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One week before the assassination of Prime Minister Hara, three Japanese military officers, all majors in ranking, met secretly in Baden-Baden, a spa town in Germany's Black Forest, to discuss what to do with their bosses and their country. Their goal was similar to Nakaoka's: to put an end to corruption in Japan.
The conspirators, Tetsuzan Nagata, Toshiro Obata and Yasuji Okamura, had been friends since attending military elementary school in Tokyo. Most of their fellow-pupils there were from upper class or wealthy family backgrounds and often bullied kids of less privileged origins. In response to the bullying, the three of them had formed a gang of their own to fight off the bullies.
The three went through later military training college together and achieved excellent grades on graduation. The emperor once presented an award to Yasuji Okamura for outstanding performance at the army college.
The three men were among the cream of the Japanese army. They would later be dubbed “the Three Crows” and their names appear in every book on Japanese military history published since World War II.
They would become symbols of Japan's Showa warlords.
But in a Baden-Baden spa, these three men who had shared school and military training together all along the line were not then as greedy as they would subsequently become. At that time, all they cared about was fighting corruption at home.
And corruption at home, as they saw it, was first and foremost corruption in politics which, in turn, was exemplified in army corruption manifested in its personnel policy. Japan had long been controlled by clan oligarchy. In the years after the Meiji Reform the navy came under control of the Satsuma and the army was the fiefdom of Choshu. Every one of the army top brass, Aritomo Yamagata, Taro Katsura and Giichi Tanaka, to name just a few, came from Choshu. The senior ranks were closed to soldiers from elsewhere.
Soaking in their Baden-Baden steam room, the three officers waxed indignant as they discussed the rottenness of the system. Perhaps memories of their fight against the campus bullies in their early schooling also came up.
It was off-season at Baden-Baden, and the quiet spa resort was perfect for conspiring.
The leader of the group, Tetsuzan Nagata had an academic air to him, and sported a Prussian style buzz-cut and a moustache trimmed to look like gull wings. In recognition of his outstanding army service he was rewarded with the privilege to tour Europe in June 1920. Even so he was not the kind of man to put forward a systematic theory. Toshiro Obata, a man of an aristocratic lineage, was the leanest, the most astute and the most excitable. Stationed in Russia right through the Russian Revolution, he had pored over Marxist publications but had come up with nothing beyond some crude ideas about building an emotional tie with the emperor through so-called “tribal communism.” The scruffy Yasuji Okamura, who cared little about how he looked, was virtually blind without his glasses and looked like a ferocious owl with them. He most admired a field commander who would jump into action. He was no great thinker.
Enveloped in hot steam, the three men eventually came up with a two-point plan:
One, find their way in via the army, which sheltered Choshu.
Two, restore Japan's strength by copying the French system.
If there was anything else to it, it was never recorded.
It was hardly an action plan worthy of the name.
After the end of World War II, Yasuji Okamura, the sole survivor of the Three Crows, recalled: “ A History of the Rise and Fall of the Military Cliques credited Tetsuzan Nagata, Toshiro Obata and me with igniting the revolution in Baden-Baden, Germany. That is an overstatement. We never even considered Manchuria and other countries. All we discussed was army reform. And we were very much in earnest about it. The reform as we discussed was a two-part thing. First, the army was highly factional and the way the Choshu clique monopolized all personnel affairs had to be changed. Second, the army's independent command alienated civilians and this, too, had to change. The three of us decided we would change these abnormalities in the Japanese army because we saw how the military worked in Europe and we believed the only way forward was through reform. We all held the rank of major at the time and that was how things started.”
When these young revolutionary officers vowed to start by taking on the Choshu clique, they were inheriting a hierarchical tradition that ran right through the Japanese military. There were actually four Japanese at the Baden-Baden gathering: The fourth was Hideki Tojo, who would go on to become prime minister of war-time Japan. But Hideki had been one year junior than the Three Crows at the military academy, so his role at Baden-Baden was confined to lighting cigarettes for Tetsuzan Nagata and standing guard outside the steam room. He was not allowed to participate in the discussion.
Who would implement their two-point plan anyway?
The “Crows” selected seven talented colleagues who were not part of the Choshu clique. The 11-strong Baden-Baden clique was thus born.
Tetsuzan Nagata, the military attaché to Europe; Toshiro Obata, the military attaché to Moscow; Yoshijiro Umezu, the military attaché to Europe; Hideki Tojo Hideki, the military attaché to Switzerland; Yoshijiro Umezu, the military attaché to Berlin; Tomoyuki Yamashita, the military attaché to Nepal; Kataro Nakamura, the military attaché to Copenhagen; Kesago Nakajima, the military attaché to Paris; Sadamu Shimomura, the military attaché to Cologne; and Iwane Matsui and Rensuke Isogai, military attachés to Beijing.
What was decided at Baden-Baden did not amount to much. It is viewed as an important event in modern Japanese history because of the three main figures and the list that they drew up. All 11 of them would become prominent figures in the Japanese army.
Tetsuzan Nagata was chief of military affairs of the army at the time of his assassination. Emperor Hirohito kept Nagata's portrait on the wall of his bunker right up to the day he gave the order for unconditional surrender to the Allied forces in August 1945.
Toshiro Obata rose to be principal of an army-run military college.
Yasiko Okamura ended up commanding the invasion of China. Hideki Tojo would be tried as top war criminal having served as prime minister during World War II.
Umezu would be appointed Japan's military chief of staff.
Yamashita would be appointed commander in chief of Japanese forces in the Philippines. The sweeping campaigns he led across Southeast Asia would earn him the epithet “Tiger of Malaya.”
Nakamura would serve as army minister.
Matsui would go on to lead the campaign in central China and to be tried, post-war, for the Nanjing Massacre.
Nakajima would be appointed commander of the 16th Division and commit atrocities during the Nanjing Massacre.
Shimomura would be appointed commander of the Japanese forces in northern China, before moving on to serve as Japan's army minister.
Isogai would serve as commander of the 10th Division that fought the bloody Battle of Taierzhuang, in northern China.
Together, these 11 men formed the heart and backbone of the Showa militarists' group that drove Japan into World War II.
October 27, 1921, the day they met in Baden-Baden, is remembered as the day of the birth of the Showa militarists' clique.
As the Three Crows left Baden-Baden, soaring to the air, they spread out their black wings, wings that would eventually bring apocalypse to Asia.
Where did these young army officers, who had yet to be taken seriously by the armed forces, obtain such power? How did a group of military attachés manage to form a militarist clique that would terrorize the world?
For answers we must look to Japanese history and to its imperial family.
Japan's political history over four centuries, from Nobunaga Oda's ascent to power in 1549 to the suicide of Hidekiin Tojo in 1945, is really nothing but a history of warlords fighting for power. The unifiers of modern Japan, Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi and Ieyasu Tokugawa, were all powerful warlords. To be a politician with real power, one must be a military man first. This was the case for Kyosuke Yamagata and Taro Katsura of the Choshu clique, just as it was for Toshimichi Okubo and Saigo Takamori of the Satsuma. The same went for Giichi Tanaka, Sadao Araki, Tetsuzan Nagata and Hideki Tojo.
Beginning in the 1920s, lower-ranking military officers challenged, and often succeeded, in hijacking top-level politics by violent means. This phenomenon had much to do with the Japanese imperial house.
In 1919, when Emperor Taisho was incapacitated by a stroke, his son Hirohito and other royal members assumed power. During his trip to Europe in March 1921, Hirohito did two things that proved to be way more significant than he probably calculated. While in France, he hosted a dinner party for a group of young officers who paid him a visit there; and, disguised as an ordinary customer in his one and only incognito outing, he personally purchased a bust of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Most of the officers granted the audience with Hirohito went on to go onto the Baden-Baden list. And the bust of Buonaparte remained in Hirohito's study, reinforcing the idea of conquest by force.
The Three Crows held their Baden-Baden meeting shortly after Hirohito returned to Japan. He secured the full support of the young soldiers even before succeeding to the throne.
The young officers had a surplus of ambition and dedication, but a deficit of ideas. Not one of them could have come up with a nation-building plan as Ikki Kita could. Hirohito recruited Shumei Okawa to rectify the situation.
Hirohito was no fan of Kita. While subsisting in poverty in Shanghai Kita had hatched radical ideas that included putting the royal family's property into state ownership. But his brother, Prince Chichibu, was very interested in Kita. He saw in Kita the ideological compass that the Baden-Baden officers were looking for.
Prince Chichibu had An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan printed and it had immediate impact. Young Japanese officers cited it as the ideological source for their fascist activities.
Shumei Okawa was an exceptionally smart man, able to read Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, German, French and English. He and Ikki Kita spent a whole night drinking sake and debating, before he removed from Kita's proposals those parts he deemed unacceptable to the royal family. The two parted ways in the end, with Kita retiring into reclusive life in the Temple of Wisdom and Okawa being appointed supervisor for learning in the imperial palace, also known as director of the University Dormitory.
The “University Dormitory” was in fact a clandestine institution, so clouded in secrecy that it was barely mentioned at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.
In November 1921, Hirohito ascended the throne and his first action was to gather around him the Baden-Baden clique and like-minded “young men who will sacrifice themselves for their dream.” He put them in the royal observatory, surrounded by walls and a moat, to the east of the palace and had Okawa give them lectures.
The old observatory had been young Hirohito's favorite place. He had spent a lot of time there after school looking at the sextant, constellation charts, rain gauges and an 18-century, Dutch-made telescope. Now he renamed the observatory University Dormitory. Almost all the chief members of what would later become known as the Showa militarist group sat at least once in Shumei Okawa's classroom, listening to the 37-year-old PhD expound on nationalism, pan-Asianism and fascism.
The University Dormitory, which opened in January 1922, became Japanese royal family's de facto training center for fascist military officers. Almost all the ambitious plans for world conquest were cooked up there.
As a kid, Hirohito had frequented this place. After he came of age, all he had to do was sit in his study, gazing at the bust of Napoleon. It was now the turn of his future militarists to frequent the University Dormitory.
The support of the imperial family was a heaven-sent boost for fascism in Japan.
Kita did not attend the gathering, but his ideas, which he had slaved hard to formulate in his Shanghai lodgings, when transmitted via Okawa, spread like a virus among the feverish young officers.
Salvation! Revolution! These were the most stirring and powerful rallying cries of the 20th century. Responding to these ideas, in the early 1920s, were groups of young men and women. One such group formed the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Another group joined the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou. Yet another group of young men, who were admittedly also very brilliant, congregated at the imperial palace in Tokyo. They completed the founding of fascist thought, under the supervision of their emperor.
In July 1920, Okawa and his comrades published their “Collective Creed” in Call to War magazine:
The Japanese people must be the eye of the storm that is going to deliver freedom to humanity. The Japanese people are destined to involve the world in the revolution. Let the realization of this ideal and the military transformation of Japan be the intellectual product of our generation. We believe our mission will not end with the revolution and reform in Japan. But we must start with our own country because we have faith in Japan's role as the liberator of the world.
Under the banner of revolution and salvation, a fascist monster was unleashed on Asia.
Its first target was China.