Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), and text enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).

An additional Transcriber’s Note is at the end.

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HEADLINE BOOKS

No. 29

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HEADLINE BOOKS

=CHANGING GOVERNMENTS= Amid New Social Problems

=SHADOW OVER EUROPE= The Challenge of Nazi Germany

=BRICKS WITHOUT MORTAR= The Story of International Cooperation

=BATTLES WITHOUT BULLETS= The Story of Economic Warfare

=IN QUEST OF EMPIRE= The Problem of Colonies

=HUMAN DYNAMITE= The Story of Europe’s Minorities

=THE PEACE THAT FAILED= How Europe Sowed the Seeds of War

=NEW HOMES FOR OLD= Public Housing in Europe and America

=WAR ATLAS= A Handbook of Maps and Facts

=THE BRITISH EMPIRE UNDER FIRE=

=SPOTLIGHT ON THE BALKANS=

=CHALLENGE TO THE AMERICAS=

=LOOK AT LATIN AMERICA= With 25 Maps and Charts

=AMERICA REARMS= The Citizen’s Guide to National Defense

=SHADOW OVER ASIA= The Rise of Militant Japan

=WAR ON THE SHORT WAVE= (In preparation)

SHADOW OVER ASIA

THE RISE OF MILITANT JAPAN

by T. A. BISSON

Illustrated by GRAPHIC ASSOCIATES

THE FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION

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COPYRIGHT 1941

FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION, INCORPORATED 22 EAST 38TH STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1941_

_Typography by Andor Braun_

PRODUCED UNDER UNION CONDITIONS AND COMPOSED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY UNION LABOR

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I. The Shadow 7

II. Introducing Imperial Japan 11

III. Imitating the Chinese 20

IV. Japan Bars Her Door 25

V. How the Door Was Opened 33

VI. Catching Up with the West 39

VII. Who Rules Modern Japan? 45

VIII. Creating a Modern Empire 53

IX. Japan and the First World War 59

X. Go Liberal, Go Fascist? 65

XI. The Shadow Deepens 73

XII. War with China 83

XIII. Shadow Over Asia 91

Suggested Reading 95

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I. The Shadow

On the morning of September 27, 1940 the cables hummed with news of a momentous ceremony. Japanese diplomats in Berlin had signed a military pact with Germany and Italy. That evening in Tokyo the Japanese people received a message from Emperor Hirohito. In their newspapers they read: “We are deeply gratified that a pact has been concluded between these three powers.” The Emperor had spoken. A new alliance had been formed. And a lengthening shadow was spreading over Asia.

TEN YEARS AGO AND NOW

The shadow had first been cast on another September day nearly ten years before, when a railway explosion at Mukden had served as an excuse for the Japanese military to take over Manchuria. As we look back now with the advantage of hindsight, that day--September 18, 1931--looms up as an important milestone. For Japan’s seizure of Manchuria ended one historic era, and began another. It abruptly broke up the period of comparative peace that had succeeded the first World War. And it ushered in our present period of strife and unsettlement. Its indirect effects on European developments were also very great. We know that Japan’s defiance lowered the prestige and authority of the League of Nations. It showed how hard it was to secure international cooperation strong enough to check determined aggression. Japan’s example undoubtedly influenced Mussolini and Hitler in the bold moves they made later on in Europe.

After 1935 German and Italian expansion in Europe paralleled Japan’s drive in the Far East. All of these movements steadily widened their scope. Increasingly these three powers played into one another’s hands, and helped one another’s advance. The anti-Comintern pact of November 1936 drew them closer together. But they were not formally allied until September 27, 1940, when Japan signed the military pact with the Axis powers.

This pact had startling implications. True, Germany and Italy were separated from Japan by vast distances. As long as Britain controlled the seas, the new allies could not actually join military forces. But Germany had only to put pressure on the French authorities at Vichy in order to help Japan win control over Indo-China. An Axis break-through in the Mediterranean, moreover, could swiftly bring her much greater aid.

TOWARD A “NEW ORDER”

It was this possibility that made Japan’s aims, as outlined in the alliance, so significant. Berlin and Rome waved Japan ahead toward the conquest of “Greater East Asia.” Until 1940 Tokyo’s official claims had reached out only to Manchuria and China. But the new term brought southeast Asia into the picture as well. This area would certainly include Indo-China, Siam, Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. On its outskirts lie Australia, New Zealand and India. By formally announcing “Greater East Asia” as Tokyo’s sphere of influence, the Axis-Japan pact served as a blueprint of the Far Eastern sector of the world order which the Axis alliance hoped to establish.

WHAT IS “GREATER EAST ASIA”?

The new allies were seeking control over three continents. Germany and Italy were bidding for domination over Europe, Africa and the Near East, creating new and urgent problems for us. Tokyo’s bid for supremacy in “Greater East Asia” raised problems which were just as great. To many of us these problems seemed far away--much more remote than those of Europe, to which we are bound by so many close ties. Yet we know now that we should be making a mistake if we tried to close our eyes to them.

More than one billion people, or half the earth’s population, live in the area embraced by “Greater East Asia.” It is thus one of the most populous regions of the globe. Its territorial spread is equally large. Its outside limits range from northern Japan to Australia, and from China and India to New Zealand. The whole North and South American continents, excluding Canada, could be fitted comfortably into this vast territory.

It is, besides, an area of great contrasts--greater, probably, than in any other region of the world. In a score of different localities conditions vary widely--climate, people, language, religion, economic life, government. Coolies working in Korean rice fields are a far cry from English-speaking Australian sheep ranchers, peasants in the remote interior of China from Malayan tin miners or East Indian rubber planters, Indian bazaars under a burning sun from Manchurian cities deep in their winter snows.

A COLONIAL REGION

Another feature of this region became especially important after Germany had conquered several European powers with Far Eastern possessions. For eastern Asia is one of the greatest colonial areas of the world, not even excepting Africa. From Korea to India runs a continuous chain of Japanese, French, American, Dutch and British holdings. Only Japan in the north, and Australia and New Zealand in the south, may be counted as fully independent countries. So this region is the scene not only of imperial rivalries, but of struggles for independence on the part of native peoples.

Thus many factors enter into the international developments affecting this region. Countless threads of policy connect it with Europe. They run to Berlin, and are woven into Hitler’s plans; to London, where they tie in with the problem of what naval and air forces the British can spare for the Far East; to Vichy, and the attitude of the French Government there; and to the refugee Netherlands authorities in Britain taking counsel on the fate of their colonies. Moscow is caught up in this diplomatic network, and so is Washington--their moves can exert decisive influence on the course of events.

JAPAN PULLS THE STRINGS

Yet the main moving force in Far Eastern developments is Japan. In fact, Japan has been pulling the strings ever since September 18, 1931. The challenge to the _status quo_ in East Asia proceeds from Tokyo, just as in Europe it proceeds from Berlin. Like Germany, but in even greater measure, Japan has the strategic advantage of a central position. She need not take too seriously the protests of European powers halfway across the globe, and she is well aware that the main centers of strength in the United States and the Soviet Union are almost equally distant. Only Japan, of the major powers, has her home bases wholly within the Far Eastern region.

And so today we are forced to think more and more about Japan. In large part we are concerned with the immediate present. We want to know what Japan is doing, and what she intends to do. Yet we can understand her present foreign policy and form some idea of her probable future moves only if we know something of her past as well. We must seek out the forces that have shaped modern Japan.

So in this book we shall go back to the legendary traditions of the Japanese nation, today being revived by Japanese patriots and preached as a state religion. We shall see how the belief in hereditary power as the privilege of the few has been strong in Japan from the earliest times, resisting the influence of democratic ideas from both China and the West; how even when Japan set up a constitutional government, the seats of ancient privilege were preserved; and how Japan, with her military leaders in the saddle, finally set out on the road to Empire.

II. Introducing Imperial Japan

Japan proper, consisting of four closely connected islands, has often been compared to the British Isles. A map of the Eurasian continent shows the similarity of their geographical position. Japan’s island chain is much longer, but it clings to the Asiatic mainland very much as the British Isles cling to the European mainland. The Straits of Tsushima take the place of the English Channel.

Actually, however, Japan is much farther from the mainland than Britain, even in the narrow waters of Tsushima. The steamer from Shimonoseki takes nearly eight hours in crossing over to Fusan, on the tip of the Korean peninsula. This fact has had important historical results. The stretch of water has been wide enough to make invasion difficult--at least until modern times. Yet it has not been so wide as to bar cultural exchanges with the mainland.

JAPAN AND THE ASIATIC MAINLAND

During historic times, for roughly 2,000 years, Japan was never successfully invaded. In 1066 William the Conqueror successfully invaded England. But two centuries later, in 1274 and 1281, Kublai Khan’s Mongol-Chinese armies twice failed to conquer Japan. For long periods, when Japan’s rulers so wished, they were able to isolate their country more or less completely from the Asiatic mainland.

On the other hand, Japan was close enough to the continent to benefit from the earlier growth of civilization there. From the very beginning of Japanese national life, we can trace significant advances to the coming of peoples and cultures from the Korean peninsula. At times, notably in the seventh and eighth centuries, the flood of cultural influences from China almost swamped Japan and threatened to sweep away her native institutions. During the past century Western influence has caused equally great changes in Japanese life. Each time, however, a solid core of Japanese tradition resisted destruction, and shaped the new elements into a social pattern characteristically Japanese.

JAPAN’S ISLAND HOME

Many local features of Japan’s island home are as important as its geographical position. Its natural beauties have fed the highly developed aesthetic sense of the Japanese people. No one who has traveled the Inland Sea can forget its sparkling waters, or the lovely islands which dot its surface. The majestic beauty of Mt. Fuji is world famous. Hallowed associations enhance its snow-capped splendor for the Japanese.

Not all characteristics of the group of Japanese islands are so favorable. Many of its mountains are volcanic in origin. Several volcanoes are still active. Earthquakes occur frequently. (The disastrous earthquake of 1923, with over 150,000 dead and injured, is still fresh in our memories.) Typhoons, sweeping in from the sea in destructive assault, are also common. So nature contributes an element of insecurity to the life of the Japanese, offsetting the protection their isolation gives them.

Today other natural features give rise to a more serious insecurity. Japan’s territory is small, barely the size of California, the population is large and prolific. Four-fifths of the islands are so mountainous that they are useless for the intensive rice cultivation which is the principal Japanese agricultural pursuit. In recent times, when modern industry became necessary, the Japanese islands were found to lack most minerals. Water power is abundant, and can be harnessed to produce electricity. There are considerable reserves of coal, though not of good coking quality. But there is little iron, and even less of the minor but still important metals. To these factors, which have not prevented the Japanese from becoming an industrial nation, we shall have to return later on.

WHO ARE THE JAPANESE?

Like all modern peoples, the Japanese of today are a mixed race. In prehistoric times one migrant people after another overran the islands. The ocean set a barrier to further migration. So the invaders had to settle down, either exterminating the people already there or else intermarrying with them.

The last invasions must have occurred early in the Christian era. Scholars are not agreed on the exact racial proportions of the groups which mingled to form the modern Japanese people. The basic stock is probably Mongolian, the result of migrations through Korea from the north Asiatic continent. There is apparently a southern admixture, coming from either southeast China or Malaysia. Many of these groups were late invaders of the islands. They found there an Ainu people, possibly of Caucasian racial origin. Ainu remnants still survive in Japan, but most of them have been absorbed or exterminated in the course of centuries of warfare.

Three main racial elements thus entered into the making of the Japanese people. To the Mongol strain is undoubtedly due the warlike spirit of the Japanese, while from southeast Asia comes a mythology that has been interwoven with Japan’s political institutions. Later, there were also many Chinese and Korean immigrants. By the end of the seventh century, according to one source, more than one-third of Japan’s noble families claimed Chinese or Korean descent.

EARLY JAPANESE INSTITUTIONS

To understand modern Japan, we need to study the past even more than in the case of most Western nations. For survivals of ancient traditions play a large part in Japan’s national life today. These beliefs and practices can be traced back for nearly two thousand years. What were these institutions like in their earliest form?

Historians give only a partial answer to this question. The latest island invaders, who became the dominant Japanese, were a group of clans or tribes. Leadership in these clans was hereditary. The clan elder was both chieftain and high priest. He supervised or performed sacrifices to the clan god, who was usually held to be his direct ancestor. All clansmen were supposedly united by blood ties to the clan elder, and thus shared in the divine descent.

“THE WAY OF THE GODS”

Societies ruled by a priest-king, usually called “theocracies,” have existed in many parts of the world. In Japan, however, theocracy grew all the stronger because of a mythological tradition, later called Shinto, or “Way of the Gods,” centering about a Sun Goddess (Amaterasu). There were many aspects to Shinto, including an early nature worship. But its main feature came to be the story of the Sun Goddess, whose descendants were the Japanese people. Early in their history the rulers of Japan raised this myth to the dignity of a state cult. The chieftain of the Yamato clan, the strongest of all, claimed direct descent from the Sun Goddess. This claim was a very real thing in Japan. It was taken much more literally than our vaguer Western idea of “the divine right of kings,” which persisted until the eighteenth century in Europe.

The clansmen were aristocrats who handed on their privileges from father to son, and to whom war was second nature. But agriculture, in the shape of the cultivation of rice, was already a cornerstone in the economy of this early Japanese society. Under the clansmen were “guilds” of farmers and artisans, who did most of the productive work. Membership in these producing units also passed from father to son. These serfs, as well as a smaller number of actual slaves, were made up largely of war captives, conquered natives, or immigrants from Korea.

The chief ideas of this primitive Shinto society are quite clear. There was a strong emphasis on the hereditary principle. The idea of an aristocracy of the blood was strengthened by the idea of descent from the gods. Government was by men, not by law. The clan or group, not the individual, was important. The mass of the people lived to serve their rulers. We shall see how these primitive ideas--so like the totalitarian ideas of today--have influenced Japanese history through the centuries.

BEGINNINGS OF A NATION-STATE

At first the invading clans were not unified. There was little centralized government. The Yamato chieftain had only a shadowy authority over the other clans. He was “first among equals,” rather than an overlord. He controlled directly the territory held by his own clan, but not the lands of other clans. Nor did his religious authority extend far beyond his own clan.

During the first four or five centuries of the Christian era this picture was steadily changing. Most of central and western Japan was conquered and occupied as the result of a long series of wars. The power of the Yamato clan was growing. Its chieftain was becoming the ruler of a centralized state. His position was approaching that of a king. Lesser leaders were being attached to this “Emperor,” and were assuming the role of ministers at the “court.”

In other ways, too, the various clans were merging into a centralized state. The Emperor, as the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, came to be recognized as divine ruler of the whole Japanese people. More and more the Japanese thought of themselves as a single patriarchal family, headed by “the Sovereign that is a manifest God.” Ancestors of the other clan leaders, also divine, were brought into relation with those of the Emperor, but in subordinate rank. The strongest clans were able to claim descent from deities closely associated with the Sun Goddess.

CONQUESTS IN KOREA

These political and religious changes were the outward signs of an underlying movement of growth and expansion. A larger and larger area of the islands was being occupied. The population was growing, and additional economic units, or “guilds,” were being formed. Japanese armies were fighting in Korea, where they dominated the southern region of the peninsula for long periods. Through this contact with the mainland, a stream of Korean immigrants, and even some Chinese, flowed into Japan. Many of them were educated scribes, Buddhist priests or expert artisans. By the fifth century the Japanese had learned the rudiments of Chinese writing, and in the sixth century Buddhism was officially introduced from Korea. The wealth of Chinese civilization was thus opened up to the Japanese people.

THE OLD ORDER BREAKS DOWN

By the sixth century, Japan faced new and difficult problems. Old forms of government were breaking down. The simple clan rule, based on blood ties, was being upset by migrations within, and immigration from without. New leaders were faking their family trees, in order to claim divine descent. The clan chieftains found their priestly control over the people slipping, and had to try the use of political and military power instead.

Special difficulties arose when new areas were conquered, or large numbers of immigrants arrived. There were disputes between clans, some of which favored “guilds” and some a freer order of serfs. The Imperial clan proved able to get the richest of the new areas, and to extend the lands and increase the people under its control. But this did not settle the problem. For the leading clans tried to control the Emperor, and fought over rival claimants to the throne.

These bitter quarrels threatened to tear the new state apart. A more effective centralization, both of economic and political power, had obviously become necessary. The groundwork had been laid, and the times called for a drastic change. The model was sought in China, then flourishing under the T’ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.).

III. Imitating the Chinese

One of the most dramatic episodes of modern history has been Japan’s adoption of Western institutions and techniques. But the interesting thing is that such wholesale borrowings were not new in the history of Japan. More than a thousand years earlier she had drawn similarly on Chinese civilization. That earlier period, moreover, was akin to the later in one significant respect--the old Japanese ways persisted under the new shell. The changes were only skin-deep. And the more important beliefs and practices that featured the early clan society we have been studying continued to govern Japanese behavior.

Japan’s contacts with China had begun well before the seventh century, the period when they became so marked. At first these contacts had been only secondhand, through Korea. Direct relations with China had been established early in the fifth century, but had remained unofficial. The first official Japanese envoy was sent to the Sui Dynasty in 607 A.D., and a second embassy followed in 608. In the two centuries after 630, no less than twelve Japanese embassies visited the T’ang court at Ch’ang-an, located on the site of the modern city of Sian (see map opposite). These two hundred years were China’s golden age, when dazzling Ch’ang-an was the world’s foremost civilized center. Japanese monks and scholars accompanied the embassies, often remaining in China for long periods of study. They brought back to Japan a thorough knowledge of Chinese culture--much as Japanese students have returned from Western countries with new knowledge and skills during the past eighty years or so.

CHINA BECOMES THE “GLASS OF FASHION”

Chinese civilization, during the seventh and eighth centuries, was transplanted to Japan on a vast scale. Nara, the new Japanese capital (see map opposite), was built on the lavish model of Ch’ang-an. Court society became highly sophisticated. The ability to write a good Chinese hand, or turn a Chinese verse, was the indispensable equipment of an educated man. The first national histories of Japan were written--most of them in the Chinese language. Buddhism flourished. Japanese artistic skill expressed itself in masterpieces of sculpture and architecture, modeled on T’ang examples but individual in genius and execution. Native Japanese poetry flowered and, in general, this was the classic age of Japanese culture.