Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  In the third term of their academic year—the winter months of January through March—staff and students moved to the imperial mansion in Numazu, where the climate was warmer. There classroom instruction was carried out in somewhat less formal surroundings. During the summer months of June through September, when his classmates returned to their families, Hirohito spent only a short period of time with his parents. His summers were mostly given to pursuing a busy schedule of tours of the main army camps, naval bases, and military arsenals in the country.78 He also toured the military academies, paid regular visits to the General Staff Headquarters of the army and navy, acquired experience in seamanship during training cruises aboard frigates and cruisers, inspected artillery tests, and observed divisional and regimental maneuvers.79

  Hirohito’s teachers, seeking to prepare him for the different roles he was to play as an emperor in the Meiji mold, taught him the official interpretation of the nation’s history, which combined elements of nationalism and racism in the myth of his descent from the gods. Although as crown prince he inhabited a moral sphere in which questions of personal accountability for the exercise of power and authority would not arise, he was indoctrinated in the same myths that were put forth in the nation’s primary and military schools. The “imperial family” (kzoku), at the apex of the national hierarchy of hereditary houses, and the titled peers (kazoku), directly below them, may not all have agreed that Crown Prince Hirohito was descended from the gods, but he understood the utility of that tenet. Eventually it became a working part of his identity.

  Hirohito was born to be the leader of a highly militarized imperial family (kzoku), whose adult male and female members played unique public roles in Japanese life. The kzoku was a self-governing, homogeneous group composed of nine ranks of royalty, extending through cousins, of which there were many. The upper ranks consisted of the reigning empress, the emperor’s eldest son, or crown prince, the dowager empress, the princes and princesses of the blood, and their children. Hirohito’s brothers, called jiki miya, consituted a separate order within the kzoku. Unaffected by seniority, they were expected to behave differently from other kzoku. The emperor, as head of the eternal imperial house, kshitsu, was not, technically speaking, a “member” of his imperial family but stood above it as a chieftain, closely supervising and unifying its members. The second and third sons of kzoku, upon reaching adulthood, automatically became hereditary peers (kazoku) and most were granted the title of “count.”80 Enjoying ownership of land, stocks, bonds, multiple residences, servants, and generous stipends administered by the Imperial Household Ministry, some kzoku traveled abroad and lived far freer lives than did most ordinary Japanese. Some also tended to express “liberal” views, though that certainly cannot be said of Hirohito’s mother, his brothers Chichibu and Takamatsu, or of his uncles, Field Marshal Kan’in Kotohito and Fleet Admiral Fushimi, who were later used by the central command of the army and navy as levers for influencing the throne.

  Adult male princes of the blood were eligible for direct appointment by the emperor to the House of Peers, an upper branch of the Imperial Diet that had equal authority with the lower house. Some of them also participated—together with the lord keeper of the privy seal, the president of the privy council, the imperial household minister, the justice minister, and the president of the Court of Cassation (the highest court of appeals)—in an Imperial Family Council, established under the Imperial Household Law.81 The infrequently convened family council addressed questions pertaining solely to the imperial house. Since kzoku were prevented by law from formally assisting the emperor as political advisers, their real influence lay in holding strategic positions of command within the armed forces and in their frequent access to the emperor.

  An affluent, landed class that participated in state activities as military officers, the kzoku may be compared to the Prussian “Junker” nobility, though without that class’s narrow-mindedness and pietism, and with a much stronger bourgeois rather than professional military character. Having become militarized in the course of strengthening the imperial state, however, the male members of the imperial family, regardless of their wishes or their suitability for military life, received military instruction, starting at the Peers’ School. On becoming professional officers, they were incorporated into the armed forces at the highest levels of command and given opportunities to pursue military studies abroad. Their importance as a service elite, diffusing within the armed forces the consciousness of being directly subordinate to the emperor, cannot be overestimated.82

  Young Hirohito pursued his first four years of military training while World War I was being fought, and his last three during the Siberian Expedition. In the first stage, 1914 through early 1918, the European war should have dampened the glory of the Russo-Japanese War, in which military men still basked. Although Japan was allied with Britain and the United States against Germany—the model for its professional military class—the Japanese army failed to learn the lessons of the critical role played by modern weaponry in mass warfare. Officers of the seventeen divisions into which the standing army was then divided preferred the idealized tradition of bushid as expressed in the classic text hagakure, which glorified death and loyalty unto death as the highest values.83 Harsh training and frequent punishments, an emphasis on military spirit, and the fostering of regionalism (by keeping together in the same regimental units men who came from the same geographical area, so that they would fight for the honor of their local region) remained the army’s chief characteristics. Indoctrination centered on cultivating bushid and the “spirit of Japan” (Yamato damashii), which connoted racial superiority and a sense of invincibility.84 Both elements were “indissolubly linked” to Japan’s national polity, or kokutai, centered on the emperor and expressed in the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882.85 The severe punishments and bullying by superiors at all levels led to a steady erosion of army morale, and to an increasingly open resort to violence by officers to maintain discipline and manage troops.86

  During Hirohito’s last three years at the Ogakumonjo, 1918 to early 1921, the maintenance of discipline in the ranks became an urgent task. Concurrently the values of military men changed, as did the times. World War I brought in its wake the Bolshevik Revolution abroad and the “rice riots” at home, creating a situation that forced the army once again to examine its own character. The riots that erupted throughout Japan in the summer of 1918 led to the callout of more than 57,000 troops to suppress them. These protests were followed over the next three years by disturbances connected with labor and tenant disputes and with the campaign for universal male suffrage. The most violent strikes in Japanese history occurred in this period: at the Tokyo Artillery Arsenal (1919 and 1921), the Kamaishi iron mine (1919), the Ashio copper mine (April 1921), Yawata Steel (1920), and the Kawasaki-Mitsubishi Shipyards in Kobe in the summer of 1921. The Kobe strikes, involving more than 35,000 workers, led to the army being called out again—as always, in support of management. Before the turmoil in Kobe ended, more than 300 workers were wounded and some 250 arrested.87 Thus the army returned to its original mission of maintaining domestic law and order, and its standing in ordinary Japanese life plummeted. For the second time since its creation—the first being in the 1870s and 1880s—the army became an object of open public criticism, especially reviled whenever troops were used to put down peasant protests and labor strikes.88

  87 Because the military was a microcosm of society, as well as a major employer of factory workers in its arsenals and shipyards throughout the country, the changes that occurred in Japanese life during the six years between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the end of the war boom in 1920 also inaugurated a new phase in the military’s relationship to the monarchy. The industrial sector was already outgrowing the agricultural sector in productivity. The sphere of imperial rule was contracting. The demeanor of Commander in Chief Emperor Taish, his utter lack of charisma, and the genr’s gross manipulation of him w
ere almost common knowledge in political circles. After 1918 Taish was increasingly unable to attend the army and navy grand maneuvers, appear at the graduation exercises of the military schools, or perform any of his other annual ceremonial duties, including the convoking of the Diet. He faded from public view just when the ideological climate was most unsettled and the military was searching for ways to overcome its social isolation. These developments made it more difficult to persuade conscripts to obey orders just as though they came directly from the emperor.

  Rather than counterpose itself dogmatically to the new trends in thought, the army followed the current mood, revising its education system and initially taking a tolerant attitude toward many aspects of the Taish democracy movement.89 Some army officers began studying the social causes of industrial and rural conflicts. Within a short time they started to question whether a kokutai based on the founding legends was an adequate spiritual source of their institutional identity. Articles soon appeared in the official journal of the army, Kaiksha kiji, which implicitly downgraded the importance of the imperial house as a symbol of the unity between the military and society.90

  V

  By the time Hirohito graduated from the Ogakumonjo in 1921, what had begun as a crisis of oligarchic government in 1912, occasioned by the transition from Meiji to Taish, had developed into something much more serious: a burgeoning crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy. While anticolonial movements in Korea and China buffeted the empire abroad, militant labor and tenant movements suddenly arose and began to spread, testifying to growing public dissatisfaction with the status quo at home. In this new post–World War I setting, with the Japanese people forcefully asserting their own views of the kokutai and questioning the unequal social order dominated by bureaucrats, the military, and capitalists, the late-Meiji image of a harmonious family-state became impossible to sustain.

  Hirohito’s middle-school tutors failed to register any of these changes. The calls for social reform; the decline in the army’s consciousness of being the emperor’s army, which had set in after 1918; the sudden acquisition by many groups of a more realistic concept of self-interest—these developments did not figure in his middle-school curriculum. The dissonance between what he was taught at home and in school about his family, the world, himself, and what was happening outside his classroom doors would increase over time.

  To appreciate why Hirohito’s educators felt as they did about his future role as commander in chief, two other features of the imperial military need to be considered. From the moment of their establishment, the idea existed that the modern armed forces of Japan were to be commanded by the emperor. The principle of supreme imperial command had been maintained in all the wars of the Restoration period; and long before the Meiji constitution had explicitly mandated the emperor to command the armed forces, the idea that he alone possessed the moral authority to do so existed in the ancient notion that the emperor was the medium through which the gods worked their will.91

  Furthermore, the emperor’s right of supreme command of the armed forces was considered to be an independent power, antedating the constitution and superior to his sovereign power in matters of state affairs. This was quite different from the clauses in the American Constitution of 1787, which designated that the president had authority as commander in chief, but only Congress had the “power” to declare war and make “rules” for the army and navy. The emperor possessed autocratic military power, and in exercising it did not constitutionally require any prior ministerial advice or consultation.92

  Though the imperial armed forces at the time of their establishment (in the 1870s and 1880s) had the look of a modern military based on European models, they were far from modern in spirit and values.93 The peasants who made up the bulk of its recruits remained unliberated from feudal social relations in agriculture, disposed to resist the authority of superior officers, and so deeply resentful of conscription that oldest sons were eventually exempted from military service. The solution that the autocratic founders of the armed forces devised was to introduce extremely harsh forms of punishment and discipline to control the situation, and to bring the emperor’s moral authority right into the basic relationship between superiors and subordinates. Inferiors were taught “to regard the orders of their superiors as issuing directly from” the emperor. This meant that orders were infallible and obedience to them had to be absolute and unconditional.94

  In addition to taking military order and discipline to excessive lengths, the Meiji government had invested the imperial forces with a vague dual mission. The army and navy were to defend against further expansion of the European powers; on the other hand the army had to engage in coercive law enforcement as an instrument of the central government. Certainly the initial motive behind its formation was to smash the defenders of feudalism, thereby furthering Japan’s modernization. But whether the army existed primarily for the protection of the people from foreign aggression or for the protection of the government in the pursuit of its purposes was never clarified during Meiji’s lifetime.95

  Unfortunately Hirohito’s instructors did not explain to him how his future exercise of this sovereign independent right of supreme command would someday eclipse his role as a “constitutional monarch.” Nor did his teachers communicate to him how the sphere of the right of supreme command had expanded over time, producing rifts between the high command and the government, as well as dissension between the Army and Navy General Staffs and their respective ministries. In short, his education at this stage only allowed him to see the outer workings of the system, not its actual functioning. Only through experience, in the third decade of his life, would he learn the dynamics and pathology of the political structure—when the raw despotism of the monarchy reared its ugly head.

  2

  CULTIVATING AN EMPEROR

  The care and attention that Hirohito’s pedagogues lavished on the military side of his education were meant to teach him that the imperial house had a much deeper relationship with the military than it did with any other national institution.1 There was, however, another side to Hirohito’s training for the monarchy that had nothing to do with socialization for war but was intended to prepare him for involvement in governance, educational, and international affairs. This was “instruction for the emperor” (teigaku), imparted in a formal classroom setting by professional educators and specialists from Tokyo Imperial University and the Peers’ School. The reasoning behind it was that the Meiji constitution had ascribed to the emperor enormous civil powers, as important as his military ones, and he had to be taught how to exercise them. If the Meiji constitution had created a true “constitutional monarchy” rather than something close to an autocracy, there would have been no need to place so much emphasis on educating the emperor, and he could have remained as badly educated as any of Britain’s kings or queens had been.

  Also mandating both civil and religious “instruction for the emperor” was the official ideology taught in the schools to counter democratic thought. The theocratic ideal of the unity of religious rites and political administration (saisei itchi), which had imparted religious significance to state actions throughout the Restoration era, required that the emperor be trained to perform rites. Equally important in the rationale for educating the emperor was the core notion, dating from the Restoration, that Japan’s emperor should always be “a charismatic political leader who stands at the head of and promotes the process of civilization and enlightenment.”2 If the emperor was to continue leading the drive to modernize and Westernize, he had to be educated in a wide range of practical subjects as well as in modern political, social, and economic thought. Given this outlook, it is striking that until the age of seventeen, Hirohito was reared in total isolation from Japanese daily life and not even allowed free access to the newspapers.3

  From May 4, 1914, when he first started, to late February 1921, when he graduated—two months short of his twentieth birthday, and a few weeks before the school permanently dis
solved—Hirohito was instructed in any and all subjects considered useful at that time for the education of an emperor.4 Math, physics, economics and jurisprudence, French (at that time still the language of diplomacy), Chinese and Japanese, calligraphy, ethics and history—all were part of teigaku: the making of an emperor. So too was natural history, which became one of Hirohito’s favorite subjects.

  Hirohito’s military educators, with their stress on hygiene, physical fitness, and direct imperial command, represented a radical departure from two and a half centuries of Tokugawa practice in educating a Japanese monarch. Before the Meiji restoration, monarchs—with the notable exception of Meiji’s own father—were educated in subjects that would not involve them in either the political or military affairs of the Tokugawa regime. They studied abstract Confucian philosophical texts, practiced reciting Shinto prayers, and steered clear of politics. Ritual and prayer, poetry and the arts preoccupied them.