Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  “The Sacred Throne was established at the time when the heavens and the earth became separated.” (Kojiki) The Emperor is Heaven descended, divine, and sacred. He is preeminent above all his subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable. He has indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law has no power to hold him accountable to it…. He shall not be made a topic of derogatory comment nor one of discussion.24

  The imperial ideology in which religious myth figured so prominently was not ancient, however. Allegedly nonreligious “state Shinto” (as opposed to “sect Shinto”) took shape during Meiji’s reign directly from the belief that Japan was a holy realm protected by Shinto deities and ruled by an emperor who was descended from the sun goddess. The nationalization of core elements of Shinto entailed the establishment of the Grand Shrine of Ise Jing as the major Shinto shrine in which the sun goddess was enshrined. Ise became the main symbol of Shinto as well as a center of national devotion and the apex of a hierarchy of lesser shrines in villages and towns throughout the country.

  In 1890 Emperor Meiji issued, without the countersignature of any minister of state, the short Imperial Rescript on Education. “Know ye, Our subjects,” it began, using the newly coined compound term shinmin to denote “loyal-officials-directly-subordinated-to-the-emperor, and people-who-obediently-comply-with-their-orders.”25 Then it went on to list the Confucian virtues, starting with filial piety, which were to inform human relationships, adding that “should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.” The final line of the rescript asserted that emperors were the source of all morality.26

  At the start of the Restoration both Confucianism and Buddhism had been considered foreign accretions to the national essence, and as such to be expunged. The education rescript, however, was part of a late-Meiji course reversal, using traditional Confucian, not Shinto, language to counter progressive, democratic thought and ideals and to drum in the new notion of “loyal subjects.” The rescript molded generations of Japanese to be loyal servants to the emperor-state, in which governance was an essentially paternalistic exercise, carried out in a paternalistic manner, by officials who were supposed to know best what was good for the people. In addition the education rescript accustomed all Japanese to the notion that morality and culture were closely tied to, yet never transcended, the state.

  Education and military affairs—two spheres of national life affecting all Japanese—had been placed under the emperor’s direct extraconstitutional control, making him the sacred pedagogue with the power to proselytize, as well as the supreme generalissimo with the power to issue orders to the armed forces.27 Without the emperor’s support and assistance, no cabinet or prime minister could rule for long.

  The strengthening of the monarchy, through the promulgation of the Meiji constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education, changed the whole intellectual climate in Japan.28 During Hirohito’s childhood the institutions and ideology of the Meiji state underwent further development. State Shinto, and the notion of “the unity of rites and governance” through the emperor, gained a new lease on life through the establishment in 1900 of a Bureau of Shrines and Religion within the Home Ministry.29 Soon each member of a household, whether Buddhist or Christian (then about 1 percent of the population), had to become a parishioner of a local shrine and have a connection with a tutelary deity. When the local shrines raised their status to the state level by choosing names from ancient myths or historical legends, all the gods of the shrine became connected genealogically to the ancestral goddess of the imperial house, Amaterasu mikami. Feelings of veneration for Emperor Meiji deepened, and many people began to imagine that they themselves existed because of him.30

  Hirohito turned seven in 1908, the year the government reaffirmed its foreign policy of expanding Japan’s colonial position on the Asian continent within a framework of continued division of spoils with the European powers and the United States. That same year the Ministry of Education began to rewrite school textbooks to describe Japan as an organic, harmonious, moral, and patriarchial “family state” in which all Japanese were related to the emperor. Revision was needed because society was changing rapidly and interpretations of Meiji’s “Imperial Rescript on Education,” written in archaic language, needed to be unified. Now the education rescript acquired a meaning it had not had in the 1890s. Children continued to be taught the foundation myths: that they were the subjects of the emperor and had to obey him just as they obeyed their fathers and mothers. But for the first time the impersonal emperor-state itself was presented as the supreme entity that took priority over all other values. The relationship of the imperial house to the nation began to be described as that of a progenitor “head-family” to its various “branch” and “stem” families. When the textbook revision was completed in 1911, the premises of monarchical absolutism had been written into public education, and state power had, in theory, been grounded in the intimate sphere of the family.31

  In the real world, of course, not all Japanese sided with the government or identified strongly with the imperial house as the new textbooks assumed. Significantly the years 1910–11 witnessed the highly publicized High Treason Incident, in which a small group of radical socialists and anarchists were charged with lèsé-majesté and executed for allegedly plotting to assassinate Emperor Meiji. One of them was a young priest of the St Zen sect, Uchiyama Gud, who had written and widely circulated a scathing denunciation of the entire imperial system:

  The Big Bullock of the present government, the emperor, is not the son of the gods as your primary school teachers and others would have you believe. The ancestors of the present emperor came forth from a corner of Kyushu, killing and robbing people as they did. They then destroyed their fellow thieves…. When it is said that the [imperialdynasty] has continued for 2,500 years, it may seem as if [the present emperor] is divine, but down through the ages the emperors have been tormented by foreign opponents and, domestically, treated as puppets by their own vassals…. Although this is well-known, university professors and their students, weaklings that they are, refuse to either say or write anything about it. Instead, they attempt to deceive both others and themselves, knowing all along the whole thing is a pack of lies.32

  II

  If Hirohito associated Japan’s entire modern history with his grandfather and the loyal circle of advisers who assisted him, he perceived his own world largely in terms of the empire his grandfather bequeathed him. The two major wars fought in Meiji’s name—against Ch’ing China in 1894–95 and czarist Russia in 1904–5—altered the conditions of Japanese national life and changed the international environment surrounding Japan.

  The war with China deepened national integration and furthered the monarchy’s transformation into a crisis-control mechanism for oligarchic, authoritarian rule. Concurrently it hastened a process of logrolling that advanced the power of political parties in the Diet, thereby imparting a measure of liberalization to the authoritarian state. Thereafter, as Japan’s economic development proceeded apace, the elites in the military, the bureaucracy, the Diet, and big business found their interests frequently at odds, making domestic politics more and more fractious.

  Ten years later came the Russo-Japanese War, followed by another period of growth in political party activity, as well as increased military spending to secure Japan’s possessions on the Asian continent. By then the Army and Navy General Staff commands had been made directly subordinate to the emperor, and their bureaucracies had begun to elude cabinet control. To counter this danger It revised the Cabinet Regulations, restoring to the prime minister some of the power that had been lost in 1889.33 Nevertheless, the relative independence of the military was never checked, and the cabinet never became the emperor’s highest advisory organ. In March 1907, the navy minister appealed to the emperor to overturn It’s work, and Meiji concurred.34

  Six months later the army a
nd navy ministers enacted General Military Ordinance Number 1, stipulating that “Regulations pertaining to the command of the army and navy which have been decided directly by the emperor are automatically military regulations (gunrei).” Emperor Meiji sanctioned the ordinance. With this, the army and navy acquired “the authority to enact, independently of the cabinet, a new form of law, called gunrei.” Thus, while the prime minister’s power of unification of the cabinet remained weak, the military—with Meiji’s support—was able to advance the argument that the emperor’s “right of supreme command” was an independent right, free of government control.35

  During Hirohito’s school years—the post–Russo-Japanese War period from 1907 to the eve of World War I—the military was allowed to arrogate power that it did not legally possess. Meiji sanctioned, as the new guiding principle of Japanese defense policy, the protection of “the rights and interests we planted in Manchuria and Korea at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and vast sums of money during the war of 1904–5.”36 New efforts were also made to infuse emperor ideology and bushid (the way of the warrior) into the armed forces. Infantry manuals and training procedures were revised to emphasize the importance in warfare of human spirit, offensive-mindedness, small-arms fire, and hand-to-hand combat. Also incidentally, the rank and authority of the emperor’s aides-de-camp were strengthened.37

  In 1907 Japan’s long struggle to subjugate the Korean people through control of their royal house entered a new phase. In September, Korean king Kojong dispatched three envoys to a peace conference at The Hague to plead that Korea’s protectorate status had been forged without his official sanction. The Great Powers denied Kojong’s envoys admission to the conference on the ground that, as a protectorate of Japan, Korea had no power in foreign policy. Following this embarrassing incident, Emperor Meiji sent Crown Prince Yoshihito to Korea to shore up relations with its royal family. Shortly after Yoshihito’s return to Japan in late October, Meiji approved It’s policy of forcing King Kojong to abdicate and removing his young heir, the “Crown Prince Imperial” Yi Un, to Tokyo—ostensibly to be educated but in reality to deter further anti-Japanese actions by Korean royals. On December 15, 1907, holding It’s hand, ten-year-old Yi Un came to the Koson Palace and was introduced to Hirohito, Chichibu, and Takamatsu. Over the next two years, while the oligarchs made their fateful decision to change Korea’s status from protectorate to colony, Meiji acted as guardian to Yi Un, lavishing more attention and gifts on him than he ever had on his own grandsons. It made sure too to bring the Korean prince with him whenever he visited Hirohito and his brothers.

  The last occasion Hirohito met Yi Un in It’s presence was on September 14, 1909, soon after It had stepped down as resident governor of Korea and assumed the presidency of the privy council. Six weeks later, on October 26, a Korean nationalist assassinated It in Harbin, Manchuria, where he was on his way to discuss Russo-Japanese relations. As for the hostage Yi Un, Tokyo became his permanent home, and he was not allowed to visit Korea until his mother’s death in 1911.38

  During Hirohito’s boyhood and afterward, Emperor Meiji was propagandized as the very touchstone of all virtue. Though Meiji’s public persona was that of a progressive, “Westernizing” monarch, the fount and essence of all moral values, he was far from that. He was privately “anti-Western” in his inclinations, and politically reactionary. His personality was not very pleasant either. He tended toward dissoluteness and obesity, and spent an inordinate amount of time satisfying his prodigious appetites. Many of the maladies that afflicted him can be traced to his excesses in food and especially drink, which eventually ruined his health.39

  During the years that Japan’s elites hyped the suprahuman virtues of Meiji, justified the post–Russo-Japanese War status quo, and rewrote the textbooks to promote emperor worship, Hirohito was attending the elementary course at the Peers’ School, which he entered in the spring of 1908, at the age of seven. Located in Yotsuya, Owari-ch, near the front gate of the old Akasaka Palace (about a twenty-minute walk from his Kson Palace), the Peers’ School had been established thirty years earlier, under the aegis of the Imperial Household Ministry, to educate all children of the imperial family (kzoku) and the old court nobility. After the Peerage Act of 1884, the children of newly titled peers (kâzoku) could also attend, and the school expanded. The Meiji emperor had appointed General Nogi, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War, as the school’s tenth president and charged him with educating his eldest grandson.

  General Nogi favored a strict military-style education and was a firm believer in Confucianism, bushid, and the precepts of Zen. He refused to pamper the little princes. On his instructions they were made to walk to school every morning, escorted by a medical attendant and two employees of the Imperial Household Ministry. As passersby looked on, they marched along in single file, with little Hirohito resolutely in the lead, Chichibu behind him, and Takamatsu in the rear. On rainy days they were allowed to ride in carriages; Hirohito rode alone while his brothers rode together and behind—the only exception being when one was sick.40

  Because Hirohito was not a robust child, the teaching staff at the school focused, on Nogi’s orders, on physical education and health as much as on deportment and academic achievement. At the same time they sought to implant the virtues and habits Nogi considered appropriate for a future sovereign: frugality, diligence, patience, manliness, and the ability to exercise strong self-control under difficult conditions. Devotion to duty and love of the military stood equally high in Nogi’s vision of the ideal monarch. Under Nogi’s tutelage Hirohito came to an early recognition of his physical weakness, and the need to overcome it by dint of hard work. From this experience as a child, he may also have come to feel that with the right education one could overcome all shortcomings.

  Nogi was aware that the armed forces of modern Japan had been since their inception the armed forces of the emperor, and that they were supposed to be directly commanded by him.41 Since the little prince would one day be in charge of the nation’s military affairs, exercising the prerogative of supreme command in a way his grandfather had never been trained to do, the instructors at the Peers’ School were told to “pay careful attention to guiding him in military matters.”42 In 1910 Meiji issued Imperial Household Regulation Number 17, requiring military training and service experience for the male members of the imperial family.43 This law completed a process of compulsory militarization of the imperial family that had been going on for more than thirty years. For young Hirohito, however, military matters at this stage merely denoted training in horsemanship, which he began as early as the fourth or fifth year of elementary school, and the playing of war games (reenacting battles of the recent war) with his brothers and classmates.44

  In formulating his spartan curriculum, Nogi must have borne in mind the failures experienced in trying to educate Hirohito’s father. Crown Prince Yoshihito had had so many chief tutors and general supervisors of his education (including It Hirobumi and Gen. yama Iwao) that no one could ever tell who was really in charge of educating him.45 Nogi, however, benefited from an established system of ideological indoctrination and his own intense, overpowering character. When Nogi insisted that the boys salute and address him every morning as “Excellency,” Hirohito and his brothers readily complied.46

  Throughout his years at the Peers’ School, Hirohito passed his winter school term and vacations in Numazu, Shizuoka prefecture, and his summers in Ikaho, Gumma prefecture, and in Hayama, Kanagawa prefecture. He had frequent contact with his brothers but was more often in the company of his specially selected classmates—thirteen boys, later reduced to nine. Already he received instruction in Shinto rituals from court nobles serving as “ritualists” within the Imperial Household Ministry. Hirohito would be the high priest of state Shinto—a religious as well as a political monarch.47 Ancestor worship was also implanted early, before his character began to crystallize, by his performance of Shinto rituals. While he and his brothers lived in the Kson
Palace, every morning on rising, after splashing water and soap, and then toweling, they were taught to pray in a small, two-mat room by bowing in the direction of the Grand Shrine of Ise and the Imperial Palace.48 As Hirohito grew older his visits to shrines and imperial mausoleums deepened his sense of the importance of his ancestors.49 The religious identity that worked its way into his thought was one of the main results of his early childhood upbringing.

  The central component of this identity was Hirohito’s strong sense of moral obligation to imperial ancestors, who were the source of his being, his authority, his household fortune, and indeed whatever sustained both him and the nation. The creed of the ancestors bore on Hirohito, as the future head of the patriarchal imperial family. He was obliged to learn to perform solemn rites for them.50 This relationship to tradition and the essence of his public obligation was summed up in the expression ks ks (”the imperial founders of our house and our other imperial ancestors”). Kso denoted his mythical forebears, starting with the sun goddess, Amaterasu mikami, and continuing through Emperor Jimmu. Ks meant “our other imperial ancestors,” or the line of historical emperors who had succeeded to the throne over time.51 Kso ks thus linked Hirohito directly to mythology and to the artificially constructed imperial tradition as a whole. It served as one source of his moral viewpoint and as the basis for his later assessments of the state. Kso ks, his eternal public burden, determined the course to which his life was dedicated: preserving the throne so long as he was its occupant.

  The rhetoric of “the imperial founders of our house and our other imperial ancestors” and “our imperial ancestors through a line of succession unbroken for ages eternal” [bansei ikkei no ks] had great historical depth. It can be traced back to such early politico-historical tracts of the imperial house as the Shoku Nihongi [Chronicle of Japan] of the early eighth century. It reappeared in Meiji’s numerous imperial edicts, including his Rescript of 1889, establishing the Constitution of the Empire of Great Japan, the preamble to that constitution, the Imperial House Law of 1889, and the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890. Hirohito’s many imperial rescripts also contain the term kso ks, as does the rescript in which he staked his family fortune in a declaration of war on Britain and the United States. Above all kso ks expressed Hirohito’s sense of himself as a ruler who had inherited the spiritual authority of his dead ancestors, and was more morally accountable to them than he was to his subjects, who after all were not the source of his authority but rather its objects.52 Acknowledging responsibility to his imperial ancestors rather than to his “subjects” would always be a significant feature of Hirohito’s character.