A Patriot's History of the Modern World (53 page)

It was not until September 25, 1940, that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop informed Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, that Germany and Italy had signed a military alliance with Japan. He attempted to reassure Molotov that this was not directed at the USSR. Quite the contrary, Ribbentrop said it was designed to warn off elements in the United States who might be considering entering the European conflict. The resulting alliance, signed in Berlin as the Tripartite Pact, formally established Germany, Italy, and Japan as the Axis Powers.

By that time, however, Japan had come to resemble Germany a great deal, and its own path of destruction through the 1930s seemed to lead inevitably toward just such an alliance. For this reason it is useful to review the decade for Japan as it unfolded half a world away from the coming blitzkriegs in Poland and France.

Even in its doctrines of racial superiority and imperial expansionism, the underlying philosophies of the Empire of Japan started to resemble the Nazi program in almost every facet. Where the Nazis had their doctrines of Aryan supermen, Japan would belatedly produce in 1943 its own view of racial domination as elucidated in “An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus” that plotted to populate Asian soil with “Japanese blood.”
¹³⁴
In contrast, Chinese were described as “bacteria infesting world civilization,” and “Nanking vermin.”
¹³⁵
Just as the Third Reich had its grandiose scheme for resettling Poland and Russia with Aryans, so too the Japanese envisioned an ambitious global policy that, in its final stage, would incorporate not only China and Southeast Asia and India, but also Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
¹³⁶
By 1942, a geographer working for the imperial government categorized Europe and Africa as part of Asia and proposed renaming America “Eastern Asia” and Australia “Southern Asia.”
The world's oceans would be renamed the “Great Sea of Japan.” A book of the same year,
The Establishment of the Greater East Asian Order
, claimed that “Asia was on the verge of overturning European control everywhere.”
¹³⁷
Another document, the “Investigation of Global Policy,” envisioned 12 million Japanese settlers living in these new lands, including 2 million in Australia and New Zealand. The Japanese language would become the official language of all, and a colonial-style industrial relationship would be imposed in the “southern areas.” While many of these planning documents appeared after Japanese military successes early in the 1940s, they all reflected intrinsic and well-established Japanese attitudes throughout the previous decade.

Unlike the Nazis' race policies, the Japanese did not envision extermination of their “parasitic” enemy, but rather the subjugation and quasi-assimilation of these peoples into Japan's empire. All Asians in Japan's “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” introduced in 1943, would be required to learn Japanese; and Japanese settlers had to be wary of racial “pollution.” There was to be no intermingling with the Han (Chinese), and personal relationships with people in “child countries” occupied by the Empire would not be permitted. A contemporary and accurate model was available in Korea, which Japan had annexed in 1910 (although the Korean emperor never signed the document). As early as 1939, the Korean language was banned from schools and all Koreans were required to attend Shinto services. Korean laborers were shipped to Japan, just as Poles, Czechs, and Jews of all nationalities were shipped to Germany to work for the Nazis. Without a doubt, the policies of militant Japan were as racist as those of Nazi Germany. While fascism and Bushido could provide a vision of the future in which Japan and Nazi Germany could coexist in principle, the racial demands of each doctrine promised a future conflict even if wars with the Americans, British, and Soviets had not intervened first. It is significant, therefore, that the totalitarians' mind-set was quite uniform. In each case, the violence with which their ideas were implemented spawned substantial resistance within conquered territories, while simultaneously producing a number of toadies who sought self-preservation or some level of power within the system. This helps explain how 136 million Germans and Japanese could dominate seven times their number of subjugated peoples. Contrary to the history of the British Empire, however—where the actual military presence was minuscule and the level of violence relatively minor—
the Axis nations employed both a large martial footprint and brutal, murderous tactics to ensure compliance.

Just as Hitler perceived America to be the most significant long-term threat to Germany, so too did the Japanese. As early as 1907, Japan identified the United States as the “sole imaginary enemy” in its “National Defense Policy.”
¹³⁸
American bases in the Philippines, in particular, galled the Japanese, posing in their view a threatening naval presence in Japanese waters. Of the many naval lessons of World War I, Imperial Japanese Navy authorities took from the Battle of Jutland the maxim that a 40 percent advantage in ships and firepower was necessary to achieve victory at sea. Attaining this ratio—or, at least, preventing the United States from reaching it—demanded that Japan have a 70 percent superiority ratio over the United States in the Pacific.
¹³⁹

A thirst for resources led Japan into its decade-long entrapment in China, an adventure that finally produced war with the United States. Some of its aggression derived, as Hitler's did, from the perception of Western weakness. Britain's signature of the London Naval Treaty in 1930, which limited the size of certain classes of warships (at a fixed disadvantage for Japan), symbolized the end of the Royal Navy as the premier force of its kind in the world. The treaty also insulted Japan by imposing lower limits than on the “white” nations, contributing to Japan's decision to ignore the treaty and eventually leave the League of Nations. There seemed to be little danger, since Singapore's defenses had been neglected as numerous British leaders called for reductions in the naval budget and overseas expenditures, citing pledges by Japanese leaders to resolve disputes peacefully.

Although the Soviet Union threatened to halt Japanese expansion on the Asian continent, the Japanese increasingly viewed the United States and Britain as the primary enemies. Smoot-Hawley Tariff increases convinced the Japanese they could not trust the United States as an economic partner, since after the act went into effect, silk prices plummeted by half and prices of imported food threatened the nation's ability to feed its population. Most
zaibatsu
heads (the leaders of Japanese industrial and banking conglomerates) and other officials in Japan had already determined that only through imperialism could Japan solve its problems of overpopulation and underproduction. Kingoro Hashimoto, a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army and a politician, wrote in
Addresses to Young Men
in 1939 that expansion of territory constituted the only one of the three options open to Japan for
growth, with the other two (emigration and free trade) closed off.
¹⁴⁰
Like most predator states, however, Japan responded to domestic hardship by increasing spending on the military, ramping up the defense budget to nearly half of the government's total expenditures.

To portray Japan's aggression in the 1930s, however, as solely or even substantially a reaction to American and/or British policies misinterprets the reality and rationale of Japanese imperialism. Some historians have seen a cold, logical quest for raw materials and a response to economic deficiency.
¹⁴¹
And while one could contort the facts to play the resource card, it simply would not win the hand. Japan, pure and simple, fomented what John David Lewis called a “social pathology” and what Kazuko Tsurumi labeled a “socialization for death.”
¹⁴²
The belief in Japanese superiority permeated the educational system, the compromised Shinto religion, and every aspect of Japanese life. Bushido warriors were lionized as the embodiment of the new military ethic. Racial dominance of Japanese was preached at every opportunity, and reinforced in all literature. Concepts of “saving face” and family honor in service to the emperor were enshrined as sacred behavior.

Assassination was so commonplace as to become just another aspect of Japanese protest. Enshrined and venerated as
gekokujo
(insubordination), young officers and patriots could and did honorably call senior officials and officers to account for their perceived deviations from
kokutai
(national policy) through outright political murder. Of course, the lives of the perpetrators were forfeit, and that was expected to occur through ritual suicide (
seppuku
). From 1912 to 1945, six prime ministers and a dozen cabinet ministers were killed. By 1930, the army had also forced out two civilian prime ministers. After Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi received a mandate to reduce the armed forces, he was assassinated; then his successor had to resign before being gunned down as well. The plotters of the assassination of the last prime minister, Ki Inukai, intended to shoot him with the visiting American superstar actor Charlie Chaplin, who escaped death only when the ringleaders learned that Chaplin's reception plans had changed. When asked during trial what the significance was in killing Chaplin, one of the conspirators said the actor was “the darling of the capitalist class…. killing him would cause a war with America….”
¹⁴³
Invoking
kokutai
, killers and mutineers could threaten
any
politician with death. Japan therefore drifted into a shadow fascism wholly unrecognizable from British or American representative constitutional government.

Japanese society had became increasingly militarized after the Meiji
Restoration, with the army as the instrument of the emperor's divine will and officers expected to fulfill that will with their lives. The connection between the army and the cult of assassination cannot be overemphasized: when Prime Minister Hamaguchi's murderers came to trial, the court received a petition for clemency signed by thirty thousand holders of the Order of the Golden Kite, Japan's highest military decoration.
¹⁴⁴
Perhaps the most influential figure of the day, War Minister General Sadao Araki, was described as “a ferocious bushido ideologue…who ran a Hitler-style youth movement.”
¹⁴⁵
Araki had led a group of officers in “the imperial way,” or
Kodo
. An ardent expansionist whose musings encapsulated the Japanese sense of victimhood and grievance, he cited European incursions into China as having no justification.

In stark contrast to purported Japanese racial superiority was the island's perpetual shortage of raw materials so desperately needed for the industrial age. Japan was entirely devoid of oil, had few iron deposits, and needed growing imports of rubber, tin, and other resources—all of which reinforced Japan's key weaknesses. Manchuria offered a solution to many of those deficiencies, particularly iron. As Czechoslovakia had constituted low-hanging fruit to Hitler, Manchuria dangled as a resource-rich plum to be plucked by the Japanese militarists. In 1931, a group of Japanese army officers constructed a plot to blow up a Japanese-owned railway outside Mukden, South Manchuria, and blame it on Chinese dissidents to provide an excuse for the Japanese Kwantung Army to invade North Manchuria. When War Minister Jiro Minami sent a representative to curb
gekokujo
in the Kwantung Army, the officers quickly put their plan into motion and detonated their explosives. They followed that up by using artillery against the Chinese garrison in Mukden. The Japanese then attacked and took Mukden, killing 500 Chinese soldiers in the process. In the aftermath of the “Chinese provocation,” the Japanese established a puppet state called Manchukuo in 1932.
¹⁴⁶
No military leaders were reprimanded for acting without authority, for to do so would have run against the grain of Japanese society as a whole.

Japan's postwar intellectual heritage had come in large part from the ideas of Ikki Kita, who in 1919 wrote
A Reconstruction Program for Japan
that blended socialism, Japanese imperialism, and Shintoism into a single code. Kita's
Reconstruction Program
justified coups d'état as a means of changing governments, a rejection of parliamentary democracy, support of a dictatorship under the emperor as the representative of the nation, and the prohibition
of all political criticism.
¹⁴⁷
Kita himself would later be arrested and executed for complicity in the 1936 plot to decapitate the Japanese civilian government.
¹⁴⁸

Beneath the cover of the Shinto religion—itself nonaggressive, but within Bushido, a militarized system as all-influencing as Nazism or communism—Japan turned into a total authoritarian state by the early 1930s. Christian missionaries had made only minor inroads in Japanese society, while attempts to inculcate Western-style individual rights and the respect for the rule of law proved even less sturdy, withering under calls for a totalitarian state. All around them, the Japanese saw powerful dictators rewarded and the response of the pacifistic democracies ignored. Less than a month after Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty, mobs carried books of Japan's leading apologist for Western constitutions, Tatsukichi Minobe, to a public book burning on top of the Tokyo Military Club.
¹⁴⁹
Minobe was derided as “theoretically a materialistic individualist and morally an anarchist.”
¹⁵⁰
A subsequent statement of “the Japanese mind” issued by the Ministry of Justice held that “there has been no conception of the individual as opposed to the state….” Individuals, noted the ministry, “participate in the highest and greatest value when they serve the state….”
¹⁵¹
In effect, Japanese individuals had become interchangeable parts serving the Japanese state. Neither Stalin nor Hitler could have wished for more.