Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear VIII
Keeping Order at Home
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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.
Outlawing Dissent.
To ensure that impure thoughts contaminated no one, the Meiji Emperor issued the Safety Preservation Law (Hoan Jōrei) on 25 December 1894. This Imperial Ordinance was to suppress the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō) that dated from the 1880s. Though this movement was a motivating factor behind the Meiji Constitution and the creation of the Diet, the Meiji and those from the former Satsuma domain had become annoyed with it. In effect, it had outlived its usefulness.
This was the most drastic of the several laws enacted to contain political opposition to the Meiji oligarchy. The law imposed stringent restrictions on the press, public speeches, and political meetings. Article Four of the Law granted the chief of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, with the approval of the Home Minister, the power to banish for three years anyone found inciting disturbances or planning to disrupt public order within seven and a half miles of the Imperial Palace.
Within three days of the law’s promulgation, authorities arrested and expelled hundreds of prominent activists in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. Despite the Law being repealed in 1898, the government introduced the more stringent Public Order and Police Law of 1900.
As with the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1894, the Public Order and Police Law of 1900 (Chian Keisatsu Hō), issued by Yamagata Aritomo during his second term as Prime Minister, was used to suppress political dissent and the rising organized labor movements. Besides restrictions on speech, assembly and association, it also specifically prohibited workers from organizing and going on strike.
The 1900 law not only targeted political dissent; it also criminalized the discussion of ideas. In 1920, the authorities prosecuted Morito Tatsuo of Tokyo Imperial University for publishing an article that criticized the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Unfortunately, he discussed anarchist ideas in some detail. For the crime of even talking about proscribed ideas in any context whatsoever, Morito spent three months in jail on charges of treason. The government clampdown on dissent further intensified after the 1921 assassination of Prime Minister Hara Takashi.
The Diet deleted a provision of the 1900 ordinance that banned women from political associations in 1922. They deleted the provisions forbidding workers to organize and go on strike in 1926, although they immediately added identical provisions in an amendment to the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925. Slowly, little by little and step by step, dissent in Japan was being made illegal.
The High Treason Incident.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) is that there was no proof the crime most of the defendants were charged with even took place. Like the Dreyfus case in France, there was never any solid evidence to prove that the accused had committed a crime, or that there was one at all.
On 20 May 1910, police searched the room of Miyashita Takichi, a laborer in Nagano Prefecture, and found materials which could have been used to construct bombs. Investigating further, the police arrested four other men, including the writer Shūsui Kōtoku, and a woman. Soon the prosecutor’s office concluded that they had arrested members of a nationwide conspiracy against the Japanese monarchy: nothing less than a plot to kill the Emperor. Using the case as an excuse, the authorities rounded up and questioned the “social deviants” and others they didn’t like from all over the country. This included socialists, anarchists, communists, and others suspected or known to not like the Imperial system, including four Buddhist monks. The authorities interrogated people who had been imprisoned for years about it. Authorities charged twenty-six people under Article 73 of the Criminal Code, which covered harming or intending harm to the Imperial family. Found guilty on 18 January 1911, the court sentenced two to life imprisonment and the rest to hang—including one monk. The next day, an Imperial Rescript commuted the death sentences of twelve to life imprisonment. Those hanged included Shūsui and the only woman. As tragic as the High Treason Incident was, and as lopsided as was its decision, the affair only reinforced in the samurai mind the fact that certain elements had to be rooted out, and that some ideas had to be suppressed.
The Tokko.
In a move that George Orwell himself would have found extraordinary, in 1911 Japan formed the Special Higher Police (Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu) within the Home Ministry, known in the vernacular as the Tokko. The Tokko, also called the Peace Police (Chian Keisatsu) or, infamously, the Thought Police (Shisō Keisatsu) tasked to investigate and control political groups and ideologies considered a threat to public order. The Tokko served as a civilian counterpart to the military’s Kempeitai and combined both criminal investigation and counter-espionage functions. It was roughly equivalent to the FBI, but with warrant-free powers and a lack of restraint that would drive the ACLU into a frenzy. People have compared the powers of the Tokko to those of the Gestapo.
The Tokko had branches all over Japan and in overseas locations with high concentrations of Japanese subjects (including Shanghai, London, and Berlin) to monitor Japanese socialist and communist activity. A Student Section under the Ministry of Education monitored university professors and students. Within the Ministry of Justice, special “Thought Prosecutors” (shiso kenji) suppressed “thought criminals” either through punishment or through “conversion” back to orthodoxy via reeducation.
The 1 March Rebellion.
But it wasn’t just the Japanese that had to be suppressed. The 1 March/Sam-Il (Korean for 3-1—March 1st) Rebellion/Movement is remarkable for several reasons, but most notably because Korea actually believed that Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were practical policies that someone was going to implement. After hearing Wilson’s speech at the Paris Peace Conference on 21 January 1919, where he spoke of self-determination, Korean students in Tokyo published a statement demanding Korean self-determination, just as Wilson had said should be available.
It wasn’t, of course—not for Korea, and not for another half-century in Japan. History doesn’t record what happened to the students in Tokyo, but the former Korean Emperor died the same day amid suspicions of poisoning. On 1 March 1919, activists at a restaurant in Seoul and at other locations throughout Korea read a Korean Declaration of Independence, which they signed and sent to the Governor General. The authorities took immediate action and arrested them. But there were also processions and signs and flag-waving by some two million Koreans in over a thousand demonstrations that the Japanese authorities couldn’t control or corral. So they called in the military.
Although scholars dispute what happened next, hundreds or thousands of people died, and some, locked in a church, burned when authorities set it alight. There were certainly thousands of arrests and executions without trials.
While some say the Sam-Il Movement was the birth of the Korean independence movement, it also sent yet another message to the samurai—and to Japan—that political liberalism was dangerous. This was one of the driving principles behind the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925.
Eliminating dissent seemed to be an obsession with the Japanese.
The Public Security (or Peace) Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō), enacted on 12 May 1925 by the Kato Takaaki administration, was the third and by far the most far-reaching of all the suppressive laws passed in prewar Japan that specifically targeted socialism and communism. The dominant force behind the law was Minister of Justice (and future Prime Minister) Hiranuma Kiichiro.
By using the vague and subjective term kokutai, the law blended politics and ethics. Under it, the law allowed for the imprisonment of anyone who formed an association meaning to disrupt the kokutai (in this case, the system of private property), and anyone who knowingly joined such a group with this goal, could be locked up for ten years. The government could label any political opposition as “altering the kokutai.” Thus, the government outlawed any form of dissent.
Gradually, punishments for communists and their sympathizers—suspected or actual—became more severe. In time, religious organizations of all descriptions—except Shinto—fell within the purview of the Thought Police. They did away with appeals for thought crimes, and eventually, the Ministry of Justice began appointing defense attorneys for thought criminals. The authorities arrested over 70,000 people under the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925, but only about 10% of them reached trial. Only the Russian spy Richard Sorge and his informant Ozaki Hotsumi received the death penalty.
The tools for prosecuting dissent were important for samurai control of Japan. As long as no one could disagree, the samurai had a free hand to express their rage.
Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction
Japan’s journey to its near destruction was long and hard, but the military caste that “led” her on that road tried to guarantee Japan would either triumph over her enemies, real and imaginary, foreign and domestic, or cease to be.
And Finally...
On 7 March:
1775: Captain James Cook in HMS Resolution sights the Oregon coast during his third voyage of exploration in search of the Northwest Passage, naming Cape Foulweather and Cape Perpetua, though he never landed. His voyage was the first to map the North Pacific coast of North America and courted interest in the seals he found there.
1936: Germany reoccupies the Rhineland unopposed by anyone, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. German officers and other military observers at the time knew that if there had been any resistance whatsoever, the Germans would have pulled back again and Hitler’s government collapsed.
And today is NATIONAL BE HEARD DAY, NOT commemorating this day in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, but promoting small businesses, encouraging them to use marketing and publicity to gain visibility and compete with larger companies. I could use some of that…