In England high military officials and diplomats formed a welcoming committee, headed by the Prince of Wales. Members of this select committee and other royalty always accompanied Hirohito on official visits and ceremonies. The high points of his visit to Britain included a three-night stay in Buckingham Palace, speeches at London’s Guildhall and Mansion House, visits to numerous British military facilities (where he sometimes wore the uniform of a British army general), visits to both houses of Parliament, the British Museum, the prime minister’s mansion at Chequers, the towns of Windsor and Oxford, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, a three-day stay at the castle of the duke of Atholl in Scotland, and a tour of Manchester and the Midlands industrial region.
The French leg of his tour (which began on May 31 and was divided into two periods of ten and sixteen days each) gave him considerably more freedom than he had been able to enjoy in monarchist Britain. On his first day in Paris, he visited stores and the Eiffel Tower, where he ordered Captain Yamamoto to purchase miniature Eiffel Towers as gifts for his fiancée, Princess Nagako, and for his brothers.49 Later he toured the Louvre and visited the parliament, the Sorbonne, and the Invalides. He also spent much time while in republican France touring battlefields, military schools, and observing French army maneuvers in the company of Generals Foch and Joffre, and Marshal Pétain. He visited more war monuments and battlefields while in Belgium (June 10–15), as the guest of King Albert I. In the Netherlands (June 15–20), he toured Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam and was feted at numerous official ceremonies and banquets, including one hosted by Queen Wilhelmina, who later wrote his father a warm letter about the prince’s visit. En route to Paris from The Hague, on June 20, his train stopped in eastern Belgium so that he could visit the city of Liège and tour yet another World War I battlefield. The second phase of his French visit took him to cities in eastern and southeastern France, where on July 8 he reboarded the Katori at Toulon and headed for Italy.
Hirohito arrived in Italy—a country with a large nobility but an insecure monarchy—on July 10, 1921, some fifteen months before Mussolini and the Fascists came to power. He spent eight days visiting Naples, Rome, and Pompeii, often in the company of his guide, King Victor Emmanuel III, soon to be a keen admirer of Mussolini. On July 15 and 16, while staying in Victor Emmanuel’s palace, Hirohito removed his military medals and decorations and twice visited the Vatican, where he exchanged greetings with Benedict XV, the pope who had attempted unsuccessfully to mediate a settlement of World War I and later defended the kaiser from the threat of a war crimes trial. For the remainder of his Italian stay Hirohito attended the usual ceremonial functions, visited patriotic war monuments, and observed a sports tournament held under the auspices of the Italian military, then already under the influence of Mussolini’s Fascist movement.
On the return voyage to Japan, which began on July 18, Hirohito did little sightseeing as the Katori retraced its course through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean to Singapore. Only when his ship anchored to take on coal at Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina did he go ashore to walk in the tropical forests and later to ride in a motorcar along the newly constructed Highway Number 1, which ran parallel to the railroad linking Hanoi and Saigon. On August 25 the Katori finally departed Cam Ranh Bay for Tateyama, Chiba prefecture, arriving there on September 2. The next day it steamed into Yokohama Harbor, where Prime Minister Hara rode out in a boat to greet the prince personally aboard the Katori, while his cabinet and members of the imperial family waited at dockside.50 Although it remained for Hirohito to make reports to his parents and to the spirits of his imperial ancestors, he had successfully completed the government’s first public relations campaign to counter popular perception of the imperial house’s decline.
Japanese press coverage of the Western tour was extensive and noteworthy. On Hirohito’s departure from Japan, the Tokyo Asahi shinbun proclaimed grandly: “The crown prince’s flag of the country of the rising sun bears down on the waves heading toward the West. Mark this glorious March 3 in history.”51 Thereafter the Asahi and other large dailies sensationalized “our crown prince’s” triumphant tour of Europe, while the Home Ministry relaxed its restrictions on printing photographs of the imperial family. On June 4 the newspapers ran pictures of a smiling crown prince in military uniform. On June 24 the papers showed Hirohito in a frock coat with a high collar, holding a walking stick. Previously the press had been permitted to photograph him only in a motorcade on an official visit. While in Europe, however, he was shown walking on a street in civilian attire. When Hirohito visited the duke of Atholl in Scotland, where he was deeply impressed by the warm intimacy between the lord’s family and his tenants, the Japanese press was allowed to report his official statement: “The duke’s family live frugally and love their people deeply. If we have this type of politics, there will be no need to worry about the rise of extremist thought.”52 The press also reported his comment, on July 9, on touring the battlefield of Verdun, that those who still glorified war should “see this ‘scene.’”53
Long after Hirohito’s return, the press continued to show him in military uniform more often than in civilian dress, and to print assessments by Japanese journalists who had accompanied him to Europe.54 In 1922 Nagura Bunichi, a writer for the Asahi shinbun, noted how Hirohito seldom spoke during the tour, never smoked, and drank only carbonated water (unlike his grandfather, who tippled heavily and often). Rather than dwell on the prince’s reticence and sobriety, however, Nagura went on to express his pique at the failure of the English to overcome their outmoded stereotypes of Japanese:
The interesting thing is that a paper like The Times showed understanding and printed an article welcoming the crown prince. Of course, the Japanese Embassy put up the money to propagandize [the visit], and so on the last day The Times printed a special Japan issue. Generally speaking the articles contained few errors, but even today they still think that all Japanese wear the topknot and dress in kimonos…. Worst of all was an article in The Herald, organ of the Labour Party, reprinted from the Church Times. I assumed that because it was the Labour Party they must have disliked Japanese militarism. The article said that the emperor of Japan is ill and the crown prince, being too busy with political affairs, was utterly unable to travel abroad. Therefore the visiting crown prince is a proxy for the real one, and the authorities, in order to prevent people from finding out, have confiscated all pictures of the crown prince that were displayed in stores in the city. When they go so far as to say things like that, we can no longer laugh…. On May 12 [he] visited the House of Commons…. but had to sit in the commoners’ gallery. At that moment Lady Astor was interpolating concerning the problem of housing improvement…. At the House of Lords he saw how the Lords passed a bill from the Commons. Here he sat next to the head of the Lords. No welcome was read out for him, and no one stood to greet him. I wonder what the Japanese Diet will do when the English crown prince visits Japan.55
Mitearai Tatsuo, a reporter for the Hchi shinbun, produced an account of the tour that was more reflective of the Taish democracy spirit. He began by contrasting his own ideal image of an intimate relationship between the emperor and the people with the actual relationship of constraint and rigidity that had developed since the death of the Meiji emperor. “The imperial family must feel the same way,” he opined. “Judging from the style of living of Prince Higashikuni, studying in Paris, and Prince Kita Shirakawa, studying in Greece, the Imperial Household Ministry’s way of thinking is just too rigid.”56
For Mitearai the tour marked the crossing of the threshold of invisibility for the imperial house.
[I]ts biggest achievement was to have removed the veil between him and the people and to have swept aside the rigid thinking of the Imperial Household Ministry authorities. Everywhere our crown prince went, he had an opportunity to receive the stimulation for change, especially from the welcomes given him by high and low in England, and, I suppose above all, from witnessing the sophis
ticated social interaction of the crown prince of England [the future duke of Windsor] and the duke of York [the future King George VI].57
Hirohito’s Western tour helped popularize the new image of a young, enthusiastic crown prince in touch with the times, keenly interested in British-style colonial management, and open to change. To those who looked at what was going on in the country as a call to reform, the message was clear: A vigorous successor to the throne was meeting Europe’s leaders and immersing himself in world affairs. Someday he would use his will to move the country forward. In this way too the tour strengthened preconceptions of the monarchy’s indispensability for political renewal.
Prime Minister Hara had expressed joy at the good press Hirohito had received in Europe, noting in his diary, on July 6, 1921: “This trip seems a really great success. There can be nothing more beneficial for the state and the imperial house.”58 When Hirohito returned home, Hara was anxious to learn from the entourage everything he could about the prince’s progress.59 Hirohito’s teacher of French, navy captain Yamamoto Shinjir, immediately reported to Hara all the grooming the prince had received while en route to Europe:
You know the prince is extremely unaccustomed to foreign countries and to social intercourse with other people. Therefore we instructed him in his table manners and in his every movement and action. Concerning general principles, Prince Kan’in spoke with him on three occasions while the chief attendant informed him on other matters. The young attendants like Saionji [Hachir] and Sawada [Renz] spoke with him with particular frankness.60
When Hara later learned that the crown prince had invited two members of the imperial family to the palace and had gone out of his way to tell them to wear ordinary business suits instead of formal court dress, he expressed his pleasure:
There are envious people who say that in England the relationship between the royal family and the people is such and such. I think this relationship is not a question of reason but arises totally from sentiment. Although the relationship between our imperial house and the nation cannot be compared with that in England, it is a mistake to hope for intimacy between the two only on the basis of reason. Surely we must rely on feeling. From this point of view one must applaud the success of the recent Western tour in producing harmony between high and low.61
But the climate of opinion at home had not been unanimously supportive of the tour, and when press photographs and a newsreel showed the crown prince acknowledging the saluting of sightseeing crowds, it rekindled the opposition of many extreme nationalists.62 Moreover, Hara’s opinion notwithstanding, the ruling elites themselves were by no means satisfied with Hirohito’s performance in Europe, or with the new attitudes that that experience had evoked in him. Chinda had been unenthusiastic about sending the crown prince abroad but, at Hara’s urging, had accompanied him to England where he looked after him. On September 6, 1921, four days after Hirohito’s return to Japan, Chinda described to Makino the crown prince’s behavior during his European tour: “It seems as though the shortcomings in [the prince’s] qualities of character are insufficient calmness and a lack of intellectual curiosity.”63
“Insufficient calmness” and “nervousness” are defects underscored by many who commented on the young prince in this period, including his own mother, Empress Sadako. In an audience granted to Makino on September 22, 1922, she made the revealing comment that her son was unable to attend the “annual food offering ceremony” (kannamesai) because “he cannot sit on his knees.” Worse still, he had stopped taking his religious rituals seriously and had recently become “extremely passionate about physical exercise. She wants him to calm down and use his mind rather than go to excess [in exercise]. His devotion to various physical exercises might harm rather than help the nervousness, which is his weak point.”64
But why Chinda could say that he lacked “intellectual curiosity” is far from clear. On the basis of his school performance, the many comments about his powers of recollection by those who knew him, and what has been written about his devotion to biological studies, just the opposite would seem to have been true. Chinda’s comment, with its intimation that the prince was not overly bright, merely reflected the complications inherent in a tutorial relationship between a conscientious sixty-five-year-old diplomat and a twenty-year-old prince happily enjoying his newfound freedom.65 Or it may just as easily have reflected an honest opinion of a senior official.
This suggests, however, that those closest to young Hirohito were at least uneasy about his ability to perform the enormous tasks about to be placed on his shoulders. They were agreed that he exhibited an average intelligence and an exceptionally good memory, though they never praised him for his boundless imagination or original thought. Mainly they were concerned about his health, and because he exhibited a level of personal insecurity (“nervousness”) and social awkwardness that they found worrisome in a monarch but believed could be corrected with time and the assistance of his retinue.66
V
In England the primary mission of the crown prince had been to learn from King George V, who had skillfully survived the storm of political reform into which Britain and the rest of the world had been thrown as a result of World War I and the collapse of monarchies all across Europe.67 George had “from the outset of his reign [in 1910]…sought to identify the monarchy with the needs and the pleasures of ordinary people, paying repeated visits to industrial centres, attending football matches, driving through the poorer districts of London, and visiting miners and workers in their homes.”68 Thereafter he helped check a trend toward pacifism at home and strove to raise morale in the British armed forces. According to George’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, he paid visits to the Grand Fleet and various naval bases, inspected the armies in France, visited three hundred hospitals, conferred tens of thousands of decorations, and repeatedly toured the industrial areas. George was particularly keen to visit damaged areas “and talk to the injured in the wards. No previous monarch had entered into such close personal relations with so many of his subjects.”69
Apart from contributing in important ways to Britain’s war effort, George V had also furthered Britain’s national interest and strengthened the cause of the British monarchy through his dealings with other royal families.70 He had refused to grant asylum in Britain to his doomed cousin, Czar Nicholas II, during the Bolshevik Revolution; but in 1919, with the war over, he assiduously undermined Lloyd George’s effort to place his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II on trial in London as a war criminal.71 When given an opportunity to shore up the authority of the Japanese imperial house, George decided to use Hirohito’s visit to strengthen Britain’s cooperation with Japan.72
George V had nearly reached the age of fifty-six when, on May 9, he came in person to Victoria Station to greet an excited twenty-year-old crown prince. He went out of his way to treat him as the monarch of a great power, and on May 29, near the end of Hirohito’s stay in England, George brought Queen Mary and the highest officials of the land with him to Victoria Station to bid farewell to the prince. The king’s welcoming strategy, riding with Hirohito to Buckingham Palace in an open carriage while crowds cheered along the route, later going out of his way to be seen with him, certainly impressed the prince and left him with friendly feelings toward the British. Indeed, all of Hirohito’s experiences in England, including the academic degrees and royal accolades bestowed on him, strengthened his sense of national pride.
The whole spectacle of Hirohito’s visit to England also impressed the first secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London, Yoshida Shigeru, as can be seen in this letter to his father-in-law, Makino:
The current visit of the crown prince was greatly welcomed in this country. Needless to say, one could not have wished for a more cordial reception by the [British] imperial house. I am utterly overjoyed to see how popular he is among high and low alike. I think our crown prince received the natural adoration of everybody because he expresses himself simply, straightforwardly, and honestly
. Although such qualities are inborn, he is indeed very wise. 73
Yoshida may have had few opportunities to meet and observe the crown prince before he wrote to Makino. Yet one cannot doubt for a moment his profoundly positive emotions on looking at Hirohito and seeing an image of “inborn” qualities that, by definition, were associated with the national polity, centered on the Imperial House. Even if what Yoshida was seeing was his own idealized image of the throne in the persona of the crown prince, the image that reached his eye was the same one seen by many Japanese elites. Precisely this eagerness and idealism of people like Yoshida to believe that the crown prince symbolized a future Japan that was better than the present one must be counted among the reasons for the success of the Western tour.
Later in life Hirohito claimed that his European tour led him to realize that he had been living like “a bird in a cage” and henceforth needed to open himself to the real world.74 He also implied that King George V had taught him how the British monarch counseled, encouraged, and, on occasion, warned his ministers regarding the conduct of political and military affairs, and that he had come to admire British-style constitutional monarchy. But the real image George conveyed was that of an activist monarch who judged the qualifications of candidates for prime minister and exercised his considerable political power behind the scenes (always pretending, of course, to be neutral and above the fray). If George’s example impressed the young crown prince, it encouraged him to retrieve the imperial prerogatives his father had been unable to exercise. Since George felt that the cabinet should reflect the monarch’s political judgments on cabinet appointments, the expulsion of government ministers from office, or the altering of policies he disliked, that lesson too would have encouraged Hirohito (and his entourage) to regain the waning powers of the throne.
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 13
