The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 18 | Issue 21 | Number 3 | Article ID 5506 | Nov 01, 2020

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Planning for War: Elite Staff Officers in the Imperial JapaneseArmy and the Road to World War II

Richard J. Smethurst

Abstract: The Japanese military was ledthroughout its history from the 1880s until theend of World War II in 1945 by a small group ofelite officers who graduated from the　ArmyWar College and then served as staff officersand/or commanders in the Army Ministry, theGeneral Staff headquarters, and in field armiesin Manchuria, China proper, and elsewhere.These officers were trained to do carefulresearch into the comparative militaries,economies and logistics of their own, theirallies, and their potential enemies’ strength forwar. The point of this essay is to explore whyhighly-trained officers, who learned from theirown observations and research about Japan’sand its wartime allies’ weaknesses vis-à-vis theUnited States, the United Kingdom, the SovietUnion, and China, ignored what they learnedand went to war between 1931 and 1945 withthese larger and economically more advancednations. That is, why did the brains of theJapanese army, with help from many staffofficers in Japan’s navy and civil bureaucracy,lead Japan into a war it could not win? Did theyreally believe, as they often said they did, thatsuperior spirit could overcome superiortechnology and production, or were theymotivated by the desire for advancement—warsbrought promotions. Or what else may havemotivated them? I believe that they knew theycould not win the war, but went to war anyway.

Keywords: Nagata Tetsuzan, Staff College,Takahashi Korekiyo, military bureaucrats,Tanaka Giichi, Imperial Japanese Army, Tōjō

Hideki, Chōshū, Ishiwara Kanji, Manchuria,Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Takahashi Line,fixed bayonet charge, total war.

Major (later Lieutenant General) NagataTetsuzan (widely believed to be the mostbrilliant staff officer in Japan, 1922-1935, andmentor of Tōjō Hideki), observed of future warsafter he returned from seven years in Europeduring and after World War I:

“Modern warfare is extremely aggressive,ferocious, serious and grave. We mustcommit every drop of our blood and everyclod of our earth to preparing for andfighting wars. Modern war combines fourkinds of warfare: scientific, economic,political and ideological. Modern warfareat its essence is between national peoplesand we must use the term ‘wars of all of anation’s power’ to describe it. Our countryis behind the other powers in developingthis.” (NHK 2011, 109-110.)

Seven-time Finance Minister TakahashiKorekiyo in 1920 on the lessons of World War I:

“The recent European war ended with theso-called Central Powers losing, and theEntente Powers winning. To put it in

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different words, Germany and Austria,which were dedicated to militarism tosecure world peace and believed ‘we canonly reach the final verdict through force,’suffered a defeat so great that they willnever recover. They lost overwhelmingly toGreat Britain, America, and France,countries committed to justice andhumanity. In the future our country mustwalk the highway of the world togetherwith Great Britain, America, France, andItaly…It is now time to put ‘new wine innew wine skins,’ that is, to use governmentpolicy and funds to raise people’sstandards of living rather than to fightwars.” (Takahashi Korekiyo, Naigaikokusaku shiken, September 1920, inMatsukata Masayoshi kankei monjo, vol.15)

The key planners in the Japanese ImperialArmy from the 1880s until the end of WorldWar II were a group of elite staff officers, whostudied at a post-graduate school called theArmy War College (rikugun daigakkō). Exceptin wartime, when reserve officers and soldierswere needed to increase rapidly the size of theImperial Army, all officers graduated from theArmy Military Academy (shikan gakkō), about600-700 per year in the early twentiethcentury. A small percentage of these officers,about 30-35 per year, went on to the Army WarCollege, the Japanese equivalent of the USArmy War College. These officers, the brightestof the officer corps, took rigorous entranceexaminations to enter the Army War College,opened under German influence in 1883. Infact, just as the Japanese government invitedAmerican and European instructors such asErnest Fenollosa and Edward Morse to teachfuture civilian bureaucrats in Tokyo ImperialUniversity, one of the first teachers at the ArmyWar College was Major Klemens W. J. Meckel,later a major general in the German army, whotaught future military strategists. The ArmyWar College students, mostly newly minted

captains in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA),studied tactics, strategy, military history,intelligence, planning and logistics while at theschool. Each studied a foreign language andculture—after leaving the school, the graduatesserved as military attachés in their country ofspecialization. For example, General TanakaGiichi, a graduate of the eighth class in 1892,who later became Army Minister and PrimeMinister in the 1918-1928 decade, studiedRussian and spent four years in St. Petersburgbefore the Russian Revolution. (Tanakapracticed his Russian by attending services atNikolai-dō, the newly opened Russian Orthodoxcathedral in Tokyo; 65 years later, the author, aRussian-language officer in an American armyintelligence unit went on Sundays to the samechurch to practice his Russian.) NagataTetsuzan, a 1911 graduate and the army’s“brains” between World War I and his murderin 1935, studied German and spent seven yearsin Sweden, Denmark and Germany during andafter World War I. Army War College graduateswere not only the officers trained to do rationalplanning for war and wartime operations, butwere also the most cosmopolitan officers in theImperial Army. (Presseisen 1965, 114-115;Drea 2009, 58-65.)

From World War I until Japan’s defeat in 1945,almost all generals in the IJA were Army WarCollege graduates. Officers who did not attendthe Army War College could expect to retire atbest at the rank of lieutenant colonel, creatinga rift between the overwhelming majority of theofficer corps, who spent their careers leadingtroops in training and in combat, and the elite,who wore a distinctive insignia similar to a latefeudal era copper coin (thus the sobriquet forthe insignia and the status of its wearer,tenpōsen, a round coin with a square hole inthe middle) and who were trained to sit at theirdesks and evaluate the strengths andweaknesses of potential enemies, allies, andpotential allies, and to make well thought-out

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plans for large scale operations and theirconcomitant logistics.

After graduation from the Army War College,the elite officers filled staff positions in theArmy Ministry, the General Staff, and fieldarmy headquarters (often alternately, that is,these staff officers did not specialize in theministry or the general staff or f ie ldcommands), and did not lead troops again untilthey reached the rank of colonel and becameregimental commanders (circa 2,500-3,000men). The intermediate smaller units, that iscompanies and battalions, were led by the non-elite officers (taizuki or unit-connected) whospent hours training and leading their troopson the ground. The elite officers, the futuregenerals, worked behind desks making plansand decisions about war and peace—they werethe Japanese army’s strategic planners and hadfew dealings with rank and file soldiers.

World War I had a great impact on the thinkingof the Japanese army’s tenpōsen elite. TanakaGiichi, for example, who had taken the lead in1910 in establishing the Imperial ArmyReservist Association, a grassroots reservistorganization to facilitate wartime mobilization,began from 1915 to reorganize it as a means ofspreading military values to militarize farmersand urban workers. In the tradition of hisChōshū domain mentor, Field MarshalYamagata Aritomo, who played an importantrole in the establishment of a conscriptionsystem in the 1870s (thus abolishing thesamurai’s monopoly on military service),Tanaka aimed at creating a Japan in which “allthe people are soldiers.” Tanaka came tobelieve during World War I that futureJapanese wars would be “total wars,” foughtbetween nations, not armies, and thus that itwas essential to enlist the whole nation, fromgovernmental elite to poor tenant farmers andurban proletariat, in peacetime preparations

for war. Under his leadership, a system wascreated in which reservists led rural youth andwomen’s groups in spreading military values tothe countryside—that is, he worked to make thecoun t rys ide “ the a rmy ’ s e l ec to ra lconstituency.” (Smethurst 1974, passim.) Healso strove, in the tradition not only of FieldMarshal Yamagata, but also of intermediateChōshū mentors such as Generals Katsura Tarōand Terauchi Masatake, to increase militaryinfluence at the highest levels of government.All four served as prime minister in the yearsbetween 1889 and 1928. But unlike Nagata,Tōjō and other interwar and World War II staffofficers, who wanted to establish direct militarycontrol over the Japanese government, theChōshū types increased their political influenceas individuals and eschewed attempting directarmy control over government. AlthoughTanaka was the last Chōshū clique general, heworked closely with a non-Chōshū officer,General Ugaki Kazushige, who becameTanaka’s “Chōshū” successor. If the tenpōsenelite’s power angered the rank and file officers,the Chōshū clique’s power also angered thenon-Chōshū members of the tenpōsen elite.

In October 1921, three of the most highlyregarded of these non-Chōshū elite middle levelofficers, Majors Nagata Tetsuzan, ObataToshirō, and Okamura Yasuji, met at the VillaStephanie Hotel in Baden Baden, Germany todiscuss the lessons the Japanese army couldlearn from the European war of 1914-18. Intheir discussions, they committed themselves totwo goals: breaking the power of theYamagata/Chōshū “clique” and creating anation mobilized for total war “by bringing thepeople and the army closer together.” Whenthey returned to Japan they organized a seriesof study groups that discussed these issues.(Humphreys 1995, 34-38.) Oddly, none of themany journalists and academics who havewritten about the military staff officers’activities in the post-World War I decade

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m e n t i o n w h a t s e e m s t o m e a b a s i ccontradiction. Nagata and his colleaguesworked to break the control over the army ofpeople such as Tanaka who were alreadyattempting to do what Nagata et al. wanted, tocreate a total war state by bringing the peopleand the army closer together. One can onlywonder if careerism, that is, the desire to riseto the top of the army, was a greater motivationfor the non-Chōshū elite officers than theirdesire to reorganize Japan and its capacity tofight wars. Promotions were hard to come bybetween the end of the Russo-Japanese War in1905 and the beginnings of World War II in the1930s—although Tanaka from Chōshū wentfrom Lieutenant Colonel to General in1905-1920, non-Chōshū officers in generaladvanced more slowly.

Over the next decade, Nagata and his elitecolleagues organized a series of “study”groups, which by 1930 included most of theArmy War College graduates who would leadthe Japanese army and Japan in World War II.The Issekikai, which was formed by a merger ofseveral study groups in 1929, enrolled fortymembers, including men who would becomeprime minister, Tōjō Hideki; ministers of state,Obata Toshihirō and Suzuki Teiichi; fullgenerals, Tōjō, Itagaki Seishirō, Doihara Kenji,Okamura Yasuji, Okabe Naosaburō, andYamashita Tomoyuki; lieutenant generals (30),area army commanders (8), and field armycommanding generals (14). The Issekikaienlisted Ishiwara Kanji, who together withItagaki led the IJA in bringing Manchuria intoJapan’s empire in 1931-32—Ishiwara, afterNagata’s murder in 1935 the army’s “brains,”was retired before he became a full generalbecause of his opposition to the invasion ofChina in 1937. All served in key staff positionsin the Army Ministry and Army General Staff inthe interwar period. Five, including Tōjō,Itagaki and Yamashita, died as war criminals,four died as prisoners of war of the Russians or

Chinese, and four others served prison terms aswar criminals. (Humphreys 1995, 112; NHK2011, 108-112.)

These officers, while serving in key staffpositions, met regularly in their study groups.Kawada Minoru, a Japanese historian whotaught at Nagoya University, has analyzed theminutes of these meetings and found thatNagata and his peers, during the 1920s wereworking out a plan for mobilizing Japan for apreemptive war against the Soviet Union, anddoing so independently of their superiors,successive army ministers and chiefs of thearmy general staff (Kawada 2011 and 2014-5,passim.) Japan, after Russia passed its leasedterritories in Manchuria to Japan in 1905,maintained an army there to protect itslegitimate treaty rights—control over key portcities on the Liaodong Peninsula and railroadsand their rights-of-way into the Manchurianinterior. By the 1920s, Manchuria wasessentially under Japanese economic control,and under the joint military control of theJapanese army and its Chinese “ally,” thewarlord Zhang Zuolin.

This led in the 1920s to widespread discussionof what was known as the Manchuria-MongoliaProblem (Manmō mondai). Different groupsadvocated differing ideas of how Japan shoulddeal with a northeast China under its economic(and to some extent, military) control. Onegroup, led by the Minseitō party ForeignMinister Shidehara Kijūrō and the formerSeiyūkai party leader Takahashi Korekiyo,viewed Manchuria as part of China—while theJapanese had treaty rights there much as theBritish and Americans did in Shanghai andBeijing—Manchuria was not Japan’s to governdirectly. The Issekikai members viewed thisapproach as both wrong-headed, since they didnot think Manchuria was historically part ofChina, and weak-kneed. Shidehara and

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Takahashi feared that an overly aggressiveapproach to Manchuria would antagonize theAmericans and British, that is, nations thatwere far more power fu l than Japaneconomically and thus militarily, and on whomJapan relied for much of its own economic andmilitary power. Japan to Shidehara andTakahashi was not rich and powerful enough tobuild an autarkic economy in a bloc thatincluded Japan, Korea, and Manchuria. (Thearmy and its civilian collaborators such as KishiNobusuke tried to create an autarkic Japancapable of r ival ing the US and USSRindustrially, but failed because Japan did nothave the necessary capital to succeed. And asTakahashi pointed out more than once, thecapital that Japan had was needed to buy rawmaterials, especially oil, from the US, so thatthe Manchurian enterprise made Japaneconomically and thus militarily weaker, notstronger.)

The Issekikai members advocated a Manchuriaunder complete Japanese control. They wantedto exploit its raw materials and establishfactories and mines to produce weapons andthe materials such as coal and steel needed toproduce these weapons. Kawada writes about aFutabakai (one of the forerunners of theIssekikai) meeting on 1 March 1928, only threemonths before one of its members, KōmotoDaisaku, had the Chinese warlord ofManchuria, Zhang Zuolin, assassinated, atwhich the participants discussed Japan’sposition in Manchuria. The discussion wassummarized by Tōjō Hideki, who was present,as follows:

“The primary goal of army preparations isfor war with the Soviet Union. Thisrequires as our first goal complete politicalcontrol of Manchuria. It is necessary tomake defensive preparations for war withthe United States in case it intervenes in

our war with the Russians. We do not haveto make any preparations for war withChina. China is important only as a placeto acquire raw materials.”

Future wars, the participants stated, will bewars of national survival（国家生存）and theUS, a continental size country, can exist on itsdomestically produced raw materials. So it hasno need for military action in Asia. Tōjō whenasked if Japan needed to take Manchuria for itsresources; replied, “Exactly.” (然り) Theconclusion to the meeting was short and sweet:

“In order to secure the Imperial Country’sexistence we must have complete politicalcontrol over Manchuria. Thus our primarywar preparations must be for war withRussia, and we don’t have to worry muchabout China at all. But we must considerthe possibility of American participationand develop a defensive plan for that war.”(Kawada 2011, 11-12.)

On 4 June 1928, Kōmoto engineered theassassination of Zhang, thus eliminating theJapanese army’s rival for power in Manchuria,and three years later, on 18 September 1931,two other Issekikai members, Itagaki andIshiwara, blew up their own railroad inManchuria, blamed it on the Chinese, and usedthe incident as a pretext to bring all ofNortheast China under Japanese control. Inboth cases, the military commanders inManchuria and Tokyo, and of course thecivilian leaders in Tokyo, were not informed ofthe incidents until after the fact. Subordinateofficers, that is, staff officers who made plansfor and otherwise served the commanders,carried out aggressive military actions on theirown that began their nation’s road to WorldWar II.

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Some have argued that Japan seized Manchuriaonly after the world economic depression,beginning in 1929, impoverished Japan and itstrading partners, and forced all nations toeschew internationalism to save their own“sinking ships.” The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act,signed into law by President Herbert Hoover inJune 1930, for example, more than doubled UStariffs, raising them to 29.6% of the price of allcovered imports, thus reducing the value of theexports to the US that the Japanese used to payfor the imports of raw materials andtechnology. (However, Japan’s most importantexport to the US, raw silk, 25-30% in value ofall Japanese exports, faced no tariffs because itd id not compete with goods made byAmericans.) According to this view, the plan toconquer Manchuria and turn it into Japan’smilitary industrial workshop to prepare for the“1936 Crisis,” that is, for a preemptive waragainst the Soviet Union before it became toostrong and dangerous to Japan, began onlyafter Japan’s and its primary trading partners’industrial bases shrank in the early years of thedepression in 1929-1931. But Japanese scholarssuch as Kawada, Tobe Ryōichi and Katō Yōkohave pointed out in recent books that theplanning for Japanese control of Manchuriabegan among the elite staff officers almost adecade before the onset of the depression orthe Manchurian Incident. When the staffofficers acted on their plans, they did so, as wehave seen, independently of the Army Ministeror Chief of the Army General Staff, but they didso with the belief (and in some cases, with thetacit understanding) that these top rankingofficers, themselves former staff officers,agreed with the general principles of theiractions, even if they did not condone actionsfrom below that threatened the army’scommand structure. In every case, beginningwith Zhang Zuolin’s murder in 1928 and theManchurian Incident in 1931, the army’s brassgave in to the actions of their subordinates veryquickly because they too thought Japan should

have direct control over Manchuria. Theseofficers believed that the solution to theManchuria-Mongolia problem should be in thehands of the army, not politicians likeShidehara and Takahashi. The army, and manyoutside of the army, resented the British andAmerican’s highhanded policies toward Japan,and acted autonomously, overlooking, asShidehara and Takahashi did not, thedisparities between Japanese and Anglo-American economic power. Japan, either inprosperity or depression, and even after itsrecovery from the depression by 1936-1938 atleast partly because of Takahashi’s “Keynesian”policies, had only one-ninth of America’smanufac tur ing product ion ( the USmanufacturing potential vis-a-vis Japan waseven greater), which the elite army plannersknew, but ignored in acting autonomously.(League of Nations 1945, 13)

The commanders in Tokyo found themselves ina difficult spot. On the one hand, like theirsubordinates in Manchuria and China, theybelieved that Manchuria could be a Japaneseresource and industrial base that would makeJapan less dependent on the United States fornatural resources and technology. On the otherhand, they believed it important to maintain achain of command in which the Army Ministerand Chief of the General Staff in Tokyo madedecisions that would be binding on regionalarmies. But how to bridge this gap, especiallywhen their subordinates in the ministry andgeneral staff office in Tokyo also actedindependently of their commanders, and oftenin coordination with their counterparts in thefield army headquarters staffs. For example,Major General (少将) Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, astaff officer in the Army Ministry, who was sentby Army Minister General Minami Jirō toManchuria on September 17, 1931 to stop thearmy command there from carrying out therailroad explosion that led to the subsequentseizure of Manchuria (I have yet to find out

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how Minami knew such an incident was aboutto occur), made sure he arrived after theincident so it could proceed unhindered.Although Tatekawa intentionally arrived at theKwantung Army headquarters in Mukden afterItagaki and Ishiwara had sent the KwantungArmy into action (in fact, he spent the night ofthe incident with a geisha), he was neitherreprimanded nor punished in any way for his“failure.”

The Tokyo military’s primary method forcontrolling the Kwantung Army, an army thatwas legally based in Manchuria to protect thetreaty rights there that Japan won from Russiain 1905 (and Russia had “negotiated” withChina ten years earlier), was not to issueorders from the Army Ministry or General Stafffor Manchurian commanders to ceaseaggressive operations, but to build up Japan’sother mainland army, the Tianjin Army, toblock the Kwantung Army’s movements intonorth China. The Tianjin Army was based innorth China to protect Japan’s diplomaticrepresentatives under the terms of the BoxerProtocol of 1901, which allowed all of thepowers endangered by the Boxer uprising tostation troops in the Beijing area to guard theirlegations/embassies. In the 1930s the ImperialJapanese Army increased the number of itstroops there, according to the NHK book, “WhyDid Japan Go to War,” written with essays byTobe Ryōichi, Katō Yōko, and Mori Yasuo, alleminent Japanese scholars of World War II, notto protect Japanese diplomats, but to block theKwantung Army. And, moreover, all of theseactions in Manchuria and north China werecarried out completely independent ofsuccessive prime ministers and foreignministers, even when in several cases the primeministers were retired military officers. Before1937, subordinates in the Japanese army actedindependently of their commanders, and bothsubordinates and commanders actedindependently of the internationally recognized

government of Japan. Civilian leaders mosteasily influenced policy when they collaboratedwith the military.

While the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and theMarco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937 are themost famous of the army operations carried outwithout Tokyo orders or even off icialknowledge, other incidents took place as well.In May 1935, for example, a Japanese staffofficer in Tianjin, Colonel Sakai Takashi, hadseveral pro-Japanese Chinese newspapereditors assassinated, blamed it on Chineseextremists, and used the assassinations as anexcuse to mobilize the Tianjin Army troops andnegotiate an agreement that made the areaalong the Manchuria border a neutral zone,that is, a zone under joint Chinese andJapanese control. Sakai did this in the absenceof his commanding officer, who was not onbase at the time. Sakai’s punishment for hisinsubordination was to be promoted to the rankof major general. This led the Japanese consulin Tianjin at the time, Shigemitsu Mamoru(later the foreign minister who signed thesurrender document for Japan on the deck ofthe USS Missouri), to write in his diary that theTianjin Army types wanted to get into theaction in China because they wantedpromotions of the sort their colleagues inManchuria were getting. Then in December ofthe same year, the Kwantung Army, under thecommand of General Itagaki Seishirō, who as acolonel in 1931 had helped organize theManchurian Incident, crossed the border intoChina and set up a puppet government nearBeijing. The central army’s response to this wasto triple the number of troops in the TianjinArmy without informing the Chinesecommanders in the region of this. Even beforethe Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, theJapanese army had 15,000 men stationed innorth China, far more than any of the othernations signatory to the Boxer Protocol of 1900.

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The most famous of these uncontrolledincidents was the so-called Marco Polo BridgeIncident of July 7, 1937. On this evening,Colonel Mutaguchi Ren’ya, a regimentalcommander (thus not the highest-rankingofficer in the Tianjin Army much less in Tokyo)and an Issekikai member, ordered his troops toconduct night maneuvers in the southwesternsuburbs of Beijing, and to do so carrying riflesloaded with live ammunition. When a skirmishensued between his troops and Chinese ones,Mutaguchi blamed the Chinese for instigatingthe encounter and used it as an excuse tomobilize his troops for further action. As iswell-known, this incident led to an eight-yearwar in which “as many as ten million Chinesesoldiers” (not to mention far more civilians) andat least 410,000 Japanese soldiers died. (Drea2009, 245.) The war was later justified as a“holy war” to liberate Asia from Westernimperialism, but the incident that began thewar seems to have been more pedestrian in itsorigins. Not only was it carried out without thePrime Minister or even the Army Minister orChief of the Army General Staff being informed,but once again even without the knowledge ofthe local commander. Mutaguchi later becamea lieutenant general in the IJA. After the war hewas tried and convicted as a war criminal. (SeeNHK 2011 for a discussion of the causes of, andpeople involved in, the 1928-1937 incidents.)

Takahashi Korekiyo

Historians and journalists writing about therise of Japanese militarism, or in the usage ofmany of them, Japanese fascism, haveadvanced the “fascism from below,” “fascismfrom above,” or the “imperial way faction,”“control faction” dichotomies to explain politicsin the 1930s in Japan. In the early 1930s,younger officers, both the Army War Collegegraduates discussed above and the nextgeneration of elite officers, that is, future ArmyWar College students (See Shillony in Wilson,1970, 26-35, for an analysis of the elite statusof the 2-26-1936 rebels), carried out theincidents described above and a number ofdomestic incidents in which these youngerofficers attempted to eliminate the political andindustrial leaders that they saw as impedimentsto the creation of an emperor-centered, army-led national polity. These young officers viewedpolitical leaders such as Hamaguchi Osachi,Inoue Junnosuke, Shidehara Kijūrō andTakahashi Korekiyo as people who put theinterests of capitalist entrepreneurs and theirown political parties before the needs ofnational unity and strength, and before theeconomic well-being of the Japanese people.When Finance Minister Takahashi stated onNovember 27, 1935, in a widely reportedspeech, “If the military continues to push for

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larger budgets unreasonably, I think it will losethe trust of the people,” he signed his owndeath warrant. The military assassins ofFebruary 26, 1936 rejected the idea that afinance minister, who in their minds wasresponsible only to big business and partypoliticians and not to emperor and nation,could think that the people trusted him morethan they trusted the army. In fact, the rebelofficers went so far as to blame Takahashi forurban unemployment and rural poverty at thevery time that his “Keynesian” policies createdfull urban employment and brought about atwo-third’s growth in the real per capita valueof agricultural production in four years, arecovery matched only by Sweden amongindustrialized or industrializing countries.(Skidelsky 1994, 488) Young military officersand rightwing nationalists killed three of thefive men who served as prime minister between1930 and 1936 (and the assassins missed afourth only by killing his brother-in-law bymistake) and two of three finance ministers(the middle finance minister, Fujii Sanenobu,evaded murder by dying prematurely from job-related stress.) Their primary motive in thesemurders was eliminating the unpatriotic menwho followed Western liberal and democraticideas and did not work to create an emperor-centered system in which his key supportersserved in the Japanese Imperial Army.(Takahashi was seen as anti-emperor eventhough, ironically, Takahashi’s seaside villa inHayama was near the emperor’s, and onweekends the finance minister often visitedHirohito to brief him on economic matters.)These assassinations culminated in theFebruary 26, 1936 Incident in which youngarmy officers murdered Takahashi (theempress sent flowers to his funeral eventhough the army declared martial law afterFebruary 26 and forbade the Finance Ministryand the Takahashi family from having a publicfuneral), former Prime Minister Lord Privy SealAdmiral Saitō Makoto, and General WatanabeJōtarō, the Director of Military Education whohad the effrontery, as an army officer, to

advocate civilian control of the military, andmissed Prime Minister Admiral Okada Keisukeonly by accident. They also severely injuredAdmiral Grand Chamberlain Suzuki Kantarō,who later as prime minister engineered Japan’ssurrender in 1945. (Is it mere chance that threeof the soldier assassins’ five targets were high-level naval officers and only one was a civilian?)(Matsumoto Seichō 2005 Vol. 7.)

Mutaguchi Renya

The paradigm for the rise of militarism/fascismintroduced above may oversimplify, as JamesCrowley pointed out some years ago, a morecomplicated story. But be that as it may, onefinds that after Mutaguchi engineered the

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Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937,military adventurism and plots from belowdisappeared almost completely, and from thesummer of 1937 the system worked more orless according to its blueprint (at least on thesurface). That is, Prime Ministers, ForeignMinisters (in 1941-45, the only civilian in theroom), Army and Navy Ministers, and Chiefs ofthe military general staffs seemed to make thedecisions to begin and expand wars. (FinanceMinisters, who raised the money essential tofight the wars, were not included in thisdecision-making!) For example, afterMutaguchi’s July 1937 incident in Beijing, thearmy debated at some length how to deal withChina. A key staff officer in the Army Ministry,Lieutenant General Ishiwara Kanji, planner ofthe Manchurian Incident six years earlier,argued vociferously that Japan should notexpand its commitment of troops to themainland because Japan gained no benefitsfrom China’s conquest. China south and west ofBeijing was a densely populated agriculturalarea with few natural resources to provideJapan. Since the Imperial Japanese Armyalready controlled northeast China (Manchuria)and was trying to build it as an industrial basefor a future war with the Soviet Union, a war inthe Beijing/Shanghai/Nanjing/Wuhan areaswould only drain resources and men needed fora war with its potential enemy to the north.Ishiwara was overruled in this case not only byhis army superiors, but also by two civilians,Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro and ForeignMinister Hirota Kōki. In other words, thesystem worked as it was designed to work inthe summer of 1937 and Japan, under theleadership of “reformist” bureaucrats began aneight-year war on the mainland of Asia. (NHK2011, 126-131.)

The same happened as Japan moved towardwar with the United States and Great Britainand its dominions. Leaders such as PrimeMinister Konoe, and Foreign Ministers

Matsuoka Yōsuke and Tōgō Shigenori in Tokyo,in cooperation with both the army and navy,made decisions to advance into the northernpart of French Indo-China in July 1940, to makean all iance with Germany and Italy inSeptember 1940, to move into southern Indo-China in July 1941, and to go to war with theUS and UK in fall-winter 1941—these moveswere not instigated by lower level army staffofficers, but by Japan’s top political andmilitary (often the same men) leaders. (Oddlyhowever, the men who made the decision forwar with the US and UK in 1941 decided ongoing to war, but not on how to start the war;that dec is ion was made by the navyindependently even of the army; I have no ideawhen Prime Minister General Tōjō learnedabout the navy’s plan to attack Pearl Harbor tobegin the war.)

Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the February26, 1936 Incident eliminated either byassassination or fear of assassination the keyrealistic opponents of war with the UnitedStates, British Empire and the Soviet Union (byrealistic I mean that men like Takahashi werenot anti-empire, only anti-empire outside whatwas acceptable to the US/UK empire-buildersbecause he thought Japan benefitted more fromsiding with, not confronting the world’s mostpowerful nations)., and put in their placerevisionist politicians and bureaucrats likeKonoe, Matsuoka, Baba Eiichi, and HiranumaKiichirō, who seemed to believe that emperor-centered spirit could overcome superiorweaponry, technology, and logistics—spirit overscience! While we have no evidence that theserevisionist politicians played a role in the 26February 1936 Incident, we do know that someof the leading revisionist army commanderssuch as Araki Sadao and Masaki Jinzaburō gavemore than tacit support to the rebels, whoclaimed to be acting to bring Araki and Masakito power as the leaders both of the army andJapan.

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The elimination of Admiral Saitō, GeneralWatanabe, and Finance Minister Takahashibrought an end to efforts to stop Japan’s roadto World War II. Takahashi, as the RikkyôUniversity historian Matsuura Masatake hasargued, was the primary figure in bringingJapan out of the depression and fightingmilitarism in the mid-1930s. Takahashi headeda force known as the “Takahashi Line,” acoalition of business leaders, moderate partypoliticians and bureaucrats, and non-Marxistunions, whose primary goal was growing theJapanese economy and people’s standards ofliving and blocking unproductive, that is,military spending. (Takahashi argued thatmilitary production was unproductive becauseits goods in peacetime had a much slowerturnover than consumer goods, and thus didnot lead to increased consumer spending andmore production—a la Keynes, a wheel ofgreater consumption/demand and thusproduction, higher wages, more workers, moreconsumption, more production, many timesover—the multiplier effect.) He argued forabolition of the army and navy general staffs,civilian control of the military, unionizationeven in defense factories, sharing the profitsfrom higher industrial productivity withworkers, decentralization of political power,abolition of the Ministry of Education andnational universities, turning administration ofthe land tax over to local governments to payfor the decentralized schools, and to “listeningto markets.” Takahashi was, in the words of thejournalist Baba Tsunego in 1933, “one old manfighting militarism by himself.” The 26February 1936 Incident eliminated Takahashiand others like him who believed that war withChina, the United States, and Great Britainspelled disaster for Japan.

The Takahashi Line not only challenged themilitary, it also threatened the so-called

“revisionist bureaucrats,” a group of middle-level bureaucrats in civilian ministries whoeven before February 26, 1936 had advocated a“national polity” centered on the imperialmystique in which civilian and military officialsbuilt a command economy under bureaucraticcontrol, suppressed dissent through censorshipand police arrests, and otherwise used theirexpertise to run Japan “efficiently” and“patriotically.” Men like Konoe, Hiranuma,Kishi, and even Hoshino Naoki in Takahashi’sown ministry fought to suppress theconservative liberalism of men like Takahashi.In fact, Matsuura argues that both Hiranuma’s“prosecutorial fascism” in the alleged Teijinstock scandal of 1934, and the movement tosuppress Minobe Tatsukichi’s Emperor OrganTheory in 1935 were attempts to end theTakahashi Line before it was too late. That is,the revisionists wanted, as did the youngFebruary 26 assassins, to get rid of Takahashibefore his economic policies were recognizedas having brought prosperity back to Japan,thus discrediting the men who were attackinghim for having failed to do what he actually did.Whatever they said about their motives, theyoung officer assassins of February 26, 1936seemed more concerned with advancing thearmy’s and thus their own political power andcareers than in ending working class poverty.(Matsuura and Kitaoka 2010; Matsuura 2002,127-133, 150-161; Smethurst 2007, 268-294.)

One of the striking aspects of Japan after thewar in China began in earnest in late summer1937 is how few people stood up in oppositionto the government’s and the military’s stepstoward total war. Although Hamaguchi, Inoueand Takahashi were all dead after February1936, other men who had taken the lead inattempting to have Japan “go along” ratherthan “go alone,” for example, former PrimeMinister Wakatsuki Reijirō and ForeignMinister Shidehara Kijūrō, did not reappear onthe political radar until after Japan’s defeat.

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There is no significant elite group that stood upto the revisionist politicians and military duringthe war. Revisionist politicians and bureaucratslike Konoe, Hiranuma, Baba Eiichi, andMatsuoka replaced middle-level staff officerslike Itagaki, Tōjō, and Yamashita, in makingdecisions about foreign policy and war. Butthen, many of these middle-level staff officerswho were forming policy as members of theTokyo high command, Kwantung and Tianjinarmies in 1928-1937 became army ministers,chiefs of the general staff and top-level fieldcommanders after 1937 and continued to shapepolicy during the war. All three of these armyofficers are prime examples of men who seguedfrom middle-level staff officers makingdecisions of war and peace before 1937 to high-level commanders making decisions of war andpeace after 1937.

What is it that pulled all of these men togetherin leading Japan into wars it could not win inChina and with the US/UK? First, clearly manyJapanese at all levels of society, whetheremperor-centric, top-down leaders like Konoeand Hiranuma, elite military officers of the sortdiscussed above, rank-and-file officers whotrained soldiers for and then led them intobattle, the soldiers and their families backhome, advocates of a command economy likeKishi Nobusuke, and even anti-militarists likeTakahashi resented the arrogance of theWestern imperialist powers which ran theworld as they saw fit because they had thepower to do so. The difference betweenTakahashi and these other men was not in howthey conceived the problem, but in how theyplanned to resolve it—Takahashi by diplomacyand by strengthening the Japanese economyand competing with the Anglo-Americanseconomically, the ultranationalists by taking atough diplomatic stance and even by going towar with the two English-speaking powers ifnecessary, a war which Takahashi understoodJapan would lose—and he said this repeatedly

before his murder in 1936.

Second, many Japanese, including the eliteofficers who had been trained in the Army WarCollege to think analytically about planning,starting and fighting wars, seeminglymisunderstood Japan’s economic and thusmilitary weakness as a “junior” world power.Most Japanese believed by the interwar periodthat Japan had become one of the world’s greatpowers, when in fact compared to the US, UK,and the Soviet Union, its economy was still inthe process of developing from an agrarian one(44% of the Japanese work force in 1936farmed or fished compared to 20% in the US)into an industrial one. Some data to support myview of Japan’s economic weakness: In 1930,Japan ranked last in GDP of the seven majorWorld War II powers, US, USSR, Great Britain,France, Germany, Italy and Japan in that order.US GDP was seven t imes Japan’s . In1936-1937, after the Japanese economy, underTakahashi’s “Keynesian” lead, grew in realterms by 32.6% as the rest of the worldwallowed in depression (the US economy grewby 4% in the same years), Japan’s GDP hadnarrowly passed Italy’s, but US GDP was stillalmost five times larger than Japan’s.(Maddison 1995, 180-184.) Japan throughoutthis period depended on oil and refined aviationfuel imported from the United States. One ofthe ironies of World War II is that thepetroleum that fueled the Japanese ships andplanes that attacked the Americans and Britishat Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya andSingapore most likely came from Texas,California, and Oklahoma. Even after December8, 1941, Japan’s ships and planes ran to a greatextent on petroleum from the US that had beenstockpiled in Japan before summer 1941, and toa lesser extent on petroleum from the oil fieldsin its new territory, the Dutch East Indies. Theelite staff officers in the army and navyunderstood Japan’s economic weakness. Notonly had Takahashi and others told them for

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years Japan could not win a war against theUnited States, but at some level they knew thisthemselves—after all, they were trained at theArmy War College to think strategically andeconomically. In fall 1941, the JapaneseAmbassador to the United States, AdmiralNomura Kichisaburō, met with the US Chief ofNaval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, andtold him “that the military in control of(Japan’s) government were highly provincial,with little knowledge of world affairs. He feltthat the United States would win any war withJapan because it had virtually unlimitedresources, but his government didn’t seem tounderstand Japan’s limitations.” (McCrea 2016,xxi) Many knew, but Japan went into anunwinnable war anyway. (See Makino 2016,especially 137-170, for economic study groupsunder the leadership of two army staff collegegraduates, Akimaru Jirō and Iwakuro Hideo, onthe inferior size and quality of the economy ofJapan vis a vis its potential enemies and alliesin the final years before Japan’s attack on PearlHarbor.)

Third, Japanese at all levels of society seem tohave believed in Japanese emperor-centricsuperior bravery when compared to thesoldiers of other nations. It is hard to judge towhat extent Japan’s prewar civilian and militaryelite actually believed in emperor-centricnationalism and Japanese exceptionalism basedon the bushido code, at least in all of its details,but they not only used it as a way to motivatetheir troops, they also acted as if they believedin it. Army staff officers wrote the close-orderfixed bayonet charge in the face of any kind ofenemy fire as the army’s primary offensive anddefensive tactic into the army’s tacticalmanuals in 1909 and it stayed there until theImperial Japanese Army was disbanded in1945. (Drea 2009, 132-133.) These officersjustified this kind of charge on the grounds thatit was the Japanese way of fighting. Theyargued that Japanese soldiers were willing to

charge and die for their emperor and nation tothe extent that Japan, even with inferiorweaponry and logistics compared to itsenemies, could win the wars it fought. Theyargued ex post facto that General NogiMaresuke’s bayonet charges in 1904-5 had wonJapan’s war against Russia, even though Nogi’scommanders at the time thought of him as areckless leader who should be replaced. WhenGeneral Nogi committed suicide to follow theEmperor Meiji to the grave in 1912, his and histactics’ stock skyrocketed. A myth of Japanesewillingness to die for their emperor was bornand even influenced the decision-making of themen who took Japan into World War II. That is,even Japanese staff officers, who were trainedto know better, seemed to believe that thecourage of Japanese soldiers, not Anglo-American money, weapons, and diplomacy, andrevolution in European Russia, had won the1904-5 war, and they thus wrote the bayonetcharge, based on Japanese patriotic sentiment,into their approach to subsequent wars. It is myv i e w t h a t b e l i e f i n t h i s J a p a n e s e“exceptionalism” colored the army leaders’thinking as they led Japan to war in the 1930s.(There is a Nogi Shrine in Tokyo—that is,General Nogi has become a Shintō deity—butthere is no Takahashi shrine, or Jacob Schiffshrine, or Rothschild shrine, even though theirfund raising in London, Paris, and New York in1904-7 was probably more responsible forJapan’s victory over Russia than Nogi’sbutchery.)

Fourth, all of these men: the elite staff officers,their army superiors, bureaucrats in mostministries (generally, but not always excludingForeign and Finance Ministry personnel, whotended to be more internationalist than otherbureaucrats) and the revisionist bureaucratsand political leaders of the 1930s believed inthe importance of a strong, top-down state. Onecould argue that one of the main tensions inJapanese government in the two decades

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between the two world wars was between thosew h o b e l i e v e d i n s o m e d e g r e e o fdecentralization and those who advocatedcentral, bureaucratic control. Takahashirepresented the mainstream politicians mostcommitted to decentralization in these years.While serving as finance minister and primeminister after World War I, he called for theabolition of the Education Ministry (America,he wrote, had no education ministry, but stillhad education) and of national universities(scholars should be free, he wrote, to conductresearch without bureaucratic intervention),turning the national land tax over to localcommunities to pay for decentralized schools,ending the government’s vetting of textbooks,severely reducing the size and cost of Japan’smilitary, and turning its control, a la America,over to civilians—and Takahashi believed in theefficacy of the market as a transmitter ofeconomic information. On the other side, thearmy’s elite staff officers advocated the militarytaking over Japan’s government, not asYamagata, Katsura and Tanaka tried, bybecoming prime ministers in the existingpolitical system, but by interpreting the army’sconstitutional right of serving the emperor, notthe prime minister, in such a way as to allowthe army to take control of the emperor’sgovernment. The February 26, 1936 Incidentwas an effort by elite junior army officers, withthe encouragement of top-level generals, togive the army control of the Japanesegovernment. Although the coup did not succeedin achieving its short-term goal, it had tworesults that allowed the creation of a top-downstate. All of the major politicians whoadvocated decentralization, for exampleTakahashi, were quieted by murder or fear ofmurder, and the men who succeeded them inpower, both military and civilian, were by andlarge the advocates of top-down government.(See Smethurst, 2007, especially 219-298.

Fifth, Japanese elites gained a deep knowledge

of the West and its ideas after CommodorePerry visited Japan with his steamships in 1853.The shogunal authorities immediately set upgovernment schools to learn about Westernmilitary and medical technology, and whenJapan’s new universities were established afterthe Meiji government came to power in 1868,they emphasized learning about European andNorth American political, economic, scientificand technological systems—in fact, most of theearly teachers were either foreigners orJapanese trained abroad. For example,Takahashi’s first job, at age 14, was to teachEnglish in the elite Japanese school that laterbecame Tokyo University. He was chosenbecause, although badly educated in atraditional sense, he was fluent in English,having studied with American missionaries inYokohama and then in California for four years.His English-language ability as a child startedhim on a career that led to his becomingGovernor of the Bank of Japan, seven-timeFinance Minister, and even to serving brieflybut significantly as Prime Minister in 1921-22.

Two changes in “Westernization” took place bythe 1920s. To begin with, people no longer readonly officially acceptable Western books—forexample, all of John Maynard Keynes’ booksappeared in Japanese translation within twoyears of their English publications, Kurt Weill’sand Berthold Brecht’s Three Penny Operaappeared in Japanese-translation on theJapanese stage only four years after its Berlinpremiere, the poetry of left poets like LangstonHughes (who visited Japan in 1933 and stayedat the Imperial Hotel) came out in translationwithin months of their original English editions,Itagaki Eitarō, a Japanese artist who helpedpaint the murals in the Harlem Court House(and who worked for the US governmentduring World War II, but was deported to Japanin 1951 for being a Communist) l ived1915-1928 with the American sculptorGertrude Boyle, who carved a bust of

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Takahashi in 1936, and there is a photograph ina major Japanese newspaper in autumn 1935 ofFinance Minister Takahashi reading Beatriceand Sidney Webb’s laudatory book on theSoviet Union, published in a nationalnewspaper. Second, by the interwar years,Japanese no longer learned “things Western,”but learned “things modern.” That is, Japan hadbecome a member of the modern intellectualworld and made major contributions to it. Thisis most clear in the arts—the Westernmodernism of William Butler Yeats, EzraPound, Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius and FrankLloyd Wright, for example, had a strongJapanese influence in its development. AndJapanese engineers and scientists were amongthe world’s best. For example, in 1941 thefamous Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane wasfaster, had greater maneuverability, and alonger range than any of the American planes itwent against, and the battleships Yamato andMusashi were the world’s largest warships.

Japan’s military elite emphasized the centralityof Japanese spirit to victory in war at the sametime that it relied on Western militarytechnology to build a world-class army andnavy. But oddly, the officers who sought to useWestern technology to build Japan’s militarypower did not understand that as well as theyhad learned to create modern weapons, theyhad not yet caught up with the US, USSR andUK in the quality and quantity of militarytechnology. In fact, while American pilotsadmired the Zero, they also called it a “flyingcigarette lighter,” because much of its speed,maneuverability and range came from loweringthe plane’s weight by reducing its protectivearmor, especially around the gas tanks. And thebattleships Yamato and Musashi, powerful asthey were, were built for the war before theone they fought in. Aircraft carriers to launchplanes against enemy ships, carrier basedplanes that were as fast as the Zero but betterprotected, submarines to interdict Japanese

shipping, and B-29s not only to burn Japanesecities to the ground but also to drop mines inJapan’s internal waters, took over control of thewar. The US carried out “Operation Starvation”(a use of airplanes, submarines, and sea minesdropped from B-29s to cut off Japan’s rawmaterial and food supply and to destroy itshousing in order to break its peoples’ moraleand induce them to pressure their governmentinto surrender) in and around Japan in 1944-45and the Japanese, in spite of their knowledge ofWestern military technology, could not resist it.Good as the Japanese were in learning aboutWestern technology between 1853 and 1945,they were not as good at it as their Westernmodels. Possibly the Imperial Japanese elitestaff officers recognized Japan’s economicweakness and thus chose “warrior spirit” as away to make up the difference, albeit withdisastrous results for Japan and its soldiers,sailors, and urban civilians. In addition to thewar dead, by the time of Japan’s surrender in1945, one-quarter of its housing had beendestroyed, and “Rice Stocks on Hand” wereless than one-tenth of the 1937 level. (Cohen1949, 367, 407) The war, blithely entered into,came home to roost.

Sources:

Cohen, Jerome B. 1949. Japan’s Economy inWar and Reconstruction. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Drea, Edward J. 2009. The Imperial Army: ItsRise and Fall, 1853-1945. Lawrence: TheUniversity of Kansas Press.

Humphreys, Leonard A. 1995. The Way of theHeavenly Sword. Palo Alto: Stanford UniversityPress.

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Katō Yōko. 2001. Sensō no ronri: Nichirō sensōkara taiheiyō sensō made (The Logic of War:From the Russo-Japanese War to the PacificWar). Tokyo: Keisō shobō.

Katō Yōko. 2009. Soredemo, Nihonjin wa‘sensō’ o eranda (Yet, the Japanese Chose War).Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha.

Kawada Minoru. 2011. Shōwa rikugun nokiseki. (Following the Shōwa Era Army). Tokyo:Chūō kōron shinsha.

Kawada, Minoru. 2014-15. Shōwa rikugunzenshi (A Complete History of the ShōwaPeriod Army). Tokyo: Kōdansha gendai shinsho.

Kitaoka Shin’ichi and Mikuriya Takashi, eds.2010, Sensō-fukkō-hatten: kenryoku to kōsō(War, Revival, Development: Power andPlanning). Tokyo: Tokyo University Press.

League of Nations. 1945. Industrialization andForeign Trade. New York: League of Nations.

McCrea, John L. 2016. Captain McCrea’s War.New York: Skyhorse Publishing.

Maddison, Angus. 1995. Monitoring the WorldEconomy: 1821-1992. Paris: OECD.

Makino Kuniaki. 2016. Keizai gakushatachi noNichibei kaisen (Economists and the Japan-America War). Tokyo: Shinchōsha.

Matsumoto Seichō. 2005. Shōwashi hakkutsu(Excavating Shōwa Era History). Vol. 7. Tokyo:Bunshun bunkōbunko.

Matsuura Masataka. 2002. Zaikai no seijikeizaishi (A political economic history offinancial circles). Tokyo: Tokyo UniversityPress.

Mori, Yasuo. 2011. Nagata Tetsuzan: Heiwa ijiwa gunjin no saidai sekimu nari (Maintainingpeace is a soldier’s greatest duty) Kyoto:Mineruva shobō.

NHK. 2011. Nihonjin wa naze sensō e tomukatta no ka (Why did the Japanese go towar?) 3 vols. Tokyo: NHK.

Presseisen, Ernest L. 1965. Before Aggression:Europeans Prepare the Japanese Army. Tuscon:University of Arizona Press.

Skidelsky, Robert. 1994. John Maynard Keynes:The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1927. London:Penguin.

Smethurst, Richard J. 1974. A Social Basis forPrewar Japanese Militarism. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Smethurst, Richard J. 2007. From Foot Soldierto Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo,Japan’s Keynes. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.

Smethurst, Richard J. 2010. TakahashiKorekiyo: Nihon no Keinzu: Sono shōgai toshisō (Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes: HisLife and Thought) Tokyo: Tōyō keizaishinpōsha.

Smethurst, Richard J. 2012. “Japan, the UnitedStates, and the Road to World War II in thePacific, “ The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 10,Issue 37, September 10, 2012.

Takahashi Korekiyo. 1920. Naigai kokusakushiken (Personal Opinions on National Policy atHome and Abroad). Tokyo: 1920.

Tobe Ryōichi. 1999. Nihon rikugun to Chūgoku(The Japanese Army and China). Tokyo:Kōdansha.

Tobe Ryōichi 2017. Jikai no byōri: Nihon guntaino soshiki bunseki (A Pathology of Self-Destruction: An Analysis of the Structure of theJapanese Army.) Tokyo: Nihon keizaishuppansha.

Warner, Malcolm, ed. 2017. The Diffusion ofWestern Economic Ideas in East Asia.Abingdon: Routledge.

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Richard J. Smethurst is Professor Emeritus of Modern Japanese History at the University ofPittsburgh. He has written three books and many articles on modern Japan, and especially onthe rise of, and Japanese opposition to the rise of, Japanese militarism. His current research isinto Japanese industrial policy in the late nineteenth century, the military decision-makingthat led Japan into World War 2, and the woodblock prints of the nō theater by the artistTsukioka Kōgyo.