Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (63 page)

A week later the emperor carried his silent endorsement of his officers further. Chinchou, a city in southern Liaoning Province, on the rail line between Peking (now Beijing) and Mukden, was “the last vestige of Chinese authority in Manchuria.”
¹³
The air attack on it that Hirohito sanctioned was one of the first on a city since the end of World War I. As described by Nara in his diary entry of October 9:

Buoyed by these encouraging words from General Nara, Ninomiya immediately ordered briefing materials drafted on the need to bomb Chinchou. The Operations Section of the General
Staff Office thereupon explicitly noted that the emperor regarded the bombing as “only natural in view of conditions at this time.”
¹⁵
If Nara's October 9 diary entry is taken at face value, then Hirohito had changed his mind overnight. Earlier he had expressed disapproval to Nara of General Honj
's public denunciation of the Chang Hsueh-liang regime, and on October 8 he had told Nara that “the outlying military and the Foreign Ministry are at odds—the army wants to create an independent Manchuria-Mongolia regime and negotiate with it, while the diplomats consider that undesirable. I believe the army on this point is wrong. With my thinking in mind, warn army headquarters.”
¹⁶

A special meeting of the Council of the League had been called at Geneva to consider China's complaint. Opinion there had quickly hardened against Japan. On October 27 Nara's diary records imperial uneasiness:

By early November the attitude of the Foreign Ministry and the court had changed. On the sixth Foreign Minister Shidehara reported to the emperor that the ministry had decided to abandon negotiating with only the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Support should be given to Gen. Hsi Hsia and a puppet regime established based on the Chinese landlord class in
southern
Manchuria.
¹⁸
Settlement of the Manchuria and (Inner) Mongolia problem might then be negotiated directly with the notables of that regime rather than with Chang Hsueh-liang or Nanking. Shidehara afterward sought and received support for this plan from Makino and Saionji, as well as Ugaki, the new governor-general of Korea.
¹⁹

This policy shift came when army headquarters in Tokyo was trying to restrain the colonial army from invading
northern
Manchuria, risking a clash with Soviet forces. On November 5 Hirohito made a partial, special delegation of his authority to Chief of the General Staff Kanaya, allowing him to decide on “small matters” concerning troop operations and tactics. During the next three weeks, while the Kwantung Army moved by rail through northern Manchuria, Kanaya used that special authority on five separate occasions to check actions by the field army.
²⁰

Meanwhile, at the urging of U.S. Secretary of State Stimson, the League council had invoked the Kellogg-Briand Pact against both China and Japan. Over the objection of the Japanese delegate, the council then passed a moral resolution setting a time limit of November 16 for Japan to withdraw its troops from the occupied areas.
²¹
Foreign criticism of the aggression mounted, and the Japanese public, led on by the press, radio, entertainment industry, and the Imperial Military Reservists Association, rallied to the Kwantung Army and denounced both China and the West. When Uchida K
sai, president of the South Manchurian Railway Company, came to Tokyo to promote the establishment of a new Chinese regime in Manchuria in accordance with the ideas of the Kwantung Army, crowds greeted him enthusiastically.

Faced with the Kwantung Army's deep distrust of party government and its inflexible determination to bring both northern Manchuria and Inner Mongolia under Japanese control, the senior generals in Tokyo yielded to the wishes of their subordinates and withdrew their support for a southern Manchuria regime. While the emperor was participating in grand maneuvers at Kumamoto, the Kwantung Army penetrated the population centers in north Manchuria. Then, suddenly, after a week of offensive operations, the main force entrained for the south and moved toward Chinchou, far from the railway zone, where about 115,000 Chinese troops were based.
²²

Emperor Hirohito now acted decisively through Chief of Staff Kanaya and Army Minister Minami, stopping the field army from launching a ground attack on Chinchou, though only for a short period of time. Nevertheless, when the high command in Tokyo endorsed the Kwantung Army's idea of establishing “independent” Chinese regimes in all three provinces of Manchuria so that Japanese forces could be positioned in the north to block any future Soviet invasion, neither the emperor nor the court group raised objections. On November 23, Shidehara sent a mendacious message to the Associated Press of New York, placing responsibility not only for starting the incident but also for the occupation of Tsitsihar and Harbin in north Manchuria squarely on the Chinese. “Japanese troops were not in the railway zone as ornaments,” he declared. “When the Chinese attacked, they could not but perform the duty for which they were there—namely, to repel the attack and prevent its repetition.”
²³

With the Chinchou affair weathered for the time being, the attention of the court group shifted to a political crisis at home. In March 1931, and again in October, radical officers on the General Staff, members of Col. Hashimoto Kingor
's secret Cherry Blossom Society, had decided to simplify their problems by overthrowing the government.
²⁴
Hashimoto's March plans were discovered; the conspirators were arrested. When Baron Harada learned of the March incident, he concluded that the Manchurian crisis was “the opening act of an army coup d'état,” which “has made some military officers firmly believe that because they succeeded in Manchuria, they will succeed at home.”
²⁵
When the army tried to cover up the October plot, Nara, Suzuki, and Chief of Staff Kanaya reported the incident to the emperor. On November 2 Nara gave Hirohito a more comprehensive written report.
²⁶
But neither Hirohito nor any of his senior generals demanded punishment for the conspirators, who as a consequence were treated leniently: they were let out of detention and their crimes quickly forgotten.

The October conspiracy and Hirohito's weak response to it undermined the Wakatsuki cabinet's effort to control the army. As for the court group, they were now persuaded that nothing in Manchuria could be so important as preventing a domestic crisis that could bring down the monarchy and the entire Meiji political system. More particularly the October affair initiated open factional conflict between two groups of Army Staff College graduates. One, the Imperial Way faction, or Kodo-ha, comprised Gens. Araki Sadao, Mazaki Jinzabur
, and Obata Toshishir
and the “young officers” who supported them. Contemporaries labeled their opponents—a much more amorphous grouping—the Control faction, or T
sei-ha, and included within it Gens. Nagata Tetsuzan, Hayashi Senjur
, T
j
Hideki, and others of high rank, plus their young-officer supporters. Both groups aimed to establish “military dictatorship”
under
the emperor and promote aggression abroad. The Kodo-ha would use a coup d'état to achieve that aim. The T
sei-ha, though not averse to assassination and intimidation, leaned more toward legal reform of the government.