Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 11
Chapter XI
Nationalism, Militarism, and War
The political and intellectual liberalism of the 1920’s was for the most part limited to the cities. Peasants and residents of the thousands of villages and small towns, who still constituted the bulk of the population, looked on at what was happening in the cities with wonderment and often with disapproval; and certain elements among the more educated classes regarded the liberal and sometimes radical political theories of the city intelligentsia and the antics of the moga and moho with growing hostility and resentment. Army and navy officers, rural landowners, lower middle class citizens of the smaller towns, and many petty government officials found it quite impossible to accept or even to tolerate the growing challenge to established political and social authority.
These men, too, were members of the new generation and products of the new education, but with them the heavy nationalistic and militaristic indoctrination of the school system had weighed more heavily than the opening of new horizons and the influences from abroad. They were in complete sympathy with the authoritarian rule at home and the strong expansionist program abroad of the Meiji leaders, and the post-war liberalism and internationalism seemed to them signs of weakness and perversion. From the Meiji leaders they had inherited a compelling nationalistic urge to make Japan even stronger, but too much nationalistic and militaristic indoctrination had robbed them of the breadth of view of the Meiji leaders they sought to emulate.
Ultra-nationalist and militarist sentiments from time to time found expression in political parties, but these essentially reactionary elements, with their inherent distrust of representative government, leaned more to direct action through private pressure groups and extra-legal cliques than to political action by means of the ballot-box. Ultra-nationalistic secret societies quite naturally developed as one of their major forms of political expression. Some of these exerted considerable influence on Japanese politics by terroristic activities and virulent propaganda directed against their opponents. The best known of these ultra-nationalistic secret societies was formed by anti-Russian propagandists who, believing that the Amur River in Siberia should be Japan’s frontier, named their group the Amur Society. A literal translation into English has given us the very sinister sounding name of Black Dragon Society.
The reactionaries all tended to look to the armed forces as their idols and champions, for the army and navy were less tainted with the prevailing democratic views and business man’s ideals of the 1920’s. The army and navy, furthermore, were the natural organs for the continued military expansion advocated by these reactionaries. The officer corps reciprocated by leaning heavily toward the expansionist and nationalistic views of the reactionaries. Older generals and admirals were often men of broad outlook, who from long and intimate association with business leaders had come to accept much of the business man’s point of view, but the younger officers were mostly of a different breed.
The new officer caste was largely composed of sons of officers or of rural landowners, or sometimes even of peasants. Coming from such conservative backgrounds, they were given an even more conservative education. The army recruited most of its future officers at about the age of fourteen, and from that age on the young cadet was subjected to a narrow militaristic training which often made him incapable of understanding democratic concepts of government, or even the civilian mentality. Since these young officers were victims of over-indoctrination, it is not surprising that they increasingly found themselves in violent opposition to the trends of the time and completely out of sympathy with the more moderate and broadminded generals and admirals.
From the start the army had relied on the peasantry as its chief source for enlisted men, and a very special relationship had grown up between the army and the peasants. On the one hand, the army in general and army officers individually had a paternalistic interest in their men and saw to it that they were well cared for while in service, and thoroughly indoctrinated with fierce national pride and a fanatical sense of devotion to the emperor—and to the army as the visible symbol of imperial might and authority. The peasants, on the other hand, denied their share of economic prosperity and still too untutored to take their part in politics, found army life far less onerous than did the city youths, and looked upon the army and the reservist organization for discharged soldiers as their only means of achieving personal glory and prestige in an otherwise humdrum, miserable existence. As peasants they were insignificant members of a poor and downtrodden class. As soldiers they were honored members of a mystic elite corps, participating directly in all the glories of Japan as a world power.
The army officers, with predominantly rural or small town family backgrounds and an intimate and paternalistic relation with peasant soldiers, came to have a deeper understanding of the peasant and a more genuine interest in his welfare than did the representatives of big business interests or the city intellectuals, who more often looked upon the peasant as hopelessly backward and outside the pale of the new Japanese culture. Younger army officers, resenting the political and economic domination of business men, doubtful of the ethical or even the economic value of the whole capitalistic system, and distrusting deeply the liberal philosophy of the intelligentsia, gradually came to champion the economic interests of the peasantry against the big city groups, particularly the capitalists. In return, the peasantry gave the army and its officer corps blind but inarticulate support. Many young army officers, moving toward an almost revolutionary hatred of urban capitalism, were beginning to advocate vague but definitely radical programs to better the economic status of the underprivileged peasantry.
These tendencies grew slowly and almost unnoticed during the 1920’s, as the new generation of younger officers was developing. Then in the early 1930’s, the blatant militarism, fanatical nationalism, and anti-liberal and anti-democratic prejudices of the younger army and navy officers, and of other reactionary groups, swept over Japan in a sudden, startling reversal of the dominant trends of the 1920’s. Big business, with more or less active support from the urban middle classes, had been the first successor of the Meiji oligarchy. Now it was pushed aside by the militarists, with the noisy backing of ultra-nationalistic societies and the tacit support of the rural population.
The basic reason for this reversal of political and social trends was, of course, the gradual rise to influence of the younger officer group along with other nationalistic and militaristic elements. But the time and speed of this reaction against democracy, internationalism, and freer social forms were to a certain degree determined by influences from outside Japan. For one thing, the world-wide disillusionment with democracy, which followed the democratic triumph of the First World War and contributed to the creation of fascist totalitarian regimes in many parts of the world, did not go unnoticed by the Japanese. Many of them were impressed by the vaunted “superiority” of totalitarian governments and their points of similarity with traditional Japanese concepts of authoritarian rule.
Another outside influence was the world-wide depression of 1929 and the resultant collapse of international trade. Japan started its own depression with a bank crisis in 1927, but it was of little consequence compared with the raising of protective tariffs throughout the world as an aftermath of the 1929 depression. This seemed to spell ultimate disaster for Japan’s foreign trade. The business man’s program of continued economic expansion and prosperity through a growing export trade was suddenly revealed to be no more than a vain dream. Huge political units like Russia, the United States, and the British Empire could ride the storm of world depression, for they had their own sources of supply for most raw materials and their own consuming markets. But a smaller unit like Japan, which depended on other lands for much of its raw materials, and on China, India, and the Occident for a vital part of its consuming market, was entirely at the mercy of the tariff policies of other nations.
The problem was all the more acute for Japan because of the tremendous increase in population. There were now more than 60,000,000 Japanese, far more than could be supported by a simple agricultural economy, and with government encouragement the rate of increase was about 1,000,000 persons a year. For the maintenance of this expanded population in the narrow islands of Japan, foreign markets were essential for Japanese exports. Consequently, the Japanese viewed any threat to their overseas economic enterprises with concern.
In the early 1930’s many Japanese believed that the only answer to rising protective tariffs in other lands was for Japan to resume its old program of colonial expansion and win for itself the sources of raw materials and the markets needed to make it self-sufficient and invulnerable as a world power. Such reasoning seemed obvious to the reactionary and militaristic groups. Those business men and intellectuals who remained moderate and international in their views were not able to refute these arguments to the satisfaction of the Japanese public.
There was a gradual swing of popular support to the militaristic reactionaries. They did not wait, however, for a victory at the polls, because it would have come slowly and might never have come at all. They simply seized power by direct action, murdering or intimidating their leading political opponents and embroiling the nation in foreign wars of conquest which, by stirring up the nationalistic emotions of the people, won their support for imperialist and military policies.
The manner in which the militaristic reactionaries were able to seize power by direct action is a point of special interest, for it revealed a basic flaw in the Japanese political system, which the business men and bureaucrats had not attempted to mend. Indeed, they had deliberately preserved it until it contributed to their own undoing. This flaw was the mystic position of the emperor as a demi-god who stood above the government and whose personal desires took precedence over all law.
The Meiji leaders, who had come to power by championing the right of the emperor to rule, had created and fostered this tradition, for it gave them, as the men who surrounded the throne and spoke for the emperor, far greater authority over the people than they could have achieved otherwise. By building up an elaborate state cult of Shinto, centering around the person of the emperor and the imperial line, and by indoctrinating school children with fanatical devotion to the emperor and blind faith in all statements said to represent his will, they secured for themselves the unquestioning loyalty and obedience of the people. The business men and bureaucrats who followed the Meiji leaders chose to perpetuate this system, for it seemed to give them, too, an unassailable position of authority as spokesmen for the emperor. Consequently, they permitted the wildest sort of utterances by members of the lunatic fringe of ultra-nationalists and militarists, because they were couched in terms of devotion to the emperor; but they vigorously and ruthlessly suppressed all radical thinkers who challenged the validity of the emperor concept.
In 1925 a law was passed which resulted in a program to stamp out so-called “dangerous thoughts.” Any thought was considered dangerous which questioned the position of the emperor, or was unsympathetic to the system of private property on which capitalism was based. Although anti-capitalist prejudices were perhaps most prevalent in extreme militaristic circles, the business men and bureaucrats were far more afraid of communistic intellectuals, and the victims of this thought purge were largely students of liberal or radical tendencies. The embryo communist group was completely crushed, and many students who had nothing more than vague radical leanings were thrown into prison and forced to recant their “dangerous thoughts.”
The business men and bureaucrats made their fatal error in failing to see that the reactionary ultra-nationalists and militarists presented the most immediate threat to their continued supremacy. These groups neatly turned the tables on the civil government by claiming that they, not the government, represented the true imperial will. Since the army, as the personal army of the emperor, had always borne a special relationship to him, and had been partially independent of the civil government, this claim in the case of the army as a whole had a certain validity; but individual reactionaries went even further and claimed imperial sanction and approval for their personal views and deeds. Acts of aggression abroad, and at home, acts of civil disobedience, political murders, and open mutiny were all justified as being in accord with the true will of the emperor, whose views were misrepresented by corrupt politicians around the throne.
Confronted with this monstrous perversion of their own policy, the weak-kneed business men and bureaucrats failed to take drastic measures or even to stand firm and united. Liberal intellectuals and office-workers, while dismayed, were too weak politically and for the most part too timorous to fight back. The general rural and small town population accepted these acts of supposed devotion to imperial will at their face value, and created an atmosphere so sympathetic for political assassins and other extremists that they were usually given only absurdly light punishment.
Throughout the 1920’s some men high in government circles had advocated colonial expansion and a strong military policy. There was, for example, Baron General Tanaka, who has been accused of drawing up an extraordinary memorial recommending a policy of conquest and empire in East Asia. The authenticity of this particular document is definitely open to question, but there can be no doubt that such views as it expressed were advanced by some government officials during the 1920’s. These men had tried, however, to win acceptance of their program by normal political procedures, and they had usually been overruled by the business men.
The turning point between the liberal 1920’s and the reactionary 1930’s came in 1931, when certain military forces, without the approval of the civil government and possibly even without the specific approval of higher military authorities, started their own war of territorial aggrandizement. In September, Japanese Army units stationed in Manchuria to protect the great South Manchurian Railway and other Japanese interests, embarked upon the conquest of all Manchuria on the flimsy pretext that Chinese troops had tried to blow up the railway. Within a few months, Manchuria had been overrun by Japanese forces, and troops had been landed at Shanghai in central China. After a very sanguinary fight, they seized the Chinese portions of this key city and some surrounding territory. Early in 1932, Manchuria became a puppet state called Manchukuo. The League of Nations and the United States looked with strong disfavor on this outburst of military aggression in the Far East. But since neither did more than censure Japan verbally and withhold recognition of Manchukuo, Japan found their policies all bark and no bite. Her answer to their criticism was simply to withdraw from the League of Nations.
There could be no doubt that the Japanese army in Manchuria had been eminently successful. At relatively small military cost, and with only a temporary loss in exports to China because of boycott activities, the army had brought a vast new area under Japanese control, rich in natural resources and inhabited by some 30,000,000 industrious Chinese. It was a promising first step toward the creation of the self-sufficient economic empire which would make Japan invulnerable to economic or military attack.
The people as a whole accepted this act of unauthorized and certainly unjustified warfare with uncritical admiration. Many of the business men and bureaucrats, instead of denouncing the militarists for acting against the will of the government and therefore against the will of the emperor as interpreted by the government, happily accepted this expansion of the national domain and attempted to justify the acts of the military before a critical world public. The Japanese government, in fact, steadfastly maintained the fiction that there had been no war and called the whole conquest of Manchuria simply the “Manchurian incident.”
Meanwhile, other military extremists at home had brought a sudden end to party rule by another form of direct action—political assassination. A group of young army and navy officers, claiming they were attempting to free the emperor from evil advisers, assassinated the Premier on May 15, 1932. The government leaders, while condemning this act, tacitly accepted it as judgment against party government, and set up a compromise “National Government” with a cabinet made up of a central bloc of professional bureaucrats, with other contingents from the political parties and the armed forces balancing each other.
This compromise government became typical of the rest of the 1930’s. The military element in succeeding cabinets tended to grow and party representatives slowly dwindled in number, but the professional bureaucrats retained the central and, theoretically, the dominant position throughout the decade. However, the militarists definitely took the lead in creating new policies of government. With the success of their Manchurian venture assured and supported by sporadic acts of terrorism committed by individual extremists, they forced as much of their program as they could on the compromise governments.
By simply refusing to recognize the authority of the Diet over the Cabinet, the militarists robbed the Diet of one power after another, and by the end of the decade they had reduced it to little more than an impotent and very timorous debating society. They did not dare to do away with the Diet entirely, because in theory it had been a gift from the Meiji emperor, but they made it meaningless as a parliament.
The militarists also increased the already strong imperialistic and militaristic indoctrination of the people, and they did their best to whip the masses up to a frenzy of nationalistic fervor. General Araki and his colleagues invented an undefined state of “national crisis,” with the strong implication that war was imminent. There was open encouragement of anti-foreign prejudices, and the people were taught to look upon all foreigners as possible spies.
The Japanese had for long hated Russia. Now bitter anti-American and anti-British propaganda was permitted to grow and to increase in virulence. Frequent reference was made to the abrogation in 1924 by the United States of a “gentlemen’s agreement” with Japan, by which a small trickle of Japanese immigrants had been allowed entry into the United States. In its place, the American Congress had passed a bill classing the Japanese with the other Asiatics entirely excluded on the grounds of race. The Japanese took this as a direct insult. This old sad story was revived in the 1930’s, coupled with much talk and speculation about a great naval war with the United States.
At the same time, the attention of the Japanese public was also focused on the Asiatic colonial possessions of Britain and other European powers. Japanese leaders, coveting these rich territories, began to speak of freeing colonial Asiatics from oppression by the white races. Since it was obvious that the Japanese merely wished to substitute their own rule for that of the European powers, not many of the peoples of the Far East were deceived by this new line of propaganda. The Japanese themselves, however, accepted it completely and came to believe that Japan was the champion of the downtrodden peoples of Asia, and some day would free them from their white oppressors.
On the home front, all things not to the liking of the reactionary militarists were termed un-Japanese and, if possible, suppressed. Dance halls were banned; and golf and other luxury sports were frowned on. Labor unions were deprived of all influence. An effort was made to stop the use of English scientific and technical words in conversation and writing, and street and railway signs, which had once been bilingual, were remade with the English omitted. Students in the men’s higher schools and universities, which had been noted for their independence of thought, were forced into the same patterns of rote memorizing as pupils in lower schools; participation by women in the intellectual life of the nation was discouraged; freedom of expression in newspapers and journals was curbed even more rigorously than before; and a rather successful attempt was made to have the people replace rational thought on political and social problems with the use of almost mystic phrases, such as “national crisis,” “Japanese spirit,” and “national structure.”
The militarists also sanctioned and encouraged a veritable witchhunt for all persons whose slightest word or deed could be construed to be lèse majesté. Liberal educators were forced to resign their academic positions on the grounds that they had handled the imperial rescript on education improperly, and leading statesmen were driven out of political life because of some unfortunate historical allusion involving an emperor. Professor Minobe, a leading authority on constitutional law and a member of the House of Peers, was sent into dishonorable retirement because he had described the emperor as an “organ” of the state. Social scientists, liberal educators, and moderate politicians soon learned to remain silent if they could not express themselves in the mystical terms of ultra-nationalism and abject devotion to the emperor.
Party politicians, of course, fought bitterly to preserve their hold on the government, but the only method they knew was through the ballot-box, and with the decline of the Diet, elections meant less and less. Whether they won elections or not, the party politicians were gradually losing all control of the government. Some cabinets even excluded party men altogether, and those politicians who did not swing around to timid support of the extreme militarists found it best to abandon political life, or at least to keep silent. Even the Social Mass Party of city intellectuals and white collar workers, swayed by the dominant currents of the day, developed certain fascist leanings. Eventually, the parties were dissolved completely, and the only opposition the Cabinet then had to fear from the Diet was an occasional pointed question from some brave liberal politician left over from an earlier age.
The big business interests, which had stood behind the party politicians, soon made their own compromise with the militarists. Business meant far more to them than ideals. The militarists, in seizing Manchuria, had provided them with a vast new field for economic exploitation, and the wars and rearmament programs of the militarists led to a rapid development of heavy industry and of certain other specialized war industries. The average business man remained afraid of the risks and expense of a major war, but he was not averse to cooperating with the militarists in minor colonial wars and in the profits of building an empire.
At the same time, under militarist pressure the government increasingly took over the direction and control of business and industry in preparation for an unspecified “national crisis.” Control of private capital and profits grew exceedingly stringent, and the great economic empires, like Mitsui and Mitsubishi, which were coming to be run by competent managers rather than by their owners, became in some ways merely economic branches of the government. In fact, the militarists, who had long been unfriendly to capitalism, appeared to be taking the first step toward a curious sort of state socialism.
Throughout the 1930’s the bureaucrats kept up the appearance of being in the political saddle, balancing the party politicians and big business interests against the militarists; but as the politicians and big business interests lost power, it was more and more evident that the militarists, if not in the saddle, were at least leading the horse. All the bureaucrats could do was to exert a restraining influence on them. The bureaucrats were not liberals in the sense of being ardent supporters of democracy, but they were at least moderates. They had faith to some degree in parliamentary forms of government; they believed in the capitalist system, which the more extreme militarists were ready to discard; and they were apprehensive about the ultimate outcome of the aggressive foreign policy the militarists were pursuing.
This group of moderates included some of the older army and navy leaders, who in contrast to the younger officers believed that the civil government rather than the army and navy should determine foreign policy. But the chief strength of the moderates was to be found in the Privy Council and other groups around the throne. One moderate stood out in particular. He was the old court aristocrat, Prince Saionji, the last of the “elder statesmen” from the Meiji period, who served as a definite moderating influence until his death in 1940. Prince Saionji’s chief political protégé, drawn from the same old court aristocracy, was Prince Konoye, who as Premier apparently attempted to keep the militarists somewhat in check but who finally stepped aside to make way for a Cabinet favoring war with the United States.
Another figure who might be classed with the moderates was the emperor himself. In 1921, he had become Prince Regent for his mentally incompetent father, and in December 1926, he had ascended the throne, with the reign title of Showa. The political views of a person so sheltered from all normal contact with the outside world as the Showa emperor cannot be described with any degree of certainty. But it seems not improbable that he was and is at least a moderate and possibly even a liberal at heart. He grew up at the time of the First World War, when democratic trends were strongest; he traveled in Europe in 1921, and was always surrounded primarily by liberals or at least moderate men. He appears to be a man of scholarly tastes, and he has a deep interest in marine biology, which would make literal belief in his own divinity seem rather improbable. However, the views of the emperor meant relatively little in practical politics. What counted was not what was in his mind, but what the people were led to believe was in his mind, and this the militarists determined with no reference to the emperor himself.
The moderates could exert a restraining influence on the militarists, but they could not control them. The army and navy had a position of semi-independence from the civil government. Moreover, they exercised a negative control over any Cabinet or candidate for the Premiership. Army and navy ministers were chosen from the list of active generals and admirals, and the armed forces could thus make a Cabinet fall or prevent a newly appointed Premier from forming a Cabinet by refusing to let any general or admiral serve in these key posts. The use of this veto power at certain crucial points in the 1930’s aided the militarists greatly in their attempts to gain control of the government.
An even more decisive factor was that direct action on the part of the army or of individual extremists always resulted in an increase in the influence of the militarists. The general public, reverting to the feudal tradition of rule by military men, accepted the claims of military extremists at their face value and judged these men to be “sincere,” while accusing their opponents of “insincerity” as scheming politicians and selfish capitalists.
The fight was not only between the armed forces and the civil government. Much of the struggle for power between extremists and moderates took place within the army itself. In 1935, a lieutenant colonel, representing the younger officer faction, murdered one of the leading generals of the War Ministry, because he was thought to be carrying out a sweeping program of reassignment of high officers in an attempt to rob the extremists of influence.
In the general election of February 1936, the voting public definitely endorsed the more liberal candidates, indicating very strong support still for parliamentary government. Military extremists, startled by the recalcitrant attitude of the public, struck swiftly. Before dawn on February 26, a group of young officers from a Tokyo regiment, leading fully armed enlisted men, went to the homes of several liberal statesmen and slaughtered them. The Premier and Prince Saionji narrowly escaped the assassins; but General Watanabe, the inspector general of military education, Takahashi, the venerable and able finance minister, and Admiral Saito, keeper of the privy seal and one of the closest advisers of the emperor, were all murdered.
The conspirators had hoped to seize the government by this bold move, and for a while Tokyo was divided into two armed camps. Within a few days, however, the rebels were persuaded to capitulate in the face of overwhelming military might brought against them by the group around the throne, which for once took a determined stand. The ringleaders of the revolt were severely punished, but the militarists as usual emerged from the incident nearer their goal of complete domination.
The next step in the extremist policy of direct action was to start another supposedly local war of conquest. The Japanese militarists, on one pretext or another, had been pushing from Manchuria into North China and Inner Mongolia, slowly winning control over the war lords and the business interests of these regions; but during these years the Chinese Nationalist government had been steadily growing stronger in Central and South China and even gaining influence in the north. The Chinese Nationalists were bitterly opposed to the special privileges of all foreign powers, and it was becoming evident that the old days of happy hunting for concessions and territories in China were fast coming to an end. If Japan were to consolidate her gains and seize additional territory from China in another cheap local war, she would have to move fast before China became too determined or strong.
In July 1937, following the precedent of the “Manchurian Incident,” military extremists provoked a new “incident” near Peking in North China. Again the grounds for conflict were extremely flimsy, and again it seems that the local Japanese units were acting without the knowledge or the expressed approval of the government and possibly without the knowledge of higher army authorities. But again the Japanese civil government meekly supported the war brought on by the militarists. Japanese troops quickly seized the two principal cities of North China, Peking and Tientsin, and overran large parts of North China and Inner Mongolia. Fighting again broke out around Shanghai as it had during the conquest of Manchuria.
The aim of the militarists was obviously to bite off as much of North China and Inner Mongolia as possible before Chinese Nationalist authority over that region became too strong. But the militarists had miscalculated; it was already too late to seize North China by a localized war. The Chinese were determined to wage a full scale war to protect themselves from foreign domination.
Chinese resistance irritated the Japanese militarists, but it did not worry them. They would accept the challenge and crush all opposition by capturing the capital at Nanking. The campaign around Shanghai, although costly, was pushed to a successful conclusion, and Japanese armies marched on to Nanking, which fell in 
Japanese expansion on the continent
before December 1941
The Japanese now saw that their “incident” was becoming a protracted war. They held the cities and rail lines of most of northeastern China and Inner Mongolia, the major ports of the southern coast of China, and the great central cities along the Yangtse River, which constitutes the main artery of China’s trade and commerce. Yet the war had reached a stalemate because the Chinese, although pushed into the more remote and backward parts of the country and cut off from foreign aid and the industrial production of their own cities, simply refused to surrender.
Even so, the Chinese military and economic position appeared hopeless in the long run. The Japanese, holding the richest parts of China and strangling the rest of the land economically, decided to wait the Chinese out. Alternating between acts of terrorism and conciliatory gestures to the puppet government they had created at Nanking, the Japanese forces settled down to wait for the collapse of the Nationalist government.
But Japan had miscalculated again. The Chinese government did not collapse, and the fighting spirit of the supposedly pacifistic Chinese people fed upon the blunders the Japanese militarists themselves committed. Their narrow-minded and domineering attitude toward the Chinese made cooperation with them almost impossible, and the excesses they permitted their troops, as in the mad orgy of rape and murder which followed the capture of Nanking, made even the politically apathetic Chinese peasants determined and irreconcilable foes of Japan.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 must at first have looked like a fortunate event to the Japanese. In 1936, Japan had joined with Germany in an anti-communist pact, to which Italy also subscribed the following year. Now Japan’s European allies seemed on the point of crushing her potential European enemies. The eyes of the world were diverted from close scrutiny of the Far East, and the collapse of France in 1940 permitted Japan to start upon a gradual military and economic penetration of French Indo-China in the heart of the European colonial domains of Southeast Asia.
The war in Europe, however, aroused the American public to a consciousness of the true significance of Japanese aggression in China. It came to be realized that the militaristic regimes of Germany and Japan, if victorious, would constitute a perpetual menace to the peace and freedom of America, and of the world. While gradually swinging to the aid of Britain against Germany, the United States also began to take a more positive stand against Japanese aggression. The old policy of verbal protests and non-recognition of Japanese conquests was slowly supplemented by economic sanctions, which hurt Japan far more than a thousand verbal protests. Valuable shipments of scrap iron were eventually stopped; Japanese assets abroad were frozen; and with the cooperation of the British and the Dutch, shipments of oil were cut off. Imports of scrap iron and oil were vital to the Japanese economy and war machine.
By the summer of 1941, Japan was confronted with a most difficult and momentous decision. Four years of war in China had strained her economy, and the tightening blockade imposed by the Western democracies would, if permitted to continue long enough, seriously impair Japanese economic strength and greatly reduce her military effectiveness. The Chinese war would become increasingly difficult to wage, and Japan would eventually lose her military supremacy in the Far East. Obviously the policy of waiting for China to collapse was no longer feasible, and action was called for.
Two choices were open to Japan. One was to withdraw her forces from China, as the United States demanded, and be content with whatever economic concessions the Western democracies would make. The other was to break the economic blockade by war on the Western democracies. The moderates, appalled by the danger of war against a coalition of foreign powers but aware that the army would never be willing to withdraw empty-handed from China, desperately sought some compromise which would satisfy both the United States and the militarists at home. The United States, however, refused to compromise with aggression.
As the year 1941 wore on, it became obvious that war was inevitable. Although the activities of certain extremists in the past had threatened to embroil Japan in war with the West, the moderates had always managed to stop short of it. The crisis caused by the wholly unwarranted sinking of the Panay, a United States Navy gunboat bombed by Japanese planes flying over the Yangtse River in December 1937, had been settled. Numerous clashes with Russian troops on the Manchurian-Siberian border, culminating in a month-long battle in 1938, had never been permitted to develop into war. But now the government saw war with the West staring it in the face. In the autumn of 1941, Prince Konoye resigned the Premiership, making way for General Tojo and his war Cabinet.
The Japanese did not enter the war in a spirit of wild bravado. The decision on the part of the militarists, who were now definitely in the saddle, was cool and calculated. They knew how weak the American, British, and Dutch forces in the western Pacific were, and how easily the Japanese could overrun the rich lands of Southeast Asia. There they would find the minerals and oil so desperately needed. These, it was hoped, would soon make the Japanese economy stronger than ever. Russia, apparently on the verge of collapse, seemed to be out of the picture. Britain was in far too critical a situation at home to do much in the Far East, and the United States could never dare concentrate all its power in the Pacific as long as Germany was undefeated.
Germany was thus the first line of Japan’s defense. If she won, Japan was safe. If she lost, she would at least have fought a rear-guard action in behalf of Japan, tiring their mutual enemies and giving Japan time to bring China to her knees and to build an invulnerable economic and military empire, containing enormous natural resources and many hundreds of millions of industrious people, protected from attack by the vast expanse of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
It was a fateful decision. As the result of small initial wagers in 1931 and in 1937, Japan was now forced into a position in which she either had to withdraw ignominiously from the game and lose what was already won, or else make a win-all, lose-all play. In Tokyo in the autumn of 1941, the chances for success seemed good, and the rewards of victory promised to be the creation of the most populous and perhaps the richest empire the world had ever seen.
But again the Japanese miscalculated, not so much on geographic, economic, or military as on human factors. They counted heavily on their own moral superiority, the famed “Japanese spirit,” and the supposed degeneracy and pacifism of the Western democracies, particularly America, which they believed to be corrupted by too many luxuries. They were convinced that Americans did not have the will to fight a long and costly war. In this delusion the Japanese showed themselves to be so blinded by their own nationalistic and militaristic propaganda that they were unable to evaluate the spirit of other peoples or to judge their reactions correctly. They entirely misread the character not only of the Americans, but of the British and Russian peoples too. The Russians did not collapse; the British continued a valiant struggle with growing determination and strength; and the Americans entered the war with a resolution and vigor the Japanese had not dreamed possible.
The Japanese even failed to judge correctly other Far Eastern peoples. Japan had developed a telling propaganda technique, and phrases such as “East Asia for the East Asiatics,” “A New Order in East Asia,” and “The East Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere” had a ready appeal for other Asiatics. However, warned by Japanese actions in China and disillusioned by the brutality and arrogance of their conquering troops, the native populations gave the Japanese little support. The Chinese, encouraged by the appearance of powerful allies in their war against Japan, took new heart in the stubborn fight against the invaders. The Filipinos, far from welcoming the Japanese, fought stoutly alongside the Americans; and other peoples of Southeast Asia either stood by indifferent to the outcome or gave only lukewarm aid to their new masters.
Repeating the tactics used against Russia in 1904, the Japanese started the war with a brilliantly successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which crippled the American navy at one blow, virtually eliminating it for the time being, and cleared the way for an easy conquest of Southeast Asia and the islands north of Australia. The attack on Pearl Harbor was indeed an unqualified military success for Japan. But it was also a psychological blunder, because it united the American people, who had been bitterly divided over the question of participating in the wars in Europe and Asia, and they took up arms determined to crush Japan and Germany.
With a speed that must have appalled the Japanese, the Americans rebuilt their navy, created an air force against which the Japanese were no match, and dispatched strong army and marine units to the Pacific to hold the line against Japan. In the summer of 1942, the Americans stopped the Japanese advance at Midway and at Guadalcanal, and in 1943 they took the offensive.
The vast natural resources and tremendous productive power of America were pitted against the meagre resources and relatively feeble productive power of Japan, already weary from four years of war and needing far more time to benefit from the rich territories conquered in Southeast Asia. The United States, while making a major contribution to the war in Europe, could still spare enough to win control of the skies and seas in the Pacific. Her ships, submarines, and planes drove the Japanese navy back to its home waters and virtually destroyed it; they cut the life-line of Japan to Southeast Asia, and eventually to China; and they isolated the islands of the Pacific, both from one another and from the home base in Japan, so that these enemy outposts could be attacked singly and their garrisons destroyed piecemeal.
The Japanese fought with a fanaticism born of long indoctrination. Taught to believe that surrender would mean disgrace for their families, and torture and death for themselves at the hands of the enemy, the soldiers in the field usually fought on doggedly to the last man. Even civilians commonly chose death rather than surrender. But the Japanese were to learn that blind fanaticism was not enough in the face of superior weapons in the hands of a determined foe. The Americans broke through the island barriers of the central Pacific; they knifed their way along the New Guinea coast and recaptured the Philippines; and they established themselves in the heart of the Japanese Empire by seizing Okinawa, the main island of the Ryukyu chain.
By the early summer of 1945 it was clear that Japan had lost the war. Her cities were being wiped out one by one; her factories were fast being destroyed; her navy and merchant marine were largely gone; her overseas armies, though on the whole intact, were almost isolated from the homeland; and the final collapse of Germany meant that the entire strength of the United States and Great Britain could be turned against Japan. The Americans were obviously poised for an assault upon the home islands of Japan. With the crushing superiority of American arms, and the blind determination of Japanese soldiers and civilians to fight to the death, as they had been trained to do, a terrible massacre of the people and complete destruction of the nation seemed inevitable.
The Japanese people themselves, fatalists by long tradition, and victims of militaristic and nationalistic propaganda which taught them to obey orders without question, stoically watched their homes burned by incendiary raids and their friends and relatives killed. They appeared to be either unaware of their impending doom or else resigned to it. But fortunately for Japan there were men in the government who could comprehend the situation and who preferred the disgrace of defeat to national suicide.
The growing disasters brought on by the war had tended to discredit the leadership of the militarists, and the government had been slowly gravitating again into the hands of the more moderate bureaucrats. These men were spurred into immediate action by the dropping of two atomic bombs, which all but wiped out the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the Russian declaration of war against Japan. They accepted the “unconditional surrender” formula of the Allied Powers on August 14, 1945, bringing to an abrupt end a war which had wrought havoc on the nation. For the first time in its long history, Japan came under the direct control of foreign conquerors.