Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Later that day Kawashima met with the Supreme Military Council, an informal group of high-ranking army officers, most of whom were sympathetic to the rebels. Among those in attendance and controlling the meeting were the Imperial Way generals Araki, Mazaki, and Yamashita and their supporters, including Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko and Lt. Gen. Prince Asaka Yasuhiko. The council decided to try persuasion on the rebel officers before conveying the emperor’s order to them, which was precisely the opposite of what Hirohito had demanded. According to the historian Otabe Yji, “the army minister’s instruction” was issued from the palace to the rebel officers at 10:50 A.M., five hours and fifty minutes after the start of their mutiny. It declared that “(1) Your reason for rebelling has reached the emperor; (2) We recognize your true action was based on your sincere desire to manifest the kokutai…. (5) Other than this, everything depends on the emperor’s benevolence.”41 This “instruction,” expressing informal upper-echelon approval of the uprising and intimating to the rebels that the emperor might show leniency, was conveyed to the ringleaders by Tokyo martial law commander General Kashii.

  On the evening of the first day of the uprising, when the ministers of the Okada cabinet came to court to submit their resignations, Hirohito again refused to permit it, telling them to stay on without their prime minister until the mutiny ended.42

  Early on the morning of the second day, February 27, Hirohito declared “administrative martial law” on the basis of Article 8 of the Imperial Constitution, pertaining to emergency imperial ordinances. Formally he was invoking his sovereign governmental power to handle the crisis.43 In reality he was backing his orders to suppress the rebellion in his capacity as commander in chief by freeing himself from any obligation to obtain the consent of any cabinet ministers for his actions.

  Hirohito displayed unusual energy in working to crush the rebellion. At short intervals throughout the second day and into the early morning hours of the twenty-eighth, the third day, Hirohito sent chamberlains scurrying down the long corridors of the Meiji Palace to summon Honj for repeated audiences. Each time he demanded to learn whether the rebels were being suppressed. When he did not like Honj’s replies, he threatened to lead the Imperial Guard Division himself. But (as Hata notes) Honj was equally stubborn in his defense of the rebel’s actions: Indeed, Honj’s own diary account of this period shows him a virtual traitor to the emperor.44

  During the uprising Hirohito met Prince Chichibu, who had just returned from his post in distant Hirosaki and with whom his relations were not always amicable. After their meeting Chichibu is alleged to have distanced himself from the rebels and ended his relations with the young officers and the Imperial Way generals.45 Nevertheless, rumors of the prince’s sympathy for them never ended, and two years later Prince Saionji twice revealed (to his secretary, Harada) his fear that sibling rivalry in the imperial family could someday lead to murder.46 Also on the second day two senior naval officers distinguished themselves by their show of loyalty to the emperor: Rear Admiral Yonai and his chief of staff, Inoue.

  By the morning of the fourth day of the uprising, February 29, the emperor had firmly maintained his authority, the troops were returning to their barracks, and most of the ringleaders were in custody. Court-martialed in April, secretly and without benefit of defense lawyers, seventeen of them were executed in July by firing squad. Shortly afterward, around the time of the Buddhist obon festival for the spirits of the dead, Hirohito is alleged to have ordered one of his military aides (who happened to have been on night duty at the Palace when the mutiny occurred) to secure seventeen obon lanterns. The aide later hung them somewhere in the palace. Hirohito said no more about the lanterns, which had to be kept secret because he could not be perceived as condoning mutiny. Perhaps this action made him feel more at ease with himself. Even after having sanctioned death sentences in order to extinguish threats to his entourage, he could still feel that he was living his belief in compassionate concern for his subjects.47

  When the military investigated the February uprising, it discovered that the rebels’ sense of crisis had been magnified by the general election held on February 20, in which voters had expressed antimilitary sentiments by supporting left-wing candidates. Further, despite the rural roots and populist rhetoric of the ringleaders, most had not become revolutionaries because of the agricultural depression, and their ultimate goals had little to do with agrarian reforms, as many contemporaries imagined. The aim of the insurgent leaders was to further the good of the kokutai, as they understood it, by accelerating Japan’s rearmament. The military portion of the national budget had increased steadily since the start of the Manchurian Incident, going from 3.47 percent of GNP in 1931 to 5.63 percent in 1936. During that period the navy had steadily increased its tonnage; both services had begun to develop air forces; but the army had not expanded significantly and still totaled about 233,365 officers and men organized in seventeen divisions.48 The insurgent officers blamed the political system, not economic conditions, for limiting military budgets in a time of national emergency.49

  Interestingly, in their concept of total war the thinking of the ringleaders and their senior commanders in the Army Ministry and the Army General Staff was strikingly similar: Both wanted state control of industrial decision making and production in order to fully mobilize the nation’s resources. Beyond their common ignorance of what “total” war really required, the rebel leaders were as disunited in their thinking as they had been in their actions throughout the uprising. Only the idea of a “Shwa restoration” to reform the management of the state seems to have been widely shared. Notions of what such a “restoration” would mean in practice varied from individual to individual.50 For Isobe, perhaps the most extreme of the ringleaders, it denoted “[s]tate consolidation of the economy together with completing the Meiji restoration and developing it into a world restoration.”51

  The February mutiny confirmed Hirohito’s belief in the constitution’s importance for securing his powers of military command. So rigidly did he heed that lesson that when General Ishiwara Kanji later drafted a plan to establish a separate, independent army air force, Hirohito would not even consider it for fear that an air force, not provided for in the constitution, might elude his control.52 Ultimately the entire experience strengthened his sense of the enormous power he had when performing as a military commander. He seems to have resolved never to appear indecisive when confronted with decisions to act; and he began to move closer to the Control faction of the army, and to feel justified in sanctioning large military spending increases. Yet he never overcame the memory of this incident, and tended to infer from it that the throne was more insecure than it really was.

  After World War II, when Hirohito was particularly concerned to play down his role as supreme commander, he offered a deliberately distorted account of the February mutiny:

  I issued an order at that time for the rebel force to be suppressed. This brings to mind Machida Chji, the finance minister. He was very worried about the rebellion’s adverse effect on the money market and warned me that a panic could occur unless I took firm measures. Therefore I issued a strong command to have [the uprising] put down.

  As a rule, because a suppression order also involves martial law, military circles, who cannot issue such an order on their own, need the mutual consent of the government. However, at the time, Okada’s whereabouts were unknown. As the attitude of the Army Ministry seemed too lenient, I issued a strict order.

  Following my bitter experiences with the Tanaka cabinet, I had decided always to wait for the opinions of my advisers before making any decision, and not to go against their counsel. Only twice, on this occasion and at the time of the ending of the war, did I positively implement my own ideas.

  Ishiwara Kanji of the Army General Staff Office also asked me, through military aide Chjiri [Kazumoto], to issue a suppression order. I don’t know what sort of a person Ishiwara is, but on this occasion he was correct, even though he had been the ins
tigator of the Manchurian Incident.

  Further, my chief military aide, Honj, brought me the plan drafted by Yamashita Hbun, in which Yamashita asked me to please send an examiner because the three leaders of the rebel army were likely to commit suicide. However, I thought that sending an examiner would imply that they had acted according to their moral convictions and were deserving of respect….

  So I rejected Honj’s proposal, and [instead] issued the order to suppress them. I received no report that generals in charge of military affairs had gone and urged the rebels to surrender.53

  When Hirohito ordered the immediate suppression of the rebels on the morning of February 26, he was angry at them for having murdered his closest advisers, and at his senior army officers for procrastinating in putting them down. On the second day Minister of Commerce and Industry Machida assumed the additional post of finance minister, and fear of economic panic and confusion became a reason, though not the main one, for the emperor’s action. Thereafter Hirohito felt that every hour of delay harmed Japan’s international image.54

  Repeatedly since the Manchurian Incident, the emperor had clashed with the military over infringements of his authority but never over fundamental policy. Occasionally, in step with the army’s rise to power, he had impressed his own political views on policy making, just as he had done earlier under the Hamaguchi cabinet.55 The February 26 mutiny taught him and Yuasa—his privy seal from March 1936 to June 1940, and the very first lord keeper of the privy seal to come to court daily—the importance of exercising the emperor’s right of supreme command to the full whenever circumstances required. Even with Honj acting against him, Hirohito had received support and gotten his way by taking a firm stance. His decisiveness abruptly ended the period in which alienated “young officers” had tried to use him as a principle of reform to undermine a power structure they could not successfully manipulate. Hirohito, however, had learned precisely how to manipulate that establishment in most situations and circumstances.

  The decision-making process had built into it secrecy, indirection, lack of clear lines of communication, vagueness in the drafting of policy statements, and manipulation of information networks—in short, confusion, misunderstanding, and perpetual intrigue to negotiate elite consensus. That was the way things worked in Tokyo. It was how the emperor worked. Now, once again, he had reminded all the close-knit elites that he was the reason the system worked.

  IV

  On May 4, 1936, in his rescript at the opening ceremony of the Sixty-ninth Imperial Diet, while Tokyo still lay silenced under martial law, Hirohito had finally closed the curtain on the February mutiny. For a short time he considered sending the military and the nation a strong message of censure of the army, but after much thought and procrastination over a three-month period, he settled for one terse, utterly innocuous sentence: “We regret the recent incident that occurred in Tokyo.”56 Many in his audience of Diet members and military officials responded with startled “awe,” and privately some were disappointed. Once again, at a crucial moment, Hirohito declined an opportunity to rein in his military publicly through his constitutional role. Nevertheless, owing to his actions behind the scene, the drifting and yawing in domestic policy that had characterized Japan since the Manchurian Incident now ended, and over the next fourteen months, the emperor and most of his advisers concurred with the demands of the army and navy for accelerated military buildup and state-directed industrial development.

  The Hirota Kki cabinet, formed immediately after the February 26 mutiny, following Privy Seal Yuasa’s recommendation, is remembered for having furthered military influence in politics while allowing interservice rivalries and jealousies to affect national goals. In May 1936 Hirota, on the advice of his army and navy ministers, revived the practice of appointing military ministers only from the roster of high-ranking officers on active duty. He professed to believe the measure would prevent officers associated with the discredited Imperial Way faction from someday regaining power.57 By narrowing the field of candidates and increasing the power of the army vis-à-vis the prime minister, Hirota’s action paved the way for army leaders to use this weapon to overthrow the cabinet of Admiral Yonai in July 1940.58

  In policy toward China, Hirota spurned cooperation based on equality and supported the army’s plans to separate the five provinces of North China, with a population estimated at more than eighty million, from the Nanking government. Hirota had been foreign minister when the Japanese commander of the China Garrison Force, based in the port city of Tientsin, and the chief of the Mukden Special Agency had signed local agreements with Chinese Nationalist minister of war, Gen. Ho Ying-ch’in, by which Chiang Kai-shek withdrew both his political organs and his Central Army from North China. Like the emperor, Hirota had thereafter done nothing to counter statements by the commander of the China Garrison Force and other generals publicly suggesting that the coal-and iron-rich northern provinces be split away from the rest of China and, in effect, incorporated into the Japanese continental holding.59

  Also like the emperor, Hirota shared an assumption that many Japanese officers considered self-evident: China was neither a nation nor a people but merely a territorial designation, and Japan was entitled to rearrange that territory and take whatever parts it wished. Emperor Hirohito, on April 17, 1936, sanctioned the army’s request for a threefold increase in the size of its small China Garrison Force from 1,771 to 5,774 troops.60 He also approved the establishment of a new military base at Fengtai, a rail junction in the southwest suburb of Peking, not far from the historic Marco Polo Bridge. Strong Chinese protests ensued, but the expanded garrison went ahead with the construction of its Fengtai barracks. Japanese troops were soon conducting training exercises with live ammunition, in close proximity to Chinese military facilities, setting the stage for repeated clashes with Chinese troops.61

  Hirohito should have known that Japan needed time, capital, and more industry—in short, needed years of at least relative peace, if it was going to profit from its new territories on the continent and the industrial development already in place. And the Army General Staff also ought to have appreciated the dangerous animosity and distrust Japan had stirred up within China’s educated public of workers, students, and intellectuals, and especially among such Manchurian exiles as Chang Hsueh-liang and his officer corps, who identified strongly with the northeastern provinces and were determined to go on resisting Japan.

  Hirohito and his strategists were more concerned with protecting their overlong (and exposed) northern lines of supply and communication from possible Soviet interruption than with the “united front” that Chiang Kai-shek and his archrival Mao Tse-tung were forming throughout the first half of 1937. Japanese contingency planning under the Hirota cabinet focussed on defense against the Soviet Union. A major war with China was neither expected, desired, nor prepared for. Japanese relations with Moscow deteriorated as the Kwantung Army reinforced and expanded its activities in Inner Mongolia, and strengthened its positions along the northern border with Outer Mongolia.

  The Hirota cabinet responded favorably to Nazi Germany’s policies of rapid rearmament on a gigantic scale, anti-Sovietism, economic autarchy, and racial and religious bigotry and intolerance. The signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany in November 1936 was preceded by the growth of military ties between the Imperial Army and Navy and the German military command, and came on the heels of a series of foreign policy coups by Hitler that destroyed the post–World War I settlement in Europe.62 A secret protocol to the pact committed the signatories not to assist Moscow in the event of war between one of them and the Soviet Union.63 A year later Italy joined the pact. Having aligned internationally with the rising Nazi and Fascist dictatorships, imperial Japan could now be expected to act together with them in the future.64 For the democratically elected governments of Britain, France, and the United States, the Anti-Comintern Pact united the looming crises in Europe and Asia.

  Hirota adopted his most important f
oreign policy measures in mid–1936, in four-and five-member ministerial conferences that departed from the practice of full cabinet meetings envisioned under the Meiji constitution. The “Criteria for National Policy,” and the “Foreign Policy of the Empire,” both decided on August 7, 1936, set forth a grandiose, provocative and unrealistic array of projects and goals, which, if they came to be concurrently attempted, would quite exceed Japan’s national power. Manchukuo was to be built up; the resources of North China were to be secured for the empire through puppet regimes; preparations would be made for future war with the Soviet Union; control of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia was to be brought about, which would require new naval construction in competition with the United States, as well as the building of air bases and radio stations on Taiwan, the Marianas, and the Carolines (in the Central Pacific)—and, at the same time, there would be an increase in military and naval manpower and logistical support structures.65