Japan Prepares for Total War

The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

Michael A. Barnhart

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468452
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security, drawing on a wide array of Japanese and American sources.Barnhart focuses on the critical years from 1938 to 1941 as he investigates the development of Japan's drive for national economic self-sufficiency and independence and the way in which this drive shaped its internal and external policies. He also explores American economic pressure on Tokyo and assesses its impact on Japan's foreign policy and domestic economy. He concludes that Japan's internal political dynamics, especially the bitter rivalry between its army and navy, played a far greater role in propelling the nation into war with the United States than did its economic condition or even pressure from Washington. Japan Prepares for Total War sheds new light on prewar Japan and confirms the opinions of those in Washington who advocated economic pressure against Japan.

[1]

The Rise of Autarky in Japanese Strategic Planning

The Japan that Commodore Matthew Perry found had no means to support modern warfare. Conflict was waged with swords, shields, and bows and arrows, which skilled artisans manufactured one at a time.

The Meiji Restoration changed all this. Its slogan “Rich country; strong army” illustrates the commitment of Japan’s new leaders to create factories that could produce modern weapons. The Yokohama Iron Works began constructing warships in 1865. Six years later the Imperial Army acquired its own arms factories and by 1880 was producing the first rifle of Japanese design. Both services directed the growth of a military industry that, by the close of the Russo-Japanese War, was capable of maintaining an army over a million strong and a navy that had decisively defeated the tsar’s finest fleet. In the process, of course Japan’s demand for iron, steel, and the other essentials of modern conflict soared.1

Throughout these years little thought was given to the problem of acquiring these essentials. In every war waged since 1815 neutral powers had supplied the belligerents with the necessary financing and materials. Because conflicts in Asia, as in Europe, were invariably short, the Japanese military concentrated on drafting plans that would ensure the fastest possible mobilization of money, guns, and horses. They did not prepare to muster the full power of the Japanese economy for a protracted contest.2

This pattern was abruptly altered in the summer of 1915, when the fury of World War I’s initial autumn offensives gave way to grinding trench warfare. Japanese staff officers in Europe submitted reports that revolutionized thinking about the nature of modern warfare. There were no neutrals; war was sure to last more than a year, perhaps far longer; belligerents who were not self-reliant were lost. As Colonel Ugaki Kazunari, chief of the important Military Affairs Section in the Army Ministry, observed in Tokyo, it was no longer enough that Japan was able to construct its own warships and artillery pieces. The nation now needed secure access to iron ore and other necessary items.3

The Army Ministry charged Colonel Koiso Kuniaki, a close associate of Ugaki’s, to analyze Japan’s security problem in light of these new developments. Koiso toured Japan and northern and central China, and he eagerly translated a study of German attempts to achieve wartime autarky. His findings, which received much attention in high civilian and military circles, urged a two-pronged program for Japan. Neither the home islands nor the empire in Formosa, Korea, and south Sakhalin could provide resources sufficient for waging modern war. The control of richer territories, such as China, was imperative.

Establishing the necessary control would take time, but Japan could adopt the second aspect of Koiso’s program at once. Without a well-ordered domestic economy, one that could mobilize rapidly and efficiently for war, more resources would be of no value. What was needed, Koiso resolved, was a comprehensive plan for mobilization.4

This recommendation received immediate support from the Army Ministry, which had dispatched Major Suzumura Koichi to Europe expressly to study the industrial mobilization of the belligerents. In late 1917 Suzumura began drafting a central plan for Japan.5

The first result of these efforts was the Munitions Mobilization Law (Gunju dōin-hō). The army’s bill proposed a central organ for mobilization, one that would directly control those industries which produced items deemed necessary for military use in time of war or “incidents.” The organ would be staffed and operated by the Imperial Army and Navy, although it would fall under the administrative jurisdiction of the prime minister.

In normal times there would have been little hope for cabinet, much less Diet, approval of the idea. But the winter of 1917–18 was hardly normal, for in Russia a full-scale revolution was in progress. The Imperial Army was certain that Japan had an opportunity to drive Russian power out of northeastern Asia. Its General Staff planned a thrust into Siberia using twelve divisions—an operation that would require partial mobilization of the Japanese economy.

The cabinet limited the proposed force to two divisions but found refusal of the mobilization measure difficult, particularly because it was committed to provide substantial material aid to anti-Bolshevik Russians. The Diet passed the bill in March 1918, but not without amendment. The key powers of the mobilization organ were to be exercised only during full-scale wars, not incidents, insuring that they could not be invoked during the Siberian expedition.6

To administer the new law, a small munitions bureau (Gun-jukyoku) was established in June. Its first task was to survey Japan’s economic capacity for war, with a view to developing plans to mobilize that capacity. In reality the bureau could do little else. It might suggest guidelines regarding war finance to the Finance Ministry, for example, but it had no power to enforce them. Unless war came, it could only advise.

This arrangement served to retard actual planning, and so the military pressed for more authority for the bureau. It succeeded in May 1920 with the organization of the National Strength Evaluation Board (Kokusei-in) and the promulgation of an imperial command, the “Order Related to Munitions Research” of August, which compelled all cabinet ministers to cooperate with the prime minister in planning for mobilization.7

The military’s victories proved short-lived, however, as the board was abolished in November 1922. No evidence sheds light on the precise causes, but lecturers at Japan’s Military Academy later blamed the board’s interference in the traditional administrative spheres of other ministries. Army planners were dismayed, terming the abolition the greatest setback yet to control of the empire’s resources. They were equally mortified to find that the duties remaining in mobilization planning fell to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.8

Planning languished until Ugaki, now a major general, became army minister in early 1924. His interest in preparing a peacetime Japanese economy for war had grown over the years, and so had his political sophistication. He directed the attention of instructors at the Military Academy to the importance of mobilization. He recreated the defunct Munitions Bureau and established a new Equipment Bureau (Seibikyoku), this time within the Army Ministry. And he appointed young officers to posts within these agencies, placing the brilliant Lieutenant Colonel Nagata Tetsuzan at the head of the ministry’s Mobilization Section.9

Ugaki’s interest in these concerns extended beyond his own ministry. He joined the opposition to Prime Minister Katō Takaaki’s retrenchment program, which promised to reduce the national budget by over 15 percent and the army’s by an unheard-of thirty million yen. Ugaki secured less drastic cuts, which nevertheless resulted in the dissolution of four divisions—a loss that poisoned his reputation in the service for years. But in exchange he secured two key concessions. Part of the funds saved would be returned to the army, to allow the formation of modern, mechanized units. Far more important, the army minister obtained Diet approval to establish a full-fledged central mobilization agency.10

Ugaki wasted no time, and by May 1927 the Cabinet Resources Bureau had been established. Under Major General Matsuki Naosuke,11 the bureau completed a study of the scope and nature of national mobilization. It differed radically from past proposals. Rather than concentrate on the mustering of materials for direct military use only, Matsuki’s plan encompassed all of Japan’s economic activity. Every individual, from train conductors to dentists, was to be accounted for; labor actions and management profits were to be strictly controlled; and direct military supervision would no longer be confined to those factories producing only munitions and other implements of war.12

The Resources Bureau required further legal authority to complete actual plans of such vast scope. To secure that authority, it drafted a resources research law, which the Diet approved in April 1929. By June the bureau had obtained cabinet sanction for research guidelines and regulations compelling every ministry, civilian and military alike, to draw up detailed estimates of its needs for two years of a war so total that, in the phrasing of the instructions, it “gambles the fate of the nation.” In preparing these figures, each ministry was to calculate the very smallest amount of each resource it would require for its functioning as well as the amount needed to keep the Japanese civilian population at a minimum standard of living.13 The Resources Bureau would coordinate these estimates and draw up an overall plan. It could adjust a ministry’s calculations or negotiate with the ministry to secure revisions, but whichever course it chose, it could at last begin serious mobilization planning.14

Members of the Resources Bureau realized that the process could not be completed rapidly. Nor did they want to complete it only to discover insurmountable practical difficulties. In February 1929, accordingly, the bureau developed a trial plan for the Kansai (OsakaKyoto) area.

The exercise operated over a ten-day period in the early summer. Nearly all of the government’s ministries sent observers, though the army and navy officers greatly outnumbered the civilians. The exercise started when the Resources Bureau declared a state of total mobilization. The populace was duly told of the first forays of Imperial air forces over enemy territory and of retaliatory strikes against northern Kyushu, which included the use of poison gas. During this mock activity, military officers assumed real control over civilian factories and directed their rapid conversion to war production. The actual output of materials for the military, from aspirin to fuel oil, was measured carefully, and these figures were then compared with the trial plan’s goals in an effort to determine Japan’s actual capabilities for mobilization. The services purchased all the goods made during the exercise; factory owners reaped handsome profits; and the people generally experienced something of the likely nature of the next war.15

On the national scale planning proceeded apace. At the first mobilization conference, in April 1930, members of the Resources Bureau briefed representatives of the ministries about the precise information they needed. That conference also resolved thorny questions of ultimate jurisdictions (sometimes with amusing results: the Ministry of Commerce and Industry was to oversee analysis of Japan’s alcohol reserves, but the Home Ministry managed to secure for ...