Far Outliers

On July 26, 1939, the United States, having repeatedly protested Japanese actions in China, notified the Hiranuma government that it intended not to renew the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, scheduled to lapse in January 1940. 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. Now, however, anticipating that war would soon break out in Europe, the United States put Japan on notice that serious economic sanctions could follow further acts of aggression. Thereafter, if Japan’s leaders were to continue the war in China, they would have to take more seriously the reactions of the United States, on which they depended for vital imports needed to wage war.

“It would be a great blow to scrap metal and oil,” Hirohito complained to his chief aide-de-camp, Hata Shunroku, on August 5, shortly after the American move:

Even if we can purchase [oil and scrap] for the next six months, we will immediately have difficulties thereafter. Unless we reduce the size of our army and navy by one-third, we won’t make it…. They [his military and naval leaders] should have prepared for something like this a long time ago. It’s unacceptable for them to be making a commotion about it now.”

But of course Hirohito did not enjoin his chiefs of staff to end the China war, or to reduce the size of anything; he simply got angry at them for not having anticipated the American reaction.

A few weeks later, on August 23, 1939, while the Japan-Soviet truce to end the fighting on the Mongolia-Manchukuo border was being negotiated in Moscow, Germany signed a nonaggression pact with its ideological enemy, the Soviet Union–which contravened the 1936 Japan-German Anti-Comintern Pact. After a fruitless three-year quest for “collective security” with the West against Germany territorial expansion in Europe, Stalin had declared Soviet neutrality and, in a secret protocol attached to the pact, made a deal with Hitler to take over the Baltic states and eventually partition Poland. Stunned by this diplomatic reversal, and unsure how to interpret the enormous strengthening of both German and Soviet power that Hitler’s alliance with Stalin portended, the Hiranuma cabinet resigned on the morning of August 28.

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 353-354

The latter half of this book seems much better than the first, probably for two reasons: (1) The documentation is far richer, so Bix doesn’t have to overinterpret thinly sourced material. (2) Parts of it have been published before, so it is likely to have undergone more revision in response to referee comments. The chapter entitled “Prologue to Pearl Harbor” is excellent, but I think I’ll refrain from excerpting it.

At the imperial conferences Hirohito presided over and approved decisions impacting not only the destiny of Japan but of China and other countries affected by Japanese policy. Since these conferences were usually convened after the liaison conferences [between the top government and military leaders], at which all the interested parties had reached decisions in which the emperor shared [passively or actively?–J.], he already knew the contents of the matters to be “decided.” Essentially the imperial conference was designed to allow him to perform as if he were a pure constitutional monarch, sanctioning matters only in accordance with his advisers’ advice but not bearing responsibility for his action [so in this context “sanctioning” = rubberstamping–J.]. At these meetings, civilian ministers wore morning clothes and military officers full-dress uniforms. The theatrical element of these affairs should not obscure their great importance, however. Nor were all imperial conferences the same, and the emperor’s lips were not sealed at all of them [so they *were* sealed at most of them?–J.].

The imperial conference was the device for legally transforming the “will of the emperor” into the “will of the state.” And because everyone who participated in its deliberations could claim to have acted by, with, and under the unique authority of the emperor, while he could claim to have acted in accordance with the advice of his ministers of state, the imperial conference diffused lines of responsibility. In that sense it was the perfect crown to the Japanese practice of irresponsibility, for it sustained four separate fictions: (a) that the cabinet had real power; (b) that the cabinet was the emperor’s most important advisory organ; and (c) that the cabinet and the military high command had reached a compromise agreement on the matter at hand, providing the emperor with a policy that he (d) was merely sanctioning as a passive monarch [so here too “sanctioning” = rubberstamping–J.]. Reality was quite different: a powerless cabinet, an emasculated constitution, and a dynamic emperor participating in the planning of aggression and guiding the process, by a variety of interventions that were often indirect but in every instance determining. [Notice any actors missing from the “reality”? That’s right! A dynamic military planning its own aggressions–not just “participating in” the planning–and directly or indirectly forcing the government to react with new policies that ranged from bad to worse.–J.]

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 328-329

Look, I have no interest in excusing Hirohito for his manifest sins of omission, and am fully prepared to believe that he exercised malignant leadership on many occasions. (Nor do I care one way or the other whether the Japanese imperial throne is preserved or abolished.) But I just find Bix’s arguments to be more tendentious than convincing when he tries to make the case that Hirohito was a more active than passive sinner.

POSTELECTION AFTERTHOUGHT: It’s interesting how much criticism newly (and overwhelmingly) reaffirmed Prime Minister Koizumi gets for *not* making decisions in the unaccountable backroom manner described above, which has long characterized Japanese politics.

Tensions in Shanghai had begun after Japanese residents took umbrage at a Chinese newspaper article, on January 9, decrying the failure of the assassination attempt on the Shôwa emperor. Nine days later army Maj. Tanaka Ryûkichi, hoping to divert foreign attention from the army’s operations in northern Manchuria, instigated an attack by a Chinese mob on a group of Japanese Nichiren priests. The Imperial Navy found this incident a tempting chance to demonstrate its prowess to the army. The Shanghai fleet was quickly reinforced and on January 28, 1932, marines under Rear Adm. Shiozawa Kôichi went ashore and that night challenged China’s Nineteenth Route Army–a 33,500-man force stationed in the vicinity of the International Settlement, which ran along the waterfront. In the ensuing battle the Chinese gave the Japanese marines a good thrashing. Unable to retrieve the situation despite reinforcements from the fleet, the navy had to call on the army for help. But the Chinese army still held firm and again inflicted heavy losses. The high command in Tokyo then organized a full-fledged Shanghai Expeditionary Force under General Shirakawa and reinforced it with two full divisions. Intense fighting ensued; the Chinese finally fell back, and Japan was able to announce a face-saving cease-fire, followed by an armistice, negotiated with British participation on May 5, 1932, which also ended the Chinese boycott.

The Shanghai Incident should have awakened Hirohito to the recklessness and aggressiveness of his senior admirals–the very officers he and the court group regarded as sophisticated, cosmopolitan men of the world. Driven by service rivalry, they had deliberately sought a confrontation with Chinese forces in the heartland of China, knowing that problems with the United States and Britain were sure to result. Equally important, this incident was an unlearned lesson for both military services. Neither army nor navy drew any new conclusions from the heavy losses they incurred in this first large battle with a modern Chinese army. They continued as before–utterly contemptuous of the Chinese military and people, whom they saw as a rabble of ignorant, hungry peasants, lacking racial or national consciousness, that could easily be vanquished by one really hard blow. Hirohito himself may have held that view privately. But the emperor was more aware than his commanders of Japan’s vulnerability to economic blockade. Going out of his way, he told Shirakawa to settle the Shanghai fighting quickly and return to Japan. At Shanghai, Hirohito acted decisively to control events; in rural Manchuria, on the other hand, he was pleased to watch passively as his empire expanded.

At Shanghai, both during and after the fighting, Japanese officers and enlisted men alike exemplified the pathological effects of the post-1905 battlefield doctrine of never surrendering. Captured by the Chinese in February 1932, Capt. Kuga Noboru was returned to Japan in a prisoner exchange; he committed suicide to atone for his capture. Praised for his martial spirit by Army Minister Araki, Kuga was later enshrined at Yasukuni. From this time on, officers who survived were openly pressured to commit suicide. A plethora of books, movies, and stage dramas glorified the “human bombs” and “human bullets” who fave their lives on the Shanghai front. These tales heightened the popularity of the army at home, while also reinforcing its mystique abroad. [Bix later (p. 346) notes that Japanese combat casualties numbered, on average, twice as many dead as wounded during the China war.]

SOURCE: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, by Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 250-252

So much for the conventional wisdom that the Imperial Japanese Navy was much less inclined toward war than the Imperial Japanese Army.