Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (92 page)

 

Britain's response to the Axis military alliance was to reopen the Burma Road, which earlier it had agreed to close, and to look for ways “to cause inconvenience to the Japanese without ceasing to be polite.”
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President Roosevelt's response was to make another small loan to Chiang Kai-shek, and give assurances of further American support to keep China in the war. In November, Roosevelt assented to Adm. Harold Stark's “Dog” plan for the recasting of America's defense strategy on the premise that Germany was the main enemy. Henceforth the United States would follow a defeat-Germany-first strategy, focusing on the European front and aid to Britain. If war should come in the Pacific, the United States would initially wage a defensive campaign but not turn its full weight against Japan until after Germany's downfall.
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In China, Chiang Kai-shek resolved to continue fighting Japan alone, without benefit of full-scale Anglo-American aid, but confident that war in the Pacific was only a matter of time.

F
ollowing the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941, the Japanese army and navy chiefs of staff, together with the emperor's other main advisers, began to spend more and more of their workdays at court.
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Hirohito's command prerogatives were changing quickly, and he was about to become a commander in chief in every sense of the word. The liaison conference, which had been formed in November 1937 and suspended two months later until July 1940, was revived, convened with greater frequency, and gradually strengthened. The president of the Planning Board and the home minister became permanent constituent members of the liaison conference, and in the course of a year, it developed into the most important regularly convened body for deciding national policies and guidelines for policies.

The liaison conference also moved its deliberations from the prime minister's official mansion to the palace.
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It eclipsed the cabinet, usurped its decision-making function, and became, in effect, a forum for debates and arguments that had to be resolved, ultimately, by the emperor himself. Between September 27, 1940, and November 1941, there were scores of liaison conference meetings. Many more followed thereafter until early August 1944, when the liaison conference was replaced by the Supreme War Leadership Council.
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Final decisions of the liaison conference continued to be formally disclosed through imperial conferences, which now began to
convene more frequently. The Imperial Headquarters was also reorganized, and new agencies or sections added until 1945 to deal with such matters as intelligence, transportation, science and technology, occupied areas, and so forth. By May 1945 the headquarters staff, some working within the palace compound but the overwhelming majority outside, had grown to more than 1,792.
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Certain key features of the high command structure, and Hirohito's way of working within it, remained unchanged, however. The independent bureaucratic interests of the emperor's military and civil advisory organs continued to shape policy. Guidelines for the conduct of the war continued to be drafted far down the military chain of command and moved upward through a process of negotiation and consensus building. And the ever-wary Hirohito continued to search out contradictions and discrepancies in whatever was reported to him. Thus, whenever the army and navy chiefs of staff or top cabinet ministers made formal reports that were in conflict, and sometimes when they were quite consistent or nearly identical, if Hirohito was not convinced by the argument put forward, he would reject them.

As the danger of war with the United States and Britain drew nearer, and as senior general staff officers (like the often-chastised General Sugiyama) acquired a better understanding of Hirohito's character and the breadth of his military knowledge, the middle-echelon officers who prepared his briefing and background materials learned how their immediate superiors could avoid his scoldings and inconvenient questions. One cannot dismiss altogether the possibility that at least some materials intended for the emperor's study in ratifying (or rejecting) command decisions may have been shaped if not distorted by interservice maneuverings.
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Complex systems of decision making often invite manipulation, if only as a means to prioritize and simplify.

On the other hand Hirohito understood very well how the policy deliberation process worked. He knew the names and careers of the
most important bureau, department, and section chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Foreign Ministries, and their tendencies. His chief aide-de-camp's office in the palace was connected by a hot-line telephone to the offices of the Army and Navy Operations Sections and their First Departments so that his aides could immediately convey imperial questions or raise queries of their own.
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Hirohito knew who headed the First Department of the Imperial Headquarters–Army, charged with the development of operations plans and troop deployments; and who within the First Department was in charge of the Twentieth Group (grand strategic planning) and the Second Section (operations). More important, he was familiar with the step-by-step bureaucratic procedures that led directly to the drafting of the “national policy” documents deliberated at the liaison conferences and studied by him.

From 1941 onward, the high-command machinery steadily became more elaborate. The emperor widened and deepened his access to include just about all military intelligence. Detailed question-and-answer materials were compiled by staff officers in the Operations Sections, and war situation reports reached him on a weekly, daily, and sometimes twice-daily basis. Monthly and annual state-of-the-war evaluations were also compiled for the emperor's perusal; and, as historian Yamada Akira documented, Hirohito routinely received drafts of developing war plans and full explanations of operations, accompanied by detailed maps, informing him why an operation should be mounted and the units that would be carrying it out.

Battle reports and situation reports were delivered to the palace daily and, after the Pacific war started, shown to the emperor at any time of the day or night. These included itemization of combat losses and their causes, places where Japanese troops were doing well or not so well, and even such details as where cargo ships had been sunk and what matériel had been lost with them. Sometimes “even telegrams coming into the Imperial Headquarters from the
front lines” were shown to Hirohito by his three army and five navy aides-de-camp, serving around the clock on rotating shifts.
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Among the many duties of these aides was the regular updating of Hirohito's operations maps.
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In addition, throughout the Pacific war the chief of the Navy General Staff sent the emperor formal written reports, titled “Explanatory Materials for the Emperor Concerning the War Situation.” These, added to his other sources of information, kept the emperor extraordinarily well informed. But a flaw in this intelligence system was that the army and navy prepared and presented their secret information to him separately, so that only the emperor himself ever knew the entire picture, especially in respect to losses.
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When the “facts” reported from the front lines were inaccurate, Hirohito's “information” was misinformation. Still, Yamada observes, the emperor's briefers “believed in what they reported.” Certainly their intentions were not to deceive him but to present accurate figures on the losses in personnel and armaments sustained by Japanese forces, as well as the damage inflicted by them. The materials he received were timely, detailed, and of high quality—as indeed they had to be, for the emperor was not only directing the grand strategic unfolding of the war, but pressing for solutions to the inevitable mishaps and miscalculations of his staff and field commands.
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In addition, to check on the accuracy of the reports he was receiving, Hirohito would often send his army and navy aides, as well as his own brothers, on inspection tours to various fronts to gather information outside routine channels. According to Ogata Kenichi, Hirohito's army aide-de-camp from March 1942 to November 1945, the emperor “sent his aides as close to the front lines as possible and chose the seasons when the troops were sufferring most. When they returned, the emperor received them as though he valued their reports more than anything else.” When questioning his ministers of state and the chiefs of the general staffs,
Hirohito frequently quoted from these reports.
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In this way too, he kept his imperial eye constantly on his commanders.

Finally Hirohito continued his practice of viewing domestic and foreign newsreels and movies, screened for him at the palace, usually two or three times a week. He continued to read the censored Japanese press daily, and often pointedly questioned his military leaders about the news he found there.
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Thus he not only knew the truth about the war, he was also aware of the slanted versions or even outright “brainwashing” the Japanese people were receiving.

As early as the eve of Pearl Harbor, this enormous, time-consuming effort by the high command to be sure Hirohito was fully informed had begun to detract from the efficiency of key officers involved in operations and strategic planning. Because the First Department head, for example, spent so much of his time keeping the emperor abreast of developments, he often could not immerse himself fully in his main duties, which were the planning of operations and strategies. Imoto Kumao, who served on the Army General Staff during 1941, believed that this unintended consequence of the monarchy's modus operandi became a factor in Japan's defeat. Keeping Hirohito informed was a Herculean effort that forced department heads to delegate their top-level work down to “section chiefs and their subordinates,” who soon became drawn into “the war leadership activities of the department heads. When that confusion occurred, officers who might still be able to handle routine administrative affairs were quite unable to meet the Imperial Headquarters operational planning responsibilities. I see here that they caused a wide dark void to open in command at the Imperial Headquarters.”
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I

By early 1941 Japanese policy makers including the emperor were mesmerized by the connection between the stalemated war in
China and the course of events in Europe. German-Soviet relations particularly held their attention. Bound together by their nonaggression pact of August 1939, both powers were apparently positioning themselves for a further partition of Europe. But hidden complications in their relationship had developed. Hitler was secretly preparing to attack his new ally. Stalin, aware that Hitler was concentrating troops along the western border of the Soviet Union but not yet able to see an invasion imminent, mulled over the frighteningly swift triumph of the German war machine in the West, the German military campaign in the Balkans, and the overall deterioration of Russo-German relations. He felt an urgent need to secure Russia's Far Eastern borders, and also to block any further development, at Soviet expense, of the German-Japan axis.
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And he found that he could avoid the nightmare of a two-front conflict by responding to the Konoe cabinet's renewed initiative for a treaty. Intent on deflecting Japan's attention away from the Soviet Far East and toward the sphere of Anglo-American interests—Southeast Asia and the South Pacific—Stalin would agree to a neutrality pact in exchange for Japan's pledge to relinquish to the Soviets its coal and oil concessions in North Sakhalin.

On April 7 Matsuoka Y
suke arrived in Moscow from Berlin.
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Several days of hard bargaining ensued, during which he resigned himself to the impossibility of securing a nonaggression pact, then accepted Stalin's conditions and settled for what the Soviets would offer. A newly released document in the Russian Foreign Ministry archives discloses that during his meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin on April 12, Matsuoka proposed that problems in Japan-Soviet relations be resolved “from a wider point of view.” “[S]hould you wish access to the warm Indian Ocean through India,” said Matsuoka, “I think that should be permitted. And if the Soviet Union should prefer the port of Karachi for itself, Japan can close its eyes. When Special Envoy Heinrich Stahmer (Gestapo agent and later German ambassador to Tokyo) visited Japan, I told him that, in the
event the Soviet Union comes toward the warm ocean through Iran, the Germans should treat the matter exactly as Japan does.” Reverting to his pet themes—“sav[ing] Asia from the control of the Anglo-Saxons” and “washing the influence of British and American capitalism out of Asia”—Matsuoka tried to have Stalin promise to end Soviet aid to Chiang Kai-shek.
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Stalin replied that the Soviet Union could “tolerate cooperation between Japan, Germany, and Italy on the large issues,” but that “at this time I want to talk only about the neutrality treaty with Japan, for on this issue there is no doubt that the time is ripe.”
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The next day, April 13, Matsuoka and envoy extraordinary Gen. Tatekawa Yoshitsugu signed with Molotov, in Stalin's presence, a five-year neutrality treaty.
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Under its terms the two nations “pledged to maintain peaceful, friendly relations” and to respect their mutual territories. In the event of military activity by a third state against one or both of them, the other party would “maintain neutrality throughout the entire period of the conflict.” The treaty was to go into effect from the day of its ratification and remain binding for five years. In addition the Russians pledged, in a separate declaration, to respect the inviolability of Manchukuo while the Japanese recognized Russia's interest in the “Mongolian People's Republic.” If neither Moscow nor Tokyo gave notice of abrogation by the end of the fourth year, the treaty would automatically be extended for another five years. Hirohito ratified the treaty on April 25, and the following day, the official Russian newspaper,
Pravda
, announced that the neutrality pact with Japan had gone into effect.
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