On September 1, 1923, at 11:58 in the morning, an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 struck the Kantō region of Japan. The timing was catastrophic: lunchtime, when countless household fires were lit for cooking. The earthquake sparked fires that spread through Tokyo and Yokohama with terrifying speed. By the end of the day, 114 tremors had been felt and 187 major fires had been recorded in Tokyo alone. Between 100,000 and 140,000 people died; 1.5 million were left homeless (Schencking 2013, 2). Complete information collapse followed—newspapers stopped printing, and rumours rushed in to fill the void. Within hours, the government proclaimed martial law.
And then the massacres began.
The Great Kantō Earthquake is conventionally treated as background context for the political instability that followed, a traumatic event that weakened public confidence in parliamentary government. This chapter argues for a more fundamental claim: the earthquake was a revelatory crisis that exposed the logic of Japan’s modern national sovereignty. The massacre of Korean residents that followed the disaster demonstrated that colonial subjects existed outside the political order, as what the anthropologist Sonia Ryang, drawing on the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, calls homo sacer: persons who could be killed without the killing constituting homicide (Ryang 2003, 738). The earthquake did not cause the rise of militarism in Japan. But it revealed the structures of inclusion and exclusion, the institutional patterns, and the ideological frameworks that militarist politics would exploit over the following decade.
The chapter traces four interlocking developments between 1923 and 1936. First, the earthquake and its aftermath revealed that violence against those outside the political order would face no meaningful legal or institutional consequences. Second, the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 extended the emergency logic of the earthquake into peacetime governance, creating legal architecture for suppressing dissent. Third, elite staff officers who had organised themselves into clandestine study groups as early as 1921 exploited successive crises to advance a pre-existing agenda of Manchurian conquest—a strategic vision that preceded the Great Depression by almost a decade (Smethurst 2020). Fourth, the Manchurian Incident of 1931 demonstrated that the army could initiate war without the civilian government's authorization, and the February 26 Incident of 1936 eliminated the most effective civilian opponents of military expansion through assassination. The arc from earthquake to assassination traces the collapse of parliamentary democracy not through a single dramatic rupture but through accumulated precedents, institutional incentives, and the progressive elimination of opposition.
This argument engages several important historiographical debates. Scholars have variously attributed the collapse of Japanese democracy to economic factors—the devastation of the Great Depression and rural immiseration (Smith 2001)—to the appeal of ultranationalist ideology and the Shōwa Restoration rhetoric that promised national renewal (Wilson 1969), or to institutional failures such as weak civilian control over the military and constitutional ambiguities about the relationship between cabinet and military command (Gordon 1988). The question of whether Japan was “fascist” has generated decades of scholarly controversy, with some historians applying European typologies and others insisting on the specificity of Japanese institutional arrangements. This chapter sidesteps that debate—following Andrew Gordon’s emphasis on institutional analysis rather than ideological classification—by focusing on the specific mechanisms by which civilian governance was undermined. It draws on more recent interventions by Ryang (2003) and Smethurst (2020) to propose a different framing: one that centres the logic of sovereignty revealed by crisis, the institutional incentives created by rewarded insubordination, and the deliberate planning of conquest by a technocratic military elite.
The chapter also contributes to broader conversations about the relationship between colonialism and metropolitan politics. The massacre of 1923 was directed at colonial subjects living in the metropole; the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 was shaped in part by anxieties about Korean independence movements; the conquest of Manchuria extended Japan’s colonial project into new territory while bypassing the parliamentary institutions that theoretically governed imperial policy. The interplay between colonial violence and domestic political transformation runs through the entire narrative.
Part I: Cataclysm, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Massacre (1923)
The Disaster
The scale of destruction wrought by the Great Kantō Earthquake was staggering. Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan’s two largest cities, were devastated. The former Tokyo police chief later recalled that the speed at which the fire spread was “completely beyond anticipation” (Ryang 2003, 733). Survivors had no reliable information on which to depend. Rumours proliferated—that a larger earthquake would follow, that a tsunami would swallow Tokyo Bay, that Mount Fuji would erupt and sink the Japanese archipelago into the Pacific Ocean. On September 2, the government proclaimed martial law and the army assumed control of public order (Schencking 2013, 45–67).
What happened next was not the product of panic or disorder. It was something far more systematic.
The Massacres
Rumours spread rapidly that Koreans—colonial subjects who had migrated to the metropole in significant numbers after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910—were setting fires, poisoning wells, and preparing armed assault. The rumours were false. Investigators later discovered that what vigilantes took for bombs were canned pineapples, and what they took for poison was bags of sugar (Ryang 2003, 733). But the rumours did not arise spontaneously from popular hysteria. Police officers ran through the streets announcing the supposed Korean threat. The right-wing leader Uchida Ryōhei later testified—notably in protest against attempts to blame vigilantes alone—that police officers had shouted to civilians: “when you see a Korean behaving violently, you may beat him to death then and there” (quoted in Ryang 2003, 733). Fully armed soldiers arrived under the slogan: “The Enemy is in the Imperial Capital”—“The Enemy Means Koreans.”
Vigilante groups—jikeidan—formed throughout Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures. They armed themselves with bamboo spears, swords, carpentry tools, knives, broken glass, and fishing hooks. Some, as army reservists, had well-maintained firearms. And they began to kill. The army and police, Ryang argues, “did not simply play the role of the protector. They were organizers, instigators, active participants or conniving on-lookers of the persecution” (2003, 733).
The killing was widespread and, in many cases, carried out by or with the active cooperation of the state’s own agents. A former cadet officer, Etchiya Toshikazu, recalled arriving at Kameido on September 2: his battalion conducted train checks, officers drew swords and went through the cars, all Koreans were dragged out and immediately executed by sword and bullet, and Japanese passengers yelled “Long Live” victoriously and called for all Koreans to be killed (quoted in Ryang 2003, 734). The death toll remains disputed. The Japanese government claimed between 200 and 300 Korean deaths. Korean investigators and Japanese attorneys estimated between 6,000 and 10,000 in Tokyo and Kanagawa alone—and this figure excludes adjacent prefectures (Ryang 2003, 732–33). There were approximately 20,000 Koreans living in Tokyo and Kanagawa at the time. If the higher estimates are accurate, somewhere between one-quarter and one-half of the Korean population of these areas was killed in a matter of days.
The violence was not limited to the streets. In Honjo township, Saitama prefecture, Koreans were brought to the police station supposedly for protection. What followed was mass murder on police premises. An eyewitness stated that “the mob lined up children in front of parents and cut their throats; they then nailed parents to the wall by wrists and ankles and tortured them to death” (Ryang 2003, 735). Approximately one hundred Koreans were killed at the Honjo police station in a single night. Nor was the Honjo massacre an isolated incident. Across the affected region, the pattern repeated: Koreans were gathered by police ostensibly for their protection, held in custody, and then subjected to violence by vigilantes, soldiers, or police officers themselves. The official terminology used by authorities was senjin no hogokensoku—“the protection and apprehension of Koreans.” Ryang notes the “highly suspicious ring” to this phrase: not only hogo (“protection”) but kensoku (“apprehension”). The so-called protected Koreans were tied by wire, transported to camps, and murdered en route. The violence occurred precisely on police premises, under police authority (Ryang 2003, 736).
It was not only Koreans who were killed. Chinese residents were also targeted, as were Japanese citizens mistaken for Koreans—particularly those with regional accents from western Japan or Okinawa who could not pronounce standard Tokyo Japanese to the satisfaction of vigilantes at checkpoints. The vigilantes used linguistic tests—demanding that people pronounce jūgoen gojissen (“fifteen yen fifty sen”), a phrase that Koreans supposedly could not articulate correctly—but the tests were unreliable by design. Their purpose was less identification than the performance of boundaries: the ritual sorting of those who belonged from those who did not. The socialists Hirasawa Keishichi and six other labour activists were also murdered by military police during the chaos, a targeting that revealed how the state of exception could be exploited to eliminate domestic political opponents alongside colonial subjects.
Homo Sacer and the Logic of Japanese Sovereignty
How do we make sense of this violence? Standard explanations have pointed to colonial racism, economic competition between Korean and Japanese workers, political anxieties about leftist solidarity, or mass hysteria and mob psychology (Weiner 1989; De Vos and Lee 1980). Ryang finds these explanations inadequate. Colonial racism existed throughout the period of Japanese rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945, yet no other incident produced a massacre on this scale. Economic competition was minimal: 20,000 Koreans in a rapidly modernising industrial economy hardly constituted a material threat. Working-class solidarity was largely imaginary—many Korean survivors did not even understand Japanese, let alone trade union politics (Ryang 2003, 737–38).
Ryang proposes a different analytical framework, drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer: the figure from Roman law who exists outside both the political and religious order, who can be killed but not sacrificed. The killing of homo sacer does not constitute homicide because homo sacer has no recognised life within the existing political order (Agamben 1998, 82–83).
To understand why Koreans occupied this structural position, we must examine the institutional architecture of Japan’s modern national sovereignty. The koseki, or household registry system, enrolled every Japanese subject as “the Emperor’s babies” (sekishi)—members of a large Imperial household descended, in national mythology, from the Sun Goddess. Colonial subjects, however, possessed only a residential registry (kiryūbo), not a koseki. They were documented as present in the metropole, but they did not belong to the national political order. Interestingly, the Emperor himself also lacked koseki—he stood above the law rather than below it. Both the Emperor and Koreans thus occupied the position of what the folklorist Origuchi Shinobu called marebito: the outsider, the rare person, the one who comes from beyond the community’s political and ritual order. Both were sacred and accursed, revered and feared—one at the apex of the order, the other beneath it (Ryang 2003, 739–42).
This framework illuminates a crucial aspect of the form the violence took. Ryang observes that Korean bodies were predominantly dismembered and disfigured, not merely killed. Beheading—which preserves identity as proof of victory in the samurai martial tradition—was rare. In Japanese folk belief, a wandering soul can return to the world of the living if it finds an intact body. Dismemberment prevents return. The violence aimed not merely to kill but to annihilate—to ensure that Koreans, as accursed outsiders, could never come back (Ryang 2003, 743–44).
The trials of perpetrators confirmed this logic of exclusion. They were, Ryang writes, “mostly a farce.” Courtrooms filled with “chuckles and giggles” as defendants described their methods. Judges smiled and joked with defendants about their weapons. The killing of Koreans “hardly constituted homicide” in the cultural logic of the courtroom (Ryang 2003, 735–36). This was not a failure of the justice system—it was the legal system confirming that what had occurred was not, in the terms of Japanese sovereignty, murder at all.
The Massacre as Product of Modernity
Here we arrive at Ryang’s most provocative and consequential claim. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of the relationship between the Holocaust and European modernity, she argues that the 1923 massacre was not a failure of Japanese modernity but its product: “Rather than being an unexpected hiccup in the process of Japanese modernity, the 1923 massacre was a logical and ordinary outcome of the way Japan emerged as a modern nation, in the form exclusively of the nation of the Japanese, where sovereignty is indissolubly connected with nationality” (Ryang 2003, 745).
The earthquake created what Agamben calls a “state of exception”—a suspension of normal legal constraints in which “whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (Agamben 1998, 174). But the killing of Koreans was not a violation of order; it was the enactment of an order that had always excluded them. The logic of sovereignty that defined national membership through the koseki system had always placed colonial subjects outside the political community. The earthquake merely created the conditions under which this latent exclusion became manifest in violence.
The precedents established in September 1923 were fourfold. First, during crisis, martial law could place the military in charge of civilian life. Second, the state would tolerate—or actively participate in—extrajudicial killing. Third, perpetrators would face no meaningful consequences. Fourth, violence against those outside the political order did not constitute crime. These patterns would recur throughout the following decade as the institutional foundations of parliamentary democracy were progressively undermined.
Part II: Legislating Fear — The Peace Preservation Law and the Politics of Anxiety (1925–1927)
Emergency into Law
The massacres of September 1923 demonstrated what was possible during a state of exception. But states of exception are, by definition, temporary. The political challenge facing Japanese authorities in the years after the earthquake was how to institutionalise the logic of emergency—how to maintain the capacity for suppression while restoring the appearance of normal governance. The answer came in 1925, when the Diet passed legislation that would extend the earthquake’s precedents into peacetime law.
In 1925, the Diet enacted two landmark pieces of legislation. The first extended voting rights to nearly all adult men—universal male suffrage, a significant expansion of democratic participation. The second was the Peace Preservation Law (Chian Ijihō), which granted police broad powers to suppress anyone deemed threatening to the kokutai—the national polity. The pairing was not coincidental. As Elise Tipton’s research on the Special Higher Police demonstrates, the expansion of suffrage generated anxiety among conservative elites about what an expanded electorate might demand. The Peace Preservation Law was the counterweight: democracy would be permitted, but only within boundaries defined by the state (Tipton 2012, 35–58).
The pivotal concept was kokutai—a term that resists easy translation. It denotes the essential, sacred character of the Japanese state, centred on the emperor, which is presented as incompatible with Western political ideals. The term itself was ancient, but its legal significance was modern: by criminalizing threats to kokutai, the law created a category capacious enough to encompass virtually any opposition. What constituted a “threat” to the national polity? Whatever the police and prosecutors determined it to be. The law’s original text imposed maximum penalties of ten years’ imprisonment for anyone who formed an organisation or joined a movement aimed at “altering the kokutai or denying the system of private property.” In 1928, following the mass arrests of suspected communists on March 15, the maximum penalty was raised to death (Mitchell 1976, 68–69).
The Architecture of Surveillance
The Special Higher Police—the Tokkō—expanded dramatically under this legal authority. Initially targeting communists and other left-wing activists, the Tokkō came to encompass anyone deemed threatening to national unity: labour organisers, student activists, religious dissidents, Koreans, and eventually anyone who questioned the direction of national policy. By the late 1930s, the Tokkō employed thousands of officers and maintained surveillance networks that penetrated universities, factories, publishing houses, and religious organisations (Tipton 2012, 59–82). The trajectory from targeted anti-communist policing to generalised surveillance of civil society followed the expansive logic built into the vagueness of kokutai itself.
The colonial dimension of this expansion deserves emphasis. The Peace Preservation Law was drafted with the empire’s colonial subjects in mind. The March First Movement of 1919 in Korea—in which an estimated 2 million Koreans participated in peaceful demonstrations for independence—shocked Japanese authorities. Korean independence activists used religious organisations, cultural associations, and labour unions to coordinate resistance, none of which were explicitly political, yet all of which could mobilise opposition to colonial rule. The category of threats to kokutai was elastic precisely because colonial resistance took such varied institutional forms. The surveillance apparatus built to monitor Korean activists in the metropole was subsequently turned against Japanese citizens whose political activities were deemed incompatible with national unity. In this sense, the techniques of colonial governance migrated back to the metropole, and the distinction between colonial subjects and domestic dissidents blurred under the expansive logic of kokutai protection.
The logic at work here extended the earthquake’s precedents into peacetime governance. The massacre had demonstrated that those outside the kokutai could be killed without legal consequence. The Peace Preservation Law institutionalised this logic: those who threatened the kokutai could be imprisoned, and eventually executed, through legal process. The extraordinary violence of September 1923 became ordinary law.
The Toranomon Incident of December 1923—an attempted assassination of the Crown Prince by an anarchist—provided additional impetus for expanding state powers of surveillance and repression. The incident shocked the political establishment and strengthened arguments for more aggressive prosecution of lèse-majesté and threats to the imperial institution. The connection between anarchist violence and the broader landscape of political instability reinforced elite anxieties about the fragility of the existing order.
The Failure of Reconstruction
Meanwhile, the political failures accumulated. Ambitious plans to rebuild Tokyo as a modern, disaster-resistant capital collapsed under budget constraints and political opposition. The architect Gotō Shinpei had envisioned a transformed city with wide boulevards, firebreaks, and modern infrastructure—a capital that could never again burn as it had in 1923. But the vision proved too expensive and too disruptive to established property interests. The reconstructed city largely replicated its pre-earthquake vulnerabilities (Schencking 2013, 156–89). The failure symbolised something broader: the inability of parliamentary government to achieve transformative goals, even in the face of catastrophe.
Conservative interpretations of the earthquake as divine punishment for moral decay fuelled campaigns promoting discipline and traditional values against what was cast as “corrosive” Western liberalism. In 1927, the Shōwa Financial Crisis destroyed several major banks, further eroding public confidence in elected governments’ capacity to manage national challenges. Each failure fed a gathering narrative that civilian politicians were corrupt, incompetent, and unequal to the nation’s needs. Parliamentary democracy was not being overthrown from without—it was being delegitimised from within, crisis by crisis.
The Emergence of Civilian Opposition
Not everyone accepted the drift toward militarism. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo emerged as the most significant figure opposing military budgets and the expansion of army influence over national policy. Takahashi served seven terms as Finance Minister across multiple cabinets—an unprecedented record that gave him enormous institutional authority. He advocated civilian control over the military, the abolition of the Army and Navy General Staffs as independent institutions, decentralised economic planning, and what we might now recognise as Keynesian deficit spending for economic recovery rather than rearmament (Smethurst 2020, 8).
Takahashi led what Smethurst calls the “Takahashi Line”—a coalition of business leaders, moderate politicians, and non-Marxist labour unions who opposed the military’s budgetary demands. This coalition represented a plausible alternative to the militarist trajectory—a path of economic recovery through domestic stimulus, diplomatic accommodation through the Washington Treaty system that had established negotiated limits on naval armaments among the great powers, and the preservation of parliamentary governance. The Washington system, negotiated in 1921–22, had set naval construction ratios at 5:5:3 for Britain, the United States, and Japan respectively—a framework that Takahashi and his allies recognised as allowing Japan to limit military spending while securing regional hegemony through diplomacy rather than confrontation. The study group officers rejected this premise entirely: they wanted military supremacy, not negotiated accommodation. The eventual destruction of the Takahashi coalition through assassination would prove decisive in clearing the institutional space for their vision. But first, we must examine what was happening within the army itself—because the forces that would eliminate civilian opposition had been organising for more than a decade before they struck.
Part III: The Army’s Road to Insubordination — Elite Officers, Study Groups, and the Planning for Conquest (1921–1931)
The Army War College Elite
The Imperial Japanese Army was not a monolithic institution. It was stratified by education, region, and faction, and the internal dynamics of the officer corps shaped national policy as decisively as any external crisis. At the apex of the military hierarchy stood the graduates of the Army War College—the Rikugun Daigakkō—an elite corps that would dominate military leadership through the Pacific War.
The numbers tell the story of exclusivity. Each year, approximately 600–700 officers graduated from the Military Academy. Of these, only 30–35 were selected for the Army War College—a ratio of roughly one in twenty. Elite graduates wore a distinctive insignia, the tenpōsen, shaped like a feudal-era copper coin, that marked them as members of a select fraternity. Almost all generals serving between 1937 and 1945 were War College graduates. Non-graduates—the taizuki or “unit-connected” officers who led troops in the field—could not advance beyond lieutenant colonel, regardless of their operational experience or competence (Smethurst 2020, 2–3).
War College training was rigorous and comprehensive: tactics, strategy, military history, intelligence analysis, operational planning, logistics. Each officer studied a foreign language and served a tour as military attaché abroad. They learned to analyse Japan’s strategic position with clear-eyed realism. They understood Japan’s economic weaknesses relative to potential adversaries—particularly the United States and the Soviet Union. They knew that Japan’s gross domestic product was approximately one-fifth that of the United States, that 44 percent of Japan’s workforce remained in agriculture compared to 20 percent in America, and that Japan depended on imported oil and could not sustain a prolonged war against industrial powers (Smethurst 2020, 5–6).
Here is the paradox that Smethurst’s research illuminates with particular force: the officers who were trained to analyse Japan’s vulnerabilities most rigorously were the same officers who led Japan into an unwinnable war. The men who knew best that Japan could not defeat the United States nevertheless pursued policies that made war with the United States inevitable. The economic data available to these officers was stark: in the mid-1930s, Japan’s steel production stood at approximately seven million tons against America’s sixty-seven million; Japan’s industrial capacity was a fraction of the combined output of the powers it would eventually fight; and roughly 80 percent of Japan’s oil came from the United States and the Dutch East Indies—the very nations against which military planners were preparing to wage war.
How do we explain this contradiction? Part of the answer lies in ideology—the embrace of seishin (spirit) over material calculation, the faith that Japanese spiritual superiority could overcome material inferiority. Fixed bayonet charges were written into tactical manuals in 1909 and retained until 1945, justified as the “Japanese way of fighting” that would prevail over superior technology through superior will (Smethurst 2020, 9). The doctrine of spirit over science was not merely rhetorical—it shaped operational planning, training regimes, and resource allocation in ways that compounded Japan’s material disadvantages. But ideology alone cannot explain why trained strategists ignored their own analysis. We must also examine institutional incentives—and the study groups through which elite officers planned for conquest.
The Study Groups and the Pre-Planning of Conquest
The planning for Manchurian conquest did not begin with the Great Depression. It began in the early 1920s, through a network of study groups that brought together War College graduates to discuss strategy, national policy, and the path to what they understood as national security.
In October 1921, three young majors—Nagata Tetsuzan, Obata Toshirō, and Okamura Yasuji—met in Baden-Baden, Germany. There, they committed to two goals: breaking the Chōshū clique’s control over military promotions (the old guard from Yamaguchi prefecture who had dominated army leadership since the Meiji period), and creating a nation mobilised for total war. This meeting initiated the study group movement that would culminate in the Manchurian Incident a decade later (Smethurst 2020, 3).
Study groups proliferated throughout the 1920s. Members met to discuss Japan’s strategic vulnerabilities, the lessons of the First World War, and paths to national security. The groups had various names—Futabakai, Mokuyōkai, Issekikai—but their membership overlapped and their conclusions converged (Humphreys 1995, 89–112). The most significant was the Issekikai, formed in 1929 through the merger of earlier groups. Its forty members included future Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki, Generals Itagaki Seishirō and Yamashita Tomoyuki, and many other officers who would shape Japan’s trajectory through the Pacific War. The human cost of their decisions would be staggering: five Issekikai members later died as convicted war criminals, four died as prisoners of war, and four served prison terms (Smethurst 2020, 4).
A crucial document survives from this period. On March 1, 1928, the Futabakai—a precursor to the Issekikai—held a meeting at which Tōjō Hideki summarised the group’s strategic consensus: “The primary goal of army preparations must be war with the Soviet Union. This requires complete political control of Manchuria. We must make defensive preparations for American intervention. No preparations needed for China—important only as a source of raw materials” (quoted in Smethurst 2020, 4). The date is significant: March 1928 was eighteen months before the stock market crash that initiated the Great Depression. The planning for Manchurian conquest predated the economic crisis by years. The depression did not cause the turn toward military expansion—it accelerated a process already well underway.
Nagata Tetsuzan and the Technocratic Vision of Total War
If any single figure embodied the technocratic militarism of the War College elite, it was Nagata Tetsuzan. Born in 1884, Nagata spent seven years in Europe during and after the First World War, observing the industrial mobilisation that characterised total war on the Western Front. He returned to Japan convinced that the nation needed to transform itself into a state capable of sustaining modern warfare—not through spiritual fervour alone, but through systematic economic and industrial planning (Humphreys 1995, 45–67).
Nagata served as the army’s strategic architect from the early 1920s until his death in 1935. He mentored the young Tōjō Hideki, who would later serve as Prime Minister during the Pacific War. He led the campaign to break the Chōshū clique’s control over military promotions, arguing that meritocratic advancement would strengthen the institution. His vision of total war mobilisation was comprehensive: it encompassed not only military preparedness but industrial policy, resource allocation, labour management, and the subordination of the civilian economy to strategic requirements.
Nagata’s fate illuminates the violence of intra-military factionalism. On August 12, 1935, Lieutenant Colonel Aizawa Saburō—a factional rival associated with the Kōdōha (Imperial Way) faction, which emphasised spiritual renewal over Nagata’s technocratic planning—walked into Nagata’s office and murdered him with a sword. Aizawa was eventually executed, but his trial became a platform for ultranationalist ideology, and the incident revealed the deep divisions within the officer corps between those who envisioned a rationally planned total war state and those who sought a spiritual restoration of imperial virtue (Humphreys 1995, 156–78).
The key point is this: Nagata represented a form of militarism that was technocratic rather than romantic, strategic rather than mystical. The officers who planned the Manchurian Incident were not wild-eyed fanatics—they were trained professionals who believed they were acting in Japan’s rational interest. That they were catastrophically wrong does not make their planning any less deliberate, nor does it make their institutional analysis any less sophisticated.
Smethurst raises a further provocation regarding the motivations of the study group officers. They claimed to be driven by ideology—total war, national renovation, breaking the old cliques. But Nagata and his colleagues were pursuing the same total war mobilisation that the Chōshū clique’s leader Tanaka Giichi was already implementing. What distinguished the study groups, Smethurst suggests, may have been careerism as much as ideology: the desire to break the old guard’s control over promotions and advance their own careers. Wars brought promotions—creating institutional incentives for conflict that operated alongside and reinforced ideological commitments (Smethurst 2020, 5–6).
Gekokujō, Rural Crisis, and the Ideology of Insubordination
The study group officers developed an ideology that justified acting without—and against—orders from superiors. The key concept was gekokujō (下剋上): literally “the low overcome the high,” a term historically associated with the Warring States period (1467–1615) when subordinate lords overthrew their masters. The study group officers repurposed gekokujō as justification for military insubordination in service of higher national goals (Wilson 1969, 25–48).
The logic ran as follows: if civilian politicians were corrupt, incompetent, and beholden to wealthy interests indifferent to popular suffering, then loyal officers had a duty to act in the nation’s true interest—even if this meant defying orders. The Emperor’s will, they claimed, transcended the commands of mere politicians and even of military superiors. By acting without authorisation, they were fulfilling a higher loyalty. The concept is connected to older traditions of loyal retainers who disobey immediate commands to serve their lord’s true interests—a theme deeply embedded in Japanese political culture through plays, novels, and popular history.
This ideology of insubordination intersected powerfully with the rural crisis of the depression years. The army recruited heavily from farming communities—not from choice but from demographic reality. Rural Japan provided the conscripts who filled the ranks, and those communities were devastated by the collapse of silk prices after 1929. Silk had been Japan’s principal export to the United States; when American demand collapsed, the farmers who had shifted to sericulture found themselves with worthless cocoons and crushing debts. Kerry Smith’s research on rural Japan during the depression documents the depth of this crisis in the Tōhoku region—the agricultural northeast that supplied many army recruits—where daughters were sold into prostitution and indentured labour, tenant farming families could not afford to feed the conscript sons they were legally required to send to the army, and villages that had prospered during the wartime boom of the 1910s faced complete collapse (Smith 2001, 234–67). The Shōwa Restoration rhetoric—promising military-led national renewal against civilian “decadence”—found fertile ground among officers who witnessed this suffering firsthand.
But we should not romanticise this connection between rural suffering and military radicalism. The study group officers had been planning for Manchurian conquest since 1921, years before the depression created the conditions they would exploit. The crisis provided the justification and the popular support; the planning preceded both. The relationship between economic distress and military action was instrumental rather than causal.
Moreover, gekokujō was sometimes performed rather than being genuine. Smethurst demonstrates that superior officers often tacitly approved of their subordinates’ “insubordination”—agreeing with the goals while maintaining plausible deniability. The pattern was not always subordinates overruling superiors, but a coordinated fiction in which superiors could claim they had been presented with a fait accompli while actually supporting the action. This was strikingly demonstrated in 1928, when Colonel Kōmoto Daisaku—an Issekikai member—assassinated the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin without informing his commanders, creating precisely the kind of fait accompli that Tokyo struggled to address (Smethurst 2020, 6–7).
Part IV: The Manchurian Incident and the Rewards of Insubordination (1931–1936)
The Incident
On the night of September 18, 1931, a bomb exploded on the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden. The damage was so minor that a train passed over the site shortly afterward. But Kwantung Army officers blamed Chinese forces and launched an invasion of Manchuria—without authorisation from Tokyo.
The architects of the incident were Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Colonel Itagaki Seishirō, both members of the Issekikai study group. They had been planning this moment for years. The staged explosion was merely the pretext for executing a strategy developed over a decade of study group meetings and refined through years of intelligence gathering and operational planning in Manchuria (Young 1998, 40–54).
Tokyo’s response revealed the pattern that would characterise civil-military relations through the 1930s. The Wakatsuki cabinet was paralysed—unable to restrain the Kwantung Army or reverse its actions. Major General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu was dispatched from Tokyo ostensibly to stop the incident. He arrived too late—having spent the night before with a geisha while Itagaki and Ishiwara acted. Smethurst suggests this “failure” was deliberate: Tatekawa agreed with the operation’s goals and timed his arrival to prevent interference (Smethurst 2020, 6–7). The performance of gekokujō was complete: subordinates had “acted without orders,” superiors maintained deniability, and both parties achieved the outcome they desired.
Rather than issuing orders to cease operations, Tokyo reinforced the Tianjin Army to “block” the Kwantung Army’s advance—tacit acceptance disguised as restraint. The pattern was established: field commanders would act without authorisation, present Tokyo with a fait accompli, and receive implicit approval after the fact. Constitutional authority became irrelevant; the army could initiate war independently of—and against—civilian government.
The conquest of Manchuria proceeded rapidly. By early 1932, Japanese forces controlled the entire region. The puppet state of Manchukuo was proclaimed in March 1932, with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, installed as nominal head of state—a thin veneer of legitimacy over what was in practice a Japanese military colony. The League of Nations condemned the aggression; Japan withdrew from the League in 1933. International isolation only strengthened the military’s hand domestically: civilian politicians who had counselled caution were discredited, while the officers who had defied orders were vindicated by success.
As Louise Young has demonstrated, Manchuria became far more than a strategic acquisition—it became a laboratory for Japanese imperial modernity. Military-industrial cooperation in Manchukuo bypassed parliamentary oversight entirely, offering a model for the state-directed economic development the study group officers had envisioned since the 1920s. Heavy industrial investment poured into Manchuria: railways, mines, steel mills, and chemical plants were constructed on a scale that dwarfed comparable investment in the home islands. The South Manchuria Railway Company became a vast conglomerate managing not only transportation but urban planning, research, and industrial development. Manchukuo represented the total war state in embryo—the integration of military, economic, and administrative authority that Nagata Tetsuzan had theorised and that his protégés were now building in practice (Young 1998, 55–82, 241–304).
The popular reception of the Manchurian conquest in Japan further undermined the position of civilian moderates. Media coverage celebrated the conquest as a national triumph; the phrase “Manchurian boom” entered popular vocabulary; and public enthusiasm for the empire’s expansion made it politically dangerous for politicians to question the army’s actions. The gap between public opinion—fuelled by a press that had largely abandoned critical coverage of military affairs—and the strategic reality that War College graduates understood all too well would have devastating consequences in the years ahead.
The Rewards of Insubordination
The Manchurian Incident established a crucial and ultimately catastrophic institutional precedent: insubordination was rewarded. Officers who acted without authorisation, staged incidents, and presented their superiors with faits accomplis were not punished—they were promoted. This created perverse institutional incentives that encouraged further autonomous military action and effectively made civilian control over the military impossible.
Smethurst documents the pattern with a striking case from 1935. Colonel Sakai Takashi, commanding the Tianjin garrison, assassinated two pro-Japanese Chinese newspaper editors while his commanding officer was absent. He then blamed Chinese forces and used the incident to create a demilitarised zone favourable to Japanese interests. His “punishment” for this unauthorised assassination and diplomatic provocation: promotion to Major General (Smethurst 2020, 7).
The career incentives were made explicit in the private testimony of those who observed them. Shigemitsu Mamoru, later Japan’s Foreign Minister, noted in his diary that Tianjin Army officers wanted military action in North China specifically because they wanted the promotions their colleagues in Manchuria had received. Wars brought promotions; officers who remained in Tokyo while their peers were conquering Manchuria fell behind in the career competition. Careerism reinforced ideology: even officers who might have harboured reservations about autonomous action could see that restraint meant career stagnation while bold action meant advancement (Smethurst 2020, 7–8).
The pattern extended to the protection of perpetrators. The assassin Kōmoto Daisaku—who had killed the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1928 without orders—faced no court martial. Officers who staged the Manchurian Incident became heroes. The message was unmistakable: act boldly, present superiors with accomplished facts, and you will be rewarded. This incentive structure made civilian control over the military effectively impossible. Politicians who tried to restrain military action faced accomplished facts they could not reverse. Officers who counselled caution risked their careers. The logic pushed inexorably toward expansion: each successful act of insubordination encouraged the next, creating what we might recognise as a ratchet effect in which each unpunished violation raised the baseline for acceptable behaviour.
The Elimination of Opposition: February 26, 1936
By the mid-1930s, the only remaining institutional check on military expansion was the “Takahashi Line”—the coalition of business leaders, moderate politicians, and Finance Ministry officials who opposed the military’s budgetary demands. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo led this coalition with the authority of his long experience and his indispensability to economic management. On November 27, 1935, Takahashi delivered a speech warning that “if the military continues pushing for larger budgets unreasonably, it will lose the trust of the people” (quoted in Smethurst 2020, 8). That speech, in effect, signed his death warrant.
Takahashi was no pacifist—he had supported Japanese expansion in the past and had endorsed the Washington Treaty system as a framework for managed regional hegemony. But he understood, as the War College graduates themselves understood, that Japan’s economy could not sustain the military expenditures the army demanded. He advocated a balanced approach: maintain adequate defences, pursue economic recovery through domestic stimulus, and avoid provocations that might lead to war with powers Japan could not defeat. His coalition included industrialists who feared that military budgets would crowd out productive investment, bankers who worried about inflation and debt, and politicians who believed that parliamentary government could still function if given the chance.
On February 26, 1936, young officers launched a coup attempt in Tokyo. Unlike the Manchurian Incident—which had been planned by War College elites from the Tōseiha (Control) faction—the February 26 Incident was led by junior officers associated with the Kōdōha (Imperial Way) faction, which emphasised spiritual renewal over strategic planning. They occupied government buildings and assassinated several senior officials, including Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo (then eighty-one years old), Admiral Saitō Makoto (a former Prime Minister), and General Watanabe Jōtarō (Inspector General of Military Education). The rebels demanded the formation of a military government and the implementation of a Shōwa Restoration (Shillony 1973, 156–89).
The coup itself failed—the Emperor refused to sanction it, and the army leadership moved to suppress the rebels. The young officers were court-martialled and their leaders executed. In that narrow sense, constitutional order was preserved. But the assassinations achieved their strategic purpose. The most effective civilian opponents of military expansion were dead. After February 1936, effective opposition to military budgets ceased. The army’s share of government expenditure rose dramatically. Politicians learned the lesson: oppose the military and face assassination. The “Takahashi Line” had not merely been defeated but eliminated.
The irony was bitter. The Kōdōha rebels were not the technocratic War College elite who had planned the Manchurian conquest. They represented a different faction, motivated by different ideological commitments—romantic agrarianism, spiritual restoration, and a vision of direct imperial rule that the Tōseiha technocrats considered naïve and counterproductive. But the effect of their violence served the expansionists’ purposes precisely. By killing Takahashi and his allies, the rebels removed the last institutional check on military budgets. After February 1936, the army was free to spend, expand, and plan for the wars that would follow—against China in 1937 and, eventually, against the Western powers in 1941.
The aftermath of the February 26 Incident consolidated military dominance over civilian politics in ways that went beyond the immediate removal of opposition figures. The suppression of the Kōdōha faction strengthened the Tōseiha officers—the very study group graduates who had been planning military expansion since the 1920s. The threat of further military violence hung over every subsequent cabinet decision. When Prime Minister Hirota Kōki formed his government in March 1936, the army exercised effective veto power over ministerial appointments. The restoration of the requirement that the War Minister and Navy Minister be active-duty officers—a provision that had been relaxed in 1913—gave the military services the power to bring down any cabinet simply by withdrawing or refusing to nominate their ministers. Civilian government continued in form; in substance, it operated within parameters set by the military. Military budgets tripled within five years of Takahashi’s death. The money funded the invasion of China, the construction of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and ultimately the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Conclusion: From Rubble to Conquest
The February 26 Incident completed a transformation whose origins lay in the rubble of 1923. The arc from earthquake to assassination traces the collapse of parliamentary democracy in Japan through four interlocking mechanisms, each building on the precedents established before.
First, the Great Kantō Earthquake revealed the logic of Japanese sovereignty. The massacre of Koreans demonstrated that colonial subjects existed outside the political order as homo sacer—persons who could be killed without the killing constituting homicide. This was not a failure of Japanese modernity but, as Ryang argues, its product: “a logical and ordinary outcome of the way Japan emerged as a modern nation, where sovereignty is indissolubly connected with nationality” (2003, 745). The violence of September 1923 established four precedents—martial law, state-tolerated extrajudicial killing, impunity for perpetrators, and the exclusion of “outsiders” from legal protection—that would recur throughout the following decade.
Second, the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 extended the emergency logic of the earthquake into peacetime governance. By criminalising threats to the kokutai—a category deliberately vague enough to encompass virtually any opposition—the law created a permanent legal architecture for the suppression of dissent. The expansion of the Tokkō from targeted anti-communist policing to generalised surveillance of civil society demonstrated the expansive logic inherent in legal categories defined by political loyalty rather than specific criminal acts.
Third, elite staff officers planned for Manchurian conquest years before the Great Depression created the conditions that would make their plans executable. The study group movement, initiated at Baden-Baden in 1921 and formalised in the Issekikai by 1929, developed a comprehensive strategic vision that predated the economic crisis by almost a decade. Smethurst’s research challenges economic-determinist narratives by demonstrating that the turn toward military expansion was not a desperate response to economic collapse but the execution of a pre-existing plan. The depression accelerated but did not cause the trajectory toward conquest. Moreover, the institutional incentives of the military career structure reinforced ideological commitments: wars brought promotions, and careerism provided material motivation alongside ideological conviction.
Fourth, the progressive elimination of civilian opposition through assassination removed the institutional checks that might have restrained military expansion. The assassination of Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and his allies in February 1936 destroyed the coalition that had most effectively resisted military budgetary demands. After 1936, the path to war was clear—not because war was inevitable, but because the institutional forces capable of preventing it had been eliminated. The elimination was not merely physical but psychological: after February 1936, every politician, bureaucrat, and business leader understood what opposition to the military could cost. Self-censorship completed what assassination had begun.
The ratchet effect is essential to understanding this trajectory. Each unpunished violation of civilian authority raised the baseline for what was considered acceptable. The assassination of Zhang Zuolin in 1928 went unpunished; the Manchurian Incident of 1931 was rewarded; Colonel Sakai’s murders in 1935 earned promotion; the February 26 assassinations achieved their strategic purpose even as the coup failed. At no point did the institutional mechanisms exist to reverse the ratchet—to restore the norm of civilian control once it had been breached. The Meiji Constitution’s ambiguous provisions regarding the relationship between cabinet authority and military command, which had seemed a manageable constitutional tension during the era of genrō (elder statesman) leadership, proved catastrophic once the elder statesmen had passed from the scene and no equivalent institutional authority could restrain military autonomy.
Ryang concludes her analysis of the 1923 massacre with a sobering observation: “In this regard, Japanese society in 2003 remains identical with that of 1923”—meaning that the logic of sovereignty that excluded Koreans from political membership persists in contemporary citizenship law (Ryang 2003, 745). We might extend her insight further. The patterns traced in this chapter—the normalisation of emergency powers, the creation of legal categories that place persons outside protection, the institutional incentives that reward autonomous action by security forces, the elimination of opposition through violence—are not unique to interwar Japan. They describe mechanisms through which democratic institutions can be undermined from within, incrementally, through the accumulation of precedent rather than through a single dramatic rupture.
The earthquake did not cause the rise of militarism. But it revealed the logic of Japanese sovereignty that enabled militarism. The massacre was not a failure of modernity but its product. The officers who planned for conquest were not irrational actors but trained professionals responding to institutional incentives. The collapse of democracy was not inevitable—but given the patterns established in 1923 and extended through the following decade, it became increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative path.
What makes this history particularly instructive is the gradualism of the process. At no single point between 1923 and 1936 did a dramatic rupture announce the end of democratic governance. The earthquake was a natural disaster; the Peace Preservation Law was passed by a democratically elected parliament; the Manchurian Incident was the work of a handful of officers; the February 26 Incident was a failed coup whose leaders were punished. Each event could be—and was—absorbed into a narrative of normalcy: the system was stressed but functioning, the aberrations were contained, the institutions remained intact. It was only in retrospect that the cumulative effect became clear: by 1937, when Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China, the institutional capacity for civilian restraint of military action had been comprehensively dismantled.
The transformation of Japan between 1923 and 1936 thus offers lessons that extend far beyond its specific historical moment, reminding us that the conditions under which democratic institutions fail, the mechanisms through which violence becomes normalised, and the incentives that shape individual choices within institutional structures are never safely confined to the past.
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