Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (59 page)

After relating to his aides in his “Monologue” how he had secured Tanaka's resignation, Hirohito tried to explain why criticism was heaped on his entourage. In so doing, he revealed his keen sensitivity to charges of a “court conspiracy” that were circulated around that time and later helped to undercut the convenient fiction that the Imperial House always stood aloof from politics. Kuhara Fusanosuke, Minister of Communications in the reorganized Tanaka cabinet of May 1928, was to blame—for telling the truth—and Hirohito hated him for it. Instead of protecting the
kokutai
, Kuhara, one of Tanaka's “sympathizers”:

After firing Tanaka, Hirohito tended to be more cautious in choosing when to intervene politically. But the degree of his restraint depended on the times and was therefore situationally (rather than constitutionally) determined. Moreover Hirohito seems never to have understood the deep resentment generated in
Seiy
kai circles by what he had done to Tanaka.
³²
Nor did he grasp that the constant political attacks on the court by the military and the right wing, which marked his reign from 1929 onward, were one price he and his palace advisers had to pay for their active participation in politics and for reviving the fetish of imperial will as necessarily distinct from the will of the cabinet.
³³
A real “constitutional monarch” would not have believed that constitutional monarchy required the monarch to approve every report of the cabinet. But Hirohito's sense of a constitutional monarch was “impoverished,” devoid of any respect for the will of the nation as expressed through the lower house of the Diet.
³⁴

By repeatedly censuring and then finally firing his prime minister, General Tanaka, Emperor Hirohito had signaled to the political community that a cabinet led by the head of the Seiy
kai Party was not qualified to govern under his rule. He reacted quite differently, however, in the case of the Minseit
, the other main conservative party, on whose president, Hamaguchi, he bestowed the mantle of prime minister in July 1929.

Hamaguchi, having understood the lesson in Tanaka's failure, kept the young emperor fully informed before implementing policy measures. Moreover his personal values, as well as his policy goals of military and financial retrenchment, were entirely agreeable. The court group at this stage also approved of Hamaguchi's attempt to come to terms with Chinese nationalism by returning Shidehara to the post of foreign minister and signing a customs treaty with China.

Unfortunately, a few months after Hamaguchi formed his cabinet, the international financial system based on gold collapsed when, on October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed in the United States, the world's leading creditor nation and market for industrial goods. Soon the entire world economy fell into an unprecedented slump, with profound effects on the established international order. Emperor Hirohito's earlier decision to indulge the army in its
insubordination, and to dismiss the only prime minister who had treated him as though he were a real constitutional monarch, had given young army officers in Manchuria a feeling that they could take matters into their own hands.

A small minority of them now proceeded to do so. During the year that elapsed between Chang Tso-lin's assassination in June 1928 and the Tanaka cabinet's resignation in early July 1929, Colonel K
moto resigned his post as senior staff officer. His successor on the staff of the Kwantung Army, Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara, began the planning that would lead to the Manchurian Incident. Middle-and upper-echelon officers who advocated reform of the state for the purpose of waging “total war” strengthened their organizational unity and their ties with civilian right-wing groups; while elements of Tanaka's Seiy
kai (led by the dynamic Mori) joined forces with the military and the civilian right wing.

On December 29, 1928, Chang Tso-lin's son and successor, Chang Hsueh-liang, the warlord of the Three Eastern Provinces (“Manchuria”), united his territory with that of new Kuomintang government at Nanking. As China completed its nominal unification, the stage was being set in Japan for the coalescence of new forces of aggression and the neutralization of groups that supported policies of international cooperation and compromise in China. Neither the emperor nor his staff showed any understanding that the political attacks on the court by the military and the right wing, which marked his reign from 1929 onward, were the price they had to pay for infusing religion into politics and helping to create the fetish of imperial will in the first place.

III

On August 27, 1928, Japan became a signatory to the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, known in the West as the Kellogg-Briand Pact (or the Pact of Paris) and in Japan as the
No-War Treaty. The pact's signers renounced war “as an instrument of national policy” and promised to settle all disputes by peaceful means. France and the United States had presented this treaty to Japan as another project in the spirit of international conciliation endorsed at the Washington Conference. The Tanaka cabinet accepted it and dispatched Privy Councillor Uchida K
sai to Paris with instructions to use the occasion of the signing to inform the United States and other powers of Japan's special position in Manchuria. Uchida was not to arouse foreign suspicions of Japan's territorial ambitions, however, by indicating that Manchuria would be exempted from the obligations imposed by the treaty.
³⁵

How this treaty fared in Japan revealed much about the court group's attitude toward international law. By signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Japanese government accepted that the concept of “aggressive war” was a recognized crime in international law.
³⁶
In the first of the pact's two articles, the signatories pledged “in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.” In the second article they agreed to resolve “by pacific means…all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin…which may arise among them.”
³⁷
When the Tanaka government submitted this short treaty for review by the Imperial Diet, the phrase “in the names of their respective peoples” immediately became an object of dispute.
³⁸

In the United States, where the postwar peace movement had spawned the idea of criminalizing war, the treaty enjoyed wide support from the intellectual community and the public.
³⁹
Similar general acceptance might have been secured in Japan if the emperor had put his prestige behind it and made the outlawing of aggressive war his own personal project. That never happened. Instead the treaty immediately bumped against the unfolding crisis in Manchuria and a government-sponsored campaign to bind the peo
ple to the emperor, overcome the nation's increasing political fragmentation, and promote martial spirit after a decade of reviling the military.

More particularly the import of the treaty was obscured by contention over the twin issues of the emperor's sovereignty and his foreign policy prerogative. When the Imperial Diet convened in early 1929, the opposition Minseito accused the Tanaka cabinet of infringing on the emperor's sovereign powers of state because “the High Contracting Parties” in Article 1 of the No-War Treaty called for outlawing war “in the names of their respective peoples” rather than in the emperor's name.
⁴⁰
Although Minseito and Seiy
kai politicians were at one in supporting the No-War Treaty, the former could not refrain from scoring points against the governing party by claiming that the wording in Article 1 of the treaty assumed the principle of popular rather than monarchical sovereignty and was therefore inconsistent with the
kokutai
.