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

by Toland, John

  The conference to approve the move south was convened on July 2. The members sat stiffly on both sides of two long tables covered with brocade, but the minute the Emperor entered the room they shot to their feet. His skin, like that of his three brothers, was smooth as porcelain and of unique coloring. His army uniform did not make him look a bit martial. He stepped up to the dais and sat down before a gold screen, facing south, the direction to be honored according to court etiquette. He seemed detached, as if above worldly affairs.

  Below, the members sat down at right angles to His Majesty and stared woodenly at each other, hands on knees. Then the ceremony began. All but the President of the Privy Council, Yoshimichi Hara, had rehearsed what they would say. First Prince Konoye rose, bowed to the Emperor and read a document entitled “Outline of National Policies in View of Present Developments.” It was the plan to go south; the first step would be occupation of French Indochina. This, hopefully, would come without bloodshed by exerting diplomatic pressure on the Vichy government; but if persuasion failed, military force was to be used, even at the risk of provoking war with America and Britain.

  Sugiyama bowed and said he agreed that Japan should push south. “However, if the German-Soviet war develops favorably for our empire, I believe we should also use force to settle this problem and so secure our northern borders.”

  Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of the Navy General Staff, also felt it was necessary to go south despite the risks. When he finished, the President of the Privy Council began asking questions, some of them more embarrassing than expected at such a formalized meeting. What were the realistic chances of taking Indochina by diplomatic means? he wondered.

  “The odds are that diplomatic measures won’t succeed,” replied Matsuoka. Still against going south, he had to argue the majority decision.

  Hara was a small, mild-looking man but he was not at all intimidated by the stern faces of the generals and admirals. He emphasized that military action was “a serious thing.” And wasn’t sending troops into Indochina while attempting to ratify a treaty between Japan and France inconsistent with the Imperial Way of conducting diplomacy? “I do not think it wise for Japan to resort to direct, unilateral military action and thus be branded an aggressor.”

  “I will see to it that we won’t seem to be involved in an act of betrayal in the eyes of the world,” Matsuoka assured him.

  Hara remained dubious. Why not go north? he suggested and began using some of Matsuoka’s own arguments. Hitler’s attack on Russia presented the chance of a lifetime. “The Soviet Union is spreading Communism all over the world and we will have to fight her sooner or later.… The people are really eager to fight her.” What was supposed to be a formality threatened to turn into a debate. “I want to avoid war with the United States. I don’t think they would retaliate if we attacked the Soviet Union.” On the other hand, Hara feared a move into Indochina would bring war with the Anglo-Saxons.

  Matsuoka had used the same words the day before. “There is that possibility,” he agreed.

  Sugiyama privately thought that Hara’s questions were “sharp as a knife,” but curtly pointed out that the occupation of Indochina was “absolutely necessary to crush the intrigues of Britain and America. Moreover, with Germany’s military situation so favorable, I don’t believe Japan’s advance into French Indochina will provoke America to war.” He warned, however, of counting out the Soviet Union prematurely. They should wait “from fifty to sixty days,” to make certain that Germany would win. The finality of his statement shut off further discussion, and any hopes that Matsuoka might have had about resuming the debate vanished. A vote was taken and the policy document unanimously approved. Japan would go south.

  Throughout the proceedings the Emperor had been sitting silent and impassive, as custom decreed, his mere presence making any decision legal and binding. The document was taken to the Cabinet secretariat, where a copy was made on official stationery. It was signed by Konoye and the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff, brought to the Emperor and finally to the Privy Seal’s office, where the imperial seal was affixed. It was national policy, and another step had been taken toward total war.

  4.

  Now Hull’s counterproposal had to be dealt with. Matsuoka, predictably, was still in a rage over the Oral Statement, which criticized unnamed Japanese officials for inflammatory public remarks. This rather innocuous rebuke was, to Matsuoka, a personal insult as well as an unforgivable affront to Japan, and at a liaison conference on July 12 he said, with anger bordering on paranoia, “I’ve thought about it for the last ten days, and I believe America looks on Japan as a protectorate or a dependency! While I’m foreign minister, I can’t accept it. I’ll consider anything else, but I reject the Oral Statement. It is typically American to ride roughshod over the weak. The statement treats Japan as a weak and dependent country. Some Japanese are against me, and some even say the Prime Minister is against me.” His words tumbled out, revealing as much resentment for his personal enemies as for Hull. “Little wonder then that the United States thinks Japan is exhausted and therefore sends us such a statement. I propose right now that we reject the statement out of hand and break off negotiations with the United States!” He called Roosevelt “a real demagogue” and accused him of trying to lead America into war. As for himself, it had been his cherished hope since his youth to preserve peace between Japan and America. “I think there is no hope, but,” he concluded irrationally, “let us try until the very end.”

  At last he had said something the military liked. Even if there seemed to be no hope, Tojo repeated, they should keep negotiating with America. “Can’t we at least keep the United States from formally going to war by means of the Tripartite Pact? Naturally, the Oral Statement is an insult to our kokutai and we must reject it, as the Foreign Minister advises. But what if we sincerely tell the Americans what we Japanese hold to be right? Won’t this move them?”

  Navy Minister Oikawa was also for coming to some agreement with the Americans. According to reports, they weren’t in any position to instigate a war in the Pacific. “Since we don’t want a Pacific war either, isn’t there room for negotiation?”

  “Room?” Matsuoka retorted with some sarcasm. “They’ll probably listen only if we tell them we won’t use force in the south. What else would they accept?” He was in no mood for compromise. “They sent a message like this because they’re convinced we submit easily.”

  It was obvious to Prince Konoye that Matsuoka was making this a personal issue and that it would be necessary to by-pass him. But the Foreign Minister’s influence was still so great that the Prime Minister had to meet surreptitiously with key Cabinet members to draft their own conciliatory reply to Hull. This was presented to Matsuoka, but it took him several days just to read it—he claimed he was sick—and even after he had, he tried to delay matters. First, the Oral Statement should be rejected, then there should be a wait of several days before dispatching the answer.

  Prime Minister Konoye agreed to reject the statement but insisted that both the rejection and the reply be sent simultaneously to Hull, to save time. Konoye gave these instructions to Matsuoka’s associate Dr. Yoshie Saito, who promised to follow orders. He disobeyed—another act of gekokujo —and without consulting anyone, cabled a single message to Washington: the rejection of the Oral Statement. He held back the proposal for a few days, as Matsuoka had wanted, and Hull first saw it in an intercepted cable to Germany.

  To the legal-minded Tojo such action was insupportable, and he told Konoye that Matsuoka should be dismissed at once. But the prince did not want open conflict with Matsuoka, who was still a public hero after his meetings with Hitler and Stalin. Konoye decided to get rid of him by subterfuge: he would ask the entire Cabinet to resign and then form a new one with a different foreign minister. He called an extraordinary session of the Cabinet at six-thirty on July 16, and when he made his proposal, no one objected; Matsuoka was home ill in bed.

  This terminated the stormy
career of the most controversial figure in Japanese diplomacy. The end had come through an act of insubordination committed for Matsuoka’s sake by a faithful subordinate, but without his knowledge.

  The following day the Emperor asked Konoye to form a new cabinet. He did so within twenty-four hours, which was possible only because there were so few changes. Matsuoka was replaced by an admiral who got along well with Americans, Teijiro Toyoda. One of his first acts was to cable his ambassador in Vichy that the Japanese Army would push into Indochina on July 24 no matter what the Vichy government decided to do. But on the day before the deadline, Vichy agreed to the peaceful entry, of Japanese troops in southern Indochina. The ambassador in Vichy triumphantly wired Tokyo:

  THE REASON WHY THE FRENCH SO READILY ACCEPTED THE JAPANESE DEMANDS WAS THAT THEY SAW HOW RESOLUTE WAS OUR DETERMINATION AND HOW SWIFT OUR WILL. IN SHORT, THEY HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO YIELD.

  When Hull read this, courtesy of MAGIC, he was as indignant, and perhaps rightly so, as if Indochina had been taken by force. He pressed Roosevelt to retaliate by imposing a new embargo on Japan, despite a recent warning from the War Plans Division of the Navy that such action “would probably result in a fairly early attack by Japan on Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, and possibly involve the United States in early war in the Pacific.”

  This time Roosevelt listened to those who, like Ickes, had long been urging him to act forcefully against all aggressors.o On the night of July 26 he ordered all Japanese assets in America frozen, and Britain and the Netherlands soon followed suit. In consequence, not only did all trade with the United States cease, but the fact that America had been Japan’s major source of oil imports now left Japan in an untenable situation. To the New York Times it was “the most drastic blow short of war.” To Japan’s leaders it was much more. They had secured the bases in Indochina by negotiation with Vichy France, a country recognized if not approved by America, and international law was on their side; the freezing was the last step in the encirclement of the empire by the ABCD (American, British, Chinese, Dutch) powers, a denial to Japan of her rightful place as leader of Asia and a challenge to her very existence.

  The frustration, near-hysteria and anger could be expected but not the confusion among the Supreme Command. Five days later Naval Chief of Staff Nagano, a cautious and sensible man, still had not recovered from an event that should have been foreseen. In an audience with the Emperor, he first said he wanted to avoid war and that this could be done by revoking the Tripartite Pact, which the Navy had always maintained was a stumbling block to peace with America. Then he warned that Japan’s oil stock would only last for two years, and once war came, eighteen months, and concluded, “Under such circumstances, we had better take the initiative. We will win.”

  It was a curious performance. In one paragraph Nagano had put in a word for peace, cleared the Navy of responsibility for any diplomatic disaster, prophesied an oil famine, suggested a desperate attack and predicted victory.

  The Emperor cut through the tangle with one question: “Will you win a great victory? Like the Battle of Tsushima?”

  “I am sorry, but that will not be possible.”

  “Then,” said the Emperor grimly, “the war will be a desperate one.”

  * The phrase originated with Kaiser Wilhelm in 1895. He had a revelation of Oriental hordes overwhelming Europe and made a sketch of his vision: a Buddha riding upon a dragon above ruined cities. The caption read: “Die gelbe Gefahr!”—“The Yellow Peril.” Several copies were made and presented to royal relatives all over Europe as well as every embassy in Berlin.

  † Arnold Toynbee saw some logic in their point of view. He later wrote that Japan’s “economic interests in Manchuria were not superfluities but vital necessities of her international life.… The international position of Japan—with Nationalist China, Soviet Russia, and the race-conscious English-speaking peoples of the Pacific closing in upon her—had suddenly become precarious again.”

  ‡ In this connection, Ambassador Grew once told the State Department: “We should not lose sight of the fact, deplorable but true, that no practical and effective code of international morality upon which the world can rely has yet been discovered, and that the standards of morality of one nation in given circumstances have little or no relation to the standards of the individuals of the nations in question. To shape our foreign policy on the unsound theory that other nations are guided and bound by our present standards of international ethics would be to court sure disaster.”

  § Almost every Japanese household had two shrines—one Buddhist, one Shinto. Shinto (“the way of the gods”) was the national religion. It was based on awe inspired by any phenomenon of nature. More of a cult of ancestor worship and communion with the past than a religion per se, it had been revived in the nineteenth century and transformed into a nationalistic ideology.

  ǁ This was not mere paranoia. Shortly before, Stalin had written to Chiang Kai-shek: “If our negotiations with the European countries should produce satisfactory results—which is not impossible—this may be an important step toward the creation of a bloc of peace-loving nations in the Far East as well. Time is working favorably toward the formation of such a bloc.

  “As a result of the now two-year-old war with China, Japan has lost her balance, begun to get nervous, and is hurling herself recklessly, now against Britain, and now against Soviet Russia and the Republic of Outer Mongolia. This is a sign of Japanese weakness and her conduct may unite all others against her. From Soviet Russia, Japan has already received the counterblows she deserves. Britain and the United States are waiting for an opportune moment to harm Japan. And we have no doubt that before long she will receive another counterblow from China, one that will be a hundred times mightier.”

  a Now North Vietnam.

  b At this time Hitler did not want war with Japan and the Anglo-Saxons and felt, like Matsuoka, that the pact obviated such a conflict. He wrote Mussolini that “a close co-operation with Japan is the best way either to keep America entirely out of the picture or to render her entry into the war ineffective.” Almost as soon as the pact was signed the Führer changed his mind about keeping peace in the Far East. He decided that Japan had to become involved in the war as soon as possible, and the German ambassador in Tokyo was ordered to inveigle Japan into attacking Singapore at the risk of provoking the United States.

  c Hornbeck’s views on China were shared by an America which had made Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth a best seller. For three decades Americans had held a highly idealized picture of the Chinese, looking upon them as childlike innocents who needed protection against the imperialism of Britain and Japan. China was a helpless, deserving nation whose virtues America alone understood.

  “In this highly subjective picture of the Chinese,” wrote George F. Kennan, “there was no room for a whole series of historical and psychological realities. There was no room for the physical ruthlessness that had characterized Chinese political life generally in recent decades; for the formidable psychological and political powers of the Chinese people themselves; for the strong streak of xenophobia in their nature; for the lessons of the Boxer Rebellion; for the extraordinary exploitative talent shown by Chinese factions, of all times, in turning outside aid to domestic political advantage.”

  The so-called China Lobby did much to further China’s cause in America. It was created by T. V. Soong, a clever and charming member of China’s most omnipotent family. One sister had married Sun Yat-sen; another, a descendant of Confucius, H. H. Kung; and a third, Chiang Kai-shek. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Soong became close friends with influential Americans such as Henry Morgenthau, Harry Hopkins, Roy Howard, Henry Luce, Joseph Alsop and Thomas Corcoran. With their help, and that of a Pole, Ludwig Rajchman, Soong set up the lobby in 1940 and found he now had direct access to President Roosevelt without having to go through Hull.

  d Several months earlier, on November 30, 1940, Japan had signed a treaty with the Wang government.
The son of a scholar, Wang had studied political science in Tokyo and became Sun Yat-sen’s chief disciple. It was he who wrote down Sun’s last wishes at his deathbed. He served twice as premier of the Republic of China before becoming vice president of the Nationalist party. From the beginning he had been a rival of Chiang Kai-shek’s, and their relations became so strained that at a private luncheon late in 1938 he suggested they both resign their offices and “redeem the sins they had committed against China.” This infuriated Chiang and a few days later Wang thought it best to escape by plane to Hanoi. On March 30, 1940, he established his own splinter government in Nanking, although he had little popular support and not much money.

  What he wanted primarily was peace with Japan for the good of the Chinese people, and if he had succeeded he would have become a national hero. But the treaty, which, by recognizing Wang’s government, purportedly gave Japan a legal basis for fighting in China, was turning out badly for both Wang and the Japanese. It ruined any chance there was for Japan to make peace with Chiang Kai-shek and made the Nanking government a puppet of Japan. As a result, Wang had already become the symbol of treachery in China.

  e The Army General Staff had already received an optimistic report from the military attaché in Washington: IMPROVEMENT OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES CAN BE ESTABLISHED. PLEASE EXERT ALL EFFORTS TO SEND INSTRUCTIONS IMMEDIATELY.

  One of War Minister Tojo’s most trusted advisers, Colonel Kenryo Sato, was astounded that America would make such concessions. It was all “too good to be true,” he felt, and passed along his suspicions to Tojo. But the War Minister was willing to do almost anything to settle the war in China honorably and went along with the rest of the Cabinet.