dutiful mothers of Japanese tradition.
The trends toward a totalitarian society were unmistakable, but unlike Germany and Italy, no organized mass totalitarian movement emerged. In 1940 Konoe, back as prime minister for a second time, did paste together a large number of organizations into an “Imperial Rule Assistance Association” (Taisei yokusankai), but as its ponderous name suggests, it had no life. All the parties were forced to dissolve and enter its parliamentary branch, but even in the wartime election of April 1942, candidates with its official blessing could garner no more than 64 percent of the votes, the rest going to stubborn holdouts. Something closer to a mass organization was created during the war by reviving the traditional Tokugawa system of neighborhood associations (tonarigumi) to supervise rationing, spread information, and ensure absolute conformity.
What ideology the reaction of the thirties did have was directed back in history toward the ancient imperial mystique and the virtues of Tokugawa times, but of course there was no turning back to a premodern society or even to Meiji times. What had emerged was a far cry from the social solidarity of earlier days or the natural unity of ideals and objectives of the Meiji leaders. The latter, if they had survived to see it, would have been appalled by the artificial unity forced on a now very diverse society by a military dictatorship, itself divided between a largely autonomous army and navy controlling a supine civil government, disregarding the expressed wishes of the emperor, and embarked on a perilous course of adventure abroad.
The parallels were more with the emerging totalitarian states of Europe, particularly those of the Right, than with anything in Japan’s past. As an at least partially modernized country, with an educated populace and a pluralistic society, Japan could scarcely reestablish the old unity and harmony of a simpler, more static age. Nor could there be a traditional and generally accepted autocracy. Educated men inevitably had their own ideas, and they would demand a share in decisions, or else the government had to control them very carefully, limiting not only what they did but what they said and wrote. As in the modernized West, the premodern types of autocracy were no longer viable; totalitarianism had become the only real alternative to democracy. Modernization, moreover, had brought the means to transform premodern autocracy into modern totalitarianism: mass education, mass media, modernized police and military power, and a great centralization of both economic and political controls.
There were great differences, however, between the Japanese experience in totalitarianism and those of the Italians and Germans. The Japanese people, being closer to an authoritarian past, may have been more docile and easily led, while the opponents of the new trends were not well enough entrenched in their liberal ways and ideologies to put up much resistance. In any case, there was no revolutionary change, no sudden, wrenching break with the past, and no liquidation of large numbers of opponents. The changes came in small steps, none seemingly definitive in itself. Japanese totalitarianism thus appeared less harsh and more moderate—and in any case it was a truncated experience that never developed into a fully totalitarian system. Most surprising, it was achieved within the framework of the 1889 constitution. This helps account for the survival of much from the dream of the Meiji oligarchs as well as from the parliamentary system that had evolved out of it.
The constitution indeed proved to be a flexible and ambiguous document. It had accommodated the development of a fair facsimile of the British parliamentary system and then a military dictatorship with totalitarian leanings. This was its virtue in the twenties and its fatal flaw in the thirties. The theory of imperial rule without the reality had left an essentially headless system. It had never really been clear who was in charge—who would choose the prime minister or the other high officials around the emperor who acted in his name. This situation had raised no problems at first because a well-entrenched group of oligarchs occupied these posts and made the decisions; but when they disappeared, no one person or group clearly took their place. The twenties had produced one answer to the problem, the thirties an entirely different solution.
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WORLD WAR II
World War II, which was in reality the first true “world war,” actually started with the outbreak of Japan’s conflict with China in 1937, not with the European war of 1939 or the American joining of both wars in 1941. The foreign policy of the Japanese military was based on one seriously mistaken assumption. While giving full rein to Japanese chauvinism, it assumed that Japan’s neighbors would not only welcome Japan as a deliverer from Western oppression but would content themselves with docile subordination to Japanese leadership. Nationalism, however, was swelling rapidly, especially in China, and the realities of colonial rule in Korea and Manchuria made the Japanese no more attractive as masters than Europeans or Americans. As Japan’s empire grew, so did the Chinese determination to resist. Japan’s rise to power in East Asia and its drive for empire had come too late in world history for the same easy success that imperialistic adventures had had in the nineteenth century.
The war with China, which the Japanese euphemistically called the “China Incident,” was neither planned in Tokyo nor engineered by insubordinate officers in the field. On the night of July 7, 1937, fighting broke out accidentally between Chinese and Japanese troops on maneuvers near Peking. The Ja
panese military command in North China tried to settle the trouble locally, but the Chinese government, tired of many such local settlements, which had always been at China’s expense, and bolstered by a far more nationally aroused citizenry than had supported it in 1931, demanded a basic settlement. The Tokyo government, now dominated by the military, followed suit by demanding its own version of a “basic settlement.” During this impasse, Chinese planes attempted to bomb Japanese warships in the river at Shanghai on August 14, but hit the city instead. A major land battle around Shanghai ensued, while the fighting in the north continued to spread.
The Japanese government decided that the only answer to such Chinese intransigence was a quick knockout blow. It mounted a major military effort, with the army sweeping south and west from its bases in North China. Meanwhile, in heavy fighting, the crack divisions of Chiang Kai-shek’s army were finally defeated around Shanghai, and in December the invaders pressed on to capture Nanking, the capital, where Japanese soldiers indulged in an orgy of rape and pillage. But the Chinese continued to fight, and the Japanese doggedly pushed on, seeking the elusive knockout blow. By the autumn of 1938 Hankow in the center of the country and Canton in the far south were captured and most of Inner Mongolia and North China were overrun. The Japanese controlled all the largest cities, all the major ports, the bulk of the railway lines, and most of the more productive and heavily populated parts of the country. But the Nationalist government continued to fight from its provisional capital at Chungking in mountain-girt West China, while a troublesome guerrilla resistance developed around the Chinese Communist center of Yenan in the northwest.
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