JAPAN IN CONFLICT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 52, Issue 3756, 15 May 1936, Page 11

JAPAN IN CONFLICT

A STRANGE POSITION. •

EMPEROR, SERVICES, CABINET. TANGLED RELATIONS.

To Western European minds the murders in Tokio appear as atrocities committed by military gangsters who have disgraced their uniform. It is. however, not at all clear that Japanese opinion would so regard them were it able to express itself freely, wrote Harold Stannard in the Daily Telegraph, after the Tokio outbreak. According to the Japanese code, f murder, like suicide, is justifiable when committed out of patriotic motives, and during the past few years there has been more than one case of a political murderer going up to the police station to give himself up after perpetrating his crime. .We Europeans are far more individualistic in our thought than the Japanese, and have some difficulty in entering into the feelings of a Japanese patriot who murders a man whose activities he regards as an outrage on the spirit of Japan. But what is the spirit of Japan? The issues which led to the recent bloodshed go back to the very beginning of the New Era in Japan, now nearly seventy years ago. When the great Emperor Mutsuhito, then a boy of fifteen, overthrew the feudal system, he announced that he had taken all executive power into his own hands, but promised that an assembly should be convoked and that public opinion should decide on all measures. Dating From IMS. Actually the Constitution of Japan dates from 1889, though the rescript promulgating it was issued eight years earlier. Moreover, the Constitution itself was constructed on the German model, and while giving legislative power to Parliament, made Ministers responsible to the Throne and not to the House of Representatives. There was the further complication •that the Emperor was surrounded by counsellors who, before the Constitution came into existence, were organised into a body of Elder Statesmen, who it was the Emperor’s habit to consult on all important issues and whose opinion carried decisive weight. One of these Elder Statesmen Prince Saionji, still survives. He is now nearly 100 years old, has no colleagues, and occupies a unique position in Japanese life. It is significant that the injured Finance Minister, Mr. Takahashi, a man only a few years Prince Saionji’s junior, was summoned by him from retirement when the economic depression first descended on Japan. The aim of the men who led Japan into her New Era was to take over all the science of the West, but at the same time to maintain the Japanese spirit, more particularly as embodied in the Emperor. It is this anxiety to maintain the ancient Japanese spirit which has made it not merely easy, but natural, for authority to condemn all Western political thought as dangerous. Nor is it accident that the earlier phases of the present struggle were fought out over a text-book of Professor Minoge which had been in use in ’ Japanese universities for thirty years. Using Western constitutional language, the book described the Japanese Throne, just as an English writer might describe the British Crown, as an institution. ' It is now contended that the Emperor is not merely an institution, but the very essence of the State; the book has been withdrawn and its author has had to resign his life mem--1 bership of the Upper House. The Clue. This agitation against a thirtyyear old book gives the clue to the whole present situation. The Emperor and his counsellors had already become legendary figures when the Constitution came into being. All the threads of power were gathered up into their hands, and they worked smoothly together. But the great Emperor is dead, and his successor went out of his mind. Of the Elder Statemsen only one still survives, and from the nature of things the last of the makers of modern Japan can have no successor. Where, then, is the power? There are many who, touched as they have been by Western thought, say that it resides in the Japanese , people as a whole, to whose hereditary representative, the Emperor, they owe allegiance. This school looks to Britain for guidance, and was profoundly impressed by the formation of a Socialist Government in Britain in 1924. In the following year manhood suffrage was granted to Japan, and it seemed , as though the country were in prov cess of moving to a Parliamentary regime. A very different view was taken by a good many members of the armed forces. To their minds it appeared that the army and navy were the natural and necessary custodians of the spirit of Japan as incarnate in the Emperor. The first clear assertion of their standpoint was - made in connection with the Kellogg Pact, Q whose signatories declared that they were acting “in the name of their

respective people.” It was seriously contended that the Japanese envoy who signed this document had been guilty of something approaching insult towards the Throne. The Naval Treaty. A more serious breach occurred in connection with the London Naval Treaty of 1930. It is understood that the General Staffs of the Services were opposed to signature, but that the Cabinet overruled them and insisted that it was within its Constitutional rights in so doing. It was an open question whether there can be what we understand by a Cabinet when each member of it is individually responsible to the Emperor, and the question is particularly open under the Japanese Constitution, which provides that the Ministerial heads of the Japartese War Office and the Japanese Admiralty, who are always serving officers, shall not be appointed by the Prime Minister, but shall be nominated by their respective Services. There was thus latent in the constitutional machinery a possibility of conflict between rival claimants to power, which events in Northern China finally brought to a head. General Araki, the War Minister, who was the army’s mouthpiece, has been often condemned by Western opinion as a mere fire-eater. Actually the action which he proceeded to take was by no means extreme: His position was that for the time being the destinies of Japan lay with the army. It was accordingly improper that at such a crisis in Japanese history as was now developing the army should be associated with a political party. He therefore demanded the formation of a national Government.

There were those who, going far beyond General Araki, said that the whole Parliamentary system should be swept away on the ground that every politician in Japan was corrupt, and the series of financial scandals which has been brought to light in recent years show that there was considerable measure of truth in their allegation. Effort at Compromise. The solution eventually reached represents a real effort of compromise, the credit for which must doubtless be assigned to the Elder Statesman. Party politics continue in Japan, and politicians still receive Cabinet posts. But the Prime Minister in recent years has been a Admiral, and, as the navy is not making Japanese history in the same way as the army, the choice of a naval officer to head the Government both keeps the balance between the services and conciliates public opinion. The compromise ought to work, and would work if there were men of sufficient authority to carry it out. But the trouble in modern Japan is that Japanese life is disintegrating. Japan, like China, is reeling under the impact of Western ideas. In the last year or so this disintegration has gone very far and has manifested itself in a form incompatible with the compromise of a semimilitary, semi-political Government. The Foreign Office is a keypost; its holder is not merely in daily touch with Western thought, but has to deal with the reactions of the West to the operations undertaken by the General Staffs. Who, then, is to have the decisive voice as to the form and time of action—the War Office or the Foreign Office? v , Theoretically, since both Ministers have access to the Emperor, he should hear them both and finally decide, but without raising the delicate question of the source and strength of the Emperor’s power there is the further complication that the army itself does not speak with one voice. A General. The man on the spot always counts for a great deal in an overseas crisis, and in Japan to-day the man on the spot is not, as he would be in Britain, a civilian governor owing his appointment to the Cabinet, but the general commanding the Japanese army of occupation in the three provinces that once were Manchuria. Much must necessarily be left to the discretion of a fighting soldier, and since Japanese forces began to penetrate into Mongolia the question of peace or war with Russia has turned on the way in which this discretion is exercised. A veil has been drawn over conflicts between the War Office in Tokio and the Commander-in-Chief overseas, but we know that the two authorities do not see eye to eye. Roughly the position is that the War Office is prepared to take, at any rate, some notice of the views of the Foreign Minister, while the overseas army is anxious to push ahead and make the conquests which it feels it has the power to effect, regardless of diplomatic complications. Men who believe that they have it in their hands to make Japan a great Imperial Power are naturally disposed to assume that they have public opinion behind them. What Japanese could be indifferent to his country’s greatness? But these wretched politicians, eager fir graft, they argue, put obstacles in the way of conduct which will demand sacrifices from every individual citizen, and the men in the War Office mistake their voice for that of Japan. What is wanted at home, they conclude, is a good strong Government ready to

support the great effort which the army overseas is burning to make. Suppose such doctrine preached to troops actually under orders for foreign service, suppose that among their officers in even one of the recklessly enthusiastic patriots in which Japan abounds, and the murders in Tokio are explained.