Hachirō Arita

Hachirō Arita was one of the most important, and at the same time least known, Japanese diplomats of the years in which Japan moved towards war in the Pacific. Between 1936 and 1940 he headed the Foreign Ministry four times, in the cabinets of four different prime ministers. During his first term Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany; during his second it formally rejected the Washington order in China; and during his last, in a radio address of 29 June 1940, it extended Japanese aspirations to the European colonies in South-East Asia as well. At the same time Arita opposed a military alliance with Hitler to the very end and tried to maintain correct relations with Britain and the United States. But the army’s influence was too strong, and his own policy too irresolute, for him to succeed. After the war he returned to politics as a man of the left and an opponent of rearmament, and brought a lawsuit against Yukio Mishima that has gone down in the history of Japanese law.

From Sado to the ministry

He was born on 21 September 1884 in the village of Mano on Sado Island, in Niigata Prefecture, as Hachirō Yamamoto, the sixth son of a doctor who practised traditional Sino-Japanese medicine. In 1887, at the age of three, he was adopted by the Arita family and took their name. His elder brother, Teijirō Yamamoto (1870–1937), became a politician of the Rikken Seiyūkai party and Minister of Agriculture in the governments of Giichi Tanaka and Tsuyoshi Inukai. Hachirō attended the First Higher School and in 1909 graduated from the law faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, after which he passed the diplomatic service examination. He began his career as a consular attaché at Mukden in Manchuria and later worked at the consulate in Honolulu and in China, among other posts. His contemporaries in the ministry included Saburō Kurusu, later ambassador in Berlin, while Kōki Hirota and Shigeru Yoshida were slightly older colleagues. Mamoru Shigemitsu joined the service two years after him.

In 1919 Arita was a member of the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. The young diplomats were struck by how poorly prepared Japan was compared with the Western powers, and its racial equality proposal for the League of Nations Covenant was defeated. In September 1919 Arita was one of the leaders of the “Reform Association” (革新同志会), a group of young officials who demanded that the ministry be modernised: more missions abroad, new departments and open recruitment. Some of their demands were met, although Arita himself was soon transferred to the legation in Siam.

Director of the Asian Bureau and Vice-Minister

On 13 September 1927, under the government of General Giichi Tanaka, which pursued a “firm” policy towards China, Arita became director of the ministry’s Asian Bureau. He was regarded as an expert on China. He favoured strengthening Japan’s rights in Manchuria, but wanted to do so without breaking with the Washington order and the Nine-Power Treaty, which guaranteed China’s integrity, and without alienating Britain and the United States. In 1930 he went to Vienna as minister.

On 10 May 1932, a few months after the Mukden incident and the proclamation of Manchukuo, he became Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs. He was among those who persuaded Kōsai Uchida, an advocate of recognising Manchukuo, to take over the ministry. At the same time he argued that Japan should not recognise the new state before the report of Lord Lytton’s commission, so as not to violate the Nine-Power Treaty openly. Within the ministry he clashed with the head of the Information Bureau, Toshio Shiratori, an advocate of rapprochement with the army and later a supporter of an alliance with Germany. When Uchida decided to send both men abroad, Arita resigned in protest. In August 1933 he left for Belgium as ambassador. According to his biographers, in Brussels he studied the activities of communist parties and their links with Moscow, which confirmed his distrust of the USSR. He was also increasingly preoccupied with an issue that would dominate his later views: after the Great Depression the powers were retreating into trading blocs, and Japan, which lived on exports and imported raw materials, needed in his view an economic sphere of its own.

First term: the Anti-Comintern Pact

In January 1936 Arita became ambassador to China, but after the young officers’ revolt of 26 February the new prime minister, Kōki Hirota, appointed him Foreign Minister on 2 April 1936. During his term, in August 1936, the government adopted new “Fundamental Principles of National Policy”, which envisaged expansion both on the continent and to the south, as well as a build-up of the armed forces. Arita conducted talks with Nanjing on Hirota’s “three principles”: recognition of Manchukuo, joint struggle against communism and an end to anti-Japanese agitation. They came to nothing. When Mongolian and Chinese troops backed by the Kwantung Army attacked Suiyuan province in the autumn, Arita insisted that Japan had nothing to do with the campaign, which was untrue.

The most important achievement of this term was the Anti-Comintern Pact, signed in Berlin on 25 November 1936. The negotiations had been started, without the diplomats’ involvement, by Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Japanese military attaché Hiroshi Ōshima. Arita took them over and deliberately toned them down. He insisted that the commitments against the USSR be purely defensive, that they provide for consultation rather than an alliance, and that the agreement should not harm relations with Britain. As he saw it, the pact was to weaken the USSR without tying Japan to Hitler’s European policy. The Hirota cabinet fell in January 1937, and Arita handed over the ministry on 2 February. In February 1938 the Emperor appointed him a member of the House of Peers for life.

Second and third terms: the “new order” and the dispute over an alliance with Germany

In July 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, war broke out with China. In the autumn of 1938 the Foreign Minister, General Kazushige Ugaki, resigned in protest against the creation of the Asia Development Board, which took Chinese affairs away from the ministry. On 29 October 1938 Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe entrusted the ministry to Arita. On 3 November Konoe announced that the aim of the war was a “new order in East Asia” based on cooperation between Japan, Manchukuo and China. On 18 November Arita replied to the United States, which was demanding respect for the “Open Door” principle in China, that the concepts and principles applied before the war no longer applied to the “new situation” in East Asia. Japanese and American historians regard this note as the formal rejection of the Nine-Power Treaty and of the whole Washington order. A few days later Arita also turned down a British offer to mediate in negotiations with China.

In January 1939 Konoe stepped down, but Arita stayed on as minister in the government of Kiichirō Hiranuma. Throughout his term a dispute raged over turning the Anti-Comintern Pact into a military alliance with Germany and Italy. The army, with War Minister Seishirō Itagaki, and the ambassadors Ōshima and Shiratori wanted an alliance directed against Britain and France as well. Arita, Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai and the Finance Minister believed it would drag Japan into war with the Western powers, and possibly with the United States. At dozens of Five Ministers’ Conferences Arita agreed at most to an alliance aimed at the USSR. In the summer of 1939 he held talks with the British ambassador, Robert Craigie, on the blockade of the Tianjin concessions, which ended on 24 July with the Craigie–Arita formula: Britain recognised the “actual situation” in China and the “special requirements” of the Japanese army. The dispute over the alliance was settled in August by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, concluded while the Japanese were fighting the Red Army at Khalkhin Gol. The Hiranuma government resigned, and Arita left office on 30 August 1939.

Fourth term: the Yonai government

On 16 January 1940, at the wish of Emperor Hirohito, Admiral Yonai became prime minister, and Arita took over the Foreign Ministry for the fourth time. The government held to a policy of non-involvement in the war in Europe and tried to reach an understanding with the United States, whose commercial treaty with Japan had expired at the end of January. As early as 21 January Arita had to face public outrage when a British cruiser stopped the liner Asama Maru off the Japanese coast and took off 21 German passengers. On 1 February he delivered a foreign policy statement to parliament at the same session at which the government presented a record military budget. The ministry supported the creation, on 30 March, of Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing.

The German victories in the spring of 1940 undermined his policy. On 15 April, fearing that after occupying the Netherlands Germany would lay claim to its colonies, Arita declared that Japan had a “deep interest” in maintaining the status quo in the Dutch East Indies. When France fell in June and the slogan “don’t miss the bus” took hold in Japan, the army demanded the announcement of a new foreign policy. On 28 June Arita rejected an American proposal for a joint reaffirmation of the status quo in the Pacific, and on 29 June, in a radio address, he declared that East Asia and the South Seas formed a single sphere of coexistence and common prosperity, for whose stability Japan was responsible. He also began cautiously to seek an understanding with Germany that would give Japan a free hand in South-East Asia without a military alliance. For the army this was not enough. On 16 July the War Minister, Shunroku Hata, resigned, the army refused to name a successor and the government fell. On 22 July Arita handed the ministry over to Yōsuke Matsuoka, who two months later signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and gave Arita’s idea the name of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.

War and defeat

During the Pacific War Arita no longer held any important posts. From 1942 he chaired a committee dealing with assistance to Japanese nationals left behind in enemy countries. He was one of the group of former diplomats and politicians who sought a way of ending the war in its final stages, and in July 1945 he sent the Emperor a memorandum on the subject. After the surrender, in 1946, the occupation authorities purged him from public office, as they did most wartime politicians. He was not indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. In 1948 he published his diplomatic memoirs.

Politician of the left and the After the Banquet trial

Once the purge was lifted, Arita, to the astonishment of many, aligned himself with the left. In 1953 he was elected to the House of Representatives for a constituency in Niigata Prefecture as an independent candidate of the progressive camp. He wrote books against Japanese rearmament. In 1955 and 1959 he ran for Governor of Tokyo as the joint candidate of the left, backed by the Socialist Party, and lost both times – first to Seiichirō Yasui and then to Ryūtarō Azuma. In 1959 he published another volume of memoirs, They Call Me Stupid Hachi (馬鹿八と人はいう).

In 1953 he married for the second time; his wife, Terui Azegami, owned the exclusive Hannya-en restaurant in Tokyo. She mortgaged the restaurant to finance his campaign, and when after his defeat she wanted to reopen it with the help of conservative politicians, the marriage broke down. Yukio Mishima told this story in his novel After the Banquet (宴のあと, 1960). On 15 March 1961 Arita sued the writer and the publisher Shinchōsha for invasion of privacy. On 28 September 1964 the Tokyo District Court awarded him 800,000 yen in damages and, for the first time in Japanese history, recognised the right to privacy as an interest protected by law. Mishima appealed, but Arita died of pneumonia on 4 March 1965, aged 80. In November 1966 his heirs reached a settlement with Mishima. He was buried in Tama Cemetery near Tokyo. His son, Keisuke Arita, was Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs after the war.

Significance

Arita belonged to the so-called “Asia faction” of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, which believed that Japan had to build its own political and economic order in East Asia and that the Washington order stood in its way. What set him apart from the military and from men such as Matsuoka or Shiratori was that he wanted to achieve this without war with the Anglo-Saxon powers and without an alliance with Hitler. Historians see him as a minister who tried to reconcile contradictory aims: building a “new order” and keeping good relations with Britain and America. In practice he gave way to the army, and the formulas he devised to restrain it, such as the “new order in East Asia” or a sphere embracing the South Seas, were taken up by his successors, who did not share his doubts. Arita himself insisted after the war that he had not wanted an alliance with Germany. Yet his announcement of 29 June 1940 became one of the steps on the road that led Japan to war in the Pacific in December 1941.