Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (94 page)

Meanwhile, the army and navy, acting in accordance with the complex, ambiguous national policy in effect after July 2, and in step with hasty diplomatic arrangements, accelerated the pace of their expansion into Southeast Asia. Negotiations with Vichy France set up the July 28 peaceful occupation of the southern part of French Indochina in preparation for seizing the resources of the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. The incursion involved more than 40,000 Japanese troops but later grew to more than 185,000.
³²
As the advance developed, it provoked President Roosevelt and his advisers into unleashing powerful economic sanctions against Japan along with a merely token military response.

On July 26, Roosevelt ordered defenses in the Philippines—America's main Pacific possession—strengthened, promising to send, as soon as possible, 272 B-17 long-range heavy bombers and 130 new P-40 fighter planes to protect them. He also appointed the retired Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of all U.S. military forces in the Far East. Five years earlier, in preparation for the Philippines to become a self-governing commonwealth, Roosevelt had sent MacArthur to Manila as the head of a military mission charged with the impossi
ble task of arranging the islands' future defense against a Japanese attack. Now, in effect, the president moved America's own outer defense perimeter five thousand miles to the west, to an archipelago that, even though it lay on the side of Japan's southern advance, had been relegated to secondary strategic importance by the defeat-Germany-first-principle; and he placed in charge of the Pacific army a charismatic general, famous for his grandiose rhetoric and penchant for charting independent courses.
³³

That same day, July 26, Roosevelt also signed an executive order freezing Japanese assets in the United States, thereby bringing “all financial and import and export transactions in which Japanese interests are involved under the control of the Government.”
³⁴
American officials in the State and Treasury Departments, as well as the Office of Production Management (charged with preventing raw material shortages and coordinating America's own defense production) immediately proceeded to interpret the freeze order in such a way as to impose, by August 1, a total embargo on oil and gasoline exports to Japan.

The American economic sanctions threw near panic into the Konoe government and had the effect of further dividing opinion within the navy as well as between the navy and the army. Shocked, like everyone else, by this rapid escalation of Anglo-American economic pressure, Hirohito looked on as his navy and army leaders struggled to reach a consensus on how to respond to the crisis. He had been informed that Naval Chief of Staff Admiral Nagano had suggested war with the United States at the liaison conference of July 21, five days
before
the United States froze Japanese assets and followed with the oil embargo. If war with the United States began immediately, Nagano had declared prior to the oil embargo, Japan would “have a chance of achieving victory” because of the difference in their war preparations. As time passed, however, that “probability” would decrease and the situation would thereafter “become disadvantageous to the Empire.” Moreover, he added, “if we occupy
the Philippines, it will be easier for our navy to carry on the war. We can [then] manage the defense of the South Pacific fairly well.”
³⁵

Hirohito, knowing the navy's preparations were by no means sufficiently advanced to fight the United States, which was the main reason opinion within the navy was so divided, was irritated by Nagano's words at the liaison conference. Neither had he been pleased with the admiral's recent formal reports to him. He summoned the naval chief of staff on July 30—the same day that he blocked war with the Soviet Union—and expressed his dissatisfaction. According to the
Sugiyama memo
, Hirohito bluntly told him, “Prince Fushimi said that he would avoid war with Britain and the United States. Have you changed that?” Nagano replied, “I have not changed the principle but if we are going to fight, then the sooner we do so the better because our supplies are gradually dwindling anyway.”
³⁶
According to the diary of Vice Navy Minister Sawamoto Yorio, the emperor also asked Nagano, “Do you have any plans for fighting a protracted war?” When Nagano replied that there was no way to be sure of victory in a long war, and also expressed his belief that the Tripartite Pact was harming the adjustment of relations with the United States, Hirohito, unwilling to blame himself for this state of affairs, merely listened.
³⁷

The political crisis produced at the start of the third Konoe cabinet, and intensified by the crisis in Japan–U.S. relations, had revived navy fears that the army, acting unilaterally, might start a war with the Soviet Union. In fact, from late July onward, arguments rekindled within the Army for just that, and for giving primacy to the Tripartite Pact with Germany over the Neutrality Treaty with the Soviet Union. On July 30, however, as noted earlier, the emperor had told Sugiyama to stop the Kwantung Special Exercises, and shortly afterward, on August 9, the Army General Staff shelved its plans for invading the Soviet Union during 1941, though without formally notifying the navy of its decision until late August. But key army planners stuck to the view that the German-Soviet war would be
short and end in a decisive German victory. In this situation there developed in the army high command by the beginning of September, an attitude of “let's finish off down south before beginning operations up north in the spring [of 1942].” Thus, only a month after the American oil embargo, the army came around to wanting a quickly won war against the United States, so that within a year it could turn around and “do the north.”
³⁸
All these divisions and disagreements were thrashed out in liaison conference meetings before being informally reported to the emperor on September 5.

The American economic sanctions, meanwhile, were having their effect on Prime Minister Konoe. Britain had already placed economic restrictions on Japan as an ally of Germany; in late July it followed the American lead and froze Japanese assets. Japan's negotiations with the government of the Netherlands Indies for oil purchases had collapsed; on July 28 the Dutch authorities also froze Japanese assets. Japan was now forced to draw down its reserves of oil and other stockpiled strategic materials.

In the spring of 1941 Konoe had hoped to negotiate a friendlier U.S. attitude toward Japan. The secret, unofficial “conversations” between Adm. Nomura Kichisabur
and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, at which Japan had asked the American government to cease supporting Chiang Kai-shek and to furnish strategic materials, continued for several months but got nowhere. Now, because of the Japanese move into southern French Indochina, the talks faced a complete breakdown, and Konoe's hopes were collapsing.
³⁹
In despair, and believing that the man he had earlier appointed as ambassador to the United States was incompetent, Konoe resolved to meet Roosevelt directly and break the deadlock.

At 11:40
A.M
. on August 4, Konoe spoke with the emperor for about forty minutes and probably received endorsement of the idea of a summit meeting. This was because Hirohito had by no means decided on war at this time, and whenever he felt unready to make up his mind, he often liked a substitute reason for postponement.
Later that evening Konoe met the army and navy ministers and informed them that a summit of heads of state might serve to reopen the talks.
⁴⁰
Since neither the navy nor the army wanted to take responsibility at that moment for opposing Konoe, especially believing that he had the emperor's backing, they agreed to his idea.
⁴¹
Afterward Konoe instructed Nomura to propose to President Roosevelt that a meeting between himself and Roosevelt be held (at Honolulu or at sea in the mid-Pacific) to head off the looming war. Since Hull was cool to the idea of a summit, and the president was then aboard ship, en route to his historic meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill off of Argentia, Newfoundland, which would result in the Atlantic Charter, Nomura was unable to convey the message until August 17.

No Roosevelt-Konoe meeting ever took place. On October 2, the U.S. government indirectly rejected the summit proposal on the ground that Tokyo's negotiating position had yet to be clarified. To this day some Japanese conservatives and right-wing apologists for the “War of Greater East Asia” continue to see this rejection as proof that Roosevelt sought to “provoke Japan into a war.”
⁴²
But Konoe was only prepared to say that Japan would withdraw its troops from French Indochina
after
the China Incident had been resolved. On all the key issues that had crystallized after the oil embargo—the problem of how to resolve the China war, the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China, Japan's alliance with the Axis, and its southern advance—his negotiating draft was silent. Konoe had approved of Japan's aggression in China and the privileges it had secured there by force and had incorporated into the basic treaty with the Wang Ching-wei regime in Nanking; he intended to ask the United States to advise Chiang Kai-shek to stop resisting Japan. If a summit meeting had taken place, Konoe's set of stale positions, already proven inadequate, could never have led to a modus vivendi, and might even have hastened the coming of war.
⁴³
Or, one may speculate, perhaps Konoe was calculating on deceiving
Roosevelt—the master dissimulator—by leaving issues vague.

Japan's leaders could either capitulate to the pressure of the anti-Axis coalition led by the United States and Britain—or continue the course they had set. As the shock of the American sanctions spread, disagreements emerged within the court group and among the senior statesmen (
j
shin
) over how to respond to the crisis. The “mainstream” of the Court group, centered on the emperor and Kido, tended to place their trust in the hard-line senior leaders of the army and navy, and to take a more positive attitude toward war with the United States and Britain. Konoe, Okada, and those around them constituted an “antimainstream” group. They had turned away from their prior infatuation with Nazi Germany, they were supportive of the army's Imperial Way faction, they did not accept the premise that further delay in the southern advance would mean certain defeat, and they wanted to continue the talks with the United States as long as possible. These differences within the court group were fermenting in September but would not emerge clearly until after Konoe stepped down in mid-October.

III

Meanwhile the rapidly rising tension in relations with Washington following the oil embargo had clarified the choices facing Japan's leaders. The Takagi S
kichi papers offer a glimpse how the Konoe government, the navy, and the palace framed the risks of war during early autumn 1941. They could capitulate under economic pressure, which would give them a breather, or they could take some other course to end, neutralize, or escape the pressure. War, if they chose to wage it, had to supply the resources needed to make the empire invincible. During a dinner on August 4 with Hosokawa Morisada, Konoe's private secretary, Admiral Takagi was asked by Hosokawa if it was true that “war
must
be waged against the United States [emphasis added].” Takagi, replying, in effect contrasted the
U.S. with Japan in several respects: the Americans had more domestic raw materials, their navy was undergoing “strategic development,” and they were strengthening their Pacific defenses. Admiral Takagi also mentioned “relations of mutual assistance among Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands.” The United States was growing stronger vis-à-vis Japan, he stressed. “As time passes and this situation continues, our empire will either be totally defeated or forced to fight a hopeless war. Therefore we should pursue war and diplomacy together. If there is no prospect of securing our final line of national survival by diplomatic negotiations, we must be resolved to fight.”
⁴⁴