Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (36 page)

This new metaphysic of militarism and violence, which certainly as an organized entity had no precedent in Japanese history, was supposed to be accompanied by the systematic development of Western political institutions. In 1876 the samurai were disbanded as a class, losing their stipends and the right to bear swords; the last feudal revolt was put down the next year. Western-style parties and newspapers were introduced in the 1870s, a new British-style peerage, with barons, viscounts and marquises, was ordained in 1884 and a cabinet-system the following year. For the first Diet in
1890 only 400,000 out of 40 million had the vote. In 1918, the ‘three yen tax qualification’ raised it to 3.5 million out of 60 million. In 1925 Japan got the Manhood Suffrage Act, which gave the vote to all men over twenty-five, raising the suffrage to 13 million.

But authoritarian institutions advanced
pari passu
with democracy. There was a highly restrictive press law in 1875. Police supervision of political parties was established in 1880. The constitution of 1889 was deliberately restrictive, to produce, wrote its author Prince Ito, ‘a compact solidity of organization and the efficiency of its administrative activity’.
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The Diet was balanced by a powerful House of Peers and the cabinet by the institution of the
genro
, a group of former prime ministers and statesmen who gave advice directly to the Tenno. Perhaps most important of all was a regulation, drawn up in 1894 and confirmed in 1911, that the ministers of the army and the navy must be serving officers, nominated by the respective staffs. This meant not only that army and navy were independent of political control (the chiefs of staff had direct access to the Tenno) but that each service could in effect veto a civilian cabinet by refusing to nominate its own minister. This power was frequently used and was always in the background. Hence the government was really only responsible for civil matters, the army and navy conducting their own affairs, which frequently and from the 1920s increasingly impinged on foreign policy. Since army and navy were not under civil control, and officers in the field did not necessarily feel obliged in honour to obey their nominal superiors in Tokyo, there were times when Japan came closer to military anarchy than any other kind of system.

The trouble was that Japan only slowly developed the kind of civic consciousness which in Europe was the product of town life and bourgeois notions of rights. The town itself was an import. Even Tokyo was, and until very recently remained, an enormous collection of villages. Its citizens had rural not urban reflexes and attachments. Though feudalism was killed by the Meiji Revolution, it survived in a bastard version. Everyone, from the highest downwards, felt safe only as part of a clan or
batsu.
It was and is habitual for the Japanese to extend patterns of family behaviour to wider situations. The term
habatsu
, ‘permanent faction’, was applied to each new activity as it came into existence: schools of painting, or wrestling, or flower-arranging; then, after 1868, to industrial firms; and after 1890 to politics. The Japanese term
oyabun-kobun
, meaning parent—child or boss—follower relationship, became the cement of this bastard feudalism in politics, a man rendering service or loyalty in return for a share of any spoils going. Indeed the Japanese did not clearly distinguish between family and non-family groupings, since the
perpetuation of the family line by adoption was regarded as much more important than the perpetuation of the blood line.
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Ozaki Yukio, the most durable of Japanese politicians, who took part in the first general election of 1890 and lived to sit in the first post-1945 Diet, wrote in 1918 that in Japan ‘political parties, which should be based and dissolved solely on principles and political views, are really affairs of personal connections and sentiments, the relations between the leader and the members of a party being similar to those which subsisted between a feudal lord and his liegemen’.
¹⁶
Mass-parties of the Left, based on universal economic interests, might have changed this pattern. But the Peace Preservation law of 1925, the same year that Japan got male suffrage, gave the police such formidable power to combat Marxist subversion as effectively to inhibit their development. No left-wing party ever scored more than 500,000 votes until after 1945.

As a result, Japanese political parties were legal mafias which inspired little respect and offered no moral alternative to the traditional institutions refurbished in totalitarian form. Bribery was ubiquitous since elections were costly (25,000 dollars per seat in the inter-war period) and the pay small. Corruption ranged from the sale of peerages to land speculation in Osaka’s new brothel quarter. Of the two main parties, Seiyukai was financed by Manchurian railway interests, Kenseikai by Mitsubishi, in both cases illegally. Three of the most prominent political leaders, Hara (the first commoner to become Prime Minister), Yamamoto and Tanaka, were guilty of blatant corruption.
¹⁷
Politicians did not cut attractive figures compared with the bushido militarists. They fought frequently, but only in unseemly scrimmages in the Diet, sometimes with the assistance of hired ruffians. As one British eye-witness put it in 1928: ‘Flushed gentlemen, clad without in frockcoats but warmed within by too-copious draughts of
sake
, roared and bellowed, and arguments frequently culminated in a rush for the rostrum, whence the speaker of the moment would be dragged in the midst of a free fight.’
¹⁸

Moreover, if bastard feudalism persisted in the Diet, it flourished also outside it, in the form of secret societies which constituted an alternative form of political activity: non-democratic, unconstitutional, using direct action and employing weapons instead of arguments. Once the samurai lost their stipends they had either to find work or band together and offer themselves to the highest bidder. In 1881 a group of them formed the Genyosha, the first of the secret societies, which soon entered politics indirectly by providing thugs to rig Diet elections or murder rival candidates. In 1901 a Genyosha man, Mitsuru Toyama, founded the notorious Kokuryukai or Black Dragon, the prototype of many violent, ultra-nationalist sects. The
real expansion of gang-politics, however, occurred after the end of the 1914–18 war, which seems to have ushered in an era of political violence almost everywhere.

Whether the Japanese took their cue from Weimar Germany and Mussolini’s Italy is not clear. Certainly, like the European fascists, they used Leninist violence as an excuse for counter-violence. What was disturbing was the overlap between these societies and constitutional politics and, most sinister, the military. Thus, the Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, the Japan National Essence Society – using concepts from the totalitarianized forms of Shinto and bushido – which was founded in 1919, included among its members three future Prime Ministers and several generals. This was comparatively respectable. Others were mere gangs of ruffians. Some were radical in exactly the same way as the revolutionary syndicalists in Italy or the early Nazis in Germany. Thus, the Yuzonsha, founded by Kita Ikki in 1919, proposed a National Socialist plan of nationalization of industry and break-up of the great estates to prepare Japan for ‘the leadership of Asia’, her expansion being at the expense of Britain (’the millionaire’) and Russia (’the great landowner’), Japan placing itself at the head of ‘the proletariat of nations’. Other radical societies included the agrarian nationalists, who wished to destroy industry completely, and the Ketsumedian, led by Inoue Nissho, dedicated to the assassination of industrialists and financiers.
¹⁹

Virtually all these societies practised assassination, or showed an extraordinary tolerance of it. One might say that though the notion of the feudal revolt died in the 1870s, assassination was its continuance by other means. The samurai might no longer impose their will as a class; but groups of them reserved the right to register their political objections not through the ballot, beneath them, but through the sword and dagger and, after it became popular in the 1920s, the Thomson sub-machine-gun. The samurai had in fact always used hired coolie-gangsters to terrorize their peasants. Now their modernized
kais
, or gangs, were hired out to the
gumbatsu
or
zaibatsu
to enforce their will on ministers. Even more disturbing was the fact that, by 1894, the
kais
were working in conjunction with the Kempei-Tai, the Special Police to Guard Security of the state. These men reported directly to Imperial Headquarters, not the government, could hold prisoners for 121 days without formal charge or warrant and were authorized to employ torture to extract confessions. Men were frequently arrested by the Kempei-Tai after secret denunciations by the
kais.
²⁰

The
kais
indeed played a protean role in Japanese society, sometimes upholding state security, sometimes enforcing protection rackets in, for instance, the new film industry, where their sanguinary
gangland battles, fought with two-handed swords, formed an oriental descant to such episodes as the St Valentine’s Day massacre in contemporary Chicago.
²¹
Mitsuru Toyama, the most notorious gang-leader, founder of the Black Dragon, occupied a curiously ambivalent role in Japanese society. Born in 1855, he had the manners and affectations of a gentleman and a knight of bushido. According to the
New York Times
correspondent, Hugh Byas, he looked ‘like one of the Cheeryble Brothers, exuding benignity, and made great play of the fact that his creed would not allow him to kill a mosquito’. Killing politicians was another matter. He not merely organized assassination but protected other known murderers in his house, which the police dared not enter. They included Rash Behari Bose, wanted by the British for the attempted assassination of Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, in 1912. When he finally died in his nineties, full of years and wickedness, the
Tokyo Times
published a special supplement in his honour.
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That was characteristic of Japanese tolerance towards even the most flagrant and vicious law-breaking which claimed credentials of honour. The very victims themselves helped to perpetuate the system. Thus the great liberal statesman Ozaki Yukio, though constantly threatened with death himself, wrote a poem which contained the defeatist lines: ‘Praise be to men who may attempt my life/If their motive is to die for their country’.
²³

Hence political assassination was not necessarily severely punished in Japan; sometimes not punished at all. And, even more important, it was not morally reprobated by society. As a result it became increasingly common. Of the original Meiji Restoration government, one was murdered, another driven to
hara-kiri;
and Prince Ito, architect of the constitution, was murdered, despite the efforts of his tea-garden wife. Of Taisho Tenno’s Prime Ministers during the years 1912–26, Count Okuma, Viscount Takahashi and Mr Hara were assassinated; and under Hirohito, 1926–45, three more Prime Ministers died, Mr Hamaguchi, Mr Inukai and Admiral Saito, plus a dozen cabinet ministers.
²⁴
Some politicians accepted the risks of their profession more stoically than others. But fear of being murdered undoubtedly deterred ministers from pushing through reforming legislation. When the writer David James asked Prime Minister Hara in 1920 why he did not repeal the police regulation which provided six months’ imprisonment for incitement to strike, Hara replied, ‘I have no intention of committing
hara-kiri
just now.’ When Hara was stabbed to death the next year at Toyko’s Shimbashi station, his ‘offence’ was that, as a mere civilian, he had taken over the Naval Office while the Minister, Admiral Kato, was at the Washington Naval Conference.
²⁵
The Tenno himself was not immune from charges of lack of patriotism. There was an attempt on Hirohito’s life
in 1923, and this naturally timid man was undoubtedly dissuaded from giving civilian Prime Ministers the support they had a right to expect under the constitution, by fear of his own officers.

The position deteriorated after 1924–5, when army reforms introduced a new type of officer, drawn from the ranks of minor officials, shopkeepers and small landowners. These men had little respect for traditional authority – or their own high commanders – and they were imbued with Leninist and fascist notions of political violence, and above all by the new totalitarian version of bushido. While quite capable of threatening Hirohito with death, they spoke of his ‘restoration’ to power: what they wanted was military dictatorship under nominal imperial rule. Their key word was
kokutai
or ‘national policy’, and any politician guilty of the slightest disloyalty to
kokutai
was as good as dead.
²⁶
Most of them came from rural areas, where living standards were falling during the Twenties and young girls had to go out to work just for their food as no wages could be paid. Their army brothers burned with zeal and hatred and their violence enjoyed wide public support.
²⁷

Under these circumstances, civilian party government gradually collapsed, and elections became meaningless. In 1927 and again in 1928 Prime Ministers were forced out of office by the army. In 1930, the Prime Minister, Hamaguchi Yuko, having got a mandate to cut the armed forces, was gunned down immediately he tried to do so. His successor was forced out over the same issue. The next Prime Minister, Inukai Ki, who again tried to stand up to the Services, was murdered in May 1932 by a group of army and naval officers. They planned, in fact, to kill him together with Charlie Chaplin, who was on a visit to Tokyo and due to take tea with the Prime Minister. The naval ringleader of the plot told the judge: ‘Chaplin is a popular figure in the United States and the darling of the capitalist class. We believed that killing him would cause a war with America.’ When the murderers came up for trial, their counsel argued that, as their honour and future were at stake, assassination was a form of self-defence. He presented the judge with 110,000 letters, many written in blood, begging for clemency. In Niigata, nine young men chopped off their little fingers, as evidence of sincerity, and sent them to the War Minister pickled in a jar of alcohol.
²⁸
The lenient sentences passed at this trial, and at many others, recalled the farcical court cases involving right-wing murderers in early Weimar Germany.
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