Summary: In the first two chapters of this series we looked at Japan’s April Revolution of 1916; the massacre of the Japanese imperial family in the revolution’s final days; and the new regime’s brutal crackdown against Shintoism in the early years of the post-revolutionary era. In this installment we’ll examine the Liberation Society’s infamous “show trials” of 1922-23 and the rise in tensions between Japan and China in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.

******

With domestic opposition to its dictatorial rule effectively shattered, the Liberation Society regime in Japan now started turning its energies toward making an example of those critics of the regime who hadn’t already been incarcerated or executed. Yuji Kagamoto, who had been declared chancellor-for-life in September of 1920, was fully determined that those who’d tried to stand in his party’s way during its takeover of the Japanese government should be punished as harshly as possible; to that end, he sanctioned the establishment of special courts whose sole function would be to prosecute those who the regime judged guilty of the mortal sin of not agreeing with the Society’s far leftist agenda. The hearings conducted by these special courts were derisively nicknamed “show trials” by the American press because their outcomes were predetermined in much the same way that a theater play was scripted out.

The first such trial was convened in late March of 1922. That spiteful retribution and not justice was the main objective of these hearings was immediately apparent by the number of people crammed in the defendants’ box. More than a hundred suspects had been hauled in front of the court on legal grounds that were, at best, questionable. Many of those being indicted by the special court were former members of Japan’s upper classes; all of them were-- or had been --followers of the now-outlawed Shinto religion. After being relentlessly tongue- lashed by the presiding judge, they were all pronounced as guilty of “counterrevolutionary” acts against the People’s Republic and handed very harsh sentences. The lucky ones were shot by People’s Army firing squads; far more often, people sentenced to execution by the special courts were subjected to hanging or the incredibly barbaric punishment of being drawn and quartered.

  Even those spared from the death penalty couldn’t expect any sort of mercy from the special courts; next to execution, the courts’ most favored form of punishment for those considered guilty of crimes against the People’s Republic was to send dissidents to one of the dozens of prisons and labor camps the Kagamoto regime had established during its first five years in power. Anyone who was classified as an enemy of the regime could expect to be jailed at the drop of a hat-- and in some cases the government didn’t even wait for the hat to drop. A musician who had been Japan’s most respected composer before the April Revolution was arrested in the summer of 1922 for publishing a symphony whose title, “Death Of An Unjust Man”, struck Chancellor Kagamoto’s minister of internal security as a seditious swipe at his boss. In a rage he ordered the offending composer thrown in jail at once; less than twelve hours later, the unfortunate composer was on his way to solitary confinement at Japan’s largest prison, where he would die of tuberculosis eight months later.

    The few foreign journalists allowed to stay in Tokyo after the April Revolution were stunned by the Liberation Society regime’s casual disregard for due process and the arbitrary harshness of its secret police in detaining those who didn’t fit with the Society’s conception of how Japan should live. They would have further cause for shock in August of 1922 when the second wave of “show trials” began convening in Tokyo and Yokohama; not only were adult Japanese being persecuted by the special courts now, but adolescents and even children were also being hauled before those courts as a warning to their parents about the potential cost of defying the regime. Such tactics were an unfortunate precursor to the indiscriminate arrest and prosecution of youth that in more recent times has been a common method of repression among dictatorships in Latin American and the Middle East.

    Such actions inspired a wave of anti-Liberation Society feeling outside Japan that rivaled anything seen after the Imperial family was massacred. In Italy, where the monarchy was regarded with something close to reverence, Fascist Party founder and leader Benito Mussolini called for King Victor Emmanuel III to declare war on the Japanese People’s Republic; in Great Britain former Lord of the Admiralty and future British prime minister Winston Churchill penned a very scathing letter to the London Times branding Kagamoto “the most monstrous and cruel autocrat to rule over an Asian people since the days of Genghis Khan”. In Washington President of the United States Calvin Coolidge, despite his own isolationist leanings as well as those of most of his fellow Americans,  hinted that his administration might back a League of Nations embargo against Japan if such an embargo were enacted. The Russian Federal Army, acting on direct orders from then-prime minister Alexander Kerensky, placed its Siberian border divisions on full alert as a warning to Tokyo from Moscow that aggression against Russia would not be tolerated.

    But the Liberation Society regime at that time was still much more interested in asserting internal control than in confronting external adversaries. Kagamoto’s foreign minister took little notice of all the condemnations directed at his boss from foreign governments except to issue a blanket dismissal of all such criticisms as “unduly naïve” and “ignorant of the reality of the counterrevolutionary plots against the People’s Republic”.

The winter of late 1922 and early 1923 saw the Kagamoto regime turn its wrath on the few remaining senior military leaders who had managed to retain their jobs in the Japanese armed forces after the Imperial regime collapsed. In this instance, the special courts that normally presided over the “show trials” would delegate the task of prosecuting these unfortunate men to a military tribunal composed of officers chosen more for their loyalty to the Liberation Society than their legal or military competence. One of the most prominent members of this tribunal was Hideki Tojo, now a trusted junior deputy to the Japanese war minister and just a few years away from becoming minister of war himself; Chancellor Kagamoto himself had personally lobbied for Tojo’s inclusion in the tribunal as a gesture of appreciation for the loyalty Tojo had shown him during the Liberation Society’s fight for control of Japan.

  Even by the infamous standards of the “show trials” Tojo was an abusive interrogator. The verbal abuse to which he subjected unlucky defendants hauled before the tribunal was oftentimes much worse than the physical tortures inflicted by the People’s Committee for Internal Security. He was not above using obscenities to badger witnesses into telling the tribunal what it wanted to hear; before the trial was over things would get to the point where Tojo had to be privately warned by his superiors to be more discreet in his language lest his choice of words should create a poor impression of the Japanese People’s Army in the minds of the public. Even Chancellor Kagamoto-- who otherwise had no objections whatsoever to Tojo’s conduct at the tribunal --was known to admonish him not to use obscene language in the courtroom while he was interrogating witnesses.

  An air of inevitability hung over the tribunal; it took the devastating Tokyo earthquake of March 1923 to disrupt the proceedings, and even then the Kagamoto regime found a way around that obstacle by moving the tribunal to a ship anchored in Yokohama Harbor until the wreckage from the tremors had been cleared away. Once that task was complete Tojo’s kangaroo court returned to Tokyo and the show trials picked up right where they had left off. The bare minimum that those dragged before Tojo’s tribunal could expect was public humiliation and a lengthy sentence in a prison labor camp, and the tribunal wasn’t shy about going beyond the minimum-- in particularly notorious instance in May of 1923, a former Imperial Navy lieutenant commander was condemned to death by firing squad simply for disagreeing with Tojo in regard to a relatively minor legal point.

  ******

The show trials climaxed in June of 1923 with the prosecution of some three dozen surviving former Shinto priests and nuns who had been arrested and incarcerated in the final stages of the Liberation Society regime’s post-revolution crackdown on Shintoism. In the years before the April Revolution it would have been inconceivable to even consider prosecuting such revered figures; Japan’s post-revolutionary government, however, thought nothing of accusing them of every heinous crime short of first-degree murder-- and according to secret court transcripts released by Japan’s new democratic government in the late 1990s after the Society regime collapsed, at least one judge in the show trials was prepared to indict the Shinto clerics for that too. Misuharu Abe, dubbed “Japan’s Hanging Judge” by the American press, had ironically once aspired to be a Shinto priest only to have his dreams dashed when a monk told him he lacked the proper temperament to be a cleric. He had been one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the ban on Shintoism when it was first imposed by the Society after the April Revolution, and now he promised himself he would make full use of his judicial authority to sweep away the ancient religion’s last remaining fragments in the Japanese home islands. He kept that promise with a vengeance, helping sentence half the clerics to death and ordering the harshest possible prison terms for the other half.

With internal opposition to its policies effectively eviscerated, the Liberation Society now began shifting its attention more and more towards dealing with external foes. Not the least of these was Japan’s massive neighbor China, which in spite of its patchwork government was viewed by the Kagamoto regime as a potential serious obstacle to the Liberation Society’s goal of spreading its revolutionary ideals across the globe. Conversely, by the same token, the Chinese feared that the leftist oligarchy in Tokyo might now try to colonize mainland China as the defunct Imperial government had once occupied Korea.

The Liberation Society regime was at odds with China as early as 1924, when a Japanese diplomat in Shanghai was arrested and deported on suspicion of trying to incite a pro-Kagamoto uprising in that city. But Sino-Japanese relations truly began to worsen in 1928 when Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist Kuomintang party gained control of the Chinese government; Chiang had never made any secret of his loathing for the Kagamoto regime, and one of his first official acts as premier of the Republic of China was to launch a crash program intended to strengthen the Chinese armed forces against a potential Japanese invasion.

Kagamoto took this as a personal insult, and responded by having the People’s Navy stage training exercises in the summer of 1929 just outside Chinese territorial waters south of Hainan Island. The message Kagamoto intended to send to China was a simple and stark one: If you start a war with the People’s Republic of Japan, the People’s Republic will fight it to the finish. Foreign intelligence analysts noted with interest-- and a certain degree of trepidation --the extensive use of carrier aircraft in these exercises. Kagamoto’s regime had recognized early on the potential value of the aircraft carrier in future wars, and was determined to make the carrier branch of the Japanese People’s Navy the most powerful such naval arm in the world.

Three months after the exercises concluded, the world economy was derailed by the onset of the Great Depression. This development gave a heightened sense of urgency to the Kagamoto regime’s naval expansion efforts; Japan desperately needed more raw materials in order to keep her national economy going, and that meant military conquest of areas rich in mineral and other resources. One of the first and most logical targets for such conquest was China; vast, chock full of all kinds of critical resources, and saddled with a central government which had a well-deserved reputation for corruption and inefficiency, she was-- or so Kagamoto’s generals believed at the time --the ideal milieu for the People’s Army to further refine the tactics and weapons it had debuted in the April Revolution era.

In March of 1930 a serious potential obstacle to the Kagamoto regime’s ambitions vis-à-vis China was removed when a leftist coup in Korea toppled that country’s long-serving anti-Kagamoto prime minister and replaced him with a junta whose policies were almost in lockstep with those of the Japanese chancellor. The new regime in Seoul signed a mutual defense pact with Tokyo and pledged its full support to the Japanese People’s Republic in its struggle to vanquish Chiang Kai-Shek for good. These developments were watched with a very anxious eye not just by the Chinese but also by the great colonial powers of Europe-- in particular Great Britain, who feared that the expansionist Liberation Society regime in Tokyo might one day follow up its land grab in China with an invasion of British possessions in the Far East, most notably Singapore.

There was one other crucial factor in the Liberation Society regime’s expansionist agenda, although it wasn’t openly discussed: Chancellor Kagamoto was seriously ill. At the time of the Korean coup Kagamoto was battling lung cancer, and he secretly feared the disease might kill him before his plans were complete. Foreign diplomats in Tokyo observed that at his annual speech before the Diet marking the anniversary of the April Revolution the chancellor looked unusually drawn and tired; they also noted that his chief deputy and longtime friend Mitsuharu Yamagida was assuming an increasingly large share of the day-to-day responsibilities of running the Japanese government. For example, it had been Yamagida who served as chief negotiator for the mutual defense pact between the Japanese People’s Republic and Korea.

It would also be Yamagida who, seven months after the Korean coup, gave the official order that would plunge Asia into all-out war...

To Be Continued