Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (88 page)

Thereafter “annihilation campaigns” continued to involve burning down villages, confiscating grain, and forcibly uprooting peasants from their homes and mobilizing them to construct “collective hamlets.” The Japanese strategy also centered on the digging of vast trench lines, many twenty feet wide and thirteen and a half feet deep, and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers, roads, and telephone lines. Japanese police and collaborating Chinese constabulary mobilized millions of Chinese peasants to do this work for periods of up to two months at a time.
²¹
But except for killing Chinese, directly and indirectly, the enormous effort that went into these campaigns, which were always sanctioned by Hirohito, was for naught. Chinese guerrillas
were invariably able to return to the no-man's land and control it after the Japanese had departed.

There are no Japanese statistics on the number of Chinese military casualties resulting from the
sank
operations. But according to the recent rough estimate of historian Himeta Mitsuyoshi, “more than 2.47 million” Chinese noncombatants were killed in the course of those battles.
²²
Although detailed empirical analysis of this aspect of the China war, by Japanese scholars, is now under way, it has been clear for some time that the well-planned
sank
campaigns were incomparably more destructive and of far longer duration than either the army's chemical and biological warfare or the “rape of Nanking.” Yet in the United States the latter, though extremely important and deserving of attention, figures as the centerpiece in the moral condemnation of Japanese wartime conduct, and is even compared—thoughtlessly, without regard to purpose, context, or ultimate aim—with the German genocide of European Jewry.

I

During the summer of 1940, Hirohito's judgment on how to direct the Japanese military to end the war in China was shaped by his perception of how the international situation was developing in Europe, and how Britain and the United States would react to any new Japanese military moves.

On July 22, 1940, Konoe formed his second cabinet, with Matsuoka Y
suke as foreign minister and General T
j
as army minister. Five days later Konoe convened the long-suspended Imperial Headquarters–Government Liaison Conference. In a mere ninety minutes the conference decided on a new national policy designed to exploit changes in the structure and dynamics of the international system brought about by Germany's victories in Europe.
²³

The vagueness of the July 27 “national policy” document,
adopted at this meeting, was seen in its emphasis on shifting focus to the “Southern area” if the war in China could not be concluded quickly, then deciding issues by exploiting foreign and domestic situations. Afterward Konoe and the chiefs of staff formally reported the document (entitled “Outline for Dealing with Changes in the International Situation”) to the emperor. The July 27 outline also called for a military move into French Indochina to establish bases there, and the acquisition, by diplomatic means, of the raw materials of the Dutch East Indies. If Japan had to use armed force to realize these aims, it would seek to fight only Britain; at the same time it would prepare for war with the United States.
²⁴
Hirohito approved this general prescription for renewed aggression knowing that whenever concrete policies based on it were formulated, they would be reported to him and his sanction sought on each occasion.

The army's interest in a military alliance with Nazi Germany had developed slowly until 1938, when, in response to German suggestions, a positive campaign for an alliance was initiated. Throughout 1939 and early 1940, Hirohito rejected the army's idea not so much because he thought there was anything fundamentally wrong in Hitler's racist, radically anti-Semitic regime, or the German quest for continental control, but because he wanted an alliance to be directed solely against the Soviet Union. Admirals on the navy high command also opposed the idea, but for a different reason: They believed a military pact with Germany would force Britain and the United States to increase their aid to Chiang Kai-shek and thus postpone resolution of the China Incident. The European war, and the frenzied international response to Germany's blitzkrieg offensive of spring-summer 1940, changed everything. An almost palpable bandwagoning mood arose. Hirohito's brother Prince Chichibu repeatedly importuned him to end his opposition to a German alliance. Then suddenly the navy high command, whose lead Hirohito often followed, abandoned its former skepticism and began to favor a military alliance with Hitler
that would move Japan more firmly into the anti-Anglo-American camp.

The key moment in the navy's reversal came during the ninth month of the European war—June 1940—after the French government had fled Paris, Italy had entered the war, and the Germans had conquered France and taken control of the resources of most of Europe up to the Soviet borders. Several factors figured in the navy's conversion. Adm. Takagi S
kichi, a navy leader with close ties to the palace, pointed out in an internal policy document that the navy hoped that so long as Germany was allied with the Soviet Union, if Japan became a military ally of Germany, the enthusiasm of Japan's generals for war against the Soviet Union would be at least dampened.
²⁵
Both navy and army leaders also believed that Hitler would soon crush Britain, and that by “entering into a tripartite pact…Japan would be responding to Hitler's strategy and [so] joining in the new international order.”
²⁶
A third factor leading the navy to favor alliance was that the pact's negotiators had deleted from the treaty any automatic war-participation clause, thereby guaranteeing Japan would not be drawn against its will into Germany's war with Britain.

Furthermore the navy leaders projected not only an early end to the German-British war but the possibility that the Soviet Union might formally join the Axis, creating a four-power system. This possibility—not out of the question in the late summer of 1940—reflected an accurate assessment of the role of ideology in Stalin's USSR. More substantively the navy leaders believed that Germany could help Japan end its diplomatic isolation and confront the American diplomatic offensive from a position of greater strength. Finally, by agreeing to the treaty with Germany, the navy leaders hoped to eliminate a major part of their long-standing rivalry with the army. They might then be able to restrain the army's domination of the domestic political scene. With the navy lining up in support of the pact, and Germany triumphant in Europe, it remained
only to persuade the emperor. A change in his chief political adviser helped to accomplish that.

On June 1, 1940, the emperor exercised his own discretion in choosing a new lord keeper of the privy seal. Ignoring
genr
Saionji's qualms about Kido's right-wing bent, expressed through the former's refusal to recommend a candidate, Hirohito decided to heed Konoe and Yuasa's positive recommendations and appoint Kido, the revisionist bureaucrat and class-conscious leader of the hereditary aristocracy, to succeed the ailing Yuasa as his most important political adviser.
²⁷
The youngest man ever to hold the post, Kido was nearly fifty-one; Hirohito was thirty-nine. More than a year earlier, Kido had reportedly told Harada that the emperor was “a scientist” by nature, and “very liberal and pacifistic at the same time.”