Under this model, the Cabinet is essentially independent of the rest of the system, and effective government depends on the cooperative interaction of a small group of men - civilian ministers, led by the Prime Minister, and military ministers, who are not subject to the Prime Minister. This is a system designed to preserve the power and autonomy of an "oligarch group," and the primacy of civilian or military sectors of government is not determined - it's for those men themselves to determine. As you read about Japan's slide towards militarism from 1931 on, the largely independent role of the Army and Navy are important to understand - they were never under the full control of the Prime Minister.

This tension in governance did not have particularly negative effects on Japan during the 1920s, a period in which democratic government flourished, and a liberal spirit dominated Japanese domestic politics. Political parties were strong in the Japanese Diet and cabinets were formed largely of the leaders of popularly elected parliamentary majority parties. But even throughout this period, the colonial expansion of Japan empowered the military in dangerous ways. Begun with the seizure of Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese Was of 1894-95, Japan's empire was extended in 1910 when Korea, which Japan had declared a "protectorate," under its virtual control, was dissolved as a country and annexed to Japan as the colony of Choson, no longer allowed even a semblance of autonomy. Subsequently, Japan used privileges on the Chinese mainland that it had gained through its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 to expand its military presence in Manchuria, stationing a large and well-trained forced known as the Kwantung Army there. It was, in fact, the Kwantung Army that precipitated Japan's turn away from democracy and towards the fascist-influenced military state that fought World War II.

What made Japan vulnerable to being swayed by aggressive but unauthorized initiatives taken by its colonial military was the arrival of the Great Depression in Japan in 1929. The booming modernization and liberalization of Japan in the 1920s had not taken place without significant cultural tensions, reminiscent of the samurai-merchant tensions of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. Rising standards of living and the benefits of industrialization and consumer-oriented production had left conservatives, who were concerned that Japan was forsaking its national identity and by imitating the cultures of Europe and America, with little opportunity to gain public support. But after 1929, as Japan was hit by widespread market failure and unemployment, it became easier to claim that by aping the cultures of the West, Japan had become vulnerable to the same economic and moral weaknesses that had led Europe first into World War I and then into the Depression. Conservatives began movements to restore reverence for the Emperor, revive Japan's native Shinto religion, and experiment with aspects of Europe's new anti-democratic ideology of fascism, which, in Italy and Germany, appeared to represent a new wave of militaristic Western culture, much better aligned with Japan's own traditions of bushido than liberalism. (Your homework assignment for this week is designed to let you look more closely at aspects of this emerging nationalist ideology.) Among the targets of popular anger were the huge corporate zaibatsu firms, which the government had patronized and which had fueled the growth of the 1920s, but which were now viewed as institutions designed to create a capitalist class that grew rich by exploiting the common farmer and laborer.

This was the domestic political atmosphere that existed when the junior officer corps in Manchuria staged the Mukden Incident of 1931 and began the process of Japan's invasion of China. Although the attack on the Manchurian armies of Zhang Xueliang (which we studied earlier) were completely unauthorized by the Japanese government, the success of the Kwantung Army was enthusiastically reported and received in Japan, and popular sentiment forced the government to accept the fait accompli of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. This soon led to the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, and the strengthening of a foreign policy which stressed the need for Japan to gain control over East and Southeast Asia as a means of protecting the Pacific regions from further encroachments and pollution from Western imperialist powers. Within Japan, a spate of high profile assassinations in the early '30s - including that of a Prime Minister - by ultra-right wing military and civilian groups created a sense of crisis that increased the leverage of the military. The influence of political parties waned as the military's influence grew; the Diet became largely a rubber stamp for a military-dominated cabinet; and cabinets were appointed "by the Emperor" (in practice on definitive advice of an emerging right-wing political leadership) that included few or no members of the popularly elected legislature. By the time of the Kwantung Army's next major adventure in China - the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which initiated World War II in East Asia - the Japanese public had adopted a deeply nationalistic view of Japanese militarism and was ready to support all-out war, which the government rather easily endorsed.

From the standpoint of the Japanese, the Empire of Japan was both a confirmation of the superior characteristics of Japanese civilization - which became entangled with simple racist views of non-Japanese Asian peoples - and strategic defense against what were viewed as the long-term goals of conquest and subjugation that powers such as America harbored. The Japanese government viewed Chiang Kai-shek's government in China as chiefly an American tool, and it foresaw growing Western presence in a modernized China as a direct threat. Japan saw an alliance with the enemies of America and Britain as in its interest, and this, along with the ideological resonance of fascism with Japanese nationalism, led Japan to join Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy in a "Tripartite Alliance."

Japan's invasion of China was meant as a surgical strike against an ally of the West that stood in the way of the construction of a security sphere for Japan's empire - a defensible perimeter under effective Japanese control that could supply Japan with the natural resources it needed to sustain itself as a world super-power. In the eyes of the Japanese, the goal was not subjugation of China, but the creation of what was called The Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere: a realm free of Western coercion wherein all East Asians could thrive under Japan's protection and guidance. But this moralistic rationalization convinced few in China, where the brutal - sometimes near genocidal - actions of the army were clear evidence of motives that were simply racist and imperialistic. And after initial success in claiming the strategic east coastal areas, the war in China did not go well for Japan. Chiang Kai-shek's unwillingness to surrender and the strategic retreat far inland left Japanese troops bogged down in a war of attrition for eight years, costing it precious military resources.

By 1940, all of Japan was on a war footing, and the government, now led by the Army Minister Tojo Hideki, was preparing for the likelihood of war with the US. From a military point of view, success in a sustained war required continued access to critical resources such as oil and rubber, which Japan needed to procure from places such as Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asia. Although European powers who controlled these areas as colonies (such as Britain in Malaysia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the French in Vietnam) were largely neutralized by the war in Europe that had broken out in 1939, America was at this time itself a colonial power in East Asia, in control of the Philippines and maintaining a substantial Pacific fleet  in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. Fully aware that a war with the US would be terribly difficult to win, the Japanese sent negotiators to Washington to try to reach a diplomatic arrangement with the US that would preserve its access to these resources. However, the Roosevelt administration made Japan's withdrawal from China an absolute precondition, and it became clear to the Japanese government that an American war would be inevitable unless the US was effectively disarmed in the Pacific. This was the background to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

(Left) The Showa Emperor, Hirohito (reigned 1926-1988);  (Center) Wartime Prime Minister Tojo Hideki
(Right) Prime Minister Tojo Hideki (at center), toasting alliance with Nazi Germany

Civilian slaughter after Japan's "Rape of Nanjing," 1937;  The Hiroshima bomb, 1945

Hiroshima