Pacific Pacification

So our virtues
Lie in the interpretation of the time;
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
To extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
— Tullius Aufidius, Act IV, Scene VII, Coriolanus

Four gargantuan steam frigates armed with Paixhans guns, belching darkened smoke, emerged from across Edo Bay into Uraga Harbour as Manifest Destiny bestrode leading the civilizational force westward barging over the Pacific unto the Sakoku. It was neither the first nor last time that the Japanese imagination was to be captured by that which emerges from the Pacific. Though its population was to be awoken from their halcyon slumber, elites in Sakoku Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate were well-aware of the expanding powers of Western nations that had already tamed the Chinese through the Opium and Arrow Wars and the resulting unequal treaties. The dissonance nestled within the body politic, domestic and that which is foreign and alien would result in deep uncertainty and precipitous internal change in search of a new harmony that would come to define the restless Japanese spirit of the time. It was July 14, 1853, Emperor Meiji was 6 months old.

To discern the impetus behind the fateful steps the Japanese took upon the Pacific, one has to be conscious of the historical spirit that compelled the institutions and structured the faith and experience of the men who embarked upon such a flight. As such, we shall return to where the steel of the Imperial Army, that was forged under of Yamagata Aritomo as a vanguard for the accelerated modernisation regime of Japanese society under the Meiji Restoration, entered a new phase of life after the natural death of the watchful eyes of the genro class. One that engendered renewed factional strife within the armed forces and across the Kokutai at the tail end of the Great War into a world of turbulent change. The words penned by Yamagata will yet remain haunting the nation in search of yet another new harmony, “should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth”. The foreign that is ever-present in the Japanese mind would re-emerge in the Far East Russian frontier, one emblematic of the many to follow.

Across the floes of ice the glistening Golden Horn Bay of Vladivostok receded behind the horizon as General William S. Graves and the last echelon of the American Expeditionary Force returned back across the Pacific, back home. ⊕America’s Siberia Adventure 1918-1920 is a first-hand account by William S. Graves himself about the US Siberian Expedition to In the nineteen weary long months that passed, the American force had in their view served as a stabilizing force in the Siberian situation, one that illustrated “the eccentricities of a remote and irrational emanation from the central madness of a warring world.” as Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, put it. Baker was the one who had charged General Graves with command under direct orders of President Woodrow Wilson as to render together with the Allies such “aid as shall be acceptable, to the Russian people in their endeavour to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny.” consonant with the Wilsonian ideals of self-determination and collective security . Successive revolutions in Russia has seen its central sphere of influence diminished leaving the resource-laden Siberean fringes and the accompanying strategic backbone of the Trans-Siberian Railway unguarded. While the British and French were desperately attempting to resurrect the Eastern Front with a White Russian government beyond the Urals, the Japanese channeled their efforts into establishing an independent buffer state in Siberian Russia east of Lake Baikal between the ascendent Bolsheviks and Japan’s northern territories. General Graves and the American forces had the thankless task of implementing these principles to their best of their abilities executed as to act as a counterbalance the Japanese and the belligerent Cossack Atamans, the Japanese had armed and enabled. The muddled mess of irreconcilable ambitions and vacillating priorities created in Baker’s own words “a situation which made necessary the withdrawal of all Allied forces from Siberian soil when it was withdrawn, thus making impossible territorial conquests and acquisitions on Russian soil by other nations whose interests in the Far East might easily have induced them to take over for pacification, and ultimately for permanent colonial administration, vast areas of Russia’s Far East”. By 1919 the Red Army was rapidly streaming eastwards unimpeded towards the Whites sheltered in Omsk and on December 29, 1919, Graves received orders to prepare his troops for withdrawal. Within 20 years, Vladivostok will re-emerge as a critical nexus in the Pacific Route of the Soviet-American Lend and Lease program that would sustain the Soviet War Machine.

The very same year of 1919, the whirlwind of Chinese anti-imperialism and nationalism was ignited in reaction to their government’s capitulation to the unreasonable demands of the Treaty of Versailles, “from the Russo-Mongolian Treaty and the twenty-one demands down to the latest Sino-Japanese compact by which a corrupt administration had bartered away the heritage of the whole country over the heads of the people”, that culminated in the epochal May 4th Movement. Once again the ideals and the letter of the Fourteen Points articulated by the American delegation and President Woodrow Wilson at the helm failed to live up to its promise and clout. In fact, Paul S. Reinsch envoy to the Republic of China would proclaim between 1913-1919 highlights that “probably nowhere else in the world had expectations of America’s leadership at [the] Paris [Peace Conference] been raised so high as in China. The Chinese trusted America, they trusted the frequent declarations of principle uttered by President Wilson, whose words had reached China in its remotest parts.”(Xu, G.,et al, 2005, 269) Wilson caving on the demands and willingness to compromise his principle of self-determination conceding the Shandong Peninsula to the Japanese in the pursuit of the supra-national goal of creating a League of Nations left the Chinese disillusioned that swelled into deep popular outrage. Bestirred was a national consciousness, especially amongst the youth from a long slumber, an assertion that self-determination of the peoples was not an illusory commitment to be discarded from their collective vision, but one that can be realised independently of the Great Powers foreshadowing the ideological splintering of the nation to come. What the movement lacked in systematic organisation and mobilisation it would soon find “if properly organized, considering its strong points, grit, doggedness and determination, it could be the greatest force in China for the exposition of Japanese camouflage.” (Baronti,1920)

Japan that had dreamt of a permanent solution for their northern problems in the fragmented husk of Tsarist Russia was to be stuck in a quagmire for another two years till 1922 in the Far East and China that was weakened and divided was biting back and in both theatres the Americans and their failed machinations were in interplay. When the foreign players were weakest the Japanese internal national compass that was reactionary by design splintered as a divide between the once aligned army and civilian population grew exacerbated by the rural rice riots of 1918 (amplified by Japanese government redirecting rice stocks to the Siberian frontier where Japan already had deployed 10 times the troop numbers required by the Americans stationed). The early 1920s marked the nadir for the Imperial Army as harnessing this wave of popular energy civilian political parties were able to forge paths into initiating democratic reign upon the Imperial forces. Civilians favored a conciliatory approach toward China embodied in the Shidehara diplomacy approach respecting the rational position and non-interference in China’s internal politics. Both the Siberian and Chinese problems found resolution in the Washington Naval Conference where Kijūrō Shidehara acted as lead negotiator reverting Shandong to Chinese control and leave Siberia. It was seen as a victory for peace and disarmament, especially amongst the antimilitarist in the Diet reducing naval expenditure and stabilizing fleet size. The year that marked Yamagata’s death revealed the internal rifts that will define the coming decade are cracking just under the surface. In his diaries, Army Minister Kazushige Ugaki writes “The removal of troops from Shandong, the evacuation of Hankou, and now the withdrawal from Siberia have become realities. Those independent actions of the empire have all come to nothing. Nay, as in the case of our stationing troops in Shandong, which was our right by treaty, there is the tendency to relinquish the great proportion of our special rights and withdraw. Thus we further contract our noticeably diminished national prestige and national rights.” The aura of pride that was associated with the Imperial Army in the staff colleges was in dissonance with the tailspinning of the Imperial Forces in recent years amplified by their increasing technological and organisational backwardness with regards to the Great Powers. These factors would reinvigorate a new core of young officers that wished to rearticulate the historical raison d’etre. The need of deep-seated reforms and the radical paths taken to pursue them led to the recurrent phenomenon Gekokujo, where lower-ranked officers often with the sympathies of higher ranked ones carry out highly disruptive events. This was already a phenomenon recognised during the Siberian Intervention in the incident of covert war material aid was shipped to Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin as the matter of “how to dispose of the vast stores of war materials lying around Vladivostok became acute.” (Dunscomb, 2006). Such actions served to intensify uncertainty and control of on-the-ground operations, especially in remote territories further hamstringing civilian control of military actions.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were consolidating control. Stalin would proclaim looking back in January 1925 that had “capitalist countries not been engaged in mortal combat during the imperialist war in 1917, had they not been clutching at each other’s throat had they not been busy with their own affairs and unable to spare time to wage a struggle against the Soviet power, it is doubtful whether the Soviet power would have survived. The struggle, conflicts and wars between our enemies, I repeat, constitute an extremely important ally for us.”(Stalin, 1925) This is a lesson that the Party will not forget. The “future Japanese-American war” for capitalist “supremacy” in the Pacific, for the “right to loot” was one Lenin looked forward to. “They want to fight, they will fight.”, he said. “As soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism as a whole we shall immediately take it by the scruff of the neck.”(McMeekin , 2021) he proclaimed in a speech delivered at a meeting of nuclei secretaries of the Moscow Organisation. The machinations of the Third International (Comintern) were initiated explicitly devoted to world revolution and the overthrow of existing capitalist governments. In this way, Communist subversion was aligned with the Soviets instead of their own governments, by fueling political extremism on both left and right, that drove the Marxist-Leninist dialectical process of radicalisation. This movement erupted in the consciousness of the Japanese in the Toranomon incident where a son of a member of the Imperial Diet, Daisuke Namba, was radicalised and attempted an assassination of Emperor Hirohito. “To the very end of the trial, Namba maintained his faith in communism. As he heard the sentence of death, he cried out: “Japanese Proletarians and Japanesec Communist Party, Banzai!” and “Russian Socialist Soviet Republic, Banzai!””. The danger of anti-monarchist foreign ideologies that Japan had attempted to buffer itself from earlier came to haunt the political and intellectual spaces. As a reaction, the Public Security Preservation Law was passed under which, “Anyone who has formed an association with the aim of altering the kokutai or the system of private property, and anyone who has joined such an association with full knowledge of its object, shall be liable to imprisonment with or without hard labour, for a term not exceeding ten years.”(Mitchell,1973, p.19) The word Kokutai served to communicate the law’s intention to assert and preserve the essential character of the Japanese way of life to a people and an internally polarising elite class in the face of volatility and change. However well meaning it was, introduced into a still nascent parliamentary system it proved to be a death knell at containing the nation’s worst impulses during the events of 1930s that would follow. Radical actors often practicing Gekokujo appealed to the sympathies of a public that was caught up in a nationalistic fervour claiming “to have acted with the kokutai in mind. They attacked those misadvising the emperor or violating some other rightist commandment in order to strengthen the kokutai and to reroute the nation’s course. Thus, judges found themselves on trial in their own courtrooms, along with the body of law, by the very suspects and lawyers who lined up below them.” (Mitchell, 1973, p.29). Assassination and attempted coup events sidelined or eliminated potential restraining voices near the Emperor while any potential for civilian leadership would end up being untenable due to an environment of fear and groupthink tragically when political discernment and balance was needed the most in the lead up to the Pacific.

China’s reassertion of authority under the flag of the Republic of China was underway with the Northern Expeditions and increased Soviet presence particularly in the Soviet-Sino conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway in Norhtern Manchuria and subversive activities within China increased the necessity of the Japanese to assert a foothold in the continent due to their already significant investment in Southern Manchuria. The Showa financial crisis and passivity in the face of aggression upon Japanese assets by the National Revolutionary Army had already booted the Minseito government and its Shidehara’s diplomacy patterns out. “Through the South Manchuria Railway Co., it already operated the principal rail line and ports and controlled the principal industrial and mining developments.” (Stewart, 1935). The Mukden Incident occurred at the heights of the Great Depression in Japan, “for the Depression had greatly stimulated the sense that Japan was in the midst of an all-encompassing crisis, or had reached a ‘stalemate’ (yukizumari), of which the ‘population problem’ was an important part. Calls from agrarian moralists, rural groups, and politicians with rural connections for increased emigration and state-supported emigration schemes became loud” (Wilson, 1995)” Coupled with a fiscal expansion and monetary expansion policies of finance minister Korekiyo Takahashi Japan’s economy was able to recover by 1932. This substantial capital and goods were invested into Manchoukuo, “Of all the phases of development work, the extension of railways and other communications has proceeded most actively. A new and imposing capital has also been constructed at Hsinking. At the same time, industrial development has been pushed. A number of new industries have been established ; the iron and steel, coal and oil shale industries have been expanded; and the output of industrial salt has been increased. Efforts to stimulate cotton and wool production have also been made. Moreover, imports have risen rapidly, so that Manchoukuo now occupies first place in Japan’s export trade.” (Stewart,1935) Cartelization and rationalization were promoted under government guidance, one that was simple to transition into the total war economy envisioned by the Toseiha Faction of the Imperial Army preferred by the zaibatsu as free market economics floundered at solving the crisis.

The Xi’an incident in December 1936 was a pivotal crisis during the Chinese civil war sparked by the mutiny of Chang Hsüeh-liang and Yang Hucheng against Chiang Kai Shek to shift his stratagem away from communist suppression and internal pacification to find a political solution with the communist on a United Front against the Japanese. Initially the, Chinese Communist Party that had been cornered in an ongoing civil war was exultant and wanted Chiang fired and handed over to a peoples’ tribunal, however soon after “Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong called for a peaceful settlement and the protection of the safety of Chiang Kaishek. On 18 December, they sent a telegram stating that their call for Chiang’s dismissal and trial had been ‘inappropriate’, and that he should be released if a United Front against Japan would be formed. This u-turn was the result of a telegram on 16 December from the Comintern, which stated that ‘regardless of Zhang Xueliang’s intentions, objectively seen, his actions can only harm a united front to resist Japan and benefit Japanese aggression in China’ and called on the CCP to ‘firmly advocate a peaceful settlement’”(Van de Ven, 2003, p.187). Soviets had feared an alliance between the Kuomintang Nationalist and the Japanese either through Chiang Kai Shek or Wang Jingwei that would have had the Soviets facing a potential two-front war spanning two continents during the war that was about to break. Mao Zedong himself asserts such a condition being hostile to the survival of the Reds, “Splits and wars among the warlords weaken the power of the White regime. Thus opportunities are provided for the rise of Red political power in small areas. But fighting among the warlords does not go on every day. Whenever the White regime in one or more provinces enjoys temporary stability, the ruling classes there inevitably combine and do their utmost to destroy Red political power. In areas where all the necessary conditions for its establishment and persistence are not fulfilled, Red political power is in danger of being overthrown by the enemy.” (Tse-tung,1928) Koki Hirota as Foreign Minister in late 1935 had in his 3 principle approach to diplomacy as the third principles called for Sino-Japanese co-operation against Communism in China highlighting the possibility of such an approach for the Nationalists. Mao’s principle of revolutionary war thus rested on the possibility enjoining of the civil war in China with national war and as such a prolonged engagement between Japanese imperialist against the Kuomintang during which it can expand its own strength. As such the active phase of preparing for the impending war with Japan began in China.

On July the 7th of 1937 a clash occurred between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peiping in North China, along the rail line connecting Beijing with the port of Tianjin. Chiang Kaishek penned the following in his diary, “The Japanese bandits have made provocative actions at the Marco Polo Bridge. Are they trying to subdue us before we can complete our preparations; or are they making trouble for Song Zheyuan. … Is this the time to accept the challenge?”(Van de Ven, 2003, p.188). Earlier that morning, central military headquarters in Tokyo received a situation report and the army chief of staff decided to downplay events and cabled instructions to the local Japanese commander to work out a settlement with his Chinese counterpart, a common approach in the resolution of minor incidents in northern China. Kanji lshiwara, Chief of Operations in the Army General Staff, who was one of the architects of Mukden Incident agreed with his colleagues who saw the Soviet Union as Japan’s most immediate strategic problem in northern Asia and wished not to invite “the same sort of disaster which overtook Napoleon in Spain a slow sinking into the deepest sort of bog.”(McClain, 443), Also on the very same morning “the Communists issued an appeal for all Chinese to resist “the new Japanese invasion,” and within days Chiang demonstrated his commitment to the “spirit of Xi’an” by directing the military commander in Beijing to reject the terms offered by the Japanese.” Concurrently, the generalissimo began to move four of his best divisions north into Hebei Province, an open violation of the He-Umezu Agreement and Tanggu Truce” (McCain, 445), a ceasefire that was signed between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan in 1933 ending the Manchurian invasion by establishing a demilitarized zone extending south of the Great Wall. Consequently though, “by July 11 the Chinese and Japanese commanders on the scene had appeared to work out a modus vivendi” (McCain, 445), in alignment with the Konoe’s Cabinet support to reach a resolution locally amongst the commanders on the field , the Marco Polo incident instead would flare up into a bitter war of attrition lasting 8 years, a war that would not end.

Soviets would intensify its border in the Far East against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War as skirmishes and crossings at the border increased while Japan dragged weary men into the immensity of the heartlands of China into the 3rd year: a war machine sustained by oil and resources from the foreign powers. The attacks of the Operation 100 on May 3 and 4, 1939 were the first systematic carpet bombings of Chongqing , after the establishment of front-line operations for air support and logistics that can stage such joint-strike attacks, in an attempt to force a surrender. “Over the two days, the campaign comprised seventy-two bombers, 504 pilots and a total payload of 600 tons of fragmentation and incendiary bombs. Not one Japanese Imperial Army soldier had set foot on the soil; the attackers had released their bombs from an attitude of 3,000 meters, introducing people to the bitter taste of terror from the sky. The campaign left 4,400 dead and thousands more wounded. The death toll surpassed that of Guernica to establish a macabre new record for aerial bombing.” (Tanaka) These attacks fortified the spirits of the people attacked while vilifying the Japanese forces further in the eyes of the Great Powers. Just 8 days later, on “May 12 Kwantung Army frontier guards observed about 700 Outer Mongolian cavalry crossing the Khalkha River. The Japanese immediately decided that this was a frontier violation. ”(Young, 89). The Kwantung Army would act independently without referring the matter to Tokyo and against the wishes of the General Staff, a repeating motif as we have previously seen, that would come to shape the future of its role in the coming war.

Thus, sparked the beginning of “the Battle of Nomonhan at the Manchurian—Mongolian—Chinese border. The Japanese attacked first with an infantry division, but encountering stiff resistance, in July the Japanese assembled 475 aircraft, including Mitsubishi A5Ms and Nakajima Ki-27s. The Soviets’s 1st Army Group commanded by General Georgii Zhukov had poured troops into the area and had 580 aircraft available, including 125 SB-2s, 25 TB-3s, and 150 I-16s. In August, the Japanese and Soviets were engaged in the biggest air confrontation since the First World War. When the Japanese brought in tanks and infantry forces, on 23 August, General Zhukov struck back and crushed the Japanese 23rd Division in one week.” (Hans Ven, 236) 23 August will also be when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed an event that shocked the Japanese while it was in an undeclared battle with the Soviets. A deeply consequential pivot in Japanese-Soviet relationship was to occur as the General Staff and War Ministry aware of the strength of 30 divisions stationed by the Red Army in the Far East and overextension of the Imperial Forces in China would sign a truce by ways of their Soviet ambassador Shigenori Tōgō before reinforcements even arrive for the Kwantung army. Increasingly after the Nomonhan incident the defend the south advance the north form of expansion doctrine, espoused by like figures such as Kanji Ishiwara in the Imperial Army, was sidelined. Though Kwantung Army Special Maneuvers a preemptive attack strategy on the Far East or Siberia were planned it would never materialise. Two years later, Togo himself would sign the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact that enabled the Soviets to focus upon the European theater of war while Japan advanced with their Strike South doctrine favoured by the Imperial Navy headed to challenge the pre-existing Pacific spheres of influence.

The views of Nelson T. Johnson, US Ambassador to the Republic of China were affirmed, observing in the February of 1938 that “Communist Russia expects to profit by the chaos that Japan is creating, and sees safety for itself in a Japan that is exhausting itself in China.” Soviets were already through the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact sending aircraft and raw materials to help hold off the Japanese Invasion. Washington was well aware in their gauging of the strength of their Soviet ally, the fact “that Japan was not going to be able to consume China; that the Soviet Union was pleased with the weakening of Japan due to its operations in China; that, even though the purges had led to some doubts as to the effectiveness of the Soviet forces, Soviet Russia was still Japan’s biggest fear and its most formidable military foe: and that the danger of a possible conflict between them was still high, if not higher than before. Clearly, the idea that American interests could be protected by continued Soviet-Japanese tensions was now commonplace in the Roosevelt administration.”( Kennedy, 108) America would overlook the all-invasive threat the Soviets and their ideology would engender while the Comintern and Soviet threat that plagued Japan in the 1930s had already been festering in essential centres of its own body politic within the classes of the New Deal Administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By 1941, the fragility of the peace upon the Pacific was palpable, as for Japan as it treaded a narrow path to what appears to be an inevitable destination. The Hull-Nomura Talks of 1941 were thus the last resort to diplomacy between the two countries. A Sword of Damocles lay over Prime Minister Konoe’s head domestically as he attempted to navigate this narrow path. The Americans, “President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull well realized the probability that Japan had already gone so far in a policy of conquest that it would be impossible to persuade her to stop. Nevertheless, entertainment of even a faint hope that there might be worked out a fair and peaceful settlement in the Far Eastern area impelled this Government to agree to participate in exploratory conversations in order to ascertain whether there was sufficient agreement on basic issues to warrant entry upon more formal negotiations.” (United States, p.120) Though exploratory for the Americans it was a matter of greatest urgency for the moderates in the Cabinet to reach an amicable resolution with haste. “great attention must be paid to the fact that the United States is pursuing its established policy without alleviating the economic pressure on Japan in the least.”(Department of Army, 1945 , p. 56) as fuel and other vital supplies drained as each day passed. The Japanese negotiators would fail at discerning and accepting the vision the American elites were envisioning of the framework for a world economic order that didn’t neccesitate aggressive militaristic expansion to sustain. The Americans were ambivalent and slipped into generalisations and backsliding on many of what Japanese viewed as major issues in American eyes such as American economic freedom in China and Manchukuo, a shared front against communism in the North and the case of its neutrality if America entered the war. The two plans confirmed during the Imperial Conference on 5 November, Plan A and B serve illustrate the point. “The secretary of State then told” Ambassador Nomura upon receiving and asking few questions about a Plan A that “he would give an answer to each problem after further study”. However, the President “was noncommittal and it was felt that virtually Japan’s proposal was shelved.” (Department of Army, 1945 , p. 71)

On November 26th Hull would hand a plan of a broadly defined settlement for the Pacific Area “as one practical exemplification of a program which this Government envisaged as something to be worked out during future conversations” (United States, 142) where demands that had no precedent in previous series of long running discussions such as that “not to support any government in China other than the National Government of the Republic of China with its capital temporarily at Chungking; to relinquish extraterritorial and related rights in China and to obtain the agreement of other governments now enjoying such rights to give up those rights” (United States,1943, p.143) appeared. The political and social infeasibility of these additional commitments only served to belie the indifference of the Americans to the domestic stakes involved for Japanese elite and their people. President Roosevelt on December 6th a day before the Pearl Harbour Attacks would “telegraph to Tokyo, a personal message to the Emperor of Japan in which he stated that developments were occurring in the Pacific area which threatened to deprive the United States and Japan and all humanity of the beneficial influence of the long peace between the two countries, and that these developments contained “tragic possibilities”.” (United States, 1943, p.147)

Here is a land and a people defined by their lofty ideals, led towards expansion into foreign lands that it had once isolated itself away from others across vast oceans having to find itself isolated again amongst others. Such a statement could define both nations across the Pacific. However, it wasn’t the spirit of Japan that led it blind into its ill-fated adventure but the rigidity of its institutions whose evolution aborted fell into self-involving . The Shōwa Restoration embodied an ahistoric revanchism attempting to reinvoke a lost time disembodied from the historical realities of the time: a microcosm of the Japanese Society as a whole as it was at war with itself before it was against all. The shadow of the Black Ship had once cast upon Edo Bay bound a tale of two nations. The rising sun had come chasing in its shadow’s footsteps across the Pacific only to realise it had been one cast by its own light.