A bribe too far
World War Wednesday: Battlecruiser-gate, and the Japanese Count's War
1913, the leader is dead.
Rikken Dōshikai, the newest political party in Japan’s nascent democracy, was founded by the Prime Minister, Prince Katsura Tarō, to strengthen his minority government. This was the time of the Emperor Taishō, when Japan tried liberal democracy for the first time—contrary to the belief that the Japanese were only democratic after World War Two. During “Taishō democracy,” parties rose and fell with dizzying speed, and Katsura’s new party—the “Association of Comrades of the Constitution”—could not save him. In February 1913, the first successful motion of no-confidence in Japanese history brought down his government. He was dead in October, of stomach cancer. Rikken Dōshikai was founded to support a man; he was gone. What would follow? Would the party dissolve?
Into the void left by a noble prince stepped a count: Count Katō Takaaki. Earlier in his career, Katō was credited with securing the 1902 Anglo-Japanese treaty of alliance. He was an Anglophile who had served as the emperor’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Back home, conservatives viewed his attachment to British ways with suspicion. Never mind that Japan had copied the forms of British government. Shinto was the national religion like the Church of England, with the emperor at its head. The Imperial Diet was a parliament made up of a House of Peers of noble lords alongside an elected House of Representatives. And they emulated the Royal Navy for the obvious reason that both were island empires.
He kept Rikken Dōshikai together. Because of their numbers in parliament, when in April 1914 the cabinet supported by the dominant party Rikken Seiyūkai fell due to a defense spending scandal, Count Katō was there to seize the prize. He was denied the post of prime minister outright—still too British—but behind the scenes he led the new cabinet as foreign minister. The “Siemens and Vickers Scandal” shocked the public and confirmed the fears of those skeptical of the West. Japan’s reformers deliberately copied Prussia and Britain to modernize and ensure they were too strong to be colonized by Europeans like India, or carved up into spheres of influence like China. However, some wondered if they were too close to some Westerners. The scandal did not help opinions.
Goldmarks or Pounds Sterling?
To secure bids for warships, electrical equipment, and armaments, the German company Siemens and its British rival, Vickers, systematically bribed Japanese procurement officers, offering them percentages on major contracts. The bidding war escalated when Japanese officials took bribes featuring a 15% commission on contracts, specifically to build the battlecruiser Kongō—which would serve with distinction in WWII, even surviving Leyte Gulf. However, the British had gusto; they swept in at the last minute with a 25% bribe and secured the contract for the Kongō.
Now generally when one is bribed, it is only good manners to stay bribed.
The Germans found out, as of course they would when the British announced they were building the ship. Siemens could not believe it and asked for clarification. That is what we call a paper trail. Lesson of history: don’t do that. Now, a Siemens employee in Japan found the documents and apparently asked for money to keep schtum or else. (Blackmailing your German bosses from Japan is an interesting choice.) They took the “or else,” and he sold the story to Reuters, fled Japan for home in Germany—again an odd choice—and the next thing they knew the story was in The Daily Telegraph, sinking the Rikken Seiyūkai government. Rikken Dōshikai and Count Katō were in. Four months later, Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo.
The timing of the Siemens-Vickers scandal could not be worse for Germany. The premier genrō—the leader of the elder statesmen who led the Meiji Restoration—was the samurai-born Yamagata Aritomo, Prince and Field Marshal of the Empire. He was the hero that crushed the Satsuma Rebellion led by the renegade samurai Saigō Takamori. (Saigō was the inspiration for Ken Watanabe’s character in the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai). Field Marshal Prince Yamagata was favorable to Germany and thought Japan should remain neutral. He and the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained in the Prussian style, and Yamagata had built the Japanese General Staff modeled on the Prussians. In 1914, he was President of the Privy Council, a position from which he could steer Japan to his preferred path of neutrality and let the Europeans fight it out. But Count Katō had other ideas.
On August 7th, the British asked Japan to join the war and cut the Germans down in Asia. But technically the fight was in Europe; did the Japanese have a stake in the fight? Katō figured that driving the Germans out of China would allow Japan to “gift” the territory back to the Chinese and get China to grant major concessions to Japan in return. Would an opportunity to remove a European rival from East Asia ever return? He went to work and won the argument against the old samurai Yamagata.
On August 23, 1914, the Empire of Great Japan, by the grace of Heaven and in the name of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor, declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German Reich.
