The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (49 page)

The Japanese went to the Paris peace conference in 1919 numbering themselves among the victors; they departed as if they had been on the losing side. On territorial matters, they had no cause for complaint; they inherited the former German concessions in Shandong, including Tsingtao, and were granted the islands they had occupied in the Pacific as mandates (the Palaus, Marianas, Carolines and Marshalls). Taking President Wilson at his idealistic word, however, they also called for an amendment to the League of Nations Covenant that would assert the equality of the world’s races. Neither Wilson, with Western democratic sensibilities to consider, nor the Australian premier William Hughes, who had committed himself to a ‘Whites Only’ immigration policy, was minded to oblige.
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The defeat of the amendment was a slap in the face, though it suited the Japanese to parade their injury. As Prince Konoe Fumimaro said of Woodrow Wilson’s vision
of the post-war order, ‘Democracy and humanitarianism were nice sentiments, but they were simply a cloak for the United States and Britain to maintain their control over most of the world’s wealth.’ This spat over race heralded a rapid breakdown of the wartime alliance between Japan and the Western powers. In 1923 the Anglo-Japanese alliance was allowed to lapse; both parties agreed that it was superseded by the five-power treaty on naval arms limitation agreed at Washington the year before. Even more than the British, many Americans now regarded Japan’s success as a potential threat. As early as 1917, the US Navy identified Japan as America’s most likely enemy in a future war. The atmosphere was further soured in 1924 when Congress, egged on by the xenophobic Hearst press, passed the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act, which was explicitly directed against (among others) the Japanese. Western suspicions were merely confirmed when the Japanese ignored the ban on the construction of military facilities in mandated territories, turning Truk in the Carolines into their main South Pacific naval base.

Yet there was no inexorable march to war leading from 1919 to 1941. Japan in the 1920s showed every sign of accepting her place in a world dominated by the Anglo-Saxon powers. Under the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the Japanese government agreed to limit the tonnage of their navy to 60 per cent of that of the British and American fleets and to withdraw their military forces from Tsingtao, Vladivostok and the northern half of Sakhalin. Japan also agreed not to build naval bases in southern Sakhalin and Formosa (Taiwan). By 1924 there had been significant cuts in the strength of both the army and the navy. Total military expenditure was reduced from 42 per cent of the national budget in the early 1920s to 28 per cent by 1927. The standing army numbered 250,000 men. The Japanese also subscribed to the so-called Nine-Power Agreement reasserting the American principle of an ‘Open Door’ in China, which retained the near fiction of Chinese political sovereignty while allowing the advanced economies to carve her up as a shared captive market. The Japanese did not insist on retaining control of Shandong. It seemed as if – in the words of Matsui Iwane, one of the army’s rising stars – Japan would, at least for the time being, have to ‘substitute economic conquest for military invasion, financial influence for military control,
and achieve our goals under the slogan of co-prosperity and coexistence, friendship and co-operation’. Meanwhile, Japanese domestic politics seemed to move in step with those of the Western democracies, particularly after the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1925. Civilian politicians were in charge, and behind them the family-run business conglomerates known as
zaibatsu
. The threats to their position – rural food riots, banking panics, ambitious generals – were the normal threats facing democratic leaders in the volatile post-war world. The fact that two successive prime ministers, Hara Kei and Takahashi Korekiyo, contemplated abolishing the post of army chief of staff is a mark of the confidence of the civilians at this time. Japan’s economy continued to grow steadily, propelled forward by productivity gains in agriculture and light industry. Although protective tariffs favoured the growth of heavy industry, it was textile exports that were the key to Japan’s rising prosperity in the 1920s.

In Britain the inter-war years were marked by a decline in the power of two traditionally important institutions: the monarchy and the military. In December 1936 Edward VIII abdicated, having been bullied into doing so by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who disapproved of the American divorcée he wished to marry and who asserted that the British public (and the governments of the Dominions) shared his sentiments.
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The armed forces, meanwhile, were starved of cash on the principle that there would not be another major war for at least ten years – a ‘Ten-Year Rule’ that was introduced in 1919 and reaffirmed annually until 1932. In Japan the opposite happened. Monarch and military both grew more powerful. The Japanese answer to the Depression was not national socialism, as it was in Germany. It was imperial militarism.

In December 1926 the ailing Emperor Yoshihito died, to be succeeded
by his twenty-five-year-old son, Hirohito, who had been regent since 1921. Hirohito had visited Britain in 1921, where he had enjoyed the comparatively informal lifestyle of his royal counterparts. His accession to the imperial throne was as elaborate a ritual as any British coronation. Having spent the night in the holiest of Shinto shrines at Ise, communing with his progenitor the sun goddess Amaterasu O-mi-kami, Hirohito was formally reborn as a living god on November 14,1928. Two weeks later, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the new god reviewed a spectacular parade by 35,000 imperial troops. A new era, known, in retrospect ironically, as
Shōwa
(shining peace), had begun. Hirohito was, like most monarchs, quite unsuited to executive power. A marine biologist by inclination, he would probably have been happier in a laboratory than at the centre of an imperial court. He had envied the ‘freedom’ enjoyed by British royalty, who were under no obligation to behave like deities. Yet he never outwardly doubted his divine status. Nor did he ever seriously question the use that was made of his supreme right of command to strengthen the political power of the armed services – ‘the teeth and the claws of the Royal House’.

There was a tension at the heart of the Japanese army too. The first lesson young conscripts learned was the Soldier’s Code, the seven duties of the soldier: ‘Loyalty; unquestioning obedience; courage; controlled use of physical force; frugality; honour and respect of superiors.’ They were taught to value obedience above life itself, on the principle that ‘Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.’ It was glorious to fall like the cherry blossom, in the pristine state of dutiful youth. Those who died this way joined the
kami
or spirits housed at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. This was not quite the samurai code of
bushidō
, as expounded for British and American readers by Nitobe Inazō in 1899, which had also venerated qualities like rectitude, benevolence, politeness, truthfulness and sincerity – making it recognizably, as Nitobe argued, the cousin of Anglo-French chivalry. Rather, the Japanese army took from
bushido
whatever was best calculated to engender a fanatical subservience to imperial authority and the military command structure – including the preference for suicide, preferably by agonizing disembowelment, over any kind of dishonour or failure. Training was intended to push
men to the very limits of their physical and mental endurance. Recruits were drilled until they could run 100 metres inside sixteen seconds, run 1,500 metres inside six minutes, jump nearly four metres and throw a grenade over thirty-five metres – all in full marching dress. A regiment was expected to be able to march twenty-five miles a day for fifteen days with just four days’ rest. Harsh physical punishments, including routine face-slapping, became the norm even for minor breaches of discipline. As one who fought against it observed, ‘It was his [the individual Japanese soldier’s] combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese Army… so formidable.’

Yet the backward-looking ethos of Japanese military training was in many ways at odds with the reality of mid-twentieth-century warfare. Officers like Nagata Tetsuzan, head of the War Ministry’s military affairs bureau, had seen at first hand the pitiless impact of fire against men – no matter how well trained and spiritually uplifted – in the trenches of the Western Front. He urged that Japan learn from Germany’s mistakes in the First World War by preparing systematically for a future total war, drawing up meticulous lists of the national resources that would need to be mobilized. The more men like Nagata studied these lists, the more they appreciated Japan’s fundamental weakness. But they inferred from this not the need for caution and conciliation, but the need for territorial expansion, and soon.

China, the most likely location of new Japanese living space, was a country in turmoil – the remnant of an ancient empire, the kernel of a new republic, the raw material for one or more colonies. Its predicament had much in common with that which had occurred in Turkey in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, with the difference that China’s Kemal – Chiang Kai-shek – ultimately failed where Kemal succeeded in establishing a stable nationalist regime. A revolution in 1911 had overthrown the last Qing Emperor, but the republic that succeeded him had proved a precarious structure. Although it had led the revolution and went on to win a clear majority in elections to the National Assembly, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang), led
by Sun Yatsen, was forced to yield the presidency to the militarily powerful Yuan Shikai. Yuan was able to crush a second revolution instigated by the Guomindang, but his bid to make himself Emperor ended with his death in 1916. Japanese wartime demands had stoked up nationalist sentiment, particularly among educated Chinese. Indeed, when the Paris peacemakers awarded Japan the former German possessions in Shandong there were furious protests by students in Beijing, culminating in the Tiananmen Square demonstration of May 4, 1919. However, the nationalist movement soon split between a revived Guomindang and a new Chinese Communist Party. The rest of China seemed on the verge of disintegration as warlord clans carved out their own fiefdoms, the Anfu controlling the provinces of Anhui and Fujien, the Zhili running Hebei and the area around Beijing, and the Fengtien notionally in charge of Manchuria. Meanwhile, the country’s most important economic centres were under one form or another of foreign control as the system of treaty ports and extraterritoriality reached its zenith.

The extent of China’s disintegration in the 1920s is hard to overstate. The People’s Republic of today projects itself as a homogeneous society, with more than 90 per cent of the population identified in an official census as members of the Han ethnic group. The China of eighty years ago was anything but a unitary state. Quite apart from the fifty or more other ethnic groups and the eleven or more language groups still identifiable today, inhabitants even of neighbouring villages could speak mutually incomprehensible dialects. The dynasty overthrown in 1911 had been Manchu; the empire’s political centre of gravity had been in the north, in Beijing. But many of the decisive political events of the revolutionary and civil war periods took place in Shanghai, far to the south. Both the reformed Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party were established in Shanghai, which was itself dominated by the French Concession, to the west of the Old City, and the larger International Settlement, which extended along the north bank of the Huangpu River. Ironically, even the supposed nationalists looked to foreign powers for assistance. As early as 1923 Sun Yatsen sent his playboy protégé Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow to ask for assistance. Stalin responded by sending Mikhail Grunzeberg to China, with the task of reorganizing the Guomindang along Marxist-Leninist
lines. Without this Soviet support it is doubtful that the Guomindang would have expanded so quickly from its Cantonese power-base. It was Moscow that ordered the Chinese Communists to subordinate themselves to the Nationalists in a ‘united front’.

Within the Guomindang, however, Soviet ‘democratic centralism’ was slow to take root, particularly on the central question of how best to free China. Indeed, in the wake of Sun’s death in 1925 the party threatened to fall apart. As Chairman of the Nationalist government in Nanking, Wang Jingwei favoured a conciliatory approach towards the foreign powers, particularly Japan. Indeed, Wang’s rhetoric seemed to echo the pacific sentiments emanating from Japan’s long-serving Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō. Chiang, by contrast, sought a break with Moscow and a full-scale military effort to unite China. His Northern Expedition of 1926 aimed to crush the warlords as a prelude to defeating the imperialists. The first problem that dogged Chiang’s career, however, was that internal enemies always seemed to take priority over foreign ones. No sooner had he concluded his campaign in the North than he unleashed a ruthless attack on the Communists in Shanghai, allying with local gang leaders to massacre thousands of trade unionists and other suspected Communist members. Chiang’s second problem was corruption. Though he called on his fellow Chinese to embrace the four Confucian principles of Li (property), Yi (right conduct), Lian (honesty) and Qi (integrity and honour), the reality of Guomindang rule was rampant graft. Among Chiang’s most reliable confederates was the Shanghai gangster ‘Big-Eared Du’, who was appointed – conveniently, from his own point of view – director of the Opium Suppression Bureau in Shanghai.

In the midst of this confusion, there was little to choose between Japanese and British policy. Although British politicians seemed willing to make concessions on the issue of extra-territoriality, the proverbial men on the spot continued to act as if China were merely an eastward extension of the Raj. In 1925 British police in the Shanghai International Settlement killed fifteen Chinese workers who had gone on strike, provoking another wave of public indignation. A year later British sailors were involved in a pitched battle at Wanhsien on the Yangtze River in which more than 200 Chinese sailors and an unknown number of civilians were killed; the number of British
fatalities was just seven. At the end of 1926 Britain sent some 20,000 troops to Shanghai, in response to Guomindang pressure on British concessions up the Yangtze. British and American ships shelled Nanking after Chinese soldiers killed a number of foreigners. Japan’s conduct was little different, except perhaps that the use of naked force came slightly later. In May 1927 and again in August, troops were sent to Shandong to protect Japanese assets from Chiang’s forces. But once it became clear that, having won the internal power struggle, Chiang was in no hurry to confront the foreign powers, the Japanese seemed content with their share of the spoils of the Washington Treaty system. A visitor to Shanghai in around 1930 would have been struck more by the similarities between British and Japanese interests in China than by their differences.