The Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear XI
China Part II
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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.
The Marco Polo Bridge and Gekokujo
On 7 July 1937, Japanese forces demanded entry into a suburban Beijing town, alleging that a Japanese soldier was missing. The Chinese objected; the shooting started, and Japan invaded. Despite the “missing” soldier returning to his unit, the Japanese persisted. Facts, of course, didn’t matter to the samurai, who would have whatever they wanted in China if they had to kill the last Chinese to do it. They proved this lack of regard starting in December at Nanking, where the death toll of civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers may have exceeded 300,000 burned, shot, mutilated, strangled, and raped to death Chinese. Japanese officers had beheading contests. The international community watched from their churches, missions, and other more-or-less off-limits sanctuaries from samurai savagery, recording much of it in diaries which Japan spent generations denying.
Tokyo watched and waited as ammunition and fuel costs devoured the profits of Japanese businesses in Manchuria, and their soldiers and sailors plunged deeper into China. Diplomatically defensive while the atrocities piled up, the politicians and diplomats could only wait until the Chinese stopped fighting, which everyone hoped would be soon. In the meantime, American companies, at Washington’s behest, pleaded “limited availability” for critical exports, including tetra-ethyl led (TEL), high-nitrate fertilizers, and molasses used to make alcohols for explosive propellants. Suddenly copra, then jute, then nickel were in short supply. Almost everything Japan needed from elsewhere that the Americans could control became subject to silent sanctions.
Yet the samurai charged on, convinced that these Chinese vermin would end and that they could get the needed resources further into China. Just kill a few more, burn another town, rape a few thousand more women, and Chiang will give up. But the casualties kept piling up, the fuel and ammunition supplies burned up faster than expected, and the Chinese kept fighting in their ever-hopeless string of catastrophic losses punctuated by the odd Chinese pyrrhic victory, grubbing supplies and arms from Germany and the Soviets, the Americans and occasionally the British, begging for cash to pay for it all.
Tokyo could only watch, because at home, gekokujo incidents ran rampant. Ardent Shishi patriots murdered politicians and recalcitrant generals and even threatened the Imperial Palace. Neither the IJA nor the IJN could control or bargain with the fanatics dreaming of a “Showa Restoration” that would abolish political government, forgetting that it was the last Imperial “restoration” that enabled political government. Events after the 26 February Incident in 1936, controlling the samurai became nearly impossible. It was the day of the samurai and their Shishi, whether or not Japan liked it.
Useless Pacts
In 1936, Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany as a threat to the Soviet Union and communism in general. Part of the fallout from that Pact was that the Soviets began supplying the Chinese, even if Stalin didn’t believe China was ready for communism (he didn’t back Mao’s CCP yet). In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a military alliance with Germany and Italy, that had practically no value to Japan other than the recognition by the two fascist powers of Japan’s “sphere of influence” in East Asia. While the three might have had common enemies—the US, USSR, and Britain—they had no means to help each other in any meaningful way. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Japan paid lip service to Germany’s plea for Japan to march into Siberia because they were so immersed in China, even if the IJA desired such a move. All that Japan’s strengthening of diplomatic ties with Europe did was make more enemies.
Indochina: The Steps Too Far
Desperate to cut off the supply routes to China, Japan bargained with Vichy for a “friendly occupation” of Tonkin (northern Indochina) in September 1940, which the French were in no position to resist. The tiny French garrison tried to resist Vichy control, but their pro-De Gaulle leaders were recalled. Staunch patriots, taking orders from Petain, replaced them. While the IJA said the move was strategic, the IJN said it was potentially catastrophic because it threatened their fuel and made expanding the occupation into Cochin China (southern Indochina) essential as a springboard to the Dutch East Indies, where they wanted to go, anyway. While this was so, Japan also knew that if they moved south, war with the US was almost certain—a war that Japanese realists knew it could not win.
The Tonkin move alarmed Washington, which reacted swiftly, cutting off most petroleum additives that only they controlled while throttling Japan’s credit. Enraged and frightened by the new sanctions, the samurai redoubled their efforts in China while they prepared to move into Cochin China, taking that fatal step in July 1941. Washington reacted by cutting off all petroleum products, all iron and aluminum scrap, and freezing all Japanese assets in the US.
The samurai believed they had little choice but to go to war with the rest of the world.
Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction
There is practically no daylight between the samurai and the Tokyo government in most accounts of pre-1941 Japan, but the truth is far different. Yes, the samurai were savages, but the government was too frightened to stop them, and the war they were driving Japan into was hopeless before the first bomb dropped on Pearl Harbor.
And Finally...
On 6 June:
1916: Yuan Shikai dies of kidney failure in Beijing, China. Not satisfied with being a mere president of China, Shikai tried mightily to have himself crowned Emperor of China, and said he was the Emperor for 83 days, triggering the collapse of China’s central government and ushering in a period of chaos in China.
1944: The US, Britain, and Canada invade France at Normandy. The largest amphibious invasion in history—and it will probably ever be so—grabbed a narrow foothold on the continent that, within a week, contained nearly a million men.
And today is NATIONAL YO-YO DAY, celebrating the birth of Donald F. Duncan, Sr., in Kansas City, Missouri, on this day in 1892. Duncan was an American entrepreneur who founded the Duncan Toys Company and popularized the yo-yo, hence the day. I could never make them work.