Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (81 page)

On August 18 Hirohito summoned his army and navy chiefs for a pointed recommendation. The war, he told them, “is gradually spreading; our situation in Shanghai is critical; Tsingtao is also at risk. If under these circumstances we try to deploy troops everywhere, the war will merely drag on and on. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate a large force at the most critical point and deliver one overwhelming blow?”
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Peace, he went on, “based on our attitude of fairness,” could be achieved only through such a staggering victory. “Do you,” he asked them, “have in hand plans for such action? In other words, do we have any way worked out”—and here the emperor became victim of his own naive rhetoric—“to force the Chinese to reflect on their actions?”
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Three days after their audience with the emperor, the chiefs of staff delivered their written reports. A major air campaign could destroy China's air force, military facilities, vital industries, and political centers. But air attacks alone would probably not suffice to make the Chinese army and people “lose the will to fight.” Japan should also occupy certain strategic points in North China, engage
the Nationalist military forces directly, occupy Shanghai, and establish a naval blockade of the China coast.
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To this policy, advocated most strongly by the navy at a time when many in the army and the government sought to avoid an all-out war, Hirohito gave his sanction, expressing concern only about the dispatch of troops to Tsingtao and the occupation of the air bases near Shanghai.
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At this point too, he accepted the position of his admirals not reluctantly but actively, pressing his generals to move with decisiveness.

Hirohito's order of August 31 for the “Dispatch of the North China Area Army” bristled: “[D]estroy the enemy's will to fight” and “wipe out resistance in the central part of Hepei Province,” with a view to ending the war quickly. But deleted from this imperial order, in accordance with his wishes, was the deployment of troops to Tsingtao.
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Over the course of the next two weeks Hirohito sanctioned six troop mobilizations in preparation for reinforcing the Shanghai area, where the fighting had bogged down. On September 7 the emperor sanctioned the deployment of three divisions and the Taiwan Garrison Force to the Shanghai front; at the same time, because of his concern with the Soviet Union, he ordered other units sent to Manchuria to stand guard. Strongly disapproving of the troop buildup but unable to stop it, First Department Head Major General Ishiwara resigned and was appointed vice chief of staff of the Kwantung Army.
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At the beginning of the war in China, the question had arisen of defining Japan's war aims. On September 4, 1937, Army Minister Sugiyama issued a directive to his commanders stating: “Our present situation is completely different from any the empire has experienced before. We must bear in mind that this war has become total war.”
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On the same day Hirohito informed the Imperial Diet that while he was constantly preoccupied with “securing peace in Asia through cooperating with China,…China…does not really understand our empire's true intention. To our deep regret they have constantly caused difficulties and problems that have finally
resulted in the present incident. Our troops, displaying loyalty and bravery, are suffering hardships solely to make China self-reflect and to quickly establish peace in East Asia.”
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Japan needed to wage war without declaring war. Dependent on imports of American oil, iron and steel, cotton, and copper, Japan's leaders feared that if it became a formal belligerent, the United States would deny it these strategic materials. By fighting an “incident” rather than a war, Japan could enable American industrial and raw-material exporters to circumvent the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1935 and the even more stringent one of May 1937—a profitable arrangement that American business, in the grip of renewed depression, was eager to continue.

Other reasons Japan preferred not to define clearly its war aims as it had done in three previous foreign wars were more spiritual. There existed, after all, an official theology with a great number of theologians—university professors, Zen and Nichiren Buddhist priests, and government bureaucrats—to expound it: The emperor was a living god, the descendant of Amaterasu
mikami; Japan was the incarnation of morality and justice; by definition its wars were just and it could never commit aggression. Hence its effort to establish the “imperial way” (
kodo
) in China and bring people there under the emperor's benevolent occupation by means of “compassionate killing”—killing off the few troublemakers so that the many might live—was a blessing upon the occupied people, and by no means colonial expansion. Those who resisted, naturally, had to be brought to their senses. But formally there was no “war,” only an “incident.”
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Consequently, from early on in the war the Japanese government regularly referred to the “China Incident” as its “sacred struggle” or “holy war” (
seisen
). And the longer the struggle dragged on, the more its ideologues insisted on using this term—“holy war”—which expressed the national mission of unifying the world under
the emperor's benevolent rule (
hakk
ichi'u
), so that his and Amaterasu
mikami's august virtue could shine throughout the universe.

I

By early November the fighting in China had made clear to Prime Minister Konoe, the emperor, and the Army and Navy General Staffs that a more rational, more efficient high-command structure was needed to control the forces in the field and implement national policy. A Cabinet Planning Board had already been created in October. Now, on the twenty-seventh, Hirohito, on the recommendation of Konoe, ordered an “Imperial Headquarters” (
daihon'ei
) established within the palace as a purely military instrument through which he could exercise his constitutional role as supreme commander, and the army and navy could act more in concert. Thereafter, for a few hours in the morning a few days a week, the two chiefs of staff, the army and navy ministers, the chiefs of the operations sections, and Hirohito's chief aide-decamp conducted business in the palace. With a staff of just over two hundred, the Imperial Headquarters was, initially, more a haphazard collection of officers rather than an effective organization for prosecuting war and coordinating politics and strategy, as Konoe had originally envisioned.

At the same time, also at the urging of Konoe, who wanted to bring the army and navy chiefs and vice chiefs of staff into closer consultation with the government, an intergovernmental liaison body was organized on November 19, 1937: the Imperial Headquarters–Government Liaison Conference.
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Intended to help in integrating the decisions and needs of the two military branches with the resources and policies of the rest of the government, the liaison conference too at its outset was a temporary, seldom-convened conference for exchanging information.

Final decisions of the liaison conference were formally disclosed through special meetings, which Hirohito attended in person. These imperial conferences (
gozen kaigi
) were also neither established by government regulations nor related to the constitutional process. Because the emperor convened them and sanctioned their decisions, however, contemporaries regarded them as legitimate even though only a few ministers of state, such as the prime minister and finance minister, actually participated in them.
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Imperial conferences were convened at least eight times between January 11, 1938, and December 1, 1941.
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Those attending imperial conferences, in addition to the emperor, were the chiefs and vice chiefs of the two general staffs, the army and navy ministers, the prime minister, finance minister, foreign minister, president of the privy council, and president of the Planning Board. Army and navy Military Affairs Bureau chiefs and cabinet secretaries were not allowed to attend imperial conferences. Except in two critical instances, both in 1941, the newspapers informed the public of the meetings immediately after they occurred. Press reports were terse, noted who attended, what they wore, and always stressed the unanimity of the decision makers.
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At the imperial conferences Hirohito presided over and approved decisions impacting not only the destiny of Japan but of China and other countries affected by Japanese policy. Since these conferences were usually convened after the liaison conferences, at which all the interested parties had reached decisions in which the emperor shared, he already knew the contents of the matters to be “decided.” Essentially the imperial conference was designed to allow him to perform as if he were a pure constitutional monarch, sanctioning matters only in accordance with his advisers' advice but not bearing responsibility for his action. At these meetings, civilian ministers wore morning clothes and military officers full-dress uniforms. The theatrical element of these affairs should not obscure their great importance, however. Nor were all imperial conferences
the same, and the emperor's lips were not sealed at all of them.

The imperial conference was
the
device for legally transforming the “will of the emperor” into the “will of the state.” And because everyone who participated in its deliberations could claim to have acted by, with, and under the unique authority of the emperor, while he could claim to have acted in accordance with the advice of his ministers of state, the imperial conference diffused lines of responsibility.
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In that sense it was the perfect crown to the Japanese practice of irresponsibility, for it sustained four separate fictions: (
a
) that the cabinet had real power; (
b
) that the cabinet was the emperor's most important advisory organ; and (
c
) that the cabinet and the military high command had reached a compromise agreement on the matter at hand, providing the emperor with a policy that he (
d
) was merely sanctioning as a passive monarch. Reality was quite different: a powerless cabinet, an emasculated constitution, and a dynamic emperor participating in the planning of aggression and guiding the process, by a variety of interventions that were often indirect but in every instance determining.
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The senior members of the Imperial Headquarters all counseled Hirohito, but the chiefs of staff alone transmitted his orders to the various field and fleet commanders.
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Through the Imperial Headquarters, Hirohito exercised final command over both armed services, including the field armies that were directly under his orders: the Kwantung Army and the area armies in China.
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Through the liaison conference he and the high command attempted to coordinate policy with the civil government.
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But that coordination and unity of war leadership proved impossible for Hirohito to achieve, for the Imperial Headquarters reproduced the rivalry of the military services, while the liaison conference was based on—and ultimately sabotaged by—the principle of separate and independent imperial advisory authority by ministers of state.
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