ABSTRACT
The military’s voice in politics had grown louder and louder during the first half of the 1930s. Though the attempts by radicals within the military to effect a ‘Showa Restoration’ had failed to revive direct imperial rule, the series of coup attempts and assassinations of the early 1930s intimidated the civilian government into accepting the military’s dominant policymaking role. The purges carried out in the aftermath of the 26 February Incident left the Army more unified and cohesive, but power was still wielded by an array of competing interests, including the weak but lasting political parties, industrialists, and the bureaucracy. Since ali were, like the population as a whole, strong adherents of the virulent nationalism that metastasized throughout Society in the early 1930s, military adventurism was accepted and promoted as vital to Japan’s national interests. Rejecting any criticism of its foreign policy from the international community as racist and obstructionist, Japan isolated itself from its former allies.
