Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Goto-Jones

Author:Christopher Goto-Jones [Goto-Jones, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199235698
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Early Shôwa and war in the Pacific

Following the collapse of the New York Stock Market in 1929, economic depression swept the globe. Japan took the yen off the gold standard in 1931 and watched its value slump by 50% against the dollar. Unemployment rose dramatically, quickly reaching over 20%. In the urban centres, where the modern life of Taishô had seemed so exciting, the darker underside of the modern condition became readily apparent. Intellectuals started to write about the crisis of capitalism and the angst of modern life. Despite being illegal after the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, the communist movement simmered in the universities. The emblems of urban chic – the moga waitresses and shop attendants – gradually became seen as euphemisms for prostitutes in the popular imagination. Modernity began to look like an infection that threatened the soul and even the wellbeing of Japan, rather than a material boon. The people of Japan, already struggling in the late 1920s, turned their frustrations against the political parties, accusing them of being the ‘running dogs of capitalism’. Clandestine political movements began to agitate.

The early 1930s saw political violence rise to an all-time high, and a number of commentators have referred to it as the period of ‘government by assassination’. The first victim was Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi, who was shot in Tokyo Station by a member of an ultranationalist group in 1930, following his failure to secure a more equal naval treaty with the British and Americans at the London Naval Conference earlier that year. In the following year, government authorities discovered and thwarted two separate plots for a coup d’état. In 1932, the next prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated by a clandestine group of naval officers after he failed to support actions by the Imperial Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This series of events at the start of the 1930s effectively ended parliamentary rule and marked the move towards greater military control of governance. Whilst large sections of the population reacted with horror to these developments, the military could count on significant support particularly in rural areas. The promise of imperial greatness, of a return to the glories of Meiji, provided an enticing distraction from the problems of the time.

Meanwhile, the military itself had also grown factional and restive. In particular, the Kwantung Army, which had been created in 1906 to protect Japan’s interests in Manchuria, began to agitate for action. The commander in the field, Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, had a millenarian vision of the coming of the ‘final war’ in which the nations of the world would be punished for the moral corruptions of modernity. His solution was to propose that Japan should take over Manchuria and use it as a social laboratory to test new and better forms of organization; he wanted to forge a new post-capitalist society based on non-selfish principles. His motivation was largely Buddhist rather than Communist. To this end, without orders from Tokyo, the Kwantung Army orchestrated an attack on the Manchurian railway, which they were supposed to be guarding.

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