Thanks to these numerous literary conjurings of concrete memories, the long blackout on the wars of the late Meiji era ended. Children and young adults whose parents had fought in 1904–5 became better informed about the war that had won Japan a continental empire. Thus the decade that had begun as antimilitary ended with quite a different spirit: a massive reaffirmation of empire, the placing of hope in the myth of “war gods” like Admiral Tg and General Nogi, and the “virtues” of the young emperor.
Concurrently, in the foreground of national happenings, the Navy General Staff, the Seiykai Party leaders, and members of the privy council fomented public passion against the London Naval Treaty of 1930, which Japan signed with Britain and the United States on April 22. The treaty restricted the number of capital ships of each signatory and set limits for the first time on the number of cruisers and other auxiliary ships that each could build. The Japanese delegation had initially declared that it would maintain a 70 percent ratio vis-à-vis the United States on all auxiliary ships. In the end it compromised its differences with the Americans, accepted a 69 percent ratio plus parity in submarine tonnage, and agreed to renegotiate the treaty after six years.13
Two months after the ratification of the treaty in Tokyo, on November 14, while Hirohito was commanding special army maneuvers in Okayama prefecture, Sagoya Tomeo, a right-wing thug who belonged to the Aikokusha, an organization supported by the Seiykai politician Ogawa Heikichi, shot and mortally wounded Prime Minister Hamaguchi at Tokyo Station. On being informed of the shooting and of Hamaguchi’s condition by Imperial Household Minister Ichiki, Hirohito’s first concern was that “constitutional politics” not be interrupted.14 His feelings about the vicious propaganda campaign that the naval lobby had stirred up against the treaty, and that apparently had led directly to the shooting, are unknown, as are the conclusions, if any, that he drew from Hamaguchi’s death, which occurred in August of the following year, right on the eve of the Manchurian Incident.
The brief period of amity between the imperial court and a party cabinet was over, ended by the first political assassination of the 1930s. The stage was set for the last party cabinet in imperial Japan.15 With the military honing a new entitlement—its “right of supreme command”—and the public lining up in its support, a new era was about to begin. The army and navy ministers continued to be sharply at odds with their general staffs over the issue of arms reduction. Discipline within the officer corps continued to loosen; the army as an institutional entity showed signs of spiraling out of control. The stoking up of emperor worship had lowered the whole level of national political debate, not to mention public morality.
Thus, by the imprudent and highly untraditional way in which Hirohito and his staff exercised power—firing Tanaka in 1929 and then throwing domestic consensus among the elites to the winds rather than risk a diplomatic setback in the London naval talks—they helped to ignite the anger of all who were dissatisfied with social conditions and with the economy of early Shwa Japan. From their exalted position at the top of the polity, the court group never imagined they were contributing to the destruction of party government. Yet in pursuit of their own political agenda (sometimes ignored by Tanaka but executed forcefully by Hamaguchi) they introduced elements of instability that had not existed during the regency.16 The more Hirohito made use of his authority, the more he widened rifts among the ruling elites.
I
While the grand enthronement ceremonies unfolded for the mass audiences at home and abroad, Hirohito, as part of his change of persona, prepared to move his private residence and office to the Meiji Palace, then being remodeled to suit his and his family’s needs.17 At the same time politics in Tokyo moved along—more and more a process of intrigue hidden by secrecy.
The Fifty-fifth Imperial Diet, meeting from April 23 to May 7, 1928, provided the occasion for the next clash between the court group and Tanaka. This time the issues were several: Tanaka’s reorganization of his cabinet to bring in Kuhara Fusanosuke, a businessman and first-year member of the Diet, regarded by many as a dangerous right-wing extremist; his management of the Diet; and what the emperor regarded as his erroneous reporting of the proceedings inside the Diet. Hirohito had his own intelligence network. He knew that Tanaka’s cabinet was deadlocked in its conflict with the opposition parties; its management of the Diet was certainly not proceeding smoothly. Hirohito complained several times to Makino that Tanaka’s reports to him were inadequate and that his “imperial will” was being abused. In the end Kawai had to talk to Tanaka about the emperor’s wishes.18
For Hirohito’s aspirations to coexist with the constitutional order, the prime minister was expected to maintain absolute secrecy regarding the emperor’s will. Tanaka refused to accept that. He kept trying to associate the emperor, the court entourage, and the genr with his own Seiykai policies, until, finally, on May 14, 1928, one week after the Fifty-fifth Diet had ended and more than a year after Tanaka had become prime minister, Makino’s chief secretary, Kawai, gave up on him and noted in his diary that the imperial court had become totally dissatisfied with Tanaka’s performance:
All of today’s morning papers carried the gist of what the prime minister said when he visited Prince Saionji. If what they report is true, then he lacks common sense in publicizing such things; his qualifications to handle constitutional politics must be doubted; and one must pity his thoughtlessness and immaturity. He is unable even to understand Prince Saionji’s intentions. There is a very strong possibility, therefore, that he will disappoint the nation.19
Soon after Kawai wrote these words, Seiykai politician and Education Minister Mizuno Rentar, leader of the campaign to keep Kuhara out of the Tanaka cabinet, submitted his letter of resignation to the emperor. The next day, to prevent the collapse of Tanaka’s newly reorganized cabinet, Hirohito indirectly told Mizuno to remain in office. On May 23 Mizuno retracted his resignation, saying he would stay because of “the emperor’s kind words.” Mizuno’s statement immediately precipitated a political uproar, for it was interpreted to mean that the emperor had taken sides, benefiting the Seiykai while undermining the Minseito. The Minseito reacted first by denouncing the Seiykai for exploiting the emperor’s wishes in order to remain in power, then by establishing a Committee on the Problem of the Emperor’s Message.20 The committee resolved to wage a great national campaign to protect constitutional government and the kokutai. The Minseito formulated its resolution in clear doublespeak: “We firmly aspire to overthrow the Tanaka cabinet in order to protect the kokutai, which has its core foundation in the imperial house.”21
If, at this time, Hirohito had reflected on the Mizuno incident, he might have recognized the inherent contradiction in his very existence. In the process he might also have gained a better appreciation of the need to veil his interventions in absolute secrecy. But he was still young, relatively inexperienced, and not the least bit self-reflective. In due time he would gain some degree of insight into his predicament, and with that would come a worsening of his nervousness, for Hirohito’s chronic psychological stress had its root in the institution of sacred monarchy itself, and the ingrained but never acknowledged friction between himself and the Japanese people.
With political debate over kokutai issues having rekindled, and the court group at odds with the Tanaka government over the whole range of its policies, there now occurred four events in quick succession that were to have lasting effects on both Sino-Japanese relations and Japanese politics during the next decade. Hirohito was at the center of each of them. These were the Tsinan Incident (May 1928), the assassination of Chang Tso-lin by staff officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army (June 4, 1928), the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (August 27, 1928), and the introduction into the public arena, during the second half of 1928, of the ideology of enthronement and deification.
II
On March 24, 1927, soldiers of China’s Nationalist Revolutionary Army pillaged the Japanese Consulate in Nanking and assaulted the consul; they
also attacked buildings housing the American and British Consulates. Later that same day British and American warships on the Yangtze River bombarded the city. The Japanese press immediately sensationalized the Nanking Incident, in which six Westerners died, Japanese rights were violated, and no Japanese troops had been dispatched. Against this background, in the middle of the official mourning for the Taish emperor, Hirohito sanctioned Japan’s first military interventions in China’s civil war. Twice, on May 28 and July 8, he gave his consent to the army’s dispatch of troops to China’s Shantung Province, ostensibly to protect Japanese residents from assaults by Kuomintang soldiers on their way north toward Peking. Less than a year later, on April 19, 1928, he consented to another deployment: this time five thousand troops of the Sixth Division, under Gen. Fukuda Hikosuke, to the port of Tsingtao, Shantung, a center of Japanese textile capital and once a Japanese protectorate. He did so after first asking Chief Military Aide Nara whether the intervention would lead to another massacre of Japanese lives such as had occurred in the Russian city of Nikolaevsk (now Pugachev) in 1920. Nara said that it would not.
When General Fukuda arrived in Tsingtao, however, he decided on his own initiative immediately to proceed inland (by rail) to Tsinan. There, a few days later, the first of several clashes occurred between Japanese and Nationalist soldiers. Later, on May 8, Hirohito sanctioned without hesitation the dispatch of reinforcements to Tsinan to protect some two thousand Japanese civilians. Instead of making an issue of Fukuda’s going beyond his authorization, the emperor silently directed his anger at Prime Minister Tanaka.22 The Tsinan affair dragged on into early 1929, during which time seventeen thousand Japanese troops unleashed a reign of terror on the Chinese citizens of the city, wrecking chances for Sino-Japanese rapprochement. For Hirohito this incident was yet another example of Tanaka’s inadequacy as a prime minister.
Less than a month after Hirohito had sanctioned a fourth deployment of troops to Shantung Province, on June 4, 1928, senior staff officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army, led by Col. Kmoto Daisaku, assassinated the Chinese warlord and territorial sovereign, Chang Tso-lin, on whom Prime Minister Tanaka had based his Manchurian policy. This incident (and the prime minister’s alleged mishandling of it) pulled Manchuria into the turmoil of Japanese and international politics. For the young emperor and his entourage, it provided the opportunity they had long been seeking to remove Tanaka and his entire Seiykai cabinet.
Leaders of the Minseito were the first to discover that the real assassins were Kwantung Army officers rather than rogue elements of China’s Southern Army, as the Kwantung spokesmen falsely alleged. By early September the court entourage too had heard that Japanese army officers had committed the crime and were blaming it on Chinese soldiers.23 Prime Minister Tanaka was alone in slowly uncovering the truth because the top army leaders had wanted Chang Tso-lin removed and were uninterested in pursuing the matter, let alone making a full disclosure of the facts. When, in October 1928, Tanaka finally learned the truth, he resolved to punish them and reestablish discipline in the army. His fellow cabinet ministers and the army, however, strongly opposed holding the assassins accountable. Led by Army Minister Shirakawa Yoshinori and Railway Minister Ogawa, who had the status of vice prime minister, the cabinet formed a coalition against Tanaka, claiming that disclosure would harm the imperial house, worsen Sino-Japanese relations, and undermine Japan’s special rights in China. Additionally the cabinet did not want to be held accountable in the Diet for what had happened.
Isolated in his own cabinet but supported by Saionji, Tanaka went ahead anyway. His formal report to the emperor was made on December 24, 1928. He told the emperor that he intended to court-martial the criminals, purge the army, and reestablish discipline. The next day he said the same thing to Makino and Chinda in the mistaken belief that they would help him. However, when the cabinet learned of Tanaka’s formal report, the ministers refused to support a court-martial and wanted the matter to be handled as an administrative affair of the army. On December 28 Shirakawa reported to the emperor that the army would investigate Chang Tso-lin’s death but made no mention of a court-martial.24
When the Fifty-sixth Imperial Diet convened in early 1929, the opposition parties muted their attacks in questioning the government about the incident; they already knew or suspected the truth and did not desire full disclosure in any case. On this matter the Minseito in particular wanted to accommodate the wishes of the army whose support it needed to form the next cabinet.25 Meanwhile the emperor and his staff worried only about whether Tanaka would assume responsibility for what had occurred.
On January 17, 1929, the emperor pressed Shirakawa to investigate. Two days later the emperor asked Tanaka about his strategy for handling the Diet. On February 2 he again questioned Tanaka about the progress of the investigation; the prime minister hinted that his government would not take responsibility for the Chang Tso-lin incident.26 One month later, on March 4, Makino told his secretary, Okabe, to inform Saionji that Tanaka no longer had the emperor’s confidence and that the emperor intended to admonish him the next time he reported.27 By this time Tanaka knew that the entire army had united against him and that he would have to yield and let the army off the hook. Thereupon the cabinet agreed to cover up the incident and have the army treat it as an internal administrative matter.
On March 27 Army Minister Shirakawa reported the cabinet’s decision to the emperor. Colonel Kmoto and Kwantung Army Commander Muraoka Chtar had committed the crime, explained Shirakawa, but to announce the truth and severely punish those responsible for the murder would be highly disadvantageous to Japan. At that point, if not earlier, Hirohito accepted the army’s intention to lie to the public about the incident and to give merely administrative punishments to those involved.28 Hirohito, Makino, and Admiral Suzuki thus sided with Shirakawa and those in the Tanaka cabinet who wanted to prevent the army’s reputation from being blackened. In so doing they obviously, if unwittingly, abetted the forces plotting further aggression in China in order to maintain Japan’s rights and interests there.29
Many years later, in his famous “Monologue,” Hirohito claimed that “youthful indiscretion” had led him to speak to Prime Minister Tanaka in an angry tone and to request his resignation when Tanaka came and told him that he wanted to settle the Chang Tso-lin assassination “by hushing it up.”30 He conveniently failed to note that he too had wanted to hush up the murder. He also failed to note that he had carefully rehearsed with his staff what he would say to Tanaka, and that he really had no grounds for scolding the prime minister on the basis of his second, informal report of June 27, 1929. Hirohito directed attention to the scolding itself, and to the Tanaka cabinet’s subsequent resignation. He thereby deflected attention from his constitutional responsibility as supreme commander in chief, for punishing a crime by two officers in what was essentially a military, not a civil affair.
After relating to his aides in his “Monologue” how he had secured Tanaka’s resignation, Hirohito tried to explain why criticism was heaped on his entourage. In so doing, he revealed his keen sensitivity to charges of a “court conspiracy” that were circulated around that time and later helped to undercut the convenient fiction that the Imperial House always stood aloof from politics. Kuhara Fusanosuke, Minister of Communications in the reorganized Tanaka cabinet of May 1928, was to blame—for telling the truth—and Hirohito hated him for it. Instead of protecting the kokutai, Kuhara, one of Tanaka’s “sympathizers”:
made up the phrase “bloc of the senior statesmen” and eventually spread the word that the cabinet fell because of a conspiracy by the senior statesmen and the imperial court. Thus believing in the truth of such…concocted phrases…resentment was created and left a disastrous legacy that lingered long into the future. This affair had a considerable influence on the incident of February 26, 1936. Thereafter I resolved to approve every report the cabinet laid before me even though I personally might hold an opposite opinion…. When I had told Tanaka, �
�Why don’t you resign?” it was a warning, not a “veto.” However, afterward I decided I would state my opinions but never exercise any “veto.”31
After firing Tanaka, Hirohito tended to be more cautious in choosing when to intervene politically. But the degree of his restraint depended on the times and was therefore situationally (rather than constitutionally) determined. Moreover Hirohito seems never to have understood the deep resentment generated in Seiykai circles by what he had done to Tanaka.32 Nor did he grasp that the constant political attacks on the court by the military and the right wing, which marked his reign from 1929 onward, were one price he and his palace advisers had to pay for their active participation in politics and for reviving the fetish of imperial will as necessarily distinct from the will of the cabinet.33 A real “constitutional monarch” would not have believed that constitutional monarchy required the monarch to approve every report of the cabinet. But Hirohito’s sense of a constitutional monarch was “impoverished,” devoid of any respect for the will of the nation as expressed through the lower house of the Diet.34
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 23
