The popular view claiming Japan's government prior to 1941 was a formidable totalitarian monolith is wrong. In fact, Japan's civil government ended in 1931, and what remained was only a clamorous, quarrelsome amalgamation of cliques and factions, the latter ridden with subgroups, the most radical of which was the Imperial Japanese Army. Supposedly abjectly subservient to the Emperor, these groups regularly disobeyed the Emperor when they didn’t ignore him entirely.
The different Army cliques were so bloodthirsty, indocile and unruly, that the result was basically a government by assassination. Army groups who disliked policies murdered prime ministers as casually as teenager tearing up a traffic ticket, with no compunction at all.
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