It is significant that, in addition to attacking Jews in Britain, Mosley himself tried to stir up national hostility against the Japanese. His Fascist Week was full of head-lines such as "THE REALITY OF THE YELLOW PERIL." It insisted that Nippon's commercial rivalry was Britain's gravest economic problem and called for an "embargo on Japanese goods." "Japan is the cuckoo among nations," it shrilled, "Japan is the modern pirate."' Certainly Japan, the newest industrial nation, was catching up with Britain, the oldest, at an extraordinary rate between the wars. The Land of the Rising Sun actually seemed capable of eclipsing the empire on which the sun never set. But the Far Eastern colossus was to be seriously hurt by the Depression. Accordingly Japan became the first major power during the 1930s to export its aggression.
ACCORDING to the Japanese maxim, which might stand as an epigraph for the nation's history in the aftermath of the 1929 Slump, "internal dis-order leads to external troubles."' Despite amazing economic progress, which had enabled Japan to survive hard times following the Yokohama earthquake, the country still had a much lower standard of living than industrial pioneers such as Britain. The salary of a senior army general was less than 500 pounds a year, while a tenth of greater Tokyo's 5 million inhabitants existed on as little as 7 yen a month (14 shillings or 3.50 dollars). In the villages, where nearly half of Japan's 64 million people lived, peasants barely managed to subsist on the tiny plots which they tended, as Kipling had observed, with "comb and toothpick." Actually, though it possessed the smallest arable acreage per head of any country in the world, Japan had the most productive agriculture. And from 1927 to 193o rice harvests were unusually abundant. But this bounty of nature caused a disastrous drop in the price of "the king of grains." Thus the Japanese, possessing few raw materials and reliant on international trade, were sha-tered by the Depression. Nowhere else did the economic crisis implode more viciously or explode more rapidly. It pervaded the life of the country and warped the psyche of its inhabitants. It emphasised the poverty and fragility of their existence in a land so bereft of raw materials, so reliant on foreign trade. The slump in agricultural prices was catastrophic. Farming families, whose average annual income was only 300 yen, found that their rice fetched a third less in 1930 than it had in 1929. They could not even cover their costs, let alone reward themselves adequately for back-breaking toil knee-deep in the paddy-fields. Worse still, owing to the increasing popularity of rayon as well as to the collapse of the American market, the price of their other main cash crop, the "God-sent merchandise"5 of raw silk, fell by more than half. This devastated the rural economy, making it hardly worthwhile for farmers to remain in the arduous service of "the hon-ourable little gentleman," as the silkworm was styled. Not since the turn of the century had they received so little for their harvests. Now, with higher rents and debts to usurious money-lenders of some boo yen per rural household, • they could barely support their families. In some areas money virtually disappeared and farmers lived by barter—two quarts of rice for a packet of Shikishima cigarettes. The situation was made worse by a population explosion resulting in four births a minute—nearly a million new mouths to feed each year. As the contemporary cliche ran, Japan combined "an Oriental birth rate with an Occidental death rate."' For nationalistic rather than moral reasons, the authorities opposed birth control. When the American campaigner Margaret Sanger visited Japan in 1922, her literature was confiscated and she was forbidden to lecture. Later one of her Japanese followers was stabbed. But when the Depression struck, "the masses were driven into becoming a huge laboratory for contraception by necessity." As one maga-zine charmingly put it, "Groping in the dark, sometimes in violation of official regulations, they learned various devices. " The device which Japanese men liked least was the condom, which one later compared to putting on Wellington boots in order to take a bath.
An ascetic who drank no sake, the hollow-cheeked, handlebar-moustached, colourfully be-ribboned General Araki also condemned the evils of capitalism and its parasitic beneficiaries. He spoke with vatic fervour about the need for spiritual strength. He even believed that earthquakes were good for Japan, bolstering the character of its people, encouraging self-denial and teaching indifference to material possessions. Attaching significance to the fact that he had been born under the sign of the Tiger, Araki drew little sketches of tigers and presented them to visitors as sou-venirs. They were impressed. No one articulated faith in Japan's "holy mis-sion in the world" with greater "religious intensity." No one preached Japanese imperialism more volubly—or more bombastically. It was his ultimate aim, Araki declared, to instill into the nation the soul of a soldier. Even the thin blood of the aged Saionji, who regarded such hopes as Utopian, was stirred by Araki's tumultuous eloquence. The General kept young officers in a state of "constant ferment."76 By giving them their heads he sabotaged Inukai's efforts to enforce civilian rule. Declaring that "the true spirit of our nation has been quickened to life through the Manchurian crisis,"77 Araki also permitted an almost uncontrollable expansion of the Japanese war in China, which subsequently brought on a nervous breakdown and retrospective regrets. "I didn't want to do the things that are being done in North China," he said in 1936, but "the situation . . . was already there . . . it is like telling someone not to get involved with a certain woman. There is nothing you can do about it . . . if the woman is pregnant." Fatalism combined with activism is one of the most bewildering Japa-nese characteristics. Like many of his countrymen, Araki saw himself as a pawn of fate. As much as any Surrealist he believed in the certainty of chance. He willingly swayed with the "tide of events" (taisei), displaying a "voluptuous contentment in being buffeted by the great forces beyond his control." Yet in prophetic vein he himself juggled with cosmic forces. He declared that:
We cannot let things drift any longer. We are the leading Asiatic power and we should now take matters into our own hands. We must be active, ever expending the last portion of our national strength. We must be pre-pared to wage a desperate struggle. The Whites have made the countries of Asia mere objects of oppression and imperial Japan should no longer let their impudence go unpunished.
Like Ishiwara, Araki saw the Manchurian Incident as a prelude to global war (though his prime target was Russia) and he approved the army's northward push: Chinchow was taken early in January 1932 and Harbin a month later. Araki also endorsed the Kwantung Army's plans for the con-quered territory as adumbrated by Itagaki in a lecture to Hirohito's advis-ers at the Imperial Palace on II January. As Marquis Kido recorded, "Col. Itagaki gave hints that Manchuria would be placed under a new ruler, and that the Japanese army would take charge of a national defense of the new Manchurian state."" To disguise these intentions and to retaliate against damaging Chinese boycotts of Japanese goods, the armed services, again with Araki's blessing, took the momentous step of extending the war southwards. They used as a base their enclave in the great international entrep8t of Shanghai, where even the clanging tramcars were plastered with slogans like "Overthrow Japanese Imperialism" and "Sever Economic Relations with Japan."
CHINA'S commercial gateway, its largest manufacturing centre and its most populous urban area, Shanghai was the most cosmopolitan city in the world. A magnet for emigres of every race and "a thicket of spy agen-cies,"82 its International Settlement (plus the separate French Concession) profited enormously from extra-territorial administration, favourable tax rates and peace—nationals whose countries were at war suspended hostili-ties in Shanghai. Here, close to the vast mouth of the yellow Yangtse and guarded by the guns of grey warships flying the flags of many nations, flourished a strange, polyglot, quasi-colonial community. The highest buildings in Asia, monuments to the dominion of the taipan, were secured on their concrete rafts embedded in the silty Bund. Surveyors regularly checked the foundations of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank's skyscraper in case it sank under the weight of silver in its vaults. Palatial cinemas proliferated, showing films in English, French, Italian and Japanese. So did garish nightclubs, frothy soda fountains, drab mission halls, gay amusement parks with miniature golf courses, neon-lit department stores like Sun Sun's and more automobiles than in all the other Chinese cities combined. Like a phosphorescent tide, the native world lapped against this foreign bastion, though Chinese were banned from its parks. The Chinese city was a warren of wooden sweatshops, teeming bazaars, dilapidated godowns and smoke-belching factories. Its sordid slums pullulated with traders, mendicants, gamblers, gangsters, drug addicts, slave children and coolies. According to a contemporary estimate Shanghai contained more prostitutes per head of population than any other city on earth: one in 130, com-pared to one in 250 for Tokyo, one in 481 for Paris, one in 580 for Berlin and one in 96o for London. There were 1,500 opium dens and the crime rate was twelve times higher than that of Chicago: visiting policemen from the Windy City begged to be allowed to "go home:13 Shanghai even possessed a leper colony. In the sultry air (and near land fertilised by human manure distributed by the municipal (`honey carts") disease was as rife as famine. Each year nearly 30,000 corpses were picked up from the streets and one "Shanghailander" newspaper urged that the police should sweep them clean of deformed beggars, whom it called "this refuse". Such a simmering cauldron was easily brought to the boil. In January 1932 the Japanese had no difficulty in provoking a murderous affray as a pretext for military aggression, especially after a Chinese paper had deplored the recent failure of an assassination attempt (by a Korean nationalist) on Hirohito—which the Japanese themselves described, in a classic periphrasis, as "the Emperor Disrespect Incident." Eager for the navy to steal some of the army's thunder, Admiral Shiozawa Koichi deployed 2,000 blue-jacketed, white-putteed marines equipped with rifles, machine-guns, light artillery and armoured cars. Late on the moonless night of z8 January 1932, under the lurid glow of flares, they attacked the heavily-populated Chapel district, just north of the International Settlement. They were backed by detachments of "reservists" who subjected civilians to appalling atrocities, looting, raping, burning and murdering at will. The next day carrier-borne aircraft bombed the area, smashing the flimsy structures to atoms and causing fierce conflagra-tions, with flames leaping 100 feet into the air. Seaplanes flew so low to strafe the inhabitants that it was possible to see the faces of the pilots who, in martial Japanese fashion, were supplied with swords and pistols but not parachutes. From the safety of the International Settlement Westerners drove their Buicks to photograph the charred ruins and to view dead bodies being torn apart by snarling dogs. Meanwhile a "brown wave" of refugees fled with their possessions piled into trams, cars, carts, rickshaws and wheelbarrows." Old men shuffled by, clutching bamboo birdcages. Young women hobbled on tightly-bound feet tugging children quilted against the cold. By contrast the Communist-trained Chinese 19th Route Army, thought to be a rabble in pagoda-shaped straw hats, rubber-soled canvas shoes and grey cotton uniforms (the insignia fastened to their shoulders with safety pins), stood firm. After prolonged combat they even managed to counter-attack. So, having grievously lost face, the Japanese navy had to call in the army. But even when attacked by thousands of steel-helmeted troops equipped with tanks and howitzers and protected against the snow by olive-drab woollen overcoats, the Chinese fought on tenaciously. Their snipers, hiding in buildings and bamboo thickets behind the Japanese lines, were particularly effective. One nearly managed to kill General Ueda Kenkichi in his field headquarters, shooting a hole just above the red band in his hat. He was most upset, complaining to the American journalist Edgar Snow: "The Chinese have no sense of honour or what is proper in warfare. Sniping is outlawed by most civilized coun-tries.' When the pressure got too much for them the Chinese managed to retreat in good order, whereupon the Japanese claimed victory. So, in May, after protests from the League of Nations and the United States and complex negotiations, an armistice was signed and peace came once more to Shanghai. However, as a result of the fighting (particularly the bombing of civilians—the first major instance in history), public opinion in Europe and America moved decisively against Japan. But governments, hag-ridden by the Depression, which Henry Stimson described as "an emer-gency like war," were still cautious about reacting in a way that might lead to real conflict. Thus the economic crisis not only prompted Japanese aggression, but also inhibited the great powers from doing anything about it. Britain's position was particularly weak, considering its vast interests in the East. As Neville Chamberlain wrote, "If we got into a real quarrel with Japan she could blow our ships out of the water one by one as they tried to get out of the Whangpoo.
Hymans' words about the League's continuing to work to "ensure the peace of the world" rang hollow.' Coming on top of its unsuccessful attempts to secure disarmament and alleviate the Depression, the League's failure to restrain Japan was disastrous. It fatally undermined the principle of collective security and gave international sanction to the policy of appeasement. At a time when all members of the League were punch-drunk from the economic crisis, when Roosevelt was about to launch the New Deal, when Hitler was poised to create a totalitarian state, when Stalin was striding through blood to make a brave new world, it was understandable that the great powers should avert their gaze from Japan's aggression. But by resorting to non-recognition and relying
on moral condemnation the League demonstrated that it was not pre-pared to enforce its will. The tragedy of the 1930s was that supporters of the League's ideals took so long to realise that peace could only be defended by war. For Japan quitting the League was a fateful step into the valley of shadows. Matsuoka himself seemed to have some inkling of this. For he had warned the Assembly not to adopt the report, which would lead inevitably to Japan's exit, because a disintegrating China and a menacing R already threatened the peace of the world; so "we look into the gloom of the future and can see no certain gleam of light before us." Now Matsuoka's country had been solemnly arraigned before the bar of the world as an international criminal. Nippon was bitterly scornful that the League had been unable to exact punishment and supremely confident that, after pausing to digest Manchuria, it could pursue its expansionist course unscathed. But pariahdom also provoked paranoia. Japan felt persecuted and indulged in messianic passions. Militarists took stricter control of the country's destiny despite their gross ignorance of the outside world, their internecine factionalism and their hysterical bellicosity—in 1933 the Deputy Foreign Minister lamented, "The Army seems determined to attack Russia in 1935, and the Navy the United States in 1936."136 National-ists brandished ever more fiercely "the Sun Flag of the Land of the Rising Sun" which would, according to Kita Ikki, "light the darkness of the entire world. "137 Isolation bred intransigence.
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