The fall of the Tōjō cabinet

On Tuesday 18 July 1944 General Hideki Tōjō submitted the resignation of his entire cabinet to Emperor Hirohito. The government that in December 1941 had taken Japan into war with the United States and Britain had lasted two years and nine months – longer than any Japanese cabinet since the early 1920s. It fell not as a result of a parliamentary vote or a coup, but after a quiet campaign lasting several weeks, waged in the palace and in the homes of former prime ministers, and decided by the defeat in the Mariana Islands. Nine days earlier the Americans had announced the end of the fighting on Saipan – an island whose defence Tōjō had publicly presented as assured.

It is often written that on the same day the Emperor asked General Kuniaki Koiso to form a new government. In reality the change of power took several days and followed an unusual course. The council of former prime ministers (jūshin) nominated Koiso, a retired general and Governor-General of Korea, on 18 July, after Tōjō’s resignation, and on 20 July Hirohito entrusted the task of forming a cabinet not to him alone but jointly to Koiso and Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, prime minister in 1940. The new government was sworn in on 22 July and is still known as the “Koiso–Yonai coalition cabinet”. The formula of two leaders was evidence of compromise – and also of the fact that no one in Tokyo had any idea how to win the war, or how to end it.

The general in charge of everything

Tōjō came to power on 18 October 1941 as a serving general and Minister of War, and over time gathered more and more offices into his own hands. At various stages he was simultaneously prime minister and minister of war, home affairs, foreign affairs and education, and from November 1943 also Minister of Munitions. In February 1944, after the American strike on Truk, he took a step without precedent in the history of the Imperial Army: he dismissed the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Hajime Sugiyama, and took his place himself. His ally, the Navy Minister Admiral Shigetarō Shimada, at the same time replaced Admiral Osami Nagano as Chief of the Navy General Staff.

Combining military administration with operational command was supposed to remedy the coordination of the war. Above all, however, it brought accusations of infringing the Emperor’s prerogatives as supreme commander, and in the navy Shimada was spitefully called “Tōjō’s adjutant”. More importantly, the accumulation of posts made the prime minister personally responsible for every defeat. And in 1944 the defeats came one after another: in March the offensive against Imphal began, ending in disaster (on 5 July the Emperor agreed to its cancellation); in New Guinea the Americans were leapfrogging one Japanese garrison after another; and in June came a blow to the very heart of the defensive system.

The loss of the Marianas

In September 1943 the Emperor and the government had adopted the concept of an “absolute national defence sphere” (zettai kokubōken) – a line from the Kurils through the Marianas and the Carolines to western New Guinea and Burma, to be held at all costs. The Marianas were its key link: from their airfields American B-29 bombers could reach most of the home islands. Tōjō reinforced the Saipan garrison and, according to Japanese accounts, publicly expressed confidence in its defence; he is said to have told the commander on the island, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, that if Saipan fell he himself would have to step down.

The landing of 15 June and the fleet’s defeat in the Philippine Sea on 19–20 June dashed these calculations. Without carriers there was nothing with which to retake the island. On 24 June Tōjō and Shimada, as chiefs of the two general staffs, reported to the Emperor that the plans for a counter-attack had been abandoned. On 1 July the Army General Staff’s operational diary recorded that the empire no longer had the operational means to reverse the course of the war and should be thinking about ending it – or so Japanese literature quotes the entry. For those who had long been looking for a way to remove Tōjō, this was the signal to act.

The conspiracy of the elder statesmen

The centre of the opposition was the jūshin – former prime ministers who since 1940 had advised the Emperor on the choice of head of government. The most active of them was the retired Admiral Keisuke Okada, prime minister in 1934–1936, who in 1936 had miraculously survived an assassination attempt by rebels in Tokyo. Working with him were Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Tōjō’s predecessor, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai and Baron Kiichirō Hiranuma. The key figure, however, was Marquis Kōichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and the Emperor’s closest political adviser – the same man who in October 1941 had recommended Tōjō as prime minister.

According to Japanese studies based on the participants’ memoirs, as late as 27 June Tōjō summoned Okada to his residence and demanded that he stop criticising the government; the conversation turned into a fierce quarrel in which the prime minister is said to have threatened even arrest. Okada did not give way. At the same time, in the navy and among younger officers, plans for the physical elimination of the prime minister were being considered; the best known is attributed to Rear Admiral Sōkichi Takagi of the Navy Ministry. None went beyond the preparatory stage.

Kido’s conditions

Tōjō tried to save the government by reshuffling it. On 13 July he turned to Kido for advice and was told three conditions for the court’s continued support: separating the offices of Minister of War and Chief of the General Staff, removing Shimada from the Navy Ministry, and bringing representatives of the jūshin into the government. Japanese historians believe that Kido was by then already in league with Okada and Konoe, and that the conditions were designed to prove impossible to meet.

Tōjō accepted them nonetheless. On 17 July Shimada stepped down as Navy Minister (he was succeeded by Admiral Naokuni Nomura), and Tōjō gave up the post of Chief of the General Staff, which was taken over by General Yoshijirō Umezu, until then commander of the Kwantung Army. To make room for the former prime ministers, Tōjō demanded the resignation of the Minister of State Nobusuke Kishi, his former associate from Manchuria, who after the defeat in the Philippine Sea had begun to argue for seeking peace. Kishi, forewarned by Okada, refused. Under the Meiji Constitution the prime minister could not dismiss a minister – each answered directly to the Emperor – and disagreement within the cabinet usually meant its fall. Kishi was even visited by the head of the Tokyo military police (kenpeitai), who, according to Kishi’s account, threatened him with his sword; the minister is said to have replied that in Japan only the Emperor gave orders.

At the same time General Kenryō Satō, head of the Military Affairs Bureau of the War Ministry, tried to persuade Yonai to join the government. Yonai refused, as did the other jūshin. On the evening of 17 July the former prime ministers met at Hiranuma’s house and agreed that a partial reshuffle would not be enough: what was needed was an entirely new government, supported by the whole nation.

Resignation

The Emperor’s attitude proved decisive. For two and a half years Hirohito had trusted Tōjō and had supported him many times, including against ministers and commanders. Now, according to Kido and the court circle, he withdrew his support. Kido gave the prime minister to understand that the Emperor expected him to go; when Tōjō asked to be allowed to remain in office, Hirohito is said to have replied only “Ah, is that so” (sō ka). Historians differ on how far this was the monarch’s own initiative and how far that of a court anxious to shield the throne from responsibility for a war that was being lost.

Having lost the Emperor’s confidence, Tōjō gave up. His trusted officers, among them his secretary Colonel Sadao Akamatsu, are said to have urged a coup on him, but the prime minister rejected the idea, saying that when the Emperor’s confidence weakens one must step down at once. On 18 July 1944 the whole cabinet resigned. Tōjō prepared a statement attributing the government’s fall to the intrigues of the former prime ministers, but the ministers unanimously opposed its publication. Even a few days later, at a farewell meeting with his associates, the general is said to have declared that he did not fear the loss of Saipan, and that it was the jūshin who had forced him out. On 22 July, the day his successors were sworn in, he was transferred to the reserve; he never again held any public office.

Koiso and Yonai

On 18 July Kido convened the former prime ministers to choose a successor. They agreed that the prime minister should be a general who could keep the army in check – especially in view of the prospect of defending the home islands. Some proposed Umezu, but he had only just taken over the General Staff. The list included Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Army, Koiso, and Marshal Shunroku Hata, commander of the forces in China. Terauchi, the army’s favourite, could not be recalled from the front, and Hata lacked majority support. The choice fell on Koiso, even though Kido and Konoe remembered his links with the nationalist Cherry Blossom Society and the failed military plot of March 1931. Because Koiso had been away from Tokyo for years and had no political base, Konoe proposed that Yonai should support him.

The imperial rescript handed to the two officers on 20 July instructed them to “cooperate in forming a cabinet”, to strive to achieve the aims of the Greater East Asia War and not to provoke the Soviet Union. Yonai, a retired admiral, was returned to active service by special decision of the Emperor so that he could take the Navy Ministry as deputy prime minister. Sugiyama became Minister of War, and Mamoru Shigemitsu kept the Foreign Ministry. According to Kido’s diary, there was a tacit understanding among the jūshin that the new government should bring the end of the war closer, and Yonai’s presence was meant to make this easier. In public, however, Koiso announced an intensified war effort, and at the beginning of August he replaced the existing liaison conferences between the government and the high command with the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War.

Place in the war

Tōjō’s resignation was the first change of government in Tokyo forced by the course of the war, and the first – albeit very cautious – sign that part of the elite was beginning to think about ending it. It did not, however, change the strategy. At the end of July Imperial General Headquarters adopted the plans for the Shō-Gō (“Victory”) operations – a decisive defensive battle on one of four axes: the Philippines, Taiwan and the Ryukyus, the home islands, or the Kurils. The Koiso government hoped that one great victory would allow it to negotiate a tolerable peace. In October 1944, however, the Imperial Navy suffered a defeat in the Battle of Leyte Gulf after which it ceased to exist as an offensive force; in the course of that battle kamikaze pilots were used in an organised way for the first time. From November B-29s from airfields in the Marianas were bombing Tokyo and other cities.

Koiso, disregarded by the military, managed neither to strengthen civilian authority over the army nor to open real peace talks. He resigned on 5 April 1945, a few days after the American landing on Okinawa; he was succeeded by Admiral Kantarō Suzuki, while Yonai remained Navy Minister and became one of the advocates of surrender in August 1945. Tōjō, detained by the Americans after the surrender, attempted to take his own life on 11 September 1945, survived, was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and was executed on 23 December 1948. Koiso and Kido received life sentences; Koiso died in prison in 1950. Kishi, whose refusal to resign had brought down the government in 1944, was imprisoned after the war as a suspected war criminal, never stood trial, and in 1957 became prime minister of Japan.