Hirohito had been eager to fight a decisive battle in “the enemy capital” because at that time, like most of his high command, he had subscribed to the view that one big blow would bring Chiang Kai-shek to his knees and end the fighting. Consequently, despite the diplomatic harm Matsui’s and Asaka’s actions were causing, the emperor publicly praised them. On December 14, the day after Nanking fell, he conferred an imperial message on his chiefs of staff expressing his pleasure at the news of the city’s capture and occupation.65 When General Matsui returned to Tokyo to be released from temporary active duty in February 1938, Hirohito granted him an imperial rescript for his great military accomplishments.66 Prince Asaka had to wait until April 1940 to receive his honor, the Order of the Golden Eagle.67 In such ways did Hirohito exercise his authority indirectly to condone the criminality of his troops. Although he may have been privately dismayed by what had happened at Nanking, he took no notice of it publicly, and did nothing to make up for it by taking an interest in and changing Japanese policy on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Both army and navy officers and men perpetrated the Nanking atrocities. Their start coincided with the shelling by the Japanese army of Chinese refugee vessels and the British gunboats Lady Bird and Bee. At the same time two Japanese navy planes deliberately bombed the U.S. gunboat Panay, at anchor on the Yangtze River some twenty-seven miles upstream from Nanking, with diplomats and American and European journalists and photographers aboard.68 To add insult to injury, after the Panay’s crew and passengers had abandoned the burning ship, Japanese soldiers in motorboats boarded it and fired on the last lifeboat making its way to shore. Accounts of these incidents, in which three Americans later died and three others were seriously wounded, reached the West just when the British and American press began reporting the sensational news of the Nanking massacres.69 The two events impressed American public opinion with the aggressiveness, cruelty, and sheer audacity of the Japanese military, which had attacked warships of the two powers that had been most critical of Japan’s actions in China. They also gave new resonance to the image of Japan as a direct threat to American security.
Although Konoe and the Imperial Navy immediately apologized and paid more than $2.2 million in reparations for what they claimed was the “mistaken” sinking of the Panay, Hirohito once again took no personal action to counter the damage, though he could easily have sent telegrams expressing regret to President Roosevelt and King George VI.70 Clearly, neither he nor the Konoe cabinet grasped the full extent of the military and diplomatic blunder Japan had just committed.
The massacres and the sinking of the USS Panay were neither quickly forgotten, nor forgiven—either in China or in the United States. News of Nanking’s “rape” spread and was turned by many Chinese into a symbolic event: the prism through which, long afterward, they saw their entire war with Japan. In the depression-racked United States, press reports of the massacres and the sinking of the Panay received rare front-page attention.71 The Asian news momentarily raised international tensions, stimulating a wave of anti-Japanese, pro-Chinese sentiment that never entirely abated. Since the late nineteenth century, Americans had tended to view China not only as a market to be exploited but also as a proper field for the projection of their idealism and essential goodness in foreign relations. President Roosevelt’s refusal to impose sanctions against the vulnerable Japanese economy came under criticism from a new movement to boycott the sale of imported Japanese goods. American voices advocating naval expansion also grew louder. Roosevelt, then in his second term but still unable to dominate foreign policy, sent Capt. Royal E. Ingersoll, the head of the Bureau of Naval Operations, to London for naval talks concerning possible cooperation with Britain to resist Japanese aggression in Asia and the Pacific.72
The Panay incident also brought Hirohito, briefly, to the attention of Americans. On December 14 the Chicago Daily News carried a banner headline warning BREAK WITH JAPAN WEIGHED unless the “Emperor of Japan” replied swiftly to “President Roosevelt’s demand for apologies, compensation and guarantees against repetition of attacks on Americans in China.” Beneath the caption “U.S. Demands Put to Mikado,” was a picture of a small, bespectacled Hirohito, in military uniform, sitting astride his huge white horse.73 The Daily News implied an emperor who possessed real political power, and thus should be held accountable for the sinking of an American warship. Journalistic realism such as this, however, was extremely rare.
The New York Times and the Washington Post tended either to treat Japan as a monolithic political entity or to focus solely on “Japanese war lords,” “militarists,” and “military extremists.” The Los Angeles Times editorialized, on December 14, that Roosevelt’s note to the emperor on the Panay
wished to call attention to the fact that the Japanese armed forces are under the control of the Emperor alone, and not…bound to obey the Japanese government as represented by the Cabinet…. Whether the Japanese high command actually obeys the Emperor or controls him is of course another question. But there is a duality in the Japanese set-up which makes the Japanese government difficult to deal with.74
The Los Angeles Times thus left open the question of the emperor’s real power.
Judging from these big urban dailies, Hirohito was largely irrelevant in the Japanese policy-making process. With few exceptions he existed (if he existed at all) in American minds mainly as a powerless “figurehead.” And the steady worsening of relations with Japan after 1937 did little to undermine this stereotype. The dominant American image of the Japanese emperor down to Pearl Harbor was that of a monarch who, without ruling, reigned—without participating in political decision making was sustained by political decisions, and without influencing the thinking of his advisers was at all times and in all ways obedient to their counsels. These assumptions were both wrong and stubborn. Reinforced by earlier American exposure to the false image of the Meiji emperor, they persisted long after Pearl Harbor. Under the sway of the static “figurehead” image, American perceptions of Hirohito and the Japanese policy-making process leading to the Pacific War were never rooted in reality.75
III
The undeclared China war would last eight years, set the stage for the triumph of Communism in China, and end only after having given seed to Japanese involvement in World War II, and Japan’s ultimate defeat. During these years the emperor was presented with several opportunities to consider a cease-fire or an early peace. The first and best came during the attack on Nanking, when Chiang’s Nationalist Army was in complete disarray. Chiang had hoped to end the fighting by enticing intervention by friendly nations that had signed international treaties with China. Those major powers were not inclined to offer China positive support so long as a war crisis loomed in Europe, however, and isolationism was on the rise in the United States.
At the Nine-Power Treaty Conference in Brussels in November 1937, proposed by Britain and the United States and boycotted by Japan, the Nationalist representatives even failed to persuade the participants to declare Japan an aggressor.76 When the Brussels Conference ended without enacting sanctions against Japan, the Konoe government and the Imperial Headquarters had immediately expanded the combat zone, disregarding the harm to the lives and property of the other treaty powers that could result from an offensive against Nanking. In late November, desperately hoping to slow down the Japanese advance by diplomacy now that arms were failing to defend Nanking, Chiang finally accepted a previous offer of German mediation. The Army General Staff in Tokyo was also willing. Thereupon Oscar Trautmann, the German ambassador to China, attempted to resuscitate Japan-China peace negotiations, but was unsuccessful.77
One day after the fall of Nanking, on December 14, Konoe signaled in a press conference a change in his government’s attitude toward peace negotiations:
Before we take joy in the news of the fall of Nanking, we cannot help but be saddened by the fact that 500 million people, sharing the same race and the same culture, are hopelessly deluded. The N
ationalist government went to the edge both diplomatically and by its actions with its anti-Japanese movement. They failed, however, to assume responsibility for the consequences of their actions, abandoned their capital, and split their government. Now, when they are collapsing into separate military cliques, it has become clear to us that they show no sign of reflection. Accordingly we are forced to rethink our course.78
Konoe and his cabinet now offered harsh terms. China must formally recognize Manchukuo, cooperate with it and Japan in fighting Communism, permit the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops, and pay war reparations to Japan.79 The no-escalation faction within the Army General Staff still hoped for an early reduction of army expenditures in China, and therefore wanted the Trautmann peace mediation, begun in November, to continue.80 They pointed out realistically that Japan’s refusal to recognize the Nationalist regime would “drive [Chiang] into concentrating everything against Japan…. Inevitably, this will make the Soviets, the British, and the Americans more active…. The Empire will be forced to expend enormous national strength and resources for a long time to come.”81
On January 9, 1938, the newly established Imperial Headquarters–Government Liaison Conference decided on a policy for handling the China Incident. After sending on the document—entitled “Fundamental Policy for Dealing with the China Incident”—for rubber-stamping by the cabinet in order to ensure its formal legality, Konoe reported it to Hirohito. The next day he asked the emperor to convene an imperial conference but not to speak out at it, for “We just want to formally decide the matter in your majesty’s presence.”82 Hirohito and Konoe were concerned not only with blocking the views of the antiexpansionists on the Army General Staff, they also wanted to prevent undue German influence in Japanese affairs. On January 11, some thirty minutes before the imperial conference finally met in the palace, its members convened a special meeting to answer questions about the policy document that Hiranuma Kiichir, president of the privy council, insisted on asking.
After the ministers of state had satisfied Hiranuma’s concerns, the conference convened at 2 P.M. in the emperor’s “august presence” and heard Foreign Minister Hirota argue that the Trautmann mediation had no hope of succeeding and therefore “we must strengthen our resolve to fight through to the end with China.”83 Prince Kan’in, speaking for the Army General Staff, expressed “a mild reservation about the prudence of a policy that regarded the Nationalist government as a totally defeated regime,” but went along with the consensus of the meeting.84 The imperial conference then adopted a document specifying that if the Nationalist government refused to accept peace entirely on the terms proffered, Japan would withdraw recognition and confer it upon a different, more pliant regime.85 Presiding, in full-dress army uniform, at his first imperial conference since the one twenty-five years earlier, when his father had sanctioned Japan’s participation in World War I, Hirohito gave his approval.86 By sitting through the approximately seventy-minute-long meeting without uttering one word, he had appeared to maintain imperial neutrality in the matter, though in fact he was firmly backing a stronger military policy toward China than the Army General Staff proposed.
When the Chinese delayed in replying to Tokyo’s harsh conditions, the Konoe cabinet abruptly broke off negotiations. On January 16, 1938, Konoe issued the promised statement that Japan would thereafter no longer recognize the Nationalist government.87 A supplementary public announcement by Konoe two days later made clear that his real purpose in withdrawing recognition was to “eradicate” Chiang’s government—an objective that Navy Minister Yonai in particular strongly endorsed.88 Significantly, at both the liaison conference and the imperial conference that followed it, the emperor failed to support his Army General Staff on the crucial matter of continuing peace negotiations. Instead he tended to back the harder navy line.
The army opponents of an all-out “war of annihilation” in China still tried to get their views heard. On the eve of Konoe’s famous nonrecognition statement, Prince Kan’in tried unsuccessfully to make a report directly to the emperor before Prime Minister Konoe presented his formal report. By the time Hirohito finally heard Kan’in, at 9:30 P.M. on January 15, however, his mind was firmly set on continuing the war rather than negotiating. “We will be leaving an anti-Japanese Chinese force in the south, so what will our army do about that?” he asked the prince. Hirohito’s other questions concerned whether it would be wiser to prop up the [client] regimes in North China indirectly, by using “advisers so as not to draw attention,” what plans the army had made to counter “guerrilla tactics,” and what plans had been prepared to counter “a Chinese reply.”89 Hirohito’s questions mainly involved operations, but his last query could be interpreted as an indirect and dry criticism of the nonexpansionists on the General Staff for raising a matter that had already been decided at the liaison conference.90 Thus the nonexpansionists were once again checked. Sharing the same stance on the China war as Konoe and the hard-line expansionists in the Navy Ministry, Hirohito would push for a quick resolution of the incident.
The Konoe cabinet now inaugurated a second intense stage of the China war, which lasted through December 1938. By that time Japanese combat casualties since the start of fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge had reached 62,007 killed and 159,712 wounded; deaths from illness in both China and Manchuria totaled 12,605. Over the course of the next two years, Japanese combat casualties decreased sharply but still remained high. From 30,081 killed and 55,970 wounded in 1939, they declined by almost half to 15,827 killed and 72,653 wounded in 1940.91 Deaths from illness remained relatively stable, averaging over 11,500 per year. In other words, by the end of 1938 the China war had attained a plateau in respect to its cost in combat casualties, with the annual rate near 24,000. Equally important, Japan had lost all hope of being able to control the China war militarily or politically.
During 1938 the major cities and railways of northern, central, and southern China came under occupation by the Japanese army, while the vast hinterland of villages and mountainous areas in between served as bases for Chinese guerrillas. Everywhere during the first four years of the China war, the Japanese area armies slighted Communist troops controlled by Mao Tse-tung, regarding them as mere “bandits,” and directed virtually all their main blows against the “Nationalist” forces of Chiang Kai-shek. The same was true of the army air force, which carried out five long-range bombing campaigns in the interior of northern and central China during this period. They bombed military facilities in the Communist base-area of Yenan on only two occasions in October 1939. The main target of air attack was always Chungking. Not until August 1941, did the army commit large numbers of its bombers to attacking Yenan.92 Meanwhile, with the capture of Wuhan and Canton in October 1938, the Japanese ground offensive reached its apogee, and thereafter Japan shifted to the strategic defensive.93
Confronted with a deadlocked war and no prospect of victory in sight, Japan’s leaders pressed on as if unable—more than unwilling—to change their ultimate goals. Against a backdrop of full national mobilization, tighter press censorship, and ever higher levels of military spending, they initiated numerous peace maneuvers. These turned on exploiting conflicts between the Chinese Nationalists and their domestic enemies. Prime Minister Konoe’s famous declaration of a “New Order in East Asia” in November 1938 was the most significant of these initiatives. Konoe expressed his hope of achieving peace in China through Chiang Kai-shek’s enemy—and leader of his own faction within the Kuomintang—Wang Ching-wei. This particular effort to supplement military action with political maneuvers eventually culminated in the establishment of the Wang regime in Nanking at the end of March 1940, and the signing of a Japan-China Basic Treaty in November 1940. Yet never really trusting Wang or believing in his ability to end the war, the Konoe government delayed recognizing his regime, and later forced him to cede to Japan, by treaty, a vast array of military, economic, and political privileges that turned his government into a puppet regime lacking any
legitimacy in the eyes of most Chinese.
But whether focused on a direct settlement with Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking, or on the installation of a new sham government in Nanking, Japan’s efforts at ending the war aimed ultimately at expanding, consolidating, and legitimizing its war gains. Never did its “peace feelers” manifest any intention to set a deadline for withdrawal of Japanese troops from North China, let alone relinquish control over the puppet state of Manchukuo.
The Japanese summer offensive against Wuhan was scheduled to begin in July 1938, and the Army General Staff was worried about the posture of the Soviet Union. On July 11, 1938, the commander of the Nineteenth Division precipitated a major clash with the Soviets over possession of a hill on the border of Manchukuo. Known as the Chang Ku-feng Incident, the result for Japan was a complete and costly defeat. At the time diarist Harada Kumao noted Hirohito’s scolding of Army Minister Itagaki: “Hereafter not a single soldier is to be moved without my permission.”94 In other words he told his army minister that he would be in charge here, then took no disciplinary action at all against the officer who had provoked the incident. Shortly afterward, when it was clear that Soviet forces were not going to counterattack across the border, he gave the go-ahead for the planned offensive in China to begin.95 It was yet another example of his selectivity in using his authority to intervene.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 36
