Government by Assassination

Hugh Byas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415585293
• eBook ISBN: 9781136927980
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Written by someone who spent twenty-three years as a journalist in Japan, this book describes the political and military aspirations of Japan at a tumultuous period of twentieth century history. The book examines the workings of the Japanese government and discusses the role of the military in shaping political ideals: ideals which were a compound of Marxism and National Socialism, transformed for Japanese uses and combined with fanatical racial, national and semi-religious obsessions.

ChapterI
MURDER OF A PRIME MINISTER

Nine o’clock on Sunday morning in Tokyo is seven o’clock on Saturday night in New York and there was plenty of time to get through to the foreign-news desk in the New York Times office. On Sunday mornings there was usually nothing to do except go through the Japanese papers. Ofusa-san, my assistant, had already combed them. I went over them again with him. There was nothing, not an item, not a hint. All quiet on the Tokyo front.

My wife came into the room that we called the office. It was a big room with three tall windows that rattled like the devil. In winter they were pasted up to keep the wind out. On this Sunday morning in May they were wide open. You could see half Tokyo and, on the horizon, a long, saw-tooth ridge of mountains.

“There’s nothing in the papers,” I said, “not a damn thing. I have nothing to do. Let’s go off somewhere. We haven’t been out of Tokyo for a couple of years.”

I thought we had struck a blind spot in the news, one of those spells when for days at a time nothing happens that is worth cable tolls. At first the correspondent enjoys it. Then, if it lasts more than forty-eight hours, he gets a marooned feeling and begins to think the office will forget him.

But on that Sunday morning a quiet patch was indicated. Many troubles had come to a head and burst in the past six months. In Japan, which has five hundred earthquakes each year, when the dreaded rocking of the house begins, people get the habit of waiting a moment to see if it is a bad one before they run for safety. Ninety-nine times out of every hundred the foundations down below only slip an inch or two and find another base. It seemed as if Japanese affairs had shaken themselves down to a new temporary equilibrium.

To itemize the elements of that entirely erroneous feeling: A “liberal” Cabinet (inverted commas are indispensable; it means liberal relatively to the others) which had timidly opposed the army’s policy of grab in Manchuria had fallen and made room for another which accepted the army’s program. An administration that knew its place with the army was more likely to have a peaceful existence than one the fighting men disliked. The new government had held an election and received a substantial majority of the popular vote. It had been in for three months and was settling down.

Japan had gone off gold, to the profit, it was said, of some big houses and one powerful politician. Exports were booming and the farmer’s burdens had been lightened. The former Finance Minister, Junnosuke Inouye, who had stubbornly stuck to gold, and an American-educated capitalist, Baron Takuma Dan, had been assassinated. The murderers were the usual young morons kept by the patriotic societies for such jobs. The police had caught them and the outburst of political thuggery seemed over for a time.

A bloody miniature war in Shanghai, stupidly provoked by the Japanese navy, had ended without leaving an aftermath. The Japanese sailors were no match for the Chinese 19th Route Army in street fighting and the Japanese army had to send a couple of divisions to extricate them. The fighting was over and the Japanese were withdrawing their troops.

The high spot in the news had been what was called the Manchurian incident, a piece of Japanese understatement which the correspondents adopted, having no word to describe the robbery by violence of a country in time of peace. Japan had a treaty right to maintain troops in Manchuria to protect the South Manchurian Railway, which was Japanese property. This garrison of railway guards, pretending that Chinese soldiers had blown up the tracks (although the night express passed over them without noticing anything), had suddenly attacked the Manchurian army in its barracks at night and seized the whole country.

A diplomatic flurry on the grand scale followed. Japan was a foundation member of the League of Nations and a signatory of the Kellogg Pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. The “liberal” Japanese government, subsequently ousted, promised that the Japanese troops would be withdrawn to the railway zone. The army in Manchuria contemptuously and completely ignored the promise. An international commission had come out to patch up peace if possible. Geneva was threatening sanctions. But the fighting was over; the Japanese army had erected its puppet regime and installed Henry Pu Yi as decorative Manchu Emperor and, to observers in Tokyo, Manchuria was already “water over the dam.”

The United States, Britain, and most other nations refused to recognize the new state, but there was no reason to suppose that they, or anybody, would go to war about it. Even Chiang Kai-shek did not propose to fight for Manchuria. The cynical but accurate view accepted in Tokyo was that the Japanese government had decided to give the soldiers a field of adventure in Manchuria for the sake of peace at home and that the powers would withhold recognition but fire no cartridges.

That was the immediate background. Looking at it now with ten years' hindsight, it is clear that optimism was based on the illusion that stability could be bought by appeasement, and peace by isolation. We, the democracies, believed in that illusion because it responded to our needs and our wishes. The last great war with its seven million dead was only thirteen years behind us and its economic consequences were still with us. The United States was passing through the terrible winter of 1931-2, when every bank in the country closed, and Britain was staving off communism and starvation with the dole. No democratic government could have led its people into war to prevent Japan from occupying a half-empty country in northern Asia. A successful grab had been pulled off and the only visible victim was the dubious military government of Manchuria, weakly headed by the Young Marshal, son of the old bandit generalissimo who had ruled Manchuria in connivance with the Japanese army for thirty years.

The date was May 15, 1932. It went into Japanese history as the May Fifteenth incident. But at nine a.m. it was just a newsless Sunday morning in May and off we went.

Half the fun was the getting out of Tokyo and into Japan. Tokyo is the capital, a great noisy city with eight- and tenstory office buildings that look as if they had been imported from Seattle, a government, a diplomatic corps, and Society with a capital S. Twenty miles out in the country you leave all that behind.

We decided to go up the river Tama and walk part of the way back. From Shinjuku station, swarming like an ant-heap, we took an electric train to the outermost suburbs and then changed into a little countrified steam train. On such informal trips you see the Japanese as human beings, not as officers or bureaucrats or politicians or people in Society. They are for the most part pleasant kindly folks, intent on their jobs or their simple Sunday amusements. We rode through miles of suburbs dedicated to the rising incomes of the white-collar class. They were spreading like a rash over the dried rice fields. Every new little jerry-built house had a “foreign” room. It was a cheerful sight to anybody but an architect. It showed that standards were rising; those sales men and bank clerks could afford to swank it a little. They were all keeping up with the Joneses, hell for leather.

We got out at Mitake and crossed the river by a toy bridge where buses waited to take picnickers up to the old temple. We went along the village street to a small restaurant. A buxom, middle-aged landlady met us with a smile of old acquaintance. She wore a sober dark gray kimono suited to her years. We took off our shoes and she ushered us up a perpendicular stair and slid back the paper windows of a little room that contained nothing at all except the glorious view. We sat on old yellow mats with faded silk edges and looked at the brawling river and the mountains. The landlady came back with two bottles of cold beer and we ate our sandwiches and enjoyed the view and smoked.

We walked downstream for four or five miles past farmhouses and a sawmill, and then crossed on stepping-stones and climbed the steep bank to a little inn called Raku Raku En, which is a poetical way of saying that it is a place where you can take your pleasure. There we had tea, and so home in the dusk through those dim raw suburbs where every new little house had its “foreign” room, bookshelves, radio, and piano.

There was a light in the office when we got back. Ofusasan was waiting, an hour ahead of his usual time. “The Prime Minister has been murdered,” he said, “the Bank of Japan has been bombed. By army and navy officers.” I sat down at the telephone and began.

The story came out in jig-saw fragments, for even in the Metropolitan Police headquarters that day there had only been a doorkeeper on duty at the time of the assassination. It was midnight before I got it pieced together and on the air. I would not say “officers.” I could not believe that officers, especially officers of the navy, were getting into political murder. I need not have been so particular. They were officers all right, officers in uniform.

Two days earlier, on Friday, May 13, two young naval officers had made a two-hour train journey from Tokyo to a place with which they were familiar, the drab country town of Tsuchiura, railway station for the inland naval air base and training school called Kasumiga-ura, the Misty Lagoon. An army cadet and a Tokyo student accompanied them. They were met by a teacher of the Native-Land-Loving School, which trained farmer boys in agriculture and patriotism. They all went to a Japanese restaurant where they were as usual given a private room. They did not send for geisha girls though Tsuchiura, a garrison town, has plenty. The inn’s rustic slatterns served their food, and after the dishes had been cleared away they sat late talking. On Sunday the same men met some others in various places in Tokyo and their actions became the May Fifteenth incident.

At five o’clock that Sunday evening nine naval and military officers of ages between twenty-four and twenty-eight alighted from two taxicabs at the side entrance of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine is dedicated to all members of the fighting services who have died in Japan's wars. There is no holier place in Tokyo. Five white stripes running along its outer wall signify that it is under Imperial protection. It stands— or rather squats, as is the style of Japanese temples—in a small park; all around it are buildings associated with the army—officers’ and men’s clubs, a military museum, a sports amphitheater. Across a shallow valley filled with humanity the dome of the Russian Cathedral looks down on the main street of Kanda ward, sometimes called the “Boul’ Mich’” of Tokyo. Second-hand book shops, an artist’s colorman, a few shabby cafés, several universities, and the coming and going of thousands of students give the district an atmosphere, but its resemblance to the Latin Quarter is pathetically remote. The name expresses only the inverted nostalgia of the poor student dreaming of cities he will never see.

If anyone gave a passing glance to the young officers it was only to think that they had probably been ordered to Manchuria, where the Imperial army was then extending the Imperial Way. They worshipped at the shrine, doffing caps, clasping hands, and bowing towards the unseen mirror of the Sun Goddess in homage to the souls of the dead soldiers whose names are inscribed on the books and whose spirits dwell there. One of them bought charms from a priest and gave them to his comrades to protect them from the bullets of the police. They piled into their taxis, five in one, four in the other. In five minutes they had passed the British Embassy with its Sunday Union Jack flying and were entering the front and back gates of the Prime Minister’s official residence. The group who dismounted at the front gate carried revolvers and hand grenades, expecting that the police gyards would oppose them, but no challenge was offered to officers wearing the Emperor’s uniform.

The Prime Minister's official residence is a bastard of the architectural era which followed the building of the Imperial Hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright of Chicago. When George IV built his many-domed pavilion at Brighton, Sydney Smith went to see it and reported: “St. Paul’s has been down to Brighton and pupped.” It seemed1 as if the Imperial Hotel had conceived and given birth to a mongrel. The Wright style, motifs, materials, coloring, and general bizarrerie were imitated. The architect had been unable to get away from the hotel idea, and the entrance hall, with its inquiry office, was the Imperial Hotel lobby with its ceiling lifted and the reception desk placed at the right of the entrance instead of the left.

On Sunday the receptionist was absent. One of the officers asked a police sergeant to show them the Prime Minister’s private apartments. They pointed revolvers at him but he refused. Lost among passages and staircases, the officers wandered about, not knowing where to go. Some went upstairs and found the cabinet room empty. A “large man” appeared and they asked to be taken to the Prime Minister, saying they had come from the Naval Academy. Before the “large man” had done anything a group of three or four men appeared from somewhere and ran away when a shot was fired in their direction. Then someone heard a key turning in a lock and an officer shouted: “That must be the way to the private apartments.” They knocked. A voice called: “Who is there?” A naval lieutenant burst open the flimsy door with his shoulder and they rushed in.

They found the Prime Minister, Mr. Inukai, a diminutive alert man of seventy-five. His first name was Tsuyoshi but his friends knew him as “Ki.” He had been in politics all his life and had at one time led a party of his own called the Kokuminto or Nationalist Party. It did not grow big enough to compete with the major parties, and Inukai finally disbanded it and led his followers into the ranks of the Seiyukai, the more conservative of the two parties which at that time were the alternative ins and outs of Japanese politics. The Seiyukai was looking for a leader; Inukai’s age and standing and the “dowry” of voting power that he brought with him got him the post and in due time the Prime Ministership. He was a very small man, quick and fearless. His goatee beard was of a vague gray color which somehow suggested, quite erroneously, that it had once been blond. Late in life he had attained the goal of his ambition and he was intensely proud of being the Emperor’s first Minister.

He led the officers into a Japanese room. His daughter-inlaw, carrying her baby, was with him, and one of the officers, “knowing what would happen in a few minutes,” as he said at the trial, told her to go away, but she stayed. The young men were rather confused and some were impressed by the old man’s calm demeanor as he asked them to take off their shoes and sit down and talk it over. He had a cigarette in his hand and he lit it. “As I observed,” said one of the officers in his testimony,” our leader was willing to talk with the Prime Minister.” The group that had gone to the back door burst in, headed by Lieutenant Masayoshi Yamagishi, a man of action, carrying a dagger.

“No use talking,” said Yamagishi. “Fire!” The word was shouted like an order and they all began firing. One shot the Prime Minister in the neck and another, deliberately, in the stomach. The Prime Minister sank on the matted floor and never spoke again. “Believing the whole affair was over,” the officers walked out. A policeman armed with a stick challenged them...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND
• Chapter I MURDER OF A PRIME MINISTER
• Chapter II THE TECHNIQUE OF REVOLUTION
• Chapter III MARS ON THE SOAPBOX
• Chapter IV THE BLOOD BROTHERHOOD
• Chapter V A TOLSTOYAN AMONG THE TERRORISTS
• Chapter VI THE YOUNG OFFICERS
• Chapter VII THE IDEA-MONGERS
• Chapter VIII MURDER IN THE WAR OFFICE
• Chapter IX “BUT THIS IS MUTINY”
• Chapter X THE MIND OF THE ARMY
• Chapter XI THE WORDS OF THE ARMY
• Chapter XII THE PATRIOTIC THIEVES’ KITCHEN
• Chapter XIII THE PATRON SAINT OF THE BLACK DRAGONS
• Chapter XIV LEADERS AND GANGS
• Chapter XV THE PRAYER-MEETING PLOT
• Chapter XVI PATRIOTISM AND CRIME
• Chapter XVII THE “SOUL OF JAPAN”
• Chapter XVIII THE SUPPRESSION OF A SCHOLAR
• Chapter XIX THE IMPERIAL MYTHUS
• Chapter XX THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: AS MAN
• Chapter XXI THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: AS GOD
• Chapter XXII THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: AS HIGH PRIEST
• Chapter XXIII THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: AS SYMBOL
• Chapter XXIV THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN: AS EMPEROR
• Chapter XXV WAR GUILT
• Chapter XXVI SANCTIONS OF PEACE
• Chapter XXVII GEOGRAPHICAL DISARMAMENT
• Chapter XXVIII THE FUTURE
• INDEX