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Seizing The Telegraph Office: Japan’s 1916 April Revolution And Its Consequences

(based on the “The Times That Try Men’s Souls” series from the same author)

 

Part 2 By Chris Oakley

Summary: In the first chapter of this series we sketched out the circumstances leading to Japan’s April Revolution of 1916 and the start of the Revolution itself. In this installment we’ll review the Liberation Society’s swift takeover of the Japanese government and the massacre of all but one member the Imperial family in the revolution’s final days.

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The launch of the April Revolution was a masterpiece of both timing and operational security. Few people outside the Society’s ranks even suspected anything out of the ordinary was happening until the Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama telegraph offices were firmly in rebel hands; for that matter some Society members themselves weren’t fully sure what was going on until their cell leaders informed them of the impending uprisings in Tokyo and Osaka. Once the rebellion got going, however, it quickly picked up momentum as well as popular support. Not since the French Revolution of 1789 had an anti-royal revolt gained so much traction so quickly.

Further aiding the success of the April Revolution’s first wave was the rebel leaders’ decision to mount the telegraph office raids at a time when the level of police alertness would be at its lowest. Had they tried it when that alertness was at a higher level, there’s a chance the April Revolution might have been crushed at the outset; certainly they would have had a much more difficult time overthrowing the Imperial regime. In any case the rebels’ cause had a great many sympathizers among the police forces’ ranks-- as was the case with the army, much of the rank and file among the Emperor’s security forces were bitter about the condition of their lives and blamed the Imperial regime for the hardships plaguing Japan at the time the Revolution was started.

With increasingly large segments of the army and the police going over to the rebel side, the Emperor’s grip on power weakened ever more rapidly; within just eight days after the April Revolution began, the Liberation Society had effectively taken control of three-quarters of the Japanese home islands and were moving to seize the rest. Emperor Taishō became a virtual prisoner in his own palace as the insurgents tightened their grip on Japan and prepared to assault Tokyo. Foreign diplomats either barricaded themselves behind their embassy compound walls or fled the Japanese capital by any means possible; in one of the more dramatic rescue operations in the annals of naval history, a group of Russian Pacific fleet heavy cruisers steamed into Tokyo Bay under an overcast pre-dawn sky to evacuate the Russian ambassador and his staff from Japan.

On April 16th, twelve days into the April Revolution, the main body of the Liberation Society’s military wing finally began their assault on Tokyo proper. The few regular troops in Japan’s capital still loyal to the Emperor were overwhelmed by the rebel forces in a matter of hours; by sunrise the next morning Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was surrounded by insurgents. Now all that stood between the Emperor and his demise were his palace guards, who in spite of their unquestionable valor were at a disadvantage against the Society forces-- not only did the insurgents enjoy numerical superiority over the guards, but they had greater firepower too. The palace guards had very few guns, and most of the ones they did have were largely obsolescent, while the rebels were armed with the latest types of machine guns and repeating rifles.

Around 3:00 PM on the afternoon of April 17th the rebels broke through the last line of defenses at the Imperial Palace and stormed the Emperor’s throne room. What happened next, though at the time it was justified by the Society regime as a harsh yet necessary form of retribution for the Imperial government’s crimes, has since come to be viewed by the Japanese people as a black mark on their country’s history. One by one nearly every member of Emperor Taishō’s family, along with Taishō himself, was viciously put to death by the rebels; the massacre’s lone survivor, a young prince named Michi Hirohito, was smuggled to safety by a loyal Imperial family retainer who gave up his own life to ensure the prince’s safe getaway. Hirohito’s road to exile took him through Shanghai, Vladivostok, Sydney and even Los Angeles before he and a guardian eventually settled in Honolulu. In his new home the prince would establish a throne-in-exile which he would preside over until his death in 1989 at the age of 87. During the three-quarters of a century that the Liberation Society ruled Japan, this throne-in-exile served as a vital touchstone for foes of the Society’s dictatorship.

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The reaction by the international community to the massacre of Emperor Taishō and his family was one of outrage and horror; it was a feeling shared by Japanese nationals who opposed the Society, and even some of those who supported the April Revolution felt the rebels had gone too far in executing the royal family. But the protests of those who objected to the executions fell on deaf ears-- the Society’s leadership was of the opinion the liquidation of the Imperial family had been absolutely necessary and just. Indeed, one or two of the more fanatical members of the party’s inner circle favored dispatching hit squads to Honolulu to assassinate Prince Michi Hirohito and thus make it a clean sweep of the Imperial family. Fortunately this idea was ultimately vetoed on the grounds that such an action would engender unnecessary antagonisms with the United States. The Liberation Society could ill afford to contemplate getting involved in foreign conflicts before it had finished securing its own power base at home.

But this didn’t mean the new regime was totally uninterested in global affairs. Even as the remnants of the old Imperial government were being swept away, Society officials had begun to covertly forge ties with anti-colonial activists in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the hope that these ties could one day work to the new regime’s benefit. Even over in the United States, where the administration of President Woodrow Wilson was proving irredeemably hostile to the Society, the new government of Japan found allies among the far left; in June of 1916 an organization called the Friends of the Japanese Republic was formed in San Francisco with the aim of lobbying Washington to change its policy on Japan to make it more favorable to the Society. At its peak the FJR could claim a membership roll of close to 25,000, with the largest chapters of the organization being centered in Honolulu and Los Angeles. Its existence would be a brief and controversial one, however, as public outrage over its agenda combined with relentless investigation by federal and state law enforcement agents would force the group to disband by the fall of 1917.

Yuji Kagamoto, head of the Liberation Society and chancellor of what was now the People’s Republic of Japan, acted swiftly and with great ruthlessness to smash all remaining traces of opposition to his party’s rule. In his first official decree following the overthrow of the Imperial dynasty, Kagamoto ordered the abolition of all political parties other than the Society; those found in violation of this edict could be sentenced to lengthy prison terms or even put to death if it suited the new regime’s pleasure. He followed up his ban on dissident political parties with another edict forbidding the practice of Shinto Buddhism-- the largely pacifistic mindset of Buddhist philosophy was a menace to the pro-war ideology espoused by Kagamoto and his comrades.

To ensure that internal opposition to his faction’s rule would be suppressed, Chancellor Kagamoto established a secret police agency known as the People’s Committee for Internal Security; this agency had almost unlimited powers to arrest, detain, and even kill anybody who was perceived as an enemy of the state. To handle foreign intelligence tasks Kagamoto created the People’s Committee for State Defense, which would be responsible for waging covert war against the perceived foes of the People’s Republic and neutralizing foreign agents on Japanese soil. Together these two organizations would inflict repression on the Japanese people that would rival, and often surpass, the worst acts of despotism the Emperor’s security forces had committed in the pre-April Revolution era.

******

Concurrently with the establishment of the People’s Committee for Internal Security and the People’s Committee for State Defense, the Kagamoto regime embarked on a rearmament program that was aimed at making Japan one of the most dominant powers if not the most dominant power in the Far East. By June of 1917, just over a year after Emperor Taishō’s ouster and death, four new battleships had been commissioned for the Japanese People’s Navy and three more were under construction. The number of soldiers in the People’s Army had been doubled. And in a sign of the new regime’s appreciation for the importance of air power in modern warfare, the Japanese war ministry established the People’s Air Corps in August of 1917, making Japan the first nation in Asia to possess an independent air arm. When the Hohenzollern imperial regime in Germany collapsed at the end of World War I, Japanese diplomats in Europe quietly recruited some of the German military’s top officers as advisors to the Liberation Society government on aerial combat.

The People’s Air Corps began rehearsing for its planned role in Japan’s future wars by supporting the Kagamoto dictatorship’s campaign to wipe out the Shinto temples that had been the spiritual bedrock of Japan before the April Revolution. As early as October of 1917. two months after the Air Corps was established, its fighter squadrons were raiding temples in Honshu and Hokkaido and strafing Shinto followers who were trying to find sanctuary elsewhere. Its reconnaissance planes hunted those sanctuaries like bloodhounds tracking big game. And when its bomber squadrons were first revealed to the outside world in early January of 1918, it was via a terse announcement from the war ministry that two of those squadrons were engaged in what were described by the ministry’s official spokesman as “punitive missions” against illegal Shinto worshipping sites. Not since the Bourbon dynasty unleashed the French army on citizens of Paris in the days just prior to the French Revolution of 1789 had a government so viciously waged war on its own people.

By early 1919 the last remaining Shinto temples in Tokyo and Osaka had been closed and what was left of the Shinto community in the rest of Honshu was under siege not only by the Japanese military and secret police but also by ordinary citizens who had long since lost faith in the ancient religion. Rewards were offered to anybody who turned in a Shinto follower to the Committee for Internal Security, and there was no shortage of people ready and willing to claim those rewards. There were some cases in which people with personal scores to settle used false accusations of Shintoism against their neighbors to get revenge on them for slights either real or imagined; members of the infamous yakuza crime syndicates that dominated Japan’s underworld were quick to offer their services to the government on the sly to liquidate any Shinto adherents the police or army had overlooked.

In 1920 the Liberation Society regime’s crackdown on the Shinto faith in Japan reached its grim climax. While thousands of believers had fled the country to seek sanctuary abroad, thousands more were still stuck in the Japanese home islands, and the People’s Committee for Internal Security was relentless in hunting them down. To these adherents the Committee offered a simple stark choice: renounce their faith and swear allegiance to the Society, or suffer the consequences of refusing to do so.

And those consequences would be dire indeed...

 

To Be Continued

 

 

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