Herbert Bix’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction convincingly indicts Hirohito for giving the final okay on Pearl Harbor, much of Japan’s 1930s militarization, and Japan’s late surrender. What Herbert Bix does not clearly answer is why Hirohito erred: China and Singapore have shown that autocratic states with infallible leaders can do quite well. Hirohito may have played an active role in moving Japan to such a state, but that itself does not necessarily lead to failure.
Where did Hirohito go wrong?
My reading suggests that Hirohito’s failures were cognitive: Taught early the ultimate good of “victory by any means at any cost,” his north star seemed to both fuel and be reinforced by Japanese belligerence. By the time the United States presented two options—either strangulation within 24 months from an oil embargo threatening 70% of Japan’s oil imports, prompting an attack on Anglo-Americans to claim oil fields in the Dutch and British East Indies, or the retreat of Japanese troops to Manchuria—his philosophy influenced the way his advisors represented the choice.
Wishful thinking warped both sides of the decision. At first, as Bix shows, his advisers were first realistic about their “disadvantageous” odds against the United States: They recognized that, in a long war, the United States’ industrial capacity “could not be defeated,” and they saw their “probability” of victory as decreasing over time. However, instead of planning for a long war, they centered discussion on the existence of “a chance,” instead of the magnitude of that chance. If they eventually lost, it would have been “meant to be.” In doing so, they represented their odds as better than they were. At the same time, they misrepresented the losing option: When Hull sent China a tentative note on November 27th, 1941, Japan mistook it as an ultimatum. Where Hull stipulated that Japan retreat from “China” to end the embargo, without further definition, Hirohito’s advisors surmised Hull meant Manchuria as well, even though that was inconsistent with Hull’s definitions in previous negotiations. Such misreading made retreat seem more humiliating, and it made Pearl Harbor more relatively appealing. After stalling for the first month of the oil embargo, Hirohito and his advisors, on September 3rd, sent an arbitrary deadline of the “latter part of October.” When that time arrived, Hirohito chose the path of least resistance: continued belligerence.
Taking a long view, these cognitive defects were the product first of a faulty education. From an early age, his teachers prioritized his foremost embodiment of a victorious commander, not tactful leader: “As the emperor-to-be… even in make-believe war games, [little Hirohito] always had to be the commander in chief, on the winning side.” Because he was only the second emperor to reign after Meiji’s Great Restoration of 1868, which had stabilized the country around Westernization after Japan’s 1853 forced opening, and only the first active emperor, since his father Taisho had had cerebral meningitis from imperial inbreeding, the feudal lords who had architected Meiji’s unification, themselves the “genro,” designed a military education for Hirohito that would teach him the methods behind Emperor Meiji wartime triumphs. Where other budding autocrats might have learned how to manage propaganda, scapegoat quietly, or censure advisors constructively, Hirohito’s ethics classes involved lectures about the “yellow races struggle against the Aryans.” By his adulthood, he had accumulated two refrains that would exonerate his failures: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and, “As the matter has gone this far, it can’t be helped.” Little did he know that he would apply, and err, by them so much.
Within two years of his coronation, he developed a habit of rewarding insubordination where anything was permissible so long as it had resulted in victory. In early 1928, when his Kwantung Army murdered the Manchurian sovereign, Chang Tso-lin, without sanction and blamed it on the Chinese, Hirohito condoned a cover-up, against the will of the last living genro, and he fired the Prime Minister who wanted to enforce discipline, alienating an entire political party. Three years later, when the army used the Chang Tso-lin incident as precedent for the Japanese army fabricating a report that the Chinese had bombed a railroad as grounds to attack the Chinese, dubbed the Manchuria “incident,” Hirohito again rebuked nobody, saying “it could not be helped.” Later that year, when his army extended deeper into Manchuria against his advice of “not attacking” to “maintain international trust,” he “praised the insubordinate Kwantung Army” for fighting in self-defense. A year and a half later, when his military again went against his direction and invaded North China on May 7th, 1933, Hirohito sanctioned the action after the fact. In February 1936, when a trial for an officer who had sliced a member of an opposing military faction with “his samurai sword” inspired twenty-two junior army members to mutiny in Tokyo, Hirohito again neglected to censure. Under his early rule, he let his military abscond with discipline, so long as the end result was appealing.
Soon, he sought a more active role in those victories. As inactive as Hirohito may have seemed in his first decade, his limited interventions precipitated his rise as the leading voice of Japanese militarism and ruthlessness. After his precedent-breaking firing of the Prime Minister in 1929 who wanted to enforce discipline, his next military intervention came two years later. On the eve of the Manchuria Incident of 1931, he summoned his army chief to say the military’s suspected invasion was against national policy. All he accomplished was a delay. Meanwhile, he continued to tolerate insubordination and escalating militarization, offering only weak rebukes that provoked didain of advisors. Military spending went from 3.5% of GNP in 1931 to 5.6% in 1936. Starting in 1937, his interventions took a different flavor. When his Prime Minister wanted to expand a skirmish to larger conflict including Shanghai, Hirohito recommended his army and navy chiefs deliver an “overwhelming blow” and “such staggering victory” to make the Chinese “lose the will to fight.” A few month later, he and his Prime Minister created “Imperial Headquarters,” where, for a few mornings each week, Hirohito’s top military advisors would meet at the palace to coordinate and better carry out his “supreme command.” That year, military spending would triple to 69% of the budget and 15% of GNP, with the budget expanded from tax hikes. By December, during the Nanjing massacre, he sanctioned the “taking of no prisoners.” Over the next few years, the interventions intensified: In 1938, he signed off on “annihilation” campaigns in China, which sought the destruction of “enemies pretending to be local people” and “all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies,” later dubbed the “three alls policy: burn all, kill all, steal all.” In 1940, when Germany’s military victories weakened European control over the East Indies, Hirohito let the army oust wavering Anglo-American sympathetic Prime Minister Yonai. In Mid-October of 1941, reconciliation-driven Prime Minister Konoe resigned. Later, Konoe would reflect that the emperor had told him he did not “understand military matters; I [the emperor] know much more.” On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Hirohito’s chief aide, Kido, had advised that “once you grant the imperial sanction, there can be no going back. If you have even the slightest doubt, make absolutely sure until you are convinced.” On December 1st, 1941, Hirohito granted the sanction. Not losing rest, two days later, he approved “highly organized extermination operations to destroy [Chinese] will to continue fighting,” resulting in the deaths of an estimated at least “2.47 million Chinese noncombatants.” Capping a process of military favoritism that intensified over the decade, by Pearl Harbor, Hirohito was all in.
In Hirohito’s defense, Japan had cause to feel superior, but not for the reason his government peddled. In battles with China’s Nationalist forces, Japanese victories were indeed significant. For example, in the Battle of Shanghai of August 1937, against “110,000 to 150,000 of Chiang Kai-Shek’s best trained… Nearly a quarter million Chinese [were] killed, including many women and children who had fought on the front lines.” Japan, by contrast, “suffered 9,115 dead and 31,257 wounded.” After such a landslide, it is conceivable how Japanese invincibility might have gone to Hirohito’s and his advisors’ heads. After all, concomitant with the military buildup under his purview was also a spiritual mobilization. Only earlier that year in March, the Ministry of Education had published “Kokutai no hongi,” a book that would go on to sell two million copies. It extoled the superiority of the Japanese over all other races and reminded readers of the divine kamikaze winds that had saved Japan from Mongol invasions in the late thirteenth century. Harder to conceptualize than racial differences, though, were the likely actual root of Japanese success: their gradual opening to the West. After witnessing the destabilizing impact of opium and Christianity on Ming China, Japan had limited trade to one port and exclusively with the Dutch, who they viewed as less religiously motivated. When Qing China’s Great Clearance of 1661 created more demand for Japanese goods, Japanese art and industry began to undergo a transformation. The process continued steadily until 1853, when Japan’s forced opening led first to destabilization and then acceleration under Meiji. The China War might have brought relative prosperity to the palace as shareholders of railroad companies, and it might have also benefited Japanese wartime manufactures. But it seems, somewhere along the way, Japanese elite lost touch with the less exciting driver of their wealth: trade with the West.
If there is a foreign policy lesson of Hirohito’s role in the history of modern Japan, it is of the relative triumph of realism. Where 1930’s Japanese containment and economic strangulation intensified anti-Western and nationalist sentiment to the point war seemed like the only option, it was the combination of “FDR, New Deal, and liberal”-hating MacArthur’s decision to retain Hirohito as emperor after Roosevelt’s forcing of a Wilsonian-inspired unconditional surrender that has seemed most productive in aligning Japan with American interests. While Hirohito’s continued reign no doubt complicated Japan’s own understanding of its history, as Bix shows, the upside has been that America has had an unwavering anti-communist advocate at the center of Japanese politics, and that many of the most nationalism-inclined politicians owe their institutions to American generosity. It is true that little requires Japan stays grateful to the United States, similar to how the United States denied help to France in their war with Britain after receiving help during the Revolutionary War, but the trend since the end of the war has been promising. After all, as John Adams and George Washington agreed, the chief concern in policy was interest, not ideology.
In that world, then, Hirohito’s error in attacking Pearl Harbor might have been an error that MacArthur understood: As Oscar Schindler advises in Schindler’s List, “Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don’t.” Or, his error might have been something Shakespeare understood in Richard III: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
All of Greater Imperial Japan, for a horse.
Selections:
They especially wanted him to address the glaring contradiction of why, if he had been strong enough to surrender his empire at the end of the war, he had not been equally strong enough to have prevented war in the first place.
In the original Japanese text of his “Monologue” the emperor sought to convey the impression that, except on two special occasions after 1928—a military rebellion in 1936 and the ending of the war in 1945—he had stood aloof from politics and refrained from direct intervention in decision making. The war with the United States and Great Britain, he implied, had been inevitable.
He had been unable to use his influence to prevent war—partly for fear of a domestic uprising but primarily for constitutional reasons. “As a constitutional monarch under a constitutional government, I could not avoid approving the decision of the Tojo cabinet.
The longer “Monologue” remained unknown to the public until after Hirohito’s death in 1989. The greatly abbreviated English version, depicting him as a helpless puppet of “the militarists,” was not discovered and publicized in Japan until 1997. Both were apt symbols of the secrecy, myth, and gross misrepresentation that surrounded his entire life.
He led his nation in a war that cost (according to the official estimates published by governments after 1945) nearly 20 million Asian lives, more than 3.1 million Japanese lives, and more than sixty thousand Western Allied lives.
Hirohito omitted mention of how he and his aides had helped the military to become an enormously powerful political force pushing for arms expansion.
He and his court entourage had destabilized the party cabinet system that had developed during the middle and late 1920s by insisting on selecting the next prime minister and forcing on him their own national-policy agenda. He omitted discussing how the war in China had begun, his direct leadership role in its expansion.
But [his] diary—held tightly by the Imperial Household Agency—is not and probably never will be freely accessible to researchers… Also off limits is Hirohito’s correspondence with family members, the entire “Record of the Emperor’s Conversations” (Seidan haichroku) in its various versions, as well as a wealth of unpublished documents… Neither has the U.S. government opened to the public all the secret records it holds on Hirohito, such as, for example, his conversations with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the folder in the U.S. National Archives bearing his name.
The imperial court was separated from the government and reorganized in accordance with models of European monarchy. A written constitution followed. Bestowed by Meiji in 1889 as his “gift” to the nation, the constitution asserted that the emperor was the successor in an unbroken, sacred blood lineage, based on male descendants, and that government was subordinated to monarchy on that basis… This system of government can be called a kind of constitutionally guided but by no means constitutional monarchy.
In 1894, nearly a decade after having decided to catch up with the advanced Western nations by joining them in the competition for Asian colonies, the oligarchic leaders of the nation declared war on China for the purpose of occupying and controlling Korea. China lost and the next year ceded Taiwan.
Victorious war further enhanced Emperor Meiji’s prestige. Mainly a protector of the interests of the nation’s oligarchic rulers… In a people habituated to an antimilitary outlook and to regarding samurai warriors with suspicion, fear, and disdain, the victory in 1895 evoked support for the new conscript military. It also stimulated xenophobic nationalism and implanted a sense of superiority to the Korean and Chinese peoples.
In 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The ensuing conflict cost an estimated 110,000 Japanese lives and ended with a brokered peace, no indemnities, riots in the capital, and the prospect that someday Russia would seek revenge. Emperor Meiji played no role in the fighting but nonetheless again added luster to his image. Japan gained the unexpired Russian leasehold rights to the Liaotung Peninsula, a seven-hundred-mile-long railway running through southern Manchuria, and the southern half of Karafuto (Sakhalin Island) in the Sea of Okhotsk, and these were praised as his epochal achievements.
The “imperial way” became a formula for overcoming the Japanese people’s keen sense of spiritual and economic subjugation by the West. It provided channels for thought and emotion in all areas of life, not just the military. It worked to make people insensitive to the hurts imposed on others by wanton aggressiveness and self-righteousness, just as its American counterpart—the rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny”—had done in certain periods of aroused American nationalism. Almost overnight the spirit of international conciliation disappeared from the deliberations about and conduct of Japan’s foreign policy. In its place came expressions of the Shinto impulse to purify Asia from the polluting influences of Anglo-American political culture.
**He frequently scolded them, hindered their unilateral actions, and monitored their implementation of military policy decisions. Yet throughout their drive for territorial expansion, he stood by his generals and admirals, forgiving acts of insubordination as long as the result was military success.
The infant, they announced, would be given the title “Prince Michi,” connoting one who cultivates virtue, and given the name “Hirohito,” taken from the terse Chinese aphorism that when a society is affluent, its people are content.
Emperor Meiji had fathered fifteen children by five different women, and lost eleven of them. Yoshihito, the third son, was the only male to survive, and his mother was not the empress but one of Meiji’s many concubines. Inevitably the court suspected that hundreds of years of imperial inbreeding had resulted in a genetic defect.
Emperor Meiji, according to nurse Taka, was extremely reserved with his grandchildren and seldom saw them except on their birthdays.11 These meetings usually lasted only two or three minutes and were more like imperial audiences than tender encounters between a grandfather and his grandsons.
In 1900 Ito had founded a new political party, the Rikken Seiyukai, or “Friends of Constitutional Government,” to build parliamentary support for the oligarchic government and to help make the constitution work. The Seiyukai—representing mainly the preferences of large landlords and industrialists—came to dominate party politics in the Diet. The genro persuaded Emperor Meiji to acknowledge this new reality of party politics, even cabinets in which party men participated. Once again Ito played the key role in getting Meiji to abandon his opposition. He did so, however, only by promising that his new party would leave the appointment and dismissal of the prime minister and other ministers of state entirely to the discretion of the emperor. By yielding to the emperor’s autocratic prejudices, Ito denied the key parliamentary principle that cabinets should be organized by the head of the majority party. In general Meiji was indeed an autocrat, and the constitution by no means changed his view on that. He continued to support the military in disputes within the cabinet.
By then the Army and Navy General Staff commands had been made directly subordinate to the emperor, and their bureaucracies had begun to elude cabinet control. To counter this danger Ito revised the Cabinet Regulations, restoring to the prime minister some of the power that had been lost in 1889. Nevertheless, the relative independence of the military was never checked, and the cabinet never became the emperor’s highest advisory organ. In March 1907, the navy minister appealed to the emperor to overturn Ito’s work, and Meiji concurred.
Six weeks later, on October 26, 1909, a Korean nationalist assassinated Ito in Harbin, Manchuria, where he was on his way to discuss Russo-Japanese relations.
Though Meiji’s public persona was that of a progressive, “Westernizing” monarch, the fount and essence of all moral values, he was far from that. He was privately “anti-Western” in his inclinations, and politically reactionary. His personality was not very pleasant either. He tended toward dissoluteness and obesity, and spent an inordinate amount of time satisfying his prodigious appetites. Many of the maladies that afflicted him can be traced to his excesses in food and especially drink, which eventually ruined his health.
The Meiji emperor had appointed General Nogi, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War, as the school’s tenth president and charged him with educating his eldest grandson.
Ever since Emperor Meiji had come of age politically, in the 1880s, he had been a power wielder, centralizing the organs of the state, protecting the oligarchs from their critics, and mediating disputes among them as they aged and became known as the genro. His crowning achievement had been the glorification and sanctification of the empire that the hated oligarchs had actually created.
In December 1912 Adm. Yamamoto Gonbei told genro Matsukata Masayoshi that when it came to recommending a successor prime minister, Emperor Yoshihito “is not [of the same caliber] as the previous emperor. In my view it is loyal not to obey the [Taisho] emperor’s word if we deem it to be disadvantageous to the state.
They all thought that the best way to educate a future monarch was to select the nation’s most outstanding military officers and leading scholars from Tokyo Imperial University.
Capt. Sato Tetsutaro delivered lectures to Hirohito on the American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories of sea power, which emphasized that control of the sea lanes of communication by large battleship fleets was the key to a successful expansionist foreign policy… Adm. Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, an expert on German military theory.
Most important in influencing Hirohito on military issues was General Nara, an officer with a reputation for diplomatic skill. Nara, fifty-two, was appointed Hirohito’s guide and adviser on military affairs on July 18, 1920, and stayed with him as chief military aide-de-camp until 1933.
Hirohito’s naval instructors impressed on him the notion that in war the purpose of a naval engagement was to win by hurling a large, powerful fleet into a single decisive battle such as the Battle of the Sea of Japan, considered the perfect model of a naval encounter.
Certainly the initial motive behind its formation was to smash the defenders of feudalism, thereby furthering Japan’s modernization. But whether the army existed primarily for the protection of the people from foreign aggression or for the protection of the government in the pursuit of its purposes was never clarified during Meiji’s lifetime.
If the Meiji constitution had created a true “constitutional monarchy” rather than something close to an autocracy, there would have been no need to place so much emphasis on educating the emperor, and he could have remained as badly educated as any of Britain’s kings or queens had been.
Around 1927 he was given a small bust of Darwin, which thereafter adorned his study alongside busts of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Sugiura also taught “the concrete topics such as the imperial enthronement, Uesugi Kenshin [a late-sixteenth-century samurai warrior], the forty-seven masterless samurai of Ak [the classic tale of feudal vendetta], and Tokugawa Mitsukuni [an exemplar of imperial loyalty and Shinto nationalism]. In the third year he lectured on George Washington, Columbus, Malthus’s theory of population, Peter the Great, and Rousseau, and in the fourth year he selected Kaiser Wilhelm II and Muhammad… Just as we can say that the chrysanthemum is the most outstanding flower, so Japan is unsurpassed in both its national strength and its civilization.
During the first five years after Meiji’s death, journalists and bureaucrats frequently ranked Meiji’s achievements with those of the seventeenth-century Russian czar Peter the Great and Germany’s Wilhelm II.19 In his lecture on Peter, given in 1917, Sugiura explained that the twenty-five-year-old czar Peter went abroad to study foreign technology and returned to lay the foundations of the modern Russian empire… Rousseau, on the other hand, he described as a rootless, self-indulgent character who could never keep a job and was worthy of no admiration at all.
Rousseau’s theories “have led to cursing against the state and government.” Japan, he concluded, could avoid “the residual poison of European liberal thought” provided its leaders “show benevolence to the people, the people show loyalty to those above them, and everyone knows his place in the scheme of things…Although China is a big country, due to many years of internal strife the Chinese lack the power to unite as a state, and are thus utterly incapable of competing with the forces of the white race. In the Far East the Japanese Empire alone has been able to deter the Western invasion in the East.
Sugiara: “history is the history of rivalry and contention between the yellow and white races…. If we put benevolence and justice thoroughly into practice, then the Europeans and Americans cannot help but admire us.”
In 1909, Shirotori Kurakichi in 1909 published articles debunking the Confucian legends of the Chinese sages Yao, Shun, and Yu, thereby highlighting the irrationality of traditional Chinese culture.
The prince simply received the guests and then sat through the party without saying a word. Even when he was spoken to, he gave hardly any reply.
After Hirohito became regent in November 1921, however, people were also arrested and charged with lèse-majesté simply for saying, “What a lot of people for just one youngster”; or “This is too much! His majesty the emperor is only a cocky young kid. Yet whenever he goes by, all traffic is stopped for several hours beforehand.
“The right wing (represented by Sugiura and Toyama), having won on the issue of Hirohito’s marriage, lost on the issue of his Western tour, which had arisen at the onset of the engagement dispute. Hara, the imperial princes, and all the genro supported the tour, seeing it, in part, as a way of coping with the postwar enthusiasm for democratic reform; the ultranationalists opposed it as “a rash act of worshipping foreign thought.
From this seemingly minor episode in the history of the imperial house emerges the prototype of 1930s-style right-wing terrorism. On the issue of Hirohito’s marriage, the forces of the right succeeded in frustrating the will of the genro and the president of the strongest political party, creating a situation in which the legitimate leaders of the Meiji state were called national traitors.
The high points of his visit to Britain included a three-night stay in Buckingham Palace, speeches at London’s Guildhall and Mansion House, visits to numerous British military facilities (where he sometimes wore the uniform of a British army general).
Later in life Hirohito claimed that his European tour led him to realize that he had been living like “a bird in a cage.”
On November 4, 1921, two months after Hirohito returned from Europe, a nineteen-year-old railway switchman, one Nakaoka Konichi, stabbed Prime Minister Hara to death. The assassin was alleged to have been the grandson of a Meiji-era loyalist… The public downfall of Yamagata, followed by Hara’s assassination, demonstrated the enormous destructive power that could be generated whenever an issue involving the imperial house became a focal point of politics… Empress said Hara always had a smile, even with the weight of so many problems.
Political leaders like Takahashi of the Seiyukai believed, as Hara Kei had before him, that in order to flourish economically Japan had to adopt policies that appeased American interests. The major arms reduction obligations that the government had recently assumed under the Washington treaties were in line with Takahashi’s views. But right-wing groups and some military leaders railed against the Washington treaties.
Meiji furnished the specifications and was supposed to be proof of what miracles court advisers could perform by continuously cuing the monarch and by an exhortatory approach that responded to his psychological needs.
The trivial cost-saving measures Hirohito instituted in 1929 in response to the Showa financial panic left the impression that neither he nor his court team understood basic economics.
The only question that really mattered, he learned, was: Is it in the national interest?
Tachi taught that war in general was always legal, never illegal; “established international law” existed to subserve the interests of states; the right of self-defense included war that expanded territory or protected the lives and the private property of nationals living in other states. This nineteenth-century view of international law had been generally accepted before Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations had declared new basic principles and established new (American-inspired) organizations to govern and resolve disputes among nations.
His total ending of the practice of imperial concubinage and cutting back the number of ladies-in-waiting.
Japan agreed to limit its capital ships to 60 percent of the U.S. total, or a 10:6 ratio in naval power vis-à-vis the United States [in the Four-Power Treaty after WW1].
Military spending by the army and navy as a percentage of total annual government expenditures decreased steadily throughout the [1920’s]… amid deep regrets and angry recriminations in the officer corps. The feeling grew that Japan had fallen behind the other Great Powers economically, socially, and politically.
In 1925 Army Minister Ugaki secured Hirohito’s assent to posting active-duty officers in the nation’s middle schools and universities to provide military training.
The more the emperor involved himself in civil and military decision making, the more deeply involved he and his closest aides became in deception, and the greater their stake in not ever admitting the truth.
Japanese foreign policy thenceforth took a decidedly more interventionist turn, as the intensification of the Chinese civil war increased the possibilities for dispatching troops to protect Japanese lives and property in China.
Oriental principles.. “premised on the notion that the mother personified love while the father was the “main carrier of morality.”61 The view that men—or at least Japanese men—were morally superior to women was dear to monarchists of the period.”
Meanwhile, abroad, on June 4, officers of the Kwantung Army guarding the South Manchurian Railway Zone murdered the local warlord, Chang Tso-lin. The next year, 1929, young Emperor Hirohito condoned the army’s cover-up of this incident, thereby encouraging further acts of military defiance.
POW treatment in Geneva conventions could not be implemented because imperial soldiers would never let themselves become POW’s.
Hirohito, influenced by Makino and the palace staff, soon did what Emperor Meiji had never done: scold, and effectively fire, a prime minister, Gen. Tanaka Giichi, president of the Seiyukai—thereby nullifying Minobe’s “organ” theory of the state.
[On PM Tanaka] “All of today’s morning papers carried the gist of what the prime minister said when he visited Prince Saionji. If what they report is true, then he lacks common sense in publicizing such things; his qualifications to handle constitutional politics must be doubted; and one must pity his thoughtlessness and immaturity.”
By repeatedly censuring and then finally firing his prime minister, General Tanaka, Emperor Hirohito had signaled to the political community that a cabinet led by the head of the Seiykai Party was not qualified to govern under his rule. He reacted quite differently, however, in the case of the Minseit, the other main conservative party, on whose president, Hamaguchi, he bestowed the mantle of prime minister in July 1929.
Hirohito’s earlier decision to indulge the army in its insubordination, and to dismiss the only prime minister who had treated him as though he were a real constitutional monarch, had given young army officers in Manchuria a feeling that they could take matters into their own hands.
On December 29, 1928, Chang Tso-lin’s son and successor, Chang Hsueh-liang, the warlord of the Three Eastern Provinces (“Manchuria”), united his territory with that of new Kuomintang government at Nanking.
Kellogg-Briand Pact (or the Pact of Paris) and in Japan as the No-War Treaty. The pact’s signers renounced war “as an instrument of national policy” and promised to settle all disputes by peaceful means. France and the United States had presented this treaty to Japan as another project in the spirit of international conciliation.
Drawing the inference that the West no longer acknowledged Japan as a first-rate power because of Anglo-American insistence that Japan adopt an inferior ratio in capital ships, opponents of the London Naval Treaty came to feel a keen sense of alienation from the Meiji constitutional order.
Military spending was 29% of the annual budget or 3.03 percent of GNP in 1930.
In 1931, Kido informed Privy Seal Makino that he had “heard from Harada Kumao [information gatherer for Saionji and Kido] about ‘rather considerable plans for Manchuria that are being prepared by the military.
Then, in July, fighting erupted between Chinese and Korean farmers at Wamposhan, in the border area between Manchuria and Korea; the fighting led to anti-Chinese rioting and attacks on Chinese residents throughout the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese colonial authorities there failed to prevent the loss of 127 Chinese lives at the hands of Koreans, with the consequence that the mainland Chinese responded with a boycott of Japanese goods. To many Japanese suffering from the worldwide Great Depression, the boycott seemed a calculated plot by the Nationalist government in Nanking and the regime of Chang Hsueh-liang in Mukden to destroy Japan’s strategic and economic interests in China.
Officers belonging to the thirty-fifth class of the Military Academy sent genro Saionji a private manifesto “which affirmed that ‘the Shwa Restoration means the overthrow of political party government…” … “For junior officers to issue such an admonition to the surviving genro was an act of unprecedented audacity.
Not until Japan was alive with rumors of imminent war in Manchuria, however, did Hirohito personally intervene. On September 10 and 11, he queried Navy Minister Abo Kiyokazu and Army Minister Minami respectively concerning the state of military discipline… Abo may also have been unaware that two months earlier—“in June or July”—senior officers of the Army General Staff had actually informed the heads of the Navy General Staff of their plan to seize Manchuria by force, and had asked for the navy’s cooperation… Hirohito responded that the army’s political partisanship was interference with national policy, and he ordered Minami to tighten control… Their goal of wresting Manchuria from China by force did not change, but the emperor’s stance led them to postpone action and not to defy the cabinet… On September 15 Foreign Minister Shidehara received a top secret telegram from his consul general in Mukden, informing him that the Kwantung Army was about to launch a large-scale offensive action… Believing they had acted in ample time for the imperial admonition to work its dampening effect, they never imagined that the Kwantung Army would seize the initiative, completely overturn the Minseito cabinet’s policies, and undermine the emperor’s authority. Hirohito and the court bureaucrats had deeply underestimated the factionalism and discontent that had been brewing for some time among the army, the foreign ministry, and the political parties. But they also failed to counter this danger because they naturally supported the army’s mission.
During the night of September 18, 1931, Kwantung Army officers detonated an explosion near the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway line at Liut’iaokou (north of Mukden) and blamed it on the soldiers of Chang Hsueh-liang and armed Chinese “bandits.” Using an incident they themselves had staged as a pretext, and that had left the rail line itself undamaged, Staff Officer Col. Itagaki Seishir ordered the Independent Garrison Force and the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment to attack the barracks of the Chinese Manchurian Army within the walled city of Mukden… “Responsibility, according to the army spokesmen, rested with the Chinese. Chief Aide-de-Camp Nara Takeji promptly informed the emperor, adding that he believed “this incident [would] not spread.
Prime Minister Wakatsuki appealing to genro Saionji: “How can you allow dispatch of soldiers from Korea without government authorization?” He said, “Well, the fact is that during the Tanaka cabinet [1927–29] troops were dispatched without imperial sanction.” I gathered he had not foreseen any problem at all…. Under these circumstances I am quite powerless to restrain the military.”
They agreed that the orders of the high command were not being fully obeyed, and that the emperor concurred with the cabinet’s initial desire to prevent the incident from getting worse and doing more damage to Japan’s public image.
The military was angry both at the palace entourage for influencing the emperor’s statements, and at Saionji, whom it considered hostile. Hence “it would be better hereafter for the emperor himself not to speak except when a situation is out of control;”
Hirohito now had an excellent opportunity to back the Wakatsuki cabinet, control the military, and stop the incident from getting worse.
Kanaya had an audience with the emperor and asked him to approve, post facto, the dispatch of the mixed brigade from the Korean Army. I heard the emperor say that although this time it couldn’t be helped, [the army] had to be more careful in the future.
Hirohito knew that the incident had been staged. He knew who had planned it, who had ordered it, and who had carried it out. He was totally aware that several senior officers had violated the army’s own penal law of 1908 by ordering troops into areas that lay outside their command jurisdiction.
Japanese public, led on by the press, radio, entertainment industry, and the Imperial Military Reservists Association, rallied to the Kwantung Army and denounced both China and the West.
Emperor Hirohito now acted decisively through Chief of Staff Kanaya and Army Minister Minami, stopping the field army from launching a ground attack on Chinchou, though only for a short period of time. Nevertheless, when the high command in Tokyo endorsed the Kwantung Army’s idea of establishing “independent” Chinese regimes in all three provinces of Manchuria so that Japanese forces could be positioned in the north to block any future Soviet invasion, neither the emperor nor the court group raised objections.
When Baron Harada learned of the March incident, he concluded that the Manchurian crisis was “the opening act of an army coup d’état.
For young officers throughout the army and navy, the message went out that the emperor’s main concern was success; obedience to the central command in Tokyo was secondary. Signaling to the plotters and advocates of a “Shwa restoration” that his priorities were not always those of his advisers.
Prime Minister Wakatsuki resigned on December 11, 1931. He had failed to control the army, to contain the Depression, and, most vitally, to maintain the backing of the court group. The Manchurian Incident now entered a second stage. The court officials conferred and decided that the more chauvinistic Seiyukai, then a minority party in both the Diet and the prefectural assemblies, should form the next cabinet. Inukai Tsuyoshi, president of the Seiyukai, had sided with the opponents of the London Naval Treaty in 1930 and later had affirmed the legitimacy of the Manchurian Incident. He had also publicly rejected the League of Nations’ recommendations on Manchuria and declared (in a phrase that recurs throughout the whole history of twentieth-century Japanese diplomacy) that Japan should “escape from the diplomacy of apology” and develop a “new, more autonomous road.
On December 23, [1931] as Hirohito was instructing Inukai, then serving as his foreign minister, “to adopt a policy of not attacking Chinchou” and “to maintain international trust,” the Kwantung Army moved on the city.30 The United States, Britain, and France warned Japan that its actions contravened the Nine-Power Treaty. On December 27 Nara noted that the emperor had again cautioned Inukai about “the impact that the Chinchou incident is having on international affairs.”31 Nevertheless the Kwantung Army proceeded to occupy Chinchou, worsening the strain in Japanese-American relations.
Four days later, perhaps on the recommendation of Prince Kan’in, he issued an imperial rescript that praised the insubordinate Kwantung Army for having fought courageously in “self-defense” against Chinese “bandits” and for having “strengthened the authority of the emperor’s army [kgun].
Between late January and March 1932, the Japan-China conflict spread to Shanghai, and condemnation of Japan continued to grow in the West.
The administration of U.S. President Herbert Hoover hardened its view of Japan right after Inukai approved the army’s occupation of Chinchou. Secretary of State Stimson then took a fateful step that determined American policy toward Japan for the remainder of the 1930s. On January 7, 1932, he ratcheted up the pressure by sending formal notes to Japan and China declaring that the U.S. government could not recognize the legality of any political change in Manchuria if it was made by force from Japan.
Sino-Japanese conflict spread to Shanghai, where the Chinese had organized a highly successful boycott of Japanese goods, and Britain and the United States had important commercial interests, Washington could do little more than protest faintly… with the Depression worsening, neither Washington nor London was prepared to do anything very serious about Manchuria.
Hirohito blamed party-based cabinets rather than insubordinate officers for the erosion of his own authority as commander in chief. More distrustful of representative parties than of military insurgents, he would strengthen the power of the throne by weakening the power—indeed the very principle—of party government.
Reinforcing Uchida, Mori opined that “the new Manchukuo is a declaration to the world that our diplomacy has become autonomous and independent…. This action is akin to a declaration of diplomatic war.
According to Makino (verified by Kido), Hirohito told Kan’in, “We have been very lucky so far in Manchuria. It would be regrettable if we should make a mistake now. So go carefully in Jehol.”
Prince Kan’in asked permission to redeploy Kwantung Army units into Jehol. Not bothering to check with the Saito cabinet on the invasion, Hirohito gave his conditional consent. Expansion to consolidate Japan’s acquisition of Manchukuo was acceptable—but not an attack on North China proper. So he would approve the Kwantung Army’s Jehol operation, he told Kan’in, “provided that ‘they not advance beyond the Great Wall of China.’
Hirohito tried to stop the invasion. Nara should tell Prince Kan’in that he (the emperor) had decided to withdraw his previous approval; Nara demurred, pointing out that the chief of the Army General Staff was scheduled for an audience in two days, and it would be better for His Majesty to tell him directly at that time.
Hirohito summoned Nara and said, “somewhat excitedly,” that he intended to stop the operation by using a supreme commander’s direct order.
On February 12th, he sanctioned it for a second time on the “condition that they “never cross the Great Wall during the course of the invasion, and if they do not listen to this, I shall order a cancellation.”77 These were the words of a highly frustrated commander in chief.
Japan-Manchuria joint management,” he told the emperor, would enable Japan to “withstand an economic blockade from abroad” and “[continue] indefinitely as a great power.”91 The acquisition of Manchuria in its entirety would also solve the Japanese “population problem” by providing space for Japan’s rapidly increasing people,”
In early April 1933, the army entered Hopei Province, south of the Great Wall, in the vicinity of Peking. Hirohito intervened, the offensive was halted, and the army withdrew to Shanhaikuan. But on May 7, the army again crossed into North China. This time Hirohito sanctioned the action post facto, but made sure Honj knew he was infuriated. Honj noted in his diary entry of May 10: “The emperor does not intend to obstruct the operation, but neither can he permit decisions made independent of the supreme command.”
A famer told someone in 1933: “No, he is just worshiped like a god…, but he is not a real god. He is human, a very great man.”…“If the policeman were to hear us, he would tie me up and throw me in prison. But he can’t hear, can he?”
Hirohito’s military critics faulted him privately for “obstructing the army.”7 They called him an incompetent “mediocrity” who was manipulated by his advisers. Others complained, privately, that he gave less importance to affairs of state than to his recreations—marine biology, tennis, golf, and even mah-jongg.8 Young staff officers in Manchuria were irritated by his alleged dislike of war.
Restoring discipline and order in the military became the primary concern of Hirohito and his palace advisers after the formation of the Okada cabinet in July 1934.
The military portion of the national budget had increased steadily since the start of the Manchurian Incident, going from 3.47 percent of GNP in 1931 to 5.63 percent in 1936… The insurgent officers blamed the political system, not economic conditions, for limiting military budgets in a time of national emergency.
This time the highest echelons of the army reacted. The accusations by Isobe and Muranaka were condemned as disloyalty, and both officers lost their commissions. Other officers of the Imperial Way targeted for retaliation a stalwart of the Control faction, Military Affairs Bureau Chief Nagata Tetsuzan, who was rumored to be planning a major purge to rid the army of factionalism.
Lt. Col. Aizawa Sabur of the Imperial Way entered Nagata’s office and used his samurai sword to slash him to death. At that point the struggle within the military over reform of the state and the demand for increased military spending, which lay in the background of the movement to denounce Minobe, took a more dangerous turn.
Before the Aizawa trial could run its course, however, it was disrupted by a military mutiny in the capital. Army Minister Hayashi’s earlier dismissal of Imperial Way General Mazaki as superintendent of military education, and the issuing of orders for the transfer of the entire First Division to Manchuria, had triggered the largest army uprising in modern Japanese history.
Twenty-two junior-rank army officers, commanding more than fourteen hundred fully armed soldiers and noncommissioned officers from three regiments of the First Division, plus an infantry unit of the Imperial Guards, mutinied in the center of snow-covered Tokyo. They seized the army Ministry and the Metropolitan Police Headquarters.
[After the February Mutiny of 1936]: “Once again, at a crucial moment, he declined an opportunity to rein in his military publicly through his constitutional role.”
On August 25, 1936, the Hirota government announced that slightly more than 69 percent of the government’s total 1937 budget (or nearly 33 billion yen) would be allocated to the military. This amounted to almost a threefold increase in the 1936 military budget of approximately 10 billion yen, or 47.7 percent of government spending. To pay for all this, taxes would be raised and inflation tolerated, armaments manufacturers and the great zaibatsu enriched, and the patriotism of ordinary wage earners fanned up while their wages were held down.
Early on the morning of July 8, 1937, an ominous unplanned incident occurred some twenty miles south of Peking, when Japanese army units barracked at Fengtai clashed with Chinese garrison forces at the Marco Polo Bridge (in Chinese, Lukouchiao). Army headquarters in Tokyo was notified immediately and ordered that the problem—stemming from a brief exchange of rifle fire the night before—be resolved on the spot.
Support of Kwantung Army staff officers and some civilian officials of the South Manchurian Railway Company (a major repository of imperial household investments) who hoped to extend the company’s lines from Manchukuo into North China, and so wanted to see the incident expand.
Konoe cabinet had decided to enlarge the incident, and the emperor had tacitly agreed from the very start.
The shooting in the vicinity of the Chinese barracks at Fengtai near Marco Polo Bridge on July 8 had been arbitrarily ordered by a Japanese regimental commander without orders from the center, in order to rectify a perceived “insult to the Japanese army.” Though this action did not really begin the war, Hirohito would later refer to it in blaming the army for expanding a skirmish.
In view of such incidents it can hardly be said that the Japanese government was being dragged into war by its own forces. Rather it is more accurate to say that Konoe, backed by one group in the army, had resolved to exploit a small incident for the larger aim of punishing the Chinese army and securing control of the Peking-Tientsin area. In this, Konoe enjoyed the active support of Hirohito.
At Shanghai, Chiang’s best-trained and-equipped troops plus assorted “auxiliaries,” eventually totaling approximately 110,000 to 150,000 troops, took on some twelve thousand Japanese sailors and marines,”
Hirohito: “Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate a large force at the most critical point and deliver one overwhelming blow?”20 Peace, he went on, “based on our attitude of fairness,” could be achieved only through such a staggering victory…” air attacks alone would probably not suffice to make them “lose their will to fight.”
In North China, engage the Nationalist military forces directly, occupy Shanghai, and establish a naval blockade of the China coast. To this policy, advocated most strongly by the navy at a time when many in the army and the government sought to avoid an all-out war, Hirohito gave his sanction, expressing concern only about the dispatch of troops to Tsingtao and the occupation of the air bases near Shanghai.23 At this point too, he accepted the position of his admirals not reluctantly but actively, pressing his generals to move with decisiveness.
By fighting an “incident” rather than a war, Japan could enable American industrial and raw-material exporters to circumvent the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1935 and the even more stringent one of May 1937—a profitable arrangement that American business, in the grip of renewed depression, was eager to continue.
Hirohito, on the recommendation of Konoe, ordered an “Imperial Headquarters” (daihon’ei) established within the palace as a purely military instrument through which he could exercise his constitutional role as supreme commander, and the army and navy could act more in concert. Thereafter, for a few hours in the morning a few days a week, the two chiefs of staff, the army and navy ministers, the chiefs of the operations sections, and Hirohito’s chief aide-decamp conducted business.
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….”
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.
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.
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.
It seems unlikely that the Konoe government knew of the rape and pillage at Nanking but the well-briefed Hirohito did not.
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.
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.
With few exceptions he existed (if he existed at all) in American minds mainly as a powerless “figurehead.”
Up to that point the Roosevelt administration had pursued a policy of gentle appeasement of Japan, but its basic Asian policy had always been to maintain the imperialist status quo embodied in the Washington treaty system. Thus it had consistently refused to recognize any changes Japan had brought about by force in China. Roosevelt had also propped up China’s national currency by making regular silver purchases—a policy that would eventually lead him to join the British in providing foreign exchange so that Chiang Kai-shek could stabilize his currency, counter the proliferation of Japanese military currencies in occupied areas, and go on fighting.
On August 28th, 1938, Hirohito appointed General Abe prime minister, telling him (according to Konoe, who told Kido) to chose either his chief aide, Hata, or Gen. Umezu Yoshijir as army minister, and to try to “cooperate” with the United States and Britain. However, “the most important matter” was “preservation of internal order.”
The Nazi victories in Europe had created unprecedented opportunities for Japan to take over the Asian colonies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The expectation grew apace of making gains and compensating for weaknesses by riding on the coattails of the rising power of Germany, which now controlled most of the resources of Europe up to the Soviet frontier and was preparing to invade Britain. When Yonai failed to act on the long-pending issue of a German alliance, the army brought down his cabinet, and Hirohito did nothing to prevent it.
At the end of the war, Japan had only 56 Chinese POW’s… It reflected a widespread tendency among many Japanese bureaucrats, intellectuals, and right-wingers during the 1930s to regard international law itself as a purely Western fabrication.
Eventually the Chinese Communist Party labeled them the “three alls policy”: that is, “burn all, kill all, steal all,” or, in Japanese, sank sakusen. Hirohito was apprised of the nature of the pacification problem in North China and on December 2, 1938, signed off on Tairikumei 241, the redirection of policy that led to the annihilation campaigns.
The frenzied international response to Germany’s blitzkrieg offensive of spring-summer 1940, changed everything. An almost palpable bandwagoning mood arose. Hirohito’s brother Prince Chichibu repeatedly importuned him to end his opposition to a German alliance. Then suddenly the navy high command, whose lead Hirohito often followed, abandoned its former skepticism and began to favor a military alliance with Hitler.
The Roosevelt administration, which had in place a “moral embargo” on aircraft shipments to Japan, responded, symbolically, by embargoing scrap iron and aviation gasoline. Henceforth Roosevelt would seek to counter Japan by applying economic sanctions incrementally, by aiding China just enough to keep Japan bogged down, by negotiating with Japan on an informal basis, and—most important—by rapidly rearming and preparing the U.S. army and navy for war against the Axis.
It was a very self-conscious break with the Meiji legacy of Anglo-American friendship in foreign policy, and Hirohito knew it, which is another reason he vacillated so long before making it.
Few Japanese leaders at the time understood the tremendous ideological significance of the Tripartite Pact for the United States, or how the Roosevelt administration would now use it to deepen anti-Japanese feeling.
Britain’s response to the Axis military alliance was to reopen the Burma Road, which earlier it had agreed to close, and to look for ways “to cause inconvenience to the Japanese without ceasing to be polite.”67 President Roosevelt’s response was to make another small loan to Chiang Kai-shek, and give assurances of further American support to keep China in the war. In November, Roosevelt assented to Adm. Harold Stark’s “Dog” plan for the recasting of America’s defense strategy on the premise that Germany was the main enemy. Henceforth the United States would follow a defeat-Germany-first strategy, focusing on the European front and aid to Britain.
Intent on deflecting Japan’s attention away from the Soviet Far East and toward the sphere of Anglo-American interests—Southeast Asia and the South Pacific—Stalin would agree to a neutrality pact in exchange for Japan’s pledge to relinquish to the Soviets its coal and oil concessions in North Sakhalin.
President Roosevelt’s commitment to the defense of Britain, China, and the Soviet Union.
Yet precisely because Japan was fighting in China, its army and navy had been able to expand the industries, stockpile the weapons, and secure the enormous funds needed to confront the United States and Britain during the fall and early winter of 1941. After four years and five months of war in China, the army had expanded from seventeen divisions totaling 250,000 men in July 1937 to fifty-one divisions and 2.1 million men by December 8, 1941.
On August 9th he cancelled for that year the “planned” invasion of the Soviet Union.30 Hirohito’s intervention thus prevented Japan from going to war with the Soviet Union as the army high command wanted. An initial imperial decision did not control the final one at this point in time.
That same day, July 26, Roosevelt also signed an executive order freezing Japanese assets in the United States, thereby bringing “all financial and import and export transactions in which Japanese interests are involved under the control of the Government.”34 American officials in the State and Treasury Departments, as well as the Office of Production Management (charged with preventing raw material shortages and coordinating America’s own defense production) immediately proceeded to interpret the freeze order in such a way as to impose, by August 1, a total embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan.
If war with the United States began immediately, Nagano had declared prior to the oil embargo, Japan would “have a chance of achieving victory” because of the difference in their war preparations. As time passed, however, that “probability” would decrease and the situation would thereafter “become disadvantageous to the Empire.” Moreover, he added, “if we occupy the Philippines, it will be easier for our navy to carry on the war.”
Prince Fushimi said that he would avoid war with Britain and the United States. Have you changed that?” Nagano replied, “I have not changed the principle but if we are going to fight, then the sooner we do so the better because our supplies are gradually dwindling anyway.”
Thus, only a month after the American oil embargo, the army came around to wanting a quickly won war against the United States, so that within a year it could turn around and “do the north.”
Britain had already placed economic restrictions on Japan as an ally of Germany; in late July it followed the American lead and froze Japanese assets. Japan’s negotiations with the government of the Netherlands Indies for oil purchases had collapsed; on July 28 the Dutch authorities also froze Japanese assets. Japan was now forced to draw down its reserves of oil and other stockpiled strategic materials.
Admiral Matsudaira: “gave to the emperor that it is now too late to avoid war with the United States even though it will be a most bloody war.”
Konoe, the main advocate of continued negotiations with the United States, was saying, “[W]e must be very cautious about procrastinating [diplomatically].”
On September 3 the liaison conference met and adopted a short document stating first, “The empire, for its existence and self-defense, shall complete war preparations by about the latter part of October with the resolve not to hesitate to go to war with the United States (Britain, and The Netherlands).”
This would have meant halting the southward advance and withdrawing troops from colonially partitioned Southeast Asia, thereby losing the chance to seize the Dutch East Indies. Some of the navy’s top officers had deep misgivings about going into Indochina, and all of them would have acceded to such a decision had the emperor made it.
Nagano: “Assume, however, there is a sick person and we leave him alone; he will definitely die. But if the doctor’s diagnosis offers a seventy percent chance of survival, provided the patient is operated on, then don’t you think one must try surgery? And if, after the surgery, the patient dies, one must say that was meant to be. This indeed is the situation we face today…. If we waste time, let the days pass, and are forced to fight after it it is too late to fight, then we won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
During the conference Sugiyama had in his possession, and may even have introduced, prepared question-and-answer materials for the emperor. These materials made two things clear: that the United States could not be defeated, and that it was therefore impossible to predict when a war with the United States would end. However, if Japan achieved a great victory in the southern operations, Britain would be defeated and knocked out of the war, “producing a great transformation in American public opinion… Concurrently we must develop the rich resources of the southern area and utilize the economic power of the East Asian continent in order to establish a durable, self-sufficient economic position.”
Admiral intended to force an early, decisive, showdown battle in which he would commit his entire fleet, making especially important use of air and submarine forces. If he won that battle, a long war of attrition might be avoided—if not also won.
Army minister Tojo: “The heart of the matter is the [imposition on us of] withdrawal [from Indochina and China]…. If we yield to America’s demands, it will destroy the fruits of the China Incident. Manchukuo will be endangered and our control of Korea undermined.”… Now he was just as sure that Germany would lose, and also sure that the senior officers of both services could not promise a Japanese victory. Konoe’s policy of seeking to end the international pressure on Japan by negotiating in Washington had alienated pro-Axis forces in the government and military.
Konoe’s letter of resignation pointed out that on four separate occasions he had sought to withdraw troops in order to preserve peace with the United States, while Tojo had opposed both the action and its purpose.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” was Hirohito’s comment to Kido ten days afterward.
Konoe would reflect, “In short, I felt the emperor was telling me: My prime minister does not understand military matters; I know much more. In short, the emperor had absorbed the views of the army and navy high commands. Consequently, as a prime minister who lacked authority over the high command, I had no way of making any further effort because the emperor, who was the last resort, was this way.”
To Roosevelt and his strategists the negotiations were expressions of Japanese weakness. To have agreed to anything proposed by Tokyo would have been seen, all across the United States, as an act of “appeasement.” More important, they were under strong pressure from Britain and China not to compromise with Tokyo.
Hull had been reading decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages (intercepted and decoded by the system code-named MAGIC). He, like Roosevelt, was aware of the new Tojo cabinet’s military timetable for war and of Japanese troop movements toward Southeast Asia. On November 26, contrary to the advice of Ambassador Grew in Tokyo, Hull handed Ambassador Nomura and his special assistant, Kurusu Saburo, a “draft mutual declaration of policy” and a ten-point written outline of principles for a comprehensive agreement rather than a temporary truce or tactical delay.
It called for Japan to “withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indochina” but left “China” undefined in all six places in the text where the word appeared. It also omitted any mention of Manchuria, for Hull had discarded Stimson’s earlier nonrecognition doctrine from the start of the talks. Equally important, Hull stated no deadline for troop withdrawal. On the other hand the draft document made quite clear that the United States would not support any government in China other than Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.
Tojo misrepresented the American action by telling the liaison conference that Washington had issued an “ultimatum to Japan.” Togo knew, of course, that Hull’s statement was not really an ultimatum, for it was clearly marked “tentative” and lacked a time limit for acceptance or rejection.”
Although their encounter lasted only five minutes, Takamatsu would never forget his futile last-minute attempt to have a voice in the policy-making process. Afterward a puzzled Hirohito asked Kido, “What’s going on?” Kido replied, “The decision this time [the next day] will be enormously important. Once you grant the imperial sanction, there can be no going back. If you have even the slightest doubt, make absolutely sure until you are convinced.”98 After next checking with Tj, Hirohito called in his top naval leaders, Nagano and Shimada, for yet another joint review. Both men reassured him that the war operation would be successful. Whether Hirohito also questioned them about the navy’s confidence after the first two years of war—Takamatsu’s concern—we have no way of knowing.
“I would like to know,” said Hara, “whether Manchukuo is included in the term ‘China’? Did our two ambassadors confirm this point?” Togo replied that the two ambassadors had not clarified the American meaning of “China” in their meeting with Hull on the 26th. However…the American proposal [early in the negotiations on] April 16 stated that they would recognize the state of Manchukuo, so Manchukuo would not be part of China…. On the other hand…there has been a change in their position…they look upon Chungking as the one and only legitimate regime, and…they want to destroy the Nanking regime, [so] they may retract what they have said previously”… Hull always separated Manchuria from China… they all shared the same misperception.
Having made his choice, Hirohito dedicated himself totally to presiding over and guiding the war to victory at all costs… He continued to receive in audience generals and admirals returning on duty from the Pacific and China battlefronts. He publicly encouraged and praised front-line units (and, later, home-front organizations). He continued sending messages and messengers to the fronts, and bestowing rescripts (which carried far more honor and prestige than did presidential citations for American commanders) on meritorious officers. He carefully edited his rescripts to be sure exactly what words were used. He visited bases, battleships, and various army and navy headquarters. He inspected military schools, granted audiences to industrial leaders to encourage production, took a keen interest in weapons development, and everywhere drove home the message of sacrifice for the state.
The prolonged American-Filipino defense of Bataan-Corregidor had set the stage for the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway that followed by allowing American intelligence analysts to intercept, decode, and analyze Japanese radio transmissions.
One month later, at Midway, on June 5–6, the navy suffered another setback, losing four large aircraft carriers, one heavy cruiser, and approximately three thousand men, including 121 skilled pilots, in battles near Midway Island in the Central Pacific.20 American morale soared; in Tokyo the profound significance of the defeat was overlooked.
Despite his doubts about becoming locked in to a particular island battle, he continually encouraged his commanders in the Solomons to stay on the offensive and strike hard with all the weapons and men they could muster.
The emperor put constant psychological pressure on his naval commanders to recapture the island, and on three different occasions—September 15, November 5, and November 11—he pressed the army high command to throw in more troops… This change in an ongoing operation had been opposed by both upper-and middle-echelon officers. Hirohito, nevertheless, forced the change.
Apart from its losses in naval and merchant ships, the Japanese navy lost 892 planes and 1,882 pilots during the six-month-long Guadalcanal battles from August 1942 to the final withdrawal in early February 1943. Yamada notes that this was “two and a half times the number of planes and fifteen times the number of pilots lost at Midway.”
His initial reaction to Italy’s surrender was mostly concern about the Rumanian oil fields which fueled Germany’s war economy.
He asked, “Isn’t there someplace where we can strike the United States?…When and where on earth are you [people] ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?”
Hara’s questions revealed that although the government had planned “to produce 40,000 aircraft” during 1944, the present annual output was, as Tojo nonchalantly admitted, only “17,000 to 18,000 planes.”… Sugiyama: We need 55,000 aircraft to meet operational requirements. But we cannot meet those demands even if we risk all of our national resources.
The ensuing naval, air, and land battles of the Marianas, fought between June and August 1944, were the decisive battles of the war for the Japanese navy and its air force. Three Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and 395 planes shot down, without inflicting any serious damage on the American invasion force.96 After desperate fighting, in which Japanese ground commanders once again failed to prepare adequate defenses in depth, Saipan, Guam, and Tinian fell and quickly became forward U.S. bases for long-range B-29 (“Superfortress”) bombers.
“Rise to the challenge; make a tremendous effort; achieve a splendid victory like at the time of the Japan Sea naval battle [in the Russo-Japanese War],” he told Vice Chief of Staff Admiral Shimada in audience on June 17.
Hirohito himself bestowed on his favorite general Tojo an unusually warm imperial rescript praising him for his “meritorious services and hard work” and telling him that, “Hereafter we expect you to live up to our trust and make even greater contributions to military affairs.”
Personally disappointed with the state of the war, Hirohito finally decided to withdraw his support of Tojo… Kido, the quintessential backstage man, who once was as great an admirer of Tojo as the emperor, had played the key role in Tojo’s downfall.
Hirohito and his chiefs of staff forced the field commander, Gen. Yamashita Tomoyuki, to engage the American invasion force where Yamashita had not wanted to fight and had not prepared defenses. It was one more example of the destructive influence Hirohito often wielded in operational matters.
More and more kamikaze attacks, which, however, became gradually less deadly as American countermeasures were developed.
On March 9–10, the U.S. Pacific Air Force launched 334 B–29s in the first night incendiary air raid over densely populated Tokyo, turning about 40 percent of the capital into ash and burning to death an estimated eighty to one hundred thousand people. So hot was the firestorm that water boiled in canals, glass melted, and heat from the updrafts destroyed some of the bombers.
B-29s dropped scores of millions of leaflets, written in Japanese, announcing in advance the next scheduled target for B-29 attack or urging surrender while utilizing the emperor to attack the militarists. Leaflets bearing the letterhead of the chrysanthemum crest attacked the “military cliques” for “forcing the entire nation to commit suicide” and called on “everybody” to “exercise their constitutional right to make direct appeals [for peace] to the Emperor. Even the powerful military cliques cannot stop the mighty march for peace of the Emperor.
Roosevelt also projected his Wilsonian idealism into “unconditional surrender” and saw it as a means of realizing a liberal international order.
Immediately Grew met fierce opposition from his colleagues in the State Department—the “China crowd”—who argued that to keep the emperor and guarantee the future existence of the monarchy was to compromise on the very essence of Japanese fascism.42 They—Dean Acheson, poet and future Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and James Byrnes—were aware of Grew’s earlier misjudgments of Japan’s political situation and his tendency to be protective of the emperor and Japan’s conservative “moderates.” They certainly did not want to treat Japan and its emperor, whom they saw as central to the Japanese philosophy of militarism and war.
President Truman gave full expression to the vengeful mood of most Americans: “Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans”
They waited, instead, until their foreign enemies had created a situation that gave them a face-saving excuse to surrender in order to prevent the kokutai from being destroyed by antimilitary, antiwar pressure originating from the Japanese people themselves…. Preserving kokutai was the one condition for peace.
Matsudaira even managed to get the false official version of the emperor’s role in the war inserted into The Reports of General MacArthur.
It is not known if Truman was troubled by the massive American conventional bombing of Japanese noncombatants—actions that qualified as atrocities. But he was concerned with high American casualty projections. For him the alternative to dropping the atomic bombs would have been to wait for the effects of the Soviet ground attack in Manchuria and Korea, combined with the conventional bombing and shelling of the home islands, to become intolerable to Japan’s leaders. Armed with a new doomsday weapon, however, Truman lacked the patience and foresight to wait.
It was partly to destroy that psychology—or, in the words of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall, spoken in 1957, “shock them [the leaders] into action”—that Truman and Marshall justified the dropping of the atomic bombs.
On the eighteenth, a secret directive arrived from the Pentagon, with the first part of the Truman administration’s detailed blueprint for the reform of Japan. On the twentieth MacArthur let it be known to Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru that an informal visit by Emperor Hirohito would not be inappropriate.
MacArthur’s conduct of the occupation had already come under criticism from the Russians and the British at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was preparing to yield to Allied pressure for some form of group supervision of the freewheeling supreme commander. The prime minister of New Zealand had warned the American minister that “there should be no soft peace”; “the Emperor should be tried as a war criminal.
Truman was particularly displeased with MacArthur for ignoring State Department policy guidelines and for failing to return to the United States for consultations… an pinion poll conducted in early June 1945 disclosed that 77 percent of the American public wanted the emperor severely punished… On September 18 Joint Resolution 94 was introduced in the U.S. Senate (and referred to a committee), declaring that Emperor Hirohito of Japan should be tried as a war criminal.
But the emperor’s position was not all bleak. He and the Higashikuni cabinet, in keeping with their resolve to protect the kokutai, had begun disarming and demobilizing the seven-million-strong army and navy even before MacArthur’s arrival in Tokyo. Their initiative made the demilitarization of Japan far easier than the Americans had expected or even imagined. President Truman had registered this important fact on September 6, 1945, when he announced the “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan.” This document instructed MacArthur to exercise his authority through Japan’s existing governing structures and mechanisms, including the emperor, but only insofar as this promoted the achievement of U.S. objectives.
Over the next few weeks GHQ began to attack “feudal remnants” and the emperor system. On October 10, it banned the display of the sun flag (hinomaru), a symbol that antedated the Meiji restoration, but left undisturbed the more important singing in unison of the official national anthem (“Kimigayo”), a paean to the glories of the monarchy that had been made part of daily school education in 1931… On October 10 and 11 GHQ freed nearly five hundred Communist political prisoners and announced “five great reforms”: emancipation of women; promotion of labor unions; and democratization of the educational, legal, and economic systems.
Japanese public opinion surveys showed a strong desire to have the imperial system reformed. According to one such survey, 15.9 percent “wanted the prewar system to remain”; 45.3 percent wanted “the center of morality placed outside of politics; and 28.4 percent wanted a British-style emperor system.”
“Influence the people but do not inform them” was the political injunction of the great feudal politician Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Shortly after the Declaration of Humanity, a directive from Washington on the drafting of a Japanese constitution had requested that MacArthur encourage that “the Emperor institution” be abolished or reformed “along more democratic lines.” MacArthur was now forced to clarify Hirohito’s responsibility for ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor and, at the same time, end his ambiguous new status. On January 25, 1946, he sent a “Secret” telegram to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then U.S. Army Chief of Staff, stating his belief in the emperor’s total innocence.
The emperor, severed from real political power, became (and was defined as) only a “symbol” of unity. He was made so “symbolic” that neither the man nor the institution could ever again become an instrument for a revival of militarism. But the draft did permit the emperor to perform a few specified imperial “acts in matters of state” “on the advice and approval of the cabinet.” Next, the imperial armed forces were eliminated by inserting into the constitution an article—the famous Article 9—renouncing war.
The fact that pressure to abdicate came not only from Prince Higashikuni, but from his own younger brothers must have helped Hirohito overcome his reluctance to accept the MacArthur draft. Sibling rivalry in the imperial family, exploited by the militarists during the 1930s, now benefited MacArthur’s constitutional reform.
“As the matter has gone this far, it can’t be helped.” It was exactly the sort of remark he had made at every other critical juncture of his reign: from his assent to the bombing of Chinchow in south Manchuria in October 1931 and the military alliance with Hitler and Mussolini of September 1940, to his approval of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
GHQ “allowed them to coordinate their stories so that the emperor would be spared from indictment.”
The explicit anti-Semitism of Fellers (like his and MacArthur’s hatred of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, and all liberals), and how he and MacArthur transmitted their bigotry to Japan’s leaders, had not been reflected in the draft version of the new constitution… But MacArthur’s truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war.
Tojo created a stir by inadvertently and indirectly implicating the emperor. Logan: Do you remember even one example where Kido proposed something or acted against the emperor’s wish for peace? Tojo: So far as I know, such an instance never arose. Not only that, no Japanese subject, let alone a high official of Japan, would ever go against the will of the emperor. Tojo’s slip, undermining the argument that Hirohito bore no responsibility for the decision to start the war, was immediately pointed out to the prosecution by tribunal president Webb. It could not be ignored. One of Hirohito’s close aides immediately sent word to Kido in Sugamo prison to get Tojo to correct his error.
Country that had also changed its name from the very masculine “Great Imperial Japan” (Dai Nippon teikoku) to the more feminine “Japan” (Nihon koku).
This is not the first time Japan has lost a war. Long ago [in the seventh century A.D.] we dispatched troops to Korea and withdrew them after having been defeated in the battle at Hakusukinoe. Thereafter we made many reforms and they became a turning point for developing Japanese culture.
51st state: The emperor asked the supreme commander, “After the United States leaves, who is going to protect Japan?” With magnanimous disregard for Japan’s national independence, MacArthur answered, “Just as we protect California, so shall we protect Japan.”
In the United States the previous year, Keenan had disclosed that “high political circles” had decided against trying the emperor for war crimes. [communism?]
Tanaka said that, “MacArthur is convinced that monarchical rule is needed in order to stabilize Japan and suppress the Communist Party.”
On December 1, 1948, National Security Council document 13/2 was transmitted to MacArthur. It formally approved the shift in U.S. occupation policy from political democratization to economic reconstruction and remilitarization. Henceforth the United States would be concerned to strengthen Japan not only economically and politically but militarily.
Concurrently Truman adopted a provocative risk-taking strategy, as seen first in National Security Council document 48/2 of December 1949 and later NSC–68 of March 1950. Three months later, on June 25, the Korean War broke out. Largely in response to these developments, Japan rearmed, strengthened its police forces, and began to receive large infusions of economic assistance from the United States. Soon Japan experienced not only its first postwar economic boom, but also its first renewal of nationalism.
Hirohito’s continuation on the throne after independence clearly inhibited popular exercise of the constitution’s guarantee of freedom of thought and expression.
Others, including Hirohito, saw things differently. They took a “realist” view and recognized only the favorable international conditions for economic growth created by subordination to the strongest Western power. The security alliance with the United States relieved Japan of the costs of providing for its own defense, freed its industries to profit enormously from the war in Korea, and insured access to U.S.–controlled markets, technology, and raw materials.
When established in June 1954, the “Self-Defense Forces” and “Self-Defense Force Agency” were placed under the command of the prime minister with the principle of civilian control written into their enabling legislation. Being severed from the new Japan’s military was painful for Hirohito.
He cautioned the foreign minister to avoid a situation where Japan could again become a strategic rival of the United States. In late August 1955, with Nikita Khrushchev in power and seeking a peace treaty with Japan, Hirohito spoke with Shigemitsu at his mansion in Nasu, Tochigi prefecture, and, according to Shigemitsu, stressed “the need to be friendly with the United States and hostile to communism. He said that [American] troops stationed in Japan must not withdraw.”16 Hatoyama and Shigemitsu soon tired of Hirohito’s uninvited anti-Communist admonitions and stopped consulting.
National anthem sanctioned in 1999.
Ikeda Hayato, abandoned constitutional revision and hoisted the slogan “Tolerance and Patience.” Ikeda is mainly remembered for his plan to “double” the nation’s income within a decade by increasing its GNP by 9 percent annually. During his years in power—June 1960 to November 1964—Japan entered a period of extraordinary economic growth that continued until the first “oil shock” in 1973.
Conferring these imperial accolades always just before election days served not only to honor deserving artists, intellectuals, and war veterans, but also gave popular support to the LDP.
Above all, postwar Japan was politically dedicated to supporting big business, big manufacturing, and big trade, no matter what the human and environmental costs.
Nearly seven years after the Japanese publication of the Kido diaries, which showed that the emperor had never blindly followed the will of anyone, either cabinet or military, and the Sugiyama memo, which had revealed how highly active and interventionist a monarch he had been, Hirohito still mechanically reiterated the false litany that had helped to sustain him.
Late in life, he said, “It’s very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped, and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima. But it couldn’t be helped because that happened in wartime.”
If Hirohito had instead retreated, imagine: Japan could have been a third Great Power during the Cold War. They could have invaded Russia at the same time as Hitler. They could have allied with the United States to keep Mao Zedong in Mongolia. They could have offered humane terms to the British and Dutch East Indies after decolonization.
Instead, Japan’s borders are little changed from 1885, and its GDP per capita is the 12th highest in Asia.