No less true of Isoroku Yamamoto.
THE RISE TO POWER of Japan’s ultranationalist right was a gradual process that defies easy narrative. It did not repeat the pattern of German or Italian fascism, in which a single magnetic leader rode to absolute power on the back of a disciplined political party. It was a fractious and decentralized movement, a loose confederation of shifting, secretive, like-minded nationalist societies that briefly gained prominence and just as soon dissolved or splintered. The ideological emphasis varied, but often had surprisingly anti-capitalist overtones, with some groups calling for the “return” of all private property to the emperor. Many wanted to do away with all vestiges of Western-style democracy. Others wanted to confront the West and expand Japan’s overseas territories. If the movement had a center of gravity, it was in the Japanese army, or rather cliques of predominantly mid-level officers within the army. But it drew supporters from many different walks of life, including scholars, artists, writers, students, clergymen, politicians, bureaucrats, colonial adventurers, martial arts gurus, naval officers, merchants, and members of the court aristocracy. As in Europe, the movement did not lack for mass public support in the early years of the Great Depression, and by the mid-1930s it was no longer safe to hold dissenting views.
The twenties had been the era of “Taisho Democracy,” in which the prevailing political climate was moderate and tolerant. It was an era of parliamentary democracy, the heyday of civilian statesmen and Western-educated diplomats who sought friendly relations with the United States and Britain, and were willing to sign treaties that restrained Japan’s imperial ambitions in Asia. Political and intellectual elites set out to make Japan more worldly and cosmopolitan. Downtown Tokyo was rapidly assuming the look of a modern Western city, with tall office buildings, streetcars, automobiles, and neon signs—change the writing on the billboards and you might have been looking at Chicago or Philadelphia. There was a craze for all things Western, especially among the city’s huge population of university students. Young men (and even more scandalously, women) wore Western clothing and Western hairstyles, smoked Western cigarettes and drank Western cocktails. They whiled away the hours in cafés and nightclubs. They listened to jazz and learned how to dance. They watched the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They steeped themselves in Western literature and philosophy. They argued the merits of alien creeds like feminism and Marxism.
The times were tumultuous. Riots were endemic in both the cities and the country, usually prompted by wages, food prices, or rents. Landlords and employers were often targeted by death threats, and in turn hired gangs of thugs to break strikes and enforce contracts. Upstart business tycoons flaunted their recently won riches, and surreptitiously deployed their wealth to sway elections. International setbacks injured national pride. At the Versailles Conference, Japan had failed to obtain a racial equality clause (it had been opposed by the United States, among other countries). The U.S. Congress enacted the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which cut off immigration of ethnic Japanese into the United States. Disarmament treaties prompted the reduction of the Japanese army and navy, stunting the ambitions of younger officers whose frustrations were quick to metastasize into revolutionary violence.
Many Japanese were scandalized by the chaos, strife, and indecorum of Taisho Democracy—by the corruption, the vote-trading, the strident rhetoric, the vulgar flaunting of wealth, the Western-style bohemian degeneracy, and the intentional cleaving of society into rival camps. Those trends seemed irreconcilable with Nihonshugi, or “Japanism”—the cherished principles of Confucian harmony, filial piety, and reciprocal obligations between superiors and inferiors. No, all men were not created equal; no, political legitimacy was not derived from the consent of the governed; and no, ordinary people did not possess inalienable rights. If dissent existed, it could only be the symptom of a disorder. The Meiji emperor had given the Japanese people a quasi-democratic constitution as a “gift.” But he had also emphasized a political order based on national harmony, on serene interactions between the fixed echelons of society. In his Imperial Rescript on Education (1890), a document tantamount to scripture in prewar Japan, he had decreed: “Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of our Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education.” Democratic institutions could not easily grow and thrive in this soil. Autocratic government is a much more natural fit, and when push came to shove, there were simply not enough Japanese willing to put everything on the line to defend their democratic experiment.
The alternative was a theocracy known as Kodo, “the imperial way.” It was a vision of Japan as a family state, with the Tenno (or emperor) as father figure, godhead, and dictator. Its advocates declared that the nation could be reborn by harnessing the power of the Tenno against all the ills in society, defined variously as capitalist greed, the chaos of democratic politics, and the humiliations and abuses of foreign powers. That was an act of purification, for “Liberalism and individualism are the dirt which must be removed.” To millions of ordinary Japanese, there was something transcendent and sublime in the notion of subsuming themselves into the identity of the emperor; as the ultranationalist writer Ikki Kita put it, all of the “small selves” of the Japanese people would be absorbed into the “larger self” of the Tenno. The Tenno was the lineal descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-Omikami; he was the “supreme and only God of the universe, the supreme sovereign of the universe,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Goro Sugimoto, in one of his many prewar tracts; “everything in the universe is a manifestation of the emperor . . . including even the insect chirping in the hedge, or the gentle spring breeze.” His throne had been created when the heavens and earth first separated, and the first emperor descended from heaven. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 held that “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal” (Article I) and added, “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable” (Article III). He was the embodiment of all that was perfect in the Japanese people, but possessed none of their flaws; it was inconceivable that he could fail, or misconstrue his role in the hierarchy. He was infallible, by definition incapable of doing wrong: whatever morality existed in the world had emanated from his throne.
The Tenno was the only national monarch who was also a god. In fact, he was the ultimate god. It followed that his children, the racially pure and homogeneous people of Japan, were the world’s only divine race. Kodo bred contempt for all foreign races, relegating them to the status of lesser beings. In conquering them, Japan was also consecrating them, allowing them to bask in the sacred light of their holy sovereign.
Hirohito, who would ascend to the throne in 1926, was an unlikely candidate to be transmuted into a Japanese man-god. He had been born in 1901, the eldest son of the crown prince Yoshihito and grandson of Mutsuhito, the Meiji emperor. As an infant he had been taken out of the hands of his parents and brought up in carefully guarded isolation, under the influence of court handlers and military officers. The boy was shy and studious, weak-chinned, nearsighted, and slight of build; he spoke in a weedy and skirling voice. He was highly impressionable and eager to please—a trait that suited those tasked with his upbringing but could leave him vulnerable to manipulation once he took the throne. His education was largely controlled by major figures in the army and navy, including the two most renowned heroes of the Russo-Japanese War—first General Maresuke Nogi, later Admiral Heihachiro Togo. From early childhood, Hirohito was inculcated with the seapower teachings of Alfred Thayer Mahan. He was also steeped in the doctrines of divine descent and State Shinto, though he seems never to have taken the dogma of his own divinity seriously. He was rarely allowed beyond the moats and high stone walls of the imperial compound, a 240-acre expanse of grand build
ings and parklike land in the heart of Tokyo—but when he did venture out, he did so in a military uniform.
As Hirohito grew older, some in the court circle began to suspect that his childhood had been too sheltered, that he had not developed the requisite personality or leadership skills. He remained shy and socially awkward, and preferred to stay completely mute at court gatherings. He had a disturbing habit of talking to himself. He was watched carefully for any sign of psychological imbalance, for his father, Yoshihito, who became the Taisho emperor in 1912, had once, at a public function, rolled an official parchment into a tube and held it up to his eye as a telescope; he was thereafter shut away in monastic seclusion where his behavior could not distress the public. While in middle school, the boy took a deep interest in natural history, particularly marine biology. He worshiped Darwin, whose bust he had installed in his study, and he had a private laboratory installed in his palace. Here he was happiest, studying and categorizing his specimens. He found solace in science, and that was taken as evidence of an inquisitive and empirical mind. One biographer, Herbert Bix, observes, “Specimen collection and the study of taxonomy without question fitted Hirohito’s methodical nature. And certainly during his most active years, when surrounded by great disorder, by problems to which all solutions were hard and uncertain, science was a steadying, relaxing constant in his life.”
As a young man, the crown prince leaned toward relatively liberal and moderate policies. He embraced the causes of parliamentary government, arms limitation, and diplomatic cooperation with the Western colonial powers. Those tendencies were reinforced by leading members of the genro (elder statesmen) and royal court, including Prince Saionji and the major characters in his entourage, the lord keeper of the privy seal and grand chamberlain. In 1921, at age twenty, the future emperor traveled to Europe. The trip was unprecedented and caused considerable unrest among right-leaning Japanese, who feared not only for the prince’s safety but also that he would come under the dangerous influence of foreign ideas. He was hosted by royalty in several capitals, including the Windsors in London; Hirohito seems to have been bowled over by the relatively free and easy dealings of the British royal family with their servants and friends. In France he visited sites of the recent cataclysmic battles of the Great War, and was appalled by the scale of the carnage; the experience redoubled his determination to preserve the peace of Asia.
Upon his return to Japan, the prince took a more confident tone with his advisers and began to assert his personal freedom. He went skiing in the mountains of northern Honshu; he took up golf; he went out on the town with his school chums. All of that came to an abrupt end in 1923, when a would-be assassin took a shot at the prince as he rode through the streets of downtown Tokyo in his car. The bullet did not penetrate the vehicle, but the court suddenly closed ranks and Hirohito found himself boxed in, a virtual prisoner in his palace, his access to those outside his inner circle strictly curtailed. The “Toranomon Incident,” as it was known, considerably empowered the ultranationalist right, for it reinforced the godlike separation of the soon-to-be Tenno from his subjects, and cut the young man off from sources of information and perspective that might have stiffened his spine against the hidebound, reactionary impulses of his court and military advisers. Daikichi Irokawa writes that “Crown Prince Hirohito, who had returned from Europe imbued with the ideals of freedom, had to return to the life of a caged bird, far removed from ordinary life.”
Hirohito inherited the throne in 1926, upon the death of his father. The official enthronement ceremonies, comparable in scale to a modern-day Olympic Games, would last the entire year of 1928. Major new construction and public works projects were commenced in towns and cities throughout the country. There was a seemingly endless succession of banquets, rice-growing ceremonies, Shinto rites, flag parades, and lantern processions. Japanese received lavish gifts or awards or new titles of nobility, said to have come from the emperor himself. Prisoners were freed in magnanimous gestures of amnesty in his name. Hirohito performed obscure and secretive rites at the tombs of his ancestors, dressed head to toe in white silk garments and assisted by high Shinto priests. All throughout, these processes were explained to the Japanese people in the newspapers and over the new medium of radio; scholars and clergymen explained the essence of the Japanese kokutai (political order). All year long, the Japanese people’s ears rang with the rhetoric of an omnipotent and benevolent Tenno; and by December, when the imperial regalia were transferred to Hirohito, the nation had been fully indoctrinated, to a degree unknown in past Japanese history, with the cult of the emperor as a living man-god. It was said that all Japanese had now been fused into “one mind united from top to bottom.” Shortly thereafter, on Tokyo Bay, a huge naval pageant was performed for the new emperor, who stood rigidly on an elevated platform as more than 200 ships and 130 naval aircraft passed in review. The new era was designated Showa, meaning “brightness” and “harmony” or “illustrious peace.” Hirohito was now Showa Tenno; few Japanese had ever heard the name he had been given at birth.
The new era coincided with a crackdown on dissent. The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 clamped down on suspected Communists and other radicals. The dreaded Kempei Tai, or “Thought Section” of the Criminal Affairs Bureau, began surveillance of liberals in the media and academia and in suspected political parties. Staff, resources, and power grew steadily. With the approach of the Second World War, the organization and its networks of spies touched the lives of almost all Japanese, especially through the peculiar local institutions known as tonarigumi or “neighborhood associations.” Agents of the Kempei Tai were perfectly willing to use prison and torture against dissidents, but to a surprising degree they often relied on a softer touch, on moral suasion; it seemed they were genuinely more interested in curing, converting, reforming, and rehabilitating wrong-headed Japanese rather than merely repressing or punishing them. From 1933 to 1936, according to the Japan Times, some 59,013 people were arrested and charged with “dangerous thoughts.” Of those, fewer than 5,000 went to trial and only about half of those trials resulted in a prison sentence. The successful agent would note with pride not the number of convictions he had won but the number of Japanese who had fallen under the sway of foreign or radical ideas whom he had, with “tact and skill,” somehow managed to coax back into the fold.
LIKE ANCIENT ROME, Japan had built its empire gradually. Like Rome, its foreign territories were added opportunistically, and by different means—some by outright conquest, some through creative diplomacy, some by taking advantage of turmoil in neighboring countries, by sending in troops to “restore order.” As with Rome, every war had enlarged Japan’s empire, and every enlargement had merely whetted its appetite for more.
Japan’s remarkable rise was said to be preordained, the will of the gods. The same had been said of Rome’s. But Japan, unlike Rome, had never suffered a defeat.
In 1875, Japan absorbed the desolate Kurile Islands north of Hokkaido; in 1876, the Bonin Islands, south of Japan; the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa, in 1879. Japan fought and defeated China in 1894–95, and Russia in 1904–05. Those victories brought control over Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea, annexed in 1910. In the Great War, Japan sided with the Allies and was subsequently awarded with several former German colonies of Micronesia—the Carolines, the Marshalls, and the Marianas (not including Guam, a U.S. territory).
Among Japanese nationalists it was an article of faith that the United States, the British, and to varying degrees the other Western imperial powers were secretly in league against Japan. Their anger conflated a long litany of complaints, reaching decades back into the past, into a single grand conspiracy to rule over Asia. The West had forced Japan to sign humiliating “unequal treaties” governing its foreign trade and extending extraterritorial jurisdiction over Japanese soil. Anti-Japanese agitation in California was believed to have been deliberately fomented to arouse the American public, and to mobilize the country for war against Japan. At Vers
ailles, after the Great War, the Western powers had rejected a proposed “racial equality” clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The United States had enacted the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted Japanese immigration and (worse) dumped the Japanese into the same class as Chinese and other lesser nations. There was deep suspicion that the United States and its European co-conspirators were plotting to reverse Japan’s commercial and territorial gains in China.
The United States, according to a view that was steadily gaining adherents, was a rapacious, duplicitous, and malevolent nation that had bent every fiber of its strength to the subjugation and exploitation of all Asian nations, while deceitfully spreading the rhetoric of freedom, democracy and self-determination. No more stark example of this hypocrisy existed than the enforcement of a “Monroe Doctrine” in the Americas, claiming a sphere of influence throughout a neighboring continent, while insisting on an “Open Door” in China, which was really just doublespeak for the right of Americans and their British cousins to exploit China’s riches while preventing others from doing so. Throughout every stage of the rise of Japan, they believed, the United States had conspired to thwart Japan’s noble ambitions, attempting by devious means to reverse its military conquests, working behind the scenes to dissolve the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, using arms control diplomacy to check the growth of Japanese seapower.
Nothing got under the skin of the ultranationalist hard-liners so much as the naval limitation treaties. In the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, Japan had agreed to cap the aggregate tonnage of its battleship fleet to 60 percent of the U.S. and British totals, expressed as a 5:5:3 ratio. The treaty reflected a post–First World War consensus that the great powers must shun another costly naval arms race. Japan’s lower cap was justified by its lack of commitments elsewhere than the Pacific: Japan could maintain its entire fleet close to home, while the Americans and British had to worry about the Atlantic. The 5:5:3 ratio was confirmed by the London Naval Disarmament Treaty of 1930, and extended to auxiliary ships as well. Until the early 1930s, most Japanese elites—including Hirohito, his court entourage, civilian ministers, and even most of the senior admirals of the navy—supported the treaty system as a means of restraining the superior industrial and shipbuilding potential of the Western powers. Even those with dreams of further Asian conquests saw the sense in buying time, in building up Japan’s power gradually and deliberately. The navy could adhere to treaty limits while enhancing its human capital through recruitment and aggressive training, and the downsized battleship program would allow emphasis on categories outside the treaty provisions, including carrier aviation and submarines. Most of all, the treaties spared Japan the economic burden of a naval arms race at a time when its industrial economy was still fragile and emergent. Naval spending had ballooned to some 31 percent of Japan’s budget in 1921; the treaty brought that down to 21 percent in 1923. Before the treaty, Japan was literally verging on bankruptcy; military and naval disarmament offered badly needed fiscal relief in the 1920s.