Season 15, Episode 12: The War At Home
There is a general phenomenon within many historical empires in which the policies used to govern distant conquered lands frequently migrate to the home provinces, where they are often deployed against the principle citizens of the empire themselves. To what degree this was already occurring in Japan before the Showa Period is debatable but the Imperial Japanese Army’s statebuilding practices in Manchukuo arrived in the home islands in 1938 in the form of the State General Mobilization Law. To understand both this law and its effect on everyday Japanese citizens, we must first look at the process of statecraft in Manchukuo, beginning in 1932.
Aisin-Gioro Puyi was not happy when he was informed that the State of Manchuria, over which he had been promised to be made a royal sovereign, was, in fact, going to be organized as a republic with him acting in the role of chief executive. However, two years of fighting an active Chinese insurgency in northeast China eventually convinced his handlers in the Imperial Japanese Army that Manchukuo needed a firmer hand in the form of a more familiar type of government. It was also clear by 1934 that the more liberal world powers were not fooled by the Japanese government’s propaganda that Manchukuo would be a democratically-organized state with all the modern liberal trappings of governance. They may as well just call it what it actually was. On March 1, 1934, after some reorganization of the proposed government structure, Puyi was declared the official sovereign of the State of Manchuria. To assist in his governance, a Privy Council was formed, along with a General Affairs State Council, which functioned as a sort of cabinet of ministers. Every minister appointed to this council was a local - all Han or Manchu who were longtime residents of northeast China. However, this was something of a smokescreen for legitimacy; every vice-minister was Japanese and was appointed directly at the discretion of the Kwantung Army.
The commander-in-chief of the Kwantung Army was made to serve simultaneously as the ambassador representing Manchukuo. In addition to his dual responsibilities, he also had veto power over Puyi’s decisions. This last point was an especially bitter pill for Puyi, who managed to convince his Japanese patrons to grant him the title of emperor, which they grudgingly accepted. However, they insisted that he was not an emperor in the same vein as the Japanese emperor, who was his rightful overlord and sovereign.
The Kwantung Army proceeded to take over pretty much every aspect of day-to-day management in Manchukuo, particularly its economic development. Their primary objective was to transform this rural, agrarian region into an industrial powerhouse capable of producing the raw materials which would be needed in future wars. The objective of autarky - a self-sustained and self-reliant national economy - was always front and center. In the first few years, the army forbade the involvement of zaibatsu conglomerates, who were seen by ultranationalist elements as part of the corruption which was hindering Japan’s natural ascendancy as the rightful rulers over all east Asia. Thus the focus was on building industries which were useful for supplying materiel to the empire’s armed forces, rather than the creation of profitable goods.
However, the lack of private capital involvement left the government footing the bill for factories, material extraction, and labor. Recognizing that they would need some specialized political and economic assistance, the Kwantung Army looked to a rising star in Japan’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry named Kishi Nobusuke. They liked the way he thought.
In the course of his employment with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Kishi Nobusuke had traveled the world learning about the economic and industrial systems of other nations and returned to Japan singing the praises of those nations in which the state directed the course of the economy, a system known as central planning. In more recent years, he had been singing the praises of Nazi Germany, suggesting that Japan should follow their example and seize private industry in order to repurpose their productivity toward the objectives of the state. In 1935 the Kwantung Army leadership appointed him as Manchukuo’s Vice Minister of Industrial Development and gave him extreme latitude in his policies.
In 1936, Nobusuke authored a five-year plan for Manchukuo which had striking similarities to the five-year plan which Joseph Stalin had implemented in the Soviet Union six years earlier. The objectives of both plans were roughly the same; a rapid establishment of an industrialized economy which could produce all the necessary resources to make war like coal, electricity, and steel. To accelerate this plan, he allowed the zaibatsu conglomerates to invest in Manchukuo’s industrialization through the creation of several companies which were both publicly and privately owned. These companies attracted massive investments from zaibatsu supporters, and Nobusuke helped them to maximize profitability by suppressing wages well below what a worker would need as a living wage.
In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began and in the name of supporting the war effort, Kishi Nobusuke authorized drafting large numbers of local subjects as slave labor, arguing that this war represented a national emergency and that this measure was necessary to ensure that the five-year plan stayed on track and returns guaranteed for private investors. This monstrous policy would stay in place until 1944, and would force around one point five million Chinese workers into slavery every year it was enforced.
Kishi Nobusuke’s own words from the time indicate that he thought very little of the majority Chinese inhabitants of northeast China, frequently referring to them as lawless bandits who were incapable of self-governance. Upon Manchukuo’s inception in 1931, efforts had been made to establish a modern legal system but in 1937, the courts, the police, and the law itself became nothing more than tools of authoritarian oppression. Police, who were generally but not always Japanese, were permitted to arrest anyone without a charge, which they did frequently for minor and imagined offenses. The suitably vague crime of “undermining the state” became an especially popular accusation. The local population had been impoverished by decades of war and those accused of crimes were too numerous to imprison, with all the resources available being used for industrialization. Thus, corporal punishments became standard, typically public flogging but also including death sentences. The Japanese laws covering thought crimes were imported wholesale, and the expression of certain forbidden ideas landed many unfortunate residents of occupied northeast China on death row.
The supreme court of Manchukuo was designed with the appearance of a traditional east Asian court with some modern adjustments, and each individual court was staffed by two senior judges, who were both Chinese, and two junior justices, who were both Japanese. As you might guess, given the inverse relationship between Ministers and Vice Ministers which we discussed earlier, these titles were meant to merely give an appearance of Chinese seniority within the justice system. The Japanese “junior” judges actually had the final word in deliberations behind closed doors while the Chinese “senior” justices were really more like props than jurists. The Japanese justices themselves were a mixture of Pan-Asian idealists and corrupt opportunists. By 1937, most of the idealists had either left their judicial positions and returned to Japan or become corrupt opportunists themselves.
While the common people of Manchukuo were crushed under the weight of legalized repression and arbitrary punishments, Kishi Nobusuke himself was having the time of his life. When he was not busy organizing slave labor or appointing cronies to vacant seats in the judiciary, he was spending lavishly on his own holy trinity of personal entertainment: gambling, drinking, and womanizing. Practically every night he was hitting the town, throwing down large sums of money in gambling halls while getting trashed on alcohol and taking a different woman home every night, often a prostitute. How could he afford his playboy lifestyle? The answer is… corruption. He controlled vast sums of money because of his role as Manchukuo’s Minister of Industrial Development and he used some of that money investing in the local opium trade, which gave him massive returns since the addictive drug was widely used regardless of legality throughout northeast China and much of its surrounding regions. In 1939, he returned to Japan, but before doing so he advised his co-workers on the proper methods for laundering money from illegal enterprises.
A few years before his return to the home islands, the Japanese government was in the midst of a dramatic transition. In 1937, before the outbreak of war with China, Konoe Fumimaro had been selected as the new prime minister. Politically speaking, Fumimaro could be comfortably described as a fascist. A longtime prominent member of the House of Peers, he had helped to disempower the lower house of the Imperial Diet and the political parties who vied for its control. Shortly before his elevation to the premiership, he had attended a costume party dressed unironically as Adolf Hitler. At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, he organized the Liaison Conference, which was a council composed of civilian leaders like himself and military high command. Their purpose was to oversee the prosecution of the war with China, but the military members of the conference outnumbered the civilian members and their decisions were made via voting, which meant that the military members could easily continue dictating policy and the civilian councillors were little more than a rubber stamp.
Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro had big plans for Japan. In October of 1937, he gathered representatives from 74 nationalist organizations across the country and informed them that he was merging their organizations into something called “The Central League of the Spiritual Mobilization Movement.” Under the joint supervision of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Home Affairs, the purpose of this newly-amalgamated group was to rally support for the Imperial Japanese Army in the war against China.
October of 1937 also saw the founding of the Dai Nippon Sekisei-kai, or “Great Japan Youth Party.” The official purpose of this organization was to teach the youth of Japan critical wilderness survival skills, pass on cultural traditions, and give them basic weapons training. The founder of the Dai Nippon Sekisei-kai was Hashimoto Kingoro, who in many ways has been here the whole time. In addition to his participation in the March Incident, an attempted coup in 1931 which we discussed in Episode 5: “The League of Blood,” he had also participated in the later October Incident which we also discussed in that episode, and in December of 1937 would take part in the Panay Incident, in which the USS Panay river gunship was sunk by Japanese warplanes while traversing the Yangtze River.
The Great Japan Youth Party may have had an external appearance similar to the Boy Scouts of America, but in reality Hashimoto Kingoro specifically created it in imitation of the Hitler Youth. His larger goal in the creation of this scouting group was to indoctrinate Japan’s youth into militarism, emperor worship, and ultranationalism.
As the Second Sino-Japanese War bogged down into a grinding stalemate, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro was tasked with finding a way to break through that standoff. In April of 1938, he pushed a bill through the Imperial Diet which was designed to reorganize Japan’s society, economy, and resources into directly supporting the war effort in China. The bill was called “Kokka Sōdōin Hō,” or the “State General Mobilization Law.” This gave the government in Tokyo a similar level of control over the home economy which the colonial administrators in Manchukuo already enjoyed. However, knowing that the Japanese people would not respond well to being drafted as slave labor, other measures were put in place to increase their productivity. Unemployed men and women were drafted into jobs or, in the case of some of the men, sent to the front. Companies were forcibly restructured to give the unions who worked for them a greater say in how things were run. Dividend payments to shareholders were capped to ensure that profits flowed toward workers through productivity bonuses and other incentives. However, this came with strings for the unions; the government would now have a greater say in their decisions and organizations.
However, in spite of the later benefits which Japanese workers would enjoy, the State General Mobilization Law was wildly unpopular while it was still being drafted in the lower house of the Diet. The control it gave to the Prime Minister and his cabinet was far-reaching and, in the opinion of much of the general public, outright unconstitutional. In addition to its alteration of the workforce and economy, it allowed the government to set fixed prices, ration goods, and brought the independent news media under their direct control. Of the fifty articles it contained, eighteen were dedicated to establishing punishments for anyone who violated this law. Konoe Fumimaro was able to get it passed with his personal assurance that it was only being invoked for the present crisis and would be rescinded when that crisis had passed. It was given the emperor’s approval and official acceptance as national law on April 1, 1938.
The effects of the General Mobilization Law were widespread and not always in line with what its authors intended. In addition to drafting over one and a half million workers during the seven years it was in place, the Ministry of Welfare, which had been thus empowered by the law, also reclassified nearly five million already-employed workers as draftees. While draftees enjoyed the benefit of guaranteed work, they had no say in regards to the work they were assigned to and, as an added bonus, were forbidden from quitting these jobs. It was comparable to slavery, though its participants were, at least, being paid.
During the course of the enforcement of the General Mobilization Law, annual consumer expenditures within Japan dropped by several billion yen. Meanwhile, military spending would continue to rise, especially after 1941, when a certain other world power was drawn into the fighting of the second world war. The objective of transforming Japan into a total war economy devoted solely to making further conquests possible, promoted by Kanji Ishiwara and other prominent ultra-nationalists within and outside of the military, was coming closer to being a reality. The Central League of the Spiritual Mobilization Movement, hereafter called the “National Spiritual Mobilization Movement,” was strengthened in order to ensure that every Japanese citizen remained suitably patriotic and productive.
The “National Spiritual Mobilization Movement” first created public service programs which were meant to recruit inactive members of Japanese society into useful work, but after 1939 would, along with several other government organs, create propaganda via public rallies, radio programs, and even curricula for tonarigumi, which were neighborhood associations.
Descending from neighborhood mutual aid associations which were active during the Edo Period, tonarigumi had been, for many decades, unofficial groups of neighbors, usually about ten to fifteen each, who worked together toward various broad objectives, kind of like a neighborhood watch mixed with some disaster-relief mutual aid. They were instrumental in the relief work after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but many also participated in the pogroms that followed which targeted resident Koreans, Chinese, and leftist political activists.
In September of 1940, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro officially formalized the tonarigumi, essentially drafting these neighborhood leaders into tasks like firefighting, distributing rationed goods, selling government bonds, and reading the latest propaganda to the neighborhood they now officially had charge over. They informed the Tokko, the secret police, whenever they became suspicious that any of their neighbors were being unpatriotic.
Tonarigumi were drafted into this service everywhere that they already existed, and new tonarigumi were organized throughout the empire of Japan within their various colonial possessions. With a network of civilian propagandists-slash-informers established, the Tokko now had plenty of thought policing to keep themselves busy as they interrogated anyone suspected of thinking thoughts that threatened Japan’s precious Kokutai.
Thus, by the end of the 1930s Japan’s descent into an authoritarian police state was, by all appearances, practically complete. The tactics used to pacify and terrorize the discontented populace of Manchukuo and occupied China had been brought to the home provinces and applied to the population at large. Rather than inciting an insurrection among the Japanese populace, instead most of the citizens became, broadly, eager to do their part to ensure that the crisis passed as soon as possible. The National Spiritual Mobilization Movement and Great Japan Youth Party served to inject a healthy dose of martial spirit via their propaganda, the State General Mobilization Law forced the unemployed into permanent jobs and the tonarigumi reported anyone who complained to the Tokko as a likely communist. A looming question which haunted Japanese leadership, however, was whether all this effort would be enough to tip the scales in their favor during the ongoing war with China.
By 1940, forward momentum in that war had essentially ceased. The Battle of Khalkin Gol against the Red Army of Soviet Russia had been effectively repulsed and the empire was running short on the critical resources needed to win the Second Sino-Japanese War. Keenly aware of how important such resources had been for the primary belligerents in the first world war, many of the top brass of the Japanese military believed that it would soon become necessary to take what resources they needed from neighboring nations, even if that meant opening a new front in the war which they were already having great difficulty in bringing to a conclusion. Next time, we will discuss the developing rivalry between Japan and the United States as both powers sought control over vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean.