Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  But for the apocalypse to go Japan’s way, the country must first clean up its backyard. European imperialists were still crawling all over East and South East Asia. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were steadily putting China’s pieces back together. Godless Soviet troops were tramping eastward in ever greater numbers. And to top it all off, Asia-Pacific soil and seas were sprouting American bases and battleships at an alarming rate. What more did people want, by way of signs and omens? And could anyone doubt that without the rich resources of Manchuria, Japan was entirely without hope?

  And yet Japanese diplomats, Ishiwara worried, remained incapable of saying ‘no’ to the Americans and the British, allowing them to pass off their self-interested bullying as ‘internationalism’. The latest insult was the London Naval Treaty of 1930. A follow-on from the Washington Naval Treaty a few years before, it was intended to govern vessel numbers and tonnage for the world’s great seafaring powers. But its terms put Japan in such a perilously weak position that even Diet politicians – for whom the likes of Ishiwara generally had very little time – condemned it as a betrayal of the country’s security interests. Fights broke out in the chamber. Ashtrays were thrown. Then later that year a gunman took matters a step further, shooting and seriously wounding Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi at Tokyo Station – not far from where Prime Minister Hara had been stabbed to death nine years before. By this time, Ishiwara had had himself transferred to the Kwantung Army, where, with the help of funding from ultranationalist groups back home, he had spread his gospel of the coming apocalypse and helped to hatch the plan that opened with such a satisfying bang at Mukden.

  The next stages of the scheme, following what became known as the Mukden or the Manchurian ‘Incident’, went equally well. While a new prime minister, Wakatsuki Reijirō, tried to reassure the international press that his country would not engage in hostilities in Manchuria, and urgent military orders to that effect came in from Tokyo, the commander of the Kwantung Army gave Ishiwara his blessing to do what had to be done. Amidst a flurry of new Chinese ‘threats’ and ‘insults’ to Japanese interests, the Kwantung Army began to take control of the region, bit by bit.

  As politicians in Tokyo tried to find ways of convincing domestic and international audiences that goings-on in Manchuria remained under their control and within their definition of not gratuitously expanding hostilities, crowds in Osaka gathered in a park to cheer footage of the fighting – flown in especially by an enterprising news organization. Few newspapers questioned the Kwantung Army’s version of events. The Chinese were the aggressors, and so must pay. Nor was there much sympathy for politicians’ protestations. By December Wakatsuki realized that he had been outpaced by events, and overtaken by the public mood. He and his Cabinet resigned.

  By 1 March 1932, the job was done. A new state, ‘Manchukuo’, was declared, with arrangements for governance entirely in keeping with modern Japan’s turning of many centuries of East Asian history on its head. A man by the name of Puyi, the last of an illustrious line of Chinese emperors synonymous with the effortless pre-eminence in Asia of that country’s culture, would serve now as Japan’s puppet ruler and plaything.

  The waters from where the blue light shone were a mystery to the Chinese forces on land. There had been no aerial reconnaissance of this portion of the coast. So they had no idea that thousands of Japanese troops were out there, waiting quietly aboard transport ships for the order to attack.

  They found out just before dawn. From the direction of the light came artillery fire, ripping through Chinese positions. Navy planes suddenly appeared overhead, tearing up the roads to stop fresh units coming in to help these few coastal defenders – whom Japanese intelligence officers had promised would be far from the cream of the crop. Last came the crash and splash of amphibious landings, as soldiers rushed ashore to begin a thirty-mile push south towards Asia’s second largest city after Tokyo: Shanghai.

  Parts of that city, home to 3.5 million people, had turned into a war zone in recent days, with much of the violence focused on the district of Hongkou. ‘Little Tokyo’, as it was known, was home to Japanese businesses, the consulate and around 2,500 marines, entrusted with the security of Shanghai’s 20,000 Japanese residents. Japan had left the League of Nations four years earlier in 1933, over the organization’s criticism of events in Manchuria. The leader of the Japanese delegation had declared, as he stormed out, that his country was being ‘crucified’ by world opinion and, like Jesus of Nazareth, would one day be properly understood. Tensions in East Asia had risen further from there, to the point where in the end all it took for war to erupt in the summer of 1937 was a single, poorly timed toilet break.

  After a brief exchange of fire in July, between Chinese troops and Japanese soldiers stationed near Beijing, as part of an international contingent in the city, a Japanese soldier had wandered off to relieve himself. An attempt to search for him had led to a second incident, which at first was settled, but which soon – with leaders on both sides under pressure to put on a show of resolve – deteriorated into all-out war. With Beijing in Japanese hands by the end of the month, Chiang Kai-shek had sent 100,000 troops into Shanghai to try to secure it. He had sent planes too, which consistently missed the Japanese warship Izumo, anchored in the Huangpu river, and instead hit civilian areas including a busy street near the six-storey Great World Amusement Centre. Hundreds were killed, joined by many more as Japanese planes targeted railway stations just as Shanghai residents were trying to leave for the safety of the countryside.

  The global reach of Western imperialism, which so enraged the likes of Ishiwara, started to tell as foreign residents rushed to escape a city descending into chaos. British refugees left on an ocean liner that was made in Glasgow, named after one corner of the British Empire (Rajputana) and sailing now for another: Hong Kong. Americans, in similar fashion, escaped to Manila. Chinese residents had to make do with any foreign section of the city that would open its doors, or else drape British and American flags from their windows in hope of being spared the increasingly paranoid attentions of Chinese and Japanese forces on the lookout for enemy soldiers in civilian dress.

  The Japanese marines in Shanghai set up barriers of concrete and barbed wire, hauled machine guns and sandbags into place, and deployed tanks and flame-throwers, hoping to hold out until their comrades completed their thirty-mile trek down from the north. But the Shanghai Expeditionary Force had become stuck near to where it had landed, pinned down by heavier than expected resistance from the Chinese. Its commander, General Matsui Iwane, found himself having to put in a request to Tokyo for more men. He was very nearly refused. For Ishiwara Kanji, now head of the General Staff Operations Division, the full-on conflict with China that he had helped to start had come too soon. The Japanese Navy should be asked to help out in Shanghai, he argued. We must leave the army free to secure Japan’s position further north.

  But permission was eventually given for three new army divisions to be sent over from Japan, alongside units from Taiwan. The provocateur Ishiwara resigned in disgust, as preparations were made for hundreds of thousands of men to receive a life-changing piece of post: an akagami (‘red letter’), calling them up to serve.

  Japanese Imperial Army soldiers during the Battle for Shanghai, summer 1937 *

  One of the akagami of mid-1937 found its way into the hands of Sakaue Rikichi, the son of tenant farmers in the centuries-old Kosugi mura (Kosugi village) in Niigata prefecture. The more that Japan’s leaders had seemed to lavish their love, time and resources on the country’s growing cities in recent decades, the keener people in villages like this one had become to defend the agrarian way of life – as the true source of this ‘Japanese spirit’ about which their distant rulers never seemed to stop talking. It was a sign of just how wide the gulf in understanding between city and countryside could become that for one farmer from Ibaraki prefecture the great earthquake of 1923 appeared to be a cosmic judgement rendered against Tokyo by the earth itsel
f:

  Of late, the vainglorious striving of [these] city people had reached extremes that caused poor, simple farmers no end of anxiety. With their elegant clothes and their gold teeth, gold rings, and gold watch chains, they flitted from one lavish social affair to another … But now all that has vanished as if in a dream, consumed by fire, and suddenly they find themselves reduced to misery. It seems that Heaven found it necessary to chastise them with a natural disaster in order to protect the nation.

  The approving mention of the ‘nation’ suggested that, despite periodic eruptions of rural discontent, Japan’s modern state-builders had not entirely failed in their task. Primary schools and tax offices had become accepted features of the rural landscape, binding the hearts of the young and the pockets of their parents to a series of previously unthinkable national goals.

  Although rural boys and girls sat through similar lessons to their gold-toothed urban counterparts (albeit that attendance rates were generally lower in the countryside), and followed baseball just as avidly, there lingered a powerful sense that struggling rural communities were being asked to subsidize suspect urban aspirations. Anger peaked whenever the rural economy appeared most clearly to have been sacrificed for such things: when produce prices fell or were kept artificially low, or when the cost of essentials, from schoolbooks to silk-farming supplies, rose.

  Alternately the object of swooning urban romanticism and journalistic wonderment at the primitive ‘rat’s nest’ conditions that prevailed in regions like Tōhoku – dubbed ‘Japan’s Tibet’ – rural Japanese felt their vulnerability as never before in the early years of the worldwide Great Depression from 1929. Cash incomes fell from an index of 100 in 1926 to just 33 in 1931, climbing back only to 44 by 1934. Korean and Taiwanese rice imports had been keeping prices perilously low in recent years (urban stomachs apparently more of a political priority than rural ones), and then with a bumper crop in 1930 the floor fell away completely.

  As a child, Rikichi had helped to produce boxes of silk cocoons to supplement his family’s income: feeding the silkworms their mulberry leaves and shoots (often bought on credit), and keeping them at just the right temperature and humidity. Now, the price suddenly collapsed. Farm girls returned from closed-down silk mills. And as a flood of workless urbanites returned to the furusato – the ‘home towns’ often so misleadingly eulogized in city songs – a truly miserable migration got going in the opposite direction: young country girls were sent to work in the cities as prostitutes, some 16,000 from Tōhoku alone in the first half of 1931. Many more were taken away to labour as waitresses.

  A father didn’t have to be especially sentimental or politically aware to see that when city types first starved his family, then carted off his daughter to serve or service them, something had gone very seriously wrong with the world. Rural Japan needed to make its voice heard, now more than ever. And for that it needed allies. Fortunately, it had one very powerful ally indeed: the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), which recruited overwhelmingly from the Japanese countryside and had a far better claim than the country’s civilian leadership to be interested in its welfare.

  The people who built Japan’s new armed forces, from the late nineteenth century on, had made a deliberate break with the samurai past. The days of personal loyalty to a regional lord were over. They wanted a national organization populated by ordinary people who would take orders. Technology could take care of the rest. So farmers were recruited, force-fed stolid, starchy Western food, ordered to cram themselves into constricting Western trousers and boots, and introduced for the first time to everything from electric lighting and indoor stoves to the convenience of answering a call of nature indoors rather than squatting in some remote location with a few pages of the local newspaper to hand. Many conscripts even got their first taste of clock-time in the army, with classes arranged strictly according to a timetable composed of minutes and hours.

  The army and navy’s victories over China and then Russia had given their recruits and their civilian fans much to be proud of. And yet by the late 1920s they were struggling. Army and navy bureaux warred with one another over funds and strategic priorities, the former looking to mainland Asia for their enemies (Chinese and Russians) while the latter naturally saw danger on the high seas (British and Americans).

  Inside the army itself, once its founding father Yamagata Aritomo left the scene, space opened up for a new generation of officers to fight over positions of power and over fundamental approaches to Japan’s security predicament. An influential Kōdōha (‘Imperial Way Faction’) counted among its leaders General Araki Sadao, a man so fond of the army’s samurai myth that he set up a foundry to produce Kamakura-era samurai swords (to replace the flimsy and unromantic French sabre favoured by officers in the modern army) and forbade the use in army literature of the words ‘retreat’, ‘defence’ and ‘surrender’. Kōdōha insisted on the centrality of the Japanese spirit to the success, past and future, of the IJA, an idea that went back to the early Meiji army, whose leaders regarded surviving a lost battle as an indicator of poor or insufficient spirit, and an insult to the Emperor. Death was the gold standard.

  Like many elements of what ideologues claimed was Japan’s timeless uniqueness, this was a mostly modern and largely German idea. The famous refrain that ‘duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather’ dated back not to some medieval hero but to 1882, and an Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors that demanded they be honest, absolute in their obedience – since their orders came ultimately from the Emperor himself – and fastidious about not involving themselves in politics. The emphasis on ‘spirit’ had been encouraged by a Prussian tactician by the name of Major Klemens Wilhelm Jakob Meckel, who worked as an adviser to the IJA in the second half of the 1880s. Even the best weaponry and fail-safe strategies are not enough to ensure victory, he claimed. One needs elan, fighting spirit and a hunger for making the first, offensive move. Such became the Japanese strategy against Russia in 1904: war was waged first and declared later.

  Heirs to this wisdom, Kōdōha members insisted that Japan should plan for short, aggressive wars. Soldiers should be trained in the art of the breakthrough bayonet charge, the dawn attack and the rapid encirclement – the triumph of spirit over superior enemy numbers and armaments. Meanwhile, a loose-knit Tōseiha (‘Control Faction’) was formed to oppose these ideas, its members arguing instead that war was, now more than ever, an industrial endeavour. If Japan hoped ever to win a serious conflict again, it should play a cautious diplomatic game for a few years yet, taking its time to steer the economy towards the sustained production of the kind of modern weaponry the army still lacked. For the Kōdōha, such talk was close to defeatism.

  One thing army officers did seem to agree on was the usefulness of violence, not just against the enemy but against its own soldiers. New recruits like Rikichi suffered brutal tests of discipline: soldiers forced to stand to attention all day, with no break, or given character-building beatings. And all this for mere pennies per month. No surprise, then, that very few people volunteered to serve and that some young men actively tried to dodge the draft – drinking soy sauce to raise their blood pressure, starving themselves so as to fail the weight qualification, moving to remote Hokkaidō or Okinawa, or making furtive shrine visits to pray to the gods to spare them any correspondence printed on red paper.

  Of course, for a soldier to have complained about such vulgar topics as money or his own personal welfare would have been to invite yet more violence – by day on the training ground or by night inside the barracks. He served at the pleasure of the Emperor, after all, whose property he wore on his body and held in his hands – the breeches of army rifles were stamped with the imperial crest, lest anyone forget why they were holding them. He had been welcomed into a new home – commissioned officers served as parents, second-year soldiers as elder brothers. And recruited into his unit alongside others from his village it would be hard to forget the hopes invested in him by th
e community back home. Entering the army in the 1930s was, in any case, a natural transition from childhood: from an education that increasingly equated the military with the best of modernity; from martial exercises and games; from stagey military funerals that were sometimes hosted in school playgrounds.

  ‘Every citizen a soldier’ was, in Japan, not some last-ditch doctrine for when a war looked lost. It was a peacetime policy that went back to the years following the Russo-Japanese War, evident in education, in the local improvement campaigns beloved of Japan’s bureaucrats, and most literally in the creation of the Teikoku Zaigō Gunjinkai, the Imperial Military Reserve Association (IMRA), responsible ultimately to the Army Minister. Once a young man had completed his required national service, he became a member of the IMRA, through whose thousands of local branches the life and values of that national service lived on: solidarity, cooperation and respect for the locally influential men – often mayors or school headmasters – who doubled as branch leaders. Here was a tremendously influential organization, boasting 3 million members by 1936. Many of those were increasingly angry at Tokyo politicians whom they regarded as starving the countryside to such a degree that enormous numbers of young men were now too malnourished to make the cut for military service. Here was graphic proof of the spiritual poverty of contemporary politics, and the urgent need for change.

  At last, in the summer of 1937, dithering turned to action and rural Japan was about to get its say. Rikichi was one among nearly half a million boys and men – mostly from the reserves – seen off from their villages amidst celebrations that for some families cost as much as a wedding. Sake was drunk at the Sakaue home. A family photograph was taken at the local shrine, complete with rising sun banners inscribed with Rikichi’s name and a promise to fight well. The next day, flag-waving children of the local elementary school turned out to see Rikichi off, joined at the local train station by white-sashed members of the Patriotic Women’s Association – providing refreshment and encouragement.