Domestic Political and Social Trends: Dissent and Response

 By the 1920s, the Meiji politicians had mostly passed away, and their political heirs tried to create widespread, single-minded devotion to the country in a climate of political party division and factional rivalry. Originally based on a late 19th century German ideal of direct service to the ruler, Japan’s government now resembled a British style of rule by one of two centralized parties. Run by a tiny elite of pro-business, mostly pro-Western politicians, these parties used both policy and corruption to promote their own leadership. They did liberalize some aspects of society, allowing labor unions, giving all Japanese males the right to vote, and joining the League of Nations to participate in the international community. As a “great power”—the only one not ruled by Euro-Americans—Japan participated in naval limitation conferences, maintained its colonies by a combination of administrative bureaucracy and military-police violence in the same way Britain, France, and the United States did, and forced China to expand Japan’s treaty rights. Despite continued discrimination against the Japanese by Europeans and Americans—who continued to affirm that Japanese were not “white” people, despite their successes—Japan became a member of the “imperial club.” But Japanese internationalism, personified in Shidehara Kijurõ, Foreign Minister in the early 1920s, also posed a challenge to Japanese nationalists, who saw the politics of international diplomacy, parliamentary democracy, and compromise as weakness, in contrast to the military’s desire for further conquest.

Under the surface, economic inequality threatened the unity of the Japanese people even more in the 1920s than it had sixty years before, for industrialization had created the same tensions between workers and employers as it had in Euro-American societies. Conflicts over wages and working conditions led to unions and strikes, actions which seemed like treason to people committed to the almost religious unity of the kokutai. To combat this potential disorder, the Japanese government as early as 1900 had passed strict laws to punish anyone who promoted social conflict. Even in the relatively liberal 1920s, those laws were strengthened to give the government greater power over the press, virtually eliminating the public’s rights of free speech and assembly, rights which had never been strongly proclaimed in Japan’s constitution or law codes.

Japanese companies, especially the very large ones, learned from the government and took measures to prevent expression of worker discontent. Skilled laborers were hired for life and encouraged to link their own destinies with that of their company. Local company-based unions negotiated limited benefits for their members, while both law and custom prevented the formation of many effective national unions. Government regulation did not hamper the growth of huge manufacturing monopolies. Rather the Japanese state encouraged a dual economy of a few giant companies supplied by thousands of small operations, employing only a few people each. In periods of economic growth, these strategies proved quite effective. But tougher methods were necessary in bad times, which arrived with the crash and depression in 1929.

The Japanese economy was badly damaged by the great stock market crash because so much of its wealth came from foreign trade, which declined drastically after 1929. As the American and European economies staggered, their cash supplies low and millions of their people unemployed, they could no longer afford to buy foreign goods. During this period, the Japanese lost 50% of their overseas sales, domestic prices crashed, and Japanese incomes fell 30% on average. Ordinarily, such difficulties might produce public support for antigovernment groups like communists and socialists, whose demands included support for the poor and unemployed. But Japan’s government had discouraged even the mildest dissent, so many citizens turned instead to right-wing organizations, both civilian and military, to express their dissatisfaction with politics as practiced by the ruling parties.

These right-wing, ultranationalist groups claimed a special purity for their own ideas—the centrality of the Tennõ and opposition to international diplomacy which, they claimed, kept Japan weak by limiting its military options. They encouraged citizens to support and love the army and navy abroad, and they praised the virtues of self-sacrifice and nationalism. They also used Shintõ, part of Japan’s religious tradition, to idealize the Japanese spirit and its samurai virtues. Through local shrines and priests, who preached Japan’s superiority over other peoples and practiced rituals of “uniquely Japanese” purity and love for nature, many Japanese people became convinced of Japan’s sacred task to drive the Euro-Americans out of Asia. They also believed that making war was a central part of that mission. The beauty of nature, especially of cherry blossoms falling (constant reminders of the brevity of human life), of sacred mountains, and of the sea, came to be equated with heroic death in the national cause.

Young men, both military officers and their colleagues in civilian organizations such as the Kokuryukai (Amur River Society), expressed their nationalist passions through assassinations of politicians, industrialists, intellectuals, and others who did not conform to their rigid standards of “pure Japanese” behavior and beliefs. Prime Minister Hamaguchi was murdered at Tokyo Station in 1930, and Prime Minister Inukai was killed in 1932. Both assassinations were perpetrated by ultranationalists impatient with the corruption of party politics and eager for Japan to be driven by their own heroic values, which were expressed most obviously in the military and the drive to dominate Japan’s neighbors, especially China.

The Military Mobilizes

The military, meanwhile, had conflicts and troubles of its own. The army and navy fought one another over budgets, weapons systems, political influence in Tokyo, and Japan’s international policies. The navy, more concerned with technology than the army, had been limited in construction of large warships by the Washington (1922) and London (1930) Naval Treaties. Still, it had managed to build a strong fleet including aircraft carriers and submarines, a navy larger than any foreign fleet they might face in the western Pacific. The U.S. naval presence in Hawai’i made the United States the main target of naval war planning, and their main anxiety lay in securing the supplies of oil needed to run the ships of both the navy and the merchant marine, since most oceangoing vessels had converted from coal to diesel fuel. Japan imported most of its oil from the USA and American-controlled oil fields in Mexico, so the Japanese military found itself dependent on its most likely enemy for a crucial material resource. The nearest developed oil field to Japan lay in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia and especially Brunei), at the end of a long north-south sea lane that the Japanese navy had to secure.

The army, on the other hand, found itself bogged down occupying Taiwan, Korea (taken as a colony in 1910), and especially Manchuria, where the army protected Japanese mines, factories, railroads, and large communities of settlers. Eager to demonstrate their power, unwilling to wait for diplomacy, and convinced that their allies in Tokyo would back them, Japanese army officers planned an incident which would force the Japanese government to seize Manchuria. Despite advance warning of the plot, the High command in Tokyo was unwilling to take action against its own men until it was too late. On September 18, 1931, a bomb blast on a Japanese railroad triggered a well-prepared attack in which all of northeast China was seized. By spring, large parts of Mongolia also lay in Japanese hands, and for the next six years, by treaty and by aggressive action on the ground, Japan took over piece after piece of northern China.

In the face of this direct disobedience to orders, Tokyo did nothing, accepting this huge new territory as part of the empire. They declared Manchuria to be an independent state, Manshukoku in Japanese (usually called Manchukuo in English), under a Chinese emperor. But the real governor of Manchukuo was always the commander-in-chief of the Japanese army stationed there in overwhelming numbers. The international community reacted angrily to the “Manchurian Incident,” and, after lengthy investigation, the League of Nations condemned Japanese aggression. The Japanese delegation walked out, never to return. US influence in this matter was very limited, for the United States had never joined the League in the first place, but American public opinion ran strongly in China’s favor and against Japan.

From 1932 to 1936, domestic political conflict escalated in Japan, as war in China required more and more troops and money to control the rising armed power of Chinese nationalism. The civilian government had to bow to the demands of the military, for no government could be formed or sustained without military participation. Admiration of the military, and faith in its spirit, led many Japanese to ultranationalism, the belief that Japan was inherently superior, that the Japanese military could never be defeated, and that Japanese culture and morality were uniquely pure and true.
 But some Japanese people did not fall into the ultranationalist camp. Resistance came from civilian politicians fearful for their own power, intellectuals unwilling to accept the simple-minded ideals of kokutai and military virtue, from socialists, Christians, and others committed to self-determination of peoples (including Chinese and Koreans) and to the unity of human kind. The voters continued to choose the conservative and moderate political parties in parliamentary elections. In a February 1936 election, one of the mainstream parties won a majority with slogans such as, “What shall it be, parliamentary government or fascism?” Even the small socialist party made modest gains at the polls during the 1930s, in the face of a high tide of ultranationalist propaganda.

But only a week after those elections, on February 26, 1936, the Army First Division, stationed in downtown Tokyo, attacked the heart of the civilian government. After killing a number of high officials, they held several blocks of the central city for three days. Though still supporting their junior officers, the High Command finally called in reinforcements—many of them, not surprisingly, from the navy—and forced the rebels to surrender. The leaders and a few key civilian allies (including the right-wing intellectual Kita Ikki) were executed and generals who had been involved in the plot were fired, but the army remained deeply involved in politics, and the incident may even have strengthened the military’s hand—high officers could throw up their hands and say, “We’d love to help, but we’re afraid the young hotheads might rebel again!”
 Though civilian ultranationalists lost a measure of influence after the “Young Officers’ Coup” failed, politicians eager to demonstrate their patriotism put intense pressure on all dissidents, including not only communists and socialists but also liberal intellectuals. Party politics revived briefly in the late 1930s, but the military and the professional bureaucrats in Tokyo combined to make the Diet’s job impossible. The chaotic operations of representative government, with their public contesting of elections and open debates over policy disagreements, reinforced the view that politics consisted only of mean-spirited self-interest, not of high-minded patriotism and loyalty to the Tennõ.

The Drums of War Sound Louder

In China, events conspired against moderate forces in Japan. In December 1936, President of the Republic and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by two of his own generals and forced into an all-China alliance against Japan. This United Front, including Chiang Kai-shek’s deadly rivals, the Chinese Communist Party, posed a direct threat to Japanese military power in China, and the Japanese army could not allow it to gain national strength. Their mainland strategy required them to protect Japanese economic interests and defend against the Soviet Union, so the army chose full-scale war rather than endless local conflicts against armed Chinese nationalism. Only July 7, 1937, a local clash between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing gave them their chance. Unprepared for war—the army had just drawn up a five-year plan to produce sufficient supplies of arms and material—Japan’s generals decided to attack China before it could become a strong, unified nation. Many Japanese hoped that the war would establish a new order in East Asia, one based on all peoples’ common identity and common opposition to European and American imperialism and colonialism.

From the outset, the war did not go well for the Japanese military. Persuaded by their officers that the cowardly Chinese would not fight, Japanese troops stormed ashore at Shanghai and met stiff, protracted resistance from Chiang Kai-shek’s crack divisions. Finally victorious after weeks of battle, the Japanese army had lost tens of thousands of men and gained desire for revenge and an appetite for killing Chinese people, an emotion fed both by their losses and by the racialist propaganda of their leaders. The next city to be assaulted, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital of Nanjing, suffered the consequence. After driving out the Chinese troops, the Japanese army undertook a horrific massacre of the civilian population, with victims numbering from 80,000 to 300,000, depending on whose statistics one believes. This crime, and smaller-scale atrocities elsewhere, aided both Chiang Kai-shek’s government and its Communist rivals in stimulating ordinary Chinese to join in resistance to Japanese conquest. A Japanese-sponsored “government of China” was set up, but everyone knew it was Tokyo’s puppet. Many patriotic Chinese followed their political leaders westward—Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party both set up governments in remote areas and tried to fight the invaders.

Having signed an anti-Soviet alliance with Hitler’s Germany in 1936, Japanese diplomats saw their best advantage in squeezing the Soviet Union, still the main enemy in many policy planners’ eyes, between their powerful military forces. The Axis Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan had been designed to prevent British, American, or Soviet meddling in East and Southeast Asia, which Japan claimed as its sphere of influence. The army tried to take the measure of the Soviet Red Army in a border clash in northern Manchuria in 1939 and took a terrible beating. Never had the Japanese faced an enemy who possessed modern armor and artillery, nor an opponent as skillful as General Zhukov. After this defeat, even the army conceded that Japan’s interests lay more in the south, and a mutual non-aggression pact was signed with the Soviet Union (one that lasted until August 1945). The rich oil fields and rubber plantations of the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China constituted tempting targets, and the navy tried to consolidate the strategic sea routes from the home islands to all of these crucial resource bases. By the summer of 1941, with the Soviet Union hard-pressed by German invasion and Britain utterly incapable of overseas intervention, only one enemy remained to prevent Japan from ruling the entire western Pacific—the United States.

Why did Japan abandon its diplomatic relationship with the United States, which had worked fairly well, to initiate a new phase in the Pacific War, one which many Japanese knew could be disastrous? As early as 1915, American policy makers had noted the possible Japanese threat to American interests in China, and in the late 1930s President Roosevelt began to flex American muscle, especially economic power, to force Japan off the Chinese mainland. The USA (under Theodore Roosevelt) had covertly traded Japanese control over Korea for American control in the Philippines, but China was far too important a political, military, and sentimental ally for the USA to allow Japan a free hand there. After 1939, President Roosevelt refused to allow Japan to purchase American scrap metal. In early 1941, FDR threatened to cut off exports of oil. Without US oil, Japan could not operate its fleet or move its armored vehicles, could not fuel the huge merchant marine, which moved raw materials and goods throughout the Japanese empire, from northern Korea to the south seas. The only alternative supply lay in the Dutch East Indies. If Japan attacked the Dutch, the USA would certainly respond by declaring war, but how else could Japan ensure its supply of this vital resource? Japanese planners found themselves in an impossible bind. Economic interests as well as nationalism prevented Japan from withdrawing from China, as Roosevelt demanded, for they had invested blood, treasure, and national prestige in their mainland empire. But if the Japanese continued in China, Roosevelt would turn off the oil tap, and Japan could not obtain sufficient fuel without risking war with the USA.

At this point, naval planners in Tokyo ordered their finest strategist, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, to draw up a plan for destroying US power in the Pacific and rendering the western Pacific sea lanes, including those to the oil fields, safe for Japanese shipping. Yamamoto tried to persuade his superiors that attacking the USA would be catastrophic for Japan and that Japan would never be able to match US industrial might—he argued from first-hand experience, for he had studied and worked in the USA in the 1920s and was familiar with American military and industrial technology. But they disagreed with him, and as a good soldier and a patriot, he went ahead with his job.

The USA had military forces, mostly army, in the Philippines, but its Pacific Fleet was based at Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu. Yamamoto made a careful study of the harbor and its defenses and decided that it could be destroyed from the air, if the attack could be a complete surprise. Japan had the right weapons—Japanese aircraft carriers, torpedo planes, torpedoes, and fighter-bombers were the most advanced in the world at that time. After a year of diplomatic wrestling with the USA over their entirely incompatible demands—Roosevelt urging the Japanese to get out of China and the Japanese asserting their right to colonize in East Asia—Japan’s leaders, headed by Prime Minister and Army General Tõjõ Hideki, decided that they had no choice. They could not survive a continued embargo of oil, so they had to attack southward and take the rich Brunei oilfields from the Dutch. But first, they had to eliminate the US threat. So on December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor and destroyed much of the US fleet anchored there. Unfortunately for the Japanese navy, and for Japan, the American aircraft carriers that should have been in harbor were on maneuvers at sea that day and escaped damage.

We cannot answer the question, “Why did they do it?” with any single answer. Certainly the need to ensure supplies of oil and other raw materials played a large part in the decision to go to war with the USA despite the continuing conflict in China and an industrial complex considerably smaller than that of their chosen enemy. Other factors also played their parts—a pan-Asianist ideology that claimed all of East and Southeast Asia to be Japan’s natural sphere of influence; an (ironic) anticolonialism that took “white” domination of Asians as its target; long-term Japanese antipathy for what they perceived to be American arrogance in foreign policy; and, perhaps most telling, many decades of humiliation by American racism, best symbolized by a 1924 Act of Congress which specifically excluded all Japanese from immigration to the USA, the only people singled out in this way. Whatever complex motivations led the Japanese into these multiple wars—in China, in southeast Asia, in the Pacific—they never achieved the military and industrial superiority which they required in order to win, and the years after 1937 saw Japan spiral downward into a Dark Valley of war, privation, and suffering which was to last for over eight years.