The 26 February incident

In the early hours of 26 February 1936, in a snowbound Tokyo, some 1,500 soldiers led by a group of young officers marched out of their barracks and at 5 a.m. simultaneously attacked the homes of the most important men in the state. The Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and former prime minister Makoto Saitō was killed, as were the Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi, also a former prime minister, and the Inspector General of Military Education, General Jōtarō Watanabe. The Grand Chamberlain, Admiral Kantarō Suzuki, was gravely wounded. The Prime Minister, Keisuke Okada, survived because the soldiers mistook his brother-in-law for him. The rebels occupied the government district of Nagatachō: the War Ministry, the General Staff, the Metropolitan Police headquarters and the Prime Minister’s residence. They wanted the Emperor to appoint a military government and carry out a “Shōwa Restoration”. After four days, surrounded by loyal troops and condemned by the Emperor himself, they surrendered.

It was the most serious military revolt in the history of modern Japan. It did not bring the rebels to power, but it shifted the balance of power within the state in favour of the army – and specifically of the faction within it that a year later led Japan into war with China.

A divided army

In the first half of the 1930s the Japanese military was strong in relation to the government but weak internally. After the Mukden incident the Kwantung Army had occupied Manchuria against Tokyo’s wishes, and no one had punished it for doing so. In May 1932 young naval officers shot Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, and the court treated them leniently because the public admired their “sincerity”. Party government came to an end. The prime ministers were now admirals – Saitō and, from 1934, Okada – moderate men who tried to hold the military in check.

Within the army itself two informal factions were at war. The Kōdō-ha, the “Imperial Way faction”, grouped around Generals Sadao Araki and Jinzaburō Mazaki, put spirit above technology and stood for the cult of the Emperor and a future war against the Soviet Union. The Tōsei-ha, the “Control faction”, associated with General Tetsuzan Nagata, wanted a modern army and a planned economy ready for a long total war, and saw expansion as lying rather in China. While Araki was War Minister (1931–1934) the Kōdō-ha filled the key posts, but its men were then gradually pushed aside. In July 1935 Mazaki was dismissed as Inspector General of Military Education, and his place was taken by none other than Watanabe.

Alongside both factions stood the “young officers”, lieutenants and captains, most of them graduates of the military academy with no prospect of a staff career. Many commanded soldiers from poor villages ruined by the Depression, and this was the source of their hatred of the “privileged”: the politicians, the zaibatsu conglomerates, the bureaucrats and the court advisers who supposedly hid the truth from the Emperor. They read the radical ideologue Ikki Kita, and their go-between was the former lieutenant Mitsugi Nishida. They believed that if they removed the “evil advisers around the throne”, the Emperor would take power himself and renew the country, as in the Meiji Restoration. They counted on the support of the Kōdō-ha, which shielded them.

The conflict turned bloody on 12 August 1935, when Lieutenant Colonel Saburō Aizawa, who was close to these circles, cut down Nagata, then head of the Military Affairs Bureau, with his sword in his office at the War Ministry. Aizawa’s trial, which opened in January 1936, became a platform for his supporters. At the same time the high command decided that in the spring of 1936 the 1st Division, in which most of the conspirators served, would be transferred to Manchuria. The conspirators concluded that they had to act now or wait several years.

The night of 25–26 February

The plan was drawn up on 18–22 February by the former captains Asaichi Isobe and Takaji Muranaka, who had been dismissed from the army after a conspiracy affair at the military academy in 1934, together with lieutenants and captains from the Tokyo regiments, among them Yasuhide Kurihara, Teruzō Andō, Shirō Nonaka and Hisashi Kōno. They were to kill the chief “enemies of the national polity” (kokutai), seize the centre of the capital and the approaches to the palace, and then present their demands: the dismissal of certain generals and a government headed by Mazaki. What happened next they left to the Emperor. In their “Manifesto of the Uprising” they wrote that it was necessary to “cut down the evil ministers and military cliques around the Emperor”. They called their force the “Righteous Army”.

The soldiers, most of them conscripts with barely a month’s service, knew nothing. The NCOs were told on the evening of 25 February. The largest contingents came from the 1st and 3rd Infantry Regiments of the 1st Division and from the 3rd Imperial Guards Regiment. According to official figures from 1936, 1,483 NCOs and private soldiers took part in the revolt. Popular accounts speak of 1,400 men, a figure rounded down. The martial-law command’s communiqué of 6 March referred to “more than 1,400” NCOs and men, and when the officers, a few civilians and the detachment that entered the palace grounds are added, historians arrive at around 1,550 participants.

At 5 a.m. Lieutenant Kurihara’s group, some 280 men, broke into the Prime Minister’s residence. Four policemen were killed in the shooting, but they managed to warn Okada. The soldiers shot his brother-in-law, the retired Colonel Denzō Matsuo, and after comparing the dead man’s face with a photograph concluded that they had accomplished their task. Okada hid in a servants’ storeroom and the next day left the residence in disguise among a crowd of mourners.

At the same time a detachment from the 3rd Regiment burst into Saitō’s house in Yotsuya and riddled the 77-year-old Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal with bullets before the eyes of his wife, who tried to shield him. Lieutenant Motoaki Nakahashi of the Guards shot the 81-year-old Takahashi, whom the army hated for cutting military spending, in his bed. Captain Andō shot Suzuki, and when the Chamberlain’s wife asked to be allowed to deliver the coup de grâce to her husband herself, he withdrew with a salute. Suzuki survived, and in 1945, as prime minister, he brought Japan to surrender. At around 7 a.m. another group killed General Watanabe at his home in Ogikubo. No one had warned him.

At the spa town of Yugawara, Captain Kōno and a few civilians attacked the inn where the former Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Nobuaki Makino, was staying. A police bodyguard was killed, but Makino escaped up a hillside. The last surviving genrō, Kinmochi Saionji, was on the list of targets, but the attack on him was called off. The largest detachment, about 500 soldiers under Captain Nonaka, occupied the Metropolitan Police headquarters. Nakahashi entered the grounds of the Imperial Palace with 75 guardsmen on the pretext of reinforcing the guard, but at around 8 a.m. he was unmasked and escorted out. In the morning the rebels also wrecked the printing works of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. In all, four people died in the houses attacked (the three statesmen and Matsuo), together with five police guards, and several people were wounded.

The Emperor says no

The rebels acted in the Emperor’s name, but from the very first hours Hirohito regarded them as mutineers. He learnt of the attacks before 6 a.m. and immediately ordered his chief aide-de-camp, General Shigeru Honjō, to bring the “incident” to an end. The surviving courtiers, led by the secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, and the Imperial Household Minister, Kurahei Yuasa, advised firmness: no new government until the revolt had been suppressed, since any change of cabinet would be a victory for the rebels. When the War Minister, General Yoshiyuki Kawashima, came with the rebels’ manifesto and a proposal for a government that would “clarify the essence of the national polity”, the Emperor sent him away and demanded that the rebellion be crushed. He appointed the Home Minister, Fumio Gotō, as acting prime minister.

The army, however, hesitated. Many generals sympathised with the rebels, or were at least glad that the men who had been restraining the military were gone. An informal afternoon meeting of the Supreme War Council, dominated by Araki and Mazaki, sent the rebels the so-called War Minister’s proclamation: their “motives” had been reported to the Emperor and recognised as sincere, and further steps “depend on the will of His Imperial Majesty”. In the version distributed to the units in Tokyo, “motives” had become “actions”. The commander of the Tokyo garrison, General Kōhei Kashii, incorporated the mutinous units into the forces guarding the capital and, on the night of 26–27 February, after martial law had been declared in Tokyo, assigned them to keep order in the district they were occupying. The rebels believed they had won.

The General Staff and the navy saw matters differently. The de facto head of the General Staff was its deputy chief, General Hajime Sugiyama, a man associated with the Tōsei-ha and opposed to any concessions. Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, the instigator of the Mukden incident and now head of the Operations Section of the General Staff, was outraged at the use of troops without orders, even though the rebels had counted on his sympathy, and on the very first morning advised martial law. The navy, three of whose admirals – Okada, Saitō and Suzuki – had been attacked, brought the 1st Fleet into Tokyo Bay and landed naval infantry.

The Emperor was losing patience. When Honjō tried to defend the young officers’ motives, Hirohito retorted that by killing his most trusted advisers the rebels were “slowly strangling him with silk floss”. On 27 February he threatened that if the army delayed, he would himself lead the Imperial Guards Division and put down the revolt. On the morning of 27 February, at Sugiyama’s request, he signed an imperial order for the units to be withdrawn from the district they were holding. The command held back its promulgation until 28 February, hoping for an amicable settlement. When the rebels offered to commit suicide if the Emperor sent an envoy to them, Hirohito refused: if they wished to die, let them do so on their own.

Surrender

On the afternoon of 28 February the rebels, among whom Captain Andō was the most uncompromising, decided to fight after all. On the morning of 29 February they were surrounded by more than 20,000 troops and 22 tanks. Instead of an assault the command turned to propaganda. Aircraft dropped leaflets, a balloon hung over the district bearing the words “An imperial order has been issued. Do not resist the army’s colours”, and the radio broadcast an appeal to the soldiers: it was not too late, they should return to their units and all would be forgiven. The rank and file began to leave. By midday the officers had released their men, and Andō tried to shoot himself. Nonaka committed suicide, as did Kōno, who had been wounded at Yugawara, a few days later in hospital. The remaining officers were arrested by the military police that evening. The revolt ended without a fight.

Trials and purge

The rebels were tried by a special court martial set up on 4 March 1936. Unlike Aizawa’s public trial, which had given the assassins a platform, this one sat behind closed doors, without defence counsel and without appeal, and took no interest in the defendants’ motives. All the participants were questioned and 124 people were charged, ten of them civilians. The first death sentences were passed at the beginning of July. On 12 July 1936, in the grounds of the military prison in Shibuya, fifteen of the condemned were shot: officers and one civilian from the group that had attacked Makino. The executions of Isobe and Muranaka were postponed so that they could testify at the trial of Kita and Nishida. These two ideologues were sentenced to death, although they had taken only an indirect part in the revolt itself and the presiding judge protested that the charges were inappropriate. All four were shot on 19 August 1937. In all, 19 men were executed and several dozen were imprisoned. The only general brought to trial, Mazaki, was acquitted in September 1937. Martial law in Tokyo was lifted on 18 July 1936.

While the revolt was still in progress, the head of the Kwantung Army’s military police, General Hideki Tōjō, arrested Kōdō-ha sympathisers in Manchuria. In Tokyo the new War Minister, General Hisaichi Terauchi, and staff officers, Ishiwara among them, carried out a purge. By the end of April nine of the army’s twelve full generals had been placed on the reserve list, among them Araki, Mazaki, Kawashima and Honjō. Others, such as General Tomoyuki Yamashita, were posted away from the capital. The Kōdō-ha ceased to exist as a force within the army.

Significance

Okada’s government resigned. Saionji proposed Prince Fumimaro Konoe as prime minister, but Konoe pleaded ill health. On 9 March 1936 a government was formed by the outgoing Foreign Minister, Kōki Hirota. Even as it was being formed the army showed who had the decisive say: Terauchi objected to several ministerial candidates, among them Shigeru Yoshida as Foreign Minister, and Hirota gave way. In May 1936 the rule that only generals and admirals on the active list could serve as army and navy ministers was restored. From then on each of the two services could bring down a government by withdrawing its minister, or prevent one from being formed by refusing to nominate a candidate. The army made use of this as early as January 1937, when it blocked a government under the moderate General Kazushige Ugaki.

The paradox of the incident was that the rebels lost, yet the aims their opponents within the army claimed for themselves were achieved. The revolt ended the era of assassinations “from below”: after 1936 young officers no longer killed ministers. In its place, however, came something more lasting – control over the state exercised “from above” by a united army high command, aided by politicians’ fear of another assassination. The Emperor’s moderate advisers had been killed or, like Saionji and Makino, had lost their influence. In August 1936 the Hirota government adopted principles of national policy that combined preparations for war against the Soviet Union with expansion to the south and a build-up of the navy; it agreed to huge armaments budgets and in November concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany.

Historians still argue about Hirohito’s role. Alongside August 1945, February 1936 is the example most often cited of the Emperor openly and firmly imposing his will on the army and showing that he could do so when he wished. Some scholars, such as Herbert Bix, see this as proof that he could have restrained the military later too, but chose not to. Others stress that in February 1936 he was defending the court order and the people closest to him, not curbing an expansion to which he was not in principle opposed. Little more than a year later, in July 1937, Konoe’s government and an army high command now dominated by the victors of February 1936 turned a clash near Beijing into war with China.