Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  The “Criteria for National Policy” registered the tendency of Japan’s bureaucratic elites to line up their respective positions, side by side, in vague official texts that could be interpreted to suit the convenience of their drafters.66 This was to be the pattern of decision making for all later stages of the crisis of Japanese diplomacy. That this tendency made its appearance on the eve of war with China was significant, for it meant that the prime minister, foreign minister, army and navy ministers, and the two chiefs of staff had abandoned the task of thrashing out their disagreements in reasoned argument. Rather than struggle to reach genuine consensus, they adopted a simpler, easier procedure. They enscribed their respective positions in “national policy” documents that postponed reckoning over the resources needed to accomplish their goals, and also left unclear whether force or diplomacy, or both, would be employed.

  The drafters of the national policy equated their first criterion—to “eliminate the hegemonistic policies of the Great Powers in East Asia”—with “manifest[ing] the spirit of the imperial way” in foreign policy. Henceforth foreign policy would become more expansionist and radical, for the “imperial way” implied, internationally, that the emperor’s “benevolence” be extended until Japanese overlordship was established throughout Asia. The second yardstick of sound foreign policy required Japan “to become the stabilizing force in East Asia in both name and reality” by building up armaments. The third and fourth “criteria of national policy”—and the core of the document—were “to secure our footing on the East Asian continent, and to advance and develop in the Southern Oceans by combining diplomacy and national defense.”67

  The reference to the “East Asian continent” met the wish of the army to advance north with a view to countering the Soviet Union; the “Southern Oceans,” an elastic geographical term, denoted the navy’s goal of moving southward and preparing to achieve supremacy over the United States and Britain in the vast western Pacific. Neither service was happy with the goal of the other; neither trusted the other. By posting their plans side by side, thereby avoiding a clear decision as to which one should prevail, they prevented the pluralistic system of advising the emperor from breaking down.

  Japan was now only a year away from all-out war in China, but the inability of its constitutionally mandated imperial advisers and the chiefs of staff to agree on a unified national policy was more than ever an endemic feature of the political process. And complicating these disagreements and splits between “the government” and “the military,” under both Hirota and his successors, was continuing discord between the Army General Staff in Tokyo and officers in the field charged with implementing policy.

  Once Japan entered a serious war emergency, with the prestige of the throne exalted far beyond the limits of ordinary times, this multitiered structure of bureaucratic conflicts created increasing room for Hirohito to maximize his influence in policy making. Constantly becoming more experienced in playing his designated political and military roles, Hirohito would watch as his advisers developed their policies, note their disagreements, and finally insist that they compose their differences and unify their military and political strategies. As it was impossible for them to do so, the pressure he exerted complicated the already confused decision-making process. His “unity” card would become Hirohito’s special wedge for driving home his views, ensuring that those of “middle stratum” officers did not prevail in national policy making, and that the process itself remained primarily “top-down” in nature.

  And the more Hirohito pressed “unity” upon the representatives of his chronically divided “government” and “high command,” the more they papered over their differences in policy texts that virtually impelled expansion abroad and, soon, war without end. It was not just the Japanese military provoking aggression in China during the middle and late 1930s; the religiously charged monarchy was also driving aggression, while offering a shield from public criticism to those who acted in its name.

  On August 25, 1936, the Hirota government announced that slightly more than 69 percent of the government’s total 1937 budget (or nearly 33 billion yen) would be allocated to the military. This amounted to almost a threefold increase in the 1936 military budget of approximately 10 billion yen, or 47.7 percent of government spending.68 To pay for all this, taxes would be raised and inflation tolerated, armaments manufacturers and the great zaibatsu enriched, and the patriotism of ordinary wage earners fanned up while their wages were held down.

  These policies of the Hirota cabinet reflected and to some degree were impelled by backlash within the navy over the army’s unilateral actions at home and abroad. On March 27, 1936, the Third Fleet commander, Adm. Oikawa Koshir, had offered to the navy minister and the chief of the Navy General Staff his “Views on National Policy Centering on China.” Writing from his flagship, Izumo in Shanghai Harbor, Oikawa pointed out that the Kwantung Army was rushing “political machinations” to “separate the five provinces of North China from the authority of the Nanking government and so form a buffer zone between Manchukuo and China.”69

  After urging the navy not to permit the Kwantung Army to act unilaterally in so grave a matter, Oikawa recommended a policy of expanding southward into Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific, while also moving north. Although this should be done peacefully, Japan had to prepare and be ready someday to free itself of tariff and other obstacles to economic growth “by using military force.” Therefore, even if war against the Soviet Union should be decided on and “preparation for a war on land” made the immediate national goal, the navy still should prepare for war at sea.70 Oikawa also stressed the need to exercise care and prudence so as not to provoke the Great Powers and induce them “to unite against us.”71

  The reply to Admiral Oikawa by the navy vice minister and the vice chief of the Navy General Staff was later formally adopted as the Hirota cabinet’s “Criteria for National Policy” and “General Principles of National Policy,” approved in August.72 The latter document spoke of making Japan the “stabilizing force in East Asia” while it expanded southward.73 At this time, however, the navy’s senior commanders clearly recognized the irrationality of separate army and navy advances, fearing that this would exceed Japan’s national strength and “ultimately lead to war with more than two countries.” They recommended a policy of “gradual and peaceful expansion” in both the north and the south.74

  This was indeed the rational strand in the otherwise wildly ambitious strategy pursued by the cabinets of Hirota and his successor, General Hayashi. That influential groups in the navy, army, Foreign Ministry, and imperial court were still capable of lucid evaluations of Japan’s problems during 1936 and the first half of 1937 is undeniable. Nevertheless, these same leaders were already beginning to be carried by the momentum of their choices. Sooner or later their policy goals—military expansion on the continent, naval control of the western Pacific and Southeast Asian sea lanes, and equalization of relations with the Great Powers—would provoke military clashes with China—and even more serious clashes with the United States and Britain.

  Significantly, in the fall of 1936, after several incidents involving attacks on Japanese nationals living in central and south China, the navy began to study ways to improve its policing capabilities in south China. The air power theories of the Italian Maj. Gen. Giulio Douhet were then in vogue among navalists, and the resulting contingency plan included a punitive air campaign against the civilian population of China’s major cities as well as preparations for conducting a coastal blockade should one ever be needed.75

  Hirota’s tenure as prime minister ended on January 23, 1937. He was followed on February 2 by General Hayashi, whose cabinet lasted only four months. Prince Konoe then organized his first cabinet on June 4. He was a descendant of the famous Fujiwara family of court nobles, whose women had for centuries regularly intermarried with imperial princes and during the Heian period (794–1185) had ruled Japan. Personal cleverness, charisma, and high l
ineage, as well as good connections with the navy and willingness to cultivate the army and the civilian right wing all combined to propel him to the top.

  V

  Following the February 26, 1936, uprising, under the prime ministerships of Hirota and Hayashi, the emperor and his entourage became more supportive of reinforcing his theoretically unassailable power from below. In this context the Ministry of Education accelerated efforts to further the nation’s spiritual mobilization for a possible protracted war, and on May 31, 1937, published and distributed for school use an estimated three hundred thousand copies of Kokutai no hongi (The Fundamentals of the national polity). Eventually more than two million copies were sold nationwide.

  Kokutai no hongi was a discourse on the kokutai, and on the emperor’s ideological and spiritual role as the exemplar of national benevolence and morality. A transitional ideological tract, it did not completely reject Western thought and institutions, but went beyond merely emphasizing Japanese cultural distinctiveness. Extolling the “bright,” “pure,” and selfless “heart” of the Japanese, and counterposing the kokutai to modern Western individualism and “abstract totalitarianisms,” it stressed the absolute superiority of the Japanese people and state over all other nations. “We loyal subjects differ completely in our nature from so called citizens of Western nations…. We always seek in the emperor the source of our lives and activities.”76

  Kokutai no hongi also emphasized the centrality of the family-state, home, and ancestors, and reminded readers that the “divine winds” (kamikaze), which had twice saved Japan from Mongol invasions in the late thirteenth century, proved indisputably Japan’s divinity and indestructibility. Above all the pamphlet implanted the image of the emperor as a military ruler and “a living god who rules our country in accordance with the benevolent wishes of his imperial founder and his other imperial ancestors.”77 All Japanese subjects had the duty to give Hirohito their absolute obedience. In practice that meant “to live for the great glory and dignity of the emperor, abandoning one’s small ego, and thus expressing our true life as a people.”78 Here, in essence, was that peculiar amalgamation of Shinto, Buddhist, neo-Confucian, and Western monarchist ideals, known as kd—“the imperial way,” that powered Japanese aggression, and was used by army leaders to browbeat critics and by right-wing thugs to justify their terrorist actions. For Hirohito the chief merit of the pamphlet was the possibility it offered of producing a stronger spirit of devotion to his person, thereby enhancing his influence over the military.

  The myth of Japan as a tightly unified, monolithic state and society, which Kokutai no hongi perpetuated, was reaffirmed four years later in July 1941 in yet another hysterical Shinto-Buddhist tract published and distributed by the Ministry of Education. By this time Hirohito had become the symbol of Japan’s “escape” from the West, and had begun the process that would lead to the momentous decision to declare war against the United States and Britain. He needed more than ever the strongest possible political influence over the entire nation. The country had taken on the identity of a fascist state and had even adopted the haunting rhetoric of fascism; its people labored under the burdens of food rationing and a total war economy; policies were in place designed to increase war production by lowering living standards; in the emperor’s name all open dissent had been squashed.

  Against this background Shimmin no michi (The Way of the subject) called for overthrowing “the old order based on the dominance of individualism, liberalism, and dialectical materialism,” and building a new order in East Asia based on the principle of allowing “all nations to seek their proper places.”79 The pamphlet demanded that “a structure of…unanimity” be established in all realms of national life so that Japan could perfect its total war state and establish “a world community based on moral principles.” With every subject involved in serving the emperor, it called upon all Japanese to purge egotism from their souls and practice daily a relation to the state in which nothing is “our own,” and “even in our private lives we always remember to unite with the emperor and serve the state.”80

  9

  HOLY WAR

  Early on the morning of July 8, 1937, an ominous unplanned incident occurred some twenty miles south of Peking, when Japanese army units barracked at Fengtai clashed with Chinese garrison forces at the Marco Polo Bridge (in Chinese, Lukouchiao). Army headquarters in Tokyo was notified immediately and ordered that the problem—stemming from a brief exchange of rifle fire the night before—be resolved on the spot. The fighting in the vicinity of the bridge, located on the railway line from Peking to the interior city of Hankow, went on for three straight days. By the eleventh, negotiations by the local commanders resulted in the signing of an armistice. Thereafter, for about three weeks, the military leaders succeeded in making their armistice hold.

  Now the serious consequences of a split in China policy within the military required the emperor, vacationing in Hayama, to return to Tokyo. One group, based partly in the Military Affairs Section of the Army Ministry and partly in the Operations Section of the Army General Staff, saw the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge as an opportunity. Manchukuo had never received lawful recognition by China; the terms of the armistice that had ended the Manchurian Incident were not being observed; the demilitarized zone separating the provinces of North China from Manchukuo was often violated; and there were other irritating issues. If the fighting near Peking was taken as a provocatory pretext, all outstanding problems with China could be settled by one powerful military strike—for the Chinese would never be a formidable military match. Therefore troops should immediately be moved to the Peking area to “protect Japanese lives and property.” The officers who held this hawkish position enjoyed the support of Kwantung Army staff officers and some civilian officials of the South Manchurian Railway Company (a major repository of imperial household investments) who hoped to extend the company’s lines from Manchukuo into North China, and so wanted to see the incident expand.1

  The other, more senior group, confined to the Army General Staff and centered on Major General Ishiwara, head of the First Department, and his Second Section chief, Kawabe Torashiro, feared becoming so embroiled in China that resources would be diverted from the buildup to defend against the Soviet Union. When, on July 9, the Konoe cabinet met in emergency session and decided temporarily to postpone sending more troops to North China, the views of this second group—the nonexpansionists who called for local settlement of the incident—momentarily prevailed. The expansionists, however, were already at work behind the scenes, placing homeland divisions on alert and drafting orders to send reinforcements, and when the Konoe cabinet met again on the eleventh, it reversed its decision of the ninth and decided to send thousands of troops to North China from the Kwantung Army, the Korean Army, and the homeland.

  Meanwhile Hirohito reacted to the events in North China by first considering the possible threat from the Soviet Union. One week earlier, on June 30, Japan’s recently mutinous First Division had been building fortifications on Kanchazu Island in the Amur River. At that point along the ambiguously demarcated border between northern Manchukuo and the Soviet Union, Russian troops came onto the island, a firefight ensued, and the Japanese destroyed two Soviet gunboats. The Russians, showing restraint, brought up more troops and artillery but did not immediately respond otherwise.2 Tokyo and Moscow exchanged charges, and a test of resolution seemed imminent. Would the Russians now attack along the Manchukuo border? The emperor summoned his chief of staff, Prince Kan’in, before meeting, in succession, with Prime Minister Konoe, the new army minister, Sugiyama, and the chief of the Navy General Staff.

  “What will you do if the Soviets attack us from the rear?” he asked the prince. Kan’in answered, “I believe the army will rise to the occasion.” The emperor repeated his question: “That’s no more than army dogma. What will you actually do in the unlikely event that Soviet [forces] attack?” The prince said only, “We will have no choice.” His Majesty seemed v
ery dissatisfied.3

  Hirohito wanted to know exactly what the contingency plans were, and Kan’in was evasive. Nevertheless, despite his disappointment with Prince Kan’in’s report, the emperor approved the decision of the Konoe cabinet to move troops to North China, and put his seal on the order for their dispatch.

  Aware of the armistice yet anxious to resolve all of its outstanding problems with China in one stroke, the Konoe cabinet had decided to enlarge the incident, and the emperor had tacitly agreed from the very start. The sequence of decisions following the Marco Polo Bridge flare-up was thus quite unlike the pattern at the time of the Manchurian Incident, when field officers had perpetrated illegal faits accompli and the emperor had explicitly sanctioned their actions after the fact. On this occasion the Konoe cabinet was taking the initiative in tandem with the army expansionists, and Hirohito was supporting that decision from the outset in opposition to the nonexpansionists on the Army General Staff. On the other hand, in one respect the first episode of what would become the China war was similar to the far more premeditated Manchurian Incident. The shooting in the vicinity of the Chinese barracks at Fengtai near Marco Polo Bridge on July 8 had been arbitrarily ordered by a Japanese regimental commander without orders from the center, in order to rectify a perceived “insult to the Japanese army.” Though this action did not really begin the war, Hirohito would later refer to it in blaming the army for expanding a skirmish, already calming, into the long and bitter China conflict.4

  Three years into the war the emperor looked back and expanded on his thoughts and actions that day in early July when he had pondered what to do in North China. The number one priority had to be preparation to fight the Soviet Union. Therefore he believed he had no choice in China except to compromise and delay; and so he had talked with Prince Kan’in and the Minister of the Army Sugiyama Gen about the Kanchazu Island matter. They told him, in effect, that so far as the army was concerned there was no need to worry: “Even if war with China came,…it could be finished up within two or three months,” which seemed unreasonable to Hirohito. So he left the matter open for a short time, decided to talk with Prime Minister Konoe, convene an imperial conference, and work through to a decision. If his military opposed it, then that was that. He spoke with the service ministers and the chiefs of staff. They did not convince him either way, but “they agreed with each other on the time factor, and that made a big difference; so all right, we’ll go ahead.” The war with China was launched. Then it soon became clear that Japanese forces in China were not large enough. “Transfer troops from the border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union,” he said. But his military chiefs told him, “No, that can’t be done.”5 Hirohito was silent as to his own shortsightedness in the making of this decision.