Summary: In the previous five chapters of this series we recalled Japan’s April Revolution of 1916 and the massacre of the Japanese imperial family; the new regime’s barbaric crackdown on religious and political dissenters in the early post-revolutionary era; the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in late 1930; the brief Russian- Japanese border conflict of 1932; and the Japanese-supported terror bombings at the British colony of Singapore in December of 1933. In this segment, we’ll look at worldwide reaction to the bombings and recall the death of chancellor Yuji Kagamoto. December 7th bombing in Singapore a year later.

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Whatever divisions there might have been between Great Britain’s political parties before the December 7th terror bombings in Singapore, in the aftermath of the bombings Britons of all political stripes were united in their condemnation of the attacks. Winston Churchill, former Lord of the Admiralty and future British prime minister, declared that December 7th would be remembered by future generations as “a day which will live in infamy” because of the mass murders the Japanese People’s Republic had sanctioned against British nations in its quest to become the dominant power in Asia. The House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Kagamoto regime for its role in the bombings and pledging to back then-prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in whatever action he wanted to take against Kagamoto’s government.

MacDonald’s Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, had already moved to act decisively against Tokyo on the diplomatic front. On December 10th, only three days after the bomb attacks occurred, Simon ordered all of Britain’s remaining diplomats in Japan recalled and all of the remaining Japanese diplomatic personnel in Britain expelled. Most of the Japanese diplomats were by then ready to go home anyway; they saw Simon’s expulsion order as the ideal pretext to take their leave from a country they viewed as hopelessly and congenitally hostile to their homeland. The thought that their country’s own actions in China and on the Siberian border, or its harsh treatment of dissenters within its civil population, might have helped generate such hostility apparently never crossed the Japanese envoys’ minds.

In Germany, where Adolf Hitler was finishing his first year as chancellor of the Third Reich, the government made no public comment about the severing of British-Japanese diplomatic relations. But in private, most of the remaining non-Nazis in Hitler’s cabinet worried the MacDonald government might do the same to Germany if the Führer carried through with his plans to do away with the Versailles Treaty. True to form, Hitler blithely dismissed such concerns, insisting that Britain would respond with little other than sternly worded protests when the Reich began reasserting what he viewed as its rightful place among the world’s great powers. With Whitehall’s attention focused on Japan-- so his reasoning went --the MacDonald government wouldn’t have much time or energy left over to oppose Berlin.

In Russia Alexander Kerensky, then beginning the final stage of his second term as the country’s premier, worried his own people might be the next targets of a Singapore-style terror bombing. Memories of Japan’s defeat in the brief but intense Siberian border conflict were still fresh on both sides of that frontier; Kerensky had little doubt Tokyo was awaiting the opportunity to seek vengeance for that defeat. He ordered his top police and intelligence officials to step up their efforts to identify and capture potential terrorists within Russia’s borders and sent his foreign minister, Maxim Livitnov, on a whirlwind “shuttle diplomacy” mission to negotiate intelligence-sharing treaties with Great Britain, France, and the United States.

Spain, which a few years later would become the battleground for one of the bloodiest civil wars in European history, witnessed a massive outpouring of public sympathy for the victims of the Singapore bombings. In Rome thousands gathered spontaneously at the Vatican for an outdoor prayer vigil in memory of those killed in the attacks; one of the great ironies of European and world history in this era is that Benito Mussolini, one of the future architects of the “Pact Of Steel” linking Italy to Nazi Germany and the Japanese People’s Republic, was among the participants in this vigil. Still pro-British in his foreign policy views at the time of the Singapore attacks, Mussolini contacted the British embassy in Rome with an offer to dispatch Italian warships to the Malayan Peninsula to support the Royal Navy in the event of war between Britain and Japan.

In the United States, which was just then beginning to shake off its longtime post-World War I isolationism, government reaction to the Singapore bombings was low-key but largely pro-British. Two of the people killed in the terror attacks were U.S. Navy seamen who had been visiting the island on shore leave, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration worried the carnage Japanese agents had visited against Singapore might just as easily happen in Hawaii or the Philippines. At the Justice Department FBI director J. Edgar Hoover phoned the British ambassador in Washington to offer the assistance of federal agents in tracking down and arresting the perpetrators of the attack; that same day he issued instructions to his West Coast regional field office in which he directed them to investigate Japanese-American communities in California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada for potential collaborators with the Kagamoto regime.

France, which itself had considerable interests in the Far East, was unnerved by the Singapore attack. Panic over the possibility that anti-colonialists in French Indochina might attempt a similar attack on French commercial or military facilities caused further turmoil for a government already deep in the throes of crisis. Then-French foreign minister Joseph Paul-Boncour had his hands full trying to reassure the average Frenchman that his brethren in France’s colonies in southeast Asia would be protected against terrorist attack. But if Paul-Boncour had a difficult job, prime minister Edouard Daladier had an even more difficult one trying to sell his leftist colleagues within the French government on the idea of Paris taking up arms against Japan to save what many, if not all, of them regarded as an illegally held overseas domain that by all rights should have been liquidated generations ago. And the general staff of the French army, which had deteriorated badly after its triumph in the First World War, had a nearly impossible job trying to come up with an effective war plan for protecting France’s outposts in southeast Asia; some French military bases in the region didn’t even have proper ammunition for their guns, let alone anything remotely resembling the kind of strong defenses necessary to safeguard them from Japanese attack.

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While the major Western powers were bracing themselves for the possibility of war with Japan in the near future, in Japan itself an intense behind-the-scenes political battle was already being fought to determine who would succeed the dying Yuji Kagamoto as chancellor of the Japanese People’s Republic. Mitsuharu Yamagida, Kagamoto’s most trusted deputy, was the officially designated heir apparent, but there were a number of challengers to his position; within the Liberation Society’s central committee alone there were a dozen men agitating to knock Yamagida off his perch.

In his response to these challenges Yamagida proved to be every inch as ruthless as his mentor had been in crushing opposition to the April Revolution seventeen years earlier. He had two potential rivals assassinated, two others sent to prison camps on dubious charges, and still others blackmailed into relinquishing their claims to power. As for his other rivals, they melted into the woodwork once they realized the lengths Yamagida was willing to go to in order to get what he most wanted.

One man Yamagida didn’t have to worry about was Hideki Tojo. The Japanese war minister had already vowed unswerving loyalty to Yamagida and backed up his words with action; to name just one example, it was Tojo who personally recruited the gunmen responsible for assassinating Yamagida’s two biggest rivals for the chancellorship. In the days and weeks immediately following the Singapore bombings Tojo would prove to be invaluable in furthering Yamagida’s campaign to crush his remaining competitors for the chancellor’s post. And Yamagida was very grateful for Tojo’s backing-- to show his appreciation, he drafted a top secret memorandum declaring that Tojo would retain the war minister’s post in Yamagida’s soon-to-be-formed government.

While Yamagida was moving to neutralize all remaining opposition to his claim as inheritor of Yuji Kagamoto’s mantle, Kagamoto himself had become a shadow of the dynamic leader he once was. The lung cancer that had been one of the main factors in his decision to initiate wars of conquest against Japan’s neighbors was now increasingly keeping him confined to a private hospital bed while Tokyo’s finest doctors fought a relentless but ultimately losing battle to keep him alive. He seldom appeared in public anymore, and by January of 1934 he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that it was time for him to finally relinquish the reins of power to his protégé Yamagida. On January 28th he stunned his fellow countrymen, and the world, by announcing he would retire as chancellor the next day and swear in Yamagida as the new head of state of the Japanese People’s Republic.

It was a surprisingly quiet end to a political career that had been born in the dramatic cries of protest and mushroomed in the fires of revolution and civil war. In fact, some Western intelligence bureau chiefs were so skeptical when they heard the news that they directed their field agents in Japan to immediately launch an investigation to determine if Kagamoto’s retirement announcement wasn’t simply a ploy to test the true extent of Yamagida’s loyalty. But at dawn on January 29th two convoys of motor vehicles were seen leaving a JPA base north of Tokyo-- one a contingent of transport trucks en route to Kagamoto’s office to pick up his personal effects and deliver them to his post- retirement home in the Ogasawara Islands, the other a motorcade whose purpose was to bring Yamagida to the heart of Tokyo for the ceremony that would officially make him Japan’s new chancellor.

At noon Tokyo time Mitsuharu Yamagida was sworn in as the second chancellor of the Japanese People’s Republic. Foreign journalists and dignitaries who attended Yamagida’s inauguration that day or watched it on newsreels afterward were shocked by how frail and gaunt Kagamoto looked as he administered the chancellor’s oath to Yamagida; Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, observed in his diary entry for February 1st that the UFA newsreel footage he’d viewed of Kagamoto the night before reminded him “an especially frightening horror movie”.

It was also the last motion picture footage of Kagamoto to be filmed while he was still alive: he died on March 4th, 1934, just over a month after swearing Yamagida in as chancellor of Japan. His funeral was the largest given for a Japanese head of state since the Emperor Meiji’s memorial service in 1912, with thousands of people lining the funeral procession route to pay their final respects to the Liberation Society founder and three full JPA divisions marching at the front of the funeral cortege. Mitsuharu Yamagida, in his eulogy for his mentor, hailed Kagamoto as “the greatest ruler of the last hundred years” and pledged to continue the policies Kagamoto had started.

Unfortunately for millions of people in Asia and the Pacific, he kept that pledge....

To Be Continued