Story of the Golden Kite

[Nick Komiya]

1937 October, Rosette added to the 4th Class Ribbon

One inherent problem with all Japanese Order series was that the 4th and 5th classes were nearly identical in design. In the case of Rising Suns they caught onto this problem very early and addressed the issue of differentiation by adding a rosette on the ribbon of the 4th class from 25th October 1886.

With the Golden Kites 4th and 5th Classes, they are made from identical dies and only the plating of the exposed metal outlines are different, with silver for 5th and gold for 4th. This difference is quite obvious in the color drawings at the bottom of the citations, which I showed as photos in post 20, but not easy to discern in originals with patina, particularly so because the gold is not the cheap gold wash as seen on German WW2 medals.

This rosette was added to the 4th Class by Edict 577 signed by Hirohito on 5th October 1937. It was allowed to keep wearing 4th classes using the old ribbons, and one was not urged to retrofit rosettes to old ones, which was the case with the Rising Sun 4th Class back in 1886.

Luckily the guards were not required to salute 4th and 5th classes differently, as otherwise there would have been calls to change specs much earlier. And luckily, this feature allows us to identify 4th classes with these rosettes as Showa produced pieces of post 1937 manufacture.


1942 September, 2nd Class Golden Kite omits the Neck Order as Secondary Decoration

Ever since allowing previously won classes to be worn with the newly awarded Golden Kites from June 1941, secondary decorations had become redundant. So on 25th September 1942, Hirohito signed Edict 656 that omitted the secondary decoration from the specifications of the Golden Kite 2nd class.

However, the edict came with the comment that this change was to be applied to war awards after 8th December 1941, which shows that no Prize-givings had taken place for WW2 as of September 1942. It becomes doubtful whether these new 2nd class Kites were ever presented to the living.

[Nick Komiya]

Here's the whole range for you to enjoy.

[Nick Komiya]

Citations

[Nick Komiya]

Cases

The first cases issued for the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 were known to have been black leather covered cases, but that changed to the usual black lacquered cases from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

All these early cases have class inscriptions on the lid which are one character short of the later Showa era versions. The early cases said Kinshi-Sho (金鵄章) instead of Kinshi-Kunsho (金鵄勲章). The latter designation is more formal with “Kunsho” meaning Order, whereas “Sho” just means award. So earlier it was simply called the Golden Kite Award, but later the Golden Kite Order.

When the wording changed can only be a guess as documents do not discuss this change, but I assume the old style was applied until the Prize-giving for WW1. Unlike other orders given out each year, Golden Kites were war orders only produced for giving out after a war. In this regard, the Russo-Japanese War saw huge numbers of Kites, but WW1 was quite low key in terms of issue numbers, and normally not the kind of time you make changes. Rather it is easy to imagine huge quantities foreseen for the Manchurian Incident of 1932, making that an ideal timing for renewing striking moulds and changing wording.

Then the so called wartime version cases have the inscriptions in silver instead of gold foil to conserve precious metals. This type of change became necessary from 1937 onwards, before 1940, which was because of the China Incident. Widespread countermeasures against material shortages were introduced at that time, and the mint recovered all copper coins from the market to replace with aluminum. Even the China Incident War Medal was considered for production in aluminum, before finally deciding to mint them out of recycled bronze coins.

Cases for Golden Kites were ordered when the total quantity was known after a war and contractors were called in to bid against each other for the contract. The Decorations Bureau would preselect several reliable suppliers who were financially stable and only those suppliers could participate. This was based on the bitter lesson learned from ordering cases for the Sino-Japanese War when open bidding was allowed. The winning supplier tried to pull the government over the table, claiming production material unavailability, etc

It appears that during WW2, Golden Kites awarded posthumously were given out simply in paper wrappers without the cases. Clearly they would not have ordered any Golden Kite cases during WW2, as all war prize-giving was suspended after 29th April 1940 and no cutoff was in sight to total up the quantities and give out contracts. Whether they intended to supply the cases later, I cannot tell, but what counted was to get the orders to those families, case or no case.

The paper wrappers have the Order name and class printed on them, along with the words “Made by the Mint”. These wrappers represented the last process of production at the Japan mint before the wrapped medals went into the lacquered cases.

The orders finished at the mint were delivered to the ribbon contractor on wooden trays and the ribbons were added at that shop. Then it would go back to the mint. Putting them into the wrappers at the ribbons shop would have made it easier, but the mint still needed to do a final quality check, so I do not think they were wrapped up at the ribbon shop. The mint routinely rejected poor quality medals, etc, made by private companies for the mint. So it is unthinkable that they omitted that final check for orders. Therefore it is natural to think that the mint did the wrapping after the check. This wrapper would help against oxidization, so that would have been primarily how the mint carried stock of the finished product.

Exactly for the same reason, cases for the China Incident Commemorative Medals are not known, but examples in wrappers exist. That medal, too, was awaiting a break in the war to do the numbers and make suppliers bid for the job, but never got around to it.

[Nick Komiya]

The Dating Game

The inscriptions on the boxes and the wings of the kites are different between early and late versions as we have seen. The former is loosely called the Meiji/Taisho type and the latter the Showa type, which I also find to be a reasonable way to call them apart, considering which wars were in which era, as discussed above. But there are more variations observed such as screw positions on the back, etc., so that loose dating is only like saying what went into the long tunnel and what came out were slightly different, a frustration and challenge to many collectors.

The problem is that there is no sure and practical way to date those minute changes, as they are not documented and citation dates are about the only sure clues. However too many of those citations are matched up with orders at the dealer and are not original sets. So the date on the citation is mostly invalid for associating the characteristics of that example of order with that citation date. As previous classes were returned, there are too many orphaned citations that tempt the dealer into making up sets.

Even if you get the citation and order from the original family, using the citation to date the order is too often a futile attempt, as grandfathers, fathers and brothers would have gone to war at different times and all orders and citations tend to be collectively stored in a jumble. No one will be there alive that remembers who within the family won which Golden Kite, etc. What type of lapel rosette is being used is another good clue, if you still want to try despite my word of caution.

I don’t want to be a Borg and just talk of futility, but you deserve just one more curve ball before you try resisting assimilation. The newspaper article attached below is from 4th May 1932 about war awards for the Manchurian Incident. It says 25,000 Rising Suns and Golden Kites in the vaults since the last prize-giving of 1915 were now to be presented. That meant there were big numbers of legitimate sets having a 17-year discrepancy between the citation date and manufacturing date of the order. However, there was still the massive awarding of 1940, which must have offered these offending orders a trade-up opportunity to get melted down.

[Nick Komiya]

There were also special field cases for taking orders out into the field, which were private purchase items.

[Nick Komiya]

Chapter 6: The Beginning of the End


Tojo vs Kaneko

The 88-year old Harvard Law graduate was speaking. He was a man who had the trust and ear of the former President, Theodore Roosevelt.

“I don’t know how to describe the deep grief that once shook me in seeing the sick and wounded soldiers begging on the streets right after the Civil War. You have done nothing to alleviate fears of mine that I might have to endure such a sight again sometime in the future of our land in the event you carry out what you propose. I will not support the proposal and I have bared my soul to you all in the hope that you will reconsider and retract the bill.”

It was approaching 10:30 AM, Wednesday 18th June, 1941 within the Imperial Palace, in a meeting with Hirohito residing. The speaker was Kentaro Kaneko (金子堅太郎), a councilor of the Privy Council. The subject of the discussion was the abolition of the pension program attached to the Golden Kite since 1894.

It is well known that Teddy Roosevelt had brokered the Peace Treaty between Japan and Russia at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, but it was Kaneko who prevailed upon his old time Harvard Law School acquaintance for help.

In his youth he had actually wanted to join the Navy, but while studying in the USA, an American doctor had told him,” Son, you are not the robust military type. So unless you are from a Navy family, why don’t you consider something else?” Thus he selected law and graduated from Harvard Law School and was a member of the handful of men that drafted the Imperial Constitution of Japan.

Earlier in the meeting, he said he was dead fast against the bill, chiefly for two reasons.

“This proposal is a lopsided idea, considering the pension program attached to Orders for those in the bureaucracy. Let me remind you that at the time of rewarding deeds after the Sino-Japanese War, a petition was made to award Prince Arisugawa, the Commander-in-Chief with the First Class Golden Kite, but Emperor Meiji himself countermanded that and awarded instead the Second Class, as the Prince never went out into the battlefield, but chose to stay within general headquarters. By the same token, there is simply no comparison between the life of bureaucrats back home and the hardships endured by the officers and men having to constantly put their lives on the line in the field. To allow bureaucrats to keep their Order pensions to sacrifice only the military men is beyond reason.”

“Secondly, the China Incident has still not seen any conclusion, and a million of our men are in the field fighting as we speak. To deny them the Golden Kite Order Pension at this time is extremely inopportune. Remember the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) and the Takebashi Mutiny thereafter, which was all about the army’s discontent over the cutbacks the government made in war prizes for suppressing the Rebellion? If we learned anything from that, it’s that monetary rewards have an undeniable impact on morale. To claim that the pension had made the men lose their honor and succumb to materialism is a meaningless abstraction.”

His reminiscence of the post Civil War misery in the US actually followed this.

It was Tojo as Minister of the Army that replied to Kaneko.

“Sir, I am deeply moved to hear your thoughtful consideration of our men in the army and navy and by your passion for them. To discontinue the Golden Kite pension program we have had for 50 years is something we do not undertake lightly. We have thoroughly considered the impact it will have on the morale of our officers and men, but it was my own personal experience that in the end gave me the conviction that we need not worry about that. By clarifying the pros and cons, I am sure you will come to see our point.”

“The pension program was introduced to encourage a fighting spirit and it did have the benefit of reminding the soldiers of the benevolence of His Majesty every time the soldier received a payout. However, there was the drawback of the program tending to be taken as a materialistic reward or provision of living expenses in exchange for their sacred feats of bravery, thus offending their pride as warriors. Also, there are those among the beneficiaries that started to take it for granted. Another aspect is the imbalance it creates between the rewards for the Golden Kite winners and the others deserving of recognition. The wars fought now are substantially different in nature from those of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars and assessment of feats of bravery have gained in complexity and results are no longer as clear cut as they used to be.

Another problem is that a pension program by its very nature cannot be fair to all acts of valor. That is because those that gave their lives only bring 5 years of payout to the family left behind, so the disparity between the dead and living just grows even if their contributions had been comparable. Those who were wounded, perhaps gets the shortest end of the stick. There are also inequalities between those who are first time winners and those winning more than once. Considering such pros and cons, we came to the conclusion that war prize-giving must do away with pensions and instead reinforce preferential treatment of the winners more in spirit and attitude. The material gain aspect of it will be replaced by a lump sum reward instead of a pension.”

“The other pension program you referred to was on order of His Majesty and instituted in 1877. It was meant for both civil servants and soldiers, but since establishing the pension for the Golden Kite, there has indeed been the tendency only to reward Rising Sun winners in the civil areas with this pension. As of end of 1940, there were a total of 1,481 pensioners in that category.

Up to now, we have only been rewarding the war dead from the China Incident, but now we need to proceed to honor the living with the first round of prize-giving. So the discontinuation of the problematic pension program must be done at this important junction, after that we will grapple with the dismantling of the other pension program as well.”

Kaneko retorted

“If you seriously wish to cancel the Golden Kite pensions, you need to start with the pension program for the Order of the Rising Sun. But, I am also still doubtful about the impact on morale and cannot bring myself to vote in your favor.”

Tojo again

“The question of morale is a matter of difference in opinion only. I am of the opinion that if we handle this correctly before and after implementation, which after all is my responsibility, it need not come to any problem of morale. The only reason we are not cancelling the pensions on the Rising Sun orders now is, because we have to proceed with the prize-giving and the other pension program has nothing to do with that event.

The chairman saw that no one had anything more to say, so he decided to call a vote. “Those in favor, please rise.” The minutes recorded the fact that Councilor Kaneko alone remained seated. 41 were standing as His Majesty left, and the meeting adjourned at 11 AM.

[Nick Komiya]

1941, June The Golden Kite Pension Program is Abolished

9 days after the drama above, on 18th June 1941, the pension program was officially scrapped by Edict 725 signed by Hirohito.

By titling this chapter, “The beginning of the end” you might have thought the above was a desperate move to save costs in the economic difficulties experienced since the China Incident, but it was not. I also intentionally gave the spotlight to the underdog in the last drama before the signing of the edict, but actually Tojo was being sincere and this was no knee-jerk reaction to any empty wallet, but the culminating result of careful studies that went back to early 1938, an attempt to do a total overhaul of the Golden Kite program and rebuild it cleanly to take out all the kinks.

In that process, the Army would ask itself some fundamental questions such as “Why did we avoid a simple system like the German Iron Cross and Knights Crosses?”, but I will answer that a bit later.

Rather the point here is that in June of 1941, they were referring to the mass awarding of orders with 29th April 1940 dates on their citations in the future tense. Those medals and orders, therefore, only reached the soldiers sometime in the latter half of 1941. No wonder that the government was not ready for another prize-giving for the Greater East Asia War any time soon. Like Tojo said, only the dead have been receiving the awards while the living were forced to wait. As soon as those 29th April awards got released to the living, the next round of waiting began and only the dead got their Golden Kites from this point.

To me, this point at which the highest order for bravery got inseparably bound with death was the beginning of the end.

The lump sum amounts mentioned by Tojo were based on the pension amounts times years of average life expectancy of those times, counting from the average age of a rank group for company grade officers, field grade, etc. So normally the immediate burden on national budget would shoot up instead of being reduced. The catch, however, in retrospect, was that the lump sums were issued in bonds, which were only immediately convertible into cash under extremely special circumstances. Those bonds became worthless as Japan lost the war.

Before we move on, I will show you below, examples of the pension certificates that Golden Kite winners no longer got from the 29th April 1940 award date onwards.

As can be seen, there was an increase of issue amounts for 5th and lower classes in May 1927. Those having certificates showing the lower previous amounts were to request issue of a new certificate at that time to be able to benefit from the new amounts.

[Nick Komiya]

I thought many would appreciate this. This is the most complete listing I've found so far. It is only missing the China Incident figures for 1937-1940.

[Nick Komiya]

Now I've got it 100% complete. The China Incident data shows even the army/navy split, which you can read yourself.
The China Incident numbers are as of 1st June 1941, which are supposed to be the 29th April 1940 group, but this was probably not the final tally, as I have seen 190,000 in other sources.