The February 26 Incident — The Young Officers' Uprising and the Age of the Military Sword

Background — The Kōdōha–Tōseiha Rivalry and the Stagnation of the Shōwa Depression

By the early Shōwa period, the Japanese Army was riven by rivalry between two factions: the "Imperial Way faction" (Kōdōha), which championed direct imperial rule and radical national renewal, and the "Control faction" (Tōseiha), which favored building a modern total-war state under bureaucratic and military planning. Against a backdrop of rural devastation from the Shōwa Depression, urban economic hardship, and mounting distrust of party politics, a number of young officers sympathetic to the Kōdōha came to see the existing political establishment, financial conglomerates (zaibatsu), and senior court advisors as "evil men surrounding the throne," and increasingly embraced the radical idea of removing them by force to bring about a "Shōwa Restoration" of direct imperial rule.

Amid this climate, in 1935 Mazaki Jinzaburō, a central figure of the Kōdōha, was removed from his post as Inspector General of Military Education, prompting the so-called Aizawa Incident, in which the enraged Lieutenant Colonel Aizawa Saburō cut down Tōseiha Military Affairs Bureau chief Nagata Tetsuzan with a sword — a sign of just how sharp the factional rivalry within the Army had become. The Tokyo-based 1st Division's scheduled transfer to Manchuria in 1936 is also said to have heightened a sense among Kōdōha-aligned officers that their window for action was closing.

Further back, on May 15, 1932, young naval officers had already stormed the Prime Minister's residence and assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in the May 15 Incident, an event that effectively ended the practice of party-led cabinets. The relatively lenient sentences handed down to the May 15 defendants, amid a wave of public sympathy, is thought to have led the officers behind the later February 26 Incident to mistakenly believe that armed action in the name of a "Shōwa Restoration" might likewise be tolerated.

The Uprising — The Predawn Attacks of February 26

In the predawn hours of February 26, 1936, amid heavy snowfall in Tokyo, roughly 20 young officers — including Captain Nonaka Shirō, Captain Andō Teruzō, and Lieutenant Kurihara Yasuhide — rose in rebellion, leading approximately 1,500 non-commissioned officers and enlisted men mobilized from the 1st and 3rd Infantry Regiments and the 3rd Imperial Guards Infantry Regiment. Divided into several assault groups, the rebel force seized the Prime Minister's Official Residence, the Army Ministry, the Army General Staff Headquarters, the Metropolitan Police Department, and the offices of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in rapid succession, occupying the Nagatacho district of Tokyo by force.

The Assassinations — Takahashi Korekiyo, Saito Makoto, and Watanabe Jotaro

Each assault group simultaneously struck the residences of government and court officials. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo was attacked while asleep at his residence in Akasaka; he was shot with pistols and then, while still alive, cut down with the officers' military swords. Takahashi, who had used fiscal and monetary policy to place some restraint on military expansion, is said to have been especially reviled by the young officers for that reason. Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Saito Makoto was likewise shot to death at his residence, and Inspector General of Military Education Watanabe Jotaro was killed at his home in Suginami by machine-gun fire followed by a bayonet attack, all in front of his nine-year-old daughter. Prime Minister Okada Keisuke escaped by hiding in a storeroom within his official residence, but his brother-in-law, Matsuo Denzō, was mistakenly killed in his place. Grand Chamberlain Suzuki Kantarō was also shot and severely wounded, though he survived. Former Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Makino Nobuaki was attacked at his lodgings, the Kōfūsō villa in Yugawara, Shizuoka Prefecture, by a mostly civilian assault squad; his police bodyguard, Minagawa Yoshitaka, returned fire to buy time, allowing Makino to escape through a back exit before the building was set ablaze. Minagawa was killed in the exchange. This attack in Yugawara, the only actual assault to take place outside Tokyo, shows that the plot's reach extended well beyond the capital.

The Sword of the Era — The Type 94 Guntō and Imperial Restorationism

Just two years before the incident, in 1934, the Army had introduced a new standard officer's sword, the Type 94 guntō, replacing the Western-style saber mounting used since the Army's founding with a mounting modeled on the traditional Japanese tachi. This redesign reflected the rising tide of militarism and ethnic nationalism of the era, which favored a return to distinctly Japanese forms over wholesale Western imitation — and it was this newly adopted guntō that the rebel officers wore. The fact that Takahashi Korekiyo was cut down with a sword after being shot underscores that these guntō were not merely ceremonial ornaments but weapons that officers genuinely carried and used. Historians have noted that the same spirit of returning to "what is authentically Japanese" ran through both the young officers' imperial-restorationist ideology and the thinking behind the Army's return to traditional tachi-style sword mountings.

Four Days to Suppression — The Imperial Order and the Rebels' Surrender

In the uprising's early hours, some elements of the Army high command showed a degree of sympathy toward the rebels' aims, and there was even a brief move to formally recognize the rebel troops as a legitimate security force. But Emperor Hirohito, enraged upon learning of the assassinations, is said to have told an aide that he himself would lead the Imperial Guards Division to crush the rebellion, making his resolve unmistakable. Martial law was declared in Tokyo on February 27, and a Martial Law Headquarters under Commander Kashii Kōhei was established, gradually recasting the rebels as a surrounded "insurgent army." On the morning of February 29, leaflets reading "The Imperial Order has come down — do not raise arms against the Emperor's banner" were dropped over the occupied area, and a radio broadcast titled "An Appeal to the Soldiers" repeatedly urged the NCOs and enlisted men to return to their original units. With the Emperor's direct order stripping the rebellion of any pretense of legitimacy, most of the troops had returned to their units by that afternoon, bringing the uprising to an end after just four days. Some officers took their own lives on the spot, while others attempted suicide but failed.

The Special Court-Martial and the Executions

In the aftermath, the officers held responsible were tried before a closed special court-martial that permitted no public hearing, no defense counsel, and no right of appeal — an extraordinary judicial arrangement established to allow unusually swift proceedings given the incident's political gravity. In July 1936, more than a dozen of the central figures in the uprising were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad at the Army's Tokyo military prison. The civilian ideologues Kita Ikki and Nishida Mitsugi, believed to have ideologically influenced the rebel officers, were separately investigated and executed by firing squad in August 1937. Mazaki Jinzaburō, the senior Kōdōha figure whose removal had helped set the stage for the uprising, was indicted on suspicion of inciting the rebellion but was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Lasting Impact — The Military's Expanding Political Voice and the Road to War

The suppression of the February 26 Incident purged the Kōdōha faction from the Army, leaving the Tōseiha faction in control of Army leadership thereafter. Yet, paradoxically, the incident gave the Army greater leverage over cabinet formation and government policy in the name of "purifying the military," and this, combined with the revived system requiring active-duty officers to serve as war and navy ministers, further eroded the influence of party politics. The Hirota Kōki cabinet formed in the incident's wake was compelled to accommodate the military's wishes in its composition, and Japan thereafter turned decisively toward military expansion and a more aggressive continental policy. The February 26 Incident stands as a decisive turning point in modern Japanese history, marking Japan's shift away from party government toward a military-dominated state structure that would pave the way toward the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War.

The guntō culture symbolized by the Type 94 sword worn by the rebel officers persisted until Japan's defeat in the Pacific War, but in the immediate aftermath of surrender, the Occupation's sword-confiscation policy placed vast numbers of Japanese swords, guntō included, at risk of seizure and destruction. That a sword culture which had flourished alongside imperial-restorationist ultranationalism should, within less than a decade, meet the opposite fate — treated as a weapon to be disarmed and confiscated — marks one of the great reversals in the modern history of the Japanese sword.