Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  Keenly aware of the complex system of state institutions that Meiji had bequeathed the nation, Hirohito’s educators, military and civilian alike, dispensed with this Tokugawa tradition, focusing instead on the monarch’s need for secular education and knowledge of statecraft to make the system work. Thus they acted on the premise that even though the monarch had inherited the throne, he still had to be initiated into its rites and procedures and made technically fit to rule. For the imperial throne, situated at the very apogee of power in all its forms, had to function as an integrating and legitimating center, the keystone in the arch that held in place all the other institutions of the state: the cabinet, the separate bureaucratic ministries, the Diet, the privy council, the military, and the parties.

  The men who were to “make” Hirohito into a suitable monarch for operating in this system of rule were mostly middle-of-the-road academics associated with Tokyo Imperial University and the Peers’ School. They were a hybrid of the old unchanging Japan and the new, changing everywhere as it followed blindly the path of modernization. As pedagogues who worshiped the Meiji emperor, they constructed an orthodoxy of what the ideal monarch ought to be and do. They always tried to avoid forcing Hirohito to choose between the conflicting moral visions and norms contained in the Confucian model of the virtuous, peace-loving ruler and the Japanese bushid model of the ideal warrior. Both norms would be attractive to Hirohito, and he would seek to act in ways that conformed to both.

  In short Hirohito was the product of a hybrid education, and no serious portrait of him can neglect the tension that this produced. The late-Meiji invention of tradition, grounded in Restoration ideology, gave him his sense of identity and his basic orientation. Clashing with that tradition was modern scientific learning. The tension between these two worldviews lay at the heart of everything Hirohito did.

  I

  Hirohito became fascinated with nature in his tenderest years. While attending the Peers’ School, under the guidance of a chamberlain who delighted in collecting seashells and insects, Hirohito opened his eyes to the natural world. In 1913, at age twelve, he had made his own insect specimen book, illustrating with butterflies and cicadas the symbiotic relationship between plants and insects.5 It was an early step in the development of his capacity to assess objects critically and rationally.

  From 1914 to 1919, when Hirohito was in middle school, Professor Hattori Hirotar became his teacher of natural history and physics. Hattori remained his servant in scientific pursuits for more than thirty years, cultivating Hirohito’s childhood fondness for insects and helping him to develop a keen, lifelong interest in marine biology and taxonomy.6 Under Hattori’s guidance Hirohito read Darwin’s theory of evolution as interpreted by the popular writer Oka Asajir, whose book Shinkaron kwa (Lectures on evolution) was published in 1904. He may also have read a Japanese translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Around 1927 he was given a small bust of Darwin, which thereafter adorned his study alongside busts of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.

  In September 1925, during the fourth year of his regency, Hirohito had a small, well-equipped biological laboratory established within the Akasaka Palace. Three years later, during the second year of his reign, he built, within the Fukiage Gardens, the Imperial Biological Research Institute, consisting of a greenhouse and two large laboratories, each with specimen rooms and libraries. Hattori became associated with this laboratory and for the next four years lectured before the emperor once a week on basic science. Until 1944 Hattori and other aides also accompanied Hirohito to his personal marine research facilities in Hayama three or four times a year. There, using two rowboats and a larger, remodeled fishing vessel, they would dredge for sea specimens. Years later Hattori edited Sagamiwan sango erarui zufu (Pictorial specimens of marine life in Sagami Bay), while Sanada Hiroo and Kat Shir did the colored drawings, Baba Kikutar wrote the accompanying explanations. Because the re-formed Imperial Household Agency held the copyright,7 the book was ascribed to Hirohito. Nowhere in the book, however, did the emperor’s name appear, which raised the question, How much of its research had actually been done by him?8

  Hirohito himself was always very modest about his interest in biology. When Sagamiwan sango appeared, Hattori offered an assessment of his former pupil’s scientific bent in a discussion that appeared in the Sand Mainichi on October 2, 1949. Asked whether the emperor’s studies should be viewed as genuine scientific research rather than the work of an amateur, Hattori replied:

  Recently Professor Sat Tadao [of Nagoya University] wrote in the Nagoya newspaper that it belonged to the category of an amateur’s research. Indeed, depending on how one looks at the matter, I think that is true. He never published anything under his own name and ended up furnishing raw data to various specialists. Therefore, from one point of view he is, in the final analysis, probably a mere collector. But I don’t think so. He did not just hand them material he had collected. Rather, he first thoroughly investigated that material himself, and on that point he is no amateur.9

  Hattori’s assessment makes sense. Specimen collection and the study of taxonomy without question fitted Hirohito’s methodical nature. And certainly during his most active years, when surrounded by great disorder, by problems to which all solutions were hard and uncertain, science was a steadying, relaxing constant in his life. Taught by Hattori, the emperor became a naturalist and a patron of marine biology, pursuing as a hobby the collection of sea plants and animals, such as slugs, starfish, hydrozoa, and jellyfish.

  As a would-be scientist and a serious student of the biological evolution of sea creatures over many thousands of years, Hirohito had to be aware of the vastly different time scale of the Japanese imperial house, which by arbitrary official determination went back only twenty-six centuries. It is doubtful, though, that awareness of this discrepancy led him to reject completely his early ingrained belief in the divinity of his own ancestral line. Hirohito always placed a premium on the values that were inculcated in his youth. And as he grew older, he learned to appreciate only too well the value of ideological illusions in strengthening obedience to official codes of behavior. For him the relationship between modern science and the account of the kokutai, or national polity, taught by his other teachers were reconcilable, not inherently conflictual.

  The more general point, however, is that science cultivated the rational, scientific pole in Hirohito’s outlook: his sense of himself as a disengaged thinker, open to arguments and counsel based on reason and evidence. But there was another side to Hirohito, associated with his sense of morals and vocation. This side worked to adjust his scientific bent and practice to the imperatives and constraints of divine emperorship. Here the ideas he received from Sugiura Shigetake, Shiratori Kurakichi, and Shimizu Tru were far more influential, for they formed the context in which his rational, objective thinking was embedded.

  II

  Sugiura Shigetake was an ultranationalist Confucian educator who had received a Western education in England and returned home to become a founding member of the Society for Political Education, and contributor to its famous magazine Nihonjin (The Japanese), “whose express purpose was the ‘preservation of the national essence.’”10 Sugiura took part, with his friend Tyama Mitsuru, in the conservative intellectual reaction against the Civilization and Enlightenment movement that had dominated Japan in the first decade and a half after the Meiji restoration. Later he served as an official of the Ministry of Education, concerned with moral instruction. In 1892 Sugiura became the founder and principal (until his death in 1924) of the Japan Middle School. By the time Ogasawara recommended him as Hirohito’s (and later Nagako’s) ethics teacher, many of his former students already occupied distinguished positions in Japanese political and economic life.

  Sugiura was fifty-nine years old, an ideologue and monarchist of the highest repute, when he lectured Hirohito on the principles that should guide his behavior. To Sugiura these were embodied in the three imperial regalia of sword, jewel
, and bronze mirror, which the sun goddess, Amaterasu mikami, allegedly bestowed on her grandson, Ninigi-no-mikoto, to use in pacifying the Japanese people. The regalia had mainly ethical significance, in that they denoted the three virtues every monarch should possess: courage, intelligence, and benevolence.

  Hirohito did not openly dispute this teaching, but he came to view the regalia in his own way, mainly as symbols of his political and moral authority. As such, they required constant guarding and occasional display to insure the security of the throne. Moreover, Hirohito could not seek the ultimate source of his sovereignty in legitimacy of blood. As a descendant of the fourteenth-century northern court, his genealogical line had not been regarded—by either the nineteenth-century scholars of the “National Learning school” or the Meiji government—as the most legitimate line of succession.11

  The other fundamental rules Hirohito was taught to respect were contained in the Charter Oath of Five Articles (1868) and the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890).12 These documents had enhanced the Meiji emperor’s power and authority, and Sugiura believed that the ideals in them (which all subjects were supposed to live up to) should also become Hirohito’s standard for the future.

  Sugiura’s approach to Meiji’s Charter Oath emphasized the wisdom in the document but played down its political contingency. Here too Hirohito went beyond Sugiura and, from his own reading in nineteenth-century Japanese history, learned to situate the document within its times. The staging (on April 6, 1868) of the “oath” rituals, in which Meiji swore to the sun goddess, mythical progenitor of the imperial family, and the Charter Oath of Five Articles, which guided reforms early in his reign, were expedient concessions to potentially obstructionist feudal lords and Kyoto court nobles. The latter might have challenged the power of the samurai coup (that is, Restoration) leaders. The performance of the oath rituals marked a first step in establishing the independent authority of the “imperial will.” Hirohito would later insist that the Charter Oath was an ahistorical, timeless document—a “Magna Carta” of Japanese liberalism—but he spent his first two decades as emperor seeking to realize the “imperial will.”

  The Imperial Rescript on Education (including the special readings Sugiura gave to key words) also deeply impressed Hirohito. Sugiura’s very first lecture on the education rescript focused on the term kso ks, which appears in that document, in order to determine exactly how it should be interpreted.13 “Kso ks,” he declared, “refers to the ancestors of His Majesty the Emperor and the Japanese nation. When our ancestors founded this nation it became coeval with heaven and earth and everlasting.”14 Sugiura went on to observe how successive emperors through the ages had always sought to carry on the “unfinished work of their imperial ancestors.”15 Because Sugiura believed in the moral superiority of the Japanese throne, his subsequent lectures on the education rescript could not avoid elevating the Japanese monarchy at the expense of other countries.

  Thus Sugiura taught that in foreign countries the relationship between ruler and ruled was determined by power and limited to submission, whereas in Japan, “the emperor rules the people without power. Benevolence has been planted so deeply in the minds of the people that the sovereign/subject relationship has become indestructible. Therefore the people joyfully submit themselves to the emperor.”16 It is doubtful whether Hirohito ever accepted Sugiura’s notion of rule “without power.” But the idea of emperor-as-embodiment-of-benevolence was infinitely attractive to Hirohito, and the more he chose to act in his military capacity, the more attractive this alternative became for him. Sugiura was not only implanting a sense of morality in the future monarch, he was also fostering dissonance and frustration.

  Summarizing Sugiura’s twelve introductory lectures for Hirohito and his fellow students in their first year, and highlights of his later lectures, Nezu Masashi, the early biographer of Hirohito, noted:

  These were titled the Imperial Regalia, the Rising Sun Flag, the Country, the Military, Shrines, Rice, Swords, Clocks, Water, Mount Fuji, Sum, and Mirrors. Only in the second year of his ethics course did Sugiura have them read about abstract topics such as benevolence, fairness, rectification of wrongdoing, fidelity, justice, and uprightness, as well as concrete topics such as the imperial enthronement, Uesugi Kenshin [a late-sixteenth-century samurai warrior], the forty-seven masterless samurai of Ak [the classic tale of feudal vendetta], and Tokugawa Mitsukuni [an exemplar of imperial loyalty and Shinto nationalism]. In the third year he lectured on George Washington, Columbus, Malthus’s theory of population, Peter the Great, and Rousseau, and in the fourth year he selected Kaiser Wilhelm II and Muhammad. There were only thirty foreign examples. The vast majority of his topics were from Confucian learning and the history of the Japanese emperors. Sugiura lectured four times on the Boshin Edict [of 1908], five times on the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors [of 1882], and eleven times on the Imperial Rescript on Education [of 1890]. But he gave just one lecture on the Meiji constitution—an indication of the relatively low value he placed on this.17

  In his lectures Sugiura tended to undercut the scientific knowledge that Hirohito was discovering by celebrating Japanese nationalism and expansionism. He talked about the chrysanthemum flower—the crest of the imperial house—and concluded that “We call the European powers advanced civilized countries…. [However] just as we can say that the chrysanthemum is the most outstanding flower, so Japan is unsurpassed in both its national strength and its civilization.” He also sought to convey a sense of rivalry between whole races, noting that “The European nations and the United States are of the same racial stock, the ‘Aryan race’…. Our Japanese empire must be conscious of confronting the various Aryan races by our own power in the future.”18 Hirohito never warmed to Sugiura as an individual the way he did to Hattori. But he also never broke away from Sugiura’s neo-Darwinian view of the international order. Nor did Hirohito ever abandon the notion, as implanted by Sugiura, that superior moral and spiritual qualities ultimately determined the outcome of conflict.

  Of the foreign leaders whose lives, Sugiura felt, exhibited positive lessons for Hirohito, two were men with whom the Meiji emperor was often compared. During the first five years after Meiji’s death, journalists and bureaucrats frequently ranked Meiji’s achievements with those of the seventeenth-century Russian czar Peter the Great and Germany’s Wilhelm II.19 In his lecture on Peter, given in 1917, Sugiura explained that the twenty-five-year-old czar Peter went abroad to study foreign technology and returned to lay the foundations of the modern Russian empire. But his successors failed to build on the foundations Peter had laid, and so contributed to the upheaval in Russia.20 When lecturing on Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Sugiura treated the deeply flawed and racist kaiser as a great man who had failed for lack of competent advisers, and enthused over the good fortune of the Japanese emperor to be surrounded by many excellent advisers.21

  The eighteenth-century French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, he described as a rootless, self-indulgent character who could never keep a job and was worthy of no admiration at all. Rousseau’s theories “have led to cursing against the state and government.” Japan, he concluded, could avoid “the residual poison of European liberal thought” provided its leaders “show benevolence to the people, the people show loyalty to those above them, and everyone knows his place in the scheme of things.”22

  Hirohito never abandoned the rhetoric of benevolence, loyalty to superiors, and proper place. His attitude toward new foreign ideas, however, was more pragmatic than Sugiura’s. For him any Western system of thought was acceptable if it could be used to further the achievement of national independence and power. The only absolute value, whether in a time of reaction or in one of liberal awakening, was the state, which he learned in his early twenties to equate with the throne.

  “Love of Learning,” “Posthumous Names,” “Remonstrance,” “Measure,” “Piety,” and “Sagacity” were other topics in Sugiura’s syllabus. In these ethi
cs lessons he mainly extolled past emperors as described in the eighth-century Japanese dynastic histories the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, written in Chinese. In a Sugiura lesson titled “Cherry Blossoms,” Hirohito was told that the Japanese people were like the falling cherry blossoms: “When our imperial fatherland was in peril, our people rushed forward without regard for their lives.”23 And in “The Scientist” Hirohito was advised:

  In times of war the scientist fully prepares large artillery, airplanes, and warships, together with other modern implements. If they are used with a spirit of loyalty, courage, and justice, then, for the first time, we can say that war preparations are fully completed. With such preparations we can proudly declare that we have no enemy in the world. This is the meaning of Article 5 of the Charter Oath.24

  In 1919, when the problem of racial conflict came to a head at the Paris Peace Conference and the Japanese Foreign Ministry was complaining of the racial discrimination suffered by Japanese subjects in various countries, Sugiura dwelled on the hostility that existed between undifferentiated “Caucasians (so-called whites)” and “Mongolians (so-called yellows)” as a whole, without regard to their national identities. For him these were the only two (of “seven common”) racial groups “that have formed powerful states and possess advanced civilizations.”25 The history of the European advance in Asia from the time of Vasco da Gama in the late fifteenth century down to World War I, was shown as:

  an attempt by the white race to overpower the yellow race. Siam is nominally independent, but it obviously has no real power. Although China is a big country, due to many years of internal strife the Chinese lack the power to unite as a state, and are thus utterly incapable of competing with the forces of the white race. In the Far East the Japanese Empire alone has been able to deter the Western invasion in the East.