Summary: In the previous eleven chapters of this series we recalled the 1916 April Revolution that overthrew Japan’s monarchy and established the Japanese People’s Republic; the JPR’s brutal suppression of all dissent in the early post-revolutionary years; and the JPR regime’s expansionist attitudes and actions in foreign affairs. In this episode we’ll look back at the circumstances leading to Mitsuharu Yamagida’s overthrow as Japan’s chancellor and the armistice that ended Japan’s involvement in the Second World War.

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By the spring of 1943 the Liberation Society’s dreams of an Asia dominated by the Japanese People’s Republic were little more than an idle fantasy in the eyes of most people. Their campaign to take over Malaya and the Dutch East Indies had failed; their attempts to knock out the American Pacific fleet had disastrously backfired; their army in China was on the defensive; their occupation forces in Indochina were under constant attack by the Viet Minh; and the Russian Federal Army was decisively turning back all Japanese efforts to seize Russia’s Siberian territories.

    To make matters worse from Tokyo’s perspective, Japan’s Axis allies were in equally dire straits. Hitler was seeing his attempt to conquer Russia go up in smoke and his once seemingly unstoppable Afrika Korps on the run in Tunisia, while Mussolini was on the verge of being ousted as Italy’s ruler after a set of devastating defeats against the Allies in the Mediterranean. The Japanese embassy in Rome was sending frantic dispatches back to Tokyo warning it might be only a matter of weeks or even days before the Duce’s own generals turned against him; there were already whispers circulating around King Victor Emmanuel III’s court of a coup attempt in the offing. When the Japanese consul general in Milan reported hearing chants of “Death to the Duce” and “Mussolini must go” outside his office window shortly after an Allied air raid on the city, the Yamagida regime began to seriously rethink its diplomatic ties with Italy. When an anti-Axis rally in Rome in mid-April turned into a full- blown riot, Japanese foreign minister Daisuke Matsuoka suggested to his superiors it might be time for Italy and Japan to part ways again.

    But the Italians would beat him to punch on that score; on May 25th, less than a month after the riot in Rome, Mussolini’s own Fascist Grand Council voted to remove him as prime minister of Italy and replace him with Ethiopian war veteran Pietro Badoglio. Badoglio’s first major acts of foreign policy as the new Italian head of state were to open cease- fire discussions with the Allies and to sever diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany and the Japanese People’s Republic. The news of Badoglio’s decision was greeted with sheer rage in Berlin and with outright horror among the pro-Italian factions in Tokyo-- in one fell swoop, a critical element of the Axis war machine was about to be lost. Hitler’s response to this crisis was to deploy German soldiers to occupy northern Italy; Yamagida was considerably less proactive, mounting only a half-hearted 11th-hour attempt to persuade the Badoglio government to reverse course and retain diplomatic ties with its old Axis partners.

     Badoglio’s mind was made up, however, and on June 1st, 1943 Allied and Italian representatives met in Lisbon to sign the armistice which would formally end hostilities between Italy and the Allies. Two days later, the Badoglio government declared war on Germany and Japan while Mussolini-- who in the meantime had been spirited away by SS commandos to head a puppet regime in the German-occupied north of Italy --chose to reaffirm his unyielding, and at that point meaningless, friendship for Yamagida. Some historians have suggested that Yamagida’s apathetic reaction to Italy’s defection from the Axis camp may also have been the beginning of the end for his alliance with Hitler; certainly Japanese- German relations, always awkward to begin with, took a steady downturn in the months immediately following Mussolini’s ouster.

    Indeed, by the autumn of 1943 Goebbels’ writings and speeches about Japan, which for years had been ringing with a genuine if somewhat wary admiration for the Liberation Society, began to take on a decidedly and more overtly negative tone. So, too, did the official newsreels made by Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry and the German embassy in Tokyo’s dealings with Daisuke Matsuoka. Allied intelligence specialists on Germany-Japan relations studied every nuance of official communications between Berlin and Tokyo looking for clues as to when and how the link between Yamagida and Hitler might be severed for good.

The first months of 1944 saw the German-Japanese diplomatic bond weaken still further as German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop recalled most of his Tokyo embassy’s staff and hinted to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that the Reich might cut trade and military help to the Japanese People’s Republic unless Yamagida took more interest in backing Mussolini’s so-called Italian Social Republic in the German-held northern sectors of Italy. But by then, Yamagida’s military and foreign policy priorities were focused almost entirely on the disintegration of his country’s strategic position as the Allies pushed his armies out of Indochina and the Chinese mainland.

    In early May of 1944, just over a month before the D-Day landings in France, the Japanese People’s Navy mounted one last desperate attempt to halt the now seemingly irresistible force of Allied naval and air power in the Pacific. Sending the cream of what remained of their first-class carrier forces to attack the American naval outpost at Wake Island, the JPN admiralty hoped to lure the U.S. Pacific fleet into an ambush which would turn the tide of the war back in Japan’s favor(and, the pro-German elements of Yamagida’s inner circle hoped, preserve the German-Japanese alliance). Instead, U.S. air and naval forces deployed to defend Wake smashed the Japanese attack in what has since come to be known as “the Wake Turkey Shoot”; ninety percent of what was left of the JPN’s carrier aviation strength at that time was destroyed in the battle for Wake, and more than half the ships committed to the attack were sunk by U.S. bombs and torpedoes before the day was over. What was left of the JPN flotilla fled back to the Japanese home islands at breakneck speed, chased nearly every inch of the way by American submarines.

   Many historians both in America and Japan view the JPN defeat at Wake Island as the main catalyst for the chain of events that would eventually conclude with Yamagida’s ouster as Japanese chancellor in October of 1944. Certainly it gave his staunchest critics within the inner circle of the Liberation Society regime considerable motivation to begin taking action against him. Throughout the summer of 1944, as Allied forces in Europe drove the Germans out of France and Belgium and Allied naval power in the Pacific began to choke off what was left of Japan’s commercial maritime trade, the conspirators in the plan to oust Yamagida methodically laid out their strategy for seizing control of the government; the sudden resignation of Hideki Tojo as war minister in mid- July removed a potential serious obstacle to their efforts. For years he had been one of the cornerstones of the Yamagida regime, and had he not fallen into disgrace shortly after the Japanese People’s Army was forced to pull most of its remaining troops out of China he could very well have stopped the plotters in their tracks.

    There was still, at that time, no thought of abolishing the one-party state itself even after the defeats Japan had endured during the war; the conspirators were unwilling to go that far. Yet the leaders of the plot-- collectively known as “the Committee of Five” --had without fully knowing it planted the seeds for the chain of events that, more than four decades after the Second World War ended, would eventually culminate in the final collapse of the Liberation Society as a political force and the beginning of a more democratic era in Japan.

    As the Allied naval and air blockade of the Japanese home islands went forward, so too did the Committee of Five’s preparations to remove Yamagida as chancellor of the Japanese People’s Republic. Ironically, in some cases the moves the conspirators were making in advance of the coup were disguised as measures to prevent a coup-- such as when an elite JPA special forces brigade commanded and staffed by secret Yamagida foes was transferred to Tokyo in September of 1944 under the pretext of acting as bodyguards for the chancellor. In a similar vein, a squadron of People’s Air Corps fighter planes ostensibly transferred to the Tokyo region for air defense duty in the area comprising the Yamagida government’s central headquarters was in fact actually intended to provide air support for the coup should Yamagida loyalists move to crush it.

    Finally, in October of 1944, the Committee of Five and its supporters were ready to make their move. At dawn on October 11th JPA troops loyal to the Committee began fanning out across Tokyo to seize control of critical strategic points throughout the Japanese capital. In an echo of the chain of events that had started the April Revolution twenty-eight years before, one of the first such points to be captured was Tokyo’s central telegraph station. Chancellor Yamagida, outraged that soldiers of his own army would dare to take up arms against, tried to telephone commanders still loyal to the regime only to discover that his phone lines had been cut. And things would only get worse for him from there: at 11:30 AM Tokyo time Mitsuharu Homma, the JPA general who’d replaced Hideki Tojo as war minister shortly after Tojo’s resignation, marched into Yamagida’s office with a detail of JPA military police and coldly informed Yamagida that he was being removed as chancellor of the Japanese People’s Republic for what Homma referred to as “actions and conduct detrimental to the best interests of the Japanese people”.

   Following his arrest, the now-deposed Yamagida was taken to a military. prison to await trial; the Committee of Five then spent the next 48 hours crushing efforts by pro-Yamagida forces to restore him to power. With the now-former chancellor and his allies effectively cut off at the knees, the new government was free to begin cease-fire negotiations with the Allied powers. On October 21st, 1944 Japanese diplomats and representatives of the Allied powers met in Stockholm to open cease-fire negotiations; the formal armistice ending the war in the Pacific was signed on November 12th. While on the surface the armistice appeared to have ended the Pacific war with a stalemate, in reality Japan had lost its fight to become the supreme power in Asia and lost it badly. Its armed forces were effectively crippled, its economy was on the brink of collapse, and its industrial base was reeling from the blows it had sustained from Allied strategic bombers in the final months before the armistice.

    To add insult to injury from the Liberation Society’s perspective, the war had seriously loosened Tokyo’s once-iron grip on its Korean vassal. In spite of all Tokyo’s attempts to suppress opposition to the puppet regime of the badly misnamed Korean People’s Republic, Korean dissidents were not by any means abandoning their struggle to bring democracy and independence back to their homeland. And ordinary Japanese citizens, disgusted with the totalitarian nightmare their own country had become, were starting to take notice of the Korean dissidents’ tactics...

To Be Continued