WAR RESPONSIBILITY--delving into the past (2) / Konoe, Hirota sat on their hands

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Who should take the blame for the escalation of a small incident into all-out war between Japan and China?

On June 4, 1937, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe launched his first Cabinet. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident--a brief unplanned battle between the Imperial Japanese Army and Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese National Revolutionary Army--occurred a month later on July 7. The incident was the trigger for the Sino-Japanese War.

As the incident itself was unplanned, the slide to all-out war could have been avoided if the flare-up was handled properly. In fact, a ceasefire accord was signed in Beijing, and the matter appeared to have been settled locally.

But on the same day, the Konoe Cabinet announced it would send more troops to northern China, a step that caused the escalation of military involvement.

Konoe failed to exercise political leadership at each of the following critical phases:

-- When the decision to dispatch more troops was made.

-- When a de facto shift from a nonexpansion policy in China was announced.

-- When peace efforts through mediations by German Ambassador to China Oskar Trautman were made.

-- When the so-called first Konoe statement that closed channels for negotiations with China's Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government was announced.

In the early days of the Sino-Japanese War, Konoe indeed pursued a peaceful settlement by planning summit talks with Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and attempting to dispatch an emissary to the Nationalist Party government. But he backed down when he met opposition, mainly voiced by army officers.

Foreign Minister Koki Hirota, along with Konoe, remained silent during a meeting of related ministers that decided to send the first three army divisions. Hirota and Konoe also did not voice any objection during a subsequent Cabinet meeting. Together with War Minister Hajime Sugiyama and Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, Hirota also called for an end to peace negotiations with the Nationalist government.

Throughout the period during which the Marco Polo Bridge Incident expanded into the Sino-Japanese War, Hirota stood at the diplomatic helm, first serving as foreign minister, then prime minister and again as foreign minister.

After the Feb. 26 Incident, Hirota, as prime minister, made a series of decisions that would sow the seeds of future strife. The decisions included one to restore a system under which military officers in active service took up the posts of war and navy ministers, another on the policy guidelines that set the stage for the nation's advance into Southeast Asia and another on the signing of the Japan-Germany accord on defense cooperation that was aimed at containing the Soviet Union.

Maneuvers to secede northern China from the Nationalist government tipped Japan and China into full hostilities.

Those involved in the operations included Kenji Dohihara; Takashi Sakai, chief of staff of the troops stationed in China; and Tan Takahashi, an assistant army attache. They worked to conclude the so-called (Yoshijiro) Umezu-He Yingqin accord and the Dohihara-Qin Dechun accord, by which Nationalist agencies were expelled from Hebei and Chakhar provinces. In November 1935, Dohihara launched a puppet autonomous government in eastern Hebei Province.

The army maintained that China should not be regarded as a single country. Seishiro Itagaki, assistant chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, argued that Japan should directly conclude ties with each region in China.

In China, the Xian Incident in 1936 pushed China toward the second phase of collaboration between the Nationalists and the Communists. In the wake of growing anti-Japanese campaigns in China, Japan and China were facing a touch-and-go situation.

At the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, army leaders were sharply divided between those calling for an expansion of the war and those seeking to halt the conflict. Kanji Ishihara, the head of the Operations Bureau of the General Staff Office, sided with those for nonexpansion. But Akira Muto, Ishihara's subordinate as the head of the Operations Department, advocated the dispatch of troops by allying himself with Shinichi Tanaka, the head of the Military Affairs Department of the War Ministry. Having failed to control his subordinate, Ishihara mobilized 13 army divisions until he was transferred to the Kwantung Army as assistant chief of staff.

War Minister Hajime Sugiyama advocated expansion. He foiled peace efforts by making the terms of peace tougher after the fall of Nanjing, the Chinese capital at the time. Iwane Matsui, the commander of the Central China Expeditionary Force, exhorted top military officials on the capture of Nanjing and directed the operation. Upon the capture of Nanjing, a series of massacres and violence targeting prisoners of war and civilians, called the Nanjing Incident, took place. Such acts, which contravened military discipline, were committed particularly by members of the units led by Kesago Nakajima, the head of the 16th Army Division.

Those mainly responsible

-- Fumimaro Konoe, prime minister

-- Koki Hirota, prime minister, foreign minister

-- Kenji Dohihara, chief of the Special Service Agency at Mukden

-- Hajime Sugiyama, war minister

-- Akira Muto, chief of the Operations Department at the Army General Staff