The second Konoe cabinet

On 22 July 1940 Prince Fumimaro Konoe took office as Prime Minister of Japan for the second time. The foreign ministry went to Yōsuke Matsuoka, the diplomat who in 1933 had led Japan out of the League of Nations, and the war ministry to General Hideki Tōjō, until then Inspector-General of Army Aviation. The government was formed after the army had brought down the cabinet of Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, which it considered too cautious towards Britain and the United States. Within a week the new cabinet adopted two documents that set the course of Japanese policy right up to the Pacific War: a programme for building a “new order in Greater East Asia” and a plan to exploit Germany’s victories in Europe to reach for the colonies in the south.

It is usually said that Konoe “was appointed” prime minister on 22 July. In fact the Emperor had already charged him with forming a government on 17 July. On 22 July Konoe and his ministers were formally installed at the Imperial Palace, and it is from that day that the second Konoe cabinet is dated.

The fall of the Yonai government

Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai had become prime minister on 16 January 1940, largely at the wish of Emperor Hirohito. As navy minister in 1939 he had been, together with his vice-minister Isoroku Yamamoto, one of the chief opponents of a military alliance with Germany. His government adhered to the principle of non-involvement in the European war and tried to reach an understanding with Washington, which in January had allowed its commercial treaty with Japan to lapse. The army, represented in the cabinet by General Shunroku Hata, had distrusted it from the start.

The German victories of spring 1940 changed the balance of power in Tokyo. The defeat of the Netherlands and France left the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, rich in oil, rubber, tin and rice, cut off from support by their home countries. In the press and on the streets people repeated the slogan “don’t miss the bus”: Japan was to draw closer to victorious Germany before the division of the world was complete. On 29 June the foreign minister, Hachirō Arita, declared in a radio broadcast that East Asia and the South Seas formed a single sphere for whose stability Japan was responsible, but he announced neither an alliance with Germany nor a change of course. For the army this was not enough.

At the same time Konoe placed himself at the head of the movement for a “new political order” (新体制). On 24 June he resigned as President of the Privy Council and announced that he intended to create a new, unified political organisation to replace the quarrelling parties. Party politicians began to dissolve their organisations so as to secure good places in the new movement in time. Everyone knew that Konoe was ready to return to power, and the army saw in him a prime minister who would give it what Yonai would not.

The army had held the means of bringing down a government since 1936. After the 26 February incident a rule had been restored under which only a general on the active list – and therefore one nominated by the army itself – could be war minister. According to Japanese historians, the army leadership agreed at the beginning of July that Hata had to go. On 16 July Hata resigned, and the army refused to name a successor. That same day the Yonai cabinet resigned. In the informal association of its former ministers, which survived for decades, it was remembered that the government had both come into being and fallen on the sixteenth day of the month.

The Ogikubo conference

On 17 July the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kōichi Kido, since 1 June the Emperor’s closest political adviser, convened a meeting of former prime ministers and the President of the Privy Council. All of them named Konoe. The last of the genrō, the 90-year-old Prince Kinmochi Saionji, who for two decades had recommended successive prime ministers to the Emperor, this time declined to give his endorsement, pleading age and illness. From then on successors were chosen solely by the council of former prime ministers under Kido’s chairmanship. On the same day, 17 July, the Emperor charged Konoe with forming a government.

On 19 July Konoe invited three candidates for the key ministries to his villa, Tekigaisō, in the Ogikubo district of Tokyo: Matsuoka; Tōjō, nominated by the army; and Admiral Zengo Yoshida, the navy’s candidate. The Ogikubo conference (荻窪会談), held before the government was formally installed, settled its programme. According to Japanese studies, the participants agreed that Japan would strengthen its ties with Germany and Italy, conclude a non-aggression pact with the USSR, and bring the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies in Asia within the “new order in East Asia”. Towards the United States Japan was to avoid unnecessary clashes but firmly reject any American attempt to interfere in the building of this order.

On 22 July the new cabinet was installed. Besides Matsuoka, Tōjō and Yoshida, its members included the president of the Planning Board, Naoki Hoshino, formerly one of the architects of the economy of Manchukuo; the industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi as minister of commerce and industry; and Konoe’s close associate Akira Kazami as minister of justice. Konoe wanted policy to be decided by a small circle consisting of the prime minister and four ministers rather than by the whole cabinet. Matsuoka, energetic and voluble, was soon speaking for the government more loudly than the prime minister, and in the following months he replaced several dozen ambassadors and ministers abroad who were considered too well disposed towards the British and Americans.

Two programmes of 26 and 27 July

On 26 July the cabinet adopted the “Outline of Basic National Policy” (基本国策要綱). The document stated that the world stood at a “historic turning point” and was dividing into several blocs of states, and that Japan’s policy, based on the principle of hakkō ichiu, “the eight corners of the world under one roof”, was to consist in building a “new order in Greater East Asia”, at whose core would be a close union of Japan, Manchukuo and China. It was the first official government document to use this slogan. At home a “national defence state” was announced: a new political structure, a planned economy under state control, self-sufficiency for the area of Japan, Manchukuo and China, and education founded on the “national ideal” and a rejection of “individualism”. According to Japanese scholars, the draft had been prepared in the war ministry and presented to Konoe by the head of its Military Affairs Bureau, General Akira Mutō, even before the government was installed.

The next day, 27 July, a liaison conference of the government and Imperial General Headquarters met for the first time since 1938. It adopted the “Outline for Dealing with the Situation in Response to Changes in the World Situation” (世界情勢ノ推移ニ伴フ時局処理要綱). The text has survived in the archives of the Japanese defence ministry. Japan was to bring the “China incident” to a swift end by cutting off all outside aid to the government of Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing and, “taking advantage of a favourable opportunity”, to solve the “southern problem”. In foreign policy priority was to go to rapidly tightening political ties with Germany and Italy and to a “radical improvement” in relations with the USSR. Towards the United States Japan was to maintain a “firm attitude” and accept an “unavoidable natural deterioration” in relations, while avoiding provoking friction itself.

From French Indochina Japan was to demand an end to transit to China, the right of passage for troops, the use of airfields and supplies for the army, and “depending on circumstances” to use force. In Hong Kong, in conjunction with the closure of the Burma Road, the colony’s “hostile character” was to be “removed”. The resources of the Dutch East Indies were for the time being to be obtained by diplomatic means, and the former German and French islands in the Pacific were, as far as possible, to be acquired diplomatically. The most important was the third article, on the use of force in the south. If the war in China was essentially over, Japan would use force as soon as the situation allowed. If not, it would act within limits that would not lead to war with third powers, but should circumstances become “especially favourable”, it might also resort to force. The enemy was as far as possible to be limited to Britain alone, “but since war with the United States may prove unavoidable”, preparations had to be made for it.

Place in the war

The guidelines of 27 July envisaged, albeit conditionally, an armed strike against the possessions of the Western powers in South-East Asia, and reckoned with war against America. Washington did not yet know of them, but it was reacting to the signals coming from Tokyo. At the end of July President Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed exports of oil and scrap under a licensing system, and on 31 July the export of aviation fuel outside the Western Hemisphere was banned. The British, under Japanese pressure, had closed the Burma Road for three months on 18 July.

On 1 August 1940 Matsuoka, setting out the government’s policy to journalists, used the name “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in public for the first time. In September Japan forced Vichy France to consent to the entry of Japanese troops into northern Indochina, and on 27 September in Berlin it signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. The political parties dissolved themselves, and on 12 October the Imperial Rule Assistance Association was founded with the prime minister at its head. In November Tokyo recognised Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing, and in April 1941 Matsuoka concluded a neutrality pact with the USSR in Moscow. Within nine months the Ogikubo programme had been carried out almost in full.

It did not, however, deliver what was expected of it. The war in China went on, and the alliance with Germany, conceived as a way of deterring America, only alienated it from Japan. After the German attack on the USSR, Konoe got rid of Matsuoka in July 1941 by forming a third cabinet, but when Japanese troops entered southern Indochina, the United States froze Japanese assets and halted oil deliveries. In October 1941 Konoe stepped down and was succeeded by Tōjō, who two months later led Japan into the attack on Pearl Harbor, Malaya and the Philippines. The government installed on 22 July 1940 was the one that turned a Japan entangled in China into a state bent on southward expansion and prepared for war with Britain and the United States.