The Shōwa Political Crisis,July 1940: The Imperial Japanese Army Courts a Breach with its Sovereign

Historians and the Sources

Any study of the emperor–army relationship during the Shōwa political crisis must necessarily locate itself in a highly polarized debate concerning the Shōwa Emperor’s role in Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s. Was he, as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Herbert Bix has argued, a ‘dynamic emperor participating in the planning of aggression and guiding the process, by a variety of interventions that were often indirect but in every instance determining’? ⁴ Or was the emperor, as archivist par excellence Kurihara Ken has insisted, repulsed by the ‘extremes of unilateral military extremism’ but, at least until his ‘sacred decision’ to surrender in August 1945, powerless to ‘turn the tides of history’? ⁵

This article seeks to stake out a defensible middle ground. The emperor emerges in this account as an active participant in the Japanese policymaking process. His interventions were generally indirect – they were sometimes pointed and occasionally caustic – and were very often aimed at restraining his military. He seemed convinced that the army’s aggression abroad was inextricably intertwined with (i) lower- and middle-level officers’ propensity to ignore the service’s own chain of command, and (ii) middle- and higher-level officers’ willingness to ignore or subvert proper policymaking processes. The emperor could not, however, personally impose order on the army. He was not a despot but was, by his own admission, ‘one component of the state’. ⁶ He was, admittedly, an integral component of the pre-surrender Japanese state. But so, too, was the Japanese army. It was, in historian Edward Drea’s memorable expression, ‘the single most powerful institution in the nation’. ⁷ Not only did it have recourse to violence, but courtesy of constitutional provisions which afforded both the army chief of staff and war minister direct access to the emperor, the army in its operational and administrative functions was also largely free from interference by the civilian government. It jealously guarded its policymaking prerogatives and, even though the emperor combined in himself the functions of state sovereign and commander-in-chief, he could do little more than importune and remonstrate with the service’s highest echelons.

Whatever successes the emperor enjoyed in his efforts at reining in his army tended to be superseded by subsequent, less-than-promising developments. The large-scale rebellion led by young officers on 26 February 1936 provides a case-in-point. The emperor’s personal opposition to the rebellion ensured that the army leadership, after some initial wavering, cracked down on the rebellious young officers and forced their high-ranking sympathizers, including Generals Mazaki Jinzaburō, Araki Sadao, and Kawashima Yoshiyuki, into premature retirement. This was, in historian Ikuhiko Hata’s estimation, one of the very few instances in which an ‘imperial decision’ directly and tangibly impacted events in pre-surrender Japan. ⁸ Then, within weeks, in an apparent attempt at preventing so much as the possibility of the political re-emergence of the forcibly retired generals, the cabinet of Prime Minister Hirota Kōki – at the army’s behest – revived and resuscitated a provision that the war and navy ministers must be officers on active duty. With this, the emperor’s success in quashing the 26 February Incident turned into heavy (if not immediately apparent) defeat. The active-service-minister provision had originally been instituted by Imperial ordnance in 1900, but had been discarded in the early aftermath of the Taishō political crisis. At issue was the unhealthy political power it afforded the armed services: it gave the army and navy the power of life-and-death over any cabinet, insofar as it handed the services the exclusive right to name their own ministerial candidates. Refusal to do so, as had happened during the Taishō political crisis, guaranteed the cabinet’s downfall. ⁹ After the Hirota cabinet reinstituted this power in March 1936, it took less than 12 months before the army used it. The service in February 1937 refused to name a war minister and thereby prevented General Ugaki Kazushige from forming a cabinet; it again used this power during the Shōwa political crisis of 1940.

Source materials for this investigation are plentiful. The 2014 Imperial Household Agency compilation, entitled Shōwa tennō jitsuroku (True Documents of the Shōwa Emperor, hereafter referred to as Jitsuroku), is a 61-volume, 12,000-plus-page, day-by-day account of the Shōwa Emperor’s life and times. It includes only a modicum of interpretation and it cites 3,152 separate documentary source materials. A few dozens of those materials, including for example the chamberlains’ diaries, remain otherwise inaccessible to scholars. This means that Jitsuroku includes information which is otherwise unavailable and is hence cause for serious re-examination of the emperor and his era. Less positively, it also gives rise to unanswerable questions about whether the Imperial Household Agency was selective in what it chose to include – and what it chose not to include – from these otherwise unavailable source materials. It is nonetheless indispensable for any study of the Shōwa Emperor and his relationship with the army in this critical period. ¹⁰ Hata Shunroku’s diary, edited by the indefatigable Itō Takashi as well as Terunuma Yasutaka, has proved eminently useful. ¹¹ So, too, has Hata’s recently published memoir. ¹² Tōjō Hideki’s post-war writings from Sugamo prison, which only became available in the 1990s, provide important anecdotal evidence of the seriousness with which the emperor treated the Shōwa political crisis. ¹³ These and other materials enable the historian to reconstruct this seminal event, and to lift it from its historiographical obscurity.

The Emperor and the Army’s Intractability

The Shōwa political crisis of July 1940 was but the latest in a long line of incidents which, whatever else they achieved, served to convince the emperor of the army’s deeply entrenched intractability. Indeed, it is possible to trace the emperor’s concern with discipline and control of the army back almost to the beginning of his reign. On 27 June 1929, only some two-and-a-half years after he ascended the throne, the emperor demanded Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi’s resignation after the latter (himself an army general) bowed before army pressure and declined to discipline the Japanese military officers responsible for the murder of Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin. According to Jitsuroku, the question of the constitutionality of his actions left the emperor in a state of ‘anxiety’ (‘goshinrō’); Jitsuroku also makes apparent that the emperor subsequently received affirmation from Grand Chamberlain (and retired admiral) Suzuki Kantarō, who spoke to him of the ‘need to try and enforce discipline’. ¹⁴

Next came the Mukden Incident, which began on 18 September 1931. Rumours concerning the army’s restlessness had swirled around Tokyo for much of 1931; the emperor on 11 September admonished War Minister Minami Jirō to ‘enforce strict discipline’. ¹⁵ This proved impossible. Within a week, the garrison force known as the Kwantung Army launched an audacious plot for the conquest of China’s northeastern-most provinces, known collectively as Manchuria. It began when Kwantung Army officers staged an explosion of a Japanese-owned railway track outside the city of Mukden and blamed soldiers from a nearby Chinese military base. In so doing, they created for the Kwantung Army its casus belli. Some officers in the War Ministry and the Army General Staff were in active connivance with this plot; the Kwantung Army otherwise left policymakers in Tokyo deliberately uninformed. It was a stunning show of defiance. The emperor on 22 September encouraged Prime Minister Wakatsuki Reijirō to restrain the army and to uphold the ‘cabinet policy of non-expansion of the situation’. That same day, a fretful Hirohito listened as Army Chief of Staff Kanaya Hanzō reported that Korea Army Commander Hayashi Senjūrō had ‘acted independently and without orders’ and sent forces under his command across the border into Manchuria. ¹⁶ This resulted in an ever-widening sphere of aggression which was contrary to government policy. The cabinet resigned in December 1931, largely due to its utter inability to restrain the army.

The puppet state of Manchukuo was established in March 1932. Military operations continued virtually unabated, as Japan’s Kwantung Army took the fight to northern China. By early 1933, the province of Jehol provided a particular point of focus, and the emperor, on 4 February 1933, sanctioned strategic operations in that province. One week later, the emperor sought to revoke the sanction he had given the Jehol operation. The emperor’s change of heart was attributable to Prime Minister Saitō Makoto’s concern lest fighting in Jehol worsen Japan’s situation in the League of Nations. The army was, however, unmoved and Chief Aide de Camp Nara Takeji cautioned the emperor against attempting to halt the Jehol operation by means of an imperial order. Doing so, said Nara, would ‘give rise to a commotion and may well be the cause of a coup d’état’. ¹⁷ The emperor decided not to act, the Jehol operation went ahead, and Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.

Some two years after these events, on 26 February 1936, military officers indeed launched a coup d’état. The emperor had been well aware of restlessness in the army’s ranks. Jitsuroku records him in September 1935 cautioning Army Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in Kotohito about the baneful phenomenon of ‘gekokujō’ (insubordination), warning of the dangers inherent in allowing fire-eating junior officers to ‘drag along’ their superiors, and demanding that the army leadership ‘prohibit arbitrary decisions’ by field officers and subordinates. ¹⁸ It was to no avail. Middle-ranking army officers on 26 February targeted some of the emperor’s most trusted vassals, including Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Saitō Makoto, Grand Chamberlain Suzuki Kantarō, and Prime Minister Okada Keisuke (all of whom were, incidentally, retired navy officers). The army leadership flirted with the coup leaders before the emperor issued orders to subjugate what he called the ‘mutinous’ troops. ¹⁹

The army on 7 July 1937 stumbled into what became known as the China Incident. Days after the outbreak of fighting, on 11 July, War Minister Sugiyama Hajime and Army Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in Kotohito informed the emperor that peace should be obtainable within weeks. The emperor nonetheless expressed his misgivings. He was concerned lest the army had taken up the fight against the wrong enemy. He fretted about the army’s preparedness ‘if the worst should happen and if the Soviet Union uses military force [even as the fighting continued in China]’. ²⁰ On 31 July, an attentive Hirohito listened as the Army General Staff’s Operations Bureau Chief Major General Ishiwara Kanji spoke of the ‘urgent need to … withdraw troops [from China], as soon as possible, by means of diplomatic negotiation’. ²¹ When fighting spread to Shanghai in early August, the emperor resigned himself to the thought that it had become ‘difficult to bring the situation under control by means of diplomacy’. ²² Even so, the emperor by mid-August was voicing his concern with ‘the army’s strategy’ and spoke of the ‘dangers of expanding the incident to China in its entirety’. ²³

The emperor’s concerns became reality in July 1938, when Japanese and Soviet forces clashed even as the war in China continued. This was a ‘dangerous small war’, which the Japanese referred to as the Changkufeng Incident. ²⁴ Almost immediately upon the outbreak of fighting, War Minister Itagaki Seishirō requested an audience with the emperor. A disconsolate emperor dismissed the audience as ‘futile’ and refused Itagaki’s request. After much importuning, the emperor relented. But he remained ill-tempered and, in audience with Itagaki, adopted a suitably ‘strong tone of voice’. He pointedly asked Itagaki whether he had consulted with his cabinet colleagues about the incident. He then lashed out at the army for having acted arbitrarily and without orders on several previous occasions. He specifically mentioned the Manchurian Incident (in which Itagaki had played a leading role). He also mentioned the war in China which had expanded against his wishes and which continued without end in sight. Having lambasted the army for its repeated and all-too-apparent willingness to disregard government policy, the emperor then decreed that, in this latest incident, the army ‘must not move a single troop’ unless and until he ordered otherwise. ²⁵ It was a stinging rebuke. Itagaki emerged from the audience, said he dared never again face the emperor, and declared his desire to resign immediately.

Itagaki remained in the cabinet, and continued to brook his emperor’s displeasure. After conclusion of the small-scale war with the Soviet Union, the principal issue dividing Itagaki and his sovereign was that of a military alliance with Nazi Germany. Itagaki called repeatedly and loudly for an alliance with Germany, which would target both the Soviet Union and Britain. This put him at odds with other cabinet ministers, including Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa and Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō. Yonai was particularly obstinate and on one notable instance argued that an alliance with Germany would lead inexorably to war against an Anglo-American–Soviet–French coalition. It was, he insisted, a ‘war with no prospect [of victory]’. ²⁶ The emperor was in broad agreement with Yonai. In July 1939, the emperor told Itagaki bluntly that any attempt at a Japanese–German alliance was ‘against his will’. He ‘criticized the army’s manoeuvres to that end’ and spoke openly of his ‘dissatisfaction’ with the army. He then turned on Itagaki, and questioned his ‘competence’ as minister and as army officer. ²⁷

Conclusion of the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 stunned policymakers in Tokyo. The emperor worried about his army’s response – its arguments for an alliance with Germany were, after all, predicated on the bedrock assumption of shared Japanese–German enmity toward the Soviet Union – but he also hoped that the pact might somehow shake the army ‘to its senses’. ²⁸ The pact certainly seemed to signal an end to the army’s enthusiasm for an alliance with Germany. A new cabinet emerged, with retired general Abe Nobuyuki as prime minister. The emperor confided in Abe of his ‘long-standing dissatisfaction with the army’ and of the need to ‘enforce discipline’. ²⁹ The army had other ideas. It reasoned it could control Abe. It hence acquiesced not only in Abe’s prime ministerial appointment, but also in the emperor’s insistence that Hata Shunroku – a general whom the emperor trusted implicitly – serve as war minister. In so doing, the service dispensed with its own choice as war minister, namely Lieutenant General Tada Hayao. ³⁰

Abe proved less pliable than the army had hoped. He also proved politically inept: he lost the confidence of not only the army, but also its sister service in the navy as well as the Imperial Diet. His cabinet achieved little and it collapsed in mid-January 1940, amidst swirling rumours of another army-inspired coup d’état. ³¹ The emperor at this juncture took the unusual step of himself ‘recommending’ Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa’s prime ministerial appointment. Uppermost in the emperor’s mind was Yonai’s earlier opposition to an alliance with Germany, and he sought through Yonai to steer his nation ever farther away from a Japanese–German alliance. ³²

The Army and the Yonai Cabinet

Despite its oft-repeated professions of fierce loyalty to the emperor, the army seethed with discontent at Yonai’s prime ministerial appointment. Recalling Yonai’s earlier stand-offs with War Minister Itagaki, military officers regarded Yonai as ‘anti-army’, and reciprocated with barely disguised ‘feelings of ill will’ and even ‘repugnance’ toward Yonai and his cabinet. ³³ In the weeks and months following his appointment, army officers charged Yonai with being an obstacle in the way of successful conclusion of the war in China, and they criticized his cabinet for what they regarded as its political weakness. The Yonai cabinet had, in their estimation, failed to unite the nation. They called for a ‘new political structure’ that would repudiate Yonai’s refusal to act on the army’s demands for national mobilization and would instead support the service in its ongoing attempts at ending the war in China. ³⁴

Although it charged the Yonai Cabinet with being an impediment to conclusion of the wearying war in China, the army in early to mid-1940 was in fact confident that an end to the war was in sight. (Some believed that, when the army eventually brought down the Yonai cabinet, it did so at least partly to ensure that Yonai did not get the credit for re-establishing Sino–Japanese peace. ³⁵ ) In March, the army oversaw establishment of a pro-Japanese regime in Nanking, under the leadership of former Kuomintang official Wang Ching-wei, and Japanese army officers were hopeful it might merge with the Chiang regime in Chungking. Feeding that hope was the so-called Kiri operation, which in March 1940 brought together Japanese army officers and Chinese officials in covert, quasi-official negotiations in Hong Kong. Army Vice Chief of Staff Sawada Shigeru was so heartened by these developments that on 15 March he reported to the emperor on the Kiri operation. He explained that, in spite of contentious issues such as recognition of Manchuria, both sides had agreed on an ‘outline of peace terms’. ³⁶ By late June, the negotiators had agreed that China Expeditionary Army Commander (and former war minister) Itagaki Seishirō would conduct ceasefire talks with both Chiang and Wang. The Japanese army leadership at this juncture was so enthusiastic as to accept Chinese conditions in their virtual entirety. Most importantly, peace would not be contingent on Chinese recognition of the independent state of Manchukuo; this thorny issue would be set aside until after peace had been concluded. Nor would the Japanese army insist on stationing its troops in China after the conclusion of peace; it would instead accept conclusion of a treaty of mutual assistance (which would presumably allow for a certain number of Japanese troops in northern China and Inner Mongolia). Vice Chief of Staff Sawada met with little opposition from within the army when, on 24 June, he spoke of pursuing peace ‘as soon as possible’ on such terms. ³⁷

Occurring alongside the Kiri operation was the blitzkrieg in Europe. The German army in April and May overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, and Denmark with dizzying rapidity. France fell in early June, and most in Japan believed that Britain’s time was nigh. The unflappable Yonai continued to insist on maintaining Japan’s position of neutrality toward the European war. Infuriated, army officers ushered in the catch-cry, ‘Don’t miss the bus!’ ³⁸ Their demands were twofold: Japan must ally itself militarily with Nazi Germany, and it must launch a forceful military advance into the suddenly defenceless colonial regions of Southeast Asia. The so-called southward advance appealed to army officers for two principal reasons. First, Southeast Asia abounded in oil, rubber, iron, tin, nickel, bauxite, and various other natural resources, which were unavailable in the Japanese Empire but which were necessary if Japan were to construct a durable, self-sufficient system of national defence. Second, Anglo-American aid was reaching Chiang Kai-shek via Southeast Asia. A military advance into Southeast Asia – particularly French Indochina – would sever that supply route, and would help convince Chiang that it was indeed in his best interests to seek an end to the fighting via the above-mentioned Kiri operation. With a consensus fast emerging on these two points, the Military Affairs Bureau’s Military Affairs Section Chief, Colonel Iwakuro Hideo, asked the Operations Bureau’s Operations Section Chief, Colonel Okada Jūichi, whether the general staff had prepared ‘operational plans for the capture of the Southern regions’. ³⁹ The resulting plans, which were completed on 25 June, involved advances into French Indochina, Thailand, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies.

By this time, army officers’ dissatisfaction with Yonai had reached fever pitch. A cacophony of army voices charged Yonai with a multitude of sins of both omission and commission. The Yonai cabinet was, Vice War Minister Anami Korechika explained to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi, ‘extremely disadvantageous’ so far as the ‘pursuit of talks with Germany and Italy’ were concerned. ⁴⁰ Yonai was also blocking the southward advance, and no new domestic political order seemed possible so long as he remained as prime minister. Keenly ambitious politician and one-time prime minister Konoe Fumimaro in late June asked the key question of Military Affairs Bureau Director, Lieutenant General Mutō Akira, ‘Does the army intend to overthrow the [Yonai] cabinet?’ ⁴¹

Immediate Prelude to the Shōwa Political Crisis

The army indeed intended to overthrow the Yonai cabinet. Before it did so, however, it wanted to assure itself of Konoe’s likely prime ministerial appointment. Konoe himself proved perfectly obliging. He resigned as Privy Council President on June 24, and thereby made himself available for the prime minister’s role. As if to underline his credentials, he publicly aligned himself with the army’s concerns for domestic political reform by announcing the need for a new political structure. It was at precisely this juncture that Konoe asked Mutō whether the army intended to abort the Yonai cabinet. Konoe’s own intentions were clear, and the army felt satisfied, in the complete absence of any other suitable candidate, that it had its man.

The army’s political nerve centre in Tokyo also focused an unusual degree of attention on General Hata’s successor as war minister. This was really a task for the army’s so-called ‘big three’: War Minister Hata, Army Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in Kotohito, and Inspector-General of Military Training Yamada Otozō. Yet, the War Ministry’s more politically attuned officers, including Vice Minister Anami, Military Affairs Bureau Chief Mutō, and Military Affairs Section Chief Iwakuro, were impatient. This was a classic case of the above-mentioned phenomenon of gekokujō, or insubordination, in which subordinates imposed a solution on their superiors. The imperative of gekokujō seemed, in this instance, compelling because Anami, Mutō, and Iwakuro were agreed on the need to ward off the possibility of the emperor again imposing on the service his choice as war minister (this was, parenthetically, somewhat less than a vote of confidence in Hata). They wanted a minister who would, in their estimation, restore the army to what they regarded as its rightful, predominant position in the Japanese policymaking process. The unanimous choice was Inspector-General of Army Aviation, Lieutenant-General Tōjō Hideki. He was, according to Anami, true to his nickname of ‘razor’: he was able to ‘manage things without worrying about other people’s feelings’, and for that reason, he was ‘extremely good at getting things done’. ⁴²

Anami prevailed on former-army-officer-turned-novelist and close mutual friend, Yamanaka Minetarō, to convince Tōjō to accept the ministerial post. Yamanaka proceeded to the Inspectorate General of Army Aviation. Tōjō, however, expressed a fierce hatred of cabinet politics. He told Yamanaka that, on the basis of what he had seen during an earlier stint as vice war minister (under Minister Itagaki in the latter half of 1938), a ministerial post was fundamentally similar to the job of a barmaid. He voiced a passionate disdain for the barmaid-like task of keeping all-comers happy, avowed he had been ‘trained to command armies’, and told Yamanaka in no uncertain terms that a ministerial post meant ‘nothing’ to him. Yet, Tōjō relented when Yamanaka called on him again later that same evening. He indicated his acceptance of the ministerial post. ⁴³

Anami at this juncture approached the emperor’s political antenna, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi. Informally and off the record, Anami informed Kido of the army’s intention to name Tōjō as war minister in the Yonai cabinet’s successor. By this action, Anami hoped to head off any attempt by the emperor at naming his own preference as war minister. When Kido took the news to the emperor, he reacted unfavourably, and told Kido that only those with significant command experience should be appointed war minister. He noted that Tōjō had never even served as division commander, and named China Expeditionary Army Commander-in-Chief General Nishio Toshizō as his preferred ministerial candidate. Anami again met with Kido on 2 July, and presumably learned of the emperor’s preference for Nishio. He devised one last manoeuvre to ensure the army got its preferred war minister, and it fell on General Hata to enact the plan. ⁴⁴

An Army-instigated Political Crisis

First, it was necessary to bring down the Yonai cabinet. Army Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in wrote to War Minister Hata on 4 July and demanded his resignation from the ‘unenterprising and retrogressive’ Yonai cabinet. ⁴⁵ Hata, ever-solicitous of the emperor’s concerns, worried that the army would be regarded as an ‘extreme nuisance’ by resorting to this extreme political measure. ⁴⁶ He devised his own last-ditch effort at averting the looming political crisis, which would keep the army outwardly blameless. He sent Vice Minister Anami and Military Affairs Bureau Director Mutō to Cabinet Secretary Ishiwata Sōtarō, to argue for the cabinet’s en masse resignation. Yonai was no fool and saw straight through Hata’s plan. He would have none of it. On 16 July, he confronted Hata: ‘What will it be? Do you want to quit the cabinet? Or do you not?’ ⁴⁷ Hata submitted his resignation, Yonai asked the army to name his ministerial successor, the army refused to do so, and the Yonai cabinet collapsed.

Events then moved apace. Hata on 17 July ordered Tōjō to return to Tokyo. Tōjō, who was on a month-long tour of the continent, departed the Manchurian capital of Mukden almost immediately. His plane flew into a typhoon, and was twice turned back. There was no way through the inclement weather, and Tōjō spent the night in Heijō (present-day Pyongyang). His plane the next day flew only as far as Japan’s Gifu Prefecture. There he spent several hours before he finally arrived at 9.40 p.m. at Tachikawa Airfield, in Tokyo. He proceeded directly to the war minister’s official residence, and learned officially that he was to serve as Japan’s next war minister. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the weather he had encountered on his return flight, Tōjō’s military colleagues dubbed him the ‘lightning-strike minister’. ⁴⁸

Even as Tōjō battled the elements on his way back to Tokyo, Hata reported to the emperor and explained the reasons for his ministerial resignation. Hata then enacted his service’s plan to ensure that Tōjō represented it at cabinet level, by informing the emperor that Tōjō would succeed him as war minister (and that General Yamashita Tomoyuki would replace Tōjō as Inspector-General of Army Aviation). General Hata had, in accord with custom, reached the decision to appoint Tōjō in consultation with the other two members of the army’s above-mentioned ‘big three’. He had, in other words, joined with Army Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in and Inspector-General of Military Training Yamada and had rubber-stamped the Anami-Mutō-Iwakuro insistence on Tōjō as his ministerial successor. ⁴⁹ It was not, however, the task of the outgoing army minister to report to the emperor on his successor. Convention placed this responsibility, instead, on the shoulders of the incoming prime minister.

The emperor rebuked Hata for the indiscretion. He promptly summoned Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Kōichi and relayed his displeasure with the army for having dispensed with convention. Hirohito then summoned Chief Aide-de-Camp Hasunuma Shigeru. Hata’s actions must not, the emperor admonished Hasunuma, create a ‘precedent’. ⁵⁰

Hirohito’s reaction was at least partly attributable to his penchant for following established practice. No doubt he was annoyed at Hata for having shown contempt for the prime minister’s office and its prerogatives. It also seems possible that mention of Yamashita Tomoyuki (as Tōjō’s successor as Inspector-General of Army Aviation) provoked in the emperor a stronger reaction than might otherwise have been the case, for the emperor’s distrust of Yamashita had been visceral ever since the latter’s involvement in the failed coup d’état of 26 February 1936. Above all, however, the emperor’s rigid adherence to convention should be understood as a frustrated reaction to the army’s latest attempt at out-manoeuvring him: Hata’s report was official and formal, which so constrained the emperor that he felt unable to suggest his own preference as war minister.

War Minister Tōjō Moves to Repair His Service’s Relationship with Its Sovereign

The Shōwa political crisis brought the emperor’s relationship with his army to a new low. It convinced the emperor, if he needed any further convincing, of the army’s deeply rooted intractability. It revealed to the emperor, yet again, the baneful influence which the service’s subordinates exercised over their superiors. It showed the army’s insistence on getting its own way at cabinet level, and its preparedness to resort to both fair means and foul in pursuit of its own, narrowly defined interests.

It is unclear whether the Anami–Mutō–Iwakuro triumvirate had selected Tōjō specifically because they believed he would repair the army’s relationship with its sovereign. What is clear is that, soon after the Konoe cabinet’s formation, the emperor raised with Tōjō the ‘distress’ which the army’s recent actions had caused him. Lest Tōjō underestimate his sovereign’s complete disenchantment with the service, the emperor repeated what he had told War Minister Terauchi Hisaichi in the early aftermath of the 26 February Incident. The army was, he said, responsible for an ever-increasing number of ‘disgraceful incidents’. It had ‘violated imperial instructions’, and it had ‘sullied Our nation’s history’. He demanded that Tōjō ‘look carefully into the causes’ of the service’s most recent indiscretions and ‘sweep away the root of the [War] Ministry’s evil’. ⁵¹

Tōjō enthusiastically embraced the task of reconciling army and emperor, and did everything within his power to assuage the emperor’s concerns about the army. Indeed, this imperative gave meaning to the ministerial post which Tōjō otherwise continued to deride as a barmaid-like job. In this regard, Tōjō was fond of telling his subordinates that affairs of state centred on the emperor’s ‘disposition’ (okokoromochi), and that a cabinet minister’s highest calling involved forging ‘unity’ between ‘the people’ and the emperor. ⁵² With specific regard to his role as war minister, Tōjō believed his highest priority involved the restoration of unity between the emperor and his army.

In this pursuit, Tōjō was the beneficiary of happy circumstance. The cabinet on which he served was far more receptive to army policies than had been the case with very many of its predecessors. Forceful representations and needling arguments on Tōjō’s part were unnecessary. This first became apparent during the so-called Ogikubo conference, which on 19 July brought together the four men who would form the nucleus of the next cabinet: prime minister-to-be Konoe Fumimaro, his handpicked foreign minister in Matsuoka Yōsuke, incoming war minister Tōjō, and Vice Admiral Yoshida Zengo, who had served as navy minister in the Yonai cabinet and would remain in that post in the Konoe cabinet.

During the Ogikubo conference, Konoe spoke of the imperative of incorporating Southeast Asia into Japan’s new East Asian order. He made clear the need to ally Japan militarily with Germany and Italy. He spoke of the need to put the Japanese economy on a war footing, and he explained measures which, in his estimation, would bring the war in China to a conclusion. These included not only ongoing military operations in China, but also government aid to Wang Ching-wei. The above-mentioned advance into Southeast Asia would, moreover, cut the routes by which the Anglo-American powers were aiding Chiang Kai-shek. Konoe also outlined terms of peace to be offered Chiang (terms which bore neat resemblance to Army Vice Chief of Staff Sawada’s above-mentioned terms). Konoe noted that a Japanese advance into Southeast Asia might invite US armed intervention, but suggested that such was unlikely. Konoe also placed emphasis on the need for ‘coordination between the government and the supreme command’, for ‘army–navy harmony’, and for military preparedness. ⁵³

Almost everything Konoe said during the Ogikubo conference aligned precisely with Tōjō’s own thoughts and with army policy. Tōjō therefore said practically nothing at the Ogikubo conference. He sat, he listened, and he nodded. ⁵⁴ Only Vice Admiral Yoshida demurred. ‘Regarding relations with the [German–Italian] Axis’, he stated, ‘the navy is not thinking of an alliance.’ ⁵⁵ The Japanese decision-making process required complete unanimity; no alliance with Germany and Italy would be possible so long as Yoshida maintained his opposition. Still, Yoshida’s utterance struck Tōjō as a not entirely unwelcome development. The army had repeatedly incurred the emperor’s displeasure by swimming against the tide of majority ministerial opinion. Now, at the outset of his ministership, it was not the army but its sister service in the navy which found itself at odds with the cabinet.

By placing itself at variance with the majority ministerial opinion regarding a military alliance with Germany, the navy quite neatly reflected the emperor’s own concerns. In short, both the emperor and his navy were concerned lest a German alliance pit Japan in an unwinnable war against the maritime might of the Anglo-American powers. The navy’s resistance crumbled in early September, when Yoshida suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown and resigned his ministerial post. His successor, the supine Vice Admiral Oikawa Koshirō, immediately overturned his service’s opposition to the alliance. ⁵⁶ The emperor continued to fret about the alliance and, on the eve of its formal conclusion, he confided to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido his concern at the ‘enormous crisis’ which seemed likely to engulf Japan. He nonetheless felt constrained by cabinet (and Supreme Command) unanimity: he had no intention of trying to impose a foreign policy course when his ministers and chiefs of staff were united behind an altogether different foreign policy course. Soon after the alliance’s conclusion, and seemingly without any other recourse, the emperor prayed to his imperial ancestors and beseeched them for their ‘divine protection’. ⁵⁷

Tōjō could not but be aware of the emperor’s concerns with the alliance. Yet, the issue of the alliance did not divide Tōjō and the emperor. Nor did it divide the army and the emperor. At issue was ministerial unanimity: Tōjō had felt no need to dispute foreign and security policies with his cabinet colleagues. Indeed, Tōjō was happy to let Matsuoka take the lead on the issue of the alliance, something which the vainglorious Matsuoka was very happy to do. This meant that the emperor directed his displeasure with the alliance less at Tōjō than at Matsuoka.

This, in turn, enabled Tōjō to turn his attention to another sore point in the emperor–army relationship, namely, his unruly subordinates. In contrast to the passive stance he adopted toward his cabinet colleagues, Tōjō took a most proactive approach toward his subordinates. Soon after his ministerial appointment, Tōjō issued a jarring set of orders. He wrote of his desire for the free flow of information ‘up and down the chain of command’, but he also made clear that no officer would henceforth take issue with decisions once they were made. To this end, he identified ‘further debate of matters which have already been decided by superiors’ as the ‘root of the evil of administrative retardation’. Such practice, he avowed, must be ‘swept away’. He also moved to prohibit the phenomenon of gekokujō. The imperative of ‘obeying orders’, he wrote, must not be undermined by unsanctioned actions undertaken in the guise of the ‘demands of the times’. In a nod to his newly coined nickname of ‘lightning-strike minister’, Tōjō avowed fidelity to the concept of ‘lightning-strike management’, which he defined as a policymaking process, which did not ‘miss the opportunity’ afforded by this ‘watershed moment’ in world affairs. Yet, he was careful to set very clear parameters, and clarified his refusal to authorize ‘unlawful or unconscionable acts including the misuse of expenses’, a failure to ‘liaise’ appropriately with colleagues, as well as ‘carelessness, negligence, and slovenliness’. ⁵⁸

Over the ensuing weeks and months, Tōjō transferred out of the War Ministry those officers who proved unable or unwilling to obey. His subordinates came to regard him as a man who enjoyed ‘toying with personnel matters’. ⁵⁹ Perhaps he did. But, of greater interest to Tōjō was the impact his personnel changes had on the emperor: in September 1940 alone, Tōjō reported to the emperor four separate times on personnel changes he had made. ⁶⁰ In so doing, he was trying to impress on the emperor an image of himself as a man able to impose order on an otherwise unruly army.

This same dynamic played out in the army’s move into northern French Indochina. The emperor had long since made his own proclivities known. He did not want the Japanese army (or navy) to engage in ‘Machiavellian manoeuvres like Frederick the Great, or Napoleon’. ⁶¹ Any Japanese move into Indochina should, in other words, be peaceful. Then, on 6 September, even as Franco–Japanese negotiations continued, a battalion at Ch’innankuan (in southern China), under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Morimoto Takuji, crossed the border into Indochina. It withdrew to China after the French army protested. An utterly incensed Tōjō insisted that the South China Army court-martial Morimoto. Tōjō’s refusal to accept the adventurism of forces in the field set him apart from his recent ministerial predecessors; this cannot have been lost on the emperor when Tōjō reported to him on 11 September about the border crossing and the subsequent court-martial. ⁶² Days later, when a Franco–Japanese agreement was imminent, Tōjō sought to restrain impatient bellicosity in the Army General Staff. ‘Orders must be issued that even if the troop stationing [in northern Indochina] is delayed’, he argued, ‘it is to be carried out peacefully.’ ⁶³ In making this case, Tōjō was doing nothing less than giving real policy substance to the emperor’s expressed wishes. It seems reasonable to assume that Tōjō informed the emperor of his having restrained the general staff when he reported to the emperor about the Indochinese issue on 25 September. ⁶⁴

Conclusion

This article, at its outset, noted what little attention the Yonai cabinet’s downfall has received from historians. It postulated that the paucity of attention is at least partly due to the widely accepted notion that the Yonai cabinet’s downfall was a relatively minor step along the path to war with the Anglo-American powers. By way of conclusion, it seems useful to ask whether the downfall of the Yonai cabinet really mattered. Does it warrant sustained historical attention? Should it be regarded as a political crisis? Do events depicted in this article warrant the title of Shōwa political crisis?

Readers will, of course, reach their own conclusions to these questions. It is nonetheless incontrovertible: the emperor himself regarded events in July 1940 as very much a political crisis. He was an active and important participant throughout, yet his input was hardly determining. He himself had decided in January 1940 that Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa should serve as prime minister, precisely because he expected Yonai to steer the nation away from a military alliance with Germany and away from a southward advance. The army in July used its political prerogatives and toppled Yonai’s cabinet, because it wanted the pro-German and pro-southward advance Konoe Fumimaro as prime minister. When Yonai’s days as prime minister were numbered, the emperor – in the hope of salvaging something out of the situation – named the soldier he wanted as the next war minister. The army refused to grant the emperor his wish and instead engaged in all manner of subterfuge and intrigue to ensure that it got its own preference as war minister. The emperor found himself thwarted at almost every turn by the army. He was disconsolate and distressed by his army’s actions.

In the immediate aftermath of the Yonai cabinet’s downfall, the army revealed a political sophistication that had hitherto been sorely lacking. It came in the person of Lieutenant General Tōjō Hideki. He worked assiduously as war minister to repair his service’s relationship with its emperor. Problems in the relationship remained. The emperor did not see eye to eye with Tōjō on the issue of the German alliance, and the war in China remained a sore point. Only weeks after Tōjō’s ministerial appointment, the Kiri project had stalled, and the emperor grumbled to his chamberlains about the army’s inability to identify a viable exit strategy. He criticized the army for having hopelessly underestimated Chiang’s ability to fight. And, he castigated the service for being surprised on almost every front. ⁶⁵ Still, Tōjō scrupulously remained within the bounds of his ministerial prerogatives, and he imposed an impressive degree of control over his subordinates. In a long string of war ministers before Tōjō, these two traits seemed largely illusory. There was certainly no guarantee that any of Tōjō’s contemporaries or probable successors could match him on these two traits. The emperor might be forgiven for reasoning that Tōjō was probably as good as he was going to get from the army.

Principally because he earned the emperor’s trust during his time as war minister, Tōjō was appointed prime minister (following Konoe’s resignation) in October 1941. Tōjō led Japan into a disastrous war that very nearly resulted in national ruination. The emperor, after surrender, simplified history and publicly blamed Tōjō for the Pearl Harbor attack. ⁶⁶ Even so, he continued to speak approvingly of Tōjō, and labelled him a man who ‘worked very hard’. This was praise that the emperor could well have bestowed on any number of his subjects. What separated Tōjō from most military officers, at least so far as the emperor was concerned, was the ‘careful consideration’ which Tōjō had given to the emperor’s own proclivities. ⁶⁷ Here, then, was the greatest significance of the Shōwa political crisis: it foisted on the emperor a soldier who actively attended to the deep breach that had opened in the army–emperor relationship, while at the same time prodding Japan inexorably toward a war with no prospect of victory.