by Toland, John
A few weeks later, on November 16, Koki Hirota, now foreign minister, officially accused America of initiating an anti-Japanese front. An economic boycott against Japan, he told Grew, would not stop the fighting in China, but encouraged the Chinese to prolong the hostilities. Hirota said that until now the Japanese had felt America was the only country with genuine impartiality and would help bring about peace, as Theodore Roosevelt had done in the Russo-Japanese War.
Three days later Japan took Soochow, and the roads to Nanking and Shanghai were open. On December 12, the eve of the fall of Nanking, relations with America and Great Britain were almost shattered when Japanese naval aviators sank the gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River, though its American flag was clearly visible. A week earlier an artillery regiment commanded by Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto (founder of the Cherry Society) had fired on the British gunboat Ladybird, then seized it.
These incidents revived President Roosevelt’s hope of quarantining the aggressor. He summoned the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, and suggested their two nations join in a naval blockade which would cut Japan off from raw materials. Lindsay protested that such a quarantine would lead to war. He cabled London that his “horrified criticisms” had “made little impression upon the President.” The next day, December 17, Roosevelt sketched out his quarantine plan to the Cabinet. His resolve was strengthened by a report from the Navy’s official Court of Inquiry in Shanghai that the attack on Panay had been wanton and ruthless; more important, a message to Combined Fleet had been intercepted and decoded by the U.S. naval intelligence indicating that the raid had been deliberately planned by an officer on the carrier Kaga.
In Tokyo the Konoye government was as aggrieved by the destruction of Panay and Ladybird as the Americans and the British. Foreign Minister Hirota brought a note to Ambassador Grew expressing regrets and offering full restitution for the sinking of the Panay. Abjectly apologetic, Hirota said, “I am having a very difficult time. Things happen unexpectedly.” The Japanese Navy high command also showed its disapproval by dismissing the Kaga commander, who was responsible for the Panay bombing. “We have done this to suggest that the Army do likewise and remove Hashimoto from his command,” said Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Navy Vice Minister, who had no relish for doing battle with the U.S. fleet, since he had spent considerable time in America and was cognizant of her potentialities.
The Japanese apology was officially accepted in Washington on Christmas Day (Grew observed that its arrival on Christmas Eve was a “masterly” arrangement) and the incident was apparently closed.c Great Britain also gracefully accepted an apology for the attack on the Ladybird, despite the refusal of the Japanese Army to follow Yamamoto’s advice. Hashimoto was not even reprimanded. He had been allowed to proceed to Nanking with his troops.
By the time the Japanese entered the city in December, all resistance had ended, and their commander, General Iwane Matsui—who had left Japan with the announcement: “I am going to the front not to fight an enemy, but in the state of mind of one who sets out to pacify his brother”—ordered them “to exhibit the honor and glory of Japan and augment the trust of the Chinese people” and to “protect and patronize Chinese officials and people, as far as possible.”
Instead they roamed the city, looting, burning, raping, murdering. According to one witness, men, women and children were “hunted like rabbits; everyone seen to move was shot.” Even the friendly Germans in an official report condemned the Japanese Army as “bestial machinery.”
It was not until General Matsui triumphantly entered the city that he learned there had been “breaches of military discipline and morality.” He ordered strict compliance with his former orders to “insure that no act whatsoever, which tends to disgrace honor, be perpetrated.” He declared: “Now the flag of the Rising Sun is floating over Nanking, and the Imperial Way is shining forth in the area south of the Yangtze. The dawn of the renaissance is about to take place. On this occasion, it is my earnest hope that the four hundred million people of China will reconsider.” Matsui returned to Shanghai, only to hear rumors a week later that “illegal acts” were still being committed. “Anyone guilty of misconduct must be severely punished,” he wrote the Nanking commander.
But the atrocities continued for another month. About one third of the city was gutted by fire; more than 20,000 Chinese male civilians of military age were marched out of the city and massacred by bayoneting or machine-gun fire. As many women and young girls were raped, murdered and then mutilated. Numerous older civilians were robbed and shot. By the end of the month at least 200,000, perhaps as many as 300,000 civilians had been slaughtered.
Why was such savagery inflicted on a nation the Japanese regarded as their main source of cultural inspiration, their Rome and Greece? It is axiomatic that soldiers of any army get put of hand in a foreign land and act with a brutality they would never dare exhibit at home, but this could hardly account for the extent and intensity of the atrocities. They could only have been incited by some of the more radical officers, in the belief that the Chinese should be taught a lesson.
Back home, Prime Minister Konoye knew less about the atrocities in Nanking than the Germans. He was aware, however, that with all the conquest of vast areas, the Japanese were no nearer to victory but were sinking more deeply into a quagmire. Konoye was a unique individual—a prince by birth and a socialist at heart. He seemed soft, shy and effete, if not weak. To those who knew him best, he was a man of almost painfully discriminating taste, of such wide interests and objectivity that he could listen with sympathy to those of all political beliefs. In fact, he listened with such sympathy that each in turn thought the prince agreed with him. It always took him an interminable time to make up his mind, since he first wanted to know all sides of a question, but once decision was made, almost nothing could make him change it. “He was simply impregnable,” his private secretary, Tomohiko Ushiba, recalled. Konoye had few idols and one was Lord Balfour, considered not quite qualified for the job of prime minister but decisive and effective once he took office. Undoubtedly Konoye hoped to be the Japanese Balfour.
Prince Konoye was the eldest son of Prince Atsumaro Konoye and the first heir in 250 years in the Konoye family to be born of a lawful wife—an occasion which prompted his great-grandfather to write numerous poems expressing his joy. Eight days after his birth, his mother died of puerperal fever, but until he was an adolescent he believed that his father’s second wife, his mother’s sister, was his real mother. “When I learned that she wasn’t,” he later said, “I began to think that life was a tissue of lies.”
When he was still a young man he was stricken with tuberculosis and spent two years doing little but staring at a ceiling and thinking. From this time he had a feeling for the underdog. He disliked money, millionaires and politicians and wrote many radical essays. Some of these socialistic convictions clung to him as he matured and even now he was against the privileged classes. To outsiders he gave the appearance of being democratic and treated all alike with courtesy. “Even beggars are guests,” he once told Ushiba. But his innermost self remained aristocratic—“far more so,” Ushiba recently recalled, “than you can possibly imagine.”
Almost everything about him seemed contradictory but made sense. He felt ill at ease with Americans, yet sent his eldest son, Fumitaka, to Lawrenceville and Princeton. He was fond of kimonos and wore them with fastidious care, yet he was equally at ease in Western clothes. His marriage was a love match but he treated his mistress, a geisha, with great affection. He had upset family tradition twice: first, by abolishing the system of having rooms in the main house for second, third and fourth “wives” (“It’s pardonable to have just one mistress, don’t you agree?”); and second, by discontinuing the family diary (“How could I possibly write the truth if it were unfavorable to me?”).
Only once did he seriously scold any of his five children, this in a stern letter to Fumitaka at Princeton chastising him for drinking and neglec
ting his studies. Fumitaka replied that he was just following the American way of life and the subject was closed.
His own father, who died when Konoye was thirteen, was so overprotective that Konoye spent his childhood with a leash around his waist to keep him from falling. Konoye showed affection to all his children, including the youngest, a daughter by his mistress. He would eat with them, singing and cavorting for their amusement more like an American father than a Japanese.
Product of an elegant society, with one foot in the past and one in the future, Prince Konoye’s considerable personal charm and polish hid to all but the discerning his profound sense of obligation to his country and a cynicism so deep that he trusted no man, including himself. He seemed to be what he was not, and even his family rarely saw the man behind the façade. Ushiba, probably as close to him as anyone, did see beyond the overly fond father, the loving husband, the charming dilettante, the considerate employer, to a strange, cold man; he was self-restrained and refined, and sophisticated to such a degree “that it was sometimes quite difficult to make out his real thinking.”
Once Ushiba asked him which Japanese historical figures he respected. “None,” was the answer. “Not even General Nogi or Admiral Togo [heroes of the Russo-Japanese War]?” “Certainly not!”
He treated the Emperor, for whom he had a warm personal feeling, rather intimately. While others sat on the edge of their chairs like ramrods in His Majesty’s presence, Konoye would sprawl comfortably. He didn’t do this as an insult, but because he felt so close to Hirohito. When he told someone on his way to an audience, “Oh, do remember me to the Emperor,” he was not being facetious, merely natural. He felt he came from just as good a family.
As hope of a solution in China had faded with every month, Prince Konoye looked desperately in another direction—a negotiated peace. He preferred England as mediator but the Army persuaded him to use the good offices of Germany, which was friendly with both parties. Hitler had sent Chiang Kai-shek arms and military advisers and was bound, if tenuously, to Japan by the year-old Anti-Comintern Pact. The terms were so reasonable that when the strongly pro-Chinese German ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann, presented them, Chiang Kai-shek seemed about to accept them.
But those two banes of stability in Japan—gekokujo and opportunism—again appeared. First, news came of another great triumph in China, and War Minister Sugiyama raised the price of negotiation; then the commander of the North China Garrison unexpectedly set up a puppet regime in Peking, against the specific orders of Konoye and the General Staff. Though the latter, under the urging of Ishihara, still called for negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek, Trautmann labored in vain. After conversations in Washington between their ambassador and President Roosevelt, China insisted that the Japanese terms were too broad. The Japanese saw this as evasion, and being inflexible negotiators themselves, lost their patience. Concluding that Chiang Kai-shek really didn’t want to negotiate, Konoye decided to take a shortcut to peace and deal with those Chinese who “shared Japan’s ideals.” On January 16, 1938, he announced that “the Imperial Government shall cease to deal with the National Government of China, and shall rely upon the establishment and growth of a new Chinese regime for co-operation.”
This brought sharp rebukes from intellectuals and a number of liberal Diet members. Ishihara also warned Konoye that it was a policy which would inevitably lead to endless trouble. Such criticism forced the Prime Minister to review his position and he began to realize that his hasty act might have committed Japan to a rigid, do-or-die policy—a settlement by full-scale war, the last thing he wanted. Assailed by self-doubts, he wondered if he should resign. But court officials persuaded him to remain in office, otherwise the Chinese would quite properly assume that failure to settle the China question had caused his resignation and it would be more difficult than ever to achieve the solution they wanted.
It was at last apparent to Konoye that the Army itself didn’t have a fixed policy on China and was drifting with the tide of events, but unable to get reliable information about Supreme Command matters, he could only watch in frustration as the situation in China worsened.
In the name of national defense the Army proposed a national mobilization law, designed to take away the Diet’s last vestiges of control over war measures and direct every aspect of national life toward an efficient war economy. Army spokesmen argued persuasively and not unreasonably that Japan was a small, overpopulated country with almost no natural resources; surrounded as it was by enemies—Russians, Chinese, Americans and British—total mobilization of the nation’s strength was the sole solution. The law was passed in March 1938—the Diet, in effect, voting for its own capitulation to the Army. “Liberties lost to the Japanese Army,” commented Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador in Tokyo, “were lost for good.”
The people were also being prepared psychologically for the crusade in East Asia with two slogans borrowed from the past. One was “kokutai,” the national essence, and the other was “kodo,” connected, ironically, with the recently crushed clique. The original meaning of kodo, the Imperial Way, was twisted now into signifying world order and peace to be achieved by Japanese control of East Asia.
Both kokutai and kodo underlined the father relationship of the Emperor to the people as well as his divinity and were already rousing millions with ardor for a holy war to free Asia from both colonialism and Communism.
* In an interview a few weeks before his death in 1966 General Araki said, “We [Imperial Way] were idealists, they [Control] were pragmatists. We thought force was necessary at times but it was more important to set the nation in a proper course according to Meiji’s five principles. Therefore it was not right simply to crush China.” He then added wryly, “But those who speak of ideals lose. The realists always get their own way in the end.”
† After he had been forced to leave China, Borodin reportedly said, “When the next Chinese general comes to Moscow and shouts, ‘Hail to the world revolution!,’ better send at once for the OGPU. All that any of them want is rifles.”
‡ On their part, the Soviets accused America and Britain of plotting against them in Asia. A Short History of the U.S.S.R., Part II, put out by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Institute of History, states: “In April 1927, political circles in Britain and the U.S.A. tried to provoke a military conflict between the Soviet Union and China. Police and troops broke into the Soviet Embassy in Peking, arrested members of the staff and searched and ransacked the premises. This provocation was instigated by representatives of the Western powers, a fact which was confirmed by the Chinese chargé d’affaires in the U.S.S.R. in his reply to the Soviet protest note. He stated quite clearly that the action of the Chinese military authorities and police had been prearranged with Western diplomats.” This same work further declares: “In the summer of 1929 … ruling circles in the U.S.A., Japan, Britain and France made another attempt to provoke a Sino-Soviet clash and involve the U.S.S.R. in war in the Far East. On May 27, 1929, bandits attacked the Soviet consulate in Harbin, and on July 10, Chinese militarists tried to seize the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was administered jointly by the U.S.S.R. and China … In September and October 1929, detachments of Chinese militarists and Russian whiteguards invaded Soviet territory.” No corroborating evidence could be found to these accusations.
§ It was not until after the war that the Japanese officers involved in the Marco Polo Bridge incident generally concluded that Mao’s agents had sparked the incident. “We were then too simple to realize this was all a Communist plot,” General Akio Doi, a Russian expert, said in 1967. General Ho Ying-chin, Chiang’s minister of war at the time, still believes, like most Chinese, that the incident was plotted by Japanese radical militarists, although he did admit in a recent interview that after Chou En-lai read Chiang’s diary in Sian and realized the Generalissimo was strongly anti-Japanese, he began conspiring to get the Kuomintang involved in an all-out war with Japan.
Without d
oubt, both the Russians and the Chinese Communists were doing their best to foster a long, enervating conflict between Chiang and the Japanese. That fall Mao Tse-tung told his troops in Yenan, “The Sino-Japanese conflict gives us, the Chinese Communists, an excellent opportunity for expansion. Our policy is to devote seventy percent of our effort to this end, twenty percent to coping with the Government, and ten percent to fighting the Japanese. This policy is to be carried out in three stages. During the first stage, we are to work with the Kuomintang in order to ensure our existence and growth. During the second stage, we are to achieve parity in strength with the Kuomintang. During the third stage, we are to penetrate deep into parts of Central China to establish bases for counterattacks against the Kuomintang.”
ǁ James B. Crowley, assistant professor of history at Amherst College, wrote in the May 1963 issue of Journal of Asian Studies that “it would be safe to conclude that this incident was not caused by any ‘conspiracy’ of Japanese army officers and that the Japanese military was not primarily responsible for the steady drift towards war.” More likely, he believes, it was the Chinese—and they had plenty of provocation—who raised Marco Polo into a major crisis. “The tragedy is that the interaction of conflicting national policies and aspirations transformed an incident into a war from which neither government was to derive substantial benefit.”
