Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (3 page)

As Hirohito and the Japanese government wrestled with the problems of the depression and lack of living space, they acted to crush another threat that would have seemed familiar to the Nazi leadership — communism.
In February 1928 left-wing parties in Japan gained eight seats in the national elections.
Just over two weeks later the government sanctioned mass arrests of communists and Marxist sympathizers.

During the following year, there was more political instability when Hirohito demonstrated that he would be an aggressive player in the political arena by obtaining the resignation of prime minister Tanaka, a politician frequently criticized by the emperor.
Here was further proof that Japan was demonstrably not a stable state ruled by a British-style constitutional monarch.

The extent of the growing fracture in the Japanese democratic process was emphasized still further when, in 1930, after Japan had signed the London Naval Treaty (which agreed comparative limits amongst the world’s major navies), the new prime minister, Hamaguchi, was shot by an opponent of the agreement at Tokyo railway station.
The message could not have been clearer — stand out against the growing nationalist spirit, personified by obsequious allegiance to the emperor and an increasing distrust of all things Western, only at great personal peril.

A growing faction within the Imperial Army wanted to dissociate Japan from the ‘non-aggressive’ values of the post-First World War treaties and return to the pursuit of the kind of colonial expansion that had so characterized Japanese behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The question these military figures (and many politicians on the right) posed was this: what had embracing the West’s new-found love of peaceful compromise brought Japan in the 1920s?
The answer seemed clear: economic depression, the unsolved problem of shortage of living space, and the ‘infection’ of Japanese society with dangerous Western values like the emancipation of women, universal suffrage and communism.
Japan’s difficulties, so the right-wing argument went, could only be solved by a combination of turning against the West and expansion through military action.

Throughout the summer of 1931 the belief had been growing within the Imperial Army that Japan’s problems could best be alleviated by taking complete control of Manchuria, a land rich in everything Japan was not — chiefly space and natural resources — just 700 miles northwest of Tokyo across the Sea of Japan.
General Jiro Minami, minister of war, made a speech in August that all but demanded the army should act of its own volition and attack.
But senior officers like Minami knew that formal authorization for such an action was impossible — it would be against all the treaties Japan had recently signed.
An excuse for Japanese aggression would have to be manufactured — and it duly was.
On 18 September Japanese army units blew up a section of the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway but claimed that the Chinese had done it.
Acting on their own initiative units of the Japanese Kwantung army moved forward to engage nearby Chinese forces.
Within days the invaders had captured Kirin, the local capital and made their ally, a local Chinese warlord, declare independence.
By February 1932 the Japanese had conquered Manchuria and established a puppet state under Emperor Henry Puyi.
He announced the establishment of the state of Manchukuo — new ‘living space’ for the Japanese.

The conquest of Manchuria was the crucial moment at which Japan’s real estrangement from the Western democracies began.
It was a source of conflict that was not resolved until the end of the Second World War.
As Japanese troops moved to create the new puppet state, Hirohito faced a moment of decision — should he accept or reject the army’s actions?
After due consideration he did what, throughout his rule, he would do so often at moments of crisis — nothing.
From the moment he first heard of the unilateral action of the Kwantung army in Manchuria to the eventual subjugation of the Manchurian people, Hirohito took no effective steps to bring his troops to account.
On the one hand he was the supreme commander of the Imperial Army and could have demanded the aggression be halted, on the other he was conscious that the chief reason he remained in power was the support of the armed forces.
After all, it had not been so long ago that a powerful military figure, the Shogun, had sidelined the emperor into effective impotence.
It was a moment in history that called for courage and leadership from a Japanese emperor bolstered by the powers granted him by the Meiji constitution.
But Hirohito failed the test and in the process failed his nation’s fledgling democracy.

Of course, there is another explanation besides weakness for Hirohito’s inaction during this period.
It is very possible that he approved of what his army was doing.
It was clear they were winning the war in Manchuria, and Japanese newspapers were full of jingoistic sentiment — an emotional reaction that caught the mood of the majority of the Japanese.
Manchuria was for the Japanese what California had been to the Americans ninety years before — a land of potential riches, full of exploitable natural resources.
‘I wanted to go to Manchuria and earn money,’ says Yoshio Tsuchiya who enlisted in the Imperial Army in 1931.
‘I wanted to earn money and be able to build a house for my family.
If I stayed on in Manchuria I thought I could send money back home.’

In October 1931 the political instability worsened when a group of army officers led by Colonel Hashimoto and Major Cho of the ultra-right-wing ’Cherry Blossom’ society attempted to overthrow the civilian government.
They were arrested but, as Hirohito must have observed, punished as the army thought appropriate — the toughest sentence being imposed on Colonel Hashimoto, who was locked up for less than two weeks.
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In 1932 fighting erupted in Shanghai, China’s biggest trading city (a section of which was policed by the Japanese).
Tensions caused by a Chinese boycott of Japanese products led to clashes in the streets.
The Imperial High Command authorized two divisions to be sent to Shanghai, Chinese forces retreated from the Japanese-controlled section of the city and a treaty ending the aggressive action was signed in May that year.
While the fighting had raged in Shanghai two leading Japanese businessmen, known to be sympathetic to the notion of compromise with the West were assassinated in Japan.
Shortly afterwards, prime minister Inukai, thought by many not to have supported the army sufficiently, was murdered as well.
The effect of the military aggression on the mainland of Asia had been further to polarize political life in Japan and to leave the nationalists firmly in control.

The League of Nations condemned Japan’s actions — and, predictably, the Japanese formally withdrew from the League in March 1933.
Nothing illustrates better the contempt the Japanese leadership now had for the League than the fact that at the same moment the League was debating Japanese aggression in Manchukuo, the Imperial Army was advancing into the Chinese province of Jehol.
The love affair between the Western democracies and Japan was over.

A propaganda film produced by the Imperial Army,
Japan in the National Emergency
, and shown in Japanese cinemas just months after the country withdrew from the League of Nations, demonstrates the prevailing nationalistic mood.
‘In the past we have just followed the Western trend without thinking about it,’ runs the commentary.
‘As a result Japanese pride has faded away....Today we are lucky to see the revival of the Japanese spirit throughout the nation.’
In the film, corrupt Western values are personified by a young Japanese man who smokes a pipe and plays a mandolin, and by a Westernized young Japanese woman who smokes, dances and, in one of the film’s most provocative tableaux, demands that a middle-aged Japanese man apologise when he inadvertently steps on her toe in the street.
(The middle-aged man wears a beard in the style of the Emperor Meiji and is clearly intended to personify the strong authoritarian values that the late emperor possessed.) The mandolin-playing youth who accompanies the woman tries to demonstrate how the apology should be made — Western-style — by dropping to his knees and using his scarf to wipe her shoes clean.
This is too much for the middle-aged man who pushes the youth aside to announce dramatically: ‘Stupid!
Listen to me!
This
is Japan
!’
The propaganda may be clumsy, but the message is clear.
Women should return to their traditional subservient role and in the process reject smoking in public, Western-style clothes and standing up for themselves, whilst the Japanese as a whole should glory in their own uniqueness as a people.
Japan should take technological knowledge from the Western democracies but reject the social and political values that the makers of the technology espouse.
(Significantly, this film is regarded as still sufficiently sensitive in content that the Japanese archive house to which we traced a copy wished to censor its use and would not give the BBC permission to show contentious sections — fortunately, another copy of the film was traced in the National Archives in Washington.)

If Japan was to expand as the nationalists wished then crucial to future success was a large and powerful army.
The growth of the Imperial Army during the first part of the twentieth century was phenomenal — by 1937 it was five times bigger than at the turn of the century.
This kind of rapid expansion brought with it, unsurprisingly, problems for the military — chiefly, they worried about how to maintain discipline.
They found one answer to the problem in the training of recruits, which became more brutal.
If the soldiers made the smallest mistake they were physically beaten.
‘Sometimes you’d be hit with fists, and sometimes you’d be hit with bamboo sticks,’ says Toyoshige Karashima, who was then a Taiwanese recruit in the Imperial Army.
‘Sometimes in the evening we couldn’t eat our food because our faces were so swollen.’
Another Japanese veteran, Masayo Enomoto, revealed that his instructors used to beat him and his fellow recruits so much during basic training that their arms ached, and by the day’s end they had no energy left to hit them.
As a consequence the instructors found a novel way of maintaining discipline — ‘self-punishment’: ‘Once the instructors got tired of beating you up,’ says Enomoto, ‘they would have recruits face each other and slap each other.
So we all of us recruits, comrades together, started to slap each other — instead of being slapped by the instructor.
Gradually I felt that I’d missed out on something if by night-time I hadn’t been beaten up at least once.’
Hajime Kondo, another recruit into the Imperial Army, says simply that ‘the training was so severe that I felt I’d rather die’.

The instructors hit the recruits with their fists, with bamboo canes, and hard across their faces with the heels of their boots.
Significantly, the recruits were not just subjected to such beatings by those formally in command of them.
Senior recruits also beat the more junior ones, especially in the early days of training while the new intake were struggling to pick up the specialized
argot
of the military.
There was little hope of escaping harsh physical punishment — a whole section of soldiers would be beaten if one of their comrades failed in some way, the justification being that this was an attempt to instil in the recruits the sense that they were not individuals but part of a unit.
It was institutionalized bullying.
‘In the military there is no individual responsibility, only group responsibility,’ says Hajime Kondo, who served in the Imperial Army in China.
‘You’re often punished not due to your own crime.
At the very beginning I didn’t think it was a good idea, but after a week, or a month or two, you learn that in the battlefield you have to behave as a group.’

Every single veteran we interviewed recalled an army training of the utmost brutality.
The physical abuse of recruits was not arbitrary but planned and systematic, part of a carefully thought-out method by which the High Command attempted to mould the type of soldier they desired.
When the recruit entered the Imperial Army he was joining a family — a cold, brutal family, but a family none the less.
‘The barracks is the soldier’s family where together soldiers share hardships and joys, life and death,’ says the 1908
Guntai naimusho
(army handbook).
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‘A family means that the company is one household in the one village of the regiment.
The heads of the household are the father and the mother.
The company commander is a strict father, and the NCO a loving mother.
The lieutenants are relatives and in perfect accord with their company commander whom they loyally assist.’

The sense of the regiment as one ‘village’ was further enhanced by each unit being recruited from only one area of Japan.
Recruits would be surrounded by people with whom they had grown up.
In such circumstances the pressure to conform and not ‘disgrace’ one’s relatives back home must have been immense.
Indeed, most of the veterans we interviewed confessed that their greatest fear was that by committing some misdemeanour in the army they might bring shame on their family.

Towering over the whole familial — hierarchical structure was the all-powerful god-figure of the emperor himself — the supreme commander of the imperial armed forces.
The recruits had been taught since their schooldays that their emperor was a divine being, now through reciting the Imperial Rescript [proclamation] to Soldiers and Sailors, they learnt how much closer they were tied to the throne via their new status as soldiers in the emperor’s personal army.
They were told their equipment was given to them by the emperor — the barrel of their rifles carried the imperial chrysanthemum symbol — and every day recruits would bow in the direction of the Imperial Palace to show respect; each order they were given was issued ‘in the name of the emperor’; every beating they received was meted out because the emperor would have wished it.
Blind obedience to the emperor was the glue that held this ever-expanding army together.