Chapter Eight: Making Japanese Through War and Peace,

Part Two

We are in the midst of examining Japanese history through the lens of warfare and related matters (peace treaties, negotiations, military affairs, etc.). The following table summarizes modern Japan's major armed conflicts:

You should regard this chapter and the previous one as a continuous discussion. The only reason for making two chapters is to keep the length manageable to facilitate reasonably fast download times, especially over dailup connections.

Background: The Meiji Constitution

On February 11, 1889 Japan’s Meiji Emperor formally promulgated a constitution amidst great fanfare. This constitution was in part the result of internal pressure for greater popular representation and transparency in government and in part the result of the need to impress powerful foreigners that Japan was a fully “civilized” country (serious progress toward treaty revision took place during the 1890s and nearly all provisions of the unequal treaties were gone by 1900). Except for the Imperial Diet (the legislature), the constitution did not create any new institutions or organs of government. Instead, it consolidated and systematized institutions and administrative practices already in existence.

The overwhelmingly dominant voice in the creation of the Meiji Constitution (sometimes call the “prewar constitution”) was Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 (1841–1909). In preparation for creating a constitution for Japan, Itō studied the constitutions of several foreign countries. He found the German constitution most suitable to Japan, at least as a source of general ideas. The Meiji Constitution formally declared that the sovereignty of the nation resides in the person of the emperor. Moreover, the constitution gave the emperor almost unlimited political power, at least in theory. As we know, however, the Meiji Emperor was not interested in the details of government administration, and Itō correctly assumed that the emperor, whether the current one or a successor, would not actually exercise his formal powers except on rare occasions.

Let us now take a brief look at the major components of the Meiji state as a result of the constitution. The emperor was the foundation of the state. His official powers included appointment of the cabinet and other top officials, the power to create laws, the power to convene the national legislature, declare war, conclude treaties, re-organize the bureaucracy, command the army and navy, and much more. In practice, however, the emperor was constrained. He appointed cabinets based on the advice of the Privy Council and/or elder statesmen (often called genrō 元老), and he then relied on Prime Minister and the other cabinet ministers to exercise all of the other powers possessed by the emperor. The details of constitutionally-authorized administration also contained many checks and balances. Imperial decrees, for example, had to be countersigned by cabinet ministers to take effect. The Prime Minister could suspend other cabinet ministers but not formally appoint or dismiss them.

Other customary practices not formally written into the constitution had the effect of dispersing power. The military high command, for example, often had de facto veto power over cabinets because the army and the navy provided army and navy ministers from among their ranks. They could therefore bring down cabinets by refusing to order one of their members to serve as a minister. The elder statesmen were also not a formal part of the constitutional order, but they wielded tremendous power behind the scenes (or at least could do so if they so chose). These senior statesmen typically intervened to settle major disputes that arose between different branches of the government. Otherwise, they remained in the background and let the actual officials run the show. One problem for Japanese politics was that no elder statesmen of the stature of Itō Hirobumi or Yamagata Aritomo 山県有朋 emerged in the next generation. Therefore, by the 1920s, there were no more elder statesmen with sufficient power and prestige to settle major disputes. Politics got messier in that decade, and during the 1930s, the military gradually exerted more direct influence on the political process. Another constraint on the entire government was the bureaucracy. All laws, decrees, and policies ultimately had to be carried out by the bureaucrats, and they watched out for their own interests. Bureaucratic foot-dragging, for example, could blunt the force of a law passed by the cabinet.

A particularly interesting part of the Meiji Constitution was the Diet. It seems that Itō may have miscalculated in creating the Diet. He apparently intended that it be mainly for show, with little actual power, and indeed, on paper the Diet seems very constrained. First, the Diet itself consisted of an appointed House of Peers, all of whom were aristocrats (Japan had created a peerage system: baron, viscount, count, marquis, prince). A House or Representatives was elected by the citizenry. Initially, however, those eligible to vote were males at least 25 years old who paid over 15 yen a year in national taxes. In 1890, that amounted to about 400,000 people, or 1% of the population. (By 1930, the pool of eligible voters had expanded to all males at least 25 years of age.) The Diet could debate legislation, and if both houses approved a bill, the Diet could present it to the cabinet. But the cabinet could veto any legislation the Diet passed. The Diet had wide powers to debate, petition, and recommend, but little power to demand or require—with one major exception. The Diet had considerable power in fiscal affairs, because Diet approval was required for the passage of each year’s budget. Realizing that this power might give the Diet de facto veto power over t he whole government, Itō wrote into the constitution that should the Diet refuse to approve the budget in a particular year, the previous year’s budget would automatically carry over. The problem, however, at least for the cabinet, was that the government and society as a whole were growing so fast that the previous year’s budget was rarely sufficient. In short, the requirement that the Diet approve the budget gave the legislature a strong voice in affairs of state, fiscal or otherwise.

Control over the military was a potential problem. In theory, according to the constitution, the military was responsible only to the emperor. In other words, there was no direct civilian control of the military. On the other hand, however, the cabinet decided matters of military financing and pursued foreign policy. In practice, therefore, the cabinet exerted control over the general shape and direction of the military. As long as the powerful elder statesmen were alive (until the early 1920s), they superseded any serious conflict between the military high command and the cabinet. From the late 1920s onward, however, the military began to assert itself, gradually taking for itself a greater voice in policy making. By saying “the military,” however, I do not mean to imply that it was a monolithic, united entity. First, the army and the navy were bitter rivals, even to the point of seriously undermining overall military effectiveness. Moreover, there were two major factions within the army, the Control Faction (tōseiha 統制派) and the Imperial Way Faction (kōdōha 皇道派) who competed bitterly during the 1920s and 30s. There were even cases of members of one faction murdering their rivals. In 1931, the Imperial Way-dominated Guangdong Army in Manchuria took over Manchuria against the orders of the central government and high command in Tokyo. In 1936, the Imperial Way Faction launched an unsuccessful coup, which the Control Faction put down by force. After the failed coup, the Control Faction began ousting Imperial Way officers. This intra-military conflict is but one example of an increased level of political conflict during the 1920s and 1930s.

Background: Manchurian Incident & Early 20th Century Conditions

The military part of the *Manchurian Incident* took place over the course of a few days in September 1931. There was little fighting and few casualties. It was not the sort of armed conflict that today would excite armchair strategists and warfare enthusiasts, but it was terribly important in Japanese and world history. For one thing, the Manchurian incident led to a sequence of events during the course of which Japan marched ever deeper toward warfare on a vast scale. Some historians place the start of the Pacific War at 1931 for this reason. The Manchurian Incident was the result of a complex web of domestic and international conflict that took place throughout the 1920s. This section examines some aspects of this web of conflict, and the next section examines the Manchurian Incident itself and the ways in which it led to a broader, full-scale war between China and Japan.

Japan in the 1920s

Let us start with some domestic matters. During the 1920s, the gap in Japan between what we might call the "haves" of society and the "have-nots" grew significantly. The "haves" would have included the usual sorts of people we think of as being well off, leaders of business and industry, for example, as well as a small but growing middle class. The upper levels of this middle class included many of the typical "white collar" workers in an industrial society. The lower levels of this middle class was comprised mainly of skilled factory workers. Skilled factory workers were always in demand throughout the twentieth century, and their wages tended to increase faster than the general rate of inflation. The "have-nots," by contrast, consisted mainly of farmers and unskilled industrial workers. Their wages consistently lagged behind inflation, and agriculture in general was depressed by low prices, owing to measures taken in response to the food riots described in the previous chapter and to and natural disasters.

Consider some basic statistics. In 1873 Japan's population was about 35 million. In 1925 it had nearly doubled, growing to 60 million. The absolute number of Japanese engaged primarily in agriculture was the same in both 1873 and 1925, namely, about 15 million. By the 1920s, the majority of Japan's population lived in cities, and 30-35% lived in cities of over 100,000. In short, by the 1920s, a large majority of Japan's population lived in urban areas, not in the countryside.

If we compare the overall situation in 1890 with that of 1925, we find a 10% average per-capita increase in rice consumption by the latter date, and similar increases in the consumption of sugar, fish, and fruit. On the average, in other words, people ate better in 1925 than they did in 1890. And they seem to have worn more and/or better clothing, because 20% more textiles were sold on the domestic market in 1925 than in 1890. And, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), average per-capita income rose 30% during this period. These and other figures point to a significant increase in living standards from 1890 to 1925.

It would be a mistake, however, to take these overall averages and conclude that "the Japanese" were better off in the 1920s. Some were, but others were not. The increased living standards, in other words, were distributed unevenly among different social groups as well as geographically. For example, let us compare average incomes for two different brackets of time and for three types of workers:

As you can see, the agricultural sector of the economy continued to lag well behind the overall national income averages, while the industrial sector mover ever farther ahead in real terms. Economic historians sometimes use the term "dual economy" to indicate two very different sectors or tracks in Japan's economic makeup. The urban industrial economy generally prospered during the twentieth century, while the rural agricultural economy stagnated (as, too,  did certain sectors of the *urban economy*). In contemporary jargon, the urban industrial economy was the "new economy" (comparable to the information industries today) and rural agriculture was the "old economy." Although only two or three generations earlier, the majority of Japanese lived in rural areas and made their living directly or indirectly through agriculture, by the 1920s, this sector of economic society was small, stagnant, and impoverished--much like many of the the classic "smokestack" industries in the present U.S. economy.

*Rural poverty* was a problem all over Japan in the 1920s, but it was especially severe in the northeast, that is, in the northern regions of Honshū. The income statistics above, for example, would show an even greater unevenness if the "agriculture and forestry" group could be further divided into the Northeast vs. other regions.

Another characteristic of the agricultural sector was tenancy. Many farmers did not own the land they worked. Instead, they rented it from a landlord who often did not live nearby. In the 1920s, just under half of all agricultural land was farmed by tenants. Although all farmers tended to be hard pressed in these years, the situation in a given area was usually worse for tenant farmers than for owner-farmers. Taking the period of 1926-1927, for example, tenant farmers throughout Japan spent, on average, 57% of household income on food. Owner-farmers in the same period spent 49%. Even 49%, of course, is extremely high, indicating the difficulty of basic survival among farmers across the board. Tenancy added an even greater burden to an already difficult lifestyle.

Throughout Japan's history, farmers often suffered economic hardships. When nearly everyone else in society (or at least society as far as you knew it) was suffering similarly, however, there was less likelihood of farmers banding together for political action to demand a greater share of the wealth--although they sometimes did so during the Tokugawa period. In the 1920s technological advances, mass media, and state institutions informed farmers about the broader world and lifestyles within Japan. Most male farmers would have experienced military service in the 1920s and nearly all farmers would have completed compulsory education. The military and the school, however oppressive they might have been, also exposed the sons and daughters of farmers to glimpses of other ways of life. Indeed, careers in the military and as elementary school teachers were the classic ways out of rural poverty (the basic teacher-training track of post-elementary education was free of charge). For those who remained tilling the land, various agricultural associations (including tenant associations), reservists' associations (since all conscripts served in the reserves for a period of time after leaving active duty), and veterans' associations provided at least some formal means by which farmers could give voice to their economic suffering. And in the wretched conditions of the 1920s, many farmers complained bitterly.

But why would the rest of society pay attention to such complaints? In fact, many urban dwellers did not. As long as food could be imported at low prices from the colonial empire (Korea, Taiwan, etc.), farmers' complaints did not conjure up the possibility of food shortages. But among many Japanese, including a disproportionate number of military personnel, the farmer was a potent national symbol. And it was as a symbol of the "real" or "true" Japan, not as a producer of food per se, that the farmers' plight became broadcast in the *political rhetoric* of the day.

Japan's shift from a primarily agrarian country to an industrial country was typical of most modern societies. Also typical was the important role of the recent agrarian past in national imagining, that is, in the process of imagining the specific or peculiar features of "we Japanese." Even today, it is all too common to hear Japanese speaking of an inherent sense of harmony (wa) or cooperation in Japanese society, which, allegedly, is part of the legacy of Japan's agrarian past in which villagers lived and worked in harmonious cooperation. In this view, the rural village was the locus of a peculiarly Japanese way of life. (Incidentally, even the premises of this assertion are questionable. Many rural villages in the Tokugawa period were anything but harmonious, and litigation of various kinds was common. See Herman Ooms, #Tokugawa Village Practice#.) Such notions of the centrality of rural villages in the alleged shaping of Japanese national character were also common in the 1920s. Thus, the farmer became a symbol of "real" or "genuine" Japanese during the twentieth century, as was the case in many other modern nations as well. The plight of the farmers, therefore, was potentially an emotional political issue about the state of the nation as a whole.

When politicians made an issue of the suffering farmers, they typically contrasted these "real" Japanese with their urban counterparts. As you might expect, the rhetorical image of the well-to-do urbanites was unflattering. According to this rhetoric, unlike the farmers, upscale city folk were addicted to luxury, selfish, decadent, superficial, corrupt, and so forth. Why? Western-style foreign influence was the major reason, and, indeed, these same characteristics (selfishness, etc.) were typically applied to Western foreigners as well. Upscale, urban life, in other words, posed a severe danger of ruining the Japanese spirit. Most commonly cited for criticism were the stylish mobo ("modern boy") and #moga# ("modern gal/girl").

The terms mobo and moga referred to fashion-conscious, trend-setting urbanites of the mid 1920s to the early 1930s and were not necessarily derogatory. Because the "modernity" of these people was inevitably associated with foreign influence, however, their very presence was, to some extent, fraught with political tension. Furthermore, by the end of the 1920s, it had become common to #associate mobo and moga with Marxism,# an ideology to which the state had become increasingly hostile. Owing to gender-related biases, the image of the fun-loving, westernized, (potentially) sexually-powerful, *moga* was particularly threatening to social conservatives--much more so than the mobo, who was more likely to be under control of the institutions of the military and the workplace. Mobo were frequently the object of ridicule in *cartoons,* but these relatively humorous portrayals belie a serious social and political reaction against perceived excesses of modernity that was building throughout the 1920s.

Interestingly, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was a popular discourse about "high-collar men," which dovetailed into that of the moga and mobo of the 1920s (#for more details#). In general, the term "high-collar" was more common during the period from 1900 to about 1920, and, during the twenties, moga and mobo began to replace "high collar." But the rhetorical functions of these two terms (moga/mobo versus high-collar) were nearly identical.

One result of the hyperinflation of the immediate post-WWI years and the growing critique of modernity in the 1920s was the *rise of socialism and Marxism.* Marxism provided a convincing explanation for the social and economic ills of the day as well as a general course of action for correcting them. There were several schools of Marxism in Japan by the 1920s, and several political parties (all either illegal or under close police scrutiny) seeking to put Marxist principles into action. Although Japan's Marxists had many substantial disagreements among themselves, all tended to be critical of the current state of politics and government. Perhaps more than anything else, these leftists accused the government and major political parties of being corrupt and *beholden to the moneyed interests.* Even politics in the 1920s functioned mechanically much like British parliamentary politics (with the majority party or a majority coalition forming a government), Japan's Marxists liked to point out that there was no significant difference in policies between the two major parties and that both were utterly corrupt. "Democracy" was nothing but *pandering to the lowest* common denominator of society for votes. In short, the state, the major political parties, and their big business allies came under attack from the left during the 1920s, with "left" here meaning Marxists broadly defined. And these leftists enjoyed considerable popular sympathy--enough that the state made vigorous and generally successful efforts to suppress the power of the left-wing movements.

But the state also came under fire from what, for want of a better or even an adequate term, we might tentatively call "the right" in this context. (The terms "left" and "right" are always vague, and, in describing pre-war Japanese politics, they are especially hard to pin down. For example, one scholar of the thought of Kita Ikki, a major populist nationalist, calls Kita's politics "'Peronism'--non-communist left extremism." My preference is to avoid the labels "right" and "left" altogether whenever possible.) More specifically, the 1920s and 30s was a time when populist-nationalism became a major political force. Although often labeled "right wing," in many ways populist nationalism resembled socialism, and, indeed, many of the leading populist-nationalists were former socialists.

The basic populist nationalist critique was that the government officials, party politicians, careerist military brass, and fat-cat capitalists were all in cahoots to enrich themselves at the people's expense. Furthermore, these corrupt elements in high places served as a barrier between the emperor and his people, preventing true imperial rule. Thus, *they should be eliminated* by whatever means are at hand. These nationalists tended to look with great suspicion on urban culture and tended to see their ideal Japan as an agrarian utopia in which the people lived in harmony and contentment under the direct rule of a benevolent emperor. Their view, in other words, tended to be critical of the current state of politics and culture. It was a romantic view, which had no chance of genuine success. But this view did call for heroic action, mainly in the form of assassinations of government officials and the leaders of industry. And, as we will see in a later section, many Japanese rose to the call.

One of the many things about which both the extreme leftists and the populist-nationalists agreed was the corruption and unacceptability of the present system. Also, both groups took up the plight of Japan's farmers, although the populist-nationalists tended to do so more than the leftists. They both stressed the utter corruption of the politics of their day, and this message was appealing to many ordinary Japanese, who saw it as obviously correct. The party politics of the 1920s were, by almost any standard, highly corrupt. Furthermore, the two major political parties rarely stood for any difference in ideology or approaches to governing. Instead, they stood for maximizing power for their group. In that they were both out to aggrandize themselves, there was no major difference between them in terms of issues. In short, the major political parties were much the same. And as time went on, they became ever more alienated from the majority of Japan's people.

Many of the populist-nationalists had sympathizers in the military. Recall that the military was the main way out of rural poverty for young men. As the 1920s went on, many military officers became increasingly disgusted with the major political parties. Neither party seemed at all effective in dealing with Japan's social and economic problems, and each devoted nearly all of its resources and energy to waging election campaigns, not to governing effectively.

These three groups--leftists, populist nationalists, and military officers--all criticized the state, the political parties, popular democracy (at least as practiced at the time), and capitalist greed. Populist-nationalists and military officers pursued their politics under the banner of loyalty to the emperor, and were thus harder for the state to suppress. Leftists often tried to concoct explanations of how their views were compatible with the emperor, but these word games were largely unconvincing. By the mid 1930s, the state was generally successful in suppressing the left, but it was much less successful in suppressing the populist-nationalists and their sympathizers in the military.

>>Note: we will return to this discussion of domestic political tensions in the section on the emperor system.<<

Let us now consider some of the issues in foreign affairs during the 1920s, some of which we have already examined in the previous chapter. The 1920s was generally a time when Japan followed a multi-lateralist course in foreign policy, but the multi-lateralists were under constant pressure from pan-Asianists, and, after 1924, the multi-lateralist position became very difficult to defend.

Conditions in China

China was the major international problem in East Asia during the 1920s. From approximately 1917-1927, China had no central government. Yes, there was always some warlord or party controlling the capital, but the city and suburbs of Beijing was about as far as their power extended. The rest of China was ruled mainly by a dozen or so warlords, each of whom had his own small territory. China, in other words was near to anarchy during this period.

Starting in 1926, a warlord called #Jiang Jieshi# 蔣介石 (better known in the U.S. by the Cantonese pronunciation of his name, Jiang [or Chiang] Kai-shek) whose base was in the south of China began a northward military and diplomatic campaign in an effort to unify China under his rule. The Northern Expedition, as it was called, was partially successful. By 1928, Jiang had managed to bring most of China under his rule--at least nominally. Jiang's power was strong enough to push most of the warlords into making some sort of diplomatic deal, but it was not so strong that Jiang was actually able to eliminate the power of all of the warlords. Therefore, from about 1928 onward, China was ruled by Jiang Jieshi in his capacity as head of the #Guomindang# (often spelled Kuomintang and/or translated as "Nationalist Party"--which is not a particularly useful English rendition) political party, which we will call the "GMD." However, many regions of China, especially those in the more remote inland areas were still ruled by warlords, even though these warlords flew the GMD flag and made a pretense of loyalty to the central government. Jiang knew, however, that his grip on power was tenuous, and that he would have to let these warlords govern as they wanted as long as they remained nominally loyal to the GMD. In short China remained weak throughout the 1920s and 30s, with much of its coastal regions dominated by one or more foreign powers and with Japan generally trying to exert ever more influence over Chinese affairs.

China in U.S. Eyes

What about the general outlook on East Asia from the standpoint of the United States in the 1920s, and how did it differ from that of Japan? At the level of both official government interests, and in the popular imagination, China was the focus of much attention. While nearly everyone knew that China was experiencing political difficulties, there was a tendency in the United States after 1926 to assume that Jiang's government was stable and that China was on the road to recovery. Missionaries saw a potentially rich harvest of new souls there, and the business community saw 400,000,000 potential buyers of U.S. products. By the 1920s, the image of China as a land with a "teeming" population so large that *ordinary metaphors could not represent its vast size* had become well entrenched. When China did not seem to be an economic, military, or cultural threat, the dominant image of its vast population was that of a potential opportunity. When China seemed threatening, on the other hand, the typical image of these same "400 million" could be terrifying.

During the late teens and throughout the1920s and 30s, #Sax Rohmer's# Fu Manchu novels enjoyed great popularity in the United States, so much so that several of them became #Hollywood films# in the 1930s, with #Boris Karloff playing Fu Manchu.# Sax Rohmer was a British writer, and his books made use of the general European image of the "yellow peril," which we have already examined. Recall that the basic scenario was somebody or some entity (Japan in Kaiser Willhelm's imagination) would rouse the masses of China from their current state of ineffectiveness (owing to lethargy, political chaos, or whatever) and lead them in an Armageddon-like conquest and destruction of Europe (#Refresh your memory#). Rohmer took this basic "yellow peril" fear and the basic scenario and made some small adjustments. His leader was not Japan, but Fu Manchu, who appears in the novels with the titles "emperor" or "Dr." The former emphasizes his "Oriental" roots and the latter his mastery of Western science and technology. Here are some of the descriptive phrases of Fu Manchu from the novels: "the menace of the Yellow Doctor," "the man who dreamt of a universal Yellow Empire," and "the titanic genius whose victory meant the victory of the yellow races." Here is how John Dower aptly describes Fu Manchu and his psychological impact on U.S. readers:

The first Fu Manchu novel was published in 1913, the tenth in 1941. The author was British, and popular in both his own country and the United States, where his work usually was serialized in Collier's before appearing in book form. Several of the novels also were reworked as film thrillers, and the advertisement for a 1932 MGM production (starring Boris Karloff) suggests the flavor of these popular offerings. In The Mask of Fu Manchu, Hollywood declared the evil Chinese doctor conveyed "menace in every twitch of his finger . . . terror in each split second of his slanted eyes." Although Rohmer's villain was Chinese, the hordes of every exotic place in Asia were at his beck and call. he was more brilliant than any Westerner who went against him (his antagonist, Nayland Smith, was a tenacious bore), for not only had he mastered the languages and sciences of the West, but he also commanded the secrets of the Orient. Better than any other single individual, Sax Rohmer succeeded, through the figure of Fu Manchu, in drawing together in a flamboyant but concrete way the three main strands of an otherwise inchoate fear: Asian mastery of Western knowledge and technique; access to mysterious powers and "obscure and dreadful things"; and mobilization of the yellow horde ("shadowy," in one episode, "looking like great apes.") Whether led by China or Japan, this was the essence of the Yellow Peril. (Italics added for emphasis. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War [New York: Pantheon Books, 1896]. pp. 158-159.)

And here is one of Sax Rohmer's descriptions of Fu Manchu:

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government - which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man..." (from The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, 1913)--from the web site: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rohmer.htm

With these points in mind, study *this image* from the cover of a popular U.S. "pulp" magazine. (Another example of a typical #"Asiatic" sinister figure#)

It is important at this point to keep things in perspective. First, in general, the image of China and its people in U.S. eyes was higher in the 1920s than it had ever been, and this relatively positive image strengthened during the 1930s and early 40s. But note the word relatively. Less than a generation earlier, China and its people were typically cast in the worst possible light in U.S. media. Consider the following examples from around the turn of the century: *from 1900*--the #Boxer Uprising,#  *from 1898--cultural inferiority,*  *from ca. 1880--likening unfavorably to a pig.* Images of the "Orient" in the United States tended to be superficial ("scratches on our minds") and thus easily changeable. Furthermore, during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, broad racial categories and images ("yellow hordes," for example) competed for people's identity with national or country-based categories and images.

Under many circumstances, the racial categories and images carried greater emotive force.  Popular literature abounded with images of a massive war between "races" on a global scale in which one side obliterated the other. In 1913, for example, Jack London wrote a short story that appeared in McClure's called "The Unparalleled Invasion" (a year later it became one of the stories in The Strength of the Strong). A futuristic tale of science fiction, London describes the complete annihilation of all Chinese on earth by Western forces using biological warfare in 1976 (of all years!). Then, after the world has been purged of the Chinese menace, the land of China is opened up for settlement by the peoples of Europe--an exact reversal of the classic Yellow Peril scenario. The tale is almost redemptive in a sick way, with the co8untries and nations of the world coming together in harmony to participate in the extermination of all Chinese from the planet. (What? You can't imagine the author of "White Fang" and "Call of the Wild" writing such a thing? Then see for yourself: #the full text of the story.#) And London's tale was but one of many following the same general doomsday motif.

American images of East Asia tended to operate at two different levels: 1) specific countries (Japan, China, Korea, etc.) and 2) broad racial divisions of the human species (yellow, white, red, etc.). The two levels usually operated randomly and often separately. The possibility always existed, however, that the two levels might come together and coincide around a specific issue or set of circumstances. One such example, as we will see, was the Pacific War.

When thinking in terms of specific foreign countries, most Americans tended to imagine China as having finally begun to reform itself and embrace "civilized" ideals. Japan, by contrast, came increasingly to be described as a dangerous, freakish country, for example in London's story mentioned above: "Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japanese race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In some strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer. Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied, a world-power. There is no explaining this peculiar openness of Japan to the alien culture of the West" (4th paragraph). Indeed, as you hopefully recall from the first chapter, Japan is similarly described as a "paradox among Eastern peoples" even today in popular documentaries. So at this level, China was moving ahead of Japan in terms of general U.S. sympathies during the 1920s. Strengthening this ascendancy of the image of China was the emergence of the baseless but widely-held belief in the United States that the U.S. was a special friend to China. Why? Because, allegedly, unlike the warlike countries of Europe (France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and the like) the United States had always interacted with China peacefully on the basis of mutually-beneficial commerce. And furthermore, the myth continued, the United States had repeatedly stood up for China's interests vis-à-vis these aggressive, imperialist countries. Here is a *typical image* of this special friendship myth. Indeed, commenting to journalist Lewis Gannett on this U.S. belief in 1926, GMD leader Jiang Jieshi said:

Thinking men in China hate America more than they hate Japan. Japan talks to us in ultimatums; she says frankly that she wants special privileges. . . . We understand that and know how to meet it. The Americans come to us with smiling faces and friendly talk, but in the end, your government acts just like the Japanese. And we, disarmed by your fair words, do not know how to meet such insincerity. . . . So because we have been deceived by your sympathetic talk, we end by hating you most. Why cannot America act independently? Why does she preach fine sermons, but in the end tag along with the others? (Quoted in Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India [New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1958, 1980], p. 202.)

Compare Jiang's view of the U.S. role in China with the self-congratulatory image of "commerce, not conquest" from Harper's Weekly above. Not only was there a major gap between the way most Americans viewed the roles of the United States in China versus the way most Chinese saw it, there was also a similar difference between Japanese and American views about their respective roles and activities in China.

Before examining some aspects of these differing perceptions, we need to look just a little closer at the significance of the other level of images of East Asia, that of broad racial divisions. Consider typical U.S. depictions of the German enemy versus the Japanese enemy during the Second World War. The German menace was never the German people as a whole (during the Second World War; the #First World War# was different). The Japanese menace, on the other hand, was the Japanese people as a whole, not a specific leader, political organization, or ideology. Here is a typical example of this difference, in the form of the *cover to a piece of sheet music.* We will examine this matter in more detail below (#preview#), but as Dower points out, the rise of Japan as a world power:

did not . . . simply shift the [U.S.] focus of Yellow Peril fears from China to Japan. Rather, it multiplied those fears. While sensational writings imagining Japan's conquest of the United States or the world now appeared on the scene, the great bogey of the menace from China remained alive and well in the popular consciousness. For the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde the rising tide, indeed, of color (Dower, War, p. 156).

So, despite the rising image of China and the threatening image of Japan that Americans tended to hold in the 1920s and 30s, there was in the background a general sense of anxiety about "the East," which helped shape the ways in which Americans tended to see the Pacific War and the postwar years--as we will see in more detail below.

The United States in Japanese Eyes

Looking at the United States from Japan in the 1920s and 30s, there was a strong tendency to see a nation of hypocrites and racists. In the view from Japan, Americans, or at least white Americans, lived lives of undeserved luxury. While enjoying the fruits of a large country and extensive colonial or semi-colonial possessions, these privileged Americans sought to prevent Japan from pursuing or attaining a similar degree of wealth and security. America's leaders tended to spout forth lovely-sounding rhetoric about such vague terms as "justice," "equality," "freedom," and the like while endorsing policies of brutal racial discrimination and banning East Asian immigration (Chinese in 1882; Japanese in 1924). Closer to home, the United States talked about an "open door" in China so that it could exploit China economically (along with the other Western powers), but whenever Japan tried to increase its influence in China it faced U.S. criticism. It may be necessary to cooperate with the United States for purely strategic reasons, but the United States was no friend of Japan and never would be. This, in a nutshell, was the Japanese view of the United states that emerged in the early 1920s and steadily gained strength. By the start of the Pacific War, most Japanese sincerely believed it, and it is important to emphasize that there was plenty of evidence to support this view. It was not some kind of crazy wartime propaganda forced upon Japan's people by evil militarists (as the American-sponsored standard interpretation would claim in the postwar years). From the point of view of Japan's recent experiences in the 1920s and 30s, it was perfectly reasonable for Japanese to view the United States in precisely such a negative light.

One very specific point of contention between the United States and Japan in the 1920s and early 30s was the status of the NE part of China known as #Manchuria.# Throughout Chinese history, this region had often been on the margins of or outside of China proper, and and Manchu Qing dynasty maintained Manchuria as a separate place into which Chinese were not normally permitted to enter. With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, the rest of the world tended to assume that the region of Manchuria was Chinese territory, a claim also made by Jiang's GMD, even though the GMD did not actually control Manchuria. The precise status of Manchuria, in other words, was vague. Because Manchuria bordered Korea, Japanese interest in the region was high. The Liaodong Peninsula was part of Manchuria, and so Japan did possess a substantial economic interest in the region after it took over Russian possessions there in 1905. Throughout the 1920s, Japan's government claimed that it had a special stake in Manchuria, and that Manchuria was not really part of China. The United States consistently maintained that Manchuria was part of China and that while Japan did possess important assets there like the Southern Manchurian Railway, sovereignty over Manchuria rested with China.

The situation in Manchuria during the late 1920s was that it was controlled in part by Japan (along the railway line) and in larger part by the armies of warlord Zhang Zuolin. Zhang cooperated with Japan, but when he began to resist Japanese demands, Japanese agents had him assassinated in 1928. Zhang's son, Zhang Xueliang (1898-2001) immediately took over his father's operation. Zhang Xueliang resented Japanese influence and thus turned to Jiang's GMD, allowing Manchuria unambiguously to become part of China (but still under Zhang's governance). In other words, Japan's attempt to influence Manchurian politics by assassinating the elder Zhang backfired. The response to this development in Japan tended to go in two directions. On the one hand, many politicians saw Manchuria as politically treacherous terrain on which Japan should tread cautiously. These politicians also tended to be multi-lateralists in practice, and they feared world condemnation should Japan act recklessly in Manchuria, especially since Manchuria under the younger Zhang had officially joined the GMD. On the other hand, many (but not all) members of the armed forces tended to favor a more aggressive policy in Manchuria. Japan, they argued, should strike quickly to take Manchuria before Jiang could consolidate his strength and before Manchuria became firmly integrated into the rest of China. They were quick to criticize what they say as the government's weak-willed, overly cautious stance.

One important point to bear in mind in this connection is that Japan's constitution did not provide for firm civilian control over the military, nor did it clarify in detail the chain of military or military-civilian command. There was much room for interpretation, and many military officers claimed that Japan's army and navy need answer only to the emperor, not necessarily to the emperor's civilian officials. Even within the ranks of the military, however, there was ambiguity about precise lines of authority. Some officers claimed that, while the army or navy high command was indeed in charge of overall policy, officers in the field had the right to interpret that policy as they saw fit, owing to the unpredictable nature of combat and the need to make decisions quickly. This lack of clarity regarding lines of authority played a major role in the Manchurian Incident of 1931. It did not, however, play a role in any later conflicts because, as we will see, in 1936 the military established firm top-down control within its ranks.

The Manchurian Incident is also called the Mukden Incident. It resulted from planning by the commander of Japan's army in Manchuria (usually called the Kwangtung or Guangdong Army--pronounced the same way regardless of spelling). The Guangdong Army command was adamant that Japan should take over Manchuria and that the civilian government would go along with a Japanese takeover if presented with it as a fait accompli. They therefore decided on a lightening-fast takeover using the alleged powers of discretion by field commanders as their authority to do so. The idea was then to call on the government in Tokyo for reinforcements. Most of the planners thought that the home government would come through because the alternative of giving up territory once taken would be too unpalatable even for the whimpy civilians. But should Tokyo fail to send reinforcements, there were some in the Gaungdong Army who advocated declaring Manchuria an independent country on their own authority and defying Tokyo if necessary. Read an account  of the *Manchurian (Mukden) Incident* here.

Neither the military high command nor the civilian government knew of the Gangdong Army's plans until after the takeover was underway. Under foreign criticism, Japan's government sent orders to the Guangdong Army to cease its aggression and expansion in Manchuria The military courier dispatched to Manchuria with those orders was a secret sympathizer of the Guangdong Army officers and their plans. He therefore traveled as slowly as possible and send word in advance that he was coming. The Guangdong Army was able to complete its takeover of Manchuria by the time the official orders arrived. They had become moot, since Manchuria was in Japanese hands. As predicted, the high command and civilian government did agree to provide reinforcements. For its part, the Guangdong Army claimed that the people of Manchuria had no desire to be a part of China. It persuaded the last of China's former Manchu emperors, Puyi, to become chief executive of the new country of "Manzhouguo" 満州国 (in Chinese; Manshūkoku in Japanese). Manzhuguo was a puppet state of Japan's Guangdong Army, but Tokyo went along with the claim that its creation was the result of popular sentiment of the people of the region. After all, in modern times, military aggression and the taking of territory is almost never done in the name of aggression.

Symbolism and Visual Imagery of the Manchurian Incident (and the Creation of Manzhouguo)

Because the Manchurian Incident differed from a full-scale war and required no initial sacrifice from Japan's citizens, it produced relatively little visual imagery. But because the Manchurian Incident produced the puppet state of Manzhouguo and because this puppet state was controversial in the world opinion, throughout the 1930s numerous images reinforced Japan's claim to have helped create a Manzhouguo in which peoples of different ethnic groups all cooperated harmoniously for the mutual good in the spirit of pan-Asianism.

Puyi, the ostensible chief executive of Manzhouguo was later promoted to "emperor," or, more accurately, to #puppet emperor.# Although neither he nor his country had any real independence, Japan went to great lengths to present Manchuria and its emperor to the public (of Japan and the world generally). Puyi even visited Japan, and was given the outward treatment of an important head of state. Here is a widely-circulated *photograph from that visit.* Notice the similar attire of the two emperors (Hirohito sitting forward & to left; Puyi reclining back somewhat).

In both Japan and throughout the industrialized world, advertising and official messages often took the form of public posters during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Around the world, posters bombarded pedestrians in urban areas with a barrage of messages. In Japan, posters extolling that country's (alleged) role in reviving Asia were a common sight. Many such posters used Manzhouguo as an example of Japan's *revitalizing efforts.* Manzhouguo's flag featured five stripes of different colors to symbolize the harmony of that region's five ethnic groups: Russian, Chinese, Manchurian, Korean, Japanese. The Manzhouguo flag or the example of Manzhouguo often figured prominently in official messages and even in advertising. For example, see *this poster* from the Shizuoka Tea Growers' Association. Its caption reads "A Cup of Green Tea; The Power to Raise Asia" and it features smiling women whose clothing identifies one of them as Japanese, one as Manchurian, and the other as Chinese. The flags of these three places fly in the background, with the Manzhouguo flag most prominent. The basic message: harmony of East Asian peoples such as presumably exists in Manzhouguo.

Manzhouguo served as a rough model for Japanese portrayals of further holdings on the continent in the late 1930s. Within the broad theme of Japan leading an East Asian revival were more specific messages. One message that came up repeatedly in posters back in Japan (as well as throughout the empire) was that Japan was a friend of traditional Asian culture. Such "traditional" culture typically took the form of exotic-looking (to most Japanese) *rites, rituals,* temple sites, ancient artifacts, and so forth. Indeed, there was a distinctively "Orientalist" slant (emphasis on ancient, exotic, quaint, or mysterious aspects of "Asian" culture) to much of these Japanese portrayals, no doubt to pique public interest in Japan.

Before continuing our analysis of Japan's modern military conflicts it is now necessary to take a closer look at developments during the early and mid 1930s in two related areas: popular nationalism and what Japanese historians typically call "the emperor system." We start with the emperor system and then examine Kita Ikki as an example of popular nationalism

Japan's "Emperor System" in the Twentieth Century

As you know, the Meiji Restoration was carried out in the name of the emperor, supposedly restoring him to his proper and ancient role as political ruler of Japan. In fact, however, leading officials in the Meiji era ended up creating a new monarchy. This new monarchy included some carryover from former times, mostly in the form of court ceremonies and numerous elements derived from European monarchies. The emperor was the living symbol of Japan as a nation, and to function as such, he had to wear many hats. He was the symbol of Japan's modernity as well as the alleged ancient origins of the Japanese nation and its traditions. He was head of state, but "above" the sordid world of politics (in typical Japanese political theory of the time). He was human and yet divine, for, not only did his pre-historical ancestors allegedly descend from the heavens, but the current emperor was but one man in a long, allegedly unbroken line of sovereigns. In these ways and others, modern Japan's emperor embodied, often awkwardly, the contradictions inherent in the very idea of nations.

This brief discussion focuses on the 1930s. For an excellent history of Japan's modern imperial institution, see Takashi Fujitani, #Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan#.

The Meiji Emperor died in 1912. Succeeding him on the throne was his son Yoshihito, whose comparatively brief reign from 1912-1926 bore the official name "Taishō," which means something like "Great Rectification." He is this known as the *Taishō Emperor.* In practice, however, from about 1921 onward, the Taishō Emperor's son *Hirohito* performed most of the ritual tasks of state in the capacity of Imperial Regent. The reason for Hirohito's standing in is that the Taishō Emperor was mentally incompetent and physically impaired owing to brain damage inflicted by a childhood illness. Because of this illness, the Taishō Emperor was incapable of exerting any influence on politics.

In 1926, Hirohito formally ascended the throne as the *Shōwa Emperor* (Shōwa being the official name for his reign and meaning roughly "shining harmony"). Unlike his father, Hirohito was mentally astute. Unlike his grandfather, the Meiji Emperor, Hirohito did not have a powerful public persona. He appeared in public for formal ceremonies and similar occasions, and he performed his public duties flawlessly. But he was ill at ease in the public gaze and tended to be retiring and taciturn. This is not to say, however, that he was weak-willed or passive. He was willing to intervene politically in what he saw as grave or emergency situations. Furthermore, contrary to the image of Hirohito as a passive pawn of evil militarists--an image carefully created by U.S. occupation officials and a cooperative Japanese government starting as soon as WWII ended--he was actively involved in the conduct and planning of Japan's wars of the 1930s and 40s.

Although Hirohito performed his ceremonial, military, and political duties to the best of his ability, his real passion was scholarship. More specifically, he was a #marine biologist.# His research expertise was corals, and he ended up writing four academic books on the subject. But marine biology was his private passion. In public, he typically appeared as the head of state. In the 1930s, this role typically emphasized the Shōwa Emperor as *commander-in-chief* of the military. On such occasions, he often appeared in his military uniform riding his white horse. Despite the usual portrayal of him in U.S. wartime images as being clad in *strange-looking court robes,* Hirohito typically wore ordinary western-style clothing.

The specifics of the Shōwa Emperor's life are only part of the picture of Japan's emperor system of the 1930s. Of greater importance was the function of the emperor as an institution and symbol in the realm of politics.

Japan's 1889 constitution, often called the "Meiji Constitution," created the basic framework for formal politics from the time of its promulgation until 1946, when it was replaced by Japan's current constitution. The Meiji Constitution states that the locus of the nation's sovereignty is the emperor. What is sovereignty? Turning to a dictionary might not always help. *Click here,* for example, and look at definition 1, which is the relevant one in our case--not so great is it? The problem is that sovereignty is a highly abstract concept. Here is a longer but *more useful* description. In the context of Japan's Meiji constitution, sovereignty is, approximately, a combination of two things: 1) legitimate political authority; and 2) the intangible essence of Japan as a nation. Obviously, the first component is connected with the state, and the second with the nation. And so, at least according to the constitution, the emperor was the source of both the state and the nation.

Did this status confer on the emperor any formal, institutional power? Yes, it did, but both the emperor and most of the people around him (court officials, government officials, etc.) knew that direct imperial exercise of political power for ordinary matters of state would be dangerous. It was necessary to keep the source of sovereignty free from possible contamination by the realm of politics, or at least "politics" in the ordinary sense of competition for power and resources or for the power to allocate them. There was an unofficial but very strong division of labor. The emperor served as the abstract source of sovereignty, and the politicians, bureaucrats, police, military officers, etc. exercised specific powers derived from that sovereignty. In theory and often in rhetoric, nearly all of the order-enforcing functions of the state were carried out in the name of the emperor but almost never under the direct supervision or direction of the emperor.

The emperor was rarely seen in public (and when he was, it was under carefully orchestrated conditions), but his name was everywhere. Teachers, for example, were the emperor's servants, and they instilled in successive generations the awesome importance of the monarch (recall from an earlier chapter the daily school routine from about 1890 onward). Even to speak of the emperor was difficult because special honorific terms and grammatical constructions were required when doing so. Radio announcers who made an error in using such imperial respect language risked being fired (and some were). During the 1920s and 30s, the emperor seeped into nearly every aspect of Japanese life, and yet in many respects was quite remote from Japanese life. He was both awesome and mysterious, and it is not an exaggeration to say that by the 1930s he had become a fetish object. It was not so much that Hirohito the individual person had become such an object, but rather that the emperor had become such an object.

I do not mean to suggest that monarch-as-national-fetish was exclusively a Japanese phenomenon. Indeed, most of the world's monarchies have this quality. Consider, for example, the attention that the British monarchy draws both in Britain and in various other countries including the United States. Lacking an official sovereign and royal family, but not the desire for one, the public media in the U.S. has, in effect, crowned the Kennedy family as quasi-monarchy. And it has done so with vast popular approval. Modern nation-states or aspiring nation-states seem to need a living symbol of nationhood, and such symbols inevitably take on the qualities of public fetish objects. The case of Japan was not unique except, perhaps, in its intensity. But even in terms of intensity, numerous examples of modern rulers making public cults to themselves (one form of fetishism) come readily to mind (e.g., Kim Il-sung in North Korea, Mao Zedong in China, Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Japan's case was slightly different, however, in that the personality of any specific emperor was less important than was the institution of emperorship as an object of public fetishism. In other words, the specific individual named Hirohito was much less important than was the Shōwa Emperor, the official role that Hirohito happened to perform.

Let us consider some concrete examples of emperor-as-national-fetish in the Japan of the 1930s. In the early 1930s, it was still acceptable for ordinary citizens to look at the emperor, for example, when he walked or rode down the street in a *public procession.* But such ordinary people would normally view the emperor on their knees (while seated formally in seiza, "correct sitting"). And all along the route of an imperial procession, officials would make sure that windows or other openings of buildings from the second floor up were all covered. Why? Because it would be outrageous for anyone to look down upon the emperor.

Although certain government officials could walk or sit with the emperor, when in his presence, a high degree of formality was required. When top military officials would meet with the emperor, for example, they would typically sit so as not to face him directly, and they sat at *rigid attention* throughout the meeting. When talking they used a special formal language while in the imperial presence. When the emperor spoke, he did so in highly formal language full of words and phrases only the emperor was permitted to utter. Just after the Pacific War, when the #famous photo# (#slightly larger version#) of the tall MacArthur next to the short Hirohito appeared in newspapers, it gave rise to the following Joke: Why is MacArthur the navel of Japan? Because he is above the chin. "Chin" 朕 was a first person pronoun (i.e., "I") that the emperor (and only the emperor) used in referring to himself. But chin (written with a different character: 珍) was also a vulgar word for penis. (Today, there is "chin-chin," a word small children would typically use to indicate that part of the body and chinpō, literally "exotic treasure," which is a vulgar, adult reference, typically used among men in bars, locker rooms, etc.) To utter a joke playing on the two meanings of the sound chin during the war years would have been terribly dangerous. Today, joking about the emperor, while not common, would generally be safe if done relatively privately. To criticize him in the public eye, however, would put the criticizer at high risk of bodily harm or, in the case of elected officials and other public figures, at high risk of assassination (#for example#). The emperor, in other words, still retains some qualities of being a national fetish object, even though his constitutionally-defined role has been greatly diminished.

Take a look at *this photograph* from the 1930s. It shows the mayor of Osaka and the emperor chatting about military affairs while looking at a map. Something is terribly wrong here--what? The emperor is standing in a relatively relaxed manner. What about the mayor? He is not lounging, but neither is he standing at attention. And his top hat is in his hands, not on his head. To stand in an ordinary manner while in the august imperial presence? Such an outrage! And indeed, when this photo got into the newspapers, the public outcry was so great that the mayor resigned in disgrace. By comparison, when, in 1988, in response to a specific question, the mayor of Nagasaki publicly said that he thought the Shōwa Emperor bore some responsibility for the disastrous Pacific War, the mayor instantly became a marked man. The inevitable assassin's bullet found its mark, but not with fatal results, and  the mayor recovered from his wounds. Living under constant police guard, he ran for re-election and won by a very slim majority. Note that there are a wide variety of views concerning the emperor among "the Japanese" today (the  was mayor also deluged by letters expressing a wide range of opinion from all over Japan, many of which became a book). In the 1930s and 40s, however, the state expected all citizens to conform to a single official view of the emperor.

In 1936, it became illegal for ordinary citizens to look at the emperor in person. Gazing at official photographs was perfectly fine, and often required in the context of schools, military training, and other official situations. And many private citizens kept pictures of the emperor and empress in their homes--a few still do. There were some Japanese who would have favored eliminating the imperial institution in the 1930s, but not many. The emperor enjoyed broad popularity, and his *power as a national fetish object* only increased as a result of the relative rarity of his appearance in the flesh.

In the context of ever-increasing imperial awe during the 1930s, the emperor's public activities were surrounded by an aura of seriousness and formality. Take a look at *this very interesting photograph* of the emperor from the 1930s. You might wonder what is so interesting about it. It simply shows the emperor joking with another member of the imperial family prior to the start of an official ceremony. The public never saw this photo because it was banned by official censors. Why? Because it depicts the emperor as being all too human--hardly the appropriate image for a national fetish object. (Remember: the term "fetish object" is my usage--it is intended as a helpful and accurate description of a key aspect of the emperor's role in society. It is not a characterization of the emperor that Japanese citizens themselves would have used at the time.)

So, as of the 1930s, we see two closely related trends connected with the imperial institution. First, public political rhetoric frequently called on Japanese citizens to do their duty. Second, that duty was allegedly owed the emperor. It was actually duty owed the nation, but "nation" was an abstraction, whereas the emperor, while somewhat mysterious and rarely seen in person, was a specific manifestation of the nation to which school children bowed every day. Indeed, for those who fully bought into the rhetoric of duty toward the emperor, the discharge of such duty could and did become the main purpose in life. One very important point to bear in mind is that insofar as the call to do one's duty for the emperor came from official sources such as teachers, textbooks, government proclamations, imperial rescripts, etc., such exhortations were coming from the state. In other words, the state urged its citizens to do their duty to the nation (via the emperor), but this duty was for the benefit of the state. This rhetorical sleight of hand was, and is, a common phenomenon. If the prime minister says to the general public something like "pay your taxes so that my government can have enough money to do all the things on my long wish list of projects!" such an utterance would hardly endear listeners to their duty as followers of tax laws. If instead, however, he were to say something like "pay your taxes to further the glory of the emperor's reign," more people might be more enthusiastic about paying. But it would be the same money going to the same place either way.

One final matter of importance about the emperor concerns the term kokutai 国体. We have already seen kokutai in other contexts, and you should recall that it means something like "national essence," but translates literally as "national body" (*scroll down to last definition*). This term became a highly-charged rhetorical weapon in the political discourse of the 1930s, and we now explore some of its meanings and rhetorical effects.

Consider *this passage,* which is part of the introduction to a 1937 textbook on kokutai. Based on what it says, how would you define kokutai in a single sentence? If that does not seem possible, what about listing the specific elements of kokutai? Here is the list I would make:

Kokutai is (in whole or in part): a) the (allegedly) unbroken line of emperors from ancient antiquity to the present;  b) an eternal and unchangeable national entity;  c) that which unites all Japanese as one family;  d) that which obliges Japanese to obey the Imperial Will; e) that which is manifest in personal behavior by loyalty and filial piety; f) something that is glorious;  g) the basis of Japan as a nation;  h) something that might be found shining in shrines in Japan;  i) something that we should seek to know.

This list is quite broad, and it comes from the first few sentences of an entire textbook. Kokutai was a hard term to define with precision. Nevertheless, how about distilling this list into a meaningful but short definition? Here is my attempt: "Kokutai is a vague but emotionally powerful term for the mysterious national essence of Japan, which finds more concrete expression in such things as an unbroken line of sovereigns, loyalty and filial piety, obedience to the emperor, and a variety of Japanese cultural habits or characteristics." Simple enough, isn't it? How might kokutai appear as a visual definition? Here is *one possibility.*

Of course, trying to understand kokutai only by means of a quick and easy definition is impossible. In 1937, the Ministry of Education published a textbook called Kokutai no hongi 国体の本義 (Basic principles of the national essence) for use in all schools. Written by a panel of experts, this single volume of modest size was, apparently, inadequate for explaining kokutai fully. Why? Because soon after its appearance, several multi-volume (typical size: 10-15 substantial volumes) sets of commentaries on the Kokutai no hongi were published by various commercial presses. In other words, it took a book to explain the term kokutai, and several sets of 10-15 more books to explain that book. Whenever you find such an ever-expanding cloud of verbiage to explain a concept, you can usually be sure that __________ (fill in the blank with one word starting with "n" but not ending with it) is at the core of this concept. The answer? Nothing, of course. In other words, people assume there must be something to kokutai, that is, to our national essence, but finding that "something" turns out to be terribly hard because it is not there--at least not in the sense of anything concrete. So more and more words are needed to talk about and around it, building up, in effect, a vast cloud or fog of verbiage that obscures the emptiness of the concept itself.

Does this process sound familiar (Hint: Chapter Two, last section)? It should, because it is not unique to kokutai or to Japan. It is part of the nearly universal process of imagining the communities we call nations. Kokutai was the specific term for Japan's national essence, and, as such, it would have made no sense to say, for example, "the kokutai of France." Only Japan has kokutai, the thinking went, because only Japan has an unbroken line of sovereigns since ancient times, citizens who naturally incline toward loyalty and filial piety, a society that resembles one large family, and so forth. But, despite the allegedly unique quality of nations according to their members, the general process of imagining nations is similar (though not identical) the world over.

Now, would not it be a pity for the kokutai to be destroyed? In a sense, it cannot be destroyed, because it is unchangeable. Suppose, however, that every Japanese in the world were to die. Such a calamity would surely do it. Or, what if the emperor and his family were to vanish? For true believers in the religion of nationalism, such events, in a sense, should be unthinkably horrible. Nevertheless, official rhetoric urging sacrifice in wartime sometimes hinted at such scenarios--horrible not simply in the sense of massive loss of life, but more so in destruction of the glorious kokutai, the very reason for living. After all, full-scale modern wars have been fought between entire societies, not just opposing military forces. Certainly Japan's enemies would like to have see the kokutai destroyed. Indeed, according to wartime rhetoric, the demonic Americans (or British, Soviets--fill in the blank) were such barbarians that they would delight in killing all of the Japanese people and/or doing away with the emperor! Take a look at the *this typical example* of such rhetoric from late in the Pacific War (ca. 1944). "Eliminate all Japanese from the earth!" says a demonic Roosevelt in a poster to encourage aircraft production. Did the typical viewer of such a poster (mainly factory workers) really believe such rhetoric? It is hard to say, but postwar recollections by a wide variety of Japanese indicate a that many did believe the worst about the enemy. Here is *another example* from late in the war (and thus reflecting increasing desperation). In this image, Roosevelt and Churchill are depicted as depraved ogres, carousing within sight of sacred geography of the home islands (notice Mt. Fuji in the background--the geological symbol of Japan's kokutai) while their soldiers run amok on a murderous rampage.

During the war years, the message about the meaning and significance of the kokutai was consistent if not always clear. After 1936, the state tolerated no challenge to its official interpretation (and before then, it tolerated only a few indirect ones) of what it meant to be Japanese. The state's enemies, or imagined enemies, often faced formal legal penalties for actions "contrary to the kokutai" (an expression that always reminds me of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s and 60s). With such a vaguely-defined concept as the official standard, nearly anything could be construed as being contrary to the kokutai.

One high-level victim of what we might call a kokutai-attack was the highly esteemed legal scholar and member of the upper house of the diet #Minobe Tatsukichi.# Minobe was famous for his theory that the emperor was an "organ" of the state, albeit the most important one. For decades, his theories of politics enjoyed wide acclaim, and were even required knowledge for Japan's civil service exam. Nevertheless, Minobe fell hard and fast in the atmosphere of the 1930s. Politicians--who, in many cases, had little knowledge of what Minobe actually meant by characterizing the emperor as an "organ" of the state--attacked Minobe and his writings as being contrary to the kokutai. To be thus labeled, even wrongly, carried such a strong negative stigma that Minobe had little chance of successfully defending himself. (To get a rough sense of the emotional intensity of the situation, imagine somebody in the United States today accused loudly and publicly of child molestation--or perhaps child molestation while practicing Satanic rites. Or, similarly, imagine someone accused of being a Communist in the 1950s. Such accusations alone would be ruinous.) Indeed, Minobe was lucky to avoid prison. As it was, all of his books were banned, he was stripped of all his peerage titles and honors (Japan had a peerage system modeled roughly on that of Britain), and he was removed from his seat in the House of Peers. Naturally, cases like that of Minobe had the effect of chilling any serious discussion of politics or policies with respect to certain topics. There were dissidents, however, during the 1920s and 30s (up to 1936) who had some success at making their voices heard and influencing state behavior to at least a small extent. The next section examines the views of the most famous of these dissidents: Kita Ikki.

Popular Nationalism in the 1930s with a Focus on Kita Ikki

Kita Ikki is, arguably, the most famous (or infamous) dissident nationalist of the 1930s in Japan. The other major contender for the "most famous" (or infamous) title is Kita's acquaintance and occasional associate Ōkawa Shūmei. Read this short *biography of Ōkawa* to get a sense of a typical career and views of a twentieth-century dissident nationalist. Notice that, despite having been involved in the assassination of government officials and planning military coups against the state, Ōkawa eventually made a rough peace with Japan's government in time to provide some assistance to it during the war years of 1937-45. Kita did not make it that far.

On February 26, 1936, approximately 1,400 soldiers from three regiments led by officers affiliated with the Imperial Way faction of the army (more on army factions below) launched a military coup. They took over key buildings and communications centers in the center of Tokyo, and, for good measure, killed the Finance Minster, a former admiral, then Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal (the highest position in the imperial court), and The Inspector General of Military Education (the number two post in the armed services). They tried to kill a number of other leading public officials, who managed to escape, some with injuries.

The coup leaders hoped that they would receive support from like minded members of the military as well as from the emperor. Indeed, the coup was launched in the name of "restoring" the Shōwa Emperor to what the coup leaders though should be his rightful position: the direct ruler of the country. The term "restoration" here is the same word (ishin 維新) as "restoration" in Meiji Restoration. Like many others in the general category of popular nationalists or nationalist dissenters, these soldiers and their officers sought a new domestic order in which the emperor would rule his people directly, without the interferences of corrupt politicians and fat-cat capitalists.

Although the government imposed martial law immediately, it did not swiftly move against the insurgents. There was considerable uncertainty about what to do, especially since it was not know precisely who supported the coup and who would be willing to stand with the government. That the rhetoric of the coup leaders emphasized the restoration of the Shōwa Emperor did not help the situation either, since it might appear improper to attack pro-emperor soldiers. And what would the emperor think of the whole thing?

In fact, in a rare display of assertiveness, the emperor denounced the coup and demanded that it end. When it became clear that the coup leaders had no support from any major interest group in Japan, the government moved decisively to end it on February 28. Most of the ordinary soldiers agreed to return to their barracks peacefully, and some officers killed themselves. The next day the remaining leaders were arrested. Unlike previous incidents of terrorism, which often resulted in relatively light penalties for the instigators, the government dealt with this coup swiftly and harshly. A total of 124 people were prosecuted, with 133 officers and four civilians being sentenced to death. Kitta Ikki was one of the civilians. Although he did know about the coup, he did nothing to assist or participate in it. The main reason for Kita being a target of prosecution was that his ideas had influenced many of the coup leaders.

Let us now briefly survey some of those ideas (in no exact order). First and foremost, Kita was a pan-Asianist. He spent much of his adult life in China, which he badly wanted to help revive. Kita was critical of Japanese government actions (or lack of actions) in China during the late teens and the 1920s, and at one point the Japanese embassy ordered him to leave the country. Unlike many pan-Asianists in Japan, however, Kita did not regard Japan as inherently superior to China or any other Asian country. He genuinely longed for the day when China and Japan would cooperate willingly for their mutual benefit. Had he lived to see the brutality of the second Sino-Japanese War, he would almost certainly have deplored it, even though some historians credit Kita's ideas as having partly contributed to Japan's continental expansion.

In the same spirit, Kita despised the western imperialist powers in Asia and wanted them removed by any means necessary. He particularly hated Britain, and this hatred even extended to the English language, which he regarded as inherently poisonous:

English is neither necessary nor obligatory in popular education. In the progress of modern Japan, English has not supplied the people with world knowledge. . . . The poison English produces in the Japanese mind [is similar to that caused by] opium, by means of which the British ruined the people of China. . . . The complete elimination of English from this country is an especially urgent duty inasmuch as the basic significance of reorganizing the state is to restore the national spirit. (Quoted in George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883-1937 [Harvard University Press, 1969], p75. All subsequent quotations of Kita's writings are those provided in this book.)

Notice the links in Kita's mind between English, opium, state (government) reorganization, and the national spirit. Although Kita did not regard Japan as inherently better than China, he did acknowledge Japan's leading role in liberating Asia. Like so many of the popular nationalists of his day, Kita liked the metaphor of the rising sun lighting up the world to describe Japan's ideal influence in the international arena. Regarding Japan's mission in the world, he said:

After destroying England [in Asia] and restoring Turkey, after making India independent and China autonomous, the Rising Sun Flag of Japan shall offer the light of that sun to all mankind. The second coming of Christ, prophesized in every country on earth, actually signifies the scripture and sword of Japan [as a new] Mohammed. The Japanese people must soon face a national crisis unprecedented in history. It will come as a result of reorganizing the state's political and economic structure. . . . Peace without war is not the way of heaven. (p. 86)

The co-opting of religious traditions here is typical not only of Kita, but of many other Japanese writers. Japan was both Mohamed and Christ. Another prophecy of Kita's was that in the near future, Britain and the United States would go to war and "slaughter each other." Perhaps prediction was wishful thinking on Kita's part more than any reasoning process. Such a result would certainly reduce the amount of language pollution in the world!

A sentiment widely shared by Japanese of many persuasions was that Japan was a poor, under-privileged country in the world. It was a "have-not." Not surprisingly, Kita held this view, and he asserted the moral right of have-not countries to wage war on the present world order:

The present state of affairs is definitely unjust. . . . England is a multi-millionaire standing over the whole world. Russia is the great landlord of the northern hemisphere. Japan is in the position of an international proletarian with a string of small islands for boundaries. Does Japan not have the right to go to war and seize their monopolies in the name of justice? (p. 82)

Notice the strong Marxist influence here. Kita has applied the Marxist theory of class struggle to the world at large, with Japan a member of the proletariat. Although Kita would not have regarded himself as a Marxist or a socialist,  Marxism was also a major influence in Kita's ideas for domestic reorganization. Kita advocated the forcible government confiscation of the largest corporations and landowners, and government-imposed limits (albeit rather large ones) on the amount of land or wealth that any one person or organization could amass. He did, however, fully support the right to hold private property within these limits.

Kita's plans for reorganizing society included many specific additional rights and entitlements for Japan's citizens in general, and working class people in particular. For example:

Labor disputes . . . shall be resolved by the Ministry of Labor. These decisions shall be obeyed uniformly by the various industrial ministries . . . by private industry, and by workers. [ . . . ] Workers employed in private industry shall be apportioned one-half of its net profits, This apportionment [applies to both white-collar] and manual workers and is to be distributed in proportion to the salary or wages of each. Workers shall choose their representatives, who shall take part in the operation and planning of the enterprise. (p. 73)

In addition to his profit-sharing and management-sharing ideas, Kita advocated an eight-hour work day with Sundays off as a paid holiday. He also advocated prohibiting child labor and strictly limiting the paid labor of women. Kita's ideas about men versus women in society seem to have been a miscellaneous assortment. He advocated specific "women's rights," such as the right to have adulterous husbands punished by law. In his ideal world, the work that women could do should be limited to relatively non-strenuous activities, but, within that realm, women should receive pay and benefits equal to men doing the same job. Ideally, however, women should work only in the home, and they should have nothing to do with politics, including voting. Moreover:

In other countries there have been female suffrage movements, while in our country we have the doctrine of the good wife and wise mother . . . The entire problem of women in Japan would be solved if we reform the system so that women have the right to be mothers of the nation and wives of the nation. . . . Anyone who has seen the stupid talkativeness of European and American women, or the harsh quarrels among Chinese women, will be thankful that the Japanese women is developing along the correct path. (p. 76)

Incidentally, during the 1920s, there was a small but vocal movement for women's rights, including the right to vote. It was generally unsuccessful, although it did result in the relaxing of former rules that prohibited women from any kind of political activity at all (e.g., listening to a political speech). It seems that Kita was confident that Japanese women would indeed keep to the correct path of being good wives and wise mothers despite disturbing trends in other countries such as women demanding and getting the right to vote. Incidentally, women did not vote in Japan until 1946.

In 1920, Kita Ikki joined a political organization called the Yūzonsha, whose manifesto reads as follows:

We the Japanese people must be the cyclone center of a war to liberate mankind. Therefore the Japanese state is at Absolute which will bring about the establishment of our idea of world revolution. Ideological fulfillment and militant organization of the Japanese state is a sacred undertaking on behalf of this absolute goal. We shall try . . . today to realize the ideals of Martin Luther, who said that the state is an ethical institution. The dangerous internal and external crises that have come before our very eyes will not let us avoid fundamental reorganization of the state structure and creative revolution in the national spirit. We do not consider it sufficient to pursue reorganization and revolution for Japan alone, but because we really believe in the Japanese nation's destiny to be the great apostle of mankind's war of liberation we want to begin with the liberation of Japan itself. (p. 98)

Notice again the interesting mix of religion, Marxism, pan-Asianism, and Japanese nationalism. Although Japan's people and state never did adopt Kita's proposed reforms, the idea of Japan as destined (recall the idea of "manifest destiny" in the U.S. or "the white man's burden" in Britain) to liberate Asia through warfare did become deeply-rooted popular belief as well as Japan's official stance from 1937 onward. Even today, the idea that Japan's wars of 1937-45 were wars to liberate Asia from imperialism enjoys significant support. As we now turn to this period of warfare, it is essential to bear in mind that most Japanese genuinely believed that their country was waging a just war. And they sacrificed mightily on behalf of that cause.

Background: Second Sino-Japanese War

Of course, Japan's armies also inflicted tremendous damage on the very places they claimed to be saving, and Japanese wartime atrocities in Asia took place on a vast scale. How does one explain a genuine belief in liberation on the part of most Japanese while Japan's armies took part in infamous brutality such as the *Rape of Nanjing* (also known as the Nanjing Massacre, late 1937-early 1938)? There is no neat and tidy theory that can explain these things. Hopefully, the remainder of this chapter will at least provide some useful suggestions on making sense of some of the big questions connected with Japan's warfare--and, by extension, warfare in many other places as well.

To get started, read through this *summary of the war*

The Second Sino-Japanese War was a long time in the making. Ever since the late 1920s, there had been frequent skirmishes between Japanese and Chinese military forces in various locations in and around China. From the time of its seizure of Manchuria in 1931 until the start of full-scale war in the summer of 1937, Japanese land forces had slowly but steadily grabbed ever more Chinese territory from Manchuria southward in the direction of Beijing (the present-day capital of China, but not the capital during the 1930s). Jiang had come under increasing pressure to resist this Japanese expansion vigorously, but he chose instead to direct his main efforts at eradicating members and soldiers of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one-time allies of Jiang's GMD. Using a medical analogy, Jiang likened the CCP to a cancer and Japanese pressure to a skin rash. Eventually, however, the rash became so widespread that Jiang could ignore it no longer.

In early July, 1937, Japanese soldiers conducted night maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge in the northern suburbs of Beijing. They came into conflict with Chinese soldiers stationed nearby. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but both sides exchanged gunfire. Initially, nobody expected this small incident to grow into a full-scale war, but Jiang had come under such strong *pressure to resist Japan,* that he decided to make a stand by refusing to give any concessions to Japan when negotiating a settlement. For a variety of reasons, the incident of fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge remained unsettled as of late July, and fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces began to take place elsewhere in China. By August, both sides were engaged in full-scale warfare. This July encounter and its immediate aftermath is known as the #Marco Polo Bridge# Incident.

Shanghai, China's largest city, was the scene of the first major round of fighting, which started with a Chinese air attack on the Japanese fleet in Shanghai harbor. The attack was a miserable failure. Japanese commanders found out about it well in advance and had their ships out of the harbor and zigzagging through the open ocean by the time the attack started. Such defensive precautions may not even have been necessary, for the Chinese pilots and crews were generally so inept that a few planes even managed to drop bombs on Shanghai itself, killing numerous civilians--an accident apparently resulting from fear of getting too close to the Japanese ships and not taking wind direction into account. No Japanese ships were damaged or sunk. Spurred on in part by this Chinese air attack, the Japanese response was to amass soldiers for an invasion. During the fall and winter, one major Chinese city after another fell to the invaders. Japanese soldiers were victorious everywhere they fought. (See a *map of this early phase* of the war.)

What was going on here? Much more than a quick survey of the battle results would indicate. Let us take a look at three important questions: 1) why did the Chinese armies perform so poorly?; 2) why didn't Jiang press to negotiate a peace treaty after such devastating losses during the first few months of the war? and 3) what problems did these early victories, and the war in general, cause for Japan?

Chinese ground forces vastly outnumbered those of Japan--at least on paper. But these forces were consistently ineffective, with the exception of the CCP irregular forces. The average Chinese soldier was poorly equipped and poorly trained compared with his Japanese counterpart. Furthermore, China's air force was small, and had largely been destroyed during the first few weeks of fighting. Japan, by contrast had substantial air power located in China, which it used very effectively. But these facts are only one part of a much larger picture. One key factor is that the GMD military forces, except for a small elite that Jiang never used in battle--had little or no morale for fighting a serious war.

The root of China's military weakness was Jiang and his pursuit of what I like to call a "balance of weakness." Recall that Jiang's position as China's ruler was precarious owing to the presence of numerous semi-independent powerful groups such as warlords and their armies, *organized crime syndicates* (e.g., #The Green Gang#), and the CCP, which remained strong despite Jiang's repeatedly having tried to *crush it* since 1926. Jiang generally enjoyed the support of China's wealthy elite and of the major organized crime organizations. This support was not based on ideology or any other strong bond. It was based mainly on their seeing Jiang as the person best able to further their interests. Likewise, Jiang enjoyed the nominal support of the major warlords provided that he grant them substantial autonomy and that Jiang remained powerful enough that individual warlords did not see it as being in their best interest to break with or rebel against Jiang. Jiang's basic policies did not change from the 1920s through the 1940s. His goal was to retain and enhance his personal power, to which everything else was subordinate (incidentally, the same could be said for Mao Zedong, CCP leader and Jiang's main domestic enemy). He pursued war with Japan only when popular demands grew so large that Jiang risked alienating his major supporters by not taking a stand. Once he took a stand, he had no choice but to fight on (for reasons we will see below). But Jiang, seems to have known all along that his ultimate battle for power would be fought against other Chinese, not Japan.

So Jiang's basic strategy was to keep all potential challengers to his power weaker than himself. One way that he did so was by encouraging potential rivals to distrust each other. Japan's invasion was in many ways a boon for Jiang, because his position in the GMD was strengthened by it. He became, in other words, the only one with enough power to lead China through the crisis. Throughout the war, Jiang made sure that the situation stayed this way.

The major way of obtaining soldiers for the GMD armies was by *kidnapping young men* from rural villages. Such "recruits" were typically sent to areas of China far from their homes, where they would be unfamiliar with the local geography, and, in many cases, would not even speak the language of the local area (there was no de facto common language throughout all of China at the time). There, these recruits would endure brutal, but generally ineffective "training," while living in wretched conditions. Death was a common fate, even in the absence of any combat. Such soldiers had no real loyalty to the GMD. Insofar as they fought, it was simply to save themselves. Not all GMD army units were staffed this way, but many were. Jiang usually kept his elite soldiers back in reserve and to send armies comprised of forcibly conscripted peasants out in the field to face the enemy.

Jiang carefully balanced the commanders of his armies so that, whenever possible, commanders who distrusted or hated each other would be placed next to each other. GMD commanders often devoted more effort to watching other GMD commanders, not Japanese armies. Indeed, during many of Japan's advances, GMD armies fought bitterly--against each other--to determine which would get to retreat first. Such military forces, although large in number, were nearly useless during serious fighting. Toward the end of the war, Japanese commanders had figured out that simply hiring local peasants to move toward the Chinese lines while holding aloft the Japanese battle flag was often sufficient to spark a panicked retreat.

Not only were these Chinese armies ineffective in opposing Japanese advances, they were often just as brutal to local civilians as were Japanese soldiers. With good reason, local civilians feared GMD and Japanese soldiers about equally. In the remote northwest of China, however, where the CCP established its base of operations, the situation was different. The CCP made an effort to cultivate peasant goodwill, and this effort paid of during the war years as well as during the subsequent civil war in China that lasted roughly from 1947-1949. The CCP armies were effective against the Japanese enemy. They were reasonably well led and consisted of volunteers. It might also be useful to reflect briefly on the Korean War, ca. 1950. China's army then was just as poorly equipped as it had been a decade earlier, and Chinese military leadership was not innovative in any way. The U.S. commander, MacArthur, was contemptuous of Chinese forces amassing at the border of North Korea, and he ignored them--until they attacked and sent the (mainly) U.S. forces into full-scale retreat. The point here is that, even in their poorly equipped state, Chinese armies were capable of fighting effectively. In 1950 the Chinese typical soldier believed in the cause for which he was fighting; in 1940 the typical Chinese soldier did not.

Jiang's government more resembled an organized crime syndicate than a government in the usual sense of the term. Whenever possible, Jiang used the war against Japan to profit materially and monetarily, dolling out the proceeds to those GMD elites Jiang calculated would most benefit his long-term attempt to control China. When the United States got into the war at the end of 1941, Jiang and his cronies began gorging themselves on everything the U.S. could provide. Prices that U.S. soldiers and organizations had to pay for Chinese goods (trucks, supplies, even admission to brothels) increased several hundred percent overnight. Most of the supplies intended to support troops in the field never arrived. It is no wonder that Jiang's armies performed so poorly under these circumstances. Indeed, it is amazing that they held together at all. (There is a superb but little-known book that is particularly insightful about these and related issues concerning the war in China: Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time. Try to find the earliest edition.)

Why did not Jiang try to work out a deal with Japan after nearly all of China's eastern cities fell to the invaders? The typical explanation was that Jiang was simply determined to fight on for idealistic reasons, but such a thing would have been entirely out of character for him. Jiang had no choice but to fight on because early in the war the Japanese government formally declared that there would be no deal. In other words, nothing short of total surrender by Jiang would have been acceptable. Having made such an unambiguous declaration, Japan's government was unable to back down. This rigidity was not only a problem for Jiang, it became a problem for Japan. And it ultimately led to a broadening of the war by Japan's attacking the United States.

Take a look at *this map* and notice that, of the Chinese territory conquered by Japan during the war, the vast majority of it was in Japanese hands by the end of 1937. After that time, Japanese gains were relatively minimal. Why? There were several reasons. First and most important was logistics. One characteristic of Japan's armed forces at the time was that they were heavily weighted at the front end. Specifically, for approximately every 9 or 10 soldiers fighting on the front line in the infantry, there was one solder behind the lines providing support (e.g., supplies, communications, medical services, etc.). This ratio meant that Japanese armies tended to strike with much greater power than their overall size would indicate as possible, but, on the other hand, they lacked the staying power to carryon on a protracted war. China turned into such a war and became a logistical nightmare for Japanese which were only partially mechanized.

In addition to a severe weakness in its logistics operations, Japanese forces in China faced the constant threat of guerilla attacks. These attacks often came from the CCP armies, but Chinese organizations of various kinds resisted the Japanese presence. Even though the typical GMD soldier in the field had no particular loyalty to the GMD, China had become a nation during the twentieth century (a nation without a strong state). In other words, especially in the cities, but even to some extent in the countryside, ordinary people began self-consciously to think of themselves as Chinese. This national consciousness provided the basic sentiment for opposing Japanese conquest. So wherever Japanese were in China, they faced varying degrees of hostility, which put further *pressure on supply lines* and other aspects of supporting a vast army (well over a million strong) in a vast land area (China is approximately the size of the continental United States). By late 1938, China had turned into a logistical quagmire for Japanese armies, with no immediate prospects for a solution. At this point, many Japanese leaders would undoubtedly have wanted to conclude a diplomatic settlement, but, for the same reason that Jiang had to persist in the fight, so, too, did Japan.

But why did Japan's government declare early on in the fighting that it would accept nothing less than complete surrender, thus committing both sides to a, long, miserable war in which neither China nor Japan could prevail decisively? The main problem here was poor information from the commanders in the field. The first six months of the war was a period of one major victory after another for the Japanese invaders. In general, Japanese soldiers and officers had a contemptuous view of Chinese capabilities, both on the battlefield and in the broader realm of politics. The main reason for resorting to all-out war against a country that Japan deemed essential for its pan-Asian empire was to achieve a quick and decisive victory. The fall of the GMD would then allow Japan to set up a government in China favorable to Japan's interests. With China then on Japan's side, consolidation of the rest of the empire would could proceed rapidly. That was the general idea.

And all indications in late 1937 were that the plan was succeeding. Japanese victories were indeed real. The inaccurate part, however, was to attribute too much importance to those victories. Commanders in the field typically predicted the entire collapse of the GMD in the very near future because they could not imagine Jiang holding out after losing so much prime real estate. The typical refrain would be something like "just one more victory like the one we have achieved today and . . ." Complete victory, in other words always seemed just around the corner. As a result, Japan's government publicly committed itself to the complete removal of the GMD and the creation of what it called a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." Jiang's reaction was to keep moving further inland as he lost territory, stretching Japanese supply lines ever thinner. In such a strategy, ineffective armies are less problematic, for it was on sheer distance that Jiang most relied for defense. His armies in the field were, in effect, scarecrows, and he kept his best and most loyal troops close to wherever his capital was (Chongqing for most of the war).

So both Japan and the GMD had gotten themselves into a conflict that neither side appeared able to win, but from which neither side would try to back down. The war was a constant and substantial drain on Japanese resources. In this context Japan's leaders became ever more desperate to find a successful way out of the China quagmire. As we will see below, this desperation led to the Pacific War.

Symbolism and Visual Imagery: Second Sino-Japanese War

The world watched the developments in Japan's war with China with considerable interest. There are many approaches we might take in surveying some of the visual imagery of this war, but to keep it relatively simple, we examine three areas: 1) the war in official Japanese eyes; 2) the war in Chinese eyes;  3) the war in the eyes of Europe an the United States. This section will be relatively brief because we examine many of these images in greater detail in the next section.

Let us start with names. The common name in Japanese for the conflict that lasted from 1937-1945 was the "Great(er) East Asia War" (Dai-Tōa sensō 大東亜戦争). Today some Japanese still use this name, but it is not neutral. Its use indicates an agreement or sympathy with the official war aim of Japan at the time, which was to liberate East Asia from imperialist oppression. The most common term for this war today in Japan is the Pacific War (Taiheiyō sensō 太平洋戦争), although in English there is a tendency to distinguish the two phases of this war with two different names: the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1941) and the Pacific War (1941-1945). In some contexts, however, Japanese usage also makes this distinction, calling the war from 1937-1941, literally, the Japan-China War (Nitchū sensō 日中戦争). This term is equivalent to the English Second Sino-Japanese War. (Incidentally, the First Sino-Japanese War is known in Japanese as the Japan-Qing War [Nisshin sensō 日清戦争].) During the actual time of the war, however, because the official goal was to "liberate" China, the conflict was not called a "war." Instead, it was an "incident," specifically the *"China Incident"* (Shina jihen 支那事変). Notice that there are a variety of ways to label about conflicts, and different names often suggest particular interpretations or political stances. What most Americans call the Korean War, for example, was not officially a "war." Instead, it was a "police action."

It is common for non-Japanese students of Japanese history to underemphasize the strong sense in Japan that the war in China was a war of *liberation.* Even if, when all is said and done, you personally do not think the conflict really was a war of liberation, it is essential to bear in mind that most Japanese at the time did think so--and a significant minority of Japanese today think so as well. Consider the following passages from a manual issued to all soldiers. Its title, Kore dake yomeba, ware wa kateru これだけ読めば、我は勝てる, means something like "We can win the war if you just read this." The small book contained a variety of practical information about survival under adverse conditions, and it was also rich in ideological and motivational material. For example:

In the Japan of recent years we have unthinkingly come to accept Europeans as superior and to despise the Chinese and the peoples of the South.  This is like spitting in our own eyes.

Once you set foot on the enemy's territories you will see for yourselves just what this oppression by the white man means. Imposing, splendid buildings look down from the summits of mountains or hills onto the tiny thatched huts of the natives. Money that is squeezed from the blood of Asians maintains these small white minorities in their luxurious mode of life.

After centuries of subjection to Europe, these natives have arrived at a point of almost complete emasculation. We may wish to make men of them again quickly, but we should not expect too much.

[. . . ]

When you encounter the enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with his father's murderer. Here is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. If you fail to destroy him utterly you can never rest in peace. (Quoted in Arthur Zich et al., The Rising Sun [Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1977], p. 123)

One difficulty in coming to terms with Japan's official reason or the war is a tendency to regard passages like these as utterly ridiculous and baseless. "After all, Asia was surely not suffering from *European oppression,* and even in those places that were under European rule, I'm sure it was benevolent and *good for* the local people. . . . "--etc. Such have been the thoughts of many a westerner upon examining this period of history.

In fact,