The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  There had been a struggle over the vast territory north of China for several hundred years, with the Chinese occupying Manchuria and Korea, and the Russians taking over Maritime Province, the coastal region of Siberia from Bering Strait to Vladivostok. For centuries Japan had cut herself off from the outside world and did not join this scramble for territory until 1853. In that year an American commodore, Matthew C. Perry, sailed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay and, at cannon point, opened up a medieval Japan to modern life. The Japanese took to it with a will. They assiduously copied the latest techniques of mass production and even added original procedures—girls in textile factories, for example, worked on roller skates to handle more spindles. They built a strong army and navy and began imitating the European game of forceful diplomacy, by sending out punitive expeditions. Within a few decades Japan controlled most of Korea and in 1894 fought a war with China for this country. Japan won easily, and also gained possession of Formosa, the southern tip of Manchuria and the Liaotung Peninsula with the important seaports of Port Arthur and Dairen.

  Alarmed that an interloper was taking a piece of their “Chinese Melon,” Russia, Germany and France joined forces and compelled Japan to give up the peninsula she had just won in battle. Russia then appropriated Liaotung for herself but could keep it less than ten years. In 1904 the Japanese, their national pride stung, struck back at the Czar, whose empire covered one sixth of the earth’s land surface, and astonished the world by winning overwhelming victories. Once more Japan had Port Arthur and Dairen.

  She also had all the railways built by Russia in southern Manchuria. Japan could have seized the rest of the country but wanted to be recognized by the Europeans as a respected member of the imperialist community. Accordingly, she poured a billion dollars into the bandit-infested, sparsely populated territory, and maintained such law and order along the railroads that hundreds of thousands of Japanese, Chinese and Korean traders and settlers flooded into the area.

  It was this mass influx that had inspired Ishihara and Itagaki to envision a Manchuria free of its Chinese war-lord ruler. Ishihara dreamed of making it an autonomous state, a haven for all of its ethnic groups—Japanese, Chinese, Manchurians, Koreans and White Russians. Here genuine democracy and eventual socialism would be practiced and a buffer set up against Soviet Russia.ǁ

  All this was to be effected by the Kwantung Army, with the blessing of Tokyo. But the Emperor and the War Ministry refused to sanction a plan that appeared to be masked aggression. Undeterred, Ishihara, Itagaki and their followers decided to act on their own—to commit gekokujo. The first step was to eliminate Marshal Chang, the aging Chinese war lord. On June 4, 1928, a Kwantung Army staff officer commanding men from an Engineer regiment dynamited Chang’s special train and he was fatally injured. From then on, and despite numerous warnings from Tokyo, Ishihara and Itagaki used the Kwantung Army as if it were their private legion. At last, in the summer of 1931, they were ready for the final step and secretly massed troops to take Manchuria from the Chinese by force. Hearing rumors of this, the Foreign Minister persuaded the War Minister to send an officer from Tokyo to bring the Kwantung Army under control. The man selected, a major general, arrived in Mukden on the evening of September 18. A few miles away a charge of dynamite was being planted on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway near the barracks of the 7th Chinese Brigade. The explosion would be the excuse “to bring order” by sending in troops and seizing Mukden.

  The general was easily diverted by Colonel Itagaki to the Kikubumi, a Japanese inn, for an evening with the geishas. About ten o’clock there was a detonation, but the damage to the tracks was so slight that a southbound train passed by safely a few minutes later. A Japanese consular officer wanted to adjust the matter with the Chinese, but a Kwantung Army staff major drew his sword and threatened to run him through. At ten-thirty Japanese troops fired on the Chinese barracks while other detachments converged on the walls of Mukden. At the Kikubumi, the general was too drunk to notice the fusillade. If he had, it would have made no difference. He had known about the plot from the beginning—and approved of it.

  By morning Mukden was in Japanese hands, to the dismay of not only the world but Tokyo itself. At the request of the Cabinet, the Army General Staff ordered the Kwantung Army to limit the expanse of hostilities. This group of individualists simply ignored the command and continued to sweep over the rest of Manchuria. It was gekokujo on a grand scale.

  In Tokyo, members of the Cherry Society were already secretly conspiring to support the rebel action in Manchuria with a coup d’état of their own. Their primary purpose was to impose radical internal reforms. These reforms, together with the conquest of Manchuria, would lead to the new Japan. The plot (the Brocade Flag Revolution) involved 120 officers and their troops, augmented by followers of the firebrand Ikki Kita. The rebels planned to assassinate government and court officials, then assemble in front of the Palace, and by way of apologizing to the Emperor, commit hara-kiri.

  But so many groups with so many differing opinions were involved in the coup that someone turned informer, in pique or for pay, and the plotters were arrested on October 17, 1931. The leader of the conspiracy was sentenced to twenty days’ confinement and his assistant got half that. Their accomplices were merely reprimanded. It was the old story: amnesty for any actual or planned violence if it was done for the glory of the nation.

  That evening the War Minister radioed the Kwantung Army a limp reproach:

  1. THE KWANTUNG ARMY IS TO REFRAIN FROM ANY NEW PROJECT SUCH AS BECOMING INDEPENDENT FROM THE IMPERIAL ARMY AND SEIZING CONTROL OF MANCHURIA AND MONGOLIA.

  2. THE GENERAL SITUATION IS DEVELOPING ACCORDING TO THE INTENTIONS OF THE ARMY, SO YOU MAY BE COMPLETELY REASSURED.

  As if this wasn’t enough, the War Vice Minister added these conciliatory words:

  WE HAVE BEEN UNITED IN MAKING DESPERATE EFFORTS TO SOLVE THE EXISTING DIFFICULTY … TRUST OUR ZEAL, ACT WITH GREAT PRUDENCE.… GUARD AGAINST IMPETUOUS ACTS, SUCH AS DECLARING THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE KWANTUNG ARMY, AND WAIT FOR A FAVORABLE TURN OF EVENTS ON OUR SIDE.

  Rather than being appeased, the Kwantung commander indignantly denied that his army was seeking independence, and though admitting it had “tended to act overpositively and arbitrarily,” claimed it had done so “for the country.”

  The abortive Brocade Flag Revolution did achieve one of its purposes: in the next few years it assured the success of the Manchurian adventure. It also convinced many Japanese that politics and business were so corrupt that a military-led reform had to be supported. At the same time it engendered such bitterness that the two wings of the reform movement began to split. One, nicknamed “the Control” clique by newsmen, believed it was not enough to take Manchuria, since security against a possible attack by the Soviet Union could be forestalled only by control of China itself. The Kita followers, known as “the Imperial Way” clique, were convinced this new expansion would be folly; an industrialized Manchuria would be a sturdy enough fortress against Communism.

  The younger, more idealistic officers belonged to the latter faction, while field-grade officers as well as key men in the War Ministry supported the Control clique. The more radical nationalists turned immediately to assassination. Each member of the Blood Brotherhood, for example, was pledged to kill at least one “corrupt” political or financial leader on or about February 11, 1932, the 2,592nd celebration of the ascension to the throne of Jinmu, the first human emperor of Japan, the fifth in line of descent from the Sun Goddess, according to legend. Those marked for death included Finance Minister Junnosuke Inoue, a forthright man who often opposed the mounting Army appropriation. The conspirator assigned to kill Inoue practiced shooting on a deserted beach, and four days ahead of schedule put three bullets into Inoue right on the sidewalk. Less than a month later, the second murder took place under similar circumstances. As Baron Takuma Dan, president of Mitsui, stepped out of his car, a young assassin jabbed a pistol in his back and pulled the trigger.

/>   Once again the trials provided the citizens of Japan with melodrama and propaganda. The assassin in Japanese history had often been a more sympathetic figure than the victim. Wasn’t there some lack of virtue in a man who let himself be killed, and wasn’t an assassin who murdered for lofty purposes merely defending the common people against tyranny? Overwhelming evidence of guilt notwithstanding, the two killers were not executed but given life imprisonment, from which it was obvious they would be paroled in a few years.

  On Sunday, May 15, only two months after the death of Dan, a pair of taxis pulled up at the side entrance to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a Shinto temple dedicated to all who have died in Japan’s wars. Nine Navy and Army officers alighted from the cabs and bowed toward the Sun Goddess; then, armed with charms bought from a priest, returned to the taxis and headed for the Prime Minister’s official residence. Here they forced their way past a police sergeant and into the room of Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, a diminutive man of seventy-five with a goatee. The old man calmly led the would-be assassins to a Japanese-style room, where they politely removed their shoes and sat down. At that moment a comrade who had got lost in the corridors entered, dagger in hand, and cried out, “No use talking! Fire!” Everyone began shooting at the courageous little man who had opposed the conquest of Manchuria and steadfastly refused to recognize the puppet government of the province now going under the manufactured name of Manchukuo (“State of Manchu”). The assassins left by taxi for police headquarters to launch an attack, but it was Sunday, and except for a few duty officers there was no one to fight. Before surrendering they heaved a grenade at the Bank of Japan. Other conspirators scattered handbills in the streets, and threw bombs which shattered a few windows.

  The coup itself—named the 5/15 (May 15) Incident—had fizzled out, but it brought forth even more sensational trials. There were three in all—one for civilians, one each for Army and Navy personnel. As usual a large segment of the public sympathized with the assassins, and there was general applause when one defendant declared that he and his comrades only wanted to sound an alarm to awaken the nation. The people had heard so much about “corruption” that little sympathy was shown the memory of gallant little Inukai. His death was a warning to politicians.

  Feeling ran so high that 110,000 petitions for clemency, signed or written entirely in blood, inundated officials of the trial. Nine young men from Niigata asked to take the place of those on trial, and to show their good faith enclosed their own nine little fingers pickled in a jar of alcohol.

  One of Inukai’s assassins did express regret but said that the Prime Minister had to be “sacrificed on the altar of national reformation.” Another declared, “Life or death does not count with me. I say to those who be-moan my death, ‘Do not shed tears for me but sacrifice yourselves on the altars of reform.’ ”

  The results of the trials could have been predicted. No one was sentenced to death, and of the forty to receive sentences almost all were free in a few years. To the people they were martyrs, their own champions. Who else called for such drastic methods to end the crippling depression?a Who else would lead the farmers and workers out of poverty? Who else dared publicly assail leading politicians, court officials and financial barons for corruption? And since so many people believed in this so implicitly, the power of the militarists and rightists continued to grow.

  For three years the idealistic young officers, chafed by the corruption surrounding them, bided their time. Only their reverence for the Emperor prevented them from supporting a Communist revolution. But one of them, driven by “an impulse from on high,” took matters into his own hands. It was a bloody and bizarre action even for a country with one foot planted in feudalism. One morning in August 1935, Lieutenant Colonel Saburo Aizawa, after visiting the Meiji Shrine for advice, entered the back door of Army General Staff headquarters, a decrepit two-story wooden building just outside the Palace grounds. Like so many other idealistic, radical officers of the day, he had become incensed when their idol, General Jinsaburo Mazaki, was dismissed from his post as Inspector General of Military Education.b

  Aizawa strode unannounced into the office of another general, Tetsuzan Nagata, chief of the Military Affairs Bureau and one of Mazaki’s most outspoken foes. “I feel an impulse to assassinate Nagata,” Aizawa had recently told the Sun Goddess at the Ise Shrine. “If I am right, please help me succeed. If I am wrong, please make me fail.” Nagata, at his desk, did not even look up as Aizawa pulled his sword, lunged and missed. Slightly wounded on the second thrust, the general lurched for an exit but Aizawa stabbed him through the back, pinning him momentarily to the door. Aizawa slashed his neck twice, then walked to the office of a friend to say he had just carried out Heaven’s judgment and went off to buy a cap—he’d lost his in the fracas. When a military policeman arrested him, Aizawa thought he’d be examined briefly and allowed to return to duty. Instead he found himself the star of a sensational trial that was shaking the foundations of the Army and became the rallying point of all the young superpatriots who wanted to reform the nation overnight.

  At his trial Aizawa was treated gingerly by the five judges and was allowed to use the witness stand to attack statesmen, politicians and the zaibatsu (family business combines such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi) for corruption. Pleading guilty to the charge of murder, he claimed he had only done his duty as an honorable soldier of the Emperor. “The country was in a deplorable state: the farmers were impoverished, officials were involved in scandals, diplomacy was weak, and the prerogative of the Supreme Command had been violated by the naval-limitation agreements,” he declared in the stilted prose of reform.c “I came to realize that the senior statesmen, those close to the Throne, powerful financiers and bureaucrats, were attempting gradually to corrupt the government and the Army for their own selfish interests.” These conditions had inspired him to murder—to commit gekokujo.

  “If the court fails to understand the spirit which guided Colonel Aizawa,” his defense counsel said ominously, “a second Aizawa, and even a third, will appear.”

  2.

  These prophetic words were uttered on February 25, 1936, in snowbound Tokyo, even as the leaders of the most ambitious coup in the history of modern Japan were ready to strike. Their principal target the following morning would be Prime Minister Keisuke Okada, a retired admiral. Okada was hosting a banquet at his official residence on the evening of the twenty-fifth, in celebration of the victory of the government party (Minseito) in the general election for the House of Representatives five days earlier. He was a politician by request, not choice. The previous fall the Emperor had asked him to form a new cabinet after a scandal involving Finance Ministry officials forced the resignation of his predecessor, Viscount Makoto Saito, also a retired admiral.

  While Okada’s guests toasted the election results as a resounding triumph for the admiral’s policies and a blow to fascism and militarism, his private wish was that he could resign. He was weary from the struggle, and it seemed to him that despite the victory at the polls, the militarists and chauvinists were as strong as ever.

  Two other men marked for assassination were at a party several blocks away at the American embassy, where Ambassador Joseph C. Grew was giving a dinner for thirty-six in honor of the recently cashiered prime minister, who had been made Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Among the guests was still another retired admiral, Kantaro Suzuki, Grand Chamberlain to the Emperor.

  Grew was a tall, courtly man with black bushy eyebrows, mustache and gray-white hair. Born in Boston’s Back Bay, as was his great-grandfather, he had attended Groton and Harvard with Franklin D. Roosevelt. An aristocrat with democratic instincts, he had already distinguished himself as a diplomat in Europe. He was particularly qualified to serve in Tokyo, since he had a rare understanding and affection for Japan and all things Japanese, as well as a wife who had previously lived in the country, spoke the language and was a descendant of Commodore Perry.

  That evening Grew had gone to t
he trouble of providing special entertainment for his guest of honor: a private showing of Naughty Marietta, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. He had chosen the film because “it was full of lovely old Victor Herbert music, beautiful scenes, a pretty, romantic story and no vulgarity whatever.…” After dinner he escorted former Prime Minister Saito to a comfortable armchair in the salon. Grew knew the old gentleman had never attended a sound movie and if he was bored he could take a nap. But Viscount Saito was too enraptured to sleep; and though it was his custom to leave parties promptly at ten o’clock, not only did he stay for refreshments at the end of the first half of the film but remained until the end. The other guests must also have been moved by the romantic story, for when the lights went on, the eyes of all the Japanese ladies “were distinctly red.”

  It was half past eleven when the Privy Seal and his wife got up to leave. The Grews saw them to the door, pleased that the admiral had enjoyed himself so much. Scattered flakes of snow drifted down gently as the Saito car drove off.

  At four o’clock in the morning on February 26, Captain Kiyosada Koda and the other rebel leaders routed out their enlisted men, who still knew nothing of the plot; they thought they were going out on another night maneuver. A few were told there would be killing that night.

  “I want you to die with me,” Lieutenant Kurihara told Pfc. Kuratomo.

  Completely taken by surprise, Kuratomo nevertheless answered immediately, “Yes, sir. I’ll die.” A superior officer’s order was absolute, never to be disobeyed. “This,” Kuratomo later recalled, “was the first time I realized something very serious was taking place.”