Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (61 page)

Critics of the palace and the parties railed against Western liberalism and democracy, which for a whole decade they had equated with Judaism and “Freemasonry.” What they really wanted to smash was the restrictive Washington treaty system, which they had come to view as an Anglo-Saxon “iron ring” preventing Japan from expanding abroad. For them Japan had submitted once again to the United States and Britain, white powers that had earlier tried to curb its World War I Asian continental expansion. Drawing the inference that the West no longer acknowledged Japan as a first-rate power because of Anglo-American insistence that Japan adopt an inferior ratio in capital ships, opponents of the London Naval Treaty came to feel a keen sense of alienation from the Meiji constitutional order. The exaltation of the Sh
wa emperor had charged the state itself with energy and vigor, while sanctifying the policies implemented in the emperor's name. The problem facing the disaffected military and some political leaders was how to reverse those policies. Casting politics based on the political parties as inordinately corrupt, and the court entourage as obstructive of the emperor's will, was their chosen procedure.

When Sagoya shot Prime Minister Hamaguchi on November 14, 1930, he was angered by Hamaguchi's role in expediting the London treaty and also wanted to see the birth of a Seiy
kai cabinet. That disaffected members of the Navy General Staff had also influenced him was rumored but never proved.
⁵¹

At the time military spending was only slightly more than it had been at the start of the Sh
wa era: nearly 29 percent of the annual budget, or 3.03 percent of GNP.
⁵²
The Army and Navy General Staffs, however, were fiercely at odds with their service ministers over the issue of continued arms reduction and stagnating military allocations; the press had begun to build popular support for the
military's “right of supreme command;” and the army as an institutional entity showed signs of marching out of control.

At the start of the new year, 1931, Justice Ministry bureaucrat and Privy Council Vice President Hiranuma, surveyed the scene in depression-stricken Japan. For nearly a decade Hiranuma had attacked Western liberalism, the values of the political parties, and Taish
democracy in general. Now he heralded the parting of the ways between the new nationalism and the internationalism that Japan had pursued since 1922.

Hiranuma went on to declare that if Japan was to pursue its ideals, it would have to build up its military power, which was hard to do:

V

By the summer of 1931 the political dispute beween the military and the Minseito government of Wakatsuki Reijiro, Hamaguchi's successor, had become too threatening for the court officials to ignore. On June 13, 1931, Kawai recorded in his diary that

Two weeks later Kido informed Privy Seal Makino that he had “heard from Harada Kumao [information gatherer for Saionji and Kido] about ‘rather considerable plans for Manchuria that are being prepared by the military.'”
⁵⁶
Then, in July, fighting erupted between Chinese and Korean farmers at Wamposhan, in the border area between Manchuria and Korea; the fighting led to anti-Chinese rioting and attacks on Chinese residents throughout the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese colonial authorities there failed to prevent the loss of 127 Chinese lives at the hands of Koreans, with the consequence that the mainland Chinese responded with a boycott of Japanese goods. To many Japanese suffering from the worldwide Great Depression, the boycott seemed a calculated plot by the Nationalist government in Nanking and the regime of Chang Hsueh-liang in Mukden to destroy Japan's strategic and economic interests in China.
⁵⁷

The crisis on the Asian continent worsened in August, when the Japanese army announced the disappearance in Manchuria of Capt. Nakamura Shintar
of the Kwantung Army staff. Japanese press accounts disclosed that Nakamura had been apprehended by Chinese soldiers and murdered near the border of northern
Manchuria.
⁵⁸
Immediately the Seiy
kai charged that the Chinese were treating the Imperial Army with contempt. Played up by the parties and the press, the Wanpaoshan riots and the Nakamura incident heightened Japanese hostility against the Chinese. Behind that useful pretext the Kwantung Army increased pressure on the Mukden authorities.

As the confrontation between the Chinese and Japanese escalated, the political crisis within Japan deepened. Officers belonging to the thirty-fifth class of the Military Academy sent
genr
Saionji a private manifesto “which affirmed that ‘the Sh
wa Restoration means the overthrow of political party government' and urged that captains and lieutenants all over the country become the ‘standard bearers of the Sh
wa Restoration.'”
⁵⁹
The reference was to the current reign of the young Emperor Hirohito, but the message was that he should be a great reformer like his grandfather, or at least his era should be one of reform. For junior officers to issue such an admonition to the surviving
genr
was an act of unprecedented audacity, reflecting the ongoing breakdown in military discipline and hierarchical order. It was also a hangover of the older practice of the young generation privately importuning the only member of the older generation to get to the emperor.