Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (55 page)

S
tarting in 1927 stories of conflict with China over Manchuria returned to the front pages of Japanese newspapers, the Sh
wa financial panic erupted, and both crises worsened with each passing year. Simultaneously criticism of the monarchy and of capitalism—referred to by opinion makers as the “thought problem”—spread even as the rituals of enthronement were unfolding around Hirohito, implanting in the Japanese a new image of him as a charismatic authority on a par with Meiji.

Equally disturbing to Hirohito, naval officers now presented him with conflicting views on how best to meet the navy's national defense requirements.
¹
Adm. Kato Kanji, the leading opponent of the Washington Naval Treaty, began to pressure Hirohito to enlarge the geographic sphere of national defense. Kato argued that “the safety of the empire's homeland required confronting American naval forces deployed in the western Pacific” rather than in waters closer to home as specified in the 1923 policy.
²
Hirohito approved Kato's report, delivered to him on November 27, 1929, but clung to the arguments of Kato's opponents, the “treaty faction” admirals. They too wanted a big navy and believed in the doctrine of winning a war by fighting a decisive naval battle; but they insisted that the difference in national power between Japan and the United States ruled out, for the time being, anything but a passive defense of the empire.

At the start of his reign Hirohito avoided facing up to this continuing disagreement in national defense thinking within the navy. Although he maintained a very keen interest in the military side of his public life, he and his entourage preferred to concentrate on domestic affairs. There, they imagined, he would leave his mark in the march of emperors through the ages. Their initial, overriding goals, therefore, were to insert Hirohito's “will” into the conduct of government, to revive the power of the monarchy, and to strengthen his image as an authority figure equal to Meiji.

In affairs with the West the spirit of conciliation lingered, as attested by Japan's two main diplomatic projects of these years: the Kellogg-Briand Pact of August 1928, and the London Naval Treaty of April 1930. Yet signs of change, and of movement away from the pacifism and openness of the post–World War I era, were beginning to multiply. On February 20, 1928, representatives of left-wing parties, campaigning for progressive reform, opened a new front against the ruling elites by winning eight seats in the first national elections under the expanded suffrage law. Seventeen days later, on March 15, the government of Prime Minister Tanaka carried out mass arrests on a national scale of 1,568 Communist Party members and activists of the labor and peasant movements.
³
In April came the first expulsions of Marxist professors from the imperial universities in Kyoto, Tokyo, and Kyushu. On June 29 the Tanaka cabinet suspended normal constitutional processes and issued an emergency imperial edict revising the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 with respect to the crime of “altering the
kokutai
,” now made punishable by death.
⁴

For Communist Party members and intellectuals influenced by Marxist thought, the general election and the repression that followed in its wake became the occasion for redefining the new emperor as an oppressor, and for pointing to the social determinants of the throne. At the same time the imperial state was arresting Communists and their supporters, the new partisan slogan
“overthrow the emperor system” spread in intellectual circles affected by Marxism. 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.

The groundwork for the future commission of war atrocities by the Japanese military was also being laid during this period. In 1928 the Tanaka government failed to endorse an international protocol banning chemical and biological warfare. The next year the privy council, responding to pressure from the military, failed to ratify the full Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, signed two years earlier. The privy councillors accepted the argument of the ministers of the army and navy, and of the foreign minister, that the clause concerning treatment of POWs was too lenient and could not possibly be implemented because the emperor's soldiers would never allow themselves to become prisoners of war.
⁵
This action in particular helped pave the way for later Japanese denials of the validity of international legal conventions for the treatment of prisoners of war and military wounded.
⁶

In diaries and memoirs covering these crucial early years of his reign, Hirohito's close advisers—Makino, Kawai, Nara, and Okabe—painted a laudatory portrait of the young emperor. They admired Hirohito's unwillingness to be used by the parties—as if it was not in the nature of the imperial institution to be used—they praised him for his determination to take the supervisory role in politics that his father had been physically unable to perform, and they expressed satisfaction in their own tutoring skills for helping to bring this about. Only General Nara's account suggests that Hirohito was, at this stage, less than enthusiastic in asserting over his armed forces the control that was required of him by law.

The diaries of the entourage reveal Hirohito's abiding concern with political action. Discontent with merely looking on passively as
history proceeded along its own path, he intervened in the decisions of the party cabinets and the privy council, arbitrated indirectly disputes among the leading political parties, and even forced the parties in the Diet to halt their debates to suit his convenience. 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 Seiy
kai—thereby nullifying Minobe's “organ” theory of the state, which the political parties were then drawing on to rationalize their actions.

Having rid themselves of Tanaka and his Seiy
kai government, Hirohito and his staff gave full backing to Hamaguchi Y
k
, president of the less diplomatically adventuristic Minseito, installing him as Tanaka's successor in July 1929. In April 1930, months after Hamaguchi had formed his cabinet, Emperor Hirohito, with the full support of his entourage and Saionji as well, overrode the advice of his naval chief of staff and vice chief of staff, Admiral Kat
and Vice Admiral Suetsugu, on the contentious matter of naval tonnage reduction. Although Washington and London had hinted they might form a naval alliance against Japan if it did not comply with the warship ratios worked out at the Washington Conference, Kato and his supporters on the Navy General Staff balked at the final compromise negotiated at London. They refused to accept “any limit on the navy's heavy cruiser tonnage of less than 70 percent of the individual cruiser strengths of the American and British fleets.”
⁷
Kat
's position, as he explained to protreaty Adm. Okada Keisuke, was that “[t]his problem concerns the fate of the navy, and therefore I want you to be aware that that is more important than the fate of the government.”
⁸