Summary: In the previous thirteen chapters of this series we recalled the 1916 April Revolution that overthrew Japan’s monarchy and established the Japanese People’s Republic; the new government’s brutal repression of all dissenters in the early post-revolutionary years; its expansionist actions and policies before and during World War II; and its tentative first steps toward political and economic reform during the late 1940s and early ‘50s. In this segment we’ll look at the Liberation Society hard-liners’ backlash against these reform efforts.

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When Yoshi Komura went before the Diet to give what is now the most famous speech of his political career, the Liberation Society had been in power in Japan close to four decades. Most of the revolutionaries who had led the 1916 uprising that toppled Japan's monarchy were now old men and would soon be gone. The more fortunate among their number were enjoying a privileged retirement; the unlucky ones languished in prison camps as the price of having wronged the powers that be in Tokyo. As for Komura himself he was walking a political tightrope, trying to steer his country through the rocky shoals of political and economic modernization while at the same time preserving the Society's hold on power.

     Not surprisingly Komura, though outwardly he seemed to have the full weight of the Liberation Society behind him, was the focus of serious if covert internal criticism both by those who believed he was being much too cautious in his reforms and those who feared he was setting Japan along a dangerous path towards rebellion against the Society’s one-party rule. But even the most gifted seer couldn’t have predicted the political firestorm which would erupt in the heart of the Society’s elite when Komura took the podium at 2:00 PM on April 27th, 1955 to outline his vision for the future of Japan. The Diet had no idea the chancellor was about to give what would later be viewed by many historians as the most incendiary speech in modern Japanese history; most of its members assumed Komura would simply give the customary exhortation to strive to uphold the ideological principles which the Society had fought for in the April Revolution.

     Instead the incumbent Japanese chancellor issued what amounted to a near-indictment of the repressive practices and nature of his own party. Even those who fully endorsed Komura's political and economic reformation efforts sat open-mouthed in shock at his harsh words as he in effect took his own government to task for its dictatorial actions past and present. Every man in the Diet chamber, whether they were with or against Komura in regard to his reform agenda, stared at him in utter disbelief-- and so did many of the foreign journalists covering the speech for that matter. Over the years the Liberation Society had been in power in Tokyo, no chancellor of the People’s Republic had ever even come close to being so candid where his regime’s shortcomings were concerned. Certainly no one had ever heard Yamagida voice such sentiments.

     The hard-liners in attendance glared at Chancellor Komura with barely contained outrage; to them his criticisms of the government's past actions and policies constituted naivete at best, and borderline treason at worst. Some of the fierier spirits in their ranks wanted to have Komura executed on the spot, and even those who didn't want him dead took his speech as an intolerable and calculated insult. By the time Komura left the podium, the wheels were being set in motion for what one Western historian would later call "the most significant challenge to an established Japanese government since the April Revolution". Many of the ideologues in the Society's ranks had never trusted Komura in the first place, and they viewed his speech to the Diet as vindication of their suspicions about him.

     Four days after Komura's speech the hard-liners made their first move in their plot to oust him from power. Since 1945 it had been tradition for the Liberation Society's youth organization, the Defenders of Tomorrow, to hold memorial vigils all over Japan marking the anniversary of the Russian government's execution of known Society collaborator and suspected Japanese agent Joseph Stalin; the largest such vigil was usually staged in the heart of Tokyo, and to the hard-liners it represented the perfect opportunity to begin fanning the flames of resentment against Komura. Accordingly, two key Defenders senior officers who were in league with the hard-liners directed their propaganda teams to draft up a series of leaflets and placards which harshly criticized his April 27th speech. This material would be put on open display at the May 1st Tokyo rally-- and incense Komura's supporters in the process.

     As one might have expected, the pro-Komura factions within the Society took these leaflets and placards as an unbearable slight and took to writing their own leaflets and placards defending the chancellor. Western diplomatic offices in the Far East were astonished at this turn of events; it cast more than a few doubts on the traditional Western notion of the Japanese People's Republic as a monolithic totalitarian state. It also gave rise to genuine(if slightly misplaced) fears in some Western circles Japan might be starting to careen down the slippery slope to civil war.

     The widening rift between the pro-Komura and anti-Komura factions in the Liberation Society was serious enough to prompt then-President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower to cable Nikita Khrushchev on May 4th to request a summit meeting with the Russian premier to discuss what the rift meant for Western and Russian interests in the Pacific region. Khrushchev in turn telephoned British prime minister Anthony Eden, and within seventy- two hours the three heads of state and their respective foreign ministers were meeting in New York to frame a common policy on dealing with the split in the Japanese government. Coloring the proceedings was a mutual concern among all three leaders that one side or the other in the struggle between Komura and his rivals might seek to shift the balance of power in Tokyo by seizing control of Japan's nuclear arsenal-- a scenario which had the grim potential to act as a flashpoint for the eruption of global nuclear war.

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     Japan had broken the U.S. nuclear monopoly in 1952 with the test detonation of a 15-kiloton device approximately 220 miles southwest of the island of Honshu. Ever since then the Japanese government had been regarded by most Westerners as a bunch of trigger-happy nutcases eager to start World War III at the drop of a hat; one prominent U.S. senator went so far as to accuse the Komura government of plotting to unleash a nuclear sneak attack on America's West Coast cities even as Japan sought to cultivate better relations with the United States. But the surprising truth of the matter was that Komura and his rivals were highly reluctant to use their newly acquired atomic capability even on foreign adversaries, let alone as a means of dealing with internal conflicts. They'd seen the films of the two Allied atomic strikes on Germany in the last days of the Second World War and seen photos of the burn victims from those attacks; they were determined to spare the Japanese people from such horrors at any cost.

     Nuclear weapons release procedures in the Japanese military were even stricter than those of their American and Russian counterparts. While with the U.S. armed forces a single commander could make the decision whether or not to deploy such weapons and the Russian federal military only needed the permission of two officers for the activation of such weapons, the Japanese armed forces mandated that no fewer than four high-ranking officers had to agree on giving the order to use them. Only with the most extreme cases of emergency could there be any deviations from this procedure, and even then it required the consent of at least a brigadier general to begin the final countdown for arming and detonating an atomic warhead.

     The People's Army and People's Air Corps general staffs were bitterly split up into pro-Komura and anti-Komura camps at the time Eisenhower first contacted Khrushchev to organize the New York summit. The divisions within the People's Navy admiralty were equally sharp, if not more so. Thus there was little if any possibility of these senior officers agreeing to any kind of final decision about nuclear bombs either in defense of the regime or in rebellion against it. But those who wanted to see Komura removed as Japan's chancellor weren't averse to using more conventional methods of liquidating a political opponent. Under the guise of what were designated “self-defense readiness inspections”, both pro-Komura and anti-Komura senior officials in the upper echelons of the Japanese government embarked on what were for all practical purposes recruitment tours to enlist the support of Japan’s armed forces either in defending the existing regime or installing one of Komura’s rivals in power.

     Two months after the May 1st leaflet uproar, Komura's foes dealt him another calculated insult during the commissioning of the JPN heavy cruiser Goka. Since the April Revolution it had been a custom in the People's Navy to hang a portrait of the incumbent Japanese chancellor on the bridge of a new warship as a token of good luck; this time, however, no such portrait was present on the Goka's bridge. Publicly Komura kept silent about it, but in private he vented an almost white-hot fury to his top aides and closest friends about this unconscionable snub orchestrated by his rivals. This was music to the ears of the anti-Komura faction, who saw his ire over the snub as a perfect opportunity to further undermine him behind the scenes.

      And undermine him they did. The most hard-line of the anti-Komura members of the Liberation Society elity waged a relentless and vindictive covert propaganda offensive whose chief purposes were to paint Komura as a dangerous heretic and grease the wheels for his eventual overthrow. Komura did his best to defend himself, but it was an uphill battle. His foes were doing an excellent job of undermining his credibility not only in the ranks of his peers in the Liberation Society but also among the Japanese masses; within a matter of weeks, the American and Russian embassies in Tokyo were sending back anxious reports of massive anti-Komura rallies all across the JPR. The anti-Society underground in Japan found itself confronted with an urgent moral dilemma: as much as they disliked Komura, the thought of him being supplanted by a party hard-liner as chancellor was even more alarming to them. With Komura in charge there was at least a slim hope of reform in Japan; if the hard-liners got control of the government they would reimpose the same harsh political and economic controls that had prevailed in Japan before Komura came into power. Or worse yet, they might foist an even more cruel totalitarianism on the Japanese people...

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      ....which is precisely what some of the most doctrinaire members of the hard-line faction wanted to do. Much like the Italian fascists of the late 1920s or the fundamentalist mullahs of certain theocratic regimes in the Middle East today, the hard-liners wanted to impose strict ideological discipline on Japan once more to counteract what they viewed as the "taint" left by Komura's reform efforts. Only by returning to the strict political discipline that had prevailed within the Society's ranks in its early years in power, their argument went, could the Society hope to remain in power in Japan and avoid becoming as corrupt as the Imperial regime it had ousted so many years ago.

      One small problem with that argument: corruption was already a major problem in the Japanese government. While official state media went out of its way to sell an image of the Society's leaders as being-- like Caesar's wife --above reproach, the embarrassing truth was that many of the party's mid-level officials were every bit as crooked as the worst of the men who'd once run the deposed Imperial government. For that matter the Society elite weren't immune to corrupt thought or behavior either; archives released by the present-day Japanese government over the last decade reveal graft was a way of life for many men in the Society's inner circle. Even as propaganda posters and state radio channel broadcasts were lecturing the masses about the evils of Western-style capitalism, the plain fact was that many Society high-level functionaries enjoyed a life of luxury that would have made the richest London aristocrat or New York business tycoon envious.

      Komura threatened to destroy these functionaries' cozy lifestyle, or at the very minimum put a serious damper on it. For that reason as much as out of their disgust at his "betrayal" (as his fiercest enemies saw it) of everything the Society stood for, they secretly aided the hard-liners' plot against him in exchange for the hard-liners' silence about their upulent way of life. Over the summer months the conspirators continued to lay the groundwork for a coup to oust the would-be reformer from power. Komura's supporters desperately tried to warn him of the impending danger, but they could not agree on a plan of action for thwarting the conspiracy-- or even on who the ringleaders for the conspiracy were.

      Finally, in October of 1955, the anti-Komura faction was ready to make its move. On October 11th, under the pretext of securing key ministry officies and public works facilities against an alleged terrorist plan to attack Tokyo, JPA soldiers loyal to the conspirators occupied the Japanese capital and arrested Komura along with his wife, his two most trusted aides, his interior minister, and his chief bodyguard.(Komura's children, who were on a holiday in Europe at the time of their father's arrest, took shelter at the Canadian consulate in Geneva, where they would spend the next two years before being granted political asylum in the United States.) Komura's chief political adversary, a former People's Army lieuteant colonel named Sadaharu Bugano, was quickly sworn in as Japan's new chancellor and immediately went to work reimposing many of the stricter economic and political controls that had been in place up until Komura started his reform efforts. He also began making preparations to take vengeance on his deposed predecessor for what in his eyes was Komura's "counterrevolutionary actions" to move away from what Bugano viewed as proper Liberation Society policies and ideology....

To Be Continued