As the confrontation between the Chinese and Japanese escalated, the political crisis within Japan deepened. Officers belonging to the thirty-fifth class of the Military Academy sent genr Saionji a private manifesto “which affirmed that ‘the Shwa Restoration means the overthrow of political party government’ and urged that captains and lieutenants all over the country become the ‘standard bearers of the Shwa Restoration.’”59 The reference was to the current reign of the young Emperor Hirohito, but the message was that he should be a great reformer like his grandfather, or at least his era should be one of reform. For junior officers to issue such an admonition to the surviving genr was an act of unprecedented audacity, reflecting the ongoing breakdown in military discipline and hierarchical order. It was also a hangover of the older practice of the young generation privately importuning the only member of the older generation to get to the emperor.
In early August, Army Minister Minami Jir broke military precedent and disclosed to the press a speech he had given to a special meeting of regional and division commanders. In his speech General Minami denounced arms reduction proposals as “a sellout” and urged his fellow officers to protest military cutbacks.60 Thereafter Army Chief of Staff Kanaya Hanz and Gen. Suzuki Sroku spoke out publicly against the curtailment of military spending in general.61
As these danger signs mounted, Hirohito and the court group finally began to consider how to cope with the politicized officer corps. On Hirohito’s instruction Makino discussed with Saionji the problem of “maintaining military discipline,” and the venerable elder statesman advised him to handle the situation by dealing directly with the military authorities rather than with Prime Minister Wakatsuki.62 The Wakatsuki cabinet had been struggling unsuccessfully with the economic depression and alienating the military with its policies of financial retrenchment. To add insult to injury, Wakatsuki had chosen the summer of 1931 to compensate for revenue shortfalls by cutting the salaries of civil bureaucrats.63
Not until Japan was alive with rumors of imminent war in Manchuria, however, did Hirohito personally intervene. On September 10 and 11, he queried Navy Minister Abo Kiyokazu and Army Minister Minami respectively concerning the state of military discipline. Abo answered that he had just questioned the fleet commanders and had been told there was no problem in the navy.64 Abo did not inform the emperor that the navy was very concerned about the army’s activities in Manchuria, or that it would soon establish a “special organ” in Manchuria to spy on the Kwantung Army. Abo may also have been unaware that two months earlier—“in June or July”—senior officers of the Army General Staff had actually informed the heads of the Navy General Staff of their plan to seize Manchuria by force, and had asked for the navy’s cooperation; the naval staff officers had failed to express any opposition to what the army was about to do.65
Minami was, however, in on the Kwantung Army’s secret plans to bring Manchuria and Inner Mongolia under Japanese control by force, and he frankly admitted to the emperor that certain “young army officers have recently criticized our diplomacy as weak-kneed; the wording of their criticism was not precise and has led to their being misunderstood.” He immediately added, however, that “we cannot permit such actions, and intend to suppress them fully. The army believes that diplomacy should be conducted as a national policy by Foreign Ministry officials and shall caution [our junior officers] about this.”66
Hirohito responded that the army’s political partisanship was interference with national policy, and he ordered Minami to tighten control. The army minister replied, duplicitously, “Ever since I heard such rumors, I have been carefully controlling matters.” Hirohito then summoned Grand Chamberlain Suzuki and told him to inform Makino that “although the army minister reported to me that he has been controlling matters sufficiently so as to prevent [further acts of] military indiscipline, I urged him to be even more cautious.”67
Minami explained the emperor’s attitude to those senior officers in the Army Ministry and at General Staff Headquarters who were privy to the plot—timed to begin sometime in late September. They decided to move more cautiously. Their goal of wresting Manchuria from China by force did not change, but the emperor’s stance led them to postpone action and not to defy the cabinet. Minami, newly chastened, thereupon circulated admonitory instructions within the army.
On September 15 Foreign Minister Shidehara received a top secret telegram from his consul general in Mukden, informing him that the Kwantung Army was about to launch a large-scale offensive action. Other reports over the next few days kept Shidehara fully informed of the Kwantung Army’s plot. Nevertheless, throughout the early months of the Manchurian Incident, Shidehara functioned as the leading defender of the Kwantung Army to the Western world, claiming that victimized Japan was merely acting in self-defense, upholding the sanctity of treaties.68
Minami entrusted a letter to Gen. Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, chief of the General Staff’s Intelligence Section, and told him to deliver it personally to the newly appointed Kwantung Army commander, General Honj. Tatekawa, who had participated in Chang Tso-lin’s assassination, was thought to have influence in Kwantung Army circles. Before leaving for Mukden with his message urging patience and postponement of action, Tatekawa disclosed to Col. Hashimoto Kingor, planner of the abortive March coup, the decision of the army’s senior leaders to postpone the planned hostilities. Immediately Hashimoto sent telegrams to Col. Itagaki Seishir, the senior staff officer of the Kwantung Army at Mukden, one of which warned him to act quickly: “Plot discovered. Tatekawa coming; strike first to avoid implicating him. If Tatekawa arrives, take action before receiving his message.”69 Three days later, Lt. Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Colonel Itagaki put their plans into effect.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that the senior editors of the Tokyo Asahi and Osaka Mainichi newspaper chains, Ogata Taketora and Takaishi Shingoro, were also party to this deception. For two months earlier, on the night of July 16, 1931, they had attended a meeting in Tokyo (probably at the residence of Baron Harada Kumao) where, in the company of Foreign Ministry officials, they had heard the Military Affairs Bureau Chief, Major-General Koiso Kuniaki, advocate the “independence of Manchuria” and say that if the army starts a war the Japanese people will support it.70
So on the eve of the Mukden fighting many influential persons in Tokyo either knew or strongly suspected that the Kwantung Army was about to start trouble. Hirohito and his top palace advisers—Makino, Suzuki, Sekiya, Kido, and Nara—also sensed the growing unrest in the military but misread the situation and were laggard in responding to it. Believing they had acted in ample time for the imperial admonition to work its dampening effect, they never imagined that the Kwantung Army would seize the initiative, completely overturn the Minseito cabinet’s policies, and undermine the emperor’s authority. Hirohito and the court bureaucrats had deeply underestimated the factionalism and discontent that had been brewing for some time among the army, the foreign ministry, and the political parties. But they also failed to counter this danger because they naturally supported the army’s mission in Manchuria, and had ever since 1905.71
PART 3
HIS MAJESTY’S WARS, 1931–1945
7
THE MANCHURIAN TRANSFORMATION
During the night of September 18, 1931, Kwantung Army officers detonated an explosion near the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway line at Liut’iaokou (north of Mukden) and blamed it on the soldiers of Chang Hsueh-liang and armed Chinese “bandits.” Using an incident they themselves had staged as a pretext, and that had left the rail line itself undamaged, Staff Officer Col. Itagaki Seishir ordered the Independent Garrison Force and the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment to attack the barracks of the Chinese Manchurian Army within the walled city of Mukden. Taken by surprise, the Chinese troops fled or laid down their arms. An hour later Itagaki’s co-conspirator, Lt. Col. Ishiwara Kanji, stationed in Ryojun [Port Arthur], conveyed the false report of what had happened to Kwantung Army Commander Honj Sh
igeru. Honj then issued attack orders that Ishiwara had carefully prepared long in advance. Over the next twenty-four hours Kwantung Army units advanced beyond the leased territory and seized control of the strategic towns along the railway. The army then prepared to move on the major population centers of southern Manchuria.1
The next day, September 19, the palace learned—through newspaper reports based on Kwantung Army explanations—of the clash in Manchuria. Responsibility, according to the army spokesmen, rested with the Chinese. Chief Aide-de-Camp Nara Takeji promptly informed the emperor, adding that he believed “this incident [would] not spread.”2 Nara may also have suggested, then or a few hours later, that Hirohito convene an imperial conference to take control of the situation—an idea that Makino and Saionji quickly negated on the ground that “the virtue of his majesty” would be “soiled” if the decisions of such a conference should prove impossible to implement.3
Once started, the Manchurian Incident set off a chain reaction of international and domestic crises that interacted and fundamentally altered the whole trajectory of Japanese state development. China immediately sought redress before the League of Nations; the Kwantung Army sought reinforcements. Gen. Hayashi Senjr, commanding in Korea, sought permission, through central army headquarters in Tokyo, to send units across the Yalu River into Manchuria. On September 19 the government was still helpless and ill-informed. Prime Minister Wakatsuki appealed to Harada Kumao, secretary to genr Saionji, for assistance:
I am not being kept informed by either the Foreign Ministry or the Army Ministry…. I have just warned them through Chief Cabinet Secretary Kawasaki…. The Chinese forces in Manchuria and Mongolia number more than two hundred thousand [sic] while we have only some ten thousand. I asked the army minister, “What are you going to do if, by chance, your challenge causes something you haven’t anticipated—something that given you are so outnumbered you can’t stop?” The army minister told me, “We’ll send in troops from Korea…indeed, they may have already gone in.” I rebuked him: “How can you allow dispatch of soldiers from Korea without government authorization?” He said, “Well, the fact is that during the Tanaka cabinet [1927–29] troops were dispatched without imperial sanction.” I gathered he had not foreseen any problem at all…. Under these circumstances I am quite powerless to restrain the military. How can his majesty’s military act without his sanction? What can I do? Maybe I should not be talking to you like this, but can you do anything?…I am in serious trouble.4
That evening members of the court group met at Harada’s residence. In attendance were Kido (his diary is the available source); Konoe; Okabe Nagakage, first section chief of the Foreign Ministry’s Bureau of Political Affairs; and another titled peer.5 All were in their forties and tended to be critical of Saionji and Makino and sympathetic to the military’s attempt to resolve the Manchurian problem by force. They agreed that the orders of the high command were not being fully obeyed, and that the emperor concurred with the cabinet’s initial desire to prevent the incident from getting worse and doing more damage to Japan’s public image. The problem, Kido reported, was twofold. The military was angry both at the palace entourage for influencing the emperor’s statements, and at Saionji, whom it considered hostile. Hence “it would be better hereafter for the emperor himself not to speak except when a situation is out of control;” and Saionji should be dissuaded from coming to Tokyo “unless the situation changes.”6
In effect those meeting at Harada’s mansion agreed that Hirohito should approve the military’s actions, and that Saionji and the senior palace officials should neither pursue the illegal infringement of the emperor’s powers of military command, nor do anything else to provoke the military. Holding this attitude, the court group, over the course of the entire Manchurian war, would never take a firm stand against the army.7
On September 21 Wakatsuki convened his cabinet for six hours. They decided not to authorize reinforcements from either the homeland or Korea, and to treat the fighting in Manchuria as only an “incident,” thus avoiding a declaration of war.8 The Kwantung Army, meanwhile, had for three days been pressing army central headquarters for permission to allow General Hayashi, commander of the Korean Army, to send reinforcements across the Yalu River into Manchuria. At 1:00 P.M. on September 21, while the cabinet was still meeting, Hayashi on his own authority ordered troops to cross the border. Shortly afterwards, Army Chief of Staff Kanaya reported to the emperor that despite orders to stand by on alert, the Mixed Brigade of the Japanese colonial army in Korea, in accordance with the principle that the field commanders have such discretion, “had crossed the border and advanced on Mukden.”9 Kanaya, of course, knew well that in this instance no such principle of operational autonomy could justify Hayashi’s illegal action.
Thirty-year-old Hirohito now had an excellent opportunity to back the Wakatsuki cabinet, control the military, and stop the incident from getting worse. Politically the military was still weak. National opinion regarding Manchuria was divided. If he wanted to rule as a British-style “constitutional monarch” instead of an autocratic monarch saddled with a constitution, this was his chance.
Nara’s diary entry for September 22 says what Hirohito did at this critical moment:
In the afternoon, when I was summoned by the emperor, he asked me whether I had warned the chief of staff [Kanaya] not to broaden the action. I replied, “Yes, I did warn him, but even without my warning he understood very clearly both the cabinet’s intention and your majesty’s will, and he is already addressing each part of the problem in turn. Regrettably it is touch-and-go with the outlying army, and they often go their own way.”…[Later] At 4:20 P.M. Chief of Staff Kanaya had an audience with the emperor and asked him to approve, post facto, the dispatch of the mixed brigade from the Korean Army. I heard the emperor say that although this time it couldn’t be helped, [the army] had to be more careful in the future.10
Having now understood the need to reinforce the vastly outnumbered Kwantung Army’s forward units, Hirohito accepted the situation as a fait accompli. He was not seriously opposed to seeing his army expand his empire. If that involved a brief usurpation of his authority, so be it—so long as the operation was successful.11
By October 1, 1931, two weeks into the incident, most Japanese had begun to rally behind the army. Hirohito knew that the incident had been staged. He knew who had planned it, who had ordered it, and who had carried it out. He was totally aware that several senior officers had violated the army’s own penal law of 1908 by ordering troops into areas that lay outside their command jurisdiction. Nevertheless, as Chief Aide-de-Camp Nara’s diary makes quite clear, Hirohito intended to order only the lightest of punishments for the army chief of staff and the Kwantung Army commander.12
A week later the emperor carried his silent endorsement of his officers further. Chinchou, a city in southern Liaoning Province, on the rail line between Peking (now Beijing) and Mukden, was “the last vestige of Chinese authority in Manchuria.”13 The air attack on it that Hirohito sanctioned was one of the first on a city since the end of World War I. As described by Nara in his diary entry of October 9:
Before Vice Chief of the General Staff Ninomiya [Harushige] departed from the Imperial Palace, I told him that His Majesty wanted to know whether an expansion of the incident would become unavoidable if Chang Hsueh-liang should reorganize his army in the vicinity of Chinchow. If such an expansion should become necessary, His Majesty would probably consent. [General Ninomiya] said he would speak with the chief of staff and in a short while would report to the throne.14
Buoyed by these encouraging words from General Nara, Ninomiya immediately ordered briefing materials drafted on the need to bomb Chinchou. The Operations Section of the General Staff Office thereupon explicitly noted that the emperor regarded the bombing as “only natural in view of conditions at this time.”15 If Nara’s October 9 diary entry is taken at face value, then Hirohito had changed his mind overnight. Earlier he had expressed disapproval
to Nara of General Honj’s public denunciation of the Chang Hsueh-liang regime, and on October 8 he had told Nara that “the outlying military and the Foreign Ministry are at odds—the army wants to create an independent Manchuria-Mongolia regime and negotiate with it, while the diplomats consider that undesirable. I believe the army on this point is wrong. With my thinking in mind, warn army headquarters.”16
A special meeting of the Council of the League had been called at Geneva to consider China’s complaint. Opinion there had quickly hardened against Japan. On October 27 Nara’s diary records imperial uneasiness:
After lunch I visited with the privy seal for a while. [He] said the emperor had told him that he [the emperor] intended to have the chief military aide-de-camp question the army and navy ministers on their resolve and preparations if we are subjected to an economic embargo or are faced with military hostilities with the Great Powers.17
By early November the attitude of the Foreign Ministry and the court had changed. On the sixth Foreign Minister Shidehara reported to the emperor that the ministry had decided to abandon negotiating with only the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Support should be given to Gen. Hsi Hsia and a puppet regime established based on the Chinese landlord class in southern Manchuria.18 Settlement of the Manchuria and (Inner) Mongolia problem might then be negotiated directly with the notables of that regime rather than with Chang Hsueh-liang or Nanking. Shidehara afterward sought and received support for this plan from Makino and Saionji, as well as Ugaki, the new governor-general of Korea.19
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 25
