Our national state of affairs has reached an impasse. The critical problems of population and foodstuffs seem all without solution. The only avenue … is boldly to open up Manchuria and Mongolia.
(Kwantung army officer in 1931)1
The issue of the food supply was to prove every bit as incendiary in 1930s Japan as it was in National Socialist Germany. Military and right-wing groups used the need to secure the urban food supply and crisis in the Japanese countryside to justify ever more radical actions, beginning with the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and culminating in the war against Nationalist China in 1937. Finally, the Japanese determination to hold China in the face of American disapproval set them upon a collision course with the United States.
Japan first developed imperial ambitions during the period of the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) when a group of aristocratic modernizers removed the warrior aristocracy from power and ‘restored’ the rule of the Emperor. The Japanese set their sights on the resources of mainland China. Since defeat in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 China had been forced to allow foreigners (including Americans, French, Germans, British and the Japanese) special political and trading concessions in various inland cities and what were known as the treaty ports. After war with China in 1894–95 and Russia in 1904–05 Japan acquired first the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), then Korea and, under the conditions of extraterritoriality, whereby the trading concession areas were outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, Japan stationed a substantial number of troops in China, and established various commercial interests, the most important of which was the leasehold of a stretch of railway in southern Manchuria.2 In 1911 the Qing dynasty collapsed and central government in China disintegrated to be replaced by regional warlords. During the First World War, Japan used the fact that the west was distracted to take advantage of the political instability and obtained ‘exclusive political and trading rights in large parts of China’.3
The German defeat in 1918 came as a shock to a number of Japanese army officers who realized that Germany had lost because it was dependent on outside sources for the resources required to wage total war. This set them thinking about the vulnerability of Japan, which lacked primary resources and needed to import virtually all industrial raw materials. Crucially, Japan was dependent on the United States for one-third of its imports, particularly scrap metal and oil. But Britain, which, like Japan, was an island nation with limited natural resources, had drawn on the resources of its empire in order to win the First World War. It seemed clear to this group of ‘total war officers’ that Japan needed a similar maritime empire which would allow it to establish itself as a powerful world player, independent of the west and the US in particular.4
However, after 1919 the United States tried to rein in Japanese expansionism. In 1921–22 the American government convened the Washington Conference in an effort to restrain Japanese naval expansion. At the Conference they also persuaded the Japanese government to continue to uphold the open-door policy in China, which allowed the western powers equal access to the Chinese treaty ports. In return, America recognized Japan’s special interest in Manchuria. But there was growing dissatisfaction among the Japanese military and political elite with the international status quo. The military were particularly bitter about the limitations the Conference placed on Japan’s ability to arm.5 The American refusal to integrate a racial equality clause into the charter of the League of Nations caused further disquiet, which was intensified by hostile American measures against Japanese immigration in 1924.6 Meanwhile in 1928 the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek had established a government at Nanjing which claimed to rule all of China. While the Nationalists were friendly towards the Americans, who provided them with funding, they became increasingly hostile towards the Japanese.7 In addition, a growing awareness of the problem of rural poverty and anxieties about the country’s ability to produce sufficient food to supply the growing industrial workforce in the towns contributed to a growing sense of national crisis.
Until 1918 agriculture supported Japan’s industrial and economic growth. Agricultural exports generated the foreign exchange needed to finance the import of raw materials. Farmers also supported economic development by paying a heavy cash tax on their goods.8 But the Japanese countryside was plagued by a number of persistent problems which began seriously to hamper agricultural productivity in the 1920s. The concentration of property rights in the hands of a few rich landlords resulted in vast inequalities in wealth. Tenant farmers lacked the resources and motivation to modernize and for some their rent was so unreasonably high that it amounted to more than half their crop. For a sizeable minority, life in the countryside was marked by crippling poverty. Even the standard of living of middling farmers was well below that of the urban population and began to fall ever further behind.9
Modernization meant that Japanese eating habits were changing. Since the Meiji Restoration the government had been encouraging the consumption of milk and meat as a way of transforming Japanese bodies so that they could compete with the, supposedly superior, western physique. As part of the campaign, the public were told that the Emperor enjoyed eating beef.10 But it was not until the inter-war years that meat consumption began to rise, virtually doubling between 1919 and 1937. The annual consumption of 2 kilograms of beef or pork per person was still tiny in comparison with the 50 kilograms eaten by Europeans. But, along with a rise in the consumption of fish, it represented a marked increase in the amount of animal protein in the Japanese diet.11 Most importantly, urban Japanese began to eat more rice. By 1914 all Japanese were eating about a quarter more rice than they had in the 1890s. Then, from 1920, a marked gap began to open up between rural and urban diets. By 1929 city dwellers were eating at least 25 per cent more rice than those living in the countryside.12
The rising demand for rice was augmented by a 30 per cent increase in the population during the inter-war period and Japan looked to its colonies to make up the food deficit.13 When Formosa became a Japanese colony in 1895 Japanese companies moved in and set up sugar plantations, farming organizations disseminated better farming techniques, improved irrigation and introduced Japanese rice varieties. Exports from Formosa to Japan of rice, sugar, tea, tobacco, pigs and poultry increased sixfold between 1897 and 1905.14 Korea also exported rice to Japan. In 1918 wartime inflation meant that the price of rice virtually doubled. When rice riots broke out across the country these were interpreted as a sign that Japan’s run-down agricultural sector simply could not provide enough food for the growing urban population.15 A ‘Rice Production Development Plan’ was implemented to turn the colonies into ‘reserve rice baskets’.16 Rice imports from the colonies which had equalled 5 per cent of the Japanese domestic rice crop in 1915, equalled 20 per cent by 1935.17 The problem of urban hunger had now been successfully exported to the peasants of Korea. Indeed, Japanese food officials and agricultural economists referred to the rice that Korea sent to Japan as ‘starvation exports’. In Korea rice was transformed into a cash crop and the farmers were forced to sell such a large share of their crop that each year ‘spring hunger’ held them in its grip as the food from the previous harvest ran out before the next harvest came in. They survived by gathering wild grasses for food.18 Fifty years later Ahn Juretsu, who grew up in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, was still indignant. ‘Because we were farmers under Japanese government control, the conditions of our lives were so poor, you can’t imagine it. Just like beggars today.’19
If, to the satisfaction of its industrialists, Japan now had plenty of food with which to pacify its urban population, these measures only served to deepen the crisis in the countryside. Cheap colonial rice undercut the price of Japanese rice and further depressed domestic agricultural wages. In 1926, landlords, hit by a fall in the price of rice, began to demand that the imports be stopped.20 The flood of Formosan and Korean rice was followed by the Depression, which pushed down world food prices. By 1931 the value of a bushel of rice, which cost between 20 and 23 yen to produce, had fallen from its 1925 price of 41 yen to 18 yen.21 In addition, the American demand for silk fell dramatically, which impacted adversely on a large number of Japanese farmers for whom sericulture was a vital secondary source of income. Most farmers struggled through the Depression by mixing more barley with their rice, giving up small luxuries such as shop-bought soap and sugar, and cutting back on farm repairs.22 But farm debt increased significantly. Even before the Depression, peasants were spending a worryingly high percentage of their income on food, ranging from 40 to 57 per cent.23 Once the Depression hit, an increasing number of farming families had to buy in food. In the village of Sekishiba, in the north-eastern prefecture of Fukushima, over half the households ran out of food supplies from their own crop in 1932–33. The price they paid for food on the open market was far higher than the price they had received when they sold their crop immediately after the harvest. The only way they could find the money was to borrow, usually from private moneylenders and at devastating rates of interest from 12 to 20 per cent. In 1932 the government came up with the worrying conclusion that the farming debt now amounted to 4.7 billion yen, more than double the value of farm production, or a third of the GNP.24
That farming communities were living on the edge was indicated by the increasing number of villagers who could no longer pay their taxes. Numerous villages fell into arrears with payment of their schoolteachers’ salaries. Farmers avoided attending funerals, or shamefacedly stuffed IOU notes into the hands of the bereaved, promising to make the customary payment ‘when I sell some cocoons, or when the economy gets better’.25 A government survey in July 1932 found that 200,000 children were turning up to school with nothing to eat for lunch.26 One disgruntled farmer commented on his dinner of rice mixed with wheat, chopped yam leaves, and daikon (white radish), ‘wealthy villagers and city people throw these things away, or else feed them to oxen or pigs’.27
In the northern provinces famine took hold. Cold, wet weather in 1934 in the north-eastern area of Tohoku resulted in crop failure. The farmers in the fields threw down their tools in despair as they realized that only a few bundles of grain could be collected from each paddy.28 A Hokkaido farm girl lamented, ‘It is really tragic that we farmers who grow rice are unable to eat it.’ Even the supplies of inferior grains such as millet dried up. Her family survived by ‘eating dried potatoes and herring dregs, which are used for fertiliser’. She and her sister dug up bracken roots, others scraped the soft edible parts from tree bark.29 Infant mortality rates soared, around half a million died, and in order to relieve their families of the burden of feeding them, more than 11,000 girls were sold into prostitution, known as musume jigoku, ‘hell for young women’.30
By the early 1930s a sense of crisis pervaded Japan. The Depression and industrial unemployment, combined with the growing magnitude of the rural problem, fed a general sense of ‘stalemate, confusion and instability’.31 Among right-wing groups the Depression confirmed the need for greater independence from western capitalism. Having learned the lesson of Germany’s weakness during the First World War, the Army Minister Major-General Ugaki Kazunari, leader of the ‘total war officers’ within the armed forces, set up the Cabinet Resources Bureau. In 1931 it concluded that Japan’s economy was woefully inadequate in terms of producing the materials for modern warfare.32 At the same time Nationalist China began to protest at the level of Japanese influence in mainland China by boycotting Japanese goods. Two young officers in the Kwantung army (the Japanese army in China) took matters into their own hands in Manchuria. On the night of 18 September 1931 they planted a bomb on the Japanese-owned stretch of railway, which they then claimed was the work of bandits sponsored by the Chinese regional government. That night Japanese troops began their occupation of Manchuria, which resulted in the creation in 1932 of the puppet state of Manchukuo.33 International disapproval led to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. The army represented Manchuria as a treasure house of resources – gold, coal, livestock, soya beans, cotton. With Manchuria as part of Japan, they could withstand political isolation and the economic threat and military might of other powerful nations.34 A rather romantic 1920s notion of a Japanese empire made up of one national people, all faithful to the Japanese way of life, gave way to a more aggressive vision of an economic bloc, self-sufficient and independent from the increasingly hostile western powers, which was later summed up by the rather mystical idea of a pan-Asian brotherhood or a ‘New Order’ in the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’.35
Those in Japan who favoured the development of democracy, the growth of independent political parties, and the liberal course which would place Japan on the world stage through peaceful trade and economic exchange, were silenced. A series of right-wing terrorist attacks ensured that those who were outspokenly in favour of internationalism lived in a certain degree of fear. Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was assassinated in November 1930 after he signed a naval disarmament treaty in London. Between then and 1936 a series of advocates of a more liberal approach to Japan’s problems were murdered.36
On 15 May 1932 Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by a group of young army and navy officers in an attempted coup. At their trial the assassins invoked the agrarian crisis to justify their actions. One of the soldiers stated that, while farmers made model soldiers, ‘it is extremely dangerous that … [they] should be worried about their starving families when they are at the front exposing themselves to death’. He went on to accuse big businessmen of making fat profits while ‘the young children of the impoverished farmers … attend school without breakfast, and their families subsist on rotten potatoes’.37 The men were treated with conspicuous leniency, and were allowed to use their trial to issue lengthy political statements, which the newspapers reported in full. The trials brought to public attention a number of issues which made up the pattern of crisis but which were not normally presented as part of a whole: ‘the rural crisis, political and ideological corruption, fears of military weakness, Japan’s international standing, and Manchuria’.38 Discussion of them as interlinked problems strengthened the right-wing position advocated by the military. Militaristic nationalism attacked absentee landlords, nouveaux riches businessmen, power-seeking politicians and individualistic youth as representatives of the corrupting westernization of Japanese society. The people were urged to return to a more Japanese austerity, greater obedience to the state and to revive the Japanese military and moral spirit.39
While the extremists did not take over the government, more moderate exponents of their views did gain power. In 1932 parliamentary government was replaced by a cabinet of ‘national unity’ made up of military leaders and bureaucrats. The militaristic nature of Japanese government was reinforced by the fact that both the army and navy ministers in the cabinet were serving officers, and thus their allegiance was to the military rather than the government. In addition, they exercised rights of veto over the membership of the cabinet and could bring down any government which threatened to challenge the power of the military. Moreover, foreign policy was formed not within the cabinet but during Liaison Conferences where the prime minister, foreign, war, army and navy ministers met with the military chiefs of staff, whose power derived from the fact that they were directly answerable to the Emperor. The decision-making process at these conferences followed a distinctively Japanese pattern of lengthy discussion and debate, all carried on using an oblique language which meant that decisions appeared to arise out of the group rather than to emanate from a particular person. The decision was then ratified by a conference with the Emperor when it took on the appearance not only of consensus but of being sacrosanct.40
Each terrorist attack further intimidated the traditional ruling class, and after each of the five attempted coups the government which re-formed was progressively more isolationist. In June 1936 Prince Konoe Fumimaro became prime minister and appointed Hirota Koki as his foreign minister. Profoundly opposed to free trade and industrialization, and aggressive advocates of imperialism, they took Japan down an isolationist path which made war with the west ever more likely.41 An ideological consensus began to emerge among the ruling elite which acknowledged that the only way to fulfil Japan’s destiny would be to slip free of western domination and gain power and influence over east Asia. While the Emperor provided spiritual focus, military expansion was presented as the only way forward.42
Throughout the 1930s the military concentrated on building up a support base within rural society, conducting surveys of village health and addressing rural unemployment with public works schemes. Their concerns were less humanitarian than practical. Large numbers of applicants to the army were failing their physical examinations in the 1930s, and 500 of the soldiers dispatched to China to deal with the ‘Manchurian Incident’ had been pronounced unfit to fight within weeks of their arrival.43 The army wanted to ensure a good supply of healthy recruits and to increase rural productivity in preparation for a possible war. But, when it came to the crunch, the military were adamantly opposed to sacrificing their lion’s share of the budget to rural revitalization programmes. In fact, it was the villages which paid for most of the enormous military budget which the army secured in 1933.44 Militarist and nationalist groups exploited the agrarian crisis to press for policies which pushed Japan towards war.45 But it is unclear how much actual rural support for these groups and their policies there was. Real support was, however, relatively unimportant in securing their political position, given that Japanese politics consisted mainly of manoeuvres between small elite groups.
The countryside fed the growing isolationism and aggressive nationalism of 1930s Japan in a more diffuse way. In the 1930s a repressive ‘collectivist ethic’ dominated social relations and political thinking. Those who advocated democracy laid themselves open to charges of individualistic selfishness. Internationalism and the pursuit of open economic relations with the rest of the world could be dismissed as ‘traitorous self-seeking, disloyalty to the national polity’.46 Western liberalism was un-Japanese and therefore unworthy. This pattern of thought was particularly well entrenched in the villages where ‘families … bred into the personalities of their children a deference to all authoritarian demands to conform to the needs of the community as a whole’.47 Three-quarters of all politically active adults came from this conformist rural background.
Conformism was strengthened by the Rural Revitalization campaign, the government’s remedy for agriculture. There was no question of the campaign embarking on the painful process of restructuring land-ownership and challenge the position of landlords. Instead, farmers were urged to work harder and achieve more with less. Peasants were provided with training and shown more efficient planning and farming techniques. Women were urged to use their time more effectively and to engage in book-keeping, cottage industries and economizing kitchen improvements. Every aspect of daily life was implicated not only in the recovery of the village, but according to the rhetoric, in the economic health of the nation as a whole. These messages were transmitted through a variety of agricultural associations, co-operatives, youth leagues and women’s organizations. Japan in the 1930s was supremely successful at making voluntary membership of an organization virtually compulsory. ‘No one was left out. Not only could everyone be involved in reconstructing the village, but bureaucrats, activists, and, increasingly, rural Japanese themselves, believed that they should be.’48 In this way the countryside was incorporated into a general process of spreading ultranationalism from above. Political parties, unions and religious organizations were either coerced into stating their support for the state or silenced by the police. Conformity was encouraged through education and ‘voluntary’ associations of which virtually everyone was a member. The citizen was redefined as a member of a family which owed its allegiance to the Emperor. Although there were certainly plenty of Japanese who did not share this view of themselves and the nation, to express dissent from this view became increasingly difficult and dangerous.49
By 1937 the resurgence of the industrial economy and a corresponding rise in the price of rice and silk had brought the countryside out of the depths of depression. Now the understanding of the causes of the crisis facing the nation shifted. Withdrawal from the League of Nations over Japan’s annexation of Manchuria, the naval limitations conference of 1936 and the imposition of British and American protectionist trading tariffs in south-east Asia focused attention on Japan’s need to find new markets and develop new territory.50 The Japanese army were made wary by an alliance between Chinese Nationalists and communists against the Japanese in Manchuria. When a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops broke out in the small town of Wanping in July 1937 the Kwantung army took Japan into war with China. Thus, by the time Japan entered the wider international conflict in 1941 it had already been at war with China for four years.
In the Japanese countryside the focus shifted from revitalization to mobilization. The message did not change. The farmers were still urged to work harder and produce more with less. But the peasants were now striving for a stable home front rather than future prosperity. The agricultural associations and co-operatives of the Rural Revitalization campaign facilitated, and even made almost imperceptible, the deeper intrusion of the state into the lives of farmers. These organizations no longer made suggestions – they now determined which crops were grown, allocated fertilizer and collected the harvest for state distribution. The option to ignore or evade social control became less and less possible.51
In the same year that Japan went to war in China, the Ministry of Agriculture adopted an agrarian emigration scheme under the characteristically long-winded title, ‘Plan for the Settlement of One Million Households over Twenty Years’. An increase in landlord–tenant disputes over unfair eviction had given contemporary observers the impression that the agrarian problem was not so much that the countryside could not produce enough food, but that there were too many farmers competing for too little land. Finally the government acknowledged that it was not that the farmers needed to work harder but that a viable farm was the key to agricultural success. A survey by the Ministry of Agriculture worked out that the ideal farm size was a relatively small 1.6 cho (4 acres). According to this calculation, in order to ensure that every farm in Japan was the optimum size, 31 per cent of the farming population would have to leave the land.52 Just as in Germany, the idea developed that the Japanese needed their own Lebensraum. This was to be in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which, like eastern Europe for Germany, was styled as Japan’s equivalent to the American west. Agrarian advocates of the plan argued that, ‘like the colonial days in American history, a new State is in the making, the vast virgin plains, unhampered by tradition, ready to welcome armies of fresh immigrants’.53 While German agronomists claimed that the indigenous Slavs had no right to eastern land as they did not farm it properly, the Japanese simply ignored the presence of Chinese and Korean farmers and projected an image of Manchuria as an empty land. One woman who went to Manchuria in 1931 imagined that it was ‘a limitless snowy plain containing only huts’.54
The suggestion that the social problem of poor tenant farmers could be solved by exporting them to the colonies had been on the political agenda since 1900. In 1904 the Japanese cabinet pronounced that ‘If large numbers of emigrants from our country … can penetrate the [Korean] interior … we will acquire at a single stroke an emigration colony for our excess population and sufficient supplies of foodstuffs.’55 In 1908 the Oriental Development Company was created with the purpose of subsidizing 10,000 Japanese annually to settle in Korea. The plan was not a success. Few farmers signed up for the project and those that did move to Korea often suffered from malnutrition to the point that they were too physically debilitated to work.56 The only settlers who succeeded did so because they acted as landlords and moneylenders, renting out their land to Korean tenants. Korea was a profitable place for entrepreneurs, clerks, shopkeepers and others providing a service to the urban Japanese population but the peninsula was never going to be covered in prosperous Japanese smallholdings.57 Ideas for Japanese settlement in Formosa were equally unrealistic. Japanese sugar companies had little interest in diverting land to settlers when they were making such a good profit using Formosan labourers. Both Korea and Formosa were far more successful as suppliers of food and as markets for Japanese goods.58
These failed attempts to create Japanese farming communities in the colonies did nothing to dampen the fervour for the plan to settle Manchuria in certain sections of Japanese political, military and academic circles. When campaigners managed to persuade the ministry to accept the scheme it was planned to move 1 million farmers, or one-fifth of the 1936 farming population, to China. Those who were targeted to leave were the very poor tenant farmers. If the poor left the villages and their land was redistributed, all Japanese farmers could be transformed into middle-class farmers and social inequalities in the rural areas could be ironed out without affecting the wealthy landlords. Thus, Japanese agriculture would be rehabilitated without disturbing the social order.59
Just as the German General Plan for the East envisaged the creation of a modern but idyllic version of German society, Japan’s plan for Manchuria imagined an idealized agrarian version of Japanese society. The pioneers would live in a network of communities where each peasant would be allocated an equal holding with the same number of livestock. The entire village would work together as a co-operative using the most up-to-date farming techniques. By the end of the twenty years it would take to implement the scheme, 10 per cent of the population of Manchuria would be Japanese. Thus, the colony would have been assimilated into the Japanese polity. At the same time the farmers would double as ‘mainland warriors of the plough’, providing ‘a shield for the nation’ in the face of a possible attack by the Soviets.60
The Japanese plan did not go so far as the German one, in that it did not envisage wholesale extermination of the indigenous population. But the reality that lay behind the idyll was equally brutal and the impact on the Chinese farmers was comparable. The usual Japanese method of obtaining land for the settlers was simply to misclassify it as uncultivated, ignoring the Chinese and Korean peasants’ farms. The farmers were evicted or coerced into ‘selling’ their land for artificially low prices. In 1941 many of them were still waiting for their payments.61 Tsukui Shin’ya, an official who organized forcible land purchases in 1938, later recognized that he had participated in a crime: ‘We trampled underfoot the wishes of farmers who held fast to the land and, choking off their entreaties full of lamentations and kneeling, forced them to sell it. When we thrust on them a dirt-cheap selling price, even if the colonization group resettled the terrain, I was saddened that we would be leaving them to a future of calamity, and I felt that we had committed a crime by our actions.’62 The Chinese twisted the name of the colonial office (kaituoju) and renamed it the ‘office of murders’ (kaidaoju).63
Reality did not, of course, live up to the ideal. Those Japanese settlers who were persuaded by their fellow villagers in Japan to make the journey to China were not pursuing some planner’s dream of an ideal collective society. The idea that the Japanese settlements should function in self-sufficient isolation from Chinese society would have condemned the settlers to wearing home-made woollen clothes, and eating a basic diet of rice mixed with millet, local game and vegetables.64 Instead, they chose to hire Chinese labour to farm the large plots and they grew rice and soya beans as cash crops so that they could pay farmhands and buy in household goods. For the majority of settlers life in Manchuria was unhappy and alienated. The army’s plan that the Japanese settlements should be located in the strategically vulnerable north and east meant that farming was hard and life was brutal. The Japanese villages were surrounded by hostile Chinese and frequently subject to attack by ‘bandits’.65
If the scheme was not an unqualified success in Manchuria, it did little to solve rural problems on the mainland. Settlers tended to come, not from the areas where overpopulation was a problem, but rather from those silk-producing areas which had been worst hit by the Depression.66 By the time the emigration movement was in full swing, industrial expansion was absorbing labour from the farms and, in conjunction with increased conscription due to the war in China, villages were suffering from the new problem of a lack of labour. Urban youths, members of the Patriotic Farm Labour Brigades, had to be brought in to help with planting and harvesting. Increasingly, the pioneer settlers were recruited not from the farms but from youth brigades such as the Volunteer Army of Young Colonists.67 Brides were found for them from among a variety of training institutes which taught young women how to be good wives. Those who hoped to escape from the exigencies of wartime Japan were fed the rhetoric that they would be a comfort and help to their pioneer husbands, while nurturing the future generation of Japanese Manchurians. The reality of life in an isolated village, detested by the indigenous inhabitants, was harsh.68
The eventual fate of the Japanese settlers was tragic. The army made no plans to evacuate them as the Soviet army advanced across Manchuria in August 1945. Many of the men formed a scarecrow contingent of soldiers while the women and children fled, ‘hiding in the mountains during the day, running for their lives at night, carrying small children on their backs, feeding on whatever they could pick in the field, or aided by those Manchurians who remained humane.’69 Kuramoto Kazuko, whose family fled from Manchuria to the house of an aunt in Dairen, recalled that winter of 1945 as ‘a winter of death. It claimed hundreds of lives among the homeless Japanese refugees. They died of cold, hunger, and lack of sanitation … Many hung themselves in the parks … The hills behind the evergreen forest in the Central Park … were now covered by piles of abandoned bodies. Wild dogs fed on them and multiplied fast.’70 Of the 220,000 farmer settlers, around 80,000 died. About 11,000 of them met a violent end at the hands of the avenging Chinese, some committed suicide, and about 67,000 starved to death. The remaining 140,000 traumatized survivors were eventually repatriated to Japan.71
While the settlement of Japanese farmers in Manchuria was under way, the conflict, which the Japanese called the ‘China Incident’ and the Chinese the ‘War of Resistance against Japan’, degenerated into a war of attrition. Japan’s dogged determination to win the war in China placed it in opposition to the western powers of America, Britain and the Netherlands, whose interests were bound up with the fate of the Nationalists, whom they supported.72 In response to Japan’s war on China the Americans had given financial aid to the Nationalist government, hoping that it would be able to at least weaken, if not defeat, the Japanese. The Japanese army’s orgy of rape and massacre in Nanjing in the winter of 1937–38 had severely damaged Japanese relations with the United States. However, the war in China also perversely made Japan even more dependent upon trade with the United States. By 1938 the Japanese were running out of weapons and, more importantly, their stocks of fuel were virtually exhausted. If the United States were not placated by a peace deal in China they might well place an embargo on the scrap metal and oil imports that Japan so badly needed to maintain the war effort.73 However, 62,000 Japanese soldiers had already lost their lives in China and the Japanese military command felt that to withdraw would betray their sacrifice.74
Then, as Germany stormed across western Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, the weakness of the European colonial powers encouraged the Japanese chiefs of staff to think that they could take over the entire south-east Asian treasure house of resources.75 Occupation of the French, British and Dutch colonies in south-east Asia would enable Japan to achieve decisive victory in the Chinese war by cutting off supplies of Indo-Chinese rice to Nationalist China.76 They also set their sights on the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. Expansion into south-east Asia was a gamble but the potential rewards made it seem worth the risk. The Japanese military command felt that this was their only chance to end western dominance and establish their own claim as a great power in east Asia. In September 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, and became an official ally of Germany and Italy. Nevertheless, the military still hoped to secure Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies without drawing the United States into the conflict. However, the army began to follow a circular course of reasoning, which argued that they must prepare for war with America. This meant that they must take over the oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. But if they invaded the Dutch East Indies, this would inevitably lead to war with America. The navy was under no illusions that it could win a protracted war of attrition with the United States. Victory would have to be achieved quickly and in a decisive battle. But having justified their funding with arguments that they were preparing for war with the US they were not in a position to admit this to the army.77
Provoked by Japan’s continued aggression in China in June 1940 the Americans had placed an embargo on exports of scrap metal. A year later, prompted by the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Japanese occupied French Indo-China and the United States cut off their oil supplies. The Japanese political and military leadership overestimated the abilities of their German ally and placed their faith in Germany managing to neutralize both Britain and the Soviet Union. The only way to avoid war with the United States was to capitulate in China, but the military were inexorable in their refusal to back down. The Japanese government had manoeuvred itself into a position where it felt that war with the United States was the only possible course of action. Japan’s military commanders judged correctly that the United States possessed immense resources and could defeat Japan in a long war of attrition. However, unlike the National Socialists who hoped to defeat their enemies, Japan hoped to bring America to the negotiating table. They calculated that the Americans would be unwilling to sacrifice the lives of thousands of young men in the Pacific. When they authorized the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 Japan’s leaders knew they were entering a war they could not really hope to win. Unfortunately, they woefully overestimated the willingness of the United States to enter peace negotiations once a war had begun.78 And it was this utterly unrealistic determination to force America into a negotiated peace which provided the rationale for the refusal of the military leadership to surrender, even in the summer of 1945 when Japan’s war effort lay in ruins.
The National Socialist solution to the problems associated with the global market in food, combined with a backward farming community in need of reform, pushed Germany into war in Europe. Rather than engaging with capitalist world markets, the National Socialists chose the alternative path of autarky and an aggressive search for land. Across the globe, Japan was placed in a similarly difficult position with regard to the international economic system. A weak and failing agricultural sector which was tipped into crisis by the Depression added to Japanese woes. In a parallel process, the agrarian problem propelled Japan’s politicians into ever more conservative solutions, resulting in the decision to seek the same solution: autarky and expansion. Both Germany and Japan looked to their military to appropriate enough land not only to reverse the decline of agriculture but to recreate a ‘flourishing farm economy [which] could hold its own against the pressures of industry and commerce’. Empire was seen by both regimes as a means of making ‘peace with modernity’.79 Unfortunately, it also guaranteed that they would be unable to make peace with their neighbours.