On September 27, Japan signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. It will come out of love for the Emperor.’ Īt the beginning of September 1940, Hirohito issued order for Japanese troops to enter French Indochina. ![]() The era of democracy is finished… Fascism will develop in Japan through the people’s will. ‘In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The psychopathic vision shared by Nazi Germany and Hirohito’s Japan is apparent in the comments made by Hirohito’s Foreign Minister Matsuoka at this time. Hirohito approved this new plan of aggression. On July 27, 1940, the Japanese government agreed a new policy, designed to take advantage of Hitler’s victories in Europe, which saw Japan taking possession of French Indochina and gaining access to the natural resources of the Dutch East Indies. Hitler’s occupation of the Netherlands and France in mid-1940 provided Japan’s militarists with a golden opportunity to further their dream of a greater Japanese empire. And he sanctioned the use of experimental biological weapons in China, including the operation of the notorious biological warfare Unit 731. He sanctioned the dispatch to China of chemical weapons, which had been banned by international law following World War 1. ![]() Hirohito also bore responsibility for personally endorsing the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war, on August 5, 1937, that led directly to Japanese atrocities against captured soldiers. Hirohito knew of, and approved of, these murderous campaigns. According to recent estimates, around 2.7 million Chinese civilians were murdered in these so-called ‘sanko’ operations. Millions of Chinese were forced to construct thousands of miles of trenches in an effort to smash the resistance. Under Generals Ryukichi and Okamura, all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty were targeted, villages were burned, grain confiscated, and villagers forcefully resettled. Towards the end of 1938, the Japanese began a series of ‘annihilation’ campaigns aimed at stamping out the resistance in rural areas. ![]() When Chiang Khai-shek’s nationalist government retreated to the mountain city of Chungking, beyond the reach of Hirohito’s forces, the war reached a stalemate. The vast majority of China’s rural and mountainous territory, however, remained under Chinese Nationalist and Communist control. ĭuring 1938 the major cities of northern, central and southern China fell under the control of Japanese forces. Hirohito knew of the slaughter and responded by bestowing military honours on the commanders in charge. In total, an estimated 300,000 men, women and children were murdered in the rape of Nanking. In preparation for a triumphal victory parade, Japanese soldiers rounded up and murdered more than seventeen thousand Chinese men and boys in a single night. In the first day of the city’s occupation, over 32,000 Chinese prisoners of war were executed. The fall of Nanking was followed by a barbaric three month long campaign of rape and murder. Weeks later, on December 1, Hirohito ordered Japanese forces to take Nanking. When Shanghai fell to the Japanese in mid-November 1937, almost a quarter of a million Chinese had been killed. In turn, the Japanese retaliated with a massive campaign aimed not only at defeating the Chinese Nationalists in Shanghai, but also to pursue the fleeing troops inland all the way to Nanking.Īs the China war began, Hirohito established an ‘Imperial Headquarters’ within his palace in Tokyo, from where he acted as Supreme Commander of the armed forces right up until Japan’s surrender in 1945. Hirohito’s fateful decision rapidly resulted in full scale war.Ĭhinese leader Chiang Kai-shek responded to the Japanese occupation of Peking by shifting the focus to the south, launching an all-out attack on Japanese forces in Shanghai. Unlike the Manchurian Incident, in which local Japanese commanders acted without his knowledge or sanction, Hirohito now sided with the extremists in the military to launch an attack on Peking. ![]() Expansionists within the Japanese armed forces, however, urged Hirohito to use the incident to expand the war in China. This blog, the second of two, seeks to answer the question ‘Was Hirohito a psychopath?’ This second post examines Hirohito’s actions from his decision to escalate Japan’s war against China in 1937 to Japan’s surrender in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Īn exchange of fire between Japanese and Chinese forces on Jat the Marco Polo Bridge, twenty miles south of Peking, was quickly quelled by local commanders on both sides.
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