Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (38 page)

At the Washington Conference (November 12, 1921–February 6, 1922), Prime Minister Takahashi's Seiy
kai government had signed three treaties designed to establish a new basis for Japan's relations with the great European powers and the United States, which had emerged as the de facto world power. The Four-Power Treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that had been the backbone of Japanese diplomacy since the Russo-Japanese War; it also guaranteed the Pacific possessions of its signatories: Japan, Britain, the United States, and France. These powers plus Italy then pledged, in a Five-Power Naval Arms Limitation Treaty, to reduce their mainline battleships and aircraft carriers, while 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.
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The signatories to the Nine-Power Treaty vowed to respect the territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence of China, and to abide by the “open door” and “equal opportunity” for all the powers in China to exploit China's natural resources and cheap Chinese labor. This had been the professed policy of the United States toward Asia ever since Secretary of State John Hay's “Open Door Notes” of 1899. Other resolutions called for convening a conference to restore China's tariff autonomy, and for the establishment of a commission to consider the question of extraterritoriality, on which rested the whole structure of unequal treaties with China.

During the 1920s young Hirohito, his entourage, and the Shide
hara faction in the Foreign Ministry supported this American-led reorientation in international relations, with its emphasis on cooperation with the West in China, arms reduction, and the abrogation of Japan's previous military alliance with Britain. To be sure, they knew the postwar world order was far from just. The Great Powers had rejected Japan's modest request for a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League; the United States had designed the Washington treaties to restrain Japan in China and roll back the advances it had made there during World War I. Still they supported the new order, just as they supported the League, in the hope they might thus be able to lessen the excessive arms spending that was driving the government to the verge of bankruptcy. In addition, although the United States had changed the rules of the game, organizations like the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) embodied the principle of the equality of nations which Japan itself had espoused in Paris in 1919. The new order did indeed recognize Japan as a great power (even though it did not recognize the principle of racial equality). This was reason enough for Hirohito and Makino to support the Washington Conference.
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In addition the new international order appeared to build on, but not change, the special international status of China under the “unequal treaty” system. It allowed for the possibility of China developing into an independent nationalist state, but ensured the hegemony of the “treaty” powers in Asia. For Japan, therefore, cooperation in this new Anglo-American order, however unjust and inequitable, at least promised stability, and was less a matter of siding with democracy than opposing the disorder associated with antimonarchist Russian Communism, and its spread in China.

Nevertheless, the schema of the white and yellow races locked in conflict and competition, which Hirohito had learned in middle school, had stayed with him. It was an intensely held belief that had also served as the premise of Japanese strategic thinking and war aims during World War I. The passage by the U.S. Congress of the
blatantly racist Immigration Act of 1924 reinforced his awareness of racial conflict. Similarly Hirohito retained the knowledge he had received during the early 1920s from civilian court lecturers such as Shimizu T
ru, who rejected any urgent need for arms reduction. To counter the antimilitary mood arising from the Washington Conference, Shimizu had emphasized to Hirohito that “In a situation like the present, where the nations of the world vie with one another, every country must possess armaments to defend from danger.”
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This was the view of the entire entourage; it was Hirohito's view as well.

Hirohito's embrace of the idealistic Washington Conference goals of arms reduction and lasting peace also reflected the political influence on him of Makino, Chinda, and (to a much lesser extent) Saionji. They, together with the diplomat Shidehara, had directly participated in constructing the postwar framework and in tying the imperial court to conciliation with the West. Yet none of them ever gave his total, unqualified endorsement to the postwar “peace code,” or to the notion that peace and international cooperation were ends in themselves. The imperial court's support of the Washington treaty system, in other words, rested on unstated assumptions regarding internationalism, and the economic advantages to be gained from diplomatic cooperation with Britain and the United States.

Essentially the entourage assumed that a cooperative, peaceful foreign policy would be compatible with defense of Japan's colonial interests, especially in Manchuria. They also believed Japan could go on developing the “rights and interests” it had extorted from China in “Manchuria-Mongolia” by earlier faits accompli, and that it could do so regardless of Chinese nationalism—a phenomenon for which none of the Washington treaty powers at the time had much regard or understanding. Another shared assumption was that China would not defect from the Washington Conference framework and repudiate the older system of unequal treaties that had been built up ever since the Opium Wars.

Last, Hirohito's entourage held two other largely unsupported beliefs: namely, that the leading Western powers would not prevent Japan from rising to dominance in Asia; and that Japan would be able to separate domestic affairs and foreign policy, cooperating with the West while pursuing narrowly nationalistic, repressive policies at home. Later, when some of these assumptions proved incorrect, Hirohito and his entourage withdrew their support of the Washington treaty framework, abandoned cooperation with other powers in China, and proceeded to sanction actions that directly violated the Nine-Power Treaty, not to mention the principles Japan had subscribed to in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

IV

During the regency years Hirohito and his entourage accepted without question the coalition nature of cabinet government, in which the military was privileged over other organs of state. Under this system army and navy ministers were appointed from the list of active-duty senior officers. Therefore every cabinet was necessarily “mixed”—a coalition of military and civilian officials. In the forty-two mixed cabinets that governed Japan between 1888 and 1945, “the military was guaranteed the right of being able to interfere legally in politics,” while prime ministers could control the military only through the emperor or the military ministers.
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Because of the regent's youth and inexperience, the military ministers and the chiefs of staff worked
within
the cabinet to avoid taking unresolved disputes to the sick and incompetent emperor or bothering the inexperienced regent. But there were a few important exceptions to this sheltering of the regent.

As early as 1923 Hirohito confronted changes in Japan's long-term defense plans arising out of the Washington Conference. The chiefs of the Army and Navy General Staffs, responding to the rise of Lenin's revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union, the abrogation
of the Anglo-Japanese military alliance, and the naval arms reductions agreed to at Washington, revised their operational plans for the defense of the Japanese empire. They continued to define Russia as the number one enemy, just as they had been doing ever since the Russo-Japanese War. They showed an increased awareness of China by targeting it as the number three potential enemy, though they did not draft any plans for war against China. But now, for the first time in Japan's history, both chiefs of staff named the United States as the number one enemy.

Henceforth the army would prepare for a war on the Asian continent with a wartime force of forty divisions. The Imperial Navy would remain within the parameters of the Washington Naval Arms Reduction Treaty but organize and train for the defense of the homeland and the maintenance of sea lanes of communication with the Asian continent “north of the Taiwan Straits.”
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This meant targeting, primarily, the naval forces of the United States. The new challenge facing the navy, in the view of Prime Minister Adm. Kat
Tomosabur
, was to avoid war with the United States at all costs, while building up auxiliary ships. A minority viewpoint, associated with Admirals Kat
Kanji and Suetsugu Nobumasa, held that war could arise if Japan's conflict of interests with the United States in China turned into a major political problem, and Washington resorted to diplomatic and military pressure to make Japan submit. Hirohito, as regent, accepted the views of Admiral Kat
Tomosabur
and the navy mainstream, who would be called, starting in the early 1930s, the “treaty faction.” He approved this change in defense policy in early 1923, but only after securing detailed explanations from his chiefs of staff.