Season 15, Episode 1: Reaction and Repression

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Season 15: The Early Showa Period! We will be discussing events in Japanese history spanning the years from 1926 to 1945, an incredibly busy nineteen-year period for both Japan and pretty much the entire rest of the world. Naturally we’ll also be checking in with the broader developments in other parts of east Asia, as well as Europe and the United States. We’ll start by discussing the elevation of Emperor Showa and Japan’s contemporary political backdrop.

The popular narrative propagated by the UK, France, and the US following their great victory over the Central Powers was that the first World War was essentially a victory of liberal democracy and freedom over authoritarianism and militarism. The future belonged to free peoples whose liberal-democratic governments functioned as their servants, not their masters. During the years immediately following the end of the first world war, liberal democracy indeed seemed to be having a moment around the globe.

Having cast off the Kaiser in a revolution toward the end of the great war, the government of Germany spent several years post-1918 finding its footing and refining its character. The constitution adopted in the summer of 1919 defined the new German nation as a semi-presidential republic with both a president and a chancellor. The president, who served a seven-year term, was the commander-in-chief of the army and he appointed and dismissed the chancellor at his pleasure. The new bicameral parliament was composed of a lower house, called the Reichstag, composed of proportionally-elected representatives and an upper house, called the Reichsrat, which was composed of federal state representatives, kind of like senators. Austria-Hungary likewise was divided into two separate nations, the Republic of German-Austria and, at least initially, the Republic of Hungary. The Republic of German-Austria adopted a similar government to that of the German Republic. The Ottoman Empire was overthrown by Turkish nationalists, who established the State of Turkey over much of Asia Minor, with their colonial possessions in the middle east being divided between British and French spheres of influence in the form of newly-formed Arab states. Russia… well, the Tsars were gone, at least. During the early years of the United Soviet Socialist Republic, it was difficult to know which way the political winds were blowing and while within about a decade those winds blew them straight into a murderous dictatorship, it wasn’t at all clear in the early years that this would be the end result, which meant there were still reasons for optimism.

Even Japan was showing signs, throughout the mid-1920s, that it was embracing liberal democracy in spite of the desires and rigorous efforts of its conservative elites. Universal manhood suffrage meant that the lower house of the imperial diet was more democratic than ever before, a development which advocates of human rights and representative government hoped would steer Japan away from authoritarian tendencies. Then Emperor Taisho died, the Taisho Period abruptly came to an end, and a new Tenno was installed at the head of the Empire of Japan.

So who was Hirohito, the eldest son of the late Emperor who now occupied the Chrysanthemum Throne? Unlike the quietly mysterious Emperor Meiji and the chronically ill Emperor Taisho, we actually know quite a bit about the man who would become Emperor Showa. In addition to the journals of his various tutors and caretakers around the palace, he also left behind journals of his own. The question of whether or not he was a reliable narrator of his own life, however, still fuels heated debates among Japanese historians today and will continue to do so for years to come.

While I always draw from multiple sources, there are a few that will guide our discussion this season which deserve special mention. “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” is a remarkable book which was published in 2000 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year. However, that book comes with a caveat; it was at the time of its publication, and remains today, somewhat controversial. The author, drawing from primary sources like journals of Hirohito and his various advisers, claims that the emperor was an active leader in the second world war, and offered sanction for at least some of the many war crimes committed in his name by his army and navy. This is a serious charge; many Japanese historians previously had accepted that the emperor was kept ignorant of the worst atrocities and that he felt intimidated by the increasing power of his military leaders to simply nod his head when they made suggestions or requests of him. We will discuss that book and its claims in more detail in episodes to come this season; for now it is enough to recommend that you read it for yourself and likewise read its critiques (some of which make extremely salient points). Suffice to say, the emperor’s role in the second world war is still a matter of fierce debate, and by the end of this season, you will have some idea of which side of that debate I find myself. Honorable mention as usual goes to Marius Jensen’s “The Making of Modern Japan” and Andrew Gordon’s “A Modern History of Japan,” both excellent general works on modern Japanese history.

Born on April 29, 1901, the man who would become Emperor Showa was known throughout his childhood as “Prince Michi,” but took the name Hirohito at his coming-of-age ceremony. He was the eldest of four sons and during his youth his education was placed in the hands of General Nogi Maresuke by order of Emperor Meiji. You may recall from season 13 that General Nogi was considered a hero of the Russo-Japanese War for his siege and eventual capture of Lushunko, also called Port Arthur. You may also recall that the casualties sustained by troops under his command in that conflict haunted him so much that he and his wife committed suicide shortly after the death of Emperor Meiji. Hirohito’s education was taken over by two navy-men: Admiral Togo Heihachiro and Captain Ogasawara Naganari.

Of all the teachers who molded his young mind, Hirohito wrote especially fondly in his journal of Shiratori Kurakichi, an instructor of his middle school who captivated his mind by linking Japan’s growing success in the modern world with the divinity of its emperors, as well as teaching him that the Japanese were a superior race destined to govern the rest of the world with justice and benevolence. His connection to the military was not only education-related: in 1912 he was given an honorary commission in the Imperial Japanese Army as a Second Lieutenant and likewise made an ensign in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He was eleven years old, and these positions were symbolic, but his three younger brothers would likewise be made officers during their youths and some would even take on active service.

In episode 9 last season, we discussed how Hirohito undertook a grand six-month journey across Europe in 1921, visiting the UK, France, Holland, Vatican City, and many other friendly nation-states. He was the first Japanese crown prince to ever travel abroad, although the visit itself was a source of controversy in Japan because many conservatives opposed it. When he returned, he was made Sessho, or regent, and essentially performed his ailing father’s duties.

In 1923, just after the Great Kanto Earthquake and the massive anti-leftist violence that followed, Hirohito experienced an assassination attempt. As we discussed in the previous season, a leftist assassin, angry about the recent spate of police-sanctioned violence against his fellow partisans, fired a gun at Hirohito’s carriage, wounding a chamberlain but leaving the emperor himself unscathed. Hirohito himself seems to have been little affected by the incident; reportedly he was saddened by the whole affair after hearing of the would-be assassin’s later execution.

In December of 1926, on Christmas Day incidentally, Emperor Taisho passed away and his son Hirohito was proclaimed the new Emperor. This change of national sovereign presented an opportunity to those in government who feared that the fairly run-of-the-mill democratic changes of the Taisho Period represented a threat to the kokutai.

As you may recall from last season, Kokutai is a Japanese word which can be interpreted a variety of ways but which had essentially been claimed by conservatives during the Taisho Period to mean something like the ideal political status quo specific to Japan and intrinsic to its culture.

Even before the advent of the Showa Period, the seeds of reaction had been sown into Japan’s political structure. Alongside the Universal Manhood Suffrage Law, the Imperial Diet had also passed the Peace Preservation Law, which greatly empowered the state to engage in arbitrary censorship and oppression. Specifically, the new law greatly empowered an already-existing government entity called the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu, or “Special Higher Police.” Their rather ponderous name was usually abbreviated to “Tokko,” which is how I’ll be referring to them from now on.

Formed in 1911 in the wake of the High Treason Incident of 1910 - the leftist plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji - the Tokko were originally a modest group within the Home Ministry. Throughout the late 1910s, revolutions overturned, among many others, the governments of Russia, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, which spurred concerned Japanese leaders to continually vest the Tokko with greater and greater scope, authority, and resources. Their primary mission was the suppression of dangerous thoughts, which usually included keeping tabs on communists, socialists, student activists, anarchists, pacifists, and a smattering of far-right radicals for good measure.

Their expansion during the Taisho Period was small potatoes, however, compared to the explosion of growth they enjoyed when the Peace Preservation Law was initiated. Now they were expected to establish at least one branch in every prefecture, as well as additional branches in every major city and in overseas locations like London and Berlin which hosted a sizable Japanese populace. Some of their officers were in uniform, but many worked in plain clothes and spent their time infiltrating groups whose ideas were considered a threat to Japan’s Kokutai. They also maintained a network of informants who were already part of those groups. Both the informants and the undercover officers acted as provocateurs, encouraging members of these groups to attempt violent acts of terrorism and then arresting them in stings.

It is not incorrect to categorize the Tokko as a secret police organization in the same vein as the Tsarist Okhrana, the Nazi Gestapo, or the Soviet KGB. We will discuss one of their first large-scale arrests in the next episode.

The Meiji Constitution of 1890 placed the military under the direct command of the emperor. However, in practice this had been a mixed bag. Emperor Meiji was opposed to the First Sino-Japanese War, which was initiated without regard for his input. High-ranking officers going rogue and making independent commitments in the field was obviously far from ideal, but the imperial government often had great difficulty with military accountability. Even if they sometimes got carried away, the imperial government tended to appreciate martial spirit over passivity and inaction. Taking the initiative, even if it was unsuccessful, was often appreciated and, at the very least, was almost never seriously punished.

As the eldest of four sons, the new emperor Hirohito was occasionally troubled by the thought that he was potentially replaceable. Although the military might proclaim their devotion to him directly, there was plenty of historical precedent for forcing an emperor’s resignation and putting a more compliant brother on the throne in his stead. Throughout this season, as army commanders of various ranks take matters into their own hands, the emperor often will give those actions official sanction after the fact. Part of his motivation probably lay in his fear of a potential coup.

In the academic arena, there was still some debate over the proper relationship between the nation of Japan and its imperial sovereign. The pertinent question was not whether Japan should have an emperor - that was a given - nor did it challenge in any way the divine lineage of said emperor. The matter at hand was the emperor’s divinity - was that divinity sequestered to the sitting emperor alone, or was it possessed by the entire imperial family? Hirohito was obviously troubled by those who ascribed divinity to his brothers as well as himself, as this idea implied that he was indeed as replaceable as he feared. Some savvy up-and-coming Japanese leaders managed to gain some early promotions by writing screeds against those who argued for divinity across the family who were, they claimed, insufficiently reverent of the son of heaven who sat upon the Chrysanthemum throne and ruled with divine benevolence.

The issue of emperor worship is often fraught with over-generalization and misunderstanding. In the nonfiction book “The Women of Suye Mura,” which recounted events in 1935, Anthropologist Ella Wiswell interviewed some rural Japanese women whom she expected to believe whole-heartedly in imperial divinity and discovered in a moment of frankness that they were extremely skeptical. They believed the emperor was a great man, but just a man and explicitly not a god. One of the ladies commented, however, that she would never confess harboring this skepticism in the presence of a policeman, whom she feared would tie her up and throw her in prison. How many of her fellow Japanese citizens shared their disbelief is impossible to know, but it is worth remembering, throughout this coming season, that the Japanese people enjoyed a wide diversity of thought in the early Showa Period, in spite of the Tokko’s best efforts to suppress them. Not everyone signed up for the horrors that would come.

The state of the empire which Hirohito inherited from his chronically ill father in 1926 was, all things considered, pretty strong. In spite of occasional insurgencies, the Korean peninsula was firmly under Japanese control. Taiwan had also been thoroughly pacified by this point and was becoming a popular vacation destination. China was embroiled in a multi-party civil war between shifting alliances of warlords, which meant that they not only were no threat to Japan, but also might provide lucrative future opportunities for conquest, colonization, resource extraction, and imperial expansion.

However, the shadow of the first world war still loomed over Japan’s military. While Japan had been far from a central player in that conflict, many within her upper command structure believed that another large-scale global war was inevitable. A logical extension of that belief was that Japan ought to prepare her military if she did not want to suffer the same fate as the losing factions in the first world war, whose economies, societies, and cultures still struggled to recover after their crushing defeat.

The ruling philosophy which took hold of many Japanese leaders during the early Showa Period is known as “Kokkashugi.” Essentially, the term translates to “Nationalism” but it is best understood as a political umbrella under which emperor-worshiping ultranationalists, imperial expansionists, mainline conservatives, anti-zaibatsu activists, and militarists could comfortably find shelter. It is sometimes referred to as “Japanese Fascism,” though there is still vigorous debate regarding whether Kokkashugi should count as true fascism for a variety of reasons which are beyond our scope.

There were several prominent Japanese scholars and philosophers of the early twentieth century who are often credited with creating the intellectual scaffolding upon which Kokkashugi is built. The most influential, arguably, was Kita Ikki.

Born in 1883 on Sado Island, Ikki seemed to have acquired an innate sense of rebellion at an early age. In 1900, at the age of 17, he was publishing articles in his local newspaper which were critical of Japan’s political structure and development. He was attracted to socialism and in a few years had moved to Tokyo, where he met and worked alongside many of Japan’s earliest and most influential socialist thinkers. In short order, however, he abandoned that philosophy because he believed it was full of cynical opportunists.

In 1906 he published a massive 1,000-page political treatise under the title, “The Theory of Japan’s National Polity and Pure Socialism.” In that work, he advocated abandoning Karl Marx’s class-conflict paradigm and instead embracing an authoritarian philosophy which merged traditional Confucianism and a form of socialism that was fundamentally nationalist. I suppose you could even call it National Socialism, if you felt so inclined.

The Kokuryukai, or “Black Dragon Society,” liked the cut of Kita Ikki’s jib, and sponsored him to take a trip in 1911 and observe the Xinhua Revolution unfolding in China. He wrote about his observations and continued developing his own philosophy, steadily steering toward the far right. Eventually his writings called for a top-down coup to be initiated by the emperor himself which would suspend the constitution and grant emergency powers to the sovereign. The emperor could then reorganize the state along the lines recommended by Ikki himself. His program was vast and we don’t have time to illustrate it in its entirety, but we can look over some bullet points.

A new constitution would be promulgated, though he also suggested that amending the current one might work well enough. A new diet would be elected through relatively universal male suffrage and the Kazoku system of peerage would be abolished. Private industry would be nationalized. Taxes would be abolished, save for those strictly necessary to fund the state, freedom for all would be guaranteed under the new constitution, as well as the right to property, right to education, and basic human rights firmly established. In terms of foreign policy, Ikki recommended that Japan should take every necessary step to secure east Asia from western imperialism, through conquest when necessary but preferably through submission. In essence, Kita Ikki was proposing a Showa Restoration, wherein the Showa Emperor would radically transform Japan into an autocratic socialist state in a way that echoed the many reforms and changes of the Meiji Emperor before him.

It is not uncommon, when studying the development of fascist ideology, to encounter thought leaders who hold beliefs which strike us as so internally contradictory as to render them incomprehensible. Kita Ikki did inspire some adherents who believed that his pan-Asian national socialist agenda would work regardless of its eclectic features. However, the primary thought which drove his proposal was the emperor’s existing superiority within Japan’s Kokutai. While there would be no Showa Restoration of the type envisioned by Kita Ikki, the seeds for absolute power in Japan were, arguably, already vested in the sovereign. While emperor Meiji had been satisfied presiding over the privy council and genro, and while emperor Taisho had been too chronically ill to enforce whatever political will he had, emperor Showa was young enough to have ideals and experienced enough to understand the inner workings of the government over which he was now the head. The choices he would make, and the choices which would be made in spite of him, would define Japan’s place in the world, for better or worse.

Next time, we will discuss the first major national event of the Showa Period - a domestic crisis which would cause economic upheaval just a few years before the major upheaval of the Great Depression.