It would be a herculean task to consider all the elements and forces in the boiling pot that was the Asia Pacific region in the summer of 1937. And even then to understand the levers available to the U.S. to affect the military action in China and Manchuria that was initiated by Japan. Historians argue for or against financial leverage, military leverage, diplomatic leverage and a host of other factors. A book has been written that argues a coalition of merchant shipping companies could have been assembled that could have been effective in controlling Japan because of Japan’s dependence on foreign-flagged merchants to deliver even basic food items. Perhaps the most often discussed topic is that the United States missed a window of opportunity to broker peace between China and Japan that would have set in motion a chain of events so that the United States was never drawn into the war against Japan.

Background: US Foreign Policy

The priority of the President of the United States and the State Department was Europe and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, as well as the ongoing Spanish Civil War which was seen as a proxy for the coming conflict in Europe. It was also the priority for Britain and during this period they exerted diplomatic pressure to ensure the U.S. kept Europe as the priority. Nonetheless, the U.S. needed to pay attention to the Asia-Pacific region because of interests in China, the Philippines, Guam and elsewhere.

Some of the key players at the U.S. State Department were: Cordell Hull, Secretary of State; Stanley Hornbeck who headed the Far East Department; Nelson Johnson, Ambassador to China; Joseph Drew, Ambassador to Japan; and key advisors to Hull – J. Pierpoint Moffat and Hugh Wilson. Moffat was the son-in-law of Joseph Drew. Wilson had served in Japan in the mid-1920s.

Hull shared a view with Hornbeck: Japan was not trustworthy given their history of vague diplomacy, military aggression apart from civilian control, and a habit to ask specific current action of the U.S. while pinning their commitments to future events that might or might not happen. By the 1930s they were not considered to be forthright in their diplomacy. In the 1920s, when there was a strong current of liberal democracy, Japanese diplomats were effective – perhaps because the western nations (i.e., U.S. and Britain) achieved their goals. Meanwhile, at home, the military/nationalist parties considered the diplomats to have harmed Japan in strategy and in honor. By the 1930s, it was this latter group that dominated internal and external politics and policy, even as Japan’s diplomatic core retained career people from the 1920s. 

It must be noted that even at this point in history (1937), the U.S. had already broken the Japanese diplomatic cables and traffic (not the military). The U.S. was often reading diplomatic correspondence before the intended Japanese recipient. The distrust was rooted, not only in experience with Japan’s diplomacy of the 1930s, but also with evidence of current intentions revealed in the diplomatic cables.

Perceptions within the State Department

While Hull and Hornbeck agreed it was appropriate to be very cautious in dealing with Japan, where they were not on the same page as regards to “the next steps.” Hull was very much a diplomat who was pragmatic but at the same time was more interested in a lasting settlement rather than incremental steps to such a settlement. His emphasis was always on fundamental principles.  Hull’s experience with Japan was they negotiated to keep options open, were reluctant to commit to hard action, dates and consequences, and most often replied with vague ideas or contingent events whose outcome was rarely knowable.  In addition, the principled but pragmatic Hull believed that the U.S. did not have adequate naval assets to project power to the western Pacific; did not have substantive national interests in China to warrant the threat of military action; understood that any action taken in the summer of 1937 had zero popular support; and that the U.S. did not possess sufficient financial leverage to entice/force Japan to modify its China program. Hull did note in correspondence that “Japan’s invasion of China was not desirable but not intolerable.” 

Hornbeck and Johnson believed that Japan’s aggression would never be limited to China but would eventually expand to include the Southwest Pacific, especially the oil rich nations. Japan wanted diplomatic and trade action that would legitimize their expansive actions, both categories of which were turned down by Hull and President Roosevelt. Hull’s position was to do nothing to antagonize Japan but nothing to assist them either. Roosevelt’s position was harder to pin down. He would agree that the U.S. should do nothing to aggravate Japan, then he would make a very public speech, e.g. Chicago 1937, when we would openly criticize Japan’s aggression and seem to call for a “moral embargo” from U.S. citizens and companies to not buy Japanese goods. In any case, there was nothing concrete that was offered to mitigate Japan’s actions – and that was, in part, due to pressure from Britain and the Netherlands who had substantive interests and holding in the Southwest Pacific – the very target of Japan’s attention.  

The Neutrality Acts

The U.S. was also constrained by the Neutrality Acts. By 1937 the acts prohibited arms sales to all belligerents – in this case China and Japan. It was designed to keep the U.S. isolated. This initially gave Japan a freer hand in its aggression against China without fear of U.S. intervention. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, President Roosevelt did not invoke the Neutrality Acts, arguing that no formal declaration of war had been made. This allowed the U.S. to avoid hindering China’s defense, allowing for the shipment of arms to China, which frustrated Japan.

The 1937 Act introduced cash-and-carry, allowing the sale of non-lethal, and later other goods, if paid for upfront and transported by the buyer. While this technically allowed Japan to purchase supplies, Roosevelt selectively used this to enforce a moral embargo on aircraft sales to Japan. Revisionist historians (and what this often means is just the 2nd wave of historians) see this as escalating tensions, making diplomatic resolution difficult. Or as some argue, impossible, as it forced Japan to choose between abandoning its expansionist goals or initiating war to secure needed resources. 

This latter line of reasoning continues as time moves into 1941 concluding that every action of the U.S. to limit Japan’s ability to buy scrap steel, key material resources, aviation fuel, freezing of U.S. held Japanese financial resources, and eventually a complete oil embargo – all “caused” Japan to start the war. In the several books with trajectories along this line (Utley’s Going to War with Japan 1937-1941 and Miller’s Bankrupting the Enemy) while interesting insights and historical details are offered, the analysis seems to miss that Japan had options. In 1937, military spending was 45% of Japan’s national budget and would grow to 65% by 1940; in the United States military spending was 3% (1937). There was more than enough budget for Japan to focus on becoming a commercial powerhouse (as it became post WW2). The currents of history led Japan to become a nation with an outlook on the world similar to Nazi Germany. There is also little to no mention of the rapidly growing death toll in China among civilians and the devastation of cities and economies.

Bankrupting the Enemy acknowledges that the Japanese leadership justified the war as self-defense against the United States, who was trying to strangulate and pauperize Japan and that this was the prevailing view among the majority of government/military leaders in Japan at that time who controlled the nation. Going to War with Japan 1937-1941 notes that Grew, Moffat and Wilson were in contact with the Japanese government who wanted the U.S. to approach Japan offering to moderate a peace settlement with China. True, but in reality they were only in dialogue with the moderate wing of Japanese politics who held no influence within the cabinet, the Diet, the military, and little if any with the Imperial household. The revisionist view seems to base their conclusions of causality on “if only we’d given the moderates a chance…” It is simply near impossible to hold that view if one understood the body politic of Japan from 1937-1941. 

The Contingent Window

A missed opportunity? Was there a window to bring peace to the Asia-Pacific region and avoid the carnage and destruction that happened from 1937 to 1945? Most historians agree that by late 1937 the political, military, and ideological conditions in Japan made a negotiated peace exceedingly unlikely, extraordinarily difficult, though not theoretically impossible even then it was only for the briefest window of time. 

There was indeed a moderate faction in the autumn of 1937 but it was fragile and divided. They included people associated with Prime Minister Konoe, a member of Japanese royalty, and considered by those connections to have access to the Prime Minister. As well there were diplomats in the Foreign Ministry, some officers in the Naval Staff worried about overextension and potential engagement with the U.S., and some Army Staff officers whose primary responsibility was logistics. All in all it was not a prestigious or influential group. It should also be noted that Konoe, as Prime Minister, was an animator for even more aggressive actions in China. As a group they were not cohesive in their aims, lacked control over field commanders, and would not act openly against the tide of nationalism.

Even at its strongest, the moderate camp faced structural barriers – first among them was the autonomy of the Army.  Field commanders often acted independently and civilian leaders could not guarantee compliance. At the same time, the war already enjoyed genuine public support, especially after early successes. Arguments again the war risked accusations of betrayal in a milieu when assassinations were not unusual. And lastly, and most importantly, the war already had Imperial legitimacy. Once the Emperor sanctioned operations, reversal became politically perilous for all involved.

Even if Japan’s moderates could convince a larger element of their own government to be receptive, the U.S. lacked any real means of leverage without economic sanctions or military force, both of which were never policy options for the U.S. Two other factors the moderates did not consider were: there was no U.S. domestic support for assertive involvement and it was likely that even an offer of American mediation risked being dismissed as hostile interference.

Was there a window of opportunity for a negotiated settlement in 1937? Theoretically, yes. Realistically, no and what is really meant is “Sure, occasionally “Hail Mary” passes work in football…but…”

By early 1938, the opportunity, if it ever existed, had effectively vanished.

The “lost moment” assertion is not absolutely wrong, but it vastly overstates the cohesion and power of Japanese moderates and underestimates the force of nationalism, military autonomy, and momentum. 

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. | 

We have slowly been working our way through the early 20th century in Japan in search of key currents and views that were shaping Japan leading up to the 1937 start of the Asia-Pacific War. The 1860s movement from the Shogunate era to the Meiji Restoration was not a move to a constitutional republic that we know and accept in the United States. It is a complex topic best described by dedicated historians. To be clear, historians do not fully agree on the role Hirohito was playing  and would play in the path to the Asia Pacific War. Nonetheless, some coverage is needed to understand how events have and will play out in 1930s Japan.

The Role of the Emperor

It is fair to say that a central goal of the Meiji Restoration was to reestablish the Emperor as a center of leadership, especially moral and symbolic leadership – but it needs to be said with qualifications.

One of the Restoration’s core aims was to overturn Tokugawa Shogunate rule, which governed in the Emperor’s name but marginalized him in practice. It was a critical aspect of the Restoration to reassert the Emperor as the legitimate source of authority for the state. This was essential for national unity during rapid modernization and would serve to legitimize institution and structural changes that would be needed for Japan to take its place in the world order. These changes included military conscription, taxation, education, state and foreign policy, and more. In this sense, the Emperor was intended as the moral and symbolic center of the new order.

But that was not to say the architects of the Restoration intended the Emperor to be involved in day-to-day operation of the State. Many of the Restoration leaders were themselves daimyō (regional rulers) in the Shogunate  era. While they did not want a Shogun, neither did they intend the Emperor to govern directly. Influenced by Chinese and Western polity, they designed the ruling structures so that real power rested with the cabinet, bureaucracy, and the genrō – the elder statesmen of the era as it happens, themselves). The result was that the Emperor’s role was to sanction and embody decisions, not originate policy. This aligns with the idea of moral leadership rather than active governance.

Yet he served an important political function. The Emperor’s restored status provided continuity with Japan’s past, neutralized factionalism by placing authority above politics, and helped suppress dissent by framing opposition as disloyalty. The emperor-centered ideology was a means to an end, not an end in itself.

By elevating the Emperor as sacred, inviolable and the source of sovereignty, the Meiji system created structural ambiguity. Policies could be justified as “the Emperor’s will” while at the same time the Emperor was shielded from responsibility. While this is a broad statement, 1931 saw military leaders act in the Emperor’s name without his consent, control or authority. He is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, yet his Kwantung Army in Manchuria felt free to do what it wanted, not expecting and not receiving punishment for their actions. Emperor Hirohito’s response to the events of 1931 was to “fire” the Prime Minister and form a new government, but did not take any action within Army ranks. Most historians believe it was a choice for national stability; control could come at a later time.

That did not seem to be the response of an absolute monarch yet neither was it a role of a powerless figurehead of State. 

Prior to ascending the throne in 1926, Hirohito had taken a trip that included extended time in Britain. Among his interests was to understand the nuance and complexity of the King of England within the Constitutional Monarchy – which at the time seemed to be the closest configuration of what the Meiji founders had in mind. The historian Herbert Bix offers that King George of England shared with then Crown Prince Hirohito that the role of the monarch was also to influence the levers of power and on rare occasions to press with force. Hirohito never revealed his understanding of the role of emperor, not even after the end of the war in 1945 or later. It has left historians to research and draw their own conclusions. Historian Stephen Large offers an idea of “self-induced neutrality” – knowing he has the power but choosing not to act. Peter Wetzler believes that the Emperor knew how to put his thumb on the scale but at the same time did not believe himself to be responsible for the result. In the end his was only to approve policy, not to create it.

Whatever his actual views, his posture as Emperor from 1926 until 1937 fit into the Meiji system’s likely intent. By elevating the Emperor as divine, inviolable and the source of the nation’s sovereignty, the Meiji system created structural ambiguity wherein policies could be justified as “the Emperor’s will” and yet the Emperor was shielded from responsibility.

Sacred Duty

The education and formation ministries amplified this view of the Emperor with The Development of Sacred Duty. This was an essential idea that Japan needed to take its place among the powerful nations of the world, not only as an economic necessity but as a moral imperative rooted in its self-understanding through the eyes of Shinto religion. The argument was that if the emperor’s will was divine, then Japan’s policies (whether modernization, annexation, or war) could be framed as the fulfillment of a sacred mission. For example, in annexing Korea, Japanese officials and ideologues claimed they were “bringing civilization and order” under the emperor’s benevolent guidance.

This Shinto-based ideology taught that Japan was the land of the gods (shinkoku), uniquely pure and chosen. This translated into foreign policy as a belief that Japan had a moral right and duty to lead other Asian peoples (Korea, Taiwan, eventually China) — even if this meant dominating them. Unlike Western colonial powers, which often justified empire through Christianity or “civilizing missions,” Japan used State Shinto and emperor-centered nationalism to claim it was liberating Asia from Chinese decay or Western imperialism.

This view underpinned Japan’s expansion which was more than military force projection, it included economic and trade justifications – all connected to Japan’s need for markets, raw materials, labor, and trade routes. State Shinto teachings linked these economic aims to national survival and divine destiny. Securing resources in Korea, Taiwan, and later Manchuria wasn’t framed as “colonization,” but as fulfilling the emperor’s sacred mandate to protect and enrich his people. Thus, trade dominance and annexation were sacralized as part of a divine mission, not just pragmatic policy.

The cornerstone that held the structure together was the Emperor – or at least the idea of the Emperor.

This ideology formed the idea of The Eight Corners of the World in which the Emperor of Japan extended divine order first across East Asia then across the globe. In Korea, Manchuria and later in other conquered lands, Shinto shrines were built to enforce the symbolic inclusion of that country under Japan’s sacred imperial rule. This is the underlying foundation behind the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Asian countries should come together under Japan’s leadership to be free from Western colonial powers. On paper, it sounded like a partnership — “Asians helping Asians.” Japan said it would bring prosperity, unity, and independence to Asia. In reality, though, it mostly meant that Japan would dominate the region, control its economies, and use its resources for Japan’s benefit. So instead of being true cooperation, it was more akin to Japan empire building with kinder and gentler language and imagery. 

In the Center

At the center of the puzzle is Showa Emperor Hirohito, the 124th descendant of the Sun Goddess, son of Emperor Taisho, the son raised from birth to take his father’s place on the throne. The one who inherited the root problem passed on by his father Emperor Taisho who had positioned the throne, for all practical purposes, as a Constitutional Monarch with no real powers – or at least Taisho did not exercise any power. Internal to Japan there were supporters of this dynamic as they desired for full democratic reforms. There were detractors that saw such reforming movements as an “infection” of western ideas. When Hirohito ascended the throne, he entered into an evolving system where the Cabinet and Diet establish policy and precedence internally and externally. Was this the intent of Meiji reforms? Was it an aberration? What was to be his role? Decision maker, Imperial “whisperer” whose position was only hinted at by the question asked, or, like his father, a symbol and endorser of already made decisions. 

Historians generally describe Emperor Hirohito’s role between the Mukden Incident (1931) and the February 26 Incident (1936) as that of an engaged but constrained constitutional monarch whose authority was real yet structurally and politically limited and whose own choices increasingly favored management over confrontation. After this period, Hirohito became more engaged – how much more? But we know from this point forward Hirohito was not a passive figurehead. He received regular briefings from Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff, questioned military plans and timelines, and expressed concern about unauthorized actions, especially after Mukden. But Hirohito accepted the military’s assurances and fait accomplis rather than force a constitutional crisis. He was aware of this history of assassinations and divisions within the Army and strategically chose to avoid civil war or regicide. It was the latter in 1936 when Hirohito personally ordered the suppression of the coup. When the throne itself was directly threatened, he acted decisively. Hirohito could intervene, but usually chose not to unless imperial authority itself, not policy, was at stake.

1937 and Beyond

Perhaps getting ahead of ourselves, but continuing the thread, we continue to trace how Emperor Hirohito’s posture changed after 1937 when Japan’s actions initiated the Asia Pacific War with the outbreak of full-scale war against China that began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 1937)

Hirohito seems to accept the war as a reality to be managed. As Emperor he approved mobilization orders and war directives, accepting that conflict was now unavoidable. He shifted from questioning whether Japan should fight to how the war should be conducted as he focused on military feasibility, logistics, and timelines rather than political alternatives. Historians largely agree that Hirohito no longer saw the war as something he could stop without risking systemic collapse. Perhaps the one sentence description of how he viewed his role as Emperor would be: reluctant acceptance combined with managerial oversight.

As the war in China dragged on, Hirohito demanded more frequent briefings. During these briefings he often questioned generals on operational matters, including troop deployments and supply constraints. He continually expressed concern about two items. The first was overextension of the army. The IJA enjoyed continued success against Chinese forces, but that also meant longer logistic lines and a larger territory “behind the lines” for which they were now responsible.  Second, there was no clear exit strategy or end-game that could be delineated. The Emperor made his presence increasingly known, but avoided direct confrontation.

And the war dragged on. Meanwhile on the home front, the Prime Minister who was a prime animating force for Japan’s continued aggression in China, Prince Konoe formed the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA). It was an attempt to unify Japan under a totalitarian, ultranationalist banner for total war, effectively dissolving all other political parties to eliminate factionalism and mobilize the nation for its expansionist goals in China, Mongolia and Siberia. While intended to consolidate power, it struggled with internal divisions and never fully achieved the monolithic control seen in Nazi Germany, facing resistance from established interests and failing to fully control the military.

In this period Hirohito voiced unease about war with the United States because of Japan’s industrial and naval limitations. At the same time he supported diplomatic efforts but seemed to keep them “on a short leash” so that they did not undermine imperial prestige. It was also in this period that he ultimately approved The Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany. As well he approved the expansion to the southwest, occupying French Indochina. The Emperor seemed suspended between diplomacy and military momentum, wanting the former but unwilling to tamper down the latter.

In late 1941, despite misgivings, Hirohito approved the decision for detailed war planning against the United States and Britain and sanctioned pre-war operations while insisting that diplomacy continue until the last moment. But more on that in later posts.

After the Allies entered the Asia Pacific War and the tide soon turned, Hirohito asked increasingly pointed questions, privately expressed pessimism, but avoided direct intervention that might undermine military morale. He was informed, offered suggestions, but remained largely reactive but understood his was the final consent/approval of major actions and campaigns.

It was only in August 1945, when Japan was defeated but had not yet surrendered that Hirohito overrode military opposition to accept the Potsdam Declaration, intervened directly to solve a deadlocked cabinet, and ordered the end of the war. This moment starkly contrasted with his earlier restraint but he acted to preserve the nation and the Imperial House.

Historians often describe Hirohito’s post-1937 trajectory as moving from constitutional restraint to  managerial involvement to reluctant authorization to a final decisive intervention. The paradox, the evolution if you will, is central to his legacy.

Earlier he possessed the authority to intervene but did not, seemingly out of fear of fracture, precedent, and the sacred status of the throne. He acted decisively only when national annihilation loomed

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives

In the 2026 posts I have been working to go into more depth on the events prior 1941 that drew the U.S. to become involved in the Asia-Pacific War. In the first post of the new series I wrote that I wanted to explore:

“…the currents and eddies of history that brought Japan its wars with China (1894-1895 and 1937-1945), with Russia (1904-1905), the annexation of Korea, Manchuria and French Indochina, and to wider war in the Pacific that stretched from Hawaii to Australia and nations in between, notably the Philippines, Malay, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.”

And more, I wanted to delve into the milieu of conditions that led Japan to think that the wars were necessary, why it felt the U.S. needed to be drawn into the war, understand revisionist historians who assigned large elements of blame on the U.S. for forcing Japan’s hand making war inevitable, and so many other questions – especially what made Japan think they had any possibility for winning a war that would involve the United States.

To that end I have posted a bare bones history of Japan, her people, the ages and epochs she experienced, changes in people, in forms of governance, her relationship with other Asian countries, and especially the changes in Japanese society from the end of the Shogunate period of her history into the modern times of the Meiji Restoration. After covering multiple centuries in a single post, the focus began to narrow to cover decades, and sometimes events of just a single year.

What is common to so many of the posts was something I began to explain in the post “There’s Something About China.” That post tried to address the swirl of history surrounding China, European nations, and Japan in the days of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For business people, pirates, adventurers, explorers, seekers of the mysterious and exotic – all roads lead to China. The 1930s are no different.

But the 1930s are a confluence of many emerging influences within the Japanese world, changing the lenses by which she viewed the outside world. Although Japan had been an open country after Admiral Perry’s appearance in Tokyo Bay in the 1850s, had established a robust international trade, was an allied partner in World War I, and more – she was still a closed country in many other ways. Many of those trends were discussed in the web of previous posts and are just highlighted here:

• Social Darwinism had found its way into national strategy. Control of Korea and Manchuria were seen as strategic buffers and reserves of critical resources. This allowed Japanese leaders to claim: “We do not seek conquest; we seek existence.” It is a logic that removed ethical restraint.
• The traditional Samurai spirit had been morphed into bushidō as Japan’s equivalent to Western chivalry, and proof Japan possessed a moral civilization worthy of great-power status. This was installed in the military and imperial strategy of the 20th century – as well as popular culture.
• The Imperial Army (IJA) and Navy (IJN) received heavy investments in equipment and personnel in order to become a military of a leading world power. The goal for the IJA was control of China and Russia. The measure for the IJN was the U.S. Navy as seen in Japan’s war plan, Kantai Kessen (“Decisive Battle Doctrine”). For details see the post War Plan Orange.
• While the Meiji Constitution made provisions for a Constitutional Monarchy similar to Great Britain’s, the 1920s brought new challenges to that understanding. Liberal democracy was discredited by the post-WW1 financial crises and the Wall Street crash. Rising nationalism led to a decade of Governance by Assassination which led to a military operating with impunity, free of civilian controls and juridical consequences.

Whatever national restraints that were present in the 1920s had given way to the trends above. The 1930s were marked with a rejection of the Western nations that Japan felt had already rejected her in the Washington Conferences, the League of Nations charter, and host of other post-WW1 matters. At the same time there was an embrace of a selective account of Japanese history, culture and values. The Pan-Asian aspirations had been subsumed by Japanese nationalism so that Pan-Asian aspirations and Japanese conquest were the vision and destiny. All of this is wrapped into the promotion of racial superiority in spirit and morals, a homeland that had never been successfully invaded, all under the leadership of the divine Showa Emperor, Hirohito. Destiny called. The first call was China.

The Manchurian Campaign – Mukden

“On the roads that led Japan to and beyond Pearl Harbor, the Manchurian campaign was the first signpost. Milestones had been passed, but it was in Manchuria where the road, for the first time, divided.” (Tohmatsu and Willmott, 25). 

Until 1928 or so, China was a patchwork of local war lords and shifting alliances. It made Japan’s governance of Korea, Manchuria and the Liaodong Peninsula relatively simple. But in 1928 and 1929 the Nationalist Chinese Party (Kuomintang under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek) began to assert control over central and northern China including large swaths of Manchuria. The Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin has been assassinated by elements of the Japanese Kwantung Army (Kwantung is the Japanese name for Liaodong) only to see his son Chang assume power and align with the Kuomintang. Japan had formally adopted a non-interference policy for China. In the eyes of the military it was time to ignore that policy.

In 1930 nationalist operatives shot Prime Minister Hamaguchi, who survived, but the vacuum of power allowed space for the military to plan and put in place their conspiracy to expand its presence in Manchuria. The conspiracy was rooted in the Kwantung Army as well as the Army Ministry and General Staff in Tokyo. They believed a pre-emptive strike would allow Japan to take advantage of Chinese weaknesses and division. The origin of the plan was among middle-ranking officers in the Kwantung Army who believed that their actions could not be repudiated by Tokyo given the popularity of the military at home. They firmly believed that if they took the unauthorized initiative they would be able to dictate national policy. They were firm in their convictions that neither senior Kwantung officers nor the Army Ministry and General Staff in Tokyo would be able to repudiate their insubordination even insubordination that brought war. The 1928 assassination of Zhang had been the test case.

By early September 1931 the conspiracy was evident. Chiang Kai-Shek had information of what was afoot but knew he was powerless to stop it militarily and a series of river floods within China complicated his never ending power struggles with warlords and the traditional government in Nanking. He instructed the Manchuria Chang to not resist. 

The conspiracy was also known to the Emperor and Prime Minister Wakatsuki. An officer from the General Staff, Major General Tatekawa, was sent to Manchuria specifically to ensure restraint, but he found himself distracted and attentive to other matters. 

On September 18, 1931, officers of the Kwantung Army staged a small explosion on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden and blamed it on Chinese forces. Although the damage to the railway was minimal and no Japanese trains were seriously affected, the Kwantung Army treated the incident as justification for full-scale operations. Within two hours virtually every Japanese unit in Manchuria undertook pre-planned offensive action leading to a rapid, unauthorized military takeover of Manchuria. Tokyo’s civilian government ultimately accepted the fait accompli. The Mukden Incident led to the creation of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932), Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations (1933), and marked another decisive step toward unchecked military expansion and the erosion of civilian control in Japan.

There are a host of events between Mukden and 1934 that are important but can largely be described as unsuccessful attempts by the Kuomintang and affiliated groups in other parts of Northern China and Inner Mongolia to thwart the expanding control of Japan over all of Manchuria. In April 1934 Japan issued the Amau Declaration that asserted Japan had a special responsibility and leadership role in East Asia, particularly in China, and warned that Japan would oppose any foreign actions that interfered with its efforts to maintain order and stability in the region. While it stopped short of announcing formal annexations, it made clear that Japan would not tolerate outside powers, especially Western nations, challenging its political, economic, or military influence in China.

The Amau Declaration formalized Japan’s claim to regional dominance in East Asia and marked another step away from international cooperation toward coercive imperial policy in the 1930s It effectively proclaimed a Japanese sphere of influence in East Asia and was seen as an Asian version of the Monroe Doctrine, but backed by military force rather than diplomacy. The declaration further isolated Japan diplomatically and reinforced perceptions that Japan was abandoning collective security in favor of unilateral expansion.

The campaign in Manchuria proved to be the first of three Japanese offensives north of and astride the Great Wall: within Manchuria itself, in Inner Mongolia, and then in northern China. These efforts, following one after the other, lasted until early 1937, by which time Japan had secured Manchuria and, by a combination of military and other means, had largely neutralized Chinese and Kuomintang influence in Inner Mongolia and northern China.

The Response of Nations

All that was left for China was the posture of no resistance, no recognition of Japanese gains, and no negotiations with Japan. The League of Nations issued the Lytton Commission report condemning Japan. It was ignored and the report’s failure to initiate international sanctions or action proved to be the death knell of the League of Nations. Since the United States was not a League member and was Japan’s largest western trading partner, Japan saw no need to take any action.

In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in January 1933 and started to govern amidst a powerful isolationist sentiment among the people and in Congress. We had been drawn into the European morass of World War I and would not be fooled again.

Meanwhile… the Navy

In December 1934, Japan announced it would not renew its participation in the Washington Conference treaties, especially the limits on naval combatants and auxiliary ships. In fact, Japan was already “cheating” on the accords. The Navy began to mimic the Army’s attitude as it longed for the freedom of action that the Army had simply taken for its own. The difference is that the Navy is a capital intensive investment with long lead times. At issue was the need to be unrestrained from a naval inferiority to British and American fleets as a step into support of the vision of Japan’s Asian “Monroe Doctrine” to be implemented by force of arms.

More than a decade before Admiral Kato, chief negotiator at the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, had pointedly noted that the only eventuality that could be worse for Japan than an unrestricted naval race with the United States would be war against that country. The Washington Conference had not been perfect and had required unwanted compromises from Japan, but whatever its faults, it had limited naval construction, and provided Japan with a level of naval security in the western Pacific that had never been its own to command. “This advantage was to be thrown away, and the American and British navies were to be challenged to a naval race by a service that was convinced of Japan’s special place in history. Moreover, it was equally convinced that it had in place an organization and doctrine that, given assured moral superiority over the Americans, would ensure Japan against defeat in a naval war in the Pacific. It was somewhat ironic, under these circumstances, that once limitation arrangements lapsed, both Britain and the United States laid down battleships before Japan, and it was doubly ironic that after the end of limitation, the United States laid down as many capital ships as the rest of the world put together.” (Tohmatsu and Willmott, 40)

The Aftermath

From 1934 through 1944 Japan invested in Manchuria to the extent it promoted export of critical natural resources and food.  Perhaps the key investment was in the railroads. In 1931 Manchuria had 3, 600 miles of railbed. Japan added another 2,650 miles. This extended the reach of the rail system to areas of coal mining, iron ore prospecting as well as areas with valuable reserves of magnesite, molybdenum, tungsten, and vanadium. In general, production doubled between 1931 and 1936 – most of which was exported to Japan. Geological exploration saw estimates of iron ore reserves increase from 400 million tons to 2,700 million tons. All of these resources were critical to the military and the supporting industrial complex.

Ten years of Japanese rule witnessed the construction of 2,650 miles of railway to add to the 3,600 miles that had existed in 1931. Coal production in Manchuria rose from 8,950,000 tons in 1931 to 13,800,000 tons in 1936, and iron output rose from 673,000 tons to 1,325,000 tons in the same period. Japanese surveys and prospecting resulted in the revision of estimated reserves of iron ore from 400 million tons to 2,700 million tons and of coal from 4,800 million tons to 20,000 million tons as well as in the discovery of valuable reserves of magnesite, molybdenum, tungsten, and vanadium (critical to steel alloy production). 

U.S. Reaction

From 1931 to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 the U.S. reaction was largely restrained and limited to what might be best described as moral opposition. The Stimson Doctrine refused to recognize Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria as well as other territorial changes achieved by force. It placed U.S. opposition on record, but was otherwise meaningless to Japan.

In 1943 Congress passed The Tydings–McDuffie Act that granted a path to Philippine independence by 1946. Japan concluded that the U.S. was starting a long-term reduction in their military presence in what Japan considered its sphere of influence. It was also seen as a sign that America’s isolationist movement was also evidence of a lack of U.S. willingness and resolve to resist further Japanese expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the period 1935-1937, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts aimed at avoiding entanglement in foreign wars. These laws restricted arms sales to belligerents and, it seemed to Japan, more indication of the strong isolationist sentiment in the U.S.  This reinforced Japanese assumptions that the U.S. would avoid direct involvement in an Asian conflict and limited Roosevelt’s freedom to act forcefully even if he had wanted to.

Within the diplomatic and intelligence circles, observers increasingly warned that Japan was moving toward full-scale war in China and that moderate civilian control in Tokyo was collapsing. The U.S. quietly increased naval planning and contingency studies, though without public confrontation with Japan.

Up to this point in time there were no embargoes, no assets were frozen, and no trade restrictions specifically targeting Japan. This restraint contrasts sharply with post-1937 policy, when sanctions gradually escalated.

All in all, U.S. actions signaled disapproval but not deterrence. This left a gap that Japanese leaders and officers increasingly understood.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives
Source credit: A Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921–1942 by Haruo Tohmatsu and H.P. Willmott

After the First World War Japan experienced a political shift as liberal and democratic thinkers and politicians gained popularity. While there are many reasons for the shift, at the popular level it was clear that the winners of the war were the liberal democracies triumphant over the militaristic nations. At the same time there were currents within the Imperial Japanese Arm (IJA) that felt such a move might imperil the nation. While the political arm of the nation sought to form foreign relations, take their cooperative place in the world order of nations, the military continued to operate out of the long-held view that Japan needed a strategic buffer of allies or controlled lands that placed China and Russia at arm’s length. In addition, Japan was not able to feed its own population and as such was dependent on imports of food especially from Korea and Manchuria. Nor did Japan have room in the home islands for its burgeoning population; the late 19th and early 20th century saw extensive migration of Japanese citizens to these lands. Lands that were rich in resources needed for the continued industrialization of Japan, especially its heavy industries. The IJA saw it as their role to ensure the strategic and tactical future of Japan regardless of changes in the internal political landscape.

Other posts in this series address have (or will) speak to the interservice rivalry between Army and Navy as well as the factional divides within each service. The reasons for these fracture lines include budgetary competition, difference in strategic vision, loyalty stretched to ultranationalism, and even what we might understand as end-of-the-world religious movements. Coupled to this is a divide between the old guard senior officers and the more radical junior officers; a division that was connected to trends in the national education that increasingly emphasized national destiny, racial superiority, and loyalty to the Emperor-and-the nation (the kokutai). The result was a military and nationalist movement that came to believe radical action was needed to keep the civil government “on the right track.”

It is important to keep in mind, unlike the U.S., the Japanese military had no civilian controls. They reported directly to the Emperor. This connection inspired and followed an emperor-centric ideology that also found a populism in non-urban areas that also held hostility towards capitalism and Western influences. If violence was necessary to keep the nation on the true, destined path, it was the sacred duty of the military to “correct” the civil government – at least in the eyes of the more radical elements, especially within the IJA. Assassination became a recurring political tool.

Setting the Stage at Home

The era of assassinations began at a key juncture of Japanese history. Prime Minister Hara Takashi was assassinated on November 4, 1921, amid growing backlash against political party government and perceived political corruption in early Taishō-era Japan (Hirohito’s father as Emperor). As Japan’s first commoner prime minister and leader of the Seiyūkai party, Hara symbolized the rise of parliamentary politics, which alienated conservative elites, ultranationalists, and sections of the military who believed political party rule weakened imperial authority and national unity.

Hara’s pragmatic policies such as restraint in military expansion, moderation in foreign affairs, and cautious handling of universal male suffrage angered extremists who viewed him as insufficiently patriotic or decisive. His reliance on party patronage and ties to bureaucratic and business interests also fueled public resentment, especially in the aftermath of the Rice Riots (1918), which exposed social inequality and government indifference to popular suffering.

The assassin, a right-wing railway switchman, acted independently but was motivated by a broader climate of anti-party sentiment, nationalism, and disillusionment with democratic politics. Hara’s murder reflected a widening crisis of legitimacy for parliamentary government and foreshadowed the increasing political violence and erosion of civilian control that would mark Japanese politics in the 1920s and 1930s. The event shocked the Taishō democracy system but it continued on.

On the International Stage

Zhang Zuolin was a Manchurian warlord and leader assassinated on June 4, 1928 by elements of the Kwantung Army (Japan’s standing army in southern Manchuria). Although Zhang had long cooperated with Japan and protected its interests in Manchuria, by the late 1920s he appeared unable to halt the advance of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China forces that sought to reestablish Chinese control in the area. Japanese officers feared that Zhang might accommodate the Nationalists or lose control of Manchuria altogether, threatening Japan’s strategic, economic, and military position in the region.

Acting without authorization from Tokyo, radical Kwantung Army officers assassinated Zhang by bombing his train. It was hoped that his death would justify direct Japanese military intervention or allow the installation of a more compliant Manchurian ruler. Instead, the plot backfired: Zhang’s son, Zhang Xueliang, consolidated power and soon aligned Manchuria with the Nationalist government. The assassination exposed deep divisions between Japan’s civilian government and its military, demonstrated the growing autonomy of field officers, and foreshadowed the later escalation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria, culminating in the Mukden Incident of 1931. It also showed the lack of will for the Japanese Courts to punish those responsible.

Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi and the civilian cabinet were outraged once it became clear that officers of the Kwantung Army had acted without authorization. Tanaka promised the Emperor a full investigation and punishment of those responsible, recognizing the act as a grave breach of civilian control and international law. However, Tanaka failed to follow through. Faced with resistance from the Army General Staff and fear of provoking a political crisis, no meaningful disciplinary action was taken. When Tanaka later attempted to revive the issue, he lost imperial confidence and was forced to resign in 1929, weakening civilian authority further.

Army leadership protected its own. While some senior officers privately acknowledged the recklessness of the act, the institutional priority was to avoid setting a precedent that officers could be punished for “patriotic” actions. The perpetrators were neither court-martialed nor seriously reprimanded. Many younger officers interpreted the outcome as proof that bold action would be tolerated or even rewarded if framed as serving national interests.

The lack of any punishment sent a dangerous signal: the military could act independently of the civilian government with impunity. This episode directly encouraged later acts of insubordination, most notably the Mukden Incident (1931). In hindsight, Japanese historians often identify this incident as the turning point in the erosion of constitutional government and the rise of military dominance in policy-making.

The League of Blood Incident

The League of Blood Incident was a series of political assassinations in early 1932 carried out by ultra-nationalist extremists who believed Japan was being betrayed by corrupt political, financial, and party elites. Rooted in the ideological climate of the late Taishō and early Shōwa (Hirohito) periods, the violence reflected deep frustration with parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and perceived moral decay – a theme recurring for the better part of a decade.

The central figure, Inoue Nisshō, a religiously-inspired nationalist preacher, promoted a radical vision that fused emperor-centered loyalty, agrarian idealism, and spiritual renewal. He and his followers believed that the continuing problems, outlined above, were caused by a small group of powerful politicians and business leaders who had subordinated the national spirit to selfish interests.

The assassinations of former Finance Minister Inoue and Mitsui Corporation director Dan Takuma were intended to awaken the nation through “one man, one killing”, provoking a moral and political rebirth so as to purify the nation under direct imperial rule. The perpetrators expected punishment but sought martyrdom to inspire others.

Although the conspiracy was limited in scale, public sympathy for the defendants and relatively lenient sentences revealed widespread disenchantment with party politics and contributed to the normalization of political violence. The incident further weakened civilian government and foreshadowed the more extensive military-driven radicalism that followed later in the 1930s.

The May 15th Incident

The May 15th Incident was an attempted coup and political assassination carried out on May 15, 1932, by radical Imperial Japanese Navy junior officers, aided by army cadets and civilian ultranationalists. It culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai and marked a decisive blow against the political parties that dominated government in Japan.

The incident grew out of intense dissatisfaction with parliamentary politics, which many young officers viewed as corrupt, weak, and dominated by self-interested party leaders and zaibatsu elites (large corporations, oligarchies, industrialists), failing the nation. Many officers also resented the 1922 naval arms limitation treaties, which they believed dishonored Japan and undermined national security.

The plotters were influenced by emperor-centered nationalism, agrarian populism, and the belief that direct imperial rule, free from parties and capitalism, was necessary for national renewal. They claimed loyalty to the Emperor while rejecting the constitutional system that mediated imperial authority through civilian institutions. The assassins expected that killing the prime minister would spark a popular uprising or force a political realignment. Instead, while the coup failed militarily, the public and judicial response was strikingly lenient, with widespread petitions pleading for mercy. This reaction legitimized political violence as patriotic action and effectively ended party-led cabinets, accelerating the rise of military influence in Japanese governance throughout the 1930s.

The May 15th Incident reflected the collapse of faith in democratic politics and demonstrated how unchecked radicalism within the armed forces fatally undermined civilian rule.

February 26 Incident

The 1936 incident was an attempted military coup launched by radical Imperial Japanese Army junior officers associated with the Kōdōha (Imperial Way) faction. They too were motivated by a belief that Japan was in an unresolved moral and political crisis. The officers sought to overthrow the existing government and initiate a “Shōwa Restoration” under direct imperial rule of Hirohito, the Shōwa Emperor. The roots of the incident were almost identical to the May 15 incident. Some four years later there was not sufficient change and so arose the belief that only violent action could purge selfish leaders and restore national unity.

The rebels held to a more intense emperor-centered mysticism and as such rejected constitutional governance in favor of what they believed was a purer, moral form of imperial authority. Finance Minister Takahashi and former Prime Minister Saitō were chosen for assassinaton was they were held to symbolize fiscal restraint, moderation, and compromise with civilian politics that endangered the nation. Also killed was the Inspector General of Military Education. Unlike earlier incidents, the coup failed because the Emperor explicitly condemned it, ordering loyal forces to suppress the rebels. The conspirators were executed but not for murder. The charge was insubordination.

The fallout from this was pivotal: political parties were sidelined; the Courts became reluctant to harshly punish defendants who claimed loyalty to the Emperor, even when their acts were illegal; the military was able to exercise even greater degree of autonomy from civil government and civil courts. Paradoxically, all this served to strengthen military dominance in national decisions.

The After Effects

Many historians conclude that after this period leaders made conscious choices under coercive pressure, shaped by the lesson that resisting radical nationalism could be fatal. Political violence worked not because it happened constantly, but because it had happened before and everyone remembered. This milieu had a lasting effect in several key policy areas.

Civilian leaders became hesitant to challenge IJA and IJN initiatives. As a result, budgets were rarely cut and the earlier violence ensured some degree of compliance without the application of current lobbying or force. Civilian cabinets increasingly deferred to military demands to preserve political survival. This fear-driven deference directly enabled escalation in Manchuria, North China, and later full-scale war with China in 1937 as unauthorized military actions in China were often retroactively approved rather than punished. There was a general reluctance (…tending towards inability) to restrain the military.

And “the military” was too often junior officers making field decisions. Aggressive expansion was framed as unavoidable once initiated by field officers. Looking back, historians describe this as a shift from policymaking to policy ratification. This was an ongoing dynamic in China and continued into the war even after the U.S. entered the conflict.

Over time, both civilian and military officers who favored diplomacy or fiscal restraint were marginalized, transferred to “backwater” assignments or removed from office. There was a fear of being labeled “weak” or “unpatriotic” unless one fell inline with the more nationalistic voices. The art of moderation or compromise was slowly eroded. The most immediate effects were a hardening of foreign policy and institutionalization of military autonomy from civilian control

In 1900, a government ordinance (not part of the Meiji Constitution) required that the Army and Navy Ministers be active-duty generals or admirals.  Up to this point, this gave the services an effective veto over cabinet formation, since they could refuse to nominate an officer. That was relaxed in 1913 to allow retired officers to fill those roles – but the service still exerted strong influence. After the February 26 Incident (1936), the military successfully pressured the government to restore the active-duty requirement. From this point forward the Army and Navy could, and did bring down cabinets by withholding nominees requiring the Emperor to appoint a new Prime Minister to form a new cabinet. This became a key mechanism by which the military dominated Japanese politics without disturbing the constitutional order.

The service Ministers were not the chiefs of the services. The leading general and admiral reported directly to the Emperor thus enabling other means of strong influence. In the 1940s a special council, sometimes called the “War Cabinet” or the “Supreme War Council” consisted of the two service ministers, two service chiefs, the Foreign Secretary, and War Minister (often also a military officer). From 1941 on, this became the de facto cabinet. It shows how over a 20 year period the military came to dominate all aspects of Japanese life.

Later historians will argue that, before Pearl Harbor, there was a moderate wing of the government that could be reasoned with to avoid U.S. participation in the already ongoing war in Asia-Pacific. It seems to me a difficult argument to make if one understands the hardening of control by the military and nationalist parties.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. 

The previous posts have focused on the Japanese military in the period 1905-1930. After the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) was implanted in Korea (annexed in 1910) and in Manchuria with control of vital sea ports of Liaodong and the connected South Manchuria Railroad. This was the foundation of Japanese settlement in those areas and the start of exporting resources and food supplies to the home islands. This was part of Japan’s strategic buffer, but when Japan became dependent on the exports, the strategic buffer needed to expand, giving additional mission focus to the IJA to move south/southwest into China and northwest toward Inner Mongolia.

The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) enjoyed a period of extended accomplishments, namely, the defeat of the Russian Imperial Fleet at Port Arthur and most importantly at the Battle of Tsushima. The First World War expanded their mission as an ally of the British, securing Britain’s trade routes from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean, even supplying a destroyer flotilla to Mediterranean service. The goal of maintaining a first-world fleet ran headlong into the realities of post-war financial constraints. The goal became to reach an arms limitation treaty with Britain and the United States that limited their fleets to a size that Japan could proportionally build for themselves. The U.S. initiated Washington Naval Conference was the answer to Japan’s need – as described in the previous post.

Back Home in Japan

Now, if you consider these three treaties, it does not look like Japan came out all that well. It did not get the 10:7 naval tonnage ratio it wanted – but got close. Japan did get the commitment from the U.S. not to build west of Guam or the Philippines. Japan lost the China port/area of Shandong taken from the Germans during the war, but then it got formal recognition of dominance in Manchuria – which it already had. And…formal commitment to the China Open Door policy was a draw at best.

But Japan did get the one essential element it wanted: avoidance of a naval arms race in the Pacific against a country it had no hope of matching – the United States. But also inherited something it did not want: deep division within the Navy’s officer corps. For that we need to drop back in time and “into the weeds.”

The key Japanese figures in this mini-drama are:

• Hara Takashi, the Prime Minister of Japan who was in favor of arms limitation talks as a means of helping steer the nation into a peacetime economy.
• Vice Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, a career naval officer, hero of Tsushima, who had fleet commands before becoming Navy Minister in 1915. He was a realist understanding that an arms race with the United States was to be avoided, but defense of Japan and her holdings was also a goal
• Admiral Katō Kanji, the chief naval aide. He represented the “fleet faction” that strongly favored Japan’s naval power, contrasting with Katō Tomosaburō’s support for avoiding an arms race.

Hara promised to give Katō Tomosaburō the political “air cover” he needed to make the best decision for Japan as the circumstances allowed. Hara was assassinated before Katō reached Washington DC. During the Conference, Kanji the aide, maintained separate cable communications with others of a group that would come to be known as the  “fleet faction.” They were against the entire idea of the Washington Conference. His goal was to foster opposition and dissent within the ranks of naval officers, something heretofore unknown. 

Unbeknownst to Katō and Kanji, all the cables to/from Washington were being read by the United States as the diplomatic code had been broken for some time. Japan was at a distinct disadvantage in negotiations and forced to make decisions that Katō believed were the best to be obtained but sure to bring dissension on the home front.

Upon return home Katō became Prime Minister but died in 1923 but was able to instill commitment to the treaties within the Navy Ministry. Kanji served as the Chief of the Navy General Staff. He was able to foster a cadre of naval officers opposed to the treaties. The split of the IJN into the Treaty Faction and the Fleet Faction after the Washington Naval Conference had deep, long-lasting ramifications that extended far beyond naval policy. It reshaped Japanese civil–military relations, weakened moderate leadership, radicalized strategic thinking, and contributed directly to the collapse of the interwar international order in East Asia.

Fallout of the Naval Factions

The Treaty Faction accepted the 10:6 ratio as a realistic acknowledgment of Japan’s industrial limits and the impossibility of winning a naval arms race with the U.S. and Britain. It believed security lay in diplomacy, alliances, and high-quality fleets with well trained sailors. They were dominant in the early 1920s naval leadership.

Fleet Faction rejected the ratio as a humiliation and proof of the systematic racial prejudice against Japan that would always foster an Anglo-American alliance for Japan’s national inequality. This faction argued for unfettered fleet expansion and a posture of preparedness for war with the U.S.  They gained support among younger officers, hardline nationalists and sections of the Army.

One of the key fallouts was the shift of Navy planning to be more ideological than technical. From the civilian perspective they used to be able to count on naval strategies as expert-driven, now they were sure and both sides were directly appealing to the Emperor, using the press and public opinion to promote their views. Not that the civilians had much control other than budgetary, but the once disciplined Navy was becoming less governable and more like dealing with the Army.

The Fleet Faction was more effective and practiced at framing the issues for public consumption. They framed treaties as a national humiliation, evidence of Western racial exclusion, and a betrayal by elites. The line of argument greatly resonated with the public after news of the 1924 Immigration Act became known. The net result was that naval issues were now linked to nationalist ideology. Disagreement became a question of loyalty and compromise was recast as treason.

This factional rivalry distorted naval development and planning. Where the Treaty Faction favored balanced fleets with an emphasis on quality, training, and technology, the Fleet Faction advocated for bigger battleships as a means of an outward show of symbolic parity and national pride. The Fleet Faction remained fixated on the Mahanian “decisive battle”.  In the short term (with long term implications) this led to an often incoherent strategy and compromised on design with an overconcentration on capital ships.

One of the great ironies of the naval war in the Pacific was that there never was the great “decisive battle” between the great battleships. Japan committed itself to the super battleship Yamato and her sister ship, the Musashi. Both were sunk. Meanwhile the most effective naval component of Japan’s fleet were the small ships, especially the destroyers and their long lance torpedoes.

By the 1930s the Treaty Faction leaders were marginalized; some were assassinated or silenced. More and more younger officers gravitated toward the Fleet Faction. Slowly institutional memory of restraint was lost. In a way there was a cross-service convergence of attitude that reinforced a militarist dominance that undermined moderates in both services. All this encouraged a worldview of inevitable conflict. The Navy’s traditional role as a moderating influence weakened.

Japan did not attend the 1930 London Naval Conference and in 1935 tendered its resignation from the 1922 treaties – although by then it had long abandoned treaty limitations in its building program.

Within the Japanese Navy, acceptance of war with the U.S. moved from being plausible to being inevitable. This would eventually morph the Mahanian idea of the decisive battle to one of preemptive strike. All of this diverted attention to the problem of logistics and economic sustainability in a short-term war or a long-term war.

The map above shows the maximum extent of the Japanese Empire in June 1942. Before the war, almost 70% of all merchant ships carrying supplies to Japan were not Japanese-flagged merchants; the majority were actually British flagged. Japan’s emphasis on combat ships and the focus on battleships as a symbolic pride of the nation, failed to pay attention to the basics. At the start of the war, Japan had only 8 fleet oilers. This would be the achilles heel that US unrestricted submarine warfare would exploit.

The Treaty Faction had been correct on the fundamentals: Japan could not outbuild the U.S. and a protracted war meant defeat. But being right was not politically survivable in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Fleet Faction won the institutional battle even though it would lose the war to come. The “split” transformed the IJN from a professional, coalition-capable force into a polarized institution increasingly driven by ideology rather than strategy, with consequences that became tragically clear in 1942 and beyond.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

In the previous post, it was noted that at the end of the First World War the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had expectations but were realistic. They expected that their coalition work with the British in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and taking on maritime security in the Pacific had earned them recognition, respect and parity with the western navies. They had just successfully operated as a “global navy.” They also recognized that maintenance and expansion of their fleet was directly tied to shipyard capacity, raw materials and industrial throughput. These were industrial limits impossible to ignore and were not limitations on either British or the Americans.

Japanese Naval Planning

The nation of Japan continued to struggle financially with the burden of Russo-Japanese war debt, expenditures on military replenishment, expenses on the build up and securing their footholds in Manchuria, Korea, and Liaodong. At the same time, like all nations post-WW1, there was a desire to return to a consumer economy after the deprivations of the war years.

The Navy’s planning division began to look ahead a decade to see what would be needed in the 1930s in order to support nascent plans for a Japanese-led Asia prosperity zone. The conclusion was that the Navy required two fleet groups, each consisting of 4 battleships and 4 heavy cruisers. Thus was born the 8-8 plan. The basis of the plan was the theory of sea power of Alfred Thayer Mahan which was the foundation of both Japanese and American naval strategy. One of the central theses of Mahanian thought was the “decisive battle” after which “control of the sea” would automatically default to the winner. The Japanese had to control the Western Pacific.

The problem was that in 1918-1919 Japan was experiencing a post-WW 1 economic depression making their 8-8 fleet plan financially impossible. Nishihara Hajime, Vice Minister of Finance noted to the Navy Minister Kato that not only would the capital budget for new construction consume 20-30% of the national budget, the outyear expenses for maintenance, operations, etc, for a fully operations 8-8 fleet would extend the budgetary consumption at similar percentage rates. It was not viable or sustainable. And the problem with that was the overall naval strategy was based on several premises:

• The U.S. would not construct any fortifications/bases west of the Philippines or Guam.
• So that in the event of a US-Japan conflict, the U.S. fleet would have to cross the Pacific for any hostile action against Japan.
• Based on Mahan’s theory, the U.S. would lose 10% of its force effectiveness for every 1,000 miles of steaming – so after 3,000 miles of Pacific transit, the U.S. fleet would effectively be 70% of its original force structure.

Japan was in a position that it needed to understand what it could afford to build and maintain a 10:7 ratio of naval combatants. In other words, the two nations that had access to raw materials, finances, and shipyard capacity to outbuild Japan – they needed to be constrained to a limitation that fit within Japan’s strategic plan.

Forestalling an Arms Race

Meanwhile, there were growing tensions in East Asia over an unstable China, Japanese occupation of Shandong (former German territory), Manchuria, and more. Leaders in the international community sought to prevent the possibility of another war. Rising Japanese militarism and an international arms race heightened these concerns. Within the United States there were congressional calls for the U.S. to engage Britain and Japan in naval arms limitation negotiations.

In what must have seemed like a godsend to the Japanese in this era of growing tension, in 1921, U.S. Secretary of State Hughes invited nine nations to Washington, D.C. to discuss naval reductions and the situation in the Far East. This gathering is known as the Washington Naval Conference which produced three treaties: the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty, and the Nine-Power Treaty. Not terribly imaginative, but nonetheless descriptive.

• The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy was the cornerstone of the naval disarmament program. It called for each of the countries involved to maintain a set ratio of warship tonnage which allowed the United States and the United Kingdom 500,000 tons, Japan 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each 175,000 tons. If you do the math the ratio between US/Britain and Japan was 5:3 (10:6 equivalent and not the 10:7 Japan desired)
• In the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan agreed to consult with each other in the event of a future crisis in East Asia before taking action. This nullified the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, freeing Britain from coming to the aid of Japan in the event of war.
• The Nine-Power Treaty, marked the internationalization of the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. The treaty promised that each of the signatories (the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and China) would respect the territorial integrity of China. The treaty recognized Japanese dominance in Manchuria but otherwise affirmed the importance of equal opportunity for all nations doing business in China.

Japan and China also signed a bilateral agreement, the Shandong Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during the First World War and maintained control of it over the years that followed. Combined with the Nine-Power Treaty the effect was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. All of these treaties were set to expire in 1936.

The treaties of the Washington Naval Conference stabilized naval competition but ignored land-based conflicts. Rising Chinese nationalism with its own imperial privileges and Japanese ambitions. Manchuria remained unresolved as Soviet reemergence added strategic anxiety for Japan. Meanwhile, Western powers lacked capacity or will to enforce the system they had just created. East Asia was not at peace, it was balanced as long as there was restraint from all parties, but ready to topple once the first party was willing to move unrestrained.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.

The first concerns itself with the international situation, particularly in regard to China. The second deals specifically with Japan and how this conflict affected it. At the time, World War I was widely regarded within Japan as “an opportunity that comes once every thousand years” because it produced assured profitability for the nation and for its industries, unprecedented industrial and financial opportunity, and minimal obligation and commitment. Japan, before 1914, was poor. The country was obliged to import British and German steel because it was cheaper than steel made in Japan, and there were very few shipyards that could build steel vessels of any size. It was not until 1905 that Japan laid down a battleship built with home-produced steel. As late as 1914 state spending, especially on the armed services, remained very low because of the debt that had been accumulated in the Russian war. A mark of the narrow margins on which Japan was forced to operate was the fact that before 1914 the greatest annual profit recorded by its largest shipping company, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, was about 6 million yen. 

With the start of the war all the European powers were diminished in terms of Pacific presence and merchant traffic and trade. Merchant shipping, other than Japan’s, virtually disappeared from the Indian and Pacific oceans during this war. A mark of the impact of World War I was the fact that in 1918 Nippon Yusen Kaisha ran a profit of 86 million yen. In the course of World War I, Japanese shipping came to dominate Pacific routes, even dominating U.S. trade on the Pacific Coast – a fact that caused concerns in the U.S. and led directly to building the Mare Island shipyard and a post-war effort to reestablish U.S. trade and shipping in the Pacific.

Japan: post-war

Japan’s post-war economic policy shifted to focus on development of the civil sector, enhancement of light industry, and improvement of the economic lives of ordinary citizens. However, good intentions aside, the nation experienced a sharp economic downturn after its wartime boom, characterized by speculative bubbles bursting in 1920, leading to bank failures, widespread bad loans, and a chronic depression throughout the 1920s. A key event was the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923) which devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas, leading to huge reconstruction efforts and “earthquake bonds issued by the Bank of Japan to help overextended banks. This intervention, intended to rescue solvent but illiquid banks, was abused by already distressed institutions, accumulating a series of bad loans. When the government proposed redeeming the earthquake bonds in 1927, rumors of bank insolvency spread, causing nationwide bank runs and failure of major banks (the Shōwa Financial Crisis). Throughout this period there were shortages, price rises, and food riots especially in the 1920 crisis. The IJA was called in to quell the riots which hurt the army’s relationship with the civilian population in the home islands.

In parallel to this, encouraged by their far ranging naval activities during the war, Japan found itself with only one western power against which they could compare themselves: the United States. The Imperial Defense Policy statement of April 1907, was rewritten to change the most likely military opponent from Russia to the United States. It sanctioned the decisive battle doctrine, which stressed the importance of acquiring big ships with big guns through a program for the construction of eight 20,000-ton battleships and eight 18,000-ton battle cruisers. This was known as the 8:8 program.

The IJN proposal came during the war years but the Japanese Diet (house and senate equivalent) refused to authorize more than one battleship and two battle cruisers. This came at the same time when the United States was vociferously claiming the right to build a fleet “second to none.”  Within the US, naval leaders proposed a theoretical threat of  Germany in the Atlantic and Japan in the Pacific (as well as a German-Japanese alliance). This was the warrant for a two-ocean navy. The goal was less national defense than to protect overseas trade. Tohmatsu and Willmott note: “The least that could be said about such logic was that it grasped at the exceedingly unlikely in order to justify the manifestly unnecessary.”

Both countries had building programs that planned large increases in combatants by 1925, but the U.S. was capable of building far more than Japan because of its industrial capacity and financial strength. But in fact neither country was financially capable of implementing such grandiose plans. In Japan there was not enough capital, access to lines of credit, plus the ongoing financial problems. In the U.S. there was too much national debt associated with WW1 and a growing isolationist movement in Congress.

All of this led to the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. The simplest description of the conference: it was complicated. The agreements concluded at Washington were important because they provided the basis of how Japanese-American relations could be stripped of hostility and ill-intent. They halted what promised to be a disastrous naval race in the Pacific and put in its place arrangements for the scrapping of many existing warships and limitation of the size of fleets that could be retained. When allied with the ban on Britain fortifying any base beyond Singapore and on the Americans beyond the Hawaiian Islands, the agreements created a balance in the Far East – not only militarily but also commercially. 

Japan’s acceptance of such arrangements was the result of a singular balanced vision championed by one person: Admiral Kato Tomosaburo, the Navy minister. He held that the only eventuality that could be worse for Japan than an unrestricted naval construction race with the United States would be war against that country. An unrestricted naval race could only result in the inevitable and irreversible erosion of Japan’s position relative to the United States because of the industrial power of the U.S.  Kato believed that as a consequence, Japan had to seek security through peaceful cooperation and diplomatic negotiations rather than through international rivalry and conquest. While the IJN itself saw its role as a deterrent and, in the event of war, defensive, individuals such as Kato saw Japan’s best interest served not by confrontation and conflict with the United States but by arrangements that limited American construction relative to Japan and that provided the basis of future U.S. recognition and acceptance of Japan’s regional naval and commercial positions. The next post takes a “deeper dive” into the details of all the treaties that emerge from the Washington Conference.

The Next Generation

Germany’s loss in WW1 was seen as victory of democracy over militarism and came as a considerable surprise to many Japanese, especially those associated with the Imperial Army. But, for much of the 1920s there was no major military commitment that involved substantial taxation and financial sacrifice. The 1920s held out hope for the triumph of liberal democracy within Japan and the prospect of a better future.

But Japan had no long-term legacy of such a form of government.  It is one thing to model your military on western models, but governance is a different matter. The Meiji Constitution’s implementation of parliamentary representation, separation of powers and independence of the judiciary, and accountability under the law, were relatively new – all still within the generation of the people whose culture and frame was the Tokugawa Shogunate. There was no more than a single lifetime of support and investment in them on the part of society.

The 1920s saw the passing of the genro, or elder statesmen, who had led the country since 1868 – and especially since 1898 when many significant changes were implemented. These men, in a sense, were not only the living memory of Meiji, but were the “glue” that held the reforms together and steered national and regional interests to a common goal. Their passing created a collective gap in leadership that the next generation prime ministers could not fill. What was lost was moderation and continuity of memory.

As Japan worked to transition politically, financially and culturally, the 1920s – despite its problems – was one of peace and slowly improving conditions. But there was a different sense within the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). There were three overseas military commitments in this decade. The first was the intervention in the Russian civil war, which in effect ended in October 1922 when Japanese forces finally withdrew from Soviet mainland territory. The second was a deepening Japanese army involvement in China’s civil wars, most notably after 1926. The third, directly related to the second, was IJA operations inside Manchuria.

Notably, during IJA involvement in China’s civil war and Manchuria, the Japanese military was without guidance from Tokyo and as such set their own rules of engagement, as they decided which side to back in which province or area, and to do so without reference or consultation with Tokyo. The habit, once acquired, was never broken. 

In 1924, the Prime Minister reduced the size of the IJA, involuntarily moving officers and senior enlisted personnel into retirement or simply discharged from the military. But for their loyal service many were directed into the state education administration in positions of supervision for a newly introduced scheme of compulsory military training for children. This was especially true outside urban areas and resulted in an imposition of military values on far less well educated children with little job prospects. When we arrived in the 1930s these youths found opportunity in military service as the IJA was expanded – and the veteran’s association became a powerful political voice in the nation.. 

By the time we reached the 1930s, the IJA had developed a culture of insubordination within the army. The most notable trait was gekokujo, the manipulation of senior officers by their subordinates. Among the most radical/nationalistic members of the IGA this led to the phenomenon of “government by assassination” as cabals of junior officers (colonel and below) assassinated civil leadership leading to the setbacks of nascent parliamentary democracy. Although the Japanese Constitution was amended in 1936 to mandate that four of the six key cabinet positions be occupied by active duty military personnel. By the late 1920s and early 1930s it was a practice politically necessary to form governments under the Prime Minister. The Meiji era civilian control of the military was eroding and beginning to exist in name only. Increasingly the real power belonged to the IJA and IJN.

The Rise of Nationalism

The 1930s saw a marked rise in nationalism within Japan. It is a complex topic whose details are too complex for this series particularly to attempt to explain in terms of cause and effect. But there are “snapshots” that mark the changes.

Prior to 1933 Japanese schoolbooks made reference to non-Japanese western historical figures associated with democratic movements in history, e.g.  Washington and Lincoln. After 1933 virtually all western society references were removed. Key figures were replaced by Japanese national heroes. If there were mention of westerners, they tended to be famous military leaders such as Admiral Nelson or Napoleon Bonaparte. Overall the tone of the school curriculum became increasingly nationalistic and strident. 

By 1936 the books that taught children to read were no longer based on nature and the richness of Japanese animal life. In their place came topics of the Emperor, soldiers, duty, loyalty to the nation and service/sacrifice. Even cartoon strips were not immune. The Japanese equivalent of Felix the Cat, a dog named Norakuro, joined a regiment of dogs in the army because in the country of the Sheep (Manchuria), the latter had been obliged, because of the aggressiveness of the Pigs (the Chinese), to call in the Dogs (the Japanese), which had chased out the Pigs and created a haven for the Sheep and the Goats (the Mongolians). And in the future the Dogs would have to stand guard because the Pigs had tried to enlist the support of the Bears. Significant? Make of what you will, but it and many other examples begin to paint a picture. Clearly something was afoot that made for a fundamental change of attitudes within Japanese society. 

One example can be seen in the expected behaviors of soldiers. Thousands of Japanese soldiers taken prisoner during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 when they were repatriated were seen as heroes and honored. Almost three decades later, in the course of the fighting at Shanghai in January 1932, the Chinese took prisoner a severely wounded and unconscious Japanese officer. He recovered and was exchanged, but he killed himself because of the dishonor he felt for having been made a prisoner. Only after his suicide did the national praise him because he had embraced real Japanese values. In the same conflict three soldiers blew themselves up during the fighting at Shanghai to provide a key action in the battle. They were afforded a degree of national veneration because they had embraced the honorable value of self-sacrifice. It was never determined if the action was accidental or intentional in fact, but it was clear how it was promoted.

Change was afoot across Japanese society.

What were the root causes? While arguable – and scholars all have different takes on the question – a short list of “what” generally includes: 

• The Great Depression’s economic devastation, the perceived failures of democracy, a rising belief in Japanese racial superiority, and military leaders’ desire for expansion to secure resources and power.  These are some of the factors that led to a surge in ultranationalism, militarism, and imperialist ambitions that challenged both Western influence and Japanese civilian government. 
• The economic crises associated with the Great Depression. As elsewhere, following the 1927 banking crisis, the 1929 stock market crash devastated Japan’s export-dependent economy, causing widespread poverty, especially in rural areas, making radical, immediate solutions attractive.
• Civilian governments struggled to handle the economic collapse, leading many to view democracy as weak and ineffective, paving the way for authoritarianism. It must be remembered that the Shogunate period and the local authoritarian leaders were only a few decades past. There was a romanticizing of the “good years” when leaders were strong. 
• The military, particularly the army, presented itself as the solution, gaining influence through successful campaigns (like invading Manchuria in 1931) and advocating for expansion as a path to economic security and national strength.

From all this a virulent nationalism emerged. The idea – already and always present – was promoted that the Japanese people were racially superior and divinely destined to lead Asia, with emperors as direct descendants of the Sun Goddess. In essentially one lifetime, national sentiment moved from the isolationist period of the Tokugawa Shogunate to a globalist vision of Japan’s destiny. Nationalists argued that imperialist expansion was necessary to overcome overpopulation and resource scarcity, providing Japan with economic security and a greater role on the world stage.

On the far right was the drum beat of the ultra-Nationalist Movements. They denounced democracy, big business, and Western influence, advocated a return to traditional values, loyalty to the Emperor, and warrior/samurai ethics. They were not restrained in the use of political violence and assassinations. 

These are some of the factors combined to hollow out democratic institutions and shift Japan toward a militaristic, expansionist path by the mid-1930s, setting the stage for further aggression in Asia and another step to the broader Asia-Pacific War.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. Source reference: Gathering Darkness: The Coming of War to the Far East and the Pacific, 1921-1941 by Haruo Tohmatsu and H.P. Willmott (War and Society Book 3)

In previous posts there have been references to internal dynamics within the governance structures of Japan. By the 20th century that structure would best be described as a constitutional monarchy, somewhat akin to Great Britain which served as the model for the Meiji Constitution. Akin, but not exactly a match. The differences involved the role of the king/emperor and the makeup of the cabinet.  If you’d like to learn more, take a look at the post, In the Beginning. In more recent posts there have been references to the rise of ultra-nationalism, militarism, and other movements within Japanese society. The rise in nationalism is a natural consequence of pride in its language, culture, and uniqueness – as well as a reaction to the incursion of western imperialism into the world of East Asia. In recent memory of the nation is not only the samurai culture, but also the recent military victories in the First Sino-Japanese War as well as the Russo-Japanese War. True, each of these victories came at a cost of lives and led to wartime sacrifice, but Japan was a nation that had never been defeated. Those victories, from the centuries earlier Mongol invasions, turned back by divine winds (kamikaze) to the more recent victories were guided by the hand of Emperor, descendant of the sun goddess. 

The military rose to great prestige in civil society’s eyes because of Japan’s war victories. These reinforced the idea that military strength was central to Japan’s survival and success especially against the intrusion of western influences. The Meiji Constitution of 1889 gave the military independence from civilian control: the army and navy were responsible only to the Emperor. In addition, the cabinet required that the Army and Navy ministers be active-duty officers, giving the military an essential veto over government policies. This structural design later allowed military leaders to dominate politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Combine this with the military indoctrination of bushidō focused on reverence for the Emperor and you have an environment where militarists could claim to act in the Emperor’s name for the good of Japan.

Within the Japanese government this gives rise to a moderate wing who believe the diplomatic path is the way forward for Japan to take its place in the world order. Opposing them will be the militarist wing which holds up evidence of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 and other western impositions as evidence of the weakness and ultimate failure of diplomatic efforts. In their minds, respect, dignity and the place in the world order would be achieved with demonstrations of military power and the will to use it.

The problem is that the Japanese military was not of one mind, vision, purpose or strategy.

The Roots of Imperial Rivalry

From the beginning there was a natural divide between the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Navy (IJN) that can be traced to the Meiji decision to emulate western military power and structure as a means to ensure Japan did not fall to the same fate as China in the 19th century. The IJA was formed by Prussian advisors whose experience was limited to ground warfare. The Prussian model emphasized discipline, mass conscription, and decisive land battles which were closely tied to Japan’s mainland Asia strategy and the Emperor as supreme commander.

The IJN was formed and modeled on the British Navy who, as expected, faced seaward. The emphasis was professionalism, technology, and command of sea lanes with an oriented toward commerce protection and fleet engagements. While professionalism might seem an odd thing to mention, it stands out within the IJN mainly because within the IJA we will see repeated instances of junior office initiative/insubordination (sometimes a thin line) that had major consequences on national policy and on the battlefield. The IJN did not experience anything similar.

From their formation the two branches of the military developed distinct institutional cultures, different strategic geographies (mainland vs. ocean), and separate professional identities from the very beginning.

Back Home

As mentioned above, the Meiji Constitution placed the Army and Navy directly under the Emperor, outside normal cabinet and parliamentary control. Which meant there was no direct civilian control of the military. In addition, there was no unified command/organization such as the (later) U.S. Joint Chiefs, or a single Department of Defence/War as a cabinet position. Each branch of the military had its own Ministers at the cabinet level as well as their own General Staffs. The results were many, but one was that with independent budgets there would always be major infighting for funds based on their strategic geographical forces. As one might expect, the structure encouraged competition rather than coordination, political intrigue, and direct appeals to the Emperor. But also, the cabinet included both Ministers as well as the head of the Army and Navy.  Very often the Ministers were either active duty or retired military leaders. Together or separately, the armed forces had political leverage through institutional veto power.

The Experience of Combat

The success of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) brought success, victory, but very different conclusions. In the earlier war the Navy’s victory at the Yalu River secured sea control which they believed enabled the Army’s rapid victories on land by interfering with Chinese logistics. Those same victories reinforced the Army’s belief in offensive spirit as the critical success factor. Each service thus drew different lessons. The Army believed moral superiority and offensive will were decisive while the Navy concluded sea control and modern fleets were decisive. There was no structure where unified doctrine was examined. As a result, rather than fostering joint doctrine, success hardened service parochialism.

The critical element to Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War was … well it depended upon who you asked. The Army was victorious on land, but at a great cost of manpower. The casualties in Manchuria were enormous, but it reinforced their belief in sacrifice as the key to mainland success which in turn was the essential element to safeguard Japan from foreign incursions. The Navy was phenomenally successful at sea from its peremptory strike against the Russian Eastern Navy at Port Arthur at the beginning of the war, to its devastation of the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. These two battles became almost mythic within naval circles and confirmed their commitment to the Mahanian doctrine of sea power as the key to national security and empire. (Alfred Thayer Mahan, naval strategist, whose work The Influence of Sea Power on History was the framework of Japanese and U.S. naval strategies in the 20th century.)

After 1905 the Navy saw itself as Japan’s strategic shield against great powers while the Army saw itself as the nation’s blood-paying guardian on the continent. Both believed they had saved Japan. A rivalry was born.

The Infighting

As mentioned in earlier posts, the Russo-Japanese War resulted in territorial gains, but not the war indemnities that had enriched the national coffers after the earlier Sino-Japanese War. Now Japan faced heavy war debts, limited industrial capacity, and finite state resources. At the time there was a need to resupply and replenish the Army so that it would be able to secure and hold the recent gains in Manchuria and Korea, recruit and train new soldiers, begin to enhance the recently acquired Southern Manchurian Railroad, and build supporting garrisons.

The Navy’s priority was the development of their 8-8 plan: 8 battleships and 8 heavy cruisers in order to form two battle fleets inspired by Admiral Satō Tetsutarō’s Mahanian theories This meant a huge capital investment in shipyards and new construction, recruiting and training to man the new ships, technological innovation, and the development of bases and coaling stations.

Budgeting became a zero-sum competition, not a joint planning exercise.

World War I did not help the rivalry. The Army was largely sidelined with no active role in the war in which Japan fought against Germany on the side of the British and Americans. The Navy benefited from expanded operations and increased prestige via its experience in coalition warfare with Britain. 

Japan neutralized German naval forces in East Asia, protected sea lanes vital to British imperial communications and supply in the Western Pacific and parts of the Indian Ocean, providing security of sea lanes from Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean. In addition, a flotilla of Japanese destroyers deployed to the Mediterranean conducting convoy escort, anti-submarine patrols and search and rescue operations. At the same time, the IJN hunted German commerce raiders in the Pacific and laid siege to German commerce ports in China (Shandong ) which would later become Japanese possessions, as well as the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands.

Coalition warfare reinforced several naval convictions about sea power, technology and alliances (this latter conviction would be shattered in the post-war naval conferences). Meanwhile the IJA was largely on its own in China and Manchuria. As a result the IJN took on a more internationalist, technocratic view of its role and developed realistic views about industrial limits.  Unlike the Army, the Navy could not avoid confronting industrial constraints because warships required steel, precision machining, turbines, armor plate, fire control systems and ships took years, not months, to build. Costs were enormous and easily quantified. The IJN understood that their mission was directly tied to fleet size which depended on shipyard capacity and industrial throughput. All this made industrial limits impossible to ignore.

The Army was far more dependent upon simple manpower although they too needed the industrial capacity for production of weapons, artillery, and ammunition – all of which, by comparison, we “light” industry. Their concerns centered more on suspicion of diplomacy, the priority of unilateral continental action, and that they were becoming the “little brother” to IJN. As a result, within the IJA there was a renewed emphasis on spiritual purity, bushidō, and a national destiny to be fulfilled on the Asia mainland. Lacking coalition experience, there was a suspicion of internationalism in general, but with the turn inward, there was a marked increase in the politicization of Army officers, especially among the junior officers.

After the War

Based on their experience during the First World War, the IJN expected to have won and secured continued recognition as a British partner in maritime matters. During the war they had partnered so that Japan was responsible for maritime security in the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean – they expected this division of responsibilities to continue. It was believed they had achieved parity with the western navies. Then came the shock of:

• Indifference of British willingness to prioritize the alliance as they assumed responsibility for maritime security of their own Pacific colonial interests.
• 1922 Washington Naval Conference and what seemed to be an Anglo-American effort to contain and diminish the IJN.
• 1924 U.S. immigration exclusion

The 1922 Washington Naval Conference was a moment that would fracture the cohesiveness of the Imperial Navy, deepen the sense of needing to set its course and destiny independent of the view and consensus of western powers.

Up next: 1920s – the decade of treaties

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. | The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), Office of the Historian, U.S. State Department

In the previous post we explored the Taft-Katsura Agreement between Japan and the United States. The purpose was to use that as an example of two nations seeking a means to “keep a lid” on a pot that seems to be forever threatening to boil over. Immigration of Japanese to U.S. territories and the mainland was a flame that seemed to keep the pot at or near boiling.

The Chinese Exclusion Act

The first significant wave of 19th-century Chinese immigration to America began with the California gold rush of 1848–1855 and continued with subsequent large labor projects, such as the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Over time animosity toward the Chinese and other foreigners increased for reasons of economic competition and simple racism. Attitudes, violence and state laws led the immigrant Chinese to settle in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low-wage labor, such as restaurant and laundry work. California became the hotbed of anti-Chinese fear, segregation and exclusion laws, many of which were struck down by the Supreme Court. But the sentiment was building.

In 1892 the U.S. signed into law, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The Act also denied Chinese residents already in the US the ability to become citizens and Chinese people traveling in or out of the country were required to carry a certificate identifying their status or risk deportation. It was the first major US law implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States, and therefore significantly shaped twentieth-century immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 shaped everything that followed. The law alarmed Japan, which regarded China’s treatment as a sign of racial contempt. While Japan was not yet a great power in 1882. By 1905, it was and it expected to be treated differently.

Japanese Immigration

At the same time as the Law was being passed, there was rapid population growth after the Meiji Restoration especially in rural areas and among the urban poor. The government encouraged overseas labor migration as a means to relieve overcrowding. Meanwhile in the U.S. there was a demand for inexpensive labor in Hawaiian sugar plantations, West Coast agriculture, railroads, fisheries, and urban service work. Once the Chinese were excluded Japanese workers were more actively recruited. A U.S.-Japanese treaty signed in 1894 had guaranteed the Japanese the right to immigrate to the United States, and to enjoy the same rights in the country as U.S. citizens. 

By 1900 the Japanese immigrant population in California was small but was being noticed. As seems to be the case with immigrants in America, they work hard and become another “American success story” that, unfortunately, breeds jealousy. Labor unions had gained size and power and they became one of the voices that began to call for control, segregation or exclusion. The instances are many but the act that caused the pot to boil over was the 1906 San Francisco Board of Education enactment of a measure to send Japanese and Chinese children to segregated schools. The Government of Japan was outraged by this policy, claiming that it violated the 1894 treaty. In a series of notes exchanged between late 1907 and early 1908, known collectively as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the U.S. agreed to pressure the San Francisco authorities to withdraw the measure, and Japan promised to restrict the immigration of laborers to the United States. By this time expansion into Manchuria called for settlers and laborers and as a result immigrants were directed there.

This series of agreements still did not resolve all of the outstanding issues. U.S. treatment of Japanese residents continued to cause tension between the two nations. The Alien Land Act of 1913, for example, barred Japanese from owning or leasing land for longer than three years and adversely affected U.S.-Japanese relations in the years leading up to World War I. As before, these actions were driven by local politics, not federal diplomacy but they had international consequences.

Nativism, Immigration and U.S. Politics

During the First World War Japan was a U.S. ally and for the moment immigration tensions were muted but remained unresolved. After the war there was a national movement towards isolationism and not wanting to be involved in foreign affairs. This was accompanied by a minor, but vocal, sentiment of nativism which led to a general hardening of racial theories and stereotypes. As a result, immigration restriction became a political “hot potato” and then a national priority.  The Japanese view of all this was that the U.S. was willing to accept Japan as a partner when it suited their needs and interests, but never as an equal civilization.

There was a sense on the American side that Japan was a partner that one had to keep an eye upon. The U.S. had long worked on getting all nations to agree to its Open Door Policy for China. With the outbreak of world war, Japan seemed to take advantage of the world’s attention elsewhere and in 1915 issued its “Twenty-One Demands” of China. The demands asked that China recognize Japan’s territorial claims in Manchuria, Liaodong and other areas; prevent other nations from obtaining new concessions along its coast; and take a series of actions designed to benefit the Japanese economically. The U.S. and other nations effectively pressured Japan to drop any demand that changed the Open Door policy, but the other demands were left to China which had to acquiesce. 

The boiling point soon arrived. In 1917, worried about national security, the U.S. passed immigration laws which instituted literacy tests, an arrival tax, and excluded anyone from an “Asiatic Barred Zone” except for Japanese and Filipinos.

The Immigration Act of 1924 

This federal law limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. The Act also included a provision excluding from entry any alien who by virtue of race or nationality was ineligible for citizenship. Existing nationality laws dating from 1790 and 1870 excluded people of Asian lineage from naturalizing. As a result, the 1924 Act meant that even Asians not previously prevented from immigrating, the Japanese in particular, would no longer be admitted to the United States. Many in Japan were very offended by the new law, which was a violation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The Japanese government protested, but the law remained, resulting in an increase in existing tensions between the two nations. 

Within Japan, the act created iIntense public outrage. Newspapers framed it as a national humiliation arguing that the West will never treat Japan as an equal. Within the Japanese government, the moderates lost ground to the nationalists and militarists. This law did more damage to U.S.–Japanese relations than almost any single diplomatic act before the 1930s.

From Japan’s viewpoint, this law struck at the very heart of their view of themselves and their place in the world order. Japan demanded recognition as a “civilized” nation and yet this exclusion implied inferiority and contradicted Japan’s self-image as a great power. It was a blow to their sovereignty and dignity. Further it clarified for them that the U.S., which had just embedded a racial hierarchy into federal law, would never see them as more than a partner of convenience, and would always seek to block Japan’s efforts in Eastern Asia and the Western Pacific. From this point on these would always be a strategic mistrust of U.S. intentions.

Even more, these immigration disputes fed the nationalist narratives within Japan, strengthened arguments for self-sufficiency, and increased the military’s skepticism toward diplomacy. What made immigration explosive was not demographics, but symbolism: it convinced many Japanese that even military victory, modernization, and alliance could not overcome racial barriers in the American-led international order.

All of this was well known within the debate leading to the enactment of the law. The law was opposed by a host of interest groups and diplomats: Secretary of State Hughes, career diplomats and embassy officials in Japan, Asia specialists, academics and foreign policy intellectuals, business and commercial interests,  and Christian missionaries – even President Coolidge was reluctant to sign it. The voices all argued that the law would: humiliate Japan, damage diplomacy, strengthen hardliners within the Japanese government, undermine long-term Pacific stability, and strengthen Japanese arguments for strategic autarky* and empire. All of which came true. 

*economic self-sufficiency (I had to look that word up!

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives. | The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), Office of the Historian, U.S. State Department

At the start of the 20th century, U.S. and Japanese interests appeared to be aligned both nations supported the idea of an “open door” for commercial expansion in China. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt acted as a mediator at Japan’s request, and the two sides of the conflict met on neutral territory in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the same year, U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft met with Prime Minister Katsura Taro in Japan. The two concluded the Taft-Katsura Agreement, in which the United States acknowledged Japanese rule over Korea and condoned the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. At the same time, Japan recognized U.S. control of the Philippines. It seemed as though the great powers in the Pacific region had reached a detent.

The apparent stability in U.S.–Japanese relations after 1905 can be misleading if we assume it removed Japan’s own strategic imperatives. In fact, the Russo-Japanese War settlement and the Taft–Katsura understanding reinforced rather than reduced Japan’s incentive to deepen its position in Manchuria. Several interlocking reasons explain this.

Manchuria 

Japan did not go to war with Russia primarily to win diplomatic recognition or goodwill from the United States. Its central objectives were security and economic survival. Manchuria was always the goal of the 1904-1905 war. The war was meant prevent a renewed Russian threat on the Asian mainland and to secure resources and markets unavailable in Japan itself

The Treaty of Portsmouth transferred to Japan Russia’s leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula (Port Arthur, Dairen), control of the South Manchuria Railway (SMR) south of Changchun, and recognition of Japan’s “paramount interests” in Korea. These gains were geographically limited and strategically fragile. From Tokyo’s perspective, holding them required deeper penetration, not restraint. A narrow railway zone without political, economic, and military depth was indefensible. Taft–Katsura effectively removed constraints upon Japan rather than imposed limits.

From the U.S. perspective, the 1905 Taft–Katsura Agreement was seen as a mutual guarantee of peace. It is true that the Agreement established a recognition-of-spheres: U.S. acceptance of Japanese predominance in Korea and Japanese acceptance of U.S. control of the Philippines. But crucially, Manchuria was not restricted as the U.S. did not guarantee China’s territorial integrity in practice. So, on the Japanese side of things they concluded that as long as American core interests were untouched, it had room to maneuver on the continent. To the Japanese, Taft–Katsura signaled permissiveness, not partnership.

Economic Reality

Simply put, Manchuria was essential to Japan’s economic strategy. By 1905 Japan faced structural problems of rapid population growth, limited arable land, and dependence on foreign raw materials (coal, iron, soybeans). Manchuria offered vast resources of coal and iron, agricultural land and food supplies, a market for Japanese industry, and a base for settler colonialism, seen as a solution to domestic social pressures. The South Manchuria Railway Company quickly became a transportation firm, a development agency and a political and intelligence instrument. Economic logic alone pushed Japan beyond mere treaty rights.

The war with Russia had been a massive financial strain on Japan. The total cost of the war is estimated at around ¥17–20 billion. By comparison, government revenues in 1905 were only about ¥400 million, meaning war spending equaled roughly five years of peacetime revenue. Other war expense estimates range at nearly 11–12 times revenues.  Whatever the case, Japan had to finance the war.

Roughly three-quarters of the war cost was covered by public bonds rather than taxes. A significant portion of this debt was sold on international markets, especially in London and other European financial centers, where Japanese foreign bonds found buyers through syndicates of banks supported ultimately by foreign credit. Around 40% of war expenditure was funded via overseas borrowing.

Japan’s banking and financial markets at the end of the Russo-Japanese War were under significant stress from heavy deficit spending, heavy reliance on debt finance (both domestic and foreign), and strained central bank reserves. The war pushed the government well into deficit territory by peacetime standards and transformed how public finance and capital markets operated in modern Japan.

Manchuria was the means to solve their economic and strategic concerns.

The Pattern

At the same time, China’s weakness invited Japanese incursions into Manchuria. Qing China was militarily weak, politically unstable, and had no means to enforce sovereignty in Manchuria. Japan simply followed an imperial pattern they had seen employed by the European powers: de facto control without overt conquests. It started with the railway zones, embedding imperial advisors in positions of power, instituting a separate police force, monopolizing the financial and banking systems, inserting itself into the local school system or offering “premium” schooling opportunities.

By 1905, outright annexation was no longer the preferred first step of empire-building among great powers. It was diplomatically risky and expensive. Instead, empires sought control without sovereignty. Manchuria remained nominally sovereign as real power shifted to Japan. Japan initially avoided annexation precisely because it wished to avoid provoking the U.S. and Britain and it could extract economic and strategic benefits without legal responsibility.

Control of the Southern Manchurian Railroad (SMR) might seem somewhat minor, but was exactly the means for controlled troop movement and logistics.  The immigration of Japanese citizens to Manchuria was into settlements anchored on the railway. At the same time, the Chinese residents became economically dependent upon SMR services to transport their goods to market. In addition, by international norms of the time, railways created and defined extraterritorial “railway zones,” quasi-sovereign spaces. It is here that Japan stationed police, courts, and troops along the line. This allowed Japan to dominate Manchuria without governing all of it.

But who is in charge?

While Taft-Katsura recognized Manchuria as a “special interest” zone for Japan (since the U.S. had limited business interests there), diplomatically the U.S. held that Manchuria was part of China. As we’ve pointed out, Japan was slowly exerting increasing levels of dominance over Manchuria. But who was in charge of the Japanese strategy? The diplomats had negotiated Taft-Katsura, but it was the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) that drove policy in Manchuria. The IJA was of the view that Manchuria was the strategic barrier protecting Korea from the next Russian offensive. As a result they acted rather autonomously in the field, expanding their Japanese-held territories in Manchuria. Actions of the Japanese army (known as the Kwantung Army – Kwantung was another name for the Laiodong Peninsula area) set national policy as the government in Tokyo raced to catch up.

Where was the United States?

At this time the interests of the U.S. was maintaining the “Open Door” policy for China to ensure business interests, but also the U.S. has concerns about stability in the Philippines as well as being heavily involved in interventions and peacekeeping in the Caribbean and Central America, notably in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. As a result, the U.S. had limited military presence in East Asia, and as long as China trade was open, had other concerns. Only later, after immigration disputes, naval competition, and China policy clashes did Manchuria become a focal point of U.S. tension with Japan.

Image credit: various photographs from Naval Aviation Museum, National World War II Museum, and US Navy Archives.