Furthermore the cabinet (as a whole) could not exercise control over its military members because of its weak powers of integration and the unique position within it of the army and navy ministers, who enjoyed independent authority to advise the emperor. At the insistence of the navy, which feared both army control of the Imperial Headquarters and any weakening of its own independent “right of supreme command,” the prime minister and civil officials were excluded from the Imperial Headquarters. Although Hirohito sanctioned this arrangement, it reduced efficiency and hampered communication and coordination with the civil organs of state throughout the war.
Having established the Imperial Headquarters, Hirohito found it somewhat easier to perform as an active supreme commander in chief, something his grandfather Meiji had never been. In communicating his highest orders, called Imperial Headquarters Army Orders (tairikumei) and Imperial Headquarters Navy Orders (daikairei), directly to the theater commanders, area army commanders, often division commanders, and fleet admirals, Hirohito’s army and navy chiefs of staff acted as “transmitters.” Although it was physically impossible for him to scrutinize all the orders of the Imperial Headquarters, these orders in the highest category—his supreme commands—were carefully examined by Hirohito before being returned to the chiefs of staff for transmission.
The same was true of the more important orders and directives that the chiefs of staff issued based on the tairikumei and daikairei. Drafts originated in the operations sections of the army and navy, were revised by department heads and bureau chiefs, moved up the chain of command to the vice chiefs of staff and chiefs of staff, and finally were presented to the emperor for his approval before being sent out.39 Thus, not only as the force that animated Japan’s entire war system, but as the individual with free agency who carefully examined and sanctioned the policies, strategies, and orders for waging wars of aggression, Hirohito’s responsibility was enormous.
Hirohito interacted with his Imperial Headquarters through probing questions, admonitions, and careful repetition of his instructions and questions to his chiefs of staff and war ministers. Over time he also learned how to use his position to put constant psychological pressure on them. Usually he operated temperately, more in the courteous manner of George C. Marshall, one might say, than in that of George S. Patton. His “questions,” however, were tantamount to orders and could not be ignored. Sometimes he met objections to the changes he wished to see implemented in ongoing military operations, but so long as he persisted, he prevailed—even if that meant his chiefs of staff had to override the wishes of important department heads and operations sections chiefs who desired different policies. The chiefs of staff, in short, were responsible to an energetic, activist emperor, and could never wage the China war just as they liked.40 The same was true of the army and navy ministers, who were also subjected to Hirohito’s interrogations and sometimes made to feel his anger.
Moreover, at key moments for which documentary evidence is available, Hirohito not only involved himself, sometimes on a daily basis, in shaping strategy and deciding the planning, timing, and so on of military campaigns, but also intervened in ongoing field operations to make changes that would not have occurred without his intervention. He also monitored, and even occasionally commented on, orders issued by area commanders to their subordinate units, though the extent to which he did this cannot be determined.41
Informal briefings (nais) from the cabinet, which Hirohito had received ever since the start of his reign, were augmented from late 1937 onward by the Imperial Headquarters, which regularly supported Hirohito in his supreme commander role. To some extent the informal briefings were question-and-answer sessions—questions from his majesty (gokamon), answers from his briefers. The usual participants were the chiefs of staff and certain cabinet ministers. From time to time there were more formal sessions. At these the emperor silently received written or oral reports (js) from his ministers or senior military staff. During the nais briefings, exchanges of information and ideas could lead to discussions of policy, strategy, even tactical matters, and to decisions arrived at by Japanese-style “consensus”—with the result that cabinet decisions were predetermined “finished products” that mirrored Hirohito’s thinking and therefore rarely had to be revised.42
II
In late October the positional warfare in and around Shanghai showed signs of drawing to an end. On November 9 the Chinese army began a partial withdrawal. Some three square miles of the city and large parts of its environs had been devastated by artillery shelling and by air and naval bombardment. Nearly a quarter million Chinese had been killed, including many women and children who had fought on the front lines. Japan had suffered 9,115 dead and 31,257 wounded.43 Chinese defenses crumbled around mid-November, after the Shanghai Expeditionary Force’s Sixteenth Division, commanded by Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago, came ashore unopposed at Paimaoko on the banks of the Yangtze River, threatening to link up with the Tenth Army, under Lt. Gen. Yanagawa Heisuke, which had landed a week earlier on the northern coast of Hangchow Bay.44 The demoralized and disorganized soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek, exposed to constant bombing and strafing from Japanese navy planes and to shelling from Japanese gunboats, retreated pell-mell through villages and towns along the Yangtze toward Nanking, some 180 miles away.
Columns of Japanese troops, heavily reinforced but badly in need of rest and resupply, pushed west in hot pursuit. The original mission of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force had been to conduct only a limited war in the Shanghai area and to avoid problems with the British and the Americans. These restrictions were now ignored as field commanders began to exercise their own discretionary power in defiance of the high command in Tokyo. Entering for the first time into direct contact with ordinary Chinese civilians, the troops (who had been killing prisoners of war throughout the Shanghai fighting) were now ordered to disregard the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. As stated in the attack order of the Second Battalion of the Sixth Infantry Regiment, issued on November 11, “All the law-abiding people have retreated within the walls. Treat everyone found outside the walls as anti-Japanese and destroy them…. Since it is convenient in conducting sweep operations to burn down houses, prepare materials.”45
Burning and plundering villages and towns as they proceeded inland along main roads and along the rail trunk line toward Nanking, the different units of the Japanese army drove ahead of them a vast exodus of Chinese troops and civilian refugees. On December 1 Hirohito’s newly established Imperial Headquarters ordered the Tenth Army and the Shanghai Expeditionary Force to close in on the capital from different directions. The following day Prince Asaka took command of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and General Matsui, then in poor health, was promoted to command the Central China Area Army, which comprised his own Shanghai force and the Tenth Army. On December 8 troops under Asaka’s command began the assault on the Chinese defenses. The walled city of Nanking, with a population estimated at four to five hundred thousand, fell on December 13, after a defense of only five days.
There were no orders to “rape” Nanking. Nor did Imperial Headquarters ever order the total extermination of the enemy as the ultimate goal of the Nanking encirclement campaign. Standing orders to take no prisoners did exist, however. And once Nanking fell, Japanese soldiers began to execute, en masse, military prisoners of war and unarmed deserters who had surrendered. They also went on an unprecedented and unplanned rampage of arson, pillage, murder, and rape. The resulting slaughter continued in the city and its six adjacent rural villages for three months, and far exceeded earlier atrocities committed during the Battle of Shanghai and along the escape routes to Nanking. General Nakajima’s Sixteenth Division, in just its first day in the capital, killed approximately 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers. Another Japanese estimate reduces that total somewhat, to 24,000.46
When General Matsui, with Asaka's assent, Asaka insisted on staging a triumphal victory parade on horseback down the broad ma
in thoroughfare of Nanking on December 17, Asaka’s chief of staff, Inuma Mamoru, then ordered the Sixteenth and Ninth Divisions to intensify their mopping-up operations within the occupied city and its surrounding villages so that no harm would befall the imperial prince. On the night of December 16 and into the morning hours of the seventeenth, with the battle already won and the Chinese remnant troops, mostly unarmed and out of uniform, trying desperately to flee, Japanese soldiers rounded up and indiscriminately executed more than seventeen thousand men and boys. Just within the Nanking city walls.47 Meanwhile the Ninth Division stepped up its murderous operation in Nanking’s outlying administrative districts.
At 2 P.M. on December 17, General Matsui, accompanied by Admiral Hasegawa, concluded the victory ceremony by bowing to the east and raising the Sun Flag from the front of the former Kuomintang Government office building. “Banzai for His Majesty the Supreme Commander!” shouted Matsui three times. More than twenty thousand assembled combat troops—one-third the total number occupying the city—echoed in unison.48
The total number of Chinese atrocity-victims—both within the walled city and its rural districts—remains hotly disputed. The best Japanese estimates put the figure at “no fewer than two hundred thousand,” while acknowledging that the true number may never be known. The postwar Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal accepted an estimate of “over 200,000” civilians and prisoners of war “murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks.”49 The war crimes trial held at Nanking accepted a figure of “over 300,000,” and later uncorroborated estimates made in China increased that figure to 340,000 victims.50 In December 1937 the first Western news accounts of the Nanking massacres, based on limited access to the city, gave estimates of from ten thousand to more than twenty thousand killings in the first few days.51 Of the specific battlefield conditions that led Japanese soldiers to commit these horrendous crimes, the ones most frequently cited by Japanese historians are the breakdown of discipline, racial chauvinism, desire for revenge, and “extreme psychological frustration.”
Also in dispute is the number of rape victims. Foreign observers at the time estimated that approximately one thousand women and girls of all ages were sexually assaulted and raped, daily, throughout the early stages of the occupation, when the imperial army had completely isolated Nanking from the rest of China. Raping continued into late March, by which time order in the ranks had been restored. “Comfort stations,” where women from throughout the Japanese empire were forced to serve as prostitutes, were beginning to proliferate; and the army had established a new “National Restoration Government” for the central China area to match the one installed some three months earlier at Peking. Yet widespread violence against Chinese civilians continued. Between the start of the China war in August 1937 and the end of 1939, as many as 420 Japanese soldiers would be convicted by military courts for the rape and murder of Chinese women. Yet no Japanese soldier was ever executed for such crimes.52
Hundreds of Japanese reporters and newsreel cameramen accompanied the army in China at this time, and a relatively small number from the United States and Europe. Only the latter conveyed to the world what was really happening. The censored Japanese press, prohibited from quoting foreign news sources critical of Japan, did not discuss massacres, war atrocities, terrorized civilians, or rapes, but merely reported many prisoners captured at Nanking and large numbers of Chinese dead left unburied.53 Nevertheless the story of two Japanese second lieutenants competing to cut down with their swords a hundred Chinese soldiers had appeared several times in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi shinbun prior to the capture of Nanking, so that a context for grasping the violence on the battlefields in China existed.54 Yet only very discerning Japanese readers and those with access to foreign newspapers, such as the Christian scholar Yanaihara Tadao, made the connections and became aware that killers in uniform had committed crimes that did not accord with Japan’s idealized self-image.55
Members of the imperial family, including Hirohito’s fifty-year-old granduncle Prince Asaka, who had commanded the attack on Nanking under Matsui’s supervision and was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities; forty-nine-year-old General Prince Higashikuni, chief of the army air force and an uncle of Empress Nagako; and seventy-one-year-old uncle Prince Kan’in, chief of the Army General Staff, all knew of the massacres and the near-total collapse of discipline.56 So too, of course, did Army Minister Sugiyama. Many middle-and upper-echelon officers of the Imperial Headquarters knew. Reserve Maj. Gen. Et, a member of the Lower House of the Diet, knew.57 The Foreign Ministry certainly knew. Its East Asian Bureau chief, Ishigari Itar, confided to his diary that “A letter arrived from Shanghai reporting in detail on the atrocities of our army in Nanking. It describes an horrendous situation of pillage and rape. My god, is this how our imperial army behaves?”58 The diplomat and old China hand Shigemitsu Mamoru wrote soon after the war of how, at the time, he had “made great efforts to develop a good policy toward China in order to compensate for crimes [committed] when occupying Nanking.”59
It seems unlikely that the Konoe government knew of the rape and pillage at Nanking but the well-briefed Hirohito did not. Hirohito was at the top of the chain of command, and whatever the shortcomings of the command system at that very early stage, he could not easily be kept ignorant of high-or middle-level decisions. He closely followed every Japanese military move, read diplomatic telegrams, read the newspapers daily, and often questioned his aides about what he found in them. As the commander in chief who had sanctioned the capture and occupation of Nanking, and as the spiritual leader of the nation—the individual who gave legitimacy to the “chastisement” of China—he bore a minimal moral as well as constitutional duty to project—even if not publicly—some concern for the breakdown of discipline. He never seems to have done so.
Growing foreign diplomatic complaints about the behavior of his troops in the Shanghai-Nanking war zones may also have come to Hirohito’s attention. Certainly they came to the attention of the high command and the Foreign Ministry, not to mention several members of the Diet. U.S. ambassador Grew twice formally protested the Japanese army’s pillaging of American property and desecration of American flags in Nanking to Foreign Minister Hirota, who then raised the issue at a cabinet meeting in mid-January 1938.60
Diplomat Hidaka Shinrokur, who visited Nanking right after its fall, also reported in detail to Hirota, and may even have briefed the emperor on the atrocities in late January, though the evidence for this is conjectural.61 Hidaka spoke fluent English. He personally knew the Nazi German John Rabe, one of the organizers of the Nanking International Safety Zone, established by Westerners near the city’s center to provide a sanctuary for refugees. Manchester Guardian reporter Harold J. Timperley, author of Japanese Terror in China (1938), the first book on the Nanking massacre, was his personal friend. He also discussed Nanking events with New York Times correspondent Hallett Abend. Hidaka even transmitted to the Foreign Ministry some of the complaints of members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, including those written by Rabe and Nanking University professor Lewis Smythe. If either Hidaka or Foreign Minister Hirota had briefed Hirohito on the atrocities committed by the army, he would have been very well informed indeed.
Assuming, however, that Hirohito was not officially informed by them or anyone else in a formal position of authority of the true scale of the mass executions his soldiers were carrying out, under divisional, regimental, and even staff orders, in violation of international law, he still had secondary intelligence of the breakdown of army discipline from non-chain-of-command sources, such as the domestic and foreign press, or perhaps from his brothers, who might have passed on to him orally rumors of what was going on in occupied Nanking.62 Since he did have such secondary intelligence, he could secretly have ordered an investigation. Yet no documentary trace exists of an imperial order to investigate. Instead there remains Hirohito’s silence about the criminal behavior of the imperial
forces whose movements he was following closely up to the very moment they took the city. There also remains the equally undeniable fact that throughout the prelude to the incident and during the entire period of the murders and rapes, rather than do anything publicly to show his displeasure, anger, or remorse, he energetically spurred his generals and admirals on to greater victories in the national project to induce Chinese “self-reflection.”
On November 20, more than three weeks before the fall of Nanking and the day his new Imperial Headquarters was established, Hirohito had bestowed an imperial rescript on the commander of the China Area Fleet, Adm. Hasegawa Kiyoshi. He applauded the officers and men of the fleet for cooperating with the army, controlling China’s coasts, and interdicting its lines of marine transportation. At the same time he had warned, “We still have a long way to go before we achieve our goal. Increasingly strive to accomplish more victories.”63
Four days later, while attending his first Imperial Headquarters conference, Hirohito had given after-the-fact sanction to the momentous decision of General Matsui’s Central China Area Army to attack and occupy the capital of China. During that meeting the head of the Operations Department of the Army General Staff explained to him that both the transportation corps and the artillery units of the army in central China were still lagging far behind the foremost units on the front lines, and that while the army regrouped, “the air forces of the army and navy will…bomb Nanking and its strategic areas.”64 Thus Hirohito was quite aware of and approved the plans to bomb and strafe Nanking and its environs. He ratified (post facto) the removal of all restrictions on the army’s perimeter of operations; he did nothing to hold back the army and navy during their headlong rush toward Nanking without prior authorization from Tokyo. On December 1—many days after aerial bombardment and sea and ground attacks on Nanking had begun—Hirohito gave the formal order for General Matsui to attack: “The commander of the Central China Area Army, acting jointly with the navy, will capture and occupy the enemy capital of Nanking (Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 8).”
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 35
