Seizing The Telegraph Office Part 1

If as a certain movie poster once suggested the first casualty of war is innocence, then the final casualty of war can often as not be the losing country’s government. Sometimes the overthrow can happen in the blink of an eye; other times the process of regime collapse is a long and slow one. In the case of Japan’s monarchy, it took thirteen years after the Japanese defeat in the 1903 war with Russia before the Emperor Taishō was finally ousted; when he did fall, however, it came as a result of one of the bloodiest revolutions any nation has seen in the past century. The 1916 leftist rebellion that toppled the Imperial regime left a trail of death in its wake and laid the foundation for a tyranny which subjected its own people to oppressions far worse than those of the deposed monarchy and threatened the peace and security of Japan’s neighbors as well as the United States.

The chain of events leading to the April Revolution began with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco, which imposed some hard terms on Japan as the price of peace with the victorious Russian Empire. She lost many of her overseas colonies and was forced to drastically scale back the size of her armed forces, and also had to pay reparations to the Russian government. This not only sapped national morale, it also inflicted severe wounds to the Japanese people’s previously unshakable faith in the institution of the Imperial throne. It was in this harsh social atmosphere that a group of hardcore leftists met in Yokohama in June of 1904 to organize the People’s Society for Political and Social Liberation-- better known simply as the Liberation Society. Comprised primarily of militant college students and former members of a defunct party called the National Redemption Movement, the Liberation Society advocated the abolishment of the Imperial regime and the establishment of a so-called “people’s republic” to take its place.

Their message struck a deep chord within much of the Japanese general population. Resentment over Japan’s defeat in the 1903 war cut across social, economic, and ideological lines; thanks to artful use of propaganda, the Society was able to quickly expand its ranks outside of Yokohama to become a national force. Within just a little over a year after the group’s inaugural meeting in Yokohama they had established branches in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, Nagoya, and Hiroshima. In the spring of 1906 they held their first large-scale rally in the heart of Tokyo, drawing a crowd of close to 40,000 people to listen to their controversial ideology. Although the speakers at this rally were shouted down several times by Japanese citizens still loyal to the Emperor, the audience was for the most part chiefly supportive of the Society orators’ views and at the end of the rally swarmed two of the more vocal hecklers, nearly beating them to a pulp before order was restored by Tokyo police.

By 1908 the once-tiny faction could boast over 250,000 members throughout the Japanese home islands and another 30,000 among Japanese nationals living abroad. The following year its numbers swelled to an even 400,000; by the time World War I began in 1914 the Society had a membership roll of between 800,000 and 1.2 million, and those numbers included a substantial portion of the Japanese military-- a fact which troubled the Imperial Court a great deal. With the acquiescence of the emperor, the Japanese war ministry initiated a campaign of sweeping crackdowns meant to break the Society’s back, with special attention to suspected sympathizers of the group within the Imperial military.

The crackdown succeeded only in alienating greater numbers of ordinary Japanese citizens and driving more and more Imperial armed forces personnel into the Society’s arms. One of these was a young army officer named Hideki Tojo; in his early twenties at the time the Society was first established, Tojo had been more fortunate than many of his peers in that he had returned from the hell of fighting on the Korean Peninsula alive and more or less physically intact. Nicknamed “the Razor” by those who knew him best, Tojo was a soldier’s soldier who believed fervently in the ancient bushido principle of “death before dishonor”. If things had worked out better for Japan in the 1903 Russo-Japanese War Tojo would probably have remained a loyal defender of the institution of the Emperor-- one of the most popular themes of counterfactual history, in fact, is the idea of Tojo as a general or prime minister in a surviving Imperial regime during the 1930s and ‘40s.

But after one of his closest friends was arrested in February of 1915 for writing a newspaper article advocating a substantial overhaul of Japan’s government, Tojo completely and permanently broke with the Imperial Court to become a recruiter for the Liberation Society’s army affairs section. His appeals to his fellow soldiers to cast their lot with the Society fell on ever more receptive ears; discontent in every branch of the Japanese armed forces had been steadily mounting since the end of the 1903 conflict, with the greatest rumblings of dissent originating within the ranks of the Japanese army. In Hideki Tojo such rumblings found their most powerful voice.

Shortly after Tojo’s friend was arrested the American embassy in Tokyo sent President Woodrow Wilson a confidential twelve-page report which spelled out in the starkest possible terms just how serious the political crisis in Japan had gotten. “Japan is a volcano,” the report said, “ready to erupt at any moment. Protests and riots are happening daily in all of the country’s major cities and many of Japan’s smaller towns are also experiencing civil unrest. The Emperor is seldom seen in public anymore....strikes among industrial workers are becoming a weekly event, as are mutiny attempts among servicemen in the Japanese armed forces. A German envoy here in Tokyo whose opinions are highly respected by our embassy staff has told our ambassador that he thinks it is only a question of time before Japan is in open revolt.”

Emperor Taishō’s security forces apparently shared the German diplomat’s assessment, because during the rest of 1915 arrests of ordinary Japanese citizens for political crimes increased 400 percent and several government officials who’d made the mistake of questioning the official Imperial Court line about the political unrest sweeping Japan were forced to resign their posts after being subjected to a series of thoroughly humiliating interrogations by the Police Bureau, Japan’s central nationwide law enforcement agency at the time. But it was in March of 1916 that the time bomb of civil discontent in Japan would finally detonate....

Like “9/11” or “December 7th”, the date of March 22nd has become shorthand for a very dark chapter in human history-- in this instance March 22nd, 1916, when the Japanese city of Osaka bore witness to one of the most horrific acts of political repression since the Reign of Terror in France. That day Imperial troops and police were dispatched to Osaka at the Emperor’s behest to quell a Liberation Society rally there. The demonstrators carried the usual placards advocating the abolition of the Chrysanthemum Throne and the creation of a “people’s republic”, and newer signs calling on Emperor Taishō to release more than eleven hundred political detainees locked up in Japan’s largest prisons.

When the head of the Imperial Army contingent sent to break up the rally called on the protestors to disperse, they refused. When they heard the order a second time, the demonstrators shouted back their intention to stay where they were until their demands were met. A third repetition of the order prompted the crowd to begin chanting anti-Imperial slogans-- at which point the Imperial Army commanding officer gave the fateful order to his troops to begin opening fire on the protestors. The crowd fled in panic at the barrage of rifle and machine gun fire poured on them by the Imperial troops; by the time the volley ended less than six minutes later, 47 people lay dead and 129 wounded, with dozens more suffering from broken bones after having been trampled by people trying to escape the Imperial troops’ wrath.

The reaction of the international community to the March 22nd massacre was one of appalled fury. “MURDER!” screamed the headlines in the London Times the next day. Russia’s Duma parliament passed a resolution condemning not only the massacre but the government that had sanctioned it. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, no shrinking violet by any stretch of the imagination, ordered his foreign minister to file a formal protest of the massacre with the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. In New York City massive crowds gathered outside the Japanese consulate there to protest the massacre. The uproar even found its way to the Middle East; British colonial authorities in Jerusalem had to intervene to save a Japanese traveler from being lynched by a crowd of people infuriated by newspaper accounts of the events in Osaka. China, itself gripped by major political upheaval at the time, was the scene of massive rallies denouncing the Japanese government as “barbarians” and “murdering devils”.

In Japan itself the Osaka massacre destroyed the last fragile ties of loyalty between the Japanese people and their emperor. The Liberation Society’s executive committee met in special session on March 25th, three days after the massacre, to vote on a resolution which if passed would commit the organization to mounting an armed uprising against the Imperial regime. After only an hour’s worth of debate the committee chairman, Yuji Kagamoto, asked his comrades for a show of hands to determine whether they were for or against armed insurrection.

The vote was unanimous in favor of the resolution. Japan now stood just days away from seeing its centuries-old monarchy smashed once and for all...

Even before the fateful vote was taken, some Liberation Society cell leaders had been stockpiling arms and ammunition in anticipation of one day having to defend themselves against the Imperial Army. Once the decision had been made to commence an armed rebellion against the Imperial throne, these stockpiling efforts accelerated, secretly aided by Hideki Tojo’s contacts within the army; only the direction of them changed, as the various cell leaders shifted from a defensive frame of mind to an offensive one in preparation for the coming uprising.

On April 4th, ten days after the resolution was passed by the Society’s executive committee, the rebels made their first move in the fight to overthrow the Imperial regime. In response to prearranged signals given to them the night before, Society cells in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Sapporo took over the telephone and telegraph offices in those cities; from the Tokyo telegraph station, Tojo sent messages to Society cells in the rest of Japan directing them to make similar seizures in their own areas.

The National Redemption Movement(mentioned in Part 3 of “The Times That Try Men’s Souls”) was an organization that had been vehemently opposed to Emperor Meiji-tenno’s decision to go to war with Russia; their ideology would later be credited with influencing many of the Liberation Society’s core principles. Created in an attempt to pressure the Japanese government into making peace with the Russians, the Redemption Movement was forced to disband following its botched attempt to assassinate Emperor Meiji in March of 1903.