Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (58 page)

If, at this time, Hirohito had reflected on the Mizuno incident, he might have recognized the inherent contradiction in his very existence. In the process he might also have gained a better appreciation of the need to veil his interventions in absolute secrecy. But he was still young, relatively inexperienced, and not the least bit self-reflective. In due time he would gain some degree of insight into his predicament, and with that would come a worsening of his nervousness, for Hirohito's chronic psychological stress had its root in the institution of sacred monarchy itself, and the ingrained but never
acknowledged friction between himself and the Japanese people.

With political debate over
kokutai
issues having rekindled, and the court group at odds with the Tanaka government over the whole range of its policies, there now occurred four events in quick succession that were to have lasting effects on both Sino-Japanese relations and Japanese politics during the next decade. Hirohito was at the center of each of them. These were the Tsinan Incident (May 1928), the assassination of Chang Tso-lin by staff officers of Japan's Kwantung Army (June 4, 1928), the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (August 27, 1928), and the introduction into the public arena, during the second half of 1928, of the ideology of enthronement and deification.

II

On March 24, 1927, soldiers of China's Nationalist Revolutionary Army pillaged the Japanese Consulate in Nanking and assaulted the consul; they also attacked buildings housing the American and British Consulates. Later that same day British and American warships on the Yangtze River bombarded the city. The Japanese press immediately sensationalized the Nanking Incident, in which six Westerners died, Japanese rights were violated, and no Japanese troops had been dispatched. Against this background, in the middle of the official mourning for the Taish
emperor, Hirohito sanctioned Japan's first military interventions in China's civil war. Twice, on May 28 and July 8, he gave his consent to the army's dispatch of troops to China's Shantung Province, ostensibly to protect Japanese residents from assaults by Kuomintang soldiers on their way north toward Peking. Less than a year later, on April 19, 1928, he consented to another deployment: this time five thousand troops of the Sixth Division, under Gen. Fukuda Hikosuke, to the port of Tsingtao, Shantung, a center of Japanese textile capital and once a Japanese protectorate. He did so after first asking Chief Military
Aide Nara whether the intervention would lead to another massacre of Japanese lives such as had occurred in the Russian city of Nikolaevsk (now Pugachev) in 1920. Nara said that it would not.

When General Fukuda arrived in Tsingtao, however, he decided on his own initiative immediately to proceed inland (by rail) to Tsinan. There, a few days later, the first of several clashes occurred between Japanese and Nationalist soldiers. Later, on May 8, Hirohito sanctioned without hesitation the dispatch of reinforcements to Tsinan to protect some two thousand Japanese civilians. Instead of making an issue of Fukuda's going beyond his authorization, the emperor silently directed his anger at Prime Minister Tanaka.
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The Tsinan affair dragged on into early 1929, during which time seventeen thousand Japanese troops unleashed a reign of terror on the Chinese citizens of the city, wrecking chances for Sino-Japanese rapprochement. For Hirohito this incident was yet another example of Tanaka's inadequacy as a prime minister.

Less than a month after Hirohito had sanctioned a fourth deployment of troops to Shantung Province, on June 4, 1928, senior staff officers of Japan's Kwantung Army, led by Col. K
moto Daisaku, assassinated the Chinese warlord and territorial sovereign, Chang Tso-lin, on whom Prime Minister Tanaka had based his Manchurian policy. This incident (and the prime minister's alleged mishandling of it) pulled Manchuria into the turmoil of Japanese and international politics. For the young emperor and his entourage, it provided the opportunity they had long been seeking to remove Tanaka and his entire Seiy
kai cabinet.

Leaders of the Minseito were the first to discover that the real assassins were Kwantung Army officers rather than rogue elements of China's Southern Army, as the Kwantung spokesmen falsely alleged. By early September the court entourage too had heard that Japanese army officers had committed the crime and were blaming it on Chinese soldiers.
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Prime Minister Tanaka was alone in slowly uncovering the truth because the top army leaders had wanted
Chang Tso-lin removed and were uninterested in pursuing the matter, let alone making a full disclosure of the facts. When, in October 1928, Tanaka finally learned the truth, he resolved to punish them and reestablish discipline in the army. His fellow cabinet ministers and the army, however, strongly opposed holding the assassins accountable. Led by Army Minister Shirakawa Yoshinori and Railway Minister Ogawa, who had the status of vice prime minister, the cabinet formed a coalition against Tanaka, claiming that disclosure would harm the imperial house, worsen Sino-Japanese relations, and undermine Japan's special rights in China. Additionally the cabinet did not want to be held accountable in the Diet for what had happened.

Isolated in his own cabinet but supported by Saionji, Tanaka went ahead anyway. His formal report to the emperor was made on December 24, 1928. He told the emperor that he intended to court-martial the criminals, purge the army, and reestablish discipline. The next day he said the same thing to Makino and Chinda in the mistaken belief that they would help him. However, when the cabinet learned of Tanaka's formal report, the ministers refused to support a court-martial and wanted the matter to be handled as an administrative affair of the army. On December 28 Shirakawa reported to the emperor that the army would investigate Chang Tso-lin's death but made no mention of a court-martial.
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When the Fifty-sixth Imperial Diet convened in early 1929, the opposition parties muted their attacks in questioning the government about the incident; they already knew or suspected the truth and did not desire full disclosure in any case. On this matter the Minseito in particular wanted to accommodate the wishes of the army whose support it needed to form the next cabinet.
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Meanwhile the emperor and his staff worried only about whether Tanaka would assume responsibility for what had occurred.

On January 17, 1929, the emperor pressed Shirakawa to investigate. Two days later the emperor asked Tanaka about his strategy
for handling the Diet. On February 2 he again questioned Tanaka about the progress of the investigation; the prime minister hinted that his government would not take responsibility for the Chang Tso-lin incident.
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One month later, on March 4, Makino told his secretary, Okabe, to inform Saionji that Tanaka no longer had the emperor's confidence and that the emperor intended to admonish him the next time he reported.
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By this time Tanaka knew that the entire army had united against him and that he would have to yield and let the army off the hook. Thereupon the cabinet agreed to cover up the incident and have the army treat it as an internal administrative matter.

On March 27 Army Minister Shirakawa reported the cabinet's decision to the emperor. Colonel K
moto and Kwantung Army Commander Muraoka Ch
tar
had committed the crime, explained Shirakawa, but to announce the truth and severely punish those responsible for the murder would be highly disadvantageous to Japan. At that point, if not earlier, Hirohito accepted the army's intention to lie to the public about the incident and to give merely administrative punishments to those involved.
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Hirohito, Makino, and Admiral Suzuki thus sided with Shirakawa and those in the Tanaka cabinet who wanted to prevent the army's reputation from being blackened. In so doing they obviously, if unwittingly, abetted the forces plotting further aggression in China in order to maintain Japan's rights and interests there.
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Many years later, in his famous “Monologue,” Hirohito claimed that “youthful indiscretion” had led him to speak to Prime Minister Tanaka in an angry tone and to request his resignation when Tanaka came and told him that he wanted to settle the Chang Tso-lin assassination “by hushing it up.”
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He conveniently failed to note that he too had wanted to hush up the murder. He also failed to note that he had carefully rehearsed with his staff what he would say to Tanaka, and that he really had no grounds for scolding the prime minister on the basis of his second, informal report of June 27, 1929. Hirohito
directed attention to the scolding itself, and to the Tanaka cabinet's subsequent resignation. He thereby deflected attention from his constitutional responsibility as supreme commander in chief, for punishing a crime by two officers in what was essentially a military, not a civil affair.