The press report issued to the Japanese nation by the Konoe cabinet, also on July 11, 1937, stated that troops were being ordered to North China because “the Chinese side” had deliberately perpetrated an armed attack against Japan. “As our empire’s constant concern is to maintain peace in East Asia, however, we have not abandoned hope that peaceful negotiations may yet ensure nonexpansion of the conflict.”6 Japan’s domestic press emphasized the Konoe cabinet’s hope to contain the fighting to the Peking-Tientsin area and left unchallenged the claim that the Chinese were wholly at fault. The emperor, who by now had acquired considerable experience in dealing with his divided and deeply flawed military apparatus, probably knew otherwise. But the incident had happened; it was ongoing; and it needed to be ended quickly.
Meanwhile, as preparations went forward for a general offensive in response to recurring small-scale clashes with Chinese troops, Hirohito’s concern about Soviet intervention lessened, and he took satisfaction in the fact that the cabinet—which included Hirota as foreign minister, Sugiyama as army minister, Yonai as navy minister, and Kaya Okinori as finance minister7—had gone on record as opposed to expanding the incident beyond the Peking-Tientsin area.
Two weeks later, as the reinforcements from the Kwantung Army and the Korean Army were joined by the three divisions from the homeland, several minor clashes with the Chinese occurred, at Langfan, near Tientsin, on July 25 and at the Kuang’an Gate near the center of Peking the next day. Hirohito now pressed for a decisive, war-ending battle, and on July 27 sanctioned an imperial order directing the commander of the China Garrison Force to “chastise the Chinese army in the Peking-Tientsin area” and “bring stability to the main strategic places in that region.”8
The broad Japanese offensive followed strictly orders sanctioned by the emperor and issued from Tokyo, and after only two days of fighting led to the occupation of Peking and Tientsin, in both of which cities the British and French maintained small treaty-port settlements.9 By changing the mission of the China Garrison Force from protecting Japanese residents to occupying Chinese territory, Hirohito had abetted the escalation of the incident, leading to a new state of affairs in North China.
On July 29–30 there occurred a fresh incident which offered timely justification for Japan’s renewed policy of aggression, undertaken in the name of “chastising Chinese violence.” Tungchow, a small walled city east of Peking, was under the control of the collaborator Yin Ju-keng and his (Japanese-trained) Chinese security forces. On July 29–30, the latter rose up and attacked the Japanese civilian community, left undefended by the departure for nearby Peking and Tientsin of the main Japanese garrison. The uprising triggered a mood of blind fury against the Japanese occupiers. Assisted by students and workers, the Chinese troops slaughtered eighteen Japanese soldiers, nine intelligence officers, and 223 of the city’s 385 Japanese and Korean residents, including many women and children.
In Japan the Tungchow massacre generated a mood of anger and belligerence. The press reported a “second Nikolaevsk,” but failed to put the Chinese atrocity in perspective by mentioning that the Japanese invasion of the north was coming from the demilitarized zone, where Japanese and Koreans manufactured heroin and opium for smuggling into the provinces of North China.10 Kido greeted the news with deep anger, as did, presumably, most policy makers. Prince Takamatsu discussed Tungchow with the emperor on August 2 and cautioned him to remember that the views of the nonexpansionists in the army did not represent the entire army. Takamatsu may also have told his brother that, as he observed in his diary, “[t]he mood in the army today is that we’re really going to smash China so that it will be ten years before they can stand up straight again.”11
In view of such incidents it can hardly be said that the Japanese government was being dragged into war by its own forces. Rather it is more accurate to say that Konoe, backed by one group in the army, had resolved to exploit a small incident for the larger aim of punishing the Chinese army and securing control of the Peking-Tientsin area. In this, Konoe enjoyed the active support of Hirohito, who had cut short his vacation to return to the palace and was being carefully briefed on developments. As the historian Fujiwara Akira noted, “it was the [Konoe] government itself that had resolved on war, dispatched an army, and expanded the conflict,” and Hirohito had fully supported it.12
At this point Chiang Kai-shek decided to abandon the north and by shifting the war to the lower Yangtze River region, starting at Shanghai, possibly involve the foreign powers in defense of their citizens living in China’s largest and most international city. Japan had close to twenty-five thousand residents there, the Europeans about sixty thousand, and the Americans approximately four thousand. Nearly all of them lived in the foreign-ruled International Settlement area.13 The Battle of Shanghai began August 13; the next day Chinese air force planes joined in by attacking Japanese troops and naval airplanes on the ground and bombing the Third Fleet’s flagship Izumo. Almost immediately the Navy Ministry under Admiral Yonai became the main advocate of war expansion, including the occupation of Nanking.14 This second series of moves, by Chiang Kai-shek on one side and the Imperial Navy on the other, turned the “North China Incident” into the China war.
At Shanghai, Chiang’s best-trained and-equipped troops plus assorted “auxiliaries,” eventually totaling approximately 110,000 to 150,000 troops, took on some twelve thousand Japanese sailors and marines, who were quickly reinforced.15 Gen. Matsui Iwane was made Hirohito’s field commander on August 15, and five days later a Shanghai Expeditionary Force (consisting, eventually, mainly of poorly disciplined reservists in their late twenties and early thirties) was dispatched. The Twelfth Infantry Regiment and the Tenth Brigade Headquarters of the Eleventh Infantry Division were placed on alert at Dairen in case they were needed at Shanghai.16
Concomitantly twenty naval planes based in Nagasaki made a four-hour transoceanic flight to bomb, for the first time, the Chinese capital of Nanking.17 These aircraft were the “96-type long-range bombers,” that had recently been developed under the guidance of Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku for use in a future air war against the United States; Yamamoto was anxious to test them.18 On the seventeenth the Konoe cabinet, foreseeing quick victory, formally decided to abandon its nonexpansion policy and wage war for the singularly vague purpose of “chastising” China’s armed forces. “The empire, having reached the limit of its patience,” read the announcement, “has been forced to take resolute measures. Henceforth it will punish the outrages of the Chinese army, and thus spur the Nanking government to self-reflect.”19 Behind this decision, of course, lay the emperor’s judgment and approval, just exercised in pushing troop reinforcements and strategic bombing—or it would never have come to pass. Equally important was his and the cabinet’s arrogant disdain for the Chinese people and their capacity for resistance.
On August 18 Hirohito summoned his army and navy chiefs for a pointed recommendation. The war, he told them, “is gradually spreading; our situation in Shanghai is critical; Tsingtao is also at risk. If under these circumstances we try to deploy troops everywhere, the war will merely drag on and on. Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate a large force at the most critical point and deliver one overwhelming blow?”20 Peace, he went on, “based on our attitude of fairness,” could be achieved only through such a staggering victory. “Do you,” he asked them, “have in hand plans for such action? In other words, do we have any way worked out”—and here the emperor became victim of his own naive rhetoric—“to force the Chinese to reflect on their actions?”21
Three days after their audience with the emperor, the chiefs of staff delivered their written reports. A major air campaign could destroy China’s air force, military facilities, vital industries, and political centers. But air attacks alone would probably not suffice to make the Chinese army and people “lose the will to fight.” Japan should also occupy certain strategic points in North China, engage the Nationalist military forces directly, occupy Shanghai, and esta
blish a naval blockade of the China coast.22 To this policy, advocated most strongly by the navy at a time when many in the army and the government sought to avoid an all-out war, Hirohito gave his sanction, expressing concern only about the dispatch of troops to Tsingtao and the occupation of the air bases near Shanghai.23 At this point too, he accepted the position of his admirals not reluctantly but actively, pressing his generals to move with decisiveness.
Hirohito’s order of August 31 for the “Dispatch of the North China Area Army” bristled: “[D]estroy the enemy’s will to fight” and “wipe out resistance in the central part of Hepei Province,” with a view to ending the war quickly. But deleted from this imperial order, in accordance with his wishes, was the deployment of troops to Tsingtao.24 Over the course of the next two weeks Hirohito sanctioned six troop mobilizations in preparation for reinforcing the Shanghai area, where the fighting had bogged down. On September 7 the emperor sanctioned the deployment of three divisions and the Taiwan Garrison Force to the Shanghai front; at the same time, because of his concern with the Soviet Union, he ordered other units sent to Manchuria to stand guard. Strongly disapproving of the troop buildup but unable to stop it, First Department Head Major General Ishiwara resigned and was appointed vice chief of staff of the Kwantung Army.25
At the beginning of the war in China, the question had arisen of defining Japan’s war aims. On September 4, 1937, Army Minister Sugiyama issued a directive to his commanders stating: “Our present situation is completely different from any the empire has experienced before. We must bear in mind that this war has become total war.”26 On the same day Hirohito informed the Imperial Diet that while he was constantly preoccupied with “securing peace in Asia through cooperating with China,…China…does not really understand our empire’s true intention. To our deep regret they have constantly caused difficulties and problems that have finally resulted in the present incident. Our troops, displaying loyalty and bravery, are suffering hardships solely to make China self-reflect and to quickly establish peace in East Asia.”27
Japan needed to wage war without declaring war. Dependent on imports of American oil, iron and steel, cotton, and copper, Japan’s leaders feared that if it became a formal belligerent, the United States would deny it these strategic materials. By fighting an “incident” rather than a war, Japan could enable American industrial and raw-material exporters to circumvent the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1935 and the even more stringent one of May 1937—a profitable arrangement that American business, in the grip of renewed depression, was eager to continue.
Other reasons Japan preferred not to define clearly its war aims as it had done in three previous foreign wars were more spiritual. There existed, after all, an official theology with a great number of theologians—university professors, Zen and Nichiren Buddhist priests, and government bureaucrats—to expound it: The emperor was a living god, the descendant of Amaterasu mikami; Japan was the incarnation of morality and justice; by definition its wars were just and it could never commit aggression. Hence its effort to establish the “imperial way” (kodo) in China and bring people there under the emperor’s benevolent occupation by means of “compassionate killing”—killing off the few troublemakers so that the many might live—was a blessing upon the occupied people, and by no means colonial expansion. Those who resisted, naturally, had to be brought to their senses. But formally there was no “war,” only an “incident.”28
Consequently, from early on in the war the Japanese government regularly referred to the “China Incident” as its “sacred struggle” or “holy war” (seisen). And the longer the struggle dragged on, the more its ideologues insisted on using this term—“holy war”—which expressed the national mission of unifying the world under the emperor’s benevolent rule (hakk ichi’u), so that his and Amaterasu mikami’s august virtue could shine throughout the universe.
I
By early November the fighting in China had made clear to Prime Minister Konoe, the emperor, and the Army and Navy General Staffs that a more rational, more efficient high-command structure was needed to control the forces in the field and implement national policy. A Cabinet Planning Board had already been created in October. Now, on the twenty-seventh, Hirohito, on the recommendation of Konoe, ordered an “Imperial Headquarters” (daihon’ei) established within the palace as a purely military instrument through which he could exercise his constitutional role as supreme commander, and the army and navy could act more in concert. Thereafter, for a few hours in the morning a few days a week, the two chiefs of staff, the army and navy ministers, the chiefs of the operations sections, and Hirohito’s chief aide-decamp conducted business in the palace. With a staff of just over two hundred, the Imperial Headquarters was, initially, more a haphazard collection of officers rather than an effective organization for prosecuting war and coordinating politics and strategy, as Konoe had originally envisioned.
At the same time, also at the urging of Konoe, who wanted to bring the army and navy chiefs and vice chiefs of staff into closer consultation with the government, an intergovernmental liaison body was organized on November 19, 1937: the Imperial Headquarters–Government Liaison Conference.29 Intended to help in integrating the decisions and needs of the two military branches with the resources and policies of the rest of the government, the liaison conference too at its outset was a temporary, seldom-convened conference for exchanging information.
Final decisions of the liaison conference were formally disclosed through special meetings, which Hirohito attended in person. These imperial conferences (gozen kaigi) were also neither established by government regulations nor related to the constitutional process. Because the emperor convened them and sanctioned their decisions, however, contemporaries regarded them as legitimate even though only a few ministers of state, such as the prime minister and finance minister, actually participated in them.30 Imperial conferences were convened at least eight times between January 11, 1938, and December 1, 1941.31 Those attending imperial conferences, in addition to the emperor, were the chiefs and vice chiefs of the two general staffs, the army and navy ministers, the prime minister, finance minister, foreign minister, president of the privy council, and president of the Planning Board. Army and navy Military Affairs Bureau chiefs and cabinet secretaries were not allowed to attend imperial conferences. Except in two critical instances, both in 1941, the newspapers informed the public of the meetings immediately after they occurred. Press reports were terse, noted who attended, what they wore, and always stressed the unanimity of the decision makers.32
At the imperial conferences Hirohito presided over and approved decisions impacting not only the destiny of Japan but of China and other countries affected by Japanese policy. Since these conferences were usually convened after the liaison conferences, at which all the interested parties had reached decisions in which the emperor shared, he already knew the contents of the matters to be “decided.” Essentially the imperial conference was designed to allow him to perform as if he were a pure constitutional monarch, sanctioning matters only in accordance with his advisers’ advice but not bearing responsibility for his action. At these meetings, civilian ministers wore morning clothes and military officers full-dress uniforms. The theatrical element of these affairs should not obscure their great importance, however. Nor were all imperial conferences the same, and the emperor’s lips were not sealed at all of them.
The imperial conference was the device for legally transforming the “will of the emperor” into the “will of the state.” And because everyone who participated in its deliberations could claim to have acted by, with, and under the unique authority of the emperor, while he could claim to have acted in accordance with the advice of his ministers of state, the imperial conference diffused lines of responsibility.33 In that sense it was the perfect crown to the Japanese practice of irresponsibility, for it sustained four separate fictions: (a) that the cabinet had real power; (b) that the cabinet was the emperor’s most important advisory organ; and
(c) that the cabinet and the military high command had reached a compromise agreement on the matter at hand, providing the emperor with a policy that he (d) was merely sanctioning as a passive monarch. Reality was quite different: a powerless cabinet, an emasculated constitution, and a dynamic emperor participating in the planning of aggression and guiding the process, by a variety of interventions that were often indirect but in every instance determining.34
The senior members of the Imperial Headquarters all counseled Hirohito, but the chiefs of staff alone transmitted his orders to the various field and fleet commanders.35 Through the Imperial Headquarters, Hirohito exercised final command over both armed services, including the field armies that were directly under his orders: the Kwantung Army and the area armies in China.36 Through the liaison conference he and the high command attempted to coordinate policy with the civil government.37 But that coordination and unity of war leadership proved impossible for Hirohito to achieve, for the Imperial Headquarters reproduced the rivalry of the military services, while the liaison conference was based on—and ultimately sabotaged by—the principle of separate and independent imperial advisory authority by ministers of state.38
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 34
