Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

  On March 7, 1925, the lower house of the Diet passed the Peace Preservation Law, aimed at making anarchist, communist, or republican ideology unthinkable. It was the first law to include the word kokutai since the era of the Council of State, which had ended in 1885.81 The Diet debate brought out the problem of whether to confine the kokutai solely to the throne, the locus of sovereignty, or to tie it tightly to human relationships and the family system so that it might serve as a guide to wider action. The Kat cabinet and the leading political parties took the position that the kokutai should be confined only to the emperor’s superintendence of the rights of sovereignty and not expanded to include the social order and the moral sphere.82 Thus organizations that stood for reform of the state could be tolerated so long as they professed loyalty to the imperial house. Soon after the new security law went into effect, however, this situation began to change. By late 1926 the kokutai had become a destructive weapon in the conflicts of the political parties, just as it had shown signs of becoming during the battle over Hirohito’s marriage.

  The palace entourage quickly became alarmed at the growing friction among the conservative parties, and the tension between interest groups: elected ones in the Diet, and nonelected ones in the emperor’s privy council and House of Peers. The breakdown of cooperation among the parties in the Diet began in the summer of 1925 and deepened during the last year of Hirohito’s regency and the first months of his reign as emperor. Wakatsuki Reijir (prime minister from January 30, 1926, to April 20, 1927) had to endure intense conflicts in the Diet that contributed to making the entire political situation more unstable and tense than ever. While Hirohito kept fully abreast of these conflicts, he seems not to have grasped the danger. Professor Mikami’s lectures on Meiji’s “benevolence” had made him totally committed to demonstrating his own benevolence: aroused by the behavior of the parties in the Diet, and influenced by Makino, he became so benevolently active behind the scenes that the situation quickly worsened.

  First, during the Fifty-first Diet, the Seiykai raised an issue of corruption in the ruling party by charging two high Kenseikai officials with involvement in a brothel scandal, and calling on Wakatsuki to resign. Next, following the conclusion of the Fifty-first Diet, on July 29, 1926, the Seiykai brought the kokutai issue forward by circulating to Diet members a photograph showing a young Japanese woman, Kaneko Fumiko, sitting in a police interrogation room on the lap of her Korean husband, the political dissident Pak Yol. The couple had been arrested in September 1923, detained for nearly three years, and finally convicted for plotting the assassination of the crown prince. On April 5, 1926, eleven days after they were sentenced to be executed, the Wakatsuki cabinet commuted their punishments to life imprisonment in the name of the emperor. Now an anonymously printed pamphlet accompanying the photograph accused Wakatsuki’s Kenseikai cabinet and Justice Minister Egi Tasuku of lacking a sense of the kokutai for having commuted the couple’s death sentence.

  No mention, of course, was made of the crown prince, though it was his action behind the scenes that had helped to bring about the commutation. Hirohito had simply informed Chinda that he felt the couple had not done anything to justify such harsh punishment.83 The rowdy criticism coming from the Diet chamber and the position of the Home Ministry on this affair were so at odds with his commitment to the ideal of imperial benevolence and compassion as to rouse him to action. The unintended consequence of Hirohito’s personal need to demonstrate proper imperial behavior by saving Pak Yol and Kaneko Fumiko, however, was to intensify Diet debate on the issue of the kokutai.

  The politicians Ogawa Heikichi, Mori Tsutomu, and other leaders of the Seiykai and Seiy Hont parties supported the antikokutai charges against Wakatsuki in the Diet.84 At a general meeting of Diet members in September 1926, Seiykai president Tanaka declared that “This [Pak Yol photograph] problem…goes beyond the rights and wrongs of policy. It is against the essence of the kokutai concept.”85 In October at a regional meeting of Seiykai members, a party leader declared, “We have to say that it sets a bad precedent, destructive of the kokutai, for them [the Wakatsuki cabinet] not to discuss the importance of politics. Where the imperial house and the fundamental concept of the kokutai are concerned, we cannot go along with a government that deliberately slights this problem.”86

  Thus once the parties had defeated their oligarchic opponents, they could not refrain from using the throne as a political weapon. In Diet discussions on the Peace Preservation Law and on the Pak Yol affair, emotional issues connected with the legitimization of state power and of Japanese national identity figured prominently. In this situation Hirohito and his entourage found it impossible to avoid being drawn into the political conflict.

  VI

  Searching for some fundamental, enduring concept of identity and purpose to hold to in a Japan that was undergoing very rapid industrial and social change, Japanese in all walks of life debated the meaning of kokutai during the regency years. If the presence of the young regent, the rise of Taish democracy, and the change in the basis and direction of Japanese foreign policy gave meaning to this period, so did the experience of national questioning and redefinition expressed in kokutai debates. Neither Hirohito nor Makino or anyone else in the entourage knew what to make of the slow, continuous erosion of belief in established ideology. To deal with this challenge, which was most visible on the Left, the court attempted to strengthen both the orthodox version of kokutai ideology and imperial authority, in preparation for Hirohito’s accession to the throne.

  In the regency years kokutai discussions flourished among elite and nonelite groups alike, signaling a remarkable loss of confidence in the monarchy, a weakening of the ideological ties binding some segments of the officer corps to the imperial house, and a gradual unwinding of belief in orthodox kokutai thought itself. By the end of the regency, the very word kokutai had become detached from its dreamlike referents in mythology and was floating freely, ready to be adapted to the needs of any person or group seeking to redress a grievance, punish an opponent, aggrandize power, or adjust the political horizons of the Japanese people.

  This is to say that in Japan the 1920s was a time of intense ideological and cultural conflict: While the government, the regent, and his court entourage all clung uncritically to an official version of kokutai, reform-minded people in different fields of endeavor attempted to make Japan’s national ideology compatible with modern scientific thought, as well as with the trend toward impersonal bureaucratic rule. The political world debated the kokutai, and so too did officers in the armed forces, priests in shrines and temples, and professors in the universities. Invariably these discussions had to address the legitimacy of the emperor’s rule and the sort of moral value that he and the imperial system had, or ought to have, in Japanese society.87

  A small minority of liberals sought to reconcile the Imperial House with the spirit and logic of Taish democracy. In mainstream kokutai debates of the period, they envisioned a political system along the lines of a Western-style parliamentary democracy, and wanted to preserve the imperial house by simply removing it completely from politics. Most reform-minded writers, however, aimed only at an updating of the “original story” by which the nation rationalized its political life. Standing against them were traditional conservatives, who sought the foundation of the kokutai solely in the imperial bloodline of succession and emphasized the direct personal rule of male emperors and their absolute political authority. Traditionalists were aggrieved by Japan’s subordination to the West and wanted nothing to do with democracy. They held that the kokutai was immutable, and that those who tried to turn the emperor into a mere symbol were guilty of lèse majesté.

  For the ruling elites discussion of the kokutai was invariably linked to the problem of controlling dangerous thought. A truly stable moral basis for Japanese politics required universal acceptance of the kokutai. But the more the kokutai was debated, questioned, and interpreted, the more difficult it became to maintain that commo
n moral foundation. Seeking to resist the democratic current and build up the waning imperial authority, on November 10, 1923, the Kiyoura cabinet adopted a “cultural policy” based on the regent’s Imperial Rescript on the Promotion of the National Spirit. Prime Minister Kiyoura thereupon formed, in February 1924, a Central Association of Cultural Bodies in response to Hirohito’s call for the improvement of thought and “the awakening of the national spirit.” Invited to the association’s convocation meeting to discuss a national campaign against “dangerous thoughts” associated with the labor movement and the Left were representatives from Shinto, Christianity, and Buddhism, including the leaders of Nichiren.

  The sect, founded in the thirteenth century, was then enjoying its golden age of influence and growth, and two of its leading proseltyzers—Honda Nissh and Tanaka Chigaku—immediately seized on this “national spirit” campaign to draw up an appeal asking the court to issue a rescript conferring on Nichiren, the founder of their religion, the posthumous title of “Great Teacher Who Established the Truth,” so that they could then use it for proseltyzing purposes.88 After the court granted Nichiren the title, Imperial Household Minister Makino is alleged to have declared: “This decision was due to the emperor’s benevolent awareness that the present ideological situation in Japan requires better guidance by sound thought, and especially, firm religious belief.”89

  In fact the imperial house, controlled by Makino and Hirohito, awarded the title because it considered the social situation bad enough to warrant the services of the most passionate enemies of Taish democracy, the Nichiren believers. When Honda went to the Imperial Household Ministry to receive the award, he met Makino and told him that the Nichiren religion “is the banner of an army on the offensive in the ‘ideological warfare’ of the present day.” Honda also expressed his patriotism and boasted about the Nichiren sect’s antidemocratic, anticommunist nature.90 That Buddhism (or the faith of Nichiren believers, many of whom were upper-echelon military officers and civilian right-wing ideologues) had to be called on to supplement emperor ideology indicates that the official creed was never able to exercise a controlling influence on all groups in Japanese society.91

  Other forces deeply concerned in these years about guiding the people’s thoughts and maintaining the kokutai were the military services, activist right-wing political organizations, and the new nationalist “study associations.”92 Baron Hiranuma Kiichir’s National Foundation Society (Kokuhonsha), established in 1924, and the Golden Pheasant Academy (Kinkei Gakuin), founded by Yasuoka Masahiro in 1927, later became influential in the bureaucratic reform movement of the 1930s. The Golden Pheasant Academy had direct links to the throne via Yasuoka’s patron, Makino Nobuaki, who arranged to have Vice Imperial Household Minister Sekiya Teizabur contribute to its educational and propaganda activities as his personal representative.93

  Despite these government-supported campaigns to control discussion of the kokutai, unofficial attempts to widen the political horizons of the people by reinterpreting the kokutai continued. House of Peers and ex–Home Ministry bureaucrat Nagata Shjir wrote a book in 1921 defending the throne in terms of its symbolic and social utility.94 He rejected the orthodox view of the kokutai based on mythology and offered the belief that the imperial house could win the hearts and minds of the people provided it became a “palliative force,” standing outside politics.95 Imperial Household Ministry editor and writer Watanabe Ikujir published Kshitsu to shakai mondai (The Imperial house and social problems) in 1925, a work that sought to encourage young workers and activists in the labor movement to rely on the imperial house to solve the nation’s social ills.96

  The mythological view of the kokutai came under attack even in military circles. In 1923 Lt. Hriki Yz published a book on modern thought and military education in which he argued that “the danger to the state lies not in the intrusion of new thought but in the effort to stubbornly maintain the old state thought.” The end result, he predicted, “will be to invite the misunderstanding that our kokutai no longer harmonizes with new ideas.”97 In 1924, when the Army Officer’s Aid Society (Kaiksha) solicited essays for its journal Kaiksha kiji on the subject of educating soldiers as to “why the kokutai is so dignified and prestigious,” the officer in charge of judging the essay papers, Maj. Gen. Okudaira Toshiz, complained that “young officers do not take this problem too seriously.”98

  Recent evidence suggests a slow, gradual decline, starting around the end of World War I, in the common reference point of the Japanese national identity: the myths that constituted “the fundamental principles of the founding of the country.”99 Many military officers blamed the growing lack of belief in the founding principles on the Taish democracy movement, just as they blamed “democracy” for the decline of discipline in the ranks, and for the estrangement that had developed between the military and the people.

  Studies on the “image of the emperor” in the armed forces during the interwar decades also suggest erosion in Hirohito’s “approval rating” on the part of those who were supposed to have been most committed, by occupation, to dying for him.100 The Imperial Army and Navy provided three years of schooling in cadet schools for a select number of young boys from about the age of fourteen or fifteen. Graduates of these schools usually went on to either the Military or Naval Academy.101 In his study based on contemporary opinion surveys and post–World War II questionnaires given to thousands of former graduates of the service academies and cadet schools—most of whom served in staff positions in Tokyo during the Asia-Pacific War—Kawano Hitoshi determined that during the period from 1922 to 1931, awareness of “service to the emperor” as a motive for choosing a military career grew progressively weaker.102 Kawano also found, in both services (but particularly among the naval elite), that over the entire survey period, from 1922 to 1945, a slow decline had occurred in respect for the emperor and in willingness to die for him.103

  To counter such trends the government resorted to repression, lowering the threshold of tolerance for critical discussions of the kokutai. The lèse-majesté case of Inoue Tetsujir, which arose in the last months of Hirohito’s regency and was carefully monitored by Kawai and Makino, shows how the kokutai, the “legitimizing” concept of the Japanese state, could be used not only to divide Japanese from one another, but even to overturn power relationships in the sphere of civil society.

  In October 1926 the Home Ministry had banned a book by Inoue (a member of the House of Peers) after Vice Grand Chamberlain Kawai Yahachi had read and discussed it with Privy Seal Makino, and after it had incurred the wrath of rightists.104 Inoue, author of the official commentary on the Imperial Rescript on Education and a conservative critic of Christianity, had analyzed the relationship between the kokutai and national morality, seeking rational grounds for legitimizing the imperial institution. His 1925 study criticized “myths” pertaining to the three imperial regalia and the notion of the imperial line “being coeval with heaven and earth.” He also attempted to demonstrate that the official theory, based only on the “myth” of the “unbroken line of imperial succession for ages eternal,” was not acceptable for a modern nation.105 According to Inoue the uniqueness of the kokutai lay in its “moralistic,” “humane,” and reformist nature. It was the latter that made “democracy” and “the liberation of the working class” part of the traditional spirit of the imperial house.106 In staking out these positions, Inoue, after a long career as a political reactionary, was clearly aligning himself with the Taish democracy current.

  Inoue’s book had passed the police censors and was being sold in Tokyo bookstores during September 1925. But after coming under attack the following month, it was recalled and banned.107 A right-wing pamphlet attacking him (and sent to the Home Ministry and the Imperial Household Ministry) claimed that he had committed lèse majesté against the three imperial regalia, and called for an injunction against the sale and distribution of his book.108 Those who initiated the censorship against Inoue, however, were his former coll
eagues at Dait Bunka Gakuin, the college whose president he was. Angered by his firing of professors who opposed his school reforms, they went on strike, shut down the institution, and instigated the venerable “leader of patriots,” Tyama Mitsuru, and his rightist ideologues to compose an anti-Inoue pamphlet with the aim of bringing suit against him for expressing skepticism about Japan’s ideology of control.109 Ultimately both the Inoue lèse-majesté incident and the Seiykai’s politicization of the Pak Yol affair were signs that the Taish-era search for some new basis of legitimacy for the imperial state was drawing to an inconclusive end.

  Hirohito’s entourage monitored the Inoue incident but appears to have paid little attention to the various subcurrents of heterodox, fundamentalist thought (such as the Shinto-based religion known as motoky) that ran beneath the main currents of debate and contributed to making Japanese nationalism “ultra.” Unable to understand the moral viewpoint of people attracted to the messages of the millenarians, high court officials ignored them in their diaries, though they may have tracked them through police reports. Hirohito probably took no notice of them. If they have a place in his story it is only because they influenced politics in late Taish and helped prepare the soil for relaunching the monarchy on more nationalistic lines at the start of the Shwa era.

  One particularly influential form of millenarian kokutai thought that flourished during the 1920s was expounded for urban, middle-class audiences by nationalist groups within Nichiren Buddhism. Tanaka Chigaku, the spiritual leader of one of these groups, was deeply hostile to Taish democracy. Tanaka linked Nichiren to the expansion of the Japanese empire and made “clarification of the kokutai” his lifelong theme. A man whose fundamentalism was xenophobic but not radical, Tanaka worked to ingratiate himself with the imperial court and to make the Nichiren faith the state religion of Japan. In 1914 he renamed his main proseltyzing organization “Kokuchkai” (Pillar of the state), wherein “pillar” denoted the kokutai, and began to lecture on its “clarification.”110 Like many other conservatives who took democracy as the enemy during the 1920s and 1930s, Tanaka added hatred of Jews to his agenda, and for the remainder of his life often referred to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a czarist police tract that was the main doctrinal source of Japanese—as well as much European—anti-Semitism.111 Through the activities of the Kokuchkai, and his own lectures and voluminous writings preaching partnership with the imperial state in a grand project of global unification, Tanaka made an impact on popular sentiments in the Taish era.