Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (62 page)

The statement was mendacious because the philosophy in this form was an import from Europe, and misleading because those in Japan who most emphatically subscribed to it were the first to disobey and assault the state when its policies were not wholly subject to their control. In any case, the state was not an entity but a collection of warring factions, with murder as the arbiter. Putting military men in charge of ministries did not solve any problems: they were just as liable to be assassinated as civilians. Taking decisions collectively was no protection either: the gunmen developed the technique of collective assassination. Besides, the military were as divided as the civilian parties. The navy wanted a ‘Southern’ policy, expanding into the Far Eastern colonies and islands of the Dutch, French and British, rich in the raw materials, especially oil, which Japan lacked. The army wanted expansion into the Asian mainland. But they, too, were divided into ‘Northerners’, who wanted to build up Manchuria and strike at Russia; and ‘Southerners’, who wanted to take the Chinese cities and push up its great river valleys. None of these men, or the civilian politicians who sided with them, thought through their plans to their ultimate consequences. They were all brilliant tacticians; none was a strategist. Everyone had striking ideas about beginning a war; but from first to last, from 1931 to the hour of the bitter defeat in 1945, no Japanese, civil or military, worked out realistically how the war was likely to end. How could that be? To be known to argue that, in certain circumstances, defeat was possible, was to risk death. When debate was inhibited by physical fear, and changes of political direction brought about by slaughter, cold-blooded calculation – the essence of Realpolitik – became impossible. The truth is, as the 1930s progressed, Japan was ruled and her policies determined not by any true system of government but by an anarchy of terror.

The watershed was 1935–6. On 12 August 1935, the faction-fighting spread to the armed forces, when General Tetsuzan Nagata, Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau, was hacked to death by a radical colonel, Saburo Aizawa. Aizawa declared at his trial: ‘I failed to dispatch Nagata with one stroke of my sword, and as a fencing instructor I am bitterly ashamed.’
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But he was ashamed of nothing else and used his protracted trial to make violent anti-establishment
war propaganda. It was still going on when the elections of 20 February 1936 saw a recovery of parliamentary liberalism – for what it was worth. Five days later there was an evening party at the house of the American Ambassador, Joseph Grew. Grew was deaf, and it is characteristic of the difficulties of working with Japan that, during his audiences with the Tenno, he could not hear a word of what the interpreter said as it was an unforgivable offence to speak above a whisper in the Emperor’s presence.
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But Grew’s wife, a granddaughter of the famous Commander Perry, spoke perfect Japanese, and their house was a caravanserai of Japanese constitutionalism. That evening their guests included Admiral Makoto Saito, the Privy Seal, and Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, the Chamberlain. After dinner Grew showed them the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald film
Naughty Marietta
, which was much relished, the Japanese wives weeping copious tears of appreciation.
¹⁴

Early the next morning, 1,500 men of the Tokyo garrison, including the Guards, two crack infantry regiments and artillery units, staged a
putsch.
They took the law courts, the Diet building, and the headquarters of the army, navy and police; and they surrounded the Imperial Palace. Assassination squads, armed with swords (for honour) and Thomson sub-machine-guns (for efficiency), were sent to the residences of the leading members of the government. Saito was murdered. So was the head of Military Education, and the Finance Minister. Suzuki, though injured, was saved by the heroism of his wife. The Prime Minister, Admiral Okada, a prime target since he had just announced that the elections meant a return to constitutional rule, was also saved by his wife, who locked him in a cupboard, and the hit-squad gunned down his brother by mistake. The ultimate object of the plot was to murder and replace the Emperor; but he survived too, and the navy and imperial guards forced the mutineers to surrender four days later. Thirteen leading rebels were tried hastily and executed in secret – only two committed
hara-kiri
, though all were given the chance to do so. It was notable that throughout this grisly episode, nobody concerned – the victims, their colleagues, the Emperor, senior army and navy officers, police, bodyguards, and least of all the murderers themselves – behaved with anything other than cowardice and pusillanimity. The only exceptions were the despised womenfolk, the wives and maidservants of the ministers, who showed extraordinary courage and resourcefulness.
¹⁵

The attempted
putsch
was widely interpreted as pro-Nazi, but it is more probable that its authors were, in some cases wittingly in others unwittingly, servants of Soviet policy. Their manifesto denounced the ‘many people whose chief aim and purpose have been to amass
personal material wealth disregarding the general welfare and prosperity of the Japanese people …. The
Genro
, the senior statesmen, military cliques, plutocrats, bureaucrats and political parties are all traitors who are destroying the national essence.’
¹⁶
The young officers involved were quite prepared to introduce a form of Communism into Japan, through a mixture of Marxism and
Kodo
(the imperial Way’) with a Communist puppet-Emperor. This was the view of the Soviet agent Richard Sorge, who worked from within the Nazi embassy. He guessed, and so informed his masters in Moscow, that the mutiny would favour Soviet policy since it would mark a movement away from the ‘Northern’ tactic of confrontation with Russia along the Manchukuo border, and towards the further penetration of China. That was doubly welcome to Stalin since an all-out war between China and Japan would not only rule out an attack on his vulnerable eastern bases but, in all probability, force Chiang and the Kuomintang to drop their differences with the Chinese Communists, form a Popular Front, and thus hasten the moment when the whole of China would join the Soviet bloc.
¹⁷

That, indeed, is exactly what happened. The mutineers had wanted a more active Japanese military policy, favouring a ‘Northern’ outlet for it. The Japanese military establishment, having hanged the mutineers, promptly and cravenly adopted their activism, but – as Sorge had guessed – gave it a ‘Southern’ twist. There is no evidence, however, that Japan ever willed an all-out war with China. Rather the contrary. It was her policy to pose as China’s fellow-oriental ‘protector’ and ‘brother’, and gain her ends by trade, diplomacy, pressure and propaganda. The only great power with an interest in a Sino—Japanese war was Soviet Russia; and the only element within China which stood to gain from one was the
CCP.

The chronology of events is suggestive. By the summer of 1934, the Communist armies in China, of which Chou En-lai was political commissar, were close to destruction at the hands of Chiang’s
KMT
forces and their German advisers, von Seeckt and von Falkenhausen. In the autumn the Communist war-lords decided to begin what later became known as ‘the Long March’, ostensibly to fight the Japanese in the north; in fact to get away from Chiang’s encircling blockhouses and barbed-wire. The details of the March, which began in October 1934 and ended in Yenan in December 1936, are Maoist legend, and may be believed or not according to taste.
¹⁸
The salient point is that during the course of it Mao, for the first time, got control of the main Communist forces. The nominal commander, Chang Kuo Tao, split off and took his men to Sikiang, and so was branded with the heresy of ‘flightism’. Henceforth, as supreme Communist war-lord (with Chou as his political Merlin), Mao could
accuse any Communist competitor of ‘war-lordism’ and concentrate all power, military and political, in himself.
¹⁹

By the time this process of Communist concentration was complete and the March was over, towards the end of 1936, Stalin was pushing his ‘Popular Front’ policy of getting the
CCP
and the
KMT
to act together in war with Japan. Mao was at first reluctant: he thought Chiang should be shot. But during a visit to the northern front late in 1936, Chiang was arrested in a mysterious episode known as the ‘Sian Incident’; his papers were searched and Chou En-lai got access to his diaries revealing the fierceness of his anti-Japanese feelings.
²⁰
As a result Mao allowed himself to be persuaded; and by 1 March 1937 he had reverted to his earlier nationalism, telling a visitor, Agnes Smedley: ‘The Communists absolutely do not tie their viewpoint to the interests of a single class at a single time, but are most passionately concerned with the fate of the Chinese nation.’
²¹

To be pursued successfully, a nationalist line required a full-scale ‘patriotic war’. On 5 July 1937, the Chinese Communists and the
KMT
signed a working agreement. Two days later, on the night of 7 July, came the first ‘incident’ between
KMT
and Japanese forces at Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, the first shots coming from the Chinese side. It was this escalating episode which led to full-scale war. It is significant that the opposing commanders, Sung Chi-yuen,
KMT
Commander-in-Chief in North China, and the Japanese
C
-in-c General Gun Hashimoto, were on friendly terms and did everything in their power to damp down the affair. But repeated and inexplicable acts of violence make it clear that somebody was deliberately seeking a full-scale conflict. General Ho Ying-chin, the
KMT
Minister of War in 1937, believed to his dying day that it was the work of the Japanese military radicals, the same group who had staged the Tokyo mutiny the year before. But Japanese officers present during the Bridge affair thought at the time that the violence was the work of subversive elements in the Chinese forces, and after Mao’s post-war triumph they were convinced that his agents, acting on Soviet instruction, provoked the war. The Japanese Soviet expert, General Akio Doi, said in 1967: ‘We were then too simple to realize that this was all a Communist plot.’ What is quite clear is that the Marco Polo affair was not a repetition of the Manchurian Incident of 1931. There was no conspiracy in the Japanese army. The Chinese behaved with rather more intransigence and arrogance than the Japanese once the incident took place, and they took the initiative in spreading the war.
²²

What is equally clear is that Russia was the great beneficiary of the Sino—Japanese war. The Japanese had been the last to abandon the attempt to crush the Bolshevik regime by force. Their frontier with the
Soviets remained tense, and in the late 1930s there were several very serious military encounters: in 1937 on the Amur River; in 1938 at Changkufeng, seventy miles from Vladivostok; and in May-June of 1939 on the Mongolian-Manchukuo border – the last being a large-scale armoured engagement, foreshadowing the vast tank-battles of the Second World War. Without the China war, Japan would undoubtedly have been able to engage the Russians in full-scale conflict, and drive them from the Far East. As it was, she could not divert sufficient forces; and the 1939 battle, in which General Zhukov made his reputation, was a Soviet victory and the first defeat the Japanese forces had suffered in modern times.
²³

The other gainer was Mao. In the autumn of 1937, with the war now raging uncontrollably, he told his generals:

The Sino-Japanese conflict gives us, the Chinese Communists, an excellent opportunity for expansion. Our policy is to devote 70 per cent of our effort to this end, 20 per cent to coping with the government, and 10 per cent to fighting Japanese. This policy is to be carried out in three stages. During the first stage we are to work with the KMT to ensure our existence and growth. During the second stage we are to achieve parity in strength with the KMT. During the third we are to penetrate deep into parts of China to establish bases for counter-attack against the kmt.
²⁴

This policy was carried out to the letter. Chiang retired to Chungking, deep in the interior. Mao remained in the north-west, avoiding large-scale engagements with the Japanese but fighting a low-key guerrilla war and creating a military and political empire among the peasants.

For Japan, the war was a moral, political and ultimately a military and economic disaster. The Americans had always been basically pro-Chinese. The ‘China lobby’ already existed. Roosevelt was violently anti-Japanese. On 5 October 1937 in a speech in Chicago, he equated Japan with the Nazis and the fascists and signalled her moral isolation: ‘When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients.’
²⁵
In the conduct of Japanese policy, the military were now in the saddle, the civilian ministers being no longer consulted, or even informed, of decisions. And military control was itself shaky, as the debased doctrine of totalitarian Shinto and bushido took over the army. The Chinese capital, Nanking, fell in December 1937. The Japanese commander, General Iwane Marsui, had entered China declaring: ‘I am going to the front not to fight an enemy but in the state of mind of one who sets out to pacify his brother’; he ordered his men to ‘protect and patronize the Chinese officials and people as far as possible’. In fact once the army entered Nanking, the radical
officers took over. For four weeks the streets of the city were given over to one of the largest-scale massacres in history. Men, women and children, said an eye-witness, ‘were hunted like rabbits. Everyone seen to move was shot.’ Some 20,000 male Chinese civilians of military age were marched out into the countryside and killed by bayoneting and machine-guns – foreshadowing the Soviet massacres of the Poles in 1941 at Katyn and elsewhere. The killings went on until 6 February 1938, and by then between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese were dead. Even an official Nazi embassy report described the scenes as ‘the work of bestial machinery’. The atrocities got wide coverage in world newspapers. The Emperor and civilians in the cabinet claimed later that they knew nothing of these events until after the war.
²⁶