Japan stays out of the war in Europe

On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain and France declared war on Germany, the Japanese government issued a statement that in Tokyo was regarded as brief and self-evident: “In the face of the outbreak of the present war in Europe, the Empire will not become involved in it and will concentrate all its efforts on the settlement of the China Incident.” Behind these words, however, lay a profound change. Only a few weeks earlier Japan had been on the verge of a military alliance with Germany. Now, humiliated by the German–Soviet agreement and battered by the Red Army on the Mongolian steppe, it drew away from Berlin and resolved to sit out the European war while it dealt with its own, which had been raging in China for more than two years. The government that made the announcement had been in office for five days, and its prime minister, the retired general Nobuyuki Abe, also ran the Foreign Ministry himself.

Many chronologies speak of a formal note sent by the prime minister to all belligerent and neutral states. In fact, what happened on 4 September was a public government statement, released to the press and to diplomatic missions. The formal note went out a day later and was of a different, far less neutral character, as described below.

The shock of 23 August

Throughout the first half of 1939 Japanese foreign policy revolved around a single dispute. The army, and above all the war minister Seishirō Itagaki, demanded that the Anti-Comintern Pact be turned into a full military alliance with Germany and Italy. The ambassadors in Berlin and Rome, General Hiroshi Ōshima and Toshio Shiratori, backed the idea with enthusiasm. The prime minister, Kiichirō Hiranuma, the foreign minister, Hachirō Arita, and the navy minister, Mitsumasa Yonai, resisted: they were willing to accept an alliance directed against the USSR, but not one that would automatically drag Japan into war with Britain and France, and perhaps with the United States as well. The deliberations of the five ministers dragged on from January to August without a decision, and in May Germany and Italy concluded the Pact of Steel between the two of them.

At the same time Japan’s Kwantung Army was fighting a regular war against the Red Army on the border between Mongolia and Manchukuo, known as the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. On 20 August the forces of Georgy Zhukov launched an offensive there which within a week encircled and destroyed the Japanese 23rd Division. Three days later, on 23 August, Berlin concluded a non-aggression pact with Moscow. For Tokyo this was a blow out of the blue: its partner in the Anti-Comintern Pact, in breach of the pact’s secret protocol of 1936, which forbade political agreements with the USSR without the other party’s consent, had come to terms with the very enemy Japanese soldiers were fighting at that moment. Japan had not even been warned. The government lodged a protest in Berlin, and on 28 August Hiranuma resigned, explaining that a “complicated and inscrutable” situation had arisen in Europe. The phrase entered the Japanese political vocabulary as a byword for the discrediting of the whole of Japan’s policy towards Germany up to that point.

General Abe’s government

The successor was chosen in haste. The favourites were Prince Fumimaro Konoe and General Kazushige Ugaki, but in the end, after consultations with the last of the genrō, the elder statesman Prince Kinmochi Saionji, and with the emperor’s entourage, the choice fell on Nobuyuki Abe. He was a retired general with no combat experience and no political base, a compromise candidate acceptable to the army because he belonged to none of its factions and to the navy because he was considered a moderate. The cabinet was sworn in on 30 August 1939.

On this occasion the voice of Emperor Hirohito was heard with unusual clarity. According to Japanese and Western historians (among them Herbert Bix), the emperor demanded that the war ministry go to one of two trusted generals, Yoshijirō Umezu or his own chief aide-de-camp, Shunroku Hata, and instructed the new prime minister to seek an understanding with Britain and the United States. The army accepted Hata, while Umezu took command of the Kwantung Army in order to restore order in it after the defeat at Khalkhin Gol. Itagaki, the chief advocate of the alliance with Germany, left the government.

The statement of 4 September and the note of 5 September

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September and Britain and France entered the war on 3 September, the new government faced the question that only a month earlier had divided Tokyo more than any other: whose side to take. The answer of 4 September was simple: nobody’s. Japan would not bind itself to Germany, but nor did it intend to help the Western powers, with which it had for months been locked in a bitter dispute over the blockade of the concessions in Tientsin. The words about “the settlement of the China Incident” were no figure of speech. The war with China, which had begun with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937 and had never been formally declared (hence the official term Shina jihen, “the China Incident”), had entered a phase of exhausting stalemate. The Japanese had occupied eastern China with its largest cities and ports, but after the fall of Wuhan and Canton in the autumn of 1938 the government of Chiang Kai-shek had moved to Chongqing and had no intention of capitulating. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers were bogged down in China with no end in sight.

In practice, then, neutrality in Europe meant that Japan wanted to exploit the preoccupation of the European powers to end the war in China on its own terms. The note of 5 September already showed as much. In it the Japanese government offered Britain, France, Germany and Poland the “friendly advice” that they “voluntarily” withdraw their troops and warships from the areas of China controlled by the Japanese army. Their presence, it was explained, might lead to “undesirable incidents” and to a situation “incompatible with Japan’s policy of non-involvement”. Poland and Germany had no troops in China; the real addressees of the advice were Britain and France, which kept garrisons and gunboats in Shanghai, Tientsin, Beijing and on the Yangtze. Tokyo did not demand a reply, and for the time being London and Paris left their forces where they were, but the signal was unmistakable.

On 12 September the army carried out a reorganisation that served the same purpose: all Japanese forces in China were placed under a new command, the China Expeditionary Army, headquartered in Nanking. Its commander was General Toshizō Nishio, and its chief of staff Seishirō Itagaki. A few days later the 11th Army launched an offensive against Changsha, the capital of Hunan province.

The truce with the USSR

At the same time the Abe government was closing the northern front. As early as the turn of August and September Imperial General Headquarters had ordered the Kwantung Army to cease offensive operations at Khalkhin Gol, and on 7 September it recalled the army’s commander, General Kenkichi Ueda, who had been preparing a new offensive. In Moscow Ambassador Shigenori Tōgō negotiated a ceasefire with Vyacheslav Molotov. The agreement was concluded on 15 September: the troops were to remain in the positions they held, and the disputed border was to be demarcated by a mixed commission. The truce came into force on 16 September. The next day, 17 September, the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern border. The coincidence of dates was no accident: Joseph Stalin struck at Poland only once he was certain that he faced no threat of war on a second front in the Far East.

Between Berlin, London and Washington

Over the following months the Abe government tried to rebuild its relations with the English-speaking powers. On 25 September Admiral Kichisaburō Nomura, regarded as a friend of America, became foreign minister, and in the autumn he opened talks with the United States ambassador, Joseph Grew. Their main stake was the commercial treaty of 1911, which Washington had denounced in July 1939 and which was due to expire in January 1940. Japan was overwhelmingly dependent on American oil, scrap iron and machinery, and without the treaty the United States could restrict this trade at any moment. The talks achieved little: the Americans expected a change of policy in China, and this the government in Tokyo, beholden to the army, could not promise. Ambassadors Ōshima and Shiratori were recalled from Berlin and Rome, and for some months the idea of an alliance with Germany faded.

The Abe government proved weak and short-lived. It had no backing among the parties, and the army quickly judged it incapable of governing. On 14 January 1940 Abe resigned, and on 16 January Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, likewise an opponent of the alliance with Germany, became prime minister.

Significance

The statement of 4 September was the last moment at which Japan stood equidistant from both sides in the European war. Its neutrality was a matter not of principle but of calculation: the army needed time to finish the war in China, and after the defeat at Khalkhin Gol and the German–Soviet pact it no longer saw Germany as a reliable partner. The “China Incident”, however, could not be settled. In March 1940 the Japanese set up a collaborationist government under Wang Jingwei in Nanking, but Chiang Kai-shek fought on.

The calculation changed in the spring of 1940, when Germany defeated the Netherlands and France. Their Asian colonies, the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, lay open, and Britain was fighting for its survival. The Yonai cabinet fell in July 1940 under pressure from the army, and on 27 September 1940 Konoe’s second government concluded the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy – the very alliance Hiranuma had refused a year earlier. In August 1940 Britain withdrew its garrisons from Shanghai and northern China, in effect complying with the “advice” of 5 September 1939. In April 1941 Japan concluded a neutrality pact with the USSR, and in December 1941 it attacked Pearl Harbor and the British and Dutch possessions in Asia. The war in China, which in September 1939 Japan had wanted to keep separate from the war in Europe, became part of a single world war.