The Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear IX
Gekokujō, Earthquakes and Domestic Chaos
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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.
Peasant riots and famines were nothing particularly new in 20th Century Japan, but in July 1918 a series of disturbances without precedent in scope and violence broke out. Mid-1918 rice prices, already elevated by the labor and shipping shortages of 1917 brought about by WWI and the Siberian adventure, were spiraling out of control. A staple in both rural and urban areas, the government had made the situation worse by buying up all the rice they could on the open market to feed the IJA in Russia. While prices of everything were also rising, rice was more important to the farmers, who still made up more than half the population. Especially rice farmers, whose crop was regularly subsidized, felt they weren’t getting a big enough piece of the broker’s margins: in some areas, brokers increased the price of rice by over 1000%.
On 23 July 1918, a peaceful petitioning in the fishing village of Uozu in the Toyama Prefecture quickly turned ugly. Soon strikes, looting and bombing of police stations and government offices were widespread throughout Japan. Over 66,000 people were involved in over four hundred separate incidents that led to some 25,000 arrests and over eight thousand convictions. Penalties ranged from fines to hanging.
The outbreak of lawlessness during wartime (the IJN was heavily involved from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Baja to the Coral Sea, and the IJA had sent about 45,000 troops to Siberia and was sending more) stunned the government of Terauchi Masatake, which took responsibility and resigned on 29 September. But the inability to manage consumer prices and goods availability was a bigger concern, one that Japan was unsure how to address. What seemed clear was that Japan could not feed her rapidly growing population with indigenous farmers, which triggered more imports from Korea and Taiwan. These riots, particularly the most vicious and widespread of them, could have finally pushed the samurai to decide that Japan could only fulfill its need for resources to support its growing population by looking outside the archipelago.
Hara Takashi stepped into the office of Prime Minister on 28 September 1918. He was the first civilian (he had never served in the military), commoner (born in a samurai family, he chose to be classified as a commoner), and Christian (he attended a French parochial school and had been baptized a Catholic at 19) to hold the office of Prime Minister. He had served in the Foreign Office and as a reporter, but by 1918 he was president of the Constitutional Association of Political Friendship (Rikken Seiyūkai), the largest political party in the Lower House of the Diet. By 1920, Hara had appointed members of the Seiyūkai to every cabinet post but except the IJA, IJN and Home Affairs ministers.
This was the peak of the Taisho Democracy.
Hara was unpopular with nearly everyone. He disappointed liberals and socialists because he refused to back universal suffrage. As a party politician (something new to Japan anyway), Hara was never popular with either conservatives, bureaucrats or samurai, and the ultranationalists hated him.
While Hara was in office, Japan took part in the Paris Peace Conference and joined the League of Nations as a founding member. In Korea, he authorized military force to suppress the Sam-Il Movement, but later began more lenient policies aimed at reducing opposition to Japanese rule.
After suppressing the Sam-Il Movement, Hara pursued a conciliatory policy towards the colonies, particularly Korea. He arranged for the political moderate Saitō Makoto to take over as governor-general of Korea. This marked a great liberalization of Japanese rule over Korea—Koreans could even teach their own language in their schools. Hara also sought to encourage a limited amount of self-rule in Korea, so long as it kept in mind that Korea was under Japanese imperial control. Hara’s Korean policies won few supporters: Koreans considered them inadequate, and Japanese considered them excessive.
On the evening of 4 November 1921, Nakaoka Kon’ichi, a right-wing railroad switchman who felt that the Seiyūkai had grown too powerful, stabbed Hara to death at the Tokyo Railroad Station. Even though Nakaoka was released only 13 years after the court convicted him, the crime sent shock waves through the nascent democracy. It was the first assassination of a sitting prime minister since Japan technically became a constitutional democracy. Hara’s death marked the slow decline of the popularity of the Seiyūkai, which slowly faded away.
The Great Kanto Earthquake.
The Great Kanto earthquake on 1 September 1923 devastated much of the Island of Honshu, resulting in up to 140,000 deaths, causing raging fires in Tokyo and wiping out millions in wealth. A false rumor of Korean violence and a Korean independence movement drove the Home Ministry to declare martial law, resulting in the arrest of many menial-labor Koreans all over Japan. The ensuing mob violence may have murdered over 10,000 Koreans and Chinese.
Not wanting to let a crisis go to waste, conservative Japanese commentators interpreted the Kanto earthquake as an act of divine retribution. They scolded the Japanese people for their self-centered, immoral, and extravagant lifestyles. The disaster and the resulting recriminations revealed to Japan an unparalleled opportunity to rebuild Japanese values. In reconstructing the Imperial City (though the palace was largely undamaged), the nation, and the Japanese people, the ’23 earthquake fostered a culture of catastrophe and reconstruction that amplified accusations of moral degeneracy and made the return to ancient, non-Western values that much more strident.
The Toranomon Incident (Toranomon Jiken)
An attempt to kill the Imperial Regent, who would become the Showa Emperor Hirohito, followed this resurgence of Japanese values. On 27 December 1923, the Regent was on his way to the opening of the 48th Session of the Imperial Diet when, at the Toranomon intersection between the Akasaka Palace and the Diet in downtown Tokyo, Daisuke Namba—student, communist agitator, and son of a member of the Imperial Diet—fired a small pistol at the future Showa’s carriage. The bullet shattered a window on the carriage, injuring a chamberlain, but the Regent was unharmed.
It was motivated partly by the would-be assassin’s leftist ideology, and also by a strong desire to avenge the death of Kōtoku Shusui—a pseudonym for Kōtoku Denjirō, a radical journalist credited with introducing anarchism to Japan, executed in the aftermath of the High Treason Incident in 1910. Although Namba claimed he was rational (and the court agreed), authorities proclaimed him insane to the public, sentenced to death on 13 November 1924, and executed two days later.
Prime Minister Yamamoto (a common name in Japan) Gonnohyoe took responsibility for the Toranomon Incident and resigned, along with his cabinet and several other top officials. Kiyoura Keigo, who presided over a cabinet made up entirely of members of the House of Peers who were not associated with any political party, replaced him. This was extremely unpopular at an age when political parties were demanding more representation. The government cited later the Toranomon Incident as one justification for the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, but Kiyoura’s government lasted only six months. The incident enabled the military and police to round up and liquidate many Communists, socialists, anarchists, and other unwelcome elements in the Japanese commonweal.
The Showa Financial Crisis (Shōwa Kin’yū Kyōkō)
After World War I, Japan briefly enjoyed a small business boom, like much of the rest of the world, investing heavily in production capacity in what proved to be a tiny economic bubble. But then the rice riots of 1918 inflated prices, and after 1920 came an economic slowdown.
The Great Kanto Earthquake triggered an economic depression, which led to widespread business failures. The Wakatsuki Reijirō government intervened through the Bank of Japan by issuing discounted “earthquake bonds” to overextended banks. In January 1927, when the government proposed to redeem these bonds, rumors spread that the banks holding these bonds would go bankrupt, which caused a run on the banks. Over thirty banks, including the Bank of Taiwan and the second-tier zaibatsu financial institution Suzuki Shoten, went under. Wakatsuki requested an emergency decree to allow the Bank of Japan to extend emergency loans to save these banks, but the Privy Council denied his request, forcing him to resign.
Fervently anti-communist Tanaka Giichi succeeded Wakatsuki. Tanaka staunched the bleeding with a three-week bank holiday and emergency loans. The parliamentary elections of 1927 had sustained Tanaka’s government in office by only one seat. Because of the collapse of many smaller banks, the large financial branches of the five great zaibatsu houses could dominate Japanese finances until 1945.
Since it was the first full year of the reign of the Showa Emperor Hirohito (who inherited the throne on 25 December 1926), the crisis got his name. It started out as a financial panic and was a foreshadowing of the Great Depression, but it is also a lesson in the cumulative effect of financial shocks.
The 15 March Incident (San Ichi-go jiken)
Alarm over renewed activity by the proscribed Japan Communist Party in 1928 led to the 15 March Incident, in which the Special Higher Police arrested over 1,600 Communists—actual and suspected—under the Public Safety Preservation Law of 1925.
The show trials that followed were intended to reveal as much about the inner workings of the Japanese communists as possible, highlighting their connections with the labor movement and openly leftist organizations. The court found all the defendants guilty, but they pardoned or gave lighter sentences to those who recanted. This was an attempt to “change the direction” (tenkō) of the leftists so that they could embrace the national community. The tenkō policy had a deleterious effect on the rank-and-file in Japanese communist organizations. In the same year, Giichi pushed through an amendment to the law, raising the maximum penalty for thought crimes from ten years to death.
Crossing the Line
In order to reduce tensions in the Tokyo area at the climax of the Aizawa trial in December 1935, the IJA ordered the Imperial Guard Division from Tokyo to Manchuria. Since this unit had many Kōdōha (Imperial Way) members assigned to it, that event would have set back their planned revolution by years. The Kōdōha thus decided that the time was right for direct action. This would become the 26 February Incident (Niniroku Jiken, or 2-26 Incident), the most dangerous and flagrant of all the samurai-triggered “incidents” before 1941.
At first, both Nishida Mitsugi and Kita Ikki, leading lights in the Kōdōha, were against the plan, but when it became clear that the Young Officers (seinen shōkō, another politicized IJA group) were going to act anyway, they provided at least token support. For days before they triggered their plan, they convinced recalcitrant officers to take part. A senior officer later said that they would have lacked replacements if they had punished all officers taking part.
This was the best organized of the prewar “incidents.” The plan was to kill five senior officers and three civilians, from Prime Minister Okada Keisuke to Inspector General of Military Training Watanabe Jōtarō. The conspirators adopted the name “Righteous Army” (gigun), thought up a slogan: “revere the Emperor; destroy the traitors” (Sonnō Tōkan), and took the trouble to write a manifesto, which included:
…Now, as we are faced with great emergencies both foreign and domestic, if we do not execute the disloyal and unrighteous who threaten the kokutai, if we do not cut away the villains who obstruct the Emperor’s authority, who block the Restoration, the Imperial plan for our nation will come to nothing [...] To cut away the evil ministers and military factions near the Emperor and destroy their heart: that is our duty and we will complete it.
The action started off at 5:00 in the morning of 26 February, with the attack on Okada: they got it wrong and instead killed his brother-in-law, who bore a resemblance. They killed Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and Watanabe. They also ransacked the Asahi Shimbun offices and seized the Ministry of War, but they failed to grab the Imperial Palace.
For three days, the situation in Tokyo remained dangerous while the Showa kept asking if the government or the military had suppressed the rebellion. On the morning of 29 February, 22,000 men of the IJA and IJN with 22 tanks surrounded the 1,500 men of the Righteous Army. Some of the insurgent leaders killed themselves, but just as many surrendered. But if they were expecting another sham trial like those that followed the other “incidents,” they were sadly mistaken. The trials were secret (by Imperial decree); nineteen were shot. Because the 26 February attempted coup failed, the IJA removed nearly all Kōdōha members from top positions, sacked nine of fifteen full generals, and Araki resigned. Without the Kōdōha, the Tōseiha (Control faction) lost most of its reason to exist. Although Tōseiha followers gained control of the army, the Kōdōha ideals of spiritual power and imperial mysticism remained embedded, as did its tradition of insubordination by junior officers for “good” causes (Gekokujō). From the outside, people believed the civil authorities had restored the rule of law.
But power in pre-1945 Japan rested not with politicians, but with the samurai.
The military took more control of the civil affairs of everyday life in Japan, culminating in the merging of all political parties into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) that rubber-stamped what the military wanted. After years of chaos in and out of the military, it was time for a breather, but the trials for the 26 February Incident were still going on when the Marco Polo Bridge Incident happened in July 1937. In truth, this was another gekokujō mess that Japan could either exploit or try to clean up. Hoping for a weakness, they chose exploitation.
The die had been cast.
By 1940, the kokutai of Aizawa and the Imperial Rescripts joined with “all the world under one roof” (hakko ichiu) in Japanese political doctrine, teaching that the people belonged to the state and that the Emperor’s rule was divinely inspired. It was through these means that the military tied the Japanese people and the Showa into logical and ethical knots.
Despite the guilty verdict from the 26 February Incident, devotees erected shrines to the “twenty-two samurai” (the nineteen executed, two suicides, and Aizawa) after 1945.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Breaking with my tradition of plugging related books, I wanted to share part of an e-mail I received from an unexpected, Pulitzer-prize winning fan.
I wanted to share a bit more about what struck me in Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries (the remarkable narrative you’ve crafted of Ned Steele’s journey from Detroit into the hell of the Great War). Right from the opening pages, the way the diary unfolds—a scholar uncovering Steele’s own voice in an old steamer trunk—feels like a literary excavation that invites the reader deep into history itself. There’s such a vivid juxtaposition between Steele’s early sense of duty and the visceral horror he describes as he earns his commission, leads machine-gun units on a Flanders hill, and endures the grim mechanics of life in the trenches. These moments—where exhaustion, terror, friendship, and fleeting beauty coexist on every page—made me feel as if I were experiencing the war through his eyes rather than reading about it on a distant landscape.
What I found especially resonant was the specificity with which each entry captures not just the physical chaos of warfare the mud, the wire, the unending din of guns but also the emotional cadence of Steele’s internal world: his fleeting impressions of ruined towns, his acute awareness of fear and responsibility, and how those seemingly ordinary human thoughts persist amidst extraordinary circumstances. Your voice manages to hold both the relentless brutality of that world and the haunting humanity of the men who lived it.
Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch
Unsolicited, unexpected, took a while to figure it out, but there it is. Somebody liked it.
And Finally...
On 4 April:
1581: Queen Elizabeth I dubs Sir Francis Drake a knight on the deck of his flagship, Golden Hind, at Deptford, England. A slaver, privateer, and lifelong seafarer, Drake’s circumnavigation of the Earth, completed the previous September, was the first by an Englishman and the second in history.
1917: The US Senate passes its approval (that they voted on 2 April) for President Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany to the House of Representatives, which would pass the measure on 6 April in Washington, DC. The odd timing was due, according to sources, to procedural difficulties.
And today is NATIONAL VITAMIN C DAY, observing this day in 1932 when vitamin C was first isolated at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This isolation provided the first concrete proof of the existence of the anti-scorbutic factor—the substance in food that prevents scurvy—and was a crucial step towards understanding vitamin deficiencies and developing synthetic vitamin C supplements.