Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  Much was expected – and so much had to be promised. One new recruit, Nagatani Masao, recounted in his diary:

  Dad came to the 12 p.m. visiting hours. I promised that I would become a splendid man … I don’t know where we’re going, but when the faces of those who came to see us off come to mind … unable to withstand the sincerity and emotion of the people of the prefecture, we were resolved.

  From their regional barracks, Rikichi, Masao and all the others were funnelled onto trains and then cramped transport ships reeking of rotten food, unwashed bodies and the inevitable consequences of farmers taking to the sea for the first time. After a few days spent in extremes of heat then cold, soldiers landed in China and saw for the first time the reality of what faced them. The first thing many did was buy life insurance. Even the costliest policy suddenly seemed a grimly good bet.

  *

  Thirty-year-old Maebara Hisashi’s war began in bathetic anti-climax, stuck in the mud with the expeditionary force, still a long way north of Shanghai. Then a Chinese artillery round came out of nowhere, sending shrapnel tearing through eighteen of his friends nearby. With barely any time to register what had just happened, Maebara was ordered to cremate their remains, say a prayer for them, and then bag up the bones to send back to their families. The easiest way to do it was usually to tear down a nearby farm building and use its beams for firewood. The method was ‘like baking sardines’, remarked one soldier – and just as anonymous: after rain stopped the bodies from burning, families back in Japan eventually received fragments of what was often the same dead soldier, each pack labelled as their loved one.

  Fear, anger and a desire for revenge built quickly as battlefield scenes like this were repeated time and again, and soldiers were cut loose from their supply lines – forced to pick wild berries, steal chickens or hack away at the earth until they found some potatoes. The plunder of the local landscape soon morphed into attacks on Chinese passers-by, whether or not they were suspected of being spies. Maebara watched three young men have their heads inexpertly hacked from their bodies, by soldiers who promised to ‘do better next time’.

  Elsewhere, brutality was performed in order to give new recruits the necessary ‘baptism of blood’. Sometimes it would be a ‘live bayonet exercise’ using Chinese prisoners. For Tominaga Shōzō, it involved a trip to a remote field, where he and others under consideration for officer rank were introduced to the ‘raw materials for [a] trial of courage’: starving Chinese prisoners, hooded, kneeling next to a hole in the ground, ten metres long by two metres wide. A senior officer took out his sword, poured water onto both sides of the blade, steadied his body as though for a golf swing, and beheaded the first of the kneeling men. Tominaga’s turn eventually came. When it was over, he found his sword was slightly bent and wouldn’t go back into its sheath quite as easily as before. But ‘I felt something change inside me’, he later recalled. ‘I don’t know how to put it, but I gained strength somewhere in my gut.’

  As summer turned to autumn, creeks north of Shanghai started to fill with the still-kneeling bodies of beheaded Chinese soldiers, tumbling along in the water. Chinese morale was failing rapidly, but there were few desertions – for fear not of what might happen if their superiors caught them, but of what might happen if the Japanese did. Neither side in the conflict had the resources or the inclination to keep hold of the prisoners they took.

  All the while, senior figures representing both armies gave daily press conferences in the city, taking care to time them so that one would not overlap with the other. Pacifying and persuading the press mattered a great deal. Hoping that a gesture of civility might help counter a growing reputation for brutality, the Japanese military served tea, coffee, whisky and beer at theirs. For the Chinese, the fighting around Shanghai was going so badly that by late October their best hope was that foreign outrage at the barbarism and death toll might prompt military intervention.

  Most of these killings and cruelties were, on the Japanese side, the work of reservists hauled out of civilian life and thrown into what came to be called the ‘meat-grinder’ of the Shanghai conflict. But not all of them were. Alongside uniformed Japanese soldiers, foreign correspondents reported seeing on the streets of Shanghai roving bands of Japanese men in civilian dress, gathering intelligence for the military and murdering any Chinese whom they thought might be spies. ‘Tough, long-haired, sly as snakes’, with revolvers and knives tucked into their waists, these were tairiku rōnin, or ‘continental adventurers’: the export version of a modern domestic tradition of political violence, born with the mid-nineteenth century shishi, which by the time war broke out in China had helped to bring Japan’s home islands to the brink of chaos.

  Before they were great statesmen, many of the early Meiji leaders had been violent men. The ideal of righteous conflict that launched the imperial restoration of 1868 lived on afterwards in various forms: Saigō Takamori’s 1877 rebellion; ultranationalist organizations like the Gen’yōsha (Dark Ocean Society) and the Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society); and sōshi – political thugs for hire. The new Diet building in Tokyo had been playing host, since the 1890s, to artfully dishevelled, swaggering young men with long hair and loud voices, carrying pistols, swords or swordsticks (canes with a blade embedded in the end). Some hung around outside, waiting for a particular politician to emerge – either a target or a patron in need of protection. Others wandered the corridors inside, intimidating politicians who, it was said, would often turn up to work in bandages. One politician had his sōshi beat a rival with brass candlesticks in the middle of a public meeting – for calling him a peasant. Soon the use of sōshi became so institutionalized that political parties actively and openly recruited them from Japan’s criminal fraternity, gave them weapons training (including fencing classes), and incorporated them into bureaucratized ‘pressure groups’ that were straightforwardly divided into interidan (intelligence group) and bōryokudan (violent group).

  The rise of communism and union activism helped to produce new groups, like the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai (Greater Japan National Essence Association), which brought together public figures (including Gotō Shinpei), construction companies and yakuza (gangsters) to intimidate workers and break strikes. The Kokusuikai had around 200,000 members by the early 1930s, and was very public about what it claimed were its patriotic aims – on one occasion showering bewildered Tokyoites with 10,000 promotional handbills, dropped from an aeroplane.

  Links with political violence soon became yet another item to add to a charge-sheet against Japan’s party politicians that already included greed, gratuitous squandering of the nation’s energies in fighting one another (in the party-political sense, but often in actual Diet brawls) and gross incompetence of the sort that impoverished the countryside and imperilled national security. Nowhere did politics seem more broken and bereft of new ideas than in Hibiya Park one day when the Seiyūkai party reacted to a demonstration against Diet violence by sending along party thugs disguised as journalists (complete with fake business cards) to try to disrupt it.

  Army idealists sought to combat this sorry state of affairs with violence of their own. In 1931, a group of civilians and young military officers calling themselves the Cherry Blossom Society made plans for a military coup whose scale of ambition bordered on the surreal: the centrepiece was to be an airstrike on the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. General Araki, of the Kōdōha faction, whose support the young officers expected, eventually persuaded them to turn themselves in to military police.

  But a civilian ‘Blood Brotherhood’ – their slogan: ‘One Member, One Death’– succeeded in early 1932 in killing a former finance minister and the managing director of Mitsui. This was one of four big conglomerates, along with Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yasuda, which survived the worst of the Great Depression only to fall foul of public opinion by making enormous sums of money betting against the yen just before Japan left the gold standard in late 1931. Such was the atmosphere in the country by this poin
t that Mitsui’s response to the assassination was not outrage but apology, and the doling out of large sums of money to patriotic charitable causes. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo quickly followed suit.

  Two more acts of destabilizing, game-changing violence were to come. On 15 May 1932, a group of rogue naval officers shot Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi dead in his home, while elsewhere in Tokyo police boxes, banks and political party headquarters were attacked with hand grenades. Then in February 1936, a coup attempt led by junior army officers linked to the Kōdōha faction got as far as encircling the Diet and army HQ with more than a thousand troops. Only when the navy brought forty ships into Tokyo Bay – guns aimed at the rebel soldiers – and loyalist army divisions arrived on the scene, did the coup start to falter. Finally, Emperor Hirohito, who had ascended the chrysanthemum throne a decade earlier (his era known as Shōwa or ‘shining harmony’), took the unusual step of expressing his personal displeasure at the events unfolding in his capital. The coup came to an abrupt end, after three days of knife-edge uncertainty.

  The 1936 plotters and others in Japan who hoped for a ‘Shōwa Restoration’ – overthrowing the democratic political order and returning Japan to ‘true’ imperial rule – never saw their wishes come true. But they managed nevertheless to nudge that political order in significant new directions. After the death of Prime Minister Inukai, the sense grew stronger that Japan’s problems required a more specialized, technocratic approach than party politicians alone could offer. Only Cabinets of national unity, it came to be thought, could hope to contain the discontent and violence at home while steering an increasingly isolated nation through choppy international waters.

  So the ultimate beneficiaries of violence at home were Japan’s civil servants. The technocratic, managerial utopia for which ‘reform bureaucrats’ in particular had been longing – as free as possible from self-interested party-political meddling – seemed finally to be within sight. New super-agencies would soon be created to encourage cooperation across ministries, and between civilian and military planners. New laws would be passed, enhancing state power at the expense of employers and workers alike. Japan would see little of the demagoguery, pomp or mass rallying that marked political transformation in Italy and Germany. Nevertheless, its leaders were reaching similar conclusions: for newcomers to modern statehood, the difference between managing, controlling and coercing a population ought only to be one of degrees – a dial to be turned as the situation dictated.

  *

  The first hours of 5 November 1937: red lights, two of them, shine from atop the sea towards the land. They pick out locations on the coast, this time south of Shanghai. Thousands more Japanese soldiers are about to land, barely ten weeks after the original expeditionary force landed to the city’s north. The 200 ships that carry them have approached with their lights turned off, radios silent. Once again, there has been no Chinese aerial reconnaissance. So once again the few troops left defending the area around Hangzhou Bay have no idea what they are facing, until wave upon wave of Japanese soldiers appear in their midst.

  Pro-government soldiers guard the Diet building during the 26 February incident, 1936 The Shōwa Emperor, pictured at his formal enthronement in 1928 Chinese commanders are convinced that all this must be a diversion from the fighting elsewhere. By the time they realize they are wrong, the incoming soldiers are advancing so quickly towards Shanghai that all they can do is turn and run, destroying the infrastructure around them as they go, in the hope of denying the enemy places to eat and sleep. The most that many Japanese soldiers see of their adversaries is a series of fires burning in the night.

  Facing imminent encirclement, and with Western powers refusing to come to his aid – one of the last to say no is Stalin – Chiang Kai-shek orders his forces to withdraw completely from Shanghai. He has committed nearly half a million men to securing it, and the overwhelming majority of the conflict’s 300,000 dead soldiers – not to mention countless dead civilians – lie on his side. But on 11 November 1937 the mayor of Shanghai makes the dreaded announcement: his city is now completely in Japanese hands.

  Chinese forces beat a calamitous retreat westwards. Entire brigades desert, while other troops struggle to find good maps of the area, officers to guide them, or even the keys to the fortified structures from which they are expected to stop the Japanese from completing their long trek from Shanghai to their next target: the Nationalist capital, Nanjing. Much of China’s government infrastructure – from employees to office equipment – has left Nanjing already. And at the beginning of December, Chiang Kai-shek decides that he too must go. He boards an aeroplane and flies out, leaving behind a contingent of Chinese troops to do what they can.

  An enormous Japanese force is soon spotted approaching the city walls. Most of them are tired and hungry, better schooled in violence than young men like Rikichi could ever have imagined becoming. Discipline in the ranks is all but shredded. There will be no longdrawn-out battle for Nanjing, the way there was for Shanghai. These soldiers are not arriving, as they fear, at the gates of some fresh hell. They are bringing hell to the gates.

  10

  Divine Bluster

  General Matsui Iwane made the same short journey every day. From his villa near the sea in Japan’s Shizuoka prefecture he climbed a hill up towards a small Buddhist temple, not far from which stood a towering ten-foot statue of the bodhisattva of compassion, Kannon. She faced westwards in prayer, towards Nanjing.

  It was her birthplace. Matsui had had her crafted out of earth brought back from the city, stained with the blood of the dead, in the hope that Kannon – literally ‘the one who perceives sound’ – would hear their cries and help their restless souls find peace.

  On arriving at the great wall around Nanjing in early December 1937, Matsui had ordered his troops to stop and wait. More than ninety Japanese bombers had gone ahead, to soften up the Chinese defences inside the city and to assess the chances that a trap was being laid there. Matsui had a ‘note of advice’ dropped in by plane, counselling Chinese forces busy fortifying positions and barricading and sandbagging the city gates to surrender if they wanted to spare the city’s beauty and their own lives. A deadline was set.

  Both sides knew the Chinese position was hopeless; they were surrounded, with much of their leadership having left days and weeks before. Two dozen Japanese bombers were sent across from Shanghai, loaded not with ordnance but with champagne on ice: lubrication for the victory celebrations that commanders felt must be only days – perhaps hours – away. Back home in Japan, people in Tokyo were also feeling festive. Bunting was prepared for the façades of the War and Education ministries. Teachers made plans to march their pupils to the Imperial Palace.

  But Iwane’s deadline came and went without a response, and the first Japanese soldiers were ordered into the city on 10 December. Some scaled the surrounding walls by night, trying to win space atop them for machine-gun emplacements. The Chinese defenders consisted mostly of provincial troops, unpaid and armed only with basic rifles. Briefly they put up a level of resistance that surprised the Japanese, but soon they melted away. ‘We are fighting against metal with merely our flesh and blood,’ boasted their commander, before fleeing the city by boat.

  Nanjing residents called for a short truce, so that shelters could be constructed for hundreds of thousands of people urgently in need of them. But their entreaties were ignored, and shortly after the Chungshan Gate fell on 13 December, the city was overrun.

  Little news emerged at first of what was happening. Foreign journalists based nearby found that the usually solicitous and loquacious media representatives of the Imperial Japanese Army suddenly had little to tell them. ‘Nanking’s Silence Terrifies Shanghai’, ran a headline in the New York Times.

  But as international residents in Nanjing – journalists, missionaries, academics, welfare workers – scrambled to escape down the Yangtze River, many aboard the USS Oahu, they began to radio out news of a massacre. They had seen summary ex
ecutions running into the hundreds, streets littered with corpses and abandoned Chinese uniforms. One journalist reported having dozens of guns thrust upon him by Chinese soldiers, anxious to surrender their weapons to the nearest foreigner before disappearing into the civilian crowd.

  These were desperate strategies, and they met with mixed success. Many of the thousands of Japanese soldiers that now poured into Nanjing seemed uninterested in distinguishing combatants from non-combatants. Across the next few days and weeks, thousands of civilians of all ages were murdered, and countless women and girls were raped. City residents found themselves turfed out of their homes or forced to assist in the robbery of others. Wealthy-looking, Western-style properties were a first port of call. Soldiers used makeshift ladders to break in, stealing food, listening to records and ransacking rooms in search of gold.

  Others roamed the streets looking for Chinese troops who might have changed into civilian clothes. Suspects – including people with what could be interpreted as army knapsack marks on their shoulders – were gathered together in groups of fifty or so, tied up and taken out beyond the city walls. Tank-fire, gunfire and bayonets were turned on them. Many tens of thousands were murdered – estimates would later rise to 200,000, even 300,000 and beyond – and large numbers of them went unburied, both outside and inside the city. New York Times correspondent F. Tillman Durdin wondered whether the point of allowing dead bodies to remain in the street, gradually ground into the dirt by Japanese vehicles passing repeatedly over them, was to ‘impress on the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan’.

  Such was the city into which Matsui trotted regally on horseback, at the head of a victory parade. He was joined by the Emperor’s uncle, Lt General Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, along with 20,000 infantry, marines and mechanized units. The march passed down the East Road, from the Chungshan Gate towards the National Government Building, as warplanes flew overhead. The rising sun flag was raised, and Matsui led the gathered masses in turning eastward for three clipped shouts of ‘Long live the Emperor’. Sake was drunk, dried cuttlefish eaten. Matsui later confessed to feeling deeply moved by the whole thing, but the rank and file were more ambivalent. Second lieutenant Maeda Yoshihiko wondered ‘what the meaning of this ceremony is … a kind of self-indulgence, performed by high-ranking military men’.