Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (37 page)

The breakdown of constitutional government in Japan could not be regarded as an internal affair since it was inextricably bound up with foreign policy aims. Most Japanese regarded territorial expansion as an essential element of entry into the modern world. Did not
every other industrial power have an empire? It was as necessary as steel-mills or iron-clads. In Japan’s case there were additional and compelling reasons: the poverty of the country, its almost total lack of natural resources and the rapid, irresistible increase in population. In 1894–5, Japan struck at China, taking Korea, Formosa (Taiwan) and Port Arthur. She was forced to surrender the last by the tripartite intervention of Russia, Germany and France. Her response was to double the size of her army and make herself self-sufficient in armaments, which she had achieved by 1904. Immediately she issued an ultimatum to Russia, took Port Arthur and won the devastating naval battle of Tsushima in May 1905, assuring herself commercial supremacy in Manchuria, and taking the Sakhalin (Karafuto) islands as part of the settlement. In 1914 she entered the war solely to possess herself of Germany’s ports and property in China, and the following year she presented a series of demands to the Chinese government (the ‘Twenty-one Demands’) which in effect made her the preponderant colonial and commercial power in the region. The paramountcy was confirmed by the Versailles Treaty, which gave her Shantung and a whole string of Pacific islands as mandates.

Japan now faced a dilemma. She was determined to expand, but under what colours? Her Meiji Revolution was at heart an anti-colonial move, to preserve herself. Her original intention, in seizing Korea, was to deny it to the European powers and set herself up as commercial, political and military head of an ‘East Asian League’, a defensive alliance which would modernize East Asia and prevent further Western penetration. Japan would thus have become the first anti-colonialist great power, a role occupied by Russia after 1945, and in the process win herself (as Russia has) a family of dependent allies and satellites. The difficulty was that China, whose co-operation was essential, never showed the slightest desire to provide it, regarding Japan as a junior sovereignty and a ferocious predator, in some ways to be feared more, because nearer, than any European power. Japan never wholly abandoned this line, however. It was reflected in her demand for a racial equality clause in the League covenant, in her pious insistence that all her activities on the Chinese mainland were in the interests of the Chinese themselves, and during the 1941–5 war in her creation of puppet governments in the territories she occupied, bound together in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These were not wholly fictions; but they could not become wholly, or even mainly, facts either, so long as Japan was obliged to fight and conquer China in order to make her a ‘partner’.
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That avenue closed, was Japan to be a colonial power like the rest? That was the view of the Japanese Foreign Office, the Hirohito court, the liberal political establishment. But that meant having an ally,
above all Britain, biggest and most respectable of the established empires. Britain was anxious for stability, and means could doubtless be found to provide Japan with sufficient interests and possessions to bind her, too, to a stable system. And so long as Britain was Japan’s ally, the latter had a prime interest in preserving her own internal respectability, constitutional propriety and the rule of law, all of which Britain had taught her.

That was why the destruction of the Anglo—Japanese alliance by the USA and Canada in 1921–2 was so fatal to peace in the Far East. The notion that it could be replaced by the Washington Naval Treaty, and the further Nine Power treaty of February 1922 (also signed by Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal), which guaranteed China’s integrity, was a fantasy. For the second agreement provided no enforcement provision, even in theory, and the first made enforcement in practice out of the question. The net result was to put Japan in the role of potential predator and cast her out of the charmed circle of respectable ‘have’ powers. Britain’s influence with Japan disappeared, and America, emerging as China’s protector, assumed the shape of Japan’s irreconcilable enemy.
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Internally, the consequence was to shift power in Japan away from the Foreign Office, whose foreign friends had let them down, and in favour of the military, especially the younger officers imbued with fanatic zeal to go it alone, something which was in any event implicit in totalitarian Shinto.

There were, however, more prosaic reasons pushing in favour of national desperation. Japan could not feed herself. In 1868, with a population of 32 million, consuming each year an average of just under 4 bushels of rice a head, Japan got by with 6 million acres under cultivation, each yielding 20 bushels. By 1940, with prodigious effort and skill, she had pushed up the yield per acre to 40 bushels, and by taking in every inch of marginal land had increased the area under rice to 8 million acres. But in the meantime average consumption had risen to 5
bushels a year – not a great deal – and the population to 73 million, so Japan was short of 65 million bushels of rice a year. Agricultural productivity had already levelled off in the early 1920s and there then was no way of raising it further. So between the pre-war period 1910–14, and the end of the 1920s, rice imports tripled.
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These had to be paid for by Japan’s predominantly textile exports, already meeting cut-throat competition and tariffs.

Emigration was not really an option for the Japanese. They had been restricted by treaty from entering the United States as long ago as 1894, the first national group to be so controlled. By 1920 there were 100,000 Japanese in the USA (mainly in California) and a
further 100,000 in Hawaii: four years later American terror at the ‘yellow peril’ led to legislation precluding Japanese from receiving American citizenship, which under the new immigration law automatically excluded them even from entering the country. Australian immigration law was equally restrictive and pointedly aimed at Japan. The attitude of the American and Australian governments (which of course reflected overwhelming public feeling) caused particular bitterness among the Japanese trading community, who had European status in Asia. By the mid-1920s even some of the ‘respectable’ politicians were beginning to feel there was no peaceful way out of the dilemma. In his book
Addresses to Young Men
, Hashimoto Kingoro wrote:

… there are only three ways left to Japan to escape from the pressure of surplus population … emigration, advance into world markets, and expansion of territory. The first door, emigration, has been barred to us by the anti-Japanese immigration policies of other countries. The second door… is being pushed shut by tariff barriers and the abrogation of commercial treaties. What should Japan do when two of the three doors have been closed against her?
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The same point was made far more forcefully in the propaganda disseminated by the
kais
and the army and navy slush-funds. It became the theme of Sadao Araki, who by 1926 was the leader of the young officer groups and evangelist of
Kodo
, ‘the imperial way’, the new militant form of expansionist Shinto. Why, he asked, must Japan, with well over 60 million mouths to feed, be content with 142,270 square miles (much of it barren)? Australia and Canada, with 6.5 million people each, had 3 million and 3.5 million square miles respectively; America had 3 million square miles, France a colonial empire of 3.8 million, Britain (even without the Dominions and India) had 2.2 million, Belgium 900,000 square miles, Portugal 800,000. America, he pointed out, in addition to her huge home territories, had 700,000 square miles of colonies. Wherein lay the natural justice of these huge discrepancies? It was not as though the Japanese were greedy. They lived off fish and rice, and not much of either. They were ingeniously economic in their use of all materials. By the mid-1920s they were close to the limits of their resources and a decade later they were right up against them. Behind the romantic atavism of the military gangs, their posturings and murderous rodomontades, lay a huge and perfectly genuine sense of national grievance shared by virtually every Japanese, many millions of whom – unlike the Germans – were actually hungry.

Yet the irony is that Japan, at any rate in the first instance, did not seek to redress the balance of right by falling on the rich Western powers, whose race policies added insult to inequity, but by imposing yet another layer of oppression on what Lord Curzon called ‘the great
helpless, hopeless and inert mass of China’. Of course here again the European powers had set the example. They proffered all kinds of reasons for the imposition of dictated treaties on China and their occupation of her river-ports, but their only real justification was superior force. Sometimes they made the point explicitly. In 1900 the Kaiser’s message instructing German troops to relieve the Peking legations had read: ‘Give no quarter. Take no prisoners. Fight in such a manner that for 1,000 years no Chinaman shall dare look askance upon a German.’
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The other powers behaved similarly, usually without the rhetoric. If the rule of force was the law of nations in China, why should Japan alone be refused the right to follow it? Japan could not accept that the Great War had ended the era of colonialism. For her, it was just beginning. China was Japan’s manifest destiny. Her leading banker Hirozo Mori wrote: ‘Expansion towards the continent is the destiny of the Japanese people, decreed by Heaven, which neither the world nor we the Japanese ourselves can check or alter.’
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But there was another reason for attacking China, which went to the roots of the Japanese dynamic impulse. ‘They are peculiarly sensitive’, wrote Kurt Singer, ‘to the smell of decay, however well screened; and they will strike at any enemy whose core appears to betray a lack of firmness …. Their readiness, in the face of apparent odds, to attack wherever they can smell decomposition makes them appear as true successors of the Huns, Avars, Mongols and other “scourges of God”.’
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This shark-like instinct to savage the stricken had been proved sound in their assault upon Tsarist Russia. It was to be the source of their extraordinary gamble for Asian and Pacific paramountcy in 1941. Now, in the 1920s, it was to lead them irresistibly to China, where the stench of social and national gangrene was unmistakable.

China’s plight was the result of the optimistic belief, common to intellectuals of the Left, that revolutions solve more problems than they raise. In the nineteenth century the great powers had sought to enter and modernize China; or, as the Chinese thought, plunder it. They had imposed ‘unequal treaties’ which the Manchu dynasty had little alternative but to accept. The imperial system of government, which had lasted for three millennia, could be seen in two ways. It represented the principle of unity, not easily replaced in a vast country with little natural focus of unity, for its people spoke many different languages (though, thanks to the imperial civil service, educated men shared a common script of ideograms). It could also be seen as the principle of weakness which made foreign penetration possible. Incapable of reforming or modernizing itself, it had allowed to happen what the Japanese ruling class had successfully prevented.
If China, too, could not have a revolution from above, then let it have a revolution from below.

That was the view of the radical intellectuals, whose leader was the Western-educated Sun Yat-sen. Like Lenin he had spent much of his life in exile. In 1896 he had been kidnapped by the staff of the Imperial Chinese Legation in London. They planned to ship him back as a lunatic in a specially chartered steamer, and once in Peking he would have been tortured to death, the punishment reserved for plotting against the Dragon Throne. But from his top-floor cell in the Legation at the corner of Portland Place and Weymouth Street, Sun had thrown out messages wrapped around half-crowns. One had been picked up by a black porter, who took it to the police; and soon after the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, got Sun freed.
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He eventually returned to China. At exactly the same time as Lenin was promoting his ‘vanguard élite’ theory to justify middle-class intellectuals pushing a largely non-existent proletariat into revolution and Mussolini’s mentors were experimenting with ‘revolutionary syndicalism’, Sun founded a secret society, the Hsing Chung Hui. It was based partly on European, partly on Japanese models, and its object, like Lenin’s, was to overthrow the imperial autocracy by force. It exploited famines and rice-harvest failures, assassinated provincial officials, occasionally captured cities, or engaged in more general revolts in 1904 and 1906. Its opportunity came when the death of the Dowager-Empress Tzu Hsi in 1908 left the throne to a two-year-old, Pu Yi. A national assembly was convoked. There was a possibility of creating a constitutional monarchy which would have introduced the democratic principle while conserving the unifying principle of monarchy, shorn of its abuses. But Dr Sun would have none of it. On 29 December 1911 he set up a Republic in Nanking, with himself as president, and six weeks later the Manchus, the last of China’s dynasties, abdicated.