Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II Read Free Page B

allowed the commanders of the armed forces to report directly to him.
    The immediate years after Hirohito’s enthronement were unsettled in Japan.Just as in Germany, where the optimism of the Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s was crushed by the depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, so in Japan the ‘Western years’ following the end of the First World War were not to endure.Many of the reasons for the subsequent unrest were shared by both countries.First, both Germany and Japan suffered sudden economic depression.Japan had already entered an agricultural slump before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 plunged the USA into financial catastrophe.With their own problems at home the Americans were now less keen on purchasing imported luxuries like silk, and many Japanese farmers went bankrupt.‘Here you couldn’t find work — unemployment was high,’ says Yoshio Tshuchiya who grew up in the north of Japan during the late 1920s.He remembers ‘seven or eight’ girls from his school being sold into prostitution by their parents.‘If they had money they didn’t have to go,’ he says.‘But because that family was poor, well, they went.I felt very sorry.Yes, I sympathized.’
    Simultaneously with economic depression, Japan faced another problem that the Germans — especially the fledgling Nazi party — would have understood: the search for Lebensraum (living space).Many prominent Japanese felt there was simply not enough room in their country — the majority of which is mountainous and scarcely habitable — for the growing number of people.‘At the time the problem was our population was increasing,’ says Masatake Okumiya, who held a senior position in the Imperial Navy during the Second World War, ‘and our natural resources couldn’t sustain the increase.Ideally we hoped to receive cooperation from other countries to solve the problem, but back then the world was under the control of the West and a peaceful solution seemed impossible.’Even more than in Germany, the perceived lack of living space dominated Japanese political discourse.The population density in Japan was one of the highest in the world.(Lack of space had for thousands of years conditioned Japanese culture.A society so crammed together is less likely to tolerate the disruptive individualist, and more emphasis has, out of geographical necessity, to be placed on the need for consensus and ‘harmony’ within the group.)
    As Hirohito and the Japanese government wrestled with the problems of the depression and lack of living space, they acted to crush another threat that would have seemed familiar to the Nazi leadership — communism.In February 1928 left-wing parties in Japan gained eight seats in the national elections.Just over two weeks later the government sanctioned mass arrests of communists and Marxist sympathizers.
    During the following year, there was more political instability when Hirohito demonstrated that he would be an aggressive player in the political arena by obtaining the resignation of prime minister Tanaka, a politician frequently criticized by the emperor.Here was further proof that Japan was demonstrably not a stable state ruled by a British-style constitutional monarch.
    The extent of the growing fracture in the Japanese democratic process was emphasized still further when, in 1930, after Japan had signed the London Naval Treaty (which agreed comparative limits amongst the world’s major navies), the new prime minister, Hamaguchi, was shot by an opponent of the agreement at Tokyo railway station.The message could not have been clearer — stand out against the growing nationalist spirit, personified by obsequious allegiance to the emperor and an increasing distrust of all things Western, only at great personal peril.
    A growing faction within the Imperial Army wanted to dissociate Japan from the ‘non-aggressive’ values of the post-First World War treaties and return to the pursuit of the kind of colonial expansion that