The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  In December 1926 the ailing Emperor Yoshihito died, to be succeeded by his twenty-five-year-old son, Hirohito, who had been regent since 1921. Hirohito had visited Britain in 1921, where he had enjoyed the comparatively informal lifestyle of his royal counterparts. His accession to the imperial throne was as elaborate a ritual as any British coronation. Having spent the night in the holiest of Shinto shrines at Ise, communing with his progenitor the sun goddess Amaterasu O-mi-kami, Hirohito was formally reborn as a living god on November 14,1928. Two weeks later, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the new god reviewed a spectacular parade by 35,000 imperial troops. A new era, known, in retrospect ironically, as Shōwa (shining peace), had begun. Hirohito was, like most monarchs, quite unsuited to executive power. A marine biologist by inclination, he would probably have been happier in a laboratory than at the centre of an imperial court. He had envied the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by British royalty, who were under no obligation to behave like deities. Yet he never outwardly doubted his divine status. Nor did he ever seriously question the use that was made of his supreme right of command to strengthen the political power of the armed services – ‘the teeth and the claws of the Royal House’.

  There was a tension at the heart of the Japanese army too. The first lesson young conscripts learned was the Soldier’s Code, the seven duties of the soldier: ‘Loyalty; unquestioning obedience; courage; controlled use of physical force; frugality; honour and respect of superiors.’ They were taught to value obedience above life itself, on the principle that ‘Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.’ It was glorious to fall like the cherry blossom, in the pristine state of dutiful youth. Those who died this way joined the kami or spirits housed at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. This was not quite the samurai code of bushidō, as expounded for British and American readers by Nitobe Inazō in 1899, which had also venerated qualities like rectitude, benevolence, politeness, truthfulness and sincerity – making it recognizably, as Nitobe argued, the cousin of Anglo-French chivalry. Rather, the Japanese army took from bushido whatever was best calculated to engender a fanatical subservience to imperial authority and the military command structure – including the preference for suicide, preferably by agonizing disembowelment, over any kind of dishonour or failure. Training was intended to push men to the very limits of their physical and mental endurance. Recruits were drilled until they could run 100 metres inside sixteen seconds, run 1,500 metres inside six minutes, jump nearly four metres and throw a grenade over thirty-five metres – all in full marching dress. A regiment was expected to be able to march twenty-five miles a day for fifteen days with just four days’ rest. Harsh physical punishments, including routine face-slapping, became the norm even for minor breaches of discipline. As one who fought against it observed, ‘It was his [the individual Japanese soldier’s] combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese Army… so formidable.’

  Yet the backward-looking ethos of Japanese military training was in many ways at odds with the reality of mid-twentieth-century warfare. Officers like Nagata Tetsuzan, head of the War Ministry’s military affairs bureau, had seen at first hand the pitiless impact of fire against men – no matter how well trained and spiritually uplifted – in the trenches of the Western Front. He urged that Japan learn from Germany’s mistakes in the First World War by preparing systematically for a future total war, drawing up meticulous lists of the national resources that would need to be mobilized. The more men like Nagata studied these lists, the more they appreciated Japan’s fundamental weakness. But they inferred from this not the need for caution and conciliation, but the need for territorial expansion, and soon.

  ‘THE ONLY WAY OUT’

  China, the most likely location of new Japanese living space, was a country in turmoil – the remnant of an ancient empire, the kernel of a new republic, the raw material for one or more colonies. Its predicament had much in common with that which had occurred in Turkey in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, with the difference that China’s Kemal – Chiang Kai-shek – ultimately failed where Kemal succeeded in establishing a stable nationalist regime. A revolution in 1911 had overthrown the last Qing Emperor, but the republic that succeeded him had proved a precarious structure. Although it had led the revolution and went on to win a clear majority in elections to the National Assembly, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), led by Sun Yatsen, was forced to yield the presidency to the militarily powerful Yuan Shikai. Yuan was able to crush a second revolution instigated by the Guomindang, but his bid to make himself Emperor ended with his death in 1916. Japanese wartime demands had stoked up nationalist sentiment, particularly among educated Chinese. Indeed, when the Paris peacemakers awarded Japan the former German possessions in Shandong there were furious protests by students in Beijing, culminating in the Tiananmen Square demonstration of May 4, 1919. However, the nationalist movement soon split between a revived Guomindang and a new Chinese Communist Party. The rest of China seemed on the verge of disintegration as warlord clans carved out their own fiefdoms, the Anfu controlling the provinces of Anhui and Fujien, the Zhili running Hebei and the area around Beijing, and the Fengtien notionally in charge of Manchuria. Meanwhile, the country’s most important economic centres were under one form or another of foreign control as the system of treaty ports and extraterritoriality reached its zenith.

  The extent of China’s disintegration in the 1920s is hard to overstate. The People’s Republic of today projects itself as a homogeneous society, with more than 90 per cent of the population identified in an official census as members of the Han ethnic group. The China of eighty years ago was anything but a unitary state. Quite apart from the fifty or more other ethnic groups and the eleven or more language groups still identifiable today, inhabitants even of neighbouring villages could speak mutually incomprehensible dialects. The dynasty overthrown in 1911 had been Manchu; the empire’s political centre of gravity had been in the north, in Beijing. But many of the decisive political events of the revolutionary and civil war periods took place in Shanghai, far to the south. Both the reformed Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party were established in Shanghai, which was itself dominated by the French Concession, to the west of the Old City, and the larger International Settlement, which extended along the north bank of the Huangpu River. Ironically, even the supposed nationalists looked to foreign powers for assistance. As early as 1923 Sun Yatsen sent his playboy protégé Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow to ask for assistance. Stalin responded by sending Mikhail Grunzeberg to China, with the task of reorganizing the Guomindang along Marxist-Leninist lines. Without this Soviet support it is doubtful that the Guomindang would have expanded so quickly from its Cantonese power-base. It was Moscow that ordered the Chinese Communists to subordinate themselves to the Nationalists in a ‘united front’.

  Within the Guomindang, however, Soviet ‘democratic centralism’ was slow to take root, particularly on the central question of how best to free China. Indeed, in the wake of Sun’s death in 1925 the party threatened to fall apart. As Chairman of the Nationalist government in Nanking, Wang Jingwei favoured a conciliatory approach towards the foreign powers, particularly Japan. Indeed, Wang’s rhetoric seemed to echo the pacific sentiments emanating from Japan’s long-serving Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō. Chiang, by contrast, sought a break with Moscow and a full-scale military effort to unite China. His Northern Expedition of 1926 aimed to crush the warlords as a prelude to defeating the imperialists. The first problem that dogged Chiang’s career, however, was that internal enemies always seemed to take priority over foreign ones. No sooner had he concluded his campaign in the North than he unleashed a ruthless attack on the Communists in Shanghai, allying with local gang leaders to massacre thousands of trade unionists and other suspected Communist members. Chiang’s second problem was corruption. Though he called on his fellow Chinese to embrace the four Confucian principles of Li (property), Yi (right conduct), Lian (honesty) and Qi (integrity
and honour), the reality of Guomindang rule was rampant graft. Among Chiang’s most reliable confederates was the Shanghai gangster ‘Big-Eared Du’, who was appointed – conveniently, from his own point of view – director of the Opium Suppression Bureau in Shanghai.

  In the midst of this confusion, there was little to choose between Japanese and British policy. Although British politicians seemed willing to make concessions on the issue of extra-territoriality, the proverbial men on the spot continued to act as if China were merely an eastward extension of the Raj. In 1925 British police in the Shanghai International Settlement killed fifteen Chinese workers who had gone on strike, provoking another wave of public indignation. A year later British sailors were involved in a pitched battle at Wanhsien on the Yangtze River in which more than 200 Chinese sailors and an unknown number of civilians were killed; the number of British fatalities was just seven. At the end of 1926 Britain sent some 20,000 troops to Shanghai, in response to Guomindang pressure on British concessions up the Yangtze. British and American ships shelled Nanking after Chinese soldiers killed a number of foreigners. Japan’s conduct was little different, except perhaps that the use of naked force came slightly later. In May 1927 and again in August, troops were sent to Shandong to protect Japanese assets from Chiang’s forces. But once it became clear that, having won the internal power struggle, Chiang was in no hurry to confront the foreign powers, the Japanese seemed content with their share of the spoils of the Washington Treaty system. A visitor to Shanghai in around 1930 would have been struck more by the similarities between British and Japanese interests in China than by their differences.

  Chiang’s regime was not without its strengths. Where the Left saw only foreign exploitation, there was sometimes genuine foreign-financed development. Thousands of miles of new roads and railways were built between 1927 and 1936, the bulk of the construction financed by European investors. Yet the Chinese state remained exceptionally weak both in fiscal and in military terms. The privileges granted to Western investors hampered the development of China’s own institutions. Chiang’s China was certainly not capable of withstanding a concerted challenge to the ‘Open Door’ system by a foreign power intent on monopolizing China’s resources.

  Had it not been for the Depression, the civilian politicians and the zaibatsu might conceivably have retained the upper hand in Tokyo. But the collapse of global trade after 1928 dealt Japan’s economy a severe blow – a blow only made more painful by the ill-timed decision to return to the gold standard in 1929 (the very moment it would have made sense to float the yen) and Finance Minister Inoue Junno-suke’s tight budgets. The terms of trade turned dramatically against Japan as export prices collapsed relative to import prices. In volume terms, exports fell by 6 per cent between 1929 and 1931. At the same time, Japan’s deficits in raw materials soared to record heights (see Figure 8.2). Unemployment rose to around one million. Agricultural incomes slumped.

  There were alternatives to territorial expansion as a response to this crisis. As Finance Minister from December 1931, Takahashi Korekiyo

  Figure 8.2 Japan’s raw materials deficit, 1897–1936 (thousands of yen)

  cut Japan’s economy loose from the deadweight of orthodox economics, floating the yen, boosting government spending and monetizing debt by selling bonds to the Bank of Japan. These proto-Keynesian policies worked as well as any tried elsewhere during the Depression. Between 1929 and 1940 gross national product rose at a real rate of 4.7 per cent per annum, significantly faster than the Western economies in the same period. Export volumes doubled. In theory, Japan might have carried on in this vein, reining in the budget deficit as the recovery gathered pace, exploiting her comparative advantage as a textile manufacturer at the heart of an Asian trading bloc. As a percentage of total world trade, intra-Asian trade doubled between 1913 and 1938. By 1936 Japan accounted for 16 per cent of total Chinese imports, a share second only to that of the United States.

  Yet the proponents of military expansion forcefully argued against the option of peaceful commercial recovery. As we have seen, the countries best able to withstand the Depression appeared to be those with the biggest empires: not only the Soviet Union, but also Great Britain, which made no bones about restricting Japanese access to imperial markets in the 1930s. Japan’s principal export markets were neighbouring Asian countries; could those markets be relied upon to remain open in an increasingly protectionist world? There was, in any case, good reason to suspect the Western powers of preparing to abandon the unequal treaties in response to Guomindang pressure.* Japan was also heavily reliant on imports of Western machinery and raw materials. In 1935 she depended on the British Empire for half her imports of jute, lead, tin, zinc and manganese, nearly half her imports of rubber, aluminium, iron ore and cotton, and one-third of her imports of pig iron. She imported almost as much cotton from the United States as from India and Egypt and large quantities of American scrap metal and oil. At the same time, Japan needed the English-speaking economies as markets for her exports, around a fifth of which went to British imperial markets. In the words of Freda Utley, the left-wing English journalist and author of Japan’s Feet of Clay (1936), a liberal Japan could ‘but oscillate between the Scylla of dependence on the USA and the Charybdis of dependence on British empire markets’. In the short term, the increased military expenditure caused by a shift to formal imperialism would stimulate Japan’s domestic economy, filling the order books of companies like Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Nissan, while in the long term, it was argued, the appropriation of resource-rich territory would ease the country’s balance of payments problems, for what use is an empire if it does not guarantee cut-price raw materials? At the same time, Japan would acquire desperately needed living space to which her surplus population could emigrate. In the words of Lieutenant-General Ishiwara Kanji, one of the most influential proponents and practitioners of a policy of territorial expansion:

  Our nation seems to be at a deadlock, and there appears to be no solution for the important problems of population and food. The only way out… is in the development of Manchuria and Mongolia… [The] natural resources will be sufficient to save [Japan] from the imminent crisis and pave the way for a big jump.

  In one respect this argument was not wholly spurious. That Japan faced a Malthusian crisis seemed all too clear when famine struck some rural areas in 1934. Imperialism addressed this problem. Between 1935 and 1940 around 310,000 Japanese emigrated, mostly to the growing Japanese empire in Asia; this certainly eased the downward pressure on domestic wages and consumption. In another respect, however, the case for expansion was deeply suspect. Quite simply, expansion exacerbated precisely the structural problems it was supposed to solve, by requiring increased imports of petroleum, copper, coal, machinery and iron ore to feed the nascent Japanese military-industrial complex. As the Japanese Marxist Nawa Toichi put it, ‘the more Japan attempted to expand the productive capacity of her heavy and military-related industries as a preparation for her expansion policy… the greater her dependence on the world market and the imports of raw materials’ became. The onus of proof was unquestionably on the militarists to demonstrate that Japanese imperialism would not merely exacerbate the condition it was supposed to cure.

  A DISEASE OF THE SKIN

  Some empires are acquired by accident, as the British liked to think theirs had been. The Japanese empire in China was acquired by incidents. On September 18, 1931, a Japanese force led by Lieutenant Kawamoto Suemori blew up a short stretch of the South Manchurian Railway five miles north of the town of Mukden. They had been trying to derail the Dairen express, but missed it. Blaming the explosion on Chinese bandits, the Japanese proceeded to occupy the town and take control of the railway. Manchuria, they claimed, was descending into anarchy. It was time, in the words of the Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army – the Japanese force stationed in Manchuria since 1905 – to ‘act boldly and assume responsibility for law and order’ throughout the province. Within hours of what became k
nown as the Manchurian Incident, the Japanese had also captured Yingkou, Andong and Changchun; by the end of the week they controlled most of the provinces of Liaoning and Jilin. There would be many such incidents in the course of the next six years.

  The transformation of Manchuria into the puppet state of Manchu-kuo provides a perfect illustration of the tendency of empires to expand spontaneously, as a result of local initiatives rather than central plans. Since the Jinan Incident of May 1928, when General Fukuda Hirosuke had defied orders from Tokyo by clashing with Chinese forces in Shandong, there had been a pattern of military insubordination on the periphery of Japan’s Asian empire. A month after the Tsinan Incident, Colonel Kōmoto Daisaku of the Kwantung Army had detonated a bomb underneath the railway carriage of Zhang Zuolin, the leading Chinese politician in Manchuria, in the hope of precipitating a Japanese takeover of Mukden. Zhang’s son, Zhang Xueliang, had responded to his father’s murder by aligning himself more closely with the Guomindang government in Nanking and endeavouring to reduce Japanese influence in Manchuria. This was bound to cause concern at a time when Nanking was stepping up its pressure for an end to the system of extra-territoriality. The catalyst for the Manchurian Incident was in fact a dispute over the right of Korean farmers, whom the Japanese had encouraged to emigrate across the border, to construct their own irrigation ditches at Wanbao-shan, a small town near Changchun. Clashes between Chinese and Korean villagers set off a chain reaction; there were anti-Chinese riots in both Korea and Japan, which duly elicited anti-Japanese responses in China, including the execution of a Japanese officer accused of spying in Mongolia. The moment seemed propitious to those Kwan-tung Army officers, such as Ishiwara Kanji and Itagaki Seishirō, who had long argued for a switch from informal to formal empire. They were able to summon reinforcements from Korea, once again without authorization from Tokyo. Time and again lower-ranking officers seized the initiative in China, reflecting the way their training had emphasized strategy over tactics and operations.