Early Showa and war in the Pacific

Following the collapse of the New York Stock Market in 1929, economic depression swept the globe. Japan took the yen off the gold standard in 1931 and watched its value slump by 50% against the dollar. Unemployment rose dramatically, quickly reaching over 20%. In the urban centres, where the modern life of Taisho had seemed so exciting, the darker underside of the modern condition became readily apparent. Intellectuals started to write about the crisis of capitalism and the angst of modern life. Despite being illegal after the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, the communist movement simmered in the universities. The emblems of urban chic – the moga waitresses and shop attendants – gradually became

seen as euphemisms for prostitutes in the popular imagination. Modernity began to look like an infection that threatened the soul and even the wellbeing of Japan, rather than a material boon. The

people of Japan, already struggling in the late 1920s, turned their frustrations against the political parties, accusing them of being the ‘running dogs of capitalism’. Clandestine political movements

began to agitate.

The early 1930s saw political violence rise to an all-time high, and a number of commentators have referred to it as the period of ‘government by assassination’. The first victim was Prime Minister

Hamaguchi Osachi, who was shot in Tokyo Station by a member of an ultranationalist group in 1930, following his failure to secure a more equal naval treaty with the British and Americans at the London Naval Conference earlier that year. In the following year, government authorities discovered and thwarted two separate plots for a coup d’etat.

 In 1932, the next prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated by a clandestine group of

naval officers after he failed to support actions by the Imperial Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This series of events at the start of the 1930s effectively ended parliamentary rule and marked

the move towards greater military control of governance. Whilst large sections of the population reacted with horror to these developments, the military could count on significant support particularly in rural areas. The promise of imperial greatness, of a return to the glories of Meiji, provided an enticing

distraction from the problems of the time. 

Meanwhile, the military itself had also grown factional and restive. In particular, the Kwantung Army, which had been created in 1906 to protect Japan’s interests in Manchuria, began to agitate for action. The commander in the field, Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, had a millenarian vision of the coming of the ‘final war’ in which the nations of the world would be punished for the moral corruptions of modernity. His solution was to propose that Japan should take over Manchuria and use it as a social laboratory to

test new and better forms of organization; he wanted to forge a new post-capitalist society based on non-selfish principles. His motivation was largely Buddhist rather than Communist. To this end, without orders from Tokyo, the Kwantung Army orchestrated an attack on the Manchurian railway, which they were supposed to be guarding. They exploded a section near Mukden and proceeded to blame the attack on local Chinese forces, using this as a pretext to launch an offensive and the formal occupation of Manchuria. In Tokyo, this fait accompli was greeted with shock by then Prime Minister Inukai, who refused to condone the annexation of Manchuria as a colony. After his assassination,

the puppet state of Manchukuo was formed in March 1932. 

This ‘Manchuria Incident’ marked the start of the so-called Fifteen Years’ War between China and Japan. In the depressed environment of Japan at the time, a majority of the Japanese people received news of the Kwantung Army’s victories and the expansion of the empire with jubilation.

The international community, in the form of the League of Nations, in which Japan had played a leading role, took measures to condemn the occupation. It refused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state, and its Lytton Report called for Japan to withdraw its forces from Manchuria in February 1933. But this was too little too late. In Japan, the condemnation of the League merely confirmed the duplicity of the Western powers, and particularly the British who dominated the council.

Japan simply withdrew from the League, claiming that it would now ‘follow its own path in Asia’, implicitly accusing the League of being a regional rather than a universal organization (a charge that was not without justification). A result was that many Japanese felt vindicated in their beliefs that the Western powers were fundamentally racist against Japan and Asia more widely; Japan became increasingly isolated from the international community and hence increasingly reliant on its own military power.

In an attempt to constrain the military, the last surviving genro, Saionji Kinmochi, recommended Prince Konoe Fumimaro as the next prime minister. However, even the eminent Konoe could not constrain the army’s ambitions. Within a few weeks of his taking office, on 7 July 1937 the Imperial Army exchanged fire with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge, south of Beijing. It is not clear who fired first, but many historians argue that the Japanese Army manufactured this skirmish as a pretext

for escalation. Whatever the truth of this, it is certainly true that the Imperial Army was ambitious for further action in China. 

In the end, Konoe himself was an advocate of Japanese expansionism. Rather than trying to restrain the army in China, he authorized the escalation of the conflict, and the army immediately launched a massive offensive. By mid-December, Japanese forces had pushed south from Beijing as far as Shanghai and Nanjing. The conduct of the Imperial Army in Nanjing was horrifying and mystifying. Japanese troops herded together tens of thousands of civilians and surrendered soldiers and murdered

them; they raped and killed perhaps 20,000 women of all ages.

The total number of casualties is still contested to this day, with numbers ranging from tens of thousands to 300,000 deaths. The terrible violence continued for nearly two months. The question of why the Imperial Army behaved in this appalling way, and why the High Command permitted the atrocities to continue for nearly two months has still not received a satisfactory answer.

A small number of right-wing revisionists in contemporary Japan argue that the Nanjing Massacre never happened; they claim that it was invented by the victorious Allied Powers after the end of

the war as a means to further punish and victimize the Japanese. 

A famous example of this view can be found in the controversial manga of Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (On War, 1998). Some high school history textbooks in Japan refer to the events in neutral

terms as the Nanjing Incident (Nankin jiken) rather than as the Nanjing Massacre (Ninkin daigyakusatsu), triggering protests of atrocity-denial in China. This ‘textbook controversy’, which also

involves the under-representation of so-called ‘comfort women’ (sexual slaves of the Imperial Army) still rages to this day. 

Historians such as Inega Saburo filed lawsuits against the Ministry of Education for trying to censor their frank disclosure of Japanese wartime atrocities. Ienaga’s fight was highly publicized around the world: Noam Chomsky nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (1999, 2002).