Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan by Danny Orbach (review)

Many writers on Japan’s road to war against China, the United States, Great Britain, and their allies have oversimplified the origins of World War II. Some writers see a Japan with a ravenous appetite for conquest in Asia; others see a Japan bent on defending itself and other East Asian countries against Western imperialism. Danny Orbach has written a splendid book in which he complicates our understanding of the road to war by demonstrating how a tradition of insubordinate military actions from below led modern Japan from the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s to World War II in the late 1930s. He advances three main arguments: First, cliques of lower-ranking officers such as the shishi—or, in his translation, “warriors of high aspiration”—forced their late feudal leaders into actions that led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1860s. Second, former samurai such as Saigō Takamori and Etō Shinpei in the 1870s led their forces in rebellions against the very Meiji state that they as shishi had helped establish ten years earlier. And finally, the descendants of these men in the 1930s attempted to carry out a “Showa Restoration” in which they seized nearby territories like Manchuria that were viewed as essential to Japan’s existence and rid the Japanese government of politicians who allegedly put the interests of their political parties and capitalist supporters before the needs of Japan’s “Imperial Way.” These bourgeois leaders, who compromised with hostile (and more powerful) foreigners, needed to be replaced by men who worked for the “good of Japan and its emperor,” as defined of course by the rebels. Another strength of Or-bach’s book is that he describes each of these events in lucid prose. His book is a gripping read.

Orbach also writes about how and why the army rebels got away with their insubordination. One reason was that army officers at all levels believed the Meiji Constitution of 1889 gave the army and navy general staffs the authority under certain (ill-defined) circumstances to report directly to the emperor, not through the prime minister or even the army and navy ministers. To the rebel officers of the 1930s, a mélange of elite staff officers who graduated from the Army War College and of non-elite officers who commanded troops on a day-to-day basis, the emperor personally commanded the army, and they knew best how to advise him. The army’s top leaders, themselves often former rebel officers, put up with this pressure from below because it made the army more independent: better, they thought, to have insubordination from below than nonmilitary control from above. Another reason was that the army’s leaders agreed with the goals of the rebels and were willing to put up with insubordination, that is, a weakened chain of command within the army, to achieve these goals. In the 1920s and 1930s, virtually everyone in the Japanese army believed that direct political and military control of Northeast China (Manchuria) was necessary for the armed forces to obtain the natural resources and the means of production they needed to build a total war state. Thus, when colonels Itagaki Seishirō and Ishiwara Kanji, elite staff officers in the Japanese army stationed in Manchuria to protect Japan’s legitimate treaty rights there, planned an incident to allow for the military conquest of Northeast China, the Tokyo commanders quickly overcame their fears of insubordination and gave them their approval. Or take the case of Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo. He was assassinated by rebellious army officers on 26 February 1936 ostensibly because of “widespread poverty in the country” (p. 229), when in fact his Keynesian countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies after assuming his post in December 1931 were bringing the countryside to the highest level of prosperity in its history. But superiors put up with, and in some cases even applauded, the rebels’ actions, because...