Japan faces the World, 1925-1952

Mary L. Hanneman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317878957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

By 1925 the process of Japan's transition to a modern industrialised, westernised state was pretty much complete. Not only had the imperial tradition been restored with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, but some forms of democratic parliamentary institutions had been set up. However, during the years that followed, the so-called imperial democracy came under pressure as the Japanese sought to impose tight control over not only their own people but their neighbours as well. This impressive survey looks at developments at home, Japan's aggressive foreign policy particularly in China during the 1930s and 1940s, and her role in the Second World War. Finally, the post-war reconstruction orchestrated by the Americans is examined. The cut-off point is 1952 - the date when Allied Occupation formally came to an end and Japan once again became independent.

PART ONE INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

BACKGROUND AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

In 1868, a group of young samurai banded together to overthrow the moribund Tokugawa Shogunate. The decaying government, they believed, was not equal to the task of facing the Western imperialism that threatened their country. Instead, they would restore direct imperial rule and create a new government that could face the Western challenge and preserve Japanese sovereignty. This event, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, revolved around the goals that would guide Japan through the first half of the twentieth century. Encapsulated in the Meiji slogan ‘Rich Country, Strong Army,’ these goals represented an effort to modernize and industrialize the country and to achieve equality with and acceptance by the West. This would be achieved largely by trying to emulate the West. With the ‘restoration’ of imperial rule, Japan, alone among the East Asian nations, implemented a thoroughgoing reform program that would enable it successfully to avoid Western domination. This Meiji ‘Revolution’ fundamentally altered the shape of the Japanese society, economy and government as well as Japan’s position in Asia and the international community.

The great promise of Meiji was the creation of political democracy where none had existed before. The Meiji leaders, a young, energetic and ambitious group, outlined a series of reforms designed to strengthen Japan against the West, not to preserve Japanese culture, but to preserve the Japanese nation. To this end, they abolished the rigid traditional class system, which for centuries had divided society between the ruling samurai aristocracy and the subservient commoners. In the Imperial Charter Oath of April 1868, the new government promised that ‘all classes high and low shall unite,’ and be given the opportunity to ‘fulfill their aspirations’ (quoted in Schirokauer, 1978: 418). Land reform gave the peasantry title to the land they had worked for generations, and the freedom to grow whatever crops they chose. A new tax system, payable in money, relieved them of the need to grow rice and rice alone for payment to their daimyo overlords.¹ Education became compulsory: four years for boys and girls, later expanded to six years. A new banking system made low-interest loans available to entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurialism itself, for years despised as a mark of the lowly merchant class, was encouraged as a way to promote industrialization. The government also engaged in entrepreneurial activities, investing in and building industrial concerns like shipbuilding, mining, and chemicals manufacture, which it later sold off to private investors. Most promising to many was the prospect of a constitution, which the Emperor promised to his people in 1881. Constitutional government, many hoped, would bring democracy.

The real point of the Meiji Restoration, however, was not to establish political democracy. Democracy was instead merely a tool for building a strong state. The leading Japanese advocate of democracy in the early Meiji period was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who in the late nineteenth century wrote, The only reason for making the people in our country today advance toward civilization [viz. Western-style democracy] is to preserve our country’s independence’ (Fukuzawa, 1973: 151). In their quest to emulate Western strength, the Meiji leaders put in place the outward forms of democracy, but, intent on making rapid progress toward industrialization, they did not allow for true democratic expression. Democracy, after all, is a messy and time-consuming business. That the style, but not the substance of democracy was in place became most obvious in the 1890 Meiji Constitution, the document which would fundamentally shape the political order and political culture for the next five and a half decades. Debate between the Meiji leaders over whether to pattern the government on the English model, with a strong legislative branch and weak executive, or on the German model, with a strong executive and weak legislature, was the most divisive controversy of the Meiji period. Those who supported a more open, liberal government were defeated and forced to resign from the government.

The resulting Constitution, promulgated in 1890, created an extremely strong executive branch. The Emperor-centered document placed virtually no limits on imperial power: the Emperor could declare war, make peace, conclude treaties, and legislate by edict. The only check on imperial power was informal: while the Emperor – a youth of 16 at the time of the Restoration – had supreme authority according to the Constitution, it was understood by tradition and by the Meiji leaders that he would not exercise these powers on his own initiative.

Moreover, the Meiji system put the government into a precarious position vis-à-vis the military. A constitutional clause made the Army and Navy independent of civilian control, answerable only to the Emperor. But if the military was answerable only to the Emperor, and the Emperor was not expected to exercise power on his own initiative, who was in control of the military? As long as the civilian government was sound and functional, this question remained unasked and unanswered, but any crisis made the system vulnerable to the unilateral exertion of military power. On paper, the Emperor was all-powerful. In reality, he was not expected to act on this authority.

The first test of Japan’s success in achieving its goals of ‘Rich Country, Strong Army’ came in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Viewing Korea as ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan,’ the Japanese leadership focused on keeping Korea free from foreign domination. When China seemed poised to take a more prominent role in Korea, Japan initiated war. Victory over their vast continental neighbor, whose civilization the Japanese had admired (albeit grudgingly) for centuries, seemed to vindicate the tremendous change and sacrifice the Japanese had endured over the last generation. Fukuzawa, the Meiji liberal, wrote exultantly, but ominously, of the victory: ‘Unimpassioned thought will show this victory over China as nothing more than the beginning of our foreign policy’ (Fukuzawa, 1948: 359). In the peace settlement, Japan not only won a huge indemnity, which the government invested to spur industry, but also several territorial concessions, including the island of Taiwan, over which it established colonial rule in 1895. Following up this victory a scant ten years later with an even more surprising victory over Russia, Japan seemed destined for greatness, and a renewed sense of national pride began to take hold in Japan. At the same time, however, the Japanese became aware of Western racism as they confronted the wary Western response to their victory: as newspaper owner and former bureaucrat Ito Miyoji declared to a German friend, Of course, what is really wrong with us is that we have yellow skins. If our skins were as white as yours, the whole world would rejoice at our calling a halt to Russia’s inexorable aggression’ (quoted in Duus, 1976: 134). Increasingly, an ‘us against them’ mentality began to develop. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan extended colonial control over Korea.

Thus, by early in the twentieth century, its empire now fortified with colonies in Taiwan and Korea, Japan seemed well on its way to securing its Meiji period goals. Industrial production continued apace, with significant cooperation between the government and the emerging entrepreneurial class. As Chalmers Johnson (1982) has noted, Japanese government and business shared similar goals. ‘[T]he secret of success in business,’ declared one early Meiji businessman, ‘is the determination to work for the sake of society and mankind as well as for the future of the nation, even if it means sacrificing oneself’ (Morimura Ichizaemon, quoted in Marshall, 1967: 36).

For some, this sacrifice was more serious than for others. The growing demand for factory labor enticed many workers, male and female, off the farms. The resulting urbanization combined with Japan’s growing international stature and the political reforms of Meiji to create an increasingly politicized population. While the government wanted a mobilized population, one that would work hard to achieve national goals, it could not afford a restive and demanding population. In the early 1900s the government, concerned that the demands of a more sophisticated and politically active population would threaten progress, enacted a series of social welfare and labor laws, including a national health insurance law, child labor laws, and labor mediation laws. This action, the government sponsors hoped, would prevent the ‘social diseases’ they saw in the West, which they feared carried the germ of revolution. The government made a preemptive strike, but in doing so, robbed the people of the opportunity for political action and retarded political development.

When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, Japan, now clearly the dominant nation in Asia, declared war on Germany and focused its attention on the German-leased territories in China. Japan quickly occupied the Shandong Peninsula, taking control of German-built mines, railroads and other industrial concerns, and occupying German-held territories in the Pacific. Without taking on any other significant military involvement during the war, Japan was able to concentrate on supplying the other combatants with war matériel, and enjoyed strong economic growth as previously closed European and American markets opened up to Japanese goods.

Concerned that Chinese weakness would threaten Japan (China’s last imperial dynasty fell in 1911) and eager to back up its military gains with written agreements, in 1915 Japan took advantage of the diversion of international attention and issued the Twenty-One Demands to China. The series of demands signified Japan’s desire to establish itself on the Chinese mainland, especially in the northern area, Manchuria, and called on China to sign former German rights on the Shandong Peninsula over to Japan and to extend to Japan further privileges in southern Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. After an unsuccessful appeal to the preoccupied European nations, China found no alternative but to sign what was in effect an ultimatum. Japan received huge concessions in China. But the Chinese government, which by the mid-1910s had fractured into warlordism, was so unstable that it could offer little guarantee for Japan’s ill-gained rights. This would serve to heighten Japanese anxiety over China, an anxiety that would continue to infect Japanese attitudes toward China in the coming decades.

The economic growth of the World War I period was also a mixed blessing, for it brought with it rampant inflation. Between 1914 and 1918, rice prices in Japan quadrupled. In August 1918, high rice prices led to the outbreak of rioting which unexpectedly spread across the country. In the popular mind, the high rice prices resulted in part from the government’s stockpiling rice to provision troops for the anti-Soviet Siberian expedition, launched in response to the Russian Revolution and designed to protect Japan’s interests in the Manchurian railway. To quell the rioting, the government dispatched the police and army. Tens of thousands of the over 700,000 who participated were arrested, and some of those charged were sentenced to death. This episode showed the dangers that lurked in the confluence of domestic and foreign crises, and also provided a foretaste of the heavy-handed tactics the government would employ in the future to silence the population and keep it on the straight and narrow.

Again, in 1923, crisis would pull back the curtain to reveal the darker side of Japan’s success. On 1 September of that year, a huge earthquake devastated the Kanto plain, on which Tokyo sits. The Kanto Earthquake, which ignited fires that swept across Tokyo, killed 106,000 people and injured another 502,000. In the midst of the confusion and chaos that followed the earthquake, rioting broke out as people lashed out in anger, frustration and grief. The target of this popular emotion was the Korean minority in Japan, whom many accused, with the aid of rumors spread by both the police and the media, of setting the fires and inciting the rioting. The government, on the other hand, used the opportunity provided by the chaos to round up hundreds of left-wing intellectuals and radical leaders, whom it suspected as vectors of revolution that threatened to derail Japan’s national progress.

The round-up of radicals continued into mid-September; the government justified its actions by claiming that radical leftists had incited the Koreans to revolt. In one case, Osugi Sakae, a leading anarchist, his mistress, the feminist Ito Noe, and his six-year-old nephew were arrested, imprisoned, and murdered by Amakasu Masahiko, a captain in the military police. This particularly horrifying instance of police brutality would later reverberate in the debate surrounding universal manhood suffrage. Moreover, the effort to recover after the earthquake put heavy financial burdens on the nation. The earthquake and its aftermath not only foreshadowed things to come, but also proved to be a trigger for future events.

Thus Japan entered the mid-1920s as a nation in flux. In 1925, after years of agitation, the government finally answered popular political demands with the passage of a bill extending suffrage to all adult males. As counterbalance to this fourfold expansion of the electorate, however, the government also passed the Peace Preservation Law, which outlawed certain radical organizations and gave it a stronger hand with which to control the population. Clearly, Japan was poised between the promise of greater democracy for the people and the threat of greater control by the government. The battle between these two trends, begun with the opening of the Meiji period, would be played out over the course of the next two decades.

In an extension of the policies that had won both Taiwan and Korea as Japanese colonies, in the early 1930s and 1940s Japan practiced aggressive policies in Asia aimed at establishing Japanese control over the entire region, eventually moving into Manchuria, China, Indochina and beyond. These efforts put Japan on a collision course with the United States and led to Japan’s 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Pacific War. As the war raged, the Japanese government imposed ever-tighter controls on its own population while extending despotic control over most of Asia.

After initial victories, however, Japan’s war efforts bogged down. When the ‘utter destruction’ promised in the Potsdam Declaration was visited on Japan, no one, least of all the Japanese themselves, knew what the future held. The Allied Occupation set out, with characteristic American hubris, to remake Japan in its image, to demilitarize and democratize the country, putting in place a series of far-reaching reforms that included fundamentally altering the role of the Emperor and rewriting the Constitution, as well as enacting land and labor reforms. When the Occupation ended in 1952, Japan regained its sovereignty.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW OF MODERN JAPAN

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, young nationalists from all over Asia hoped to learn from the Japanese example of how to modernize a nation. Thousands of young men (and a few women) flocked to Japan to observe the many modernizing reforms that the Japanese government had put in place to strengthen and industrialize their country. For these young people, Japan was a model for Asia. But from the perspective of Western historians studying Japan during the first half of the twentieth century (and there were very few), Japan’s modernization was sui generis, completely unique, without precedent. Moreover, the process could not be replicated by the other ‘backward’ Asian nations.

The natural corollary of the interpretation of Japan’s modernization as sui generis was that the process had not only been set in motion but had indeed been made possible by the arrival of the West in the form of US Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Without the arrival of the West, and without the subsequent ‘assistance’ and examples provided by the West, Japan’s modernization would have been a non-starter, went this argument. Because the Japanese people were so adept at imitation, an art they had been perfecting since the early seventh-century adoption of Chinese ways, Japan was able to modernize successfully.

These views of Japan’s modernization – that it was unique, that it was based primarily on Western contact – began to change around the end of World War II with the publication of a seminal work by Canadian historian E. Herbert Norman in 1940. In this book, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State, Norman looked at trends and developments in Japan’s traditional society that predated the arrival of the West by a couple of centuries. The actual beginnings of Japan’s modernization could be traced back to indigenous developments in Japanese society such as the growth of a market economy, the spread of transportation and communications networks, and profound changes in the social order, developments that occurred over the course of the Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. Norman’s scholarship shifted the focus away from the West as motive force in Japan’s modernization.

The end of World War II ushered in a whole new generation of Western scholars on Japan, an ironic but natural result of the long years of war. This new generation of scholars observed the many changes in the postwar world, primarily the beginning modernization of many other undeveloped nations and, coupling these observations with Norman’s scholarship, arrived at more refined interpretations of Japan’s modernization process. Japan could now be viewed as an example of how the process of modernization might take place in a non-Western nation, and its experiences could be extrapolated to other non-Western societies undergoing modernization.

The modernization process is a difficult, painful one for any society. As Japan underwent the fundamental social, political and economic changes linked to industrialization, it inevitably lost much of its traditional culture. In the case of a non-Western nation, however, the cultural change is even starker, since as second-tier developers these nations inevitably borrow the more advanced technology of the industrialized nations. Consequently, the process happens much more rapidly and the social dislocation is much more severe. Japan’s modernization as a non-Western nation made it an example of a ‘late developer,’ an interpretation that unites Norman’s idea of the ‘indigenous’ roots of modernization with the ‘Western impact’ interpretation. Since Japan had not been among the first tier of modernized nations, it had to ‘catch up,’ but it had an important head start in the industrialization process, because of the developments that had taken place during its traditional period. The Japanese fear was that if it did not catch up with the industrialized West, it would be overwhelmed, perhaps robbed of its sovereignty by the West. As a late developer, this interpretation runs, Japan had to develop very rapidly, or face the consequences. The government promoted the idea that achieving the twin goals of ‘Rich Country, Strong Army’ was imperative to the very survival of the nation, and brought intense pressure to bear on the Japanese people to work toward those goals for the national good. In this view, Japan’s mobilization for war can be seen as an extreme example of the dislocation experienced by any society in transition.

However, this interpretation almost brings us back to the view of Japan as a model for modernization, a model for late developing non-Western nations. So, were those late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian students correct in their assessment of Japan as a shining example? After the conflagration of World War II, when Japan unleashed its aggression on its Asian neighbors, few non-Japanese Asians could support the notion of Japan as model. Yet from the Western perspective, Japan seemed to be the storybook model of success: Japan’s industrialization was rapid and so effective that it enabled Japan to assert itself militarily against its neighbors.

It was not until the mid-1980s and the early 1990s that Western scholars (in fact, the very scholars who had vaunted Japan’s ‘success’) began to reassess Japan’s record. Japan’s modernization, they concluded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Maps
• PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO: ANALYSIS
• PART THREE: ASSESSMENT
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Glossary
• Who’s Who
• Bibliography
• Index