Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Last, Hirohito’s entourage held two other largely unsupported beliefs: namely, that the leading Western powers would not prevent Japan from rising to dominance in Asia; and that Japan would be able to separate domestic affairs and foreign policy, cooperating with the West while pursuing narrowly nationalistic, repressive policies at home. Later, when some of these assumptions proved incorrect, Hirohito and his entourage withdrew their support of the Washington treaty framework, abandoned cooperation with other powers in China, and proceeded to sanction actions that directly violated the Nine-Power Treaty, not to mention the principles Japan had subscribed to in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

  IV

  During the regency years Hirohito and his entourage accepted without question the coalition nature of cabinet government, in which the military was privileged over other organs of state. Under this system army and navy ministers were appointed from the list of active-duty senior officers. Therefore every cabinet was necessarily “mixed”—a coalition of military and civilian officials. In the forty-two mixed cabinets that governed Japan between 1888 and 1945, “the military was guaranteed the right of being able to interfere legally in politics,” while prime ministers could control the military only through the emperor or the military ministers.55 Because of the regent’s youth and inexperience, the military ministers and the chiefs of staff worked within the cabinet to avoid taking unresolved disputes to the sick and incompetent emperor or bothering the inexperienced regent. But there were a few important exceptions to this sheltering of the regent.

  As early as 1923 Hirohito confronted changes in Japan’s long-term defense plans arising out of the Washington Conference. The chiefs of the Army and Navy General Staffs, responding to the rise of Lenin’s revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union, the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese military alliance, and the naval arms reductions agreed to at Washington, revised their operational plans for the defense of the Japanese empire. They continued to define Russia as the number one enemy, just as they had been doing ever since the Russo-Japanese War. They showed an increased awareness of China by targeting it as the number three potential enemy, though they did not draft any plans for war against China. But now, for the first time in Japan’s history, both chiefs of staff named the United States as the number one enemy.

  Henceforth the army would prepare for a war on the Asian continent with a wartime force of forty divisions. The Imperial Navy would remain within the parameters of the Washington Naval Arms Reduction Treaty but organize and train for the defense of the homeland and the maintenance of sea lanes of communication with the Asian continent “north of the Taiwan Straits.”56 This meant targeting, primarily, the naval forces of the United States. The new challenge facing the navy, in the view of Prime Minister Adm. Kat Tomosabur, was to avoid war with the United States at all costs, while building up auxiliary ships. A minority viewpoint, associated with Admirals Kat Kanji and Suetsugu Nobumasa, held that war could arise if Japan’s conflict of interests with the United States in China turned into a major political problem, and Washington resorted to diplomatic and military pressure to make Japan submit. Hirohito, as regent, accepted the views of Admiral Kat Tomosabur and the navy mainstream, who would be called, starting in the early 1930s, the “treaty faction.” He approved this change in defense policy in early 1923, but only after securing detailed explanations from his chiefs of staff.

  First, on February 17, 1923, he had the chiefs give formal reports to him at his Numazu mansion. The next day he asked for the views of his highest military advisory organ, the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals. On February 21 Field Marshal Oku Yasukata reported to Hirohito at Numazu, and on the twenty-fifth Hirohito allowed Prime Minister Kat to view the revised defense policy draft. Finally, on February 28, Hirohito again summoned his two chiefs of staff to Numazu and gave them his approval of the draft. Thus, rather than blindly putting his seal to the revised national defense plan, he approved it “only after he had fully understood it.”57 This insistence on withholding his assent until he had been made fully informed was his standard operating procedure after he became emperor in his own right.

  Following the adoption of the 1923 national defense plan, the army began to implement the first of the three personnel reductions that it was to carry out between 1922 and 1924. The navy stopped building capital ships and began scrapping old vessels in order to develop a modern fleet air force and a submarine force. And in 1923 the nonparty cabinet of Prime Minister Kat (who had led the Japanese delegation at the Washington Conference) began withdrawal of Japanese troops from China’s Shantung Province. Two years later, in May 1925, Army Minister Ugaki (in the party cabinet of Kat Kmei) deactivated four divisions and used the resulting savings to begin the modernization and reorganization of the army in order to prepare it for a future “total war.” As a result, military spending by the army and navy as a percentage of total annual government expenditures decreased steadily throughout the decade.58

  These reductions in personnel, armaments, and expenditures went forward amid deep regrets and angry recriminations in the officer corps. The feeling grew that Japan had fallen behind the other Great Powers economically, socially, and politically. Yet both services avoided fundamental institutional reform during the twenties. And because the army retrenched when it was under no foreign pressure to do so, General Ugaki became the object of bitter resentment among middle-echelon officers for yielding to the wishes of fiscally conservative politicians and industrialists.

  Meanwhile the erosion of military discipline and morale that had resurfaced during the undeclared war in Siberia against the Bolsheviks (1918–22) continued throughout the 1920s. Unquestioning obedience to orders weakened while incidents of insubordination in the ranks proliferated.59 The Report Concerning the Thought and Actions of Returning Troops, sent to the army minister in March 1919 by the commander of a garrison division, noted that “due to the rise in general knowledge and social education that enlisted men receive from newspapers and magazines, along with changes in popular thought,” they could no longer be counted on “to be blind followers of the orders of their noncommissioned superiors.”60 Two years later, in 1921, Army Minister Tanaka Giichi warned his divisional commanders of the weakening discipline in the lower ranks, where “in recent years…. they have become bold and rebellious in their attitudes, and criminal acts have increased, especially cases where men form small groups and act violently.”61

  In response to these warnings the rules and regulations governing military life inside the barracks were revised to encourage discipline based on more rationalistic criteria, while military education began to stress “awareness education.”62 These changes lasted only a few years, however. In 1924 Army Minister Ugaki alerted divisional commanders to give the utmost attention to their soldiers’ behavior in view of “the increase in criminal actions by low-ranking officers” and “the influence of [new] social thought.”63 Four years later, at the start of Hirohito’s reign, when workers’ and peasants’ protest movements had intensified, senior officers again sounded the alarm about the number of soldiers coming into barracks with attitudes critical of the imperial system.

  These circumstances forced Japan’s military leaders to question whether the armed forces should continue to characterize themselves as the forces led by the emperor and his government, or turn to the nation and become the people’s military. Army Ministers Tanaka and Ugaki—both supporters of fiscal restraint and cooperation with the political parties—argued the need to reemphasize the army’s traditional “founding principles”: namely, that all Japanese are soldiers; the emperor directly commands them; they do not interfere in politics or let politicians interfere in military matters; and their mission is to protect the state and spread the foundations of imperial rule. But the army in the early and mid-twenties was divided. Some officers argued over these principles; others said that the military, formed from the masses of the nation, was totally independent of the central government.64 />
  Eventually Gen. Araki Sadao, a future army minister and a leading opponent of Ugaki’s retrenchment policy, would settle the dispute by advocating the notion of the “emperor’s army” (kgun). For Araki the “emperor’s army” was a force of workers and peasants for the defense of the nation under the emperor’s guidance, rather than a “bourgeois force” for the defense of the ruling establishment.65 But in the mid-twenties, the army had not yet begun to indoctrinate its troops to Araki’s idea.66

  Toward the end of his regency Hirohito became aware of the army’s crisis of institutional identity and of mission. General Nara reported to him on the growth of factional fighting within the military, and General Ugaki lectured at court on the great importance that the army attached to the “independence” of the right of supreme command (tsuiken no dokuritsu). The term tsuiken carried both military and legal connotations and had always been used by military men broadly and vaguely.67 Although the emperor’s power to command the armed forces was already “independent” before the drafting of the Meiji constitution, the constitution never clearly recognized that “independence.” It specified only that “[t]he emperor has the supreme command of the army and navy” (Article 11) and “determines the organization and peace standing of the army and navy” (Article 12). Moreover, the first sentence of Article 55, declaring that “[t]he respective ministers of state shall give their advice to the emperor and be responsible for it,” left open a possible constitutional ground for “interference” by civilians in the tsuiken.

  During the regency the tsuiken became, for the first time, an ideology of organizational self-assertion and a device for the military to keep civil officials and party politicians at bay. Military men still remembered that the Meiji emperor had originally empowered them. They took pride in the way he had exercised his direct command over them, and they credited Japan’s victory in 1905 over numerically greater Russian forces to the superiority of their supreme command authority. But not until Yamagata’s death in 1922, and the rise, starting in 1924, of governments headed by party cabinets, did they come to revere the very words “supreme command” and to react wrathfully against any politician or civil bureaucrat who interfered in the emperor’s exercise thereof.

  Forced to confront growing public criticism, declining respect for the imperial institution, and party cabinets that practiced strict fiscal austerity, the army especially bore down hard on the “independence” of the tsuiken. This meant the denial of cabinet participation in matters of military command, and the denial also of the principle of “civilian control” over the armed forces—in effect, a military independent of all civilian authority.68 The issue of civilian control first arose in October 1920 when Finance Minister Takahashi proposed in a letter to Prime Minister Hara that the Army and Navy General Staff Offices, among other institutions, should be abolished.69 Thereafter the army began studying how best to defend itself against civilian control.70 On November 5, 1925, Army Minister Ugaki used a special imperial lecture to influence Hirohito against civilian control.71 Rather than alter militarism institutionally when popular sentiment might have supported such action, Hirohito, on his own, rejected the notion of civilian control of the military and embraced the theory of the supreme command’s “independence” from cabinet interference.

  This was definitely not an instance of Hirohito’s following tradition, for in the mid-1920s the army and navy were making an entirely new departure by their unqualified emphasis on “independence.” According to this new doctrine, not only were the army and navy directly subordinated to the emperor rather than the cabinet, but whatever affected their institutional interests was far more important than the fate of any particular government and its financial constraints, let alone any other organ of state. Military officers influenced by such thinking were bound to hold the civil government in contempt.72 As political parties continued to gain power, that attitude of contempt made it easy for military officials to believe that party cabinets were to blame for all the social discontent generated by economic hard times, and for the problems Japan was confronting in China. Nevertheless, during the regency, senior military leaders were more interested in strengthening the imperial system and introducing military education into the public school system than in political reform of the state.

  In 1925 Army Minister Ugaki secured Hirohito’s assent to posting active-duty officers in the nation’s middle schools and universities to provide military training. This move was unpopular with professional educators and soon led to clashes between civil and military officials. But in chief aide General Nara’s view, it at least “had the good medicinal effect of quieting down the military.”73 It is tempting to imagine that Hirohito viewed the move as a way of igniting student passion to serve the country and himself, while spreading knowledge of how the military worked, but no documents reveal what he really thought about it.

  The year 1925 was also noteworthy in terms of Hirohito’s own increased military duties, his travels in connection with them, and his slow awakening to serious factional problems in the army. On August 10 he and Prince Takamatsu sailed from Hayama aboard the battleship Nagato, accompanied by four destroyers, to domari port in Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) for a one-day tour of the empire’s northernmost colony. Some sixty thousand Japanese settlers greeted him as he came ashore. Traveling by motorcade, he inspected a wood-pulp factory and a school but spent most of his time viewing local flora.74 When he returned to Tokyo, he went to see his parents in Nikk. On October 11 he attended the last phase of the grand army maneuvers in the Thoku region, but after two weeks in the field “came down with a fever due to constipation” and had to return to Tokyo.75 Shortly afterward he was promoted to army colonel and navy captain.

  By this time Hirohito had become aware of opposition to Army Minister Ugaki within certain army circles. Perhaps Nara told him that the mood of displeasure and indiscipline among young and middle-echelon army officers was a reaction to the antimilitary mood of the times, but also to the ongoing defense cutbacks. He appears to have taken this information in stride. At twenty-four Hirohito lacked the experience to imagine where such unrest could lead and failed to see in it any portent of future trouble for himself. By his support for sending active duty officers into the classrooms, he inadvertently endorsed the egoistic assumption of military officers that they were ideally fitted to be the moral leaders of society. In the process, he sanctioned a major step forward in preparing the nation for the mobilization of all its resources in the event of war.76

  V

  In a time of political fluidity and challenge to established institutions from below, Hirohito accumulated military experience and observed how Makino worked to strengthen the independence of the court from party cabinet control. This was exactly what Makino and Saionji had wanted after Hara’s death. Neither of them believed the regent was yet mature or knowledgeable enough to intervene in politics on the basis of his own judgment. Thus Hirohito witnessed but was not consulted on the five cabinet changes that occurred between 1921 and 1926. He also observed the activities of seven regular sessions of the Diet: the forty-fifth to the fifty-second. The first three prime ministers of his regency—Takahashi Korekiyo, Kat Tomosabur, and Yamamoto Gonbei—had all been chosen by the genr. But in July 1924 the genr Matsukata Masayoshi died, leaving only Saionji Kinmochi to undertake the role of recommending the next prime minister. When the Yamamoto cabinet resigned to take responsibility for the Toranomon incident, Hirohito followed the advice of Prince Saionji (considered a great “constitutionalist”) and ordered Kiyoura Keigo, president of the privy council and a sworn enemy of party cabinets, to form the next, nonparty, government.

  Kiyoura’s “transcendental cabinet,” based on leaders drawn from the imperially appointed House of Peers, ignored the wishes of the elected House of Representatives. Ultimately it galvanized the parties in the Diet into launching a movement to protect their political rights (termed the “second movement to protect the constitution”).77 Within five month
s the parties had succeeded in frustrating Kiyoura despite the support he had from the regent. In the general election of May 10, 1924, the “three-faction alliance to protect the constitution” won an overwhelming victory; and on June 7, 1924, Kiyoura resigned. Hirohito thereupon sent an emissary to Saionji, then convalescing in Kyoto, and the latter recommended Kat Kmei, president of the Kenseikai, to succeed Kiyoura.78 Kato immediately formed a three-party coalition cabinet, signaling a major triumph of the Taish democracy movement. However, this victory of party unity over the forces of oligarchy and privilege lasted only until the summer of 1925, after which parliamentary conflict resumed, with the kokutai (thus the throne) emerging as a powerful weapon for the parties to use against one another.

  Kat’s tenure as prime minister spanned the Forty-ninth Imperial Diet, which began on June 28, 1924, to the start of the Fifty-second on December 26, 1926. During these months Hirohito and the court group supported General Ugaki’s military reforms, the noninterventionist China policy associated with Foreign Minister Shidehara, and a highly repressive peace preservation bill. In Saionji’s view the latter was needed to keep the Left from winning seats in the Diet. Thus a suitable “framework” would be maintained within which “normal constitutional government” could someday develop.79 Saionji did not worry that the new security law, by emphasizing the sacred nature of the kokutai based on the imperial house, would enable political groups to begin using the concept of the unassailable kokutai as a political weapon against opponents.80