How Japan's armed services could bring down a cabinet

Interwar Japan combined formal constitutional government with powerful military institutions operating behind it. The emperor was theoretically supreme but exercised little routine control over the political machinery described here. Because an army or navy minister was required, either service could bring down or prevent a cabinet by refusing to participate. The arrangement assumed officers would treat that power as a duty rather than a political weapon, an expectation that did not hold. For France, this institutional instability mattered because Japanese expansion in China approached the border of French Indochina and made policy difficult to predict through ordinary diplomatic channels alone.